The English church, from the accession of George I. to the end of the eighteenth century (1714-1800)

Front matter

J. listorg of the ©uglisk (Elmrch

Edited by the late Very Rev. \V. R. W. Stephens, D.D.. F.S.A.,

Dean of Winchester,

Introduction

Interest in the history of the English Church has been steadily increasing of late years^ since t/ie great importance of the Church as a factor in the develop77iejit of the ?iational life a?id character from the earliest times lias cofue to he more fully and clearly recognised. But side by side with this increase of inte7'est in the history of our Church, the want has been felt of a more complete presentment of it than has hitherto been attempted. Certain portio7tSj indeed, have been ivritten zvith a fulness and accuracy that leave 7iothing to be desired ; but 77iany others have been dealt with, if at all, only in 77ia7iuals and text-books which are generally dull by reason of excessive compression, or in sketches which, however b7-illiant and suggestive, a7-e not histories. What see77ied to be wanted was a continuous and adequate history in volu7nes of a moderate size and price, based up07i a ca7'eful study of original authorities and the best a7icient and 7nodern writers. On the other ha7id, the 77iass of 77iaterial which research has 7iow placed at the disposal of the scholar seemed to render it i77iprobable that a7iy one would venture to undertake such a history si7igle-handed, or that, if he did, he would live to co7nplete it. The best way, therefore, of 7neeting the difficulty seemed to be a division of labour amongst several co7npetent scholars, agreed in their general principles, each being responsible for a period to which he has viii INTRODUCTION

devoted special attention^ and all working in correspondence through the medium of an editor or editors^ whose business it should be to guard against errors, contradictions, overlapping, and repetitiojt ; but, consistency a?td continuity being so far secured, each writer should have as free a hand as possible. Such is the plan upon which the present history has been projected. It is proposed to carry it on far enough to include at least the Evangelical Movement in the eighteenth century. The whole work will consist of seven ^ crown octavo books uniform in outward appearance, but necessarily varying some^vhat in length and price. Each book can be bought separately, and will have its own index, together with any tables or maps that 7nay be required.

I am thankful to have secured as 7ny co-editor a scholar who is eminently qualified by the remarkable extent and accuracy of his knowledge to render me assistance, without which, amidst the pressure of many other duties, I could scarcely have ventured upon a work of this magnitude,

The Deanery, Winchester, 20thfuly 1S99.

* An eighth volume dealing with '* The English Church in the Nineteenth Century " has since been added.

INTRODUCTION ix

According to present arrangements the work will be dis tributed amongst the following writers : —

I. The English Church from its Foundation to the Norman

Conquest, by the Rev. W. Hunt, D.Litt. Ready. II. The English Church from the Norman Conquest to the Accession of Edward I., by Dean Stephens, D.D. Ready,

III. The English Church in the Fourteenth and Fifteenth

Centuries, by the Rev. W. W. Capes, M.A., late Fellow of Queen's College, Oxford. Ready.

IV. The English Church in the Sixteenth Century from the

Accession of Henry VHL to the Death of Mary, by James Gairdner, C.B., Hon. LL.D., Edinburgh. Ready.

V. The English Church in the Reigns of Elizabeth and James L, by W. H. Frere. Ready.

VI. 'i'he English Church from the Accession of Charles I. to the Death of Anne, by the Rev. William Holden Hutton, B.D., Fellow of St. John's College, Oxford. Ready.

Vn. The English Church from the Accession of George T.

to the End of the Eighteenth Century, by the late

Rev. Canon Overton, D.D., and the Rev. Frederic

Relton, A.K.C. Ready.

Vni. The English Church in the Nineteenth Centur}', by F.

