Religion in Victorian Britain: Volume Five: Culture and Empire (review)

Religion in Victorian Britain: Volume Five: Culture and Empire, edited by John Wolffe; pp. viii + 359. Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1997, £14.99, $24.95.

This work is an addition to the four very useful volumes, also entitled Religion in Victorian Britain, which were published in 1988 by Manchester University Press as the materials for an Open University course on Victorian religion, and which contain both general essays and a selection of contemporary documents. This fifth volume consists of essays (in Part One) and primary sources (in Part Two), covering subjects not treated in the earlier volumes, with an emphasis on Victorian liberalism and some reference to gender and race. Each chapter is introduced by an appropriate illustration.

Frances Knight describes the idealistic Victorian exaltation of women which justified the exclusion of middle-class women from both work and the workplace, while regarding them as the more religious sex, thus creating anxiety about the femininity of religion. This anxiety provoked the cult of Christian manliness, which, in turn, contributed to an increasing male rejection of domesticity in the convivial setting of all-male professions. John Wolffe ably describes the rise of the Victorian hymn as the most popular feature of a mass religious culture transcending denominational differences. Wolffe also usefully reminds us of the time lag between the writing of nineteenth-century hymnody and its displacement of the dominant pre-nineteenth-century tradition of metrical psalm singing.

The other essayists all look abroad. Terry Thomas outlines the historical discontents and mixed motivation of the nineteenth-century English missionary enterprise, with special reference to Evangelical missions in India. There were various tensions: between making converts and making a Christian culture, between Christianity and colonialism, and between Christianity and commerce. Additionally, the main missionary force, Evangelicalism, was divided between a pre-millennial stress on the proclamation of the Gospel to all nations before the Lord's return, and a liberal post-millennial hope for a converted world. Gerald Parsons argues that Bishop J. W. Colenso's liberal interpretation of Scripture and Biblical commentaries arose from a determination to preach a missionary Gospel which was believable to his Zulu converts and was morally and spiritually worthy of them. It could be argued, however, that this was as much the justification of his position as its cause--which was also his Evangelistic determination to preach his liberal Gospel to England. The Colenso story contains a puzzle, which Parsons mentions but does not resolve, as to why such good conservative High Churchmen as Samuel Wilberforce, Bishop of Oxford, and Robert Gray, Bishop of Capetown, chose Colenso to be a bishop in the first place. It is also clear that Colenso was already on bad terms with both the Protestants and Tractarians of his own diocese of Natal before his critical views came into prominence: the Protestants regarded him as Tractarian, the Tractarians as Protestant, which does not suggest any great diplomatic skills on his part. In fact, he particularly disliked the advance of what he considered to be Tractarian priestcraft in the Church of England. Yet for all Colenso's place in a familiar kind of Victorian church politics, the essay demonstrates the integrity of his Broad Churchmanship as the inspiration of his crusade for justice for the Zulus.

G. Beckerlegge shows that the religious convictions of another Broad Churchman, the former German Lutheran Max Müller, was an impediment to his election to the Oxford Boden Chair in Sanskrit in 1860. In this contest for the Chair, a Germanic, "romantic-antiquarian" and philological emphasis upon the translation of the ancient Rig- Veda was opposed to an English Evangelical and utilitarian stress on outfitting Christian missionaries to India. Müller himself believed in a Christian missionary strategy which recovered the truth in ancient religions like Hinduism, as discerned by his own kind of scholarship, though in the end his "breadth" took him beyond even Broad Churchmanship out of formal Christianity.

Beckerlegge...