"New fashions in ideas and conduct were not popularised then so quickly as now; and down at least until the queen's first jubilee in the year following the sixteen with which this chapter deals, the mass of her subjects, high as well as low, lived much the same mental life as they had done when the Prince Consort died. At the core of it was religion. No one will ever understand Victorian England who does not appreciate that among highly civilised, in contradistinction to more primitive, countries it was one of the most religious countries that the world has known. Moreover its particular type of Christianity laid a peculiarly direct emphasis upon conduct; for, though it recognised both grace and faith as essentials to salvation, it was in practice also very largely a doctrine of salvation by works. This type, which had come to dominate churchmen and nonconformists alike, may be called, using the term in a broad sense, evangelicalism. Starting early in the eighteenth century as far back as William Law, author of the Serious Call, coming down through the Wesleys and Whitefield, Johnson and Cowper, Clarkson and Wilberforce and the Clapham 'sect', great schoolmasters like Thomas Arnold and Charles Wordsworth, great nobles like the Greys on the whig side and the philanthropic Lord Shaftesbury on the tory, not to mention the eighteenth century preachers and divines, it became after Queen Victoria's marriage practically the religion of the court, and it gripped all ranks of conditions of society. After Melbourne's departure it inspired nearly every front-rank public man, save Palmerston, for four decades. That does not mean that they were all Evangelicals in the sense of being ... for the low church, as Shaftesbury and Cairns were- Bright was a quaker; Gladstone and Selborne and Salisbury were pronounced high churchmen; Livingstone, like many another, was reared in Scottish presbyterianism. But nothing is more remarkable than the way in which evangelicalism in the broader sense overleaped sectarian barriers and pervaded men of all creeds, so that even T.H. Huxley, the agnostic, oozed it from every pore of his controversial writing.... Even Disraeli, by nature as remote from it as Palmerston, paid every deference to it in politics, and conformed to all its externals in the Hughenden church.
The essentials of evangelicalism were three. First, its literal stress on the Bible. It made the English the "people of a book", somewhat as devout as Moslems are, but as few other Europeans were. Secondly, its certainty about the existence of an afterlife of rewards and punishments. If one asks how nineteenth century English merchants earned the reputation of being the most honest in the world (a very real factor in the nineteenth century primacy of English trade), the answer is: because hell and heaven seemed as certain to them as to-morrow's sunrise, and the Last Judgement as real as the week's balance sheet. This keen sense of moral accountancy had also much to do with the success of self government in the political sphere. Thirdly, its corollary that the present life is only important as a preparation for eternity. Exalted minds in abnormal moments may have reached that feeling in al ages, and among primitive peoples it has often moved mass enthusiasms. But the remarkable feature of evangelicalism was that it came so largely to dispense with the abnormal; made other-worldliness an everyday conviction and, so to say, a business proposition; and thus induced a highly civilised people to put pleasure in the background, and what it conceived to be duty in the foreground, to a quite exceptional degree. A text from the Epistle to the Hebrews, 'He endured as seeing Him who is invisible,' has often and very aptly been used to commemorate General Gordon. It might equally have been applied to Livingstone's lonely heroism in midmost Africa, to Gladstone laying daily before God the issues of right and wrong in national politics, to Shaftesbury championing oppressed classes who could never conceivably repay him, to Clarkson and Wilberforce in an earlier day climbing their 'obstinate hill' to end the slave trade and slavery; and no less truly, though on a lower spiritual plane, to the common conscientious Victorian:
Staid Englishman, who toil and slave
From your first childhood to your grave
And seldom spend and always save-
And do your duty all your life
By your young family and your wife.
This is not the place to evaluate Victorian evangelicalism on religious or theological grounds. But to ignore its effect on outward life would be to render much of the period's history unintelligible. It is often accused of being gloomy, but it seemed less so at the time of its votaries; who for their self denials had compensations not visible to their latter day critics. Certainly, however, it was anti-hedonistic. To-day's passion for pleasure would have shocked it profoundly. Its own corresponding passion was for self-improvement; and perhaps there never has been an age and a country in which so many individuals climbed to outstanding excellences or achievements of one sort or another across the most discouraging barriers.
This religion was sustained by a vast amount of external observance. The evangelicals set relatively little store by sacraments; to communicate only twice a year (the practice of the prince consort and Queen Victoria) was quite normal even in the church of England. But they spent a remarkable amount of time on organised prayer, praise, and preaching. The pulpit dominated. In typical English villages in the seventies and eighties practically all the inhabitants above infancy attended either church or chapel every Sunday, many of them twice or even three times. The children also went twice to Sunday schools. Apart from cases of necessity, the only exceptions to this universal worship would be, here and there, a few known village ne'er-do-wells. In addition, the chapels held prayer meetings during the week, and the church often a regular week-night service- both numerously attended. In towns of moderate size there was almost a strictness, though different regions showed a prevalence of different sects. Thus in many Lancashire manufacturing towns a low-church anglicanism predominated; in their Yorkshire equivalents, dissent. This was reflected in politics, where parts of Lancashire developed a conservative and Yorkshire a liberal tradition. Local distribution varied similarly among dissenters themselves; e.g. primitive methodists would preponderate in some regions, and weslyans in others. Only in the dozen largest English cities were there considerable areas, whose growth neither church nor chapel had overtaken, and extensive 'heathen' populations who attended no place of worship. In London these areas and populations were of enormous size, and from the middle of the century onward much devoted but quite inadequate missionary effort was spent on them by both the anglicans and the nonconformists. But public worship was not all; a great feature of the period was the almost universal practice in the upper, middle, and lower-middle classes of family prayers. The observance, too, of Sunday was almost a religion in itself. No games of any kind were ever played on it; no field-sports indulged in; no entertainment given, public or private. Even books were censored for the day; novels were banned; you might only read the Bible or serious, preferably religious, works. Thus sermons had large sales, and so did 'magazines for Sunday reading'. It is easy now to see the ludicrous side of these restraints; but they had another. The habit of setting a part one rest-day in the week for religion and serious thinking deepened the character of the nation. And some high peaks of literature- the Bible, Paradise Lost, and the Pilgrim's Progress, for instance- became extremely familiar to very wide classes who to-day would never read anything on that level."
~England 1870-1914 by Robert Ensor, later Sir, part of the Oxford History of England series.
0 comments:
Post a Comment