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Internal Church Reform, 1780-1850 31 Religion in Industrial Society; Yates, The Religious Condition of Ireland; Williams et al., The Welsh Church; for a slightly more negative view of internal church reform see Virgin, The Church in an Age of Negligence. Internal Church Reform, 1780-1850 Establishment under Fire Nigel Yates † The work of scholars such as Arthur Burns, Jeremy Gregory, W.M. Jacob, Frances Knight, F.C. Mather, Mark Smith and myself, has largely discredited the traditional view of the nineteenth century, that reform had to be forced on an unwilling church by parliament, and has shown, I hope convincingly, that the Anglican churches of England, Ireland and Wales had been committed to reforming themselves well before the government took a hand.1 Unfortunately there has been little equivalent research on the Presbyterian established church in Scotland and it has been assumed, perhaps not entirely accurately, that reform was supported by Evangelicals in the face of opposition from the ruling ‘moderates’ in the General Assembly. In this chapter we will examine the nature of the internal church reform process across Britain and Ireland between 1780 and 1850 and at the various contributions to it made by pressure groups within the established churches. We will also look at equivalent reform movements in the Roman Catholic and Protestant Dissenting Churches, and at various issues arising from the reform process: the role of minority languages, the education and professionalisation of the clergy, lay participation in reform and the campaigns for home and foreign missions. 1 Burns, The Diocesan Revival in the Church of England; Gregory, Restoration, Reformation and Reform; Jacob, The Clerical Profession in the Long Eighteenth Century; Knight, The Nineteenth-Century Church; Mather, High Church Prophet; Smith, Nigel Yates † 32 2 An excellent biography is Malcomson, Archbishop Charles Agar. The Impact of Internal Church Reform From the last quarter of the eighteenth century there appears to have been a reform movement which spread across England, Ireland and Wales from one diocese to another , starting in Ireland in the 1770s, and spreading to Wales by the 1780s and England by the 1790s. This movement was not, as far as we can tell, centrally directed and is contrary to the perceived expectation that reform tends to begin in London, or at least England, and spread outwards to the periphery. This may suggest that internal reform, in the early period, was at least partly a practical response to local conditions. In Ireland the church was struggling to act as a national church with only a minority of the population as adherents. In Wales bishops were faced with difficulties in communication, poor parishes and a rather greater threat from nonconformity than in England. Reform initiatives seem to have been the work of bishops acting independently of one another, but clearly influenced by initiatives in neighbouring dioceses. There is, however, certainly evidence of correspondence between bishops on diocesan and parochial reform and it is likely that bishops exchanged ideas with one another, for example when they were in London for meetings of the House of Lords. In Ireland, the initial pioneer of the reform movement was Charles Agar (17361809 ), successively bishop of Cloyne, archbishop of Cashel and archbishop of Dublin.2 His example was followed by his successor at Cashel, Charles Broderick (1761-1822), and by Thomas Lewis O’Beirne (1749-1823), bishop of Ossory and, later, Meath, Archbishop William Stuart (1755-1822) of Armagh and Richard Mant (1776-1848), bishop of Down and Connor. Agar, who had inherited rural deans at Cloyne, saw them as a vital element of diocesan middle management. He introduced them at Cashel and persuaded many of his fellow bishops to follow his example. By 1820 the office had been revived in 16 out of the 22 dioceses of the Church of Ireland. Agar also persuaded his fellow bishops that training standards for Irish clergy needed to be improved, by requiring candidates for ordination to produce a certificate stating that they had attended at least one complete course of divinity lectures at Trinity College, Dublin, and by agreeing a list of books to be prescribed for the examination of such candidates. Agar tightened the requirements for clerical residence in the diocese of Cashel and in his primary charge to the diocese of Dublin he urged clergy, not just to reside in their parishes, but to visit their parishioners, particularly those who were sick. An insistence on clerical residence was also promulgated by Bishop O’Beirne at both Ossory and Meath; he...

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