W. Cornish, M.A., Vice-Provost of Eton College. In

preparatiotu

Preface

When Canon Overton died he left behind him the rough draft of this volume. It was contained in three small octavo note-books, and written in pencil. There were a few notes on the opposite blank pages as to amplifications or modifications to be made in the final revision, and references to quotations from his own or other books which he intended to insert in full. These quotations for the most part, owing to considerations of space, it has been found necessary either materially to curtail or altogether to omit. What would have been the ultimate form in which his book as thus planned, partly on paper and partly only by reference, would have been sent by him to press it is impossible even to conjecture. The plan on which he had worked was unfortunately not that of the other volumes of this series. It comprised four long chapters, dealing with the four periods into which he divided his work, and supplemental chapters on General Church Life, Missionary and Colonial Work, and the relations with Sister Churches. The difficulty that I had to contend with all through has, therefore, been to preserve so much of his work as was possible, and in the order in which he had sketched it, and at the same time to break it up into a number of short and more or less self-contained chapters. Canon Overton, moreover, had not, in this instance, departed from his favourite method of writing history, namely, that of dealing with the lives of the great men of the xii PREFACE

time rather than writing a consecutive narrative of events and tendencies. It was found impossible, without so obliterating his work as to make the retention of his name as joint-author an anomaly, to depart from this method. What has been done is to add to his material certain sections with which he had either not dealt at all or but only partially, and in some cases to rewrite whole sections, retaining his phraseology wherever possible, and modifying his order and arrangement. I have not willingly parted with a line, scarcely a word, of what he had written. As the work now stands, therefore, it is a distinctly composite production. Some is wholly his, some wholly mine, and the able hand of the Editor has been exercised freely on both. I am solely responsible for the lists of Authorities at the end of the chapters. I could not now, without reference to the documents in their respective stages, distinguish always accurately between these three, and the "higher criticism" would fail to disentangle the various contributions of O. and R. and H. I did make a rough calculation of the relative amount of each, and it might be expressed by the formula Oa^Ri^H^.

Since Canon Overton and his colleague C. J. Abbey first drew the attention of the thoughtful to the problems of our eighteenth-century Church life, a gradual change has come over our judgments upon it. The more it is studied the more full of life it is found to be. Not perhaps our kind of life, but life nevertheless. Every investigation that is made into the annals of a diocese or a parish reveals this more and more. The day is not yet when the full history can be written. Much spade work has still to be done before the foundations can be fully explored. Local and diocesan records need to be investigated and their results tabulated before any trustworthy verdict can be pronounced upon the religious life of the Church as a whole. Overton's and Abbey's work was pioneer work, and much more of the same kind is required.

In one respect a very severe restraint has had to be

PREFACE xlH

exercised. Tempting and congenial as the subject is, there was no space in which to treat of the secular literature of the time. The poetry, the essays, the novels especially, have been passed over, though their influence upon the thought and life of the age was enormous. Chapters might be written thereon. The contemporary life of the Church of Ireland was sketched by Dr. Overton, but that too had to be omitted. I have to thank my eldest son, the Rev. B. F. Relton, B.A., late Scholar of St. John's College, Oxford, for invaluable help in the way of research and verification, without which the growing claims of a town parish would have prevented my making much progress. To the Rev. Dr. Hunt I must express my deep sense of obligation for much guidance and patience. I can only conclude in the words of one whose life began towards the close of the century —

" What is writ is writ ; Would it were worthier."

