Nineteenth-Century English Religious Traditions: Retrospect and Prospect ed. by D. G. Paz (review)

114BOOK REVIEWS The fact is that, until the rise of Irish nationalism, the Irish Catholic laity had little interest in formal church practice. For example, under Archbishop John Thomas Troy (1787-1823), Murray's (1823-1852) immediate predecessor, Dublin Catholics, many of whom, like Troy's father, were wealthy, middle-class businessmen and who were perfectly free to worship and quite financially capable of contributing to the Church, showed little interest in formal church participation . Thus under Troy's tenure, and though he was as strong and competent a leader as Murray or Cardinal Cullen (1852-1878),Dublin churches remained poorly maintained and very sparsely attended, though Troy repeatedly tried to alter this fact. However,with the advent ofO'Connell's Catholic Association in 1823 these psychological and physical realities began to change dramatically, so much so that by Murray's death in 1852 all of the poorly attended and largely dilapidated back-street chapels of Troy's day had been replaced by their massive new namesakes and at prominent Dublin locations and, most important of all, they were not only all paid for but they were all full! Since the copyright for this volume is in the author's name and not that ofthe University of Notre Dame Press, one suspects that its publication was heavily or totally subsidized by the Sisters ofMercy. Certainly there is nothing wrong with the desire of the Sisters of Mercy to see their founder canonized, which is the primary and obvious purpose of this volume. However, Irish Catholic church history scholars as well as the interested reader would have been far better served by making this primary source material available in a more accurate and probably less expensive mode than the printed page. And academic presses such as the University of Notre Dame would much better promote the cause of scholarship by encouraging and funding the publication of a first: a survey history of die Catholic Church in Ireland. VincentJ. McNally Sacred Heart School ofTheology Hales Corners, Wisconsin Nineteenth-Century English Religious Traditions: Retrospect and Prospect. Edited by D. G. Paz. [Contributions to the Study of Religion, Number 44.] (Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press. 1995. Pp. xiv, 232. $55.00.) Denis Paz, himself a distinguished historian of religion during the Victorian era, has assembled a highly stimulating series of predominantly bibliographical and historiographical essays on virtually all shades of the century's religious spectrum. The contributors are all experts in the fields they survey. Four authors devote themselves to those Victorian Protestant Nonconformists who, between the 1840's and the 1890's, were at least as likely as were adherents of the established Church of England to attend religious services on Sunday. RichardJ. Helmstadter assesses the Baptists and Congregationalists who had been awakened from their eighteendi-century doldrums by the early nine- BOOKREVIEWS115 teentíi-century Evangelical Revival. Robert K. Webb appraises the Quakers and die Unitarians, the two numerically tiny denominations that furnished so many important figures in Victorian business, banking, social reform, and local government , even if the Unitarians "are not perceived as having the same distinctive identity as the Quakers"(p. 112). David Hempton discusses numerically the most significant product of the Evangelical Revival, Victorian Methodism, itself divided amongWesleyans, Primitive Methodists, and other groups. The subjects of Peter Lineham are the elusive and often ephemeral "sects"—millenarian, charismatic, spiritualist—that flourished intermittently on the fringes of organized Nonconformity and Anglicanism. Edward Royle masterfully surveys "Freethought: The Religion of Irreligion," whose organized adherents "loomed much larger on the Christian horizon . . . than their numbers alone would appear to have warranted" (p. 195), andJeffrey Cox surveys the historical literature on those intrepid Victorian Protestant missionaries who set off for Africa and Asia. Cox makes astute comments both on the increasingly significant role ofwomen in the mission movement and on the manner in which it may most appropriately be understood in relation to British imperialism. In some ways the least satisfactory essay is "Anglicanism" by John Wolffe. Wolffe, too, is keenly knowledgeable, but thirty-one pages simply do not suffice to do justice to the social, economic, and political significance of the (internally divided) established Church of England. Its official status may have been under...