Alexander Forbes of Brechin. The First Tractarian Bishop by Rowan Strong (review)

BOOK REVIEWS137 Alexander Forbes ofBrechin. The First Tractarian Bishop. By Rowan Strong. (New York: Clarendon Press, Oxford University Press. 1995. Pp. xii, 281. $56.00.) One durable feature of the historiography of the Church of England is the celebratory narrative of the achievements of the Oxford Movement. In this story, a church dominated by a somnolent, self-satisfied, socially conservative High Church establishment was revived by the Oxford Apostles—John Henry Newman, John Keble, and Hurfell Froude. Having recovered the vital truth of the Catholic tradition inside the Church of England, they launched the Tractarian movement which helped restore the Church to a central position in Victorian English life. The celebratory narrative provides the basis for the never-ending revisionism that is at the heart of the historian's craft. Rowan Strong modifies and complicates the narrative in two ways. First, he puts Scotland in the story. The subtitle almost tells it all: the first Tractarian bishop in the British Isles was consecrated in 1847, not in England, but in the Scottish Episcopal Church. A dissenting church under a Presbyterian establishment, the Scottish Episcopal Church was no mere annex of the Church of England. It had its own complex history,its own episcopal and Catholic traditions, and its own tradition of internecine conflict. Strong struggles throughout to overcome the fact that Alexander Forbes, Bishop of Brechin from 1847 to 1875, was apart from his Tractarian views not a very interesting person. Asserting that Forbes's sacrificial work among the poor of Dundee was distinctive, Strong is never able to explain what was sacrificial about the work or even what was distinctive about it in a century when all the churches engaged in extensive urban social work. But Forbes's life does contribute to a second revisionist agenda, the elucidation of the complicated history of the relationship between High Church Anglicanism and Tractarianism. In Scotland as in England, the old High Church tradition did not merely give way to the new Tractarianism, but participated on its own terms in the broader Victorian revival of institutional religion. Among the institutions revived by Tractarianism, according to the celebratory narrative of Tractarian progress, was the Scottish Episcopal Church. Strong's account of the importation of Tractarian ideas into the Scottish church by the dour Forbes, who was predictably reactionary on almost all matters social and political, demonstrates that the effect of the Oxford Movement north of the border was almost entirely disruptive. Forbes caused nothing but trouble for the tiny church, setting off bitter disputes with High Churchmen who occasionally agreed, but often disagreed, with Forbes over eucharistie theology, the status of the Scottish Common Office, reunion with Rome, and lay representation on diocesan bodies. In reading Strong's well-written accounts of these controversies (far more extensive than his account of Forbes's sacrificial work among the poor), it is easy to forget the broader issues at stake and treat them as deservedly forgotten examples of a lack of any sense of proportion among 138BOOK REVIEWS bishops and theologians. But Strong shows clearly that the passions aroused by the Oxford Movement had complicated and unpredictable consequences that do not fit easily into a straightforward narrative of religious revival. Jeffrey Cox University ofIowa Methodism and Education, 1849-1902:J. H Rigg, Romanism, and Wesleyan Schools. By John T. Smith. (NewYork: Clarendon Press, Oxford University Press. 1998. Pp. xii, 258. $75.00.) This study of Wesleyan Methodism and education in England and Wales in the second half of the nineteenth century illuminates many aspects of the intricate and fractious history of religious denominations in connection with educational development. Anti-Catholicism and anti-Anglicanism