Chapter I Page

Introduction ....... i

FIRST PERIOD, 17 14-1738

CHAPTER n

The Bangorian Controversy and the Silencing of Convocation . . . , . .11

CHAPTER HI The Trinitarian and Deistic Controversies . . 30

CHAPTER IV The Answer to Deism ...... 40

CHAPTER V

Jacobites and Non-Jurors — Beginnings of Spiritual xvi CONTENTS

SECOND PERIOD, 1 738-1 760 CHAPTER VI

PAGE

The Early Phases of the Wesleyan Movement . . 72

CHAPTER VII Potter, Gibson, and Sherlock .... 90

CHAPTER VIII Benson, Butler, and Secker • . . . . 107

CHAPTER IX Bishop Wilson ....... 125

CHAPTER X The Later Work of William Law — The Early Evangelicals 137

THIRD PERIOD, 1 760-1 789

CHAPTER XI

Warburton, Hurd, and Lowth . . ., .158

CHAPTER XII

The Evangelical Clergy . . . . .173

CHAPTER XIII Minor Currents up to 1789 ..... 197

PAGE

CONTENTS

FOURTH PERIOD, 1789-1800

CHAPTER XIV General Influences— The Growth of Toleration 218

CHAPTER XV The Later Evangelicals ..... 230

CHAPTER XVI Closing Years of the Century . . . .251

CHAPTER XVII General Church Life ...... 267

CHAPTER XVHI Church Fabrics and Services ..... 287

CHAPTER XIX The Sunday School Movement .... 298

CHAPTER XX

Colonial and Missionary Work .... 306

CHAPTER XXI

Relations with Sister Churches .... 346

APPENDIX I . . . . . • -359 APPENDIX II . . . - . . .361 INDEX ^^l

CHAPTER I

INTRODUCTION

The time is now past when the period from the death of Queen Anne down to the end of the eighteenth century, if not to the beginning of the Oxford Movement, was regarded as practically a blank page in English g^tYml^te Church history. It has at last been recognised that a period which produced such clergymen as Joseph Butler and Daniel Waterland, William Law. and Samuel Horsley, and such lay churchmen as Edmund Burke and Samuel Johnson, William Wilberforce and William Stevens, must have bten at any rate a period worth studying. It is true that a lover of the English Church cannot study it without a blush. It is a period, for instance, of lethargy instead of activity, of worldliness instead of spirituality, of self-seeking ^|"teJistkr' instead of self-denial, of grossness instead of refinement. There was a grovelling instead of a noble conception of the nature and function of the Church as a Christian society, an ignoring instead of a conscientious and worthy carrying out of the plain system of the Church, work neglected instead of work well done. All this meets him at every turn. But there is another side to the picture. The enemies of the faith from all quarters were fairly grappled with and fairly vanquished by its defenders. Never, perhaps, during the whole course of English Church history ' ^' ^ was the victory in such contests so obviously on the Christian side. If the general type of character was, on the one hand, coarse and gross, it was, on the other hand, manly and robust ; moreover, if the majority were "of the earth, earthy," the S B

2 INTRODUCTION chap.

minority afforded some of the noblest specimens of the Christian character the world has ever seen ; and finally, the history is, as a whole, the history of a rise, not of a fall ; of a rise so gradual as to be almost imperceptible, so slow that when we come to the end of the period we do not seem to have risen very much above the level from which we started, but still distinctly a rise. The study of it, therefore, is encouraging, and not depressing. We close the page with a sure conviction that better times were at hand. And the event proved that this was in fact the case.

If it is true that the " eighteenth century is the best period from which to begin the study of contemporary English history," to no department of our history does this ^'"'hfstSy.''^' saying apply more forcibly than to that of the English Church. That sober and somewhat inelastic spirit which to this day forms alike the strength and weakness of the Englishman is really a survival of the spirit which found its expression in the abhorrence of what used to be called " enthusiasm," and which must still be ^pibd!°" reckoned with in the introduction of any innovation either in Church or in State, and especially in the Church. It did not exist to anything like the same extent before the eighteenth century, which this volume covers ; and so by making a leap, say, from the Caroline to the Oxford divines, we miss the clue which guides us to a right understanding of many a problem in later Church history. The feeling which stigmatised Bishop Butler as " a papist " because he put up a cross of white marble above the altar in his palace chapel at Bristol, where it remained until it was destroyed with the chapel and palace during the Reform riots in 1831 ; and because he dwelt on the importance of "external religion"; and which dubbed Bishop Beilby Porteus " a Methodist " because he strove to revive the observance of Good Friday, has by no means died out. A prosaic element was introduced into English theology in the eighteenth century, and it has continued prosaic ever since. To this very day the writings of such men as Henry More, John Smith, William Law, in his later stage, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, apart from his poetry, and others who represent the Platonic as distinguished from the Aristotelian type of

I INTRODUCTION 3

mind, the mystical as distinguished from the practical temperament, have never been popular in England. But it was not so before the Georgian era. There is a tenderness, a delicacy about the theology of the seventeenth century which is wholly wanting in that of the eighteenth, and has hardly yet been restored in that of the twentieth.

Again, great questions were discussed in the eighteenth century much more fully than they were in earlier periods. Underlying all such questions as, Did Christ leave ^

•^ ^ . ^ , - . , , Fundamental

one representative on earth ? or, in other words, questions Should the whole Church be in subjection to one ^'^'^"^^'^• external authority ? which was the root of the Papal Controversy ; What is the true internreLation of Holy Scripture in such and such matters ? which '•'\ rC the one question between the Anglicans and the Presbyterians — the questions in dispute in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries — were the deeper questions, What were the true nature and character of our Blessed Saviour ? which lay at the root of the Arian, Socinian, and Unitarian Controversies ; and. What was the true character of the Holy Scriptures as a revelation from God ? which was at the root of the great Deistic Controversy. These vital questions were not thoroughly threshed out until the period with which this volume deals, and for that reason alone it would be an important epoch.

The subject is one which lends itself more readily to the essay-like than to the historical or chronological mode of treatment, and it will be observed that most writers upon it have adopted that method. Neither the volumes ^e t°o^rk.^ of W. E. H. Lecky, nor those of Sir Leslie Stephen, nor those of C. J. Abbey and his colleague (Canon Overton) can conscientiously be called narrative history ; and Archdeacon Perr}^ frankly owns that he is compelled to make an exception to his general rule in treating this portion of Church history, because "the history of the Church of England during the eighteenth century cannot well be written in the way of a chronicle preserving an exact order in the sequence of events. The external and political history of the Church has but little connexion with its internal and more real history, and to relate both of these together is liable to produce confusion."

The drawback to this method is that it is apt to produce

4 INTRODUCTION chap.

essays or papers which may form material for history rather than history itself; and the readers of a series which is called *' A History of the English Church " naturally expect to find narrative history in it. It is purposed in the present volume to make a sort of compromise by dividing the eighty-six years into four well-defined periods, and then to treat of subjects within those periods rather than to attempt a formal chronicle. Since the average length of each period will be less than a quarter of a century, the consecutive order which a reader is entitled to expect in anything that calls itself a history will, perhaps, be sufficiently presented by such a method.

I. The First Period embraces twenty-four years, from the accession of George 1. in 1714 to the "conversion" of John . Wesley in i738,Tor;"in other words, to the beginning ■ of the Evangelical revival. This is obviously the proper date with which to begin a new period. For not only was the Evangelical revival, from one point of view, by far the most important feature in the religious history of the eighteenth century, but it marks a change from what was an appeal mainly to the head to what was an appeal mainly to the heart, from the intellectual to the emotional. Both appeals are necessary, and they came in the order named. The Evangelical revival could never have been the force it was unless it had been preceded by the work which was done most effectually by those who placed Christianity upon a thoroughly firm intellectual basis. Such men as Butler and Waterland and Conybeare and Law not only paved the way for the Wesleys and Whitefield, for Newton, Venn, and Cecil, but rendered their mission possible ; and as the former group could never have done the work of the latter, so neither could the latter have ever done the work of the former. The one set lacked the fire of energy, the other intellectual equipment. Scant justice has been done to the splendid array of writings in defence of Christianity which appeared between 17 14 and 1738. They embraced, among others,

Daniel Waterland s Vindication of Cnrisfs Divinity (17 19), Second Vindication of Chris fs Divinity {i '12 -7,), Further Vindication of Chris fs Divinity (1724), his Case of A?'ian Subscription (1721), and Supplement (1722), and his Imi)orta?tce of the Doctrine of the Holy Trinity asserted (1734) ;

I INTRODUCTION 5

Joseph Butler's Fifteen Sermons preached at the Rot/s Chapel (17 20), and the Ana/ogy of Religion^ Natural and Ret'ealed, to thi' Constitution and Course of Nature (1736); Thomas Sherlock's Use and hitent of Prophecy (1725), and his Tryal of the Witnesses of the Resurrectiofi of Jesus Christ (1729); John Conybeare's Defence of Revealed Religion (1732); George Berkeley's Alciphron, or the Minute Philosopher (1732); William Law's Three Letters to the Bishop of Bangor (17 17), his~rVzJ(? of Reason, or N^afural Religion fairly and fully stated (1731); and the First Part of William Warburton's Divine Legation of Moses (1737). It may be -doubted whether, in the whole course of the long history of the Church oi^- England, from the close of the seventh to the beginning of the twentieth century, any single quarter of a cient wo^ould be found in which so many first-class works of the i*? hest kmd on controversial divinity, or what would now be called Apologetics, were written.

The First Period includes the Bangorian Controversy, ending in the virtual silencing of Convocation, the later stages of the Non-Juror Controversy, the Jacobite Controversy, ending with the trial and banishment of Bishop Atterbury, the greater part of the Trinitarian, Arian, and Deistic Controversies, the very interesting correspondence of Archbishop Wake with the Gallican Church and of the Non-Jurors with the Greek Church, and the curious relation of Queen Caroline to the Church. It is certainly fraught with interest, though, alas ! much of it is a melancholy interest, for we shall have to trace the rapid decay of practical activity and of spirituality, the falling off both in the number and in the attractiveness of church services, the alienation between the higher and the lower clergy, and the baneful operation of State influence upon the Church.

II. The Second Period, from 1738 to 1760, includes the rise and early history of the Methodist movement, which entered upon a new phase in 1760, when the Sacraments began to be administered in Methodist ^^perS"'^ chapels. It is, however, the men, who were all professedly churchmen, and the general stirring up of the dry bones which they caused, rather than the Methodist, as distinguished from the Evangelical movement, which fall

6 INTRODUCTION chap.

within the province of a writer on the Church of England. Any history of the kind which did not give full prominence lodis ^° ^^ names of John and Charles Wesley, George ■ Whitefield, John Fletcher, and other leaders (and especially to the first named) would be absurdly defective. It may, however, be fairly contended that as an organised system Methodism never was a Church movement, and but for the commanding influence of its great founder, would never have retained so long as it did the continually loosening tie which, ' I a sort of way, bound it to the Church. From this point of vipw, the later Methodism of John Wesley belongs no more to .^ history of the Church of England than, say, the Hutchinsonianism of William Jones of Nayland. The two men — Wesley ana;^ j^^^-are most interesting men, and the two subjects — Mel?..^aism and Hutchinsonianism — are interesting subjects, but neither of them is strictly matter for a Church of England history. Wesley himself may have in- "tended his united societies to have been merely an expansion of the religious societies with which he had been familiar from his childhood, and which were handmaids of the Church, but did one in ten thousand among the rapidly increasing Methodists ever regard them in that light ?

The reader will, therefore, find little in these pages about the marvellous organisation which Wesley either originated or adopted, not because it is a thing of naught, but simply because it is not a part of the particular subject of this book. For the same reason Whitefi eld's efforts, under the patronage of Lady Huntingdon, are lightly passed over, because they had even less connexion with the Church of England than the Wesleyan societies ; Whitefield himself being far less of a churchman than either of the brothers Wesley. On the other hand, much more might be said, than is usually done in this connexion in describing these movements, concerning the prelates who were brought into contact with them — Gibson and Potter and, above all, that trio who were bound together almost all their lives long by the closest bonds, Butler, Seeker, and Benson. To this period belongs also what is called the Anti-subscription movement, which was fraught with imminent danger to the Church ; but, as it happily found quiet solution, it will not require to be dwelt upon at any great length. It

I INTRODUCTION 7

is during this period that the Church seems to have reached its nadir. Whatever the after effects of Methodism upon it, the immediate results were only to stir up a violent hostility, which was deploral)le, but not altogether unnatural or unreasonable : and, apart from Methodism, the influences which affected the Church at this period were debasing.

III. The Third Period, from 1760 to 1790, includes the first half of the long reign of George III., which, whatever it may have been from a political standpoint, was conducive, so far as George was concerned, to the ^peHod'.'^'^ interests of religion and morality. There is no doubt a danger in attributing too much importance to the higher and purer tone which prevailed at Court, because the direct influence of such improvement would >> ecessarily be limited to a small area, and at any rate in the middle of the eighteenth century to England. As Claudian so well says:

But the Court, then as now, set the fashion, and indirectly the influence of the good King and his good Queen permeated into quarters where the two were personally unknown. And then, again, the influence was not Hanoverian only good in itself, but also took the place of an influence which was intolerably bad. The Court of the first two Georges was little less immoral than that of Charles II., and infinitely more gross ; and if there be any truth in the dictum of Edmund Burke, that vice divested of all its grossness loses half of its evil, the English nation gained nothing in this respect by exchanging the Stewarts for the early Hanoverians. Infinitely greater and more extensive than that uf the Court was the influence of the Evangelical party within the Church, which was now beginning to be felt, ^^^^ and which steadily increased within this period. Evangelical The story of Evangelicalism as distinguished from ^''^'^' Methodism will form the leading feature of this part of our history, and the lives of such men as Venn, Newton, Scott, and the Milners, of Cecil, Berridge, Grimshaw, and the rest, must, unless through some fault in treatment, be both profitable and attractive. In this period also were prominent

8 INTRODUCTION chap

many good men who did not belong to the Evangehcal party, but were rather what would now be called distinctly High

Church. Such were Samuel Johnson and Edmund Churchmen. I^^^ke among the laity, and George Home, William

Jones, Samuel Horsley, and Robert South among the clergy. The foundation of Sunday schools, the consecration of the first bishop for America, the removal of some of the disabilities of the Scottish Episcopal Church and its recognition by its sister Church of England, all belong to this period, which is, as will be seen, a singularly rich and fruitful one.

IV. The last Period embraces only ten or eleven years from 1790 to 1800, and the hne of demarcation which dis-

ting^shes it from its predecessor is not so obvious as "^^eSr^^ in the case of the other three, neither is it possible

to select one particular turning-point with so much certainty as in the other periods. Nevertheless, there was a greater change, and that of the most decided character, in the last few years of the century, beginning, say, from about 1789, than in any other period. Three events which

had lately taken place, all outside England, affected iSuences. ^^ English Church in a multitude of ways, and to

an extent which it is extremely difficult to express or even to grasp. These events were — (i.) The War of American Independence and its results ; (ii.) the altered position of the Scottish Episcopal Church ; and (iii.) the French Revolution, the last, from our present point of view, being by far the most important of the three. The effects produced by these three events will be described in detail later on. It may suffice here to say that the first and the second tended to widen the horizon of the English Church by bringing it into contact with two sister Churches, the ancient Church of Scotland and the modern Church of America. The first two taught English churchmen, what many of them seem hardly to have grasped before, that there were other liturgies besides their own " incomparable " one, to use the epithet that was so often applied to our Prayer Book by men who paid scant attention to its plain rules ; and that there were other kinds of bishops besides those who drove their coaches-and-six and sat in the House of Lords.

I INTRODUCTION 9

The third had far more varied and wide-reaching effects. It startled and excited the whole English people, but it affected difierent classes in different ways, and also the same people in different ways at different RevJutbn^ times. But one general effect resulted in all cases which differentiated the last decade of the century from those which preceded it. Whether it was right or wrong, a blessing or a curse ; whether it was the harbinger of a glorious time coming, or the bird of ill omen that precedes the storm which will presently carry havoc and disaster in its mad career, the French Revolution at any rate disturbed the prevailing quiet, creating wild hopes on the one side and wild fears on the other, and by its subsequent development turning hopes into fears in a most bewildering manner. The extraordinary circulation of such books as Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France, and of Thomas Paine's Rights of Man, in answer to Burke, are illustrations of the spirit on both sides. Paine's later book, The Age of Reason, and Hannah More's Village Politics by "Will Chip," show how the religious element became even more prominent than the political ; while Sir James Mackintosh's Vindiciae Gallicae, so soon to be followed by his open recantation, illustrates markedly how hopes were changed into fears.

But one thing was common to all parties both in Church and State — a general awakening. The reign of lethargy was over. The reign of energy was begun. One definite change, so far as religion was concerned, tendlndes. may be noted, a marked alienation between the Church and Protestant dissenters, and a m.arked decrease of the hostility of the Church towards Rome. For, on the one side, the English dissenters (not including under that term the Methodists, who were strongly Anti-revolutionary) were supposed to be tainted by the revolutionary spirit ; and, on the other side, the immigrant clergy from France were received in England v.ith a respectful sympathy which went far to sink minor differences as to this and that mode of Christianity, so long as men were clearly seen to be on the side of Christianity at all. The Priestley riots in Birmingham, and the prevalence of the "Church and King" cry, are tokens of a very general feeling. But all this will appear in lo INTRODUCTION chap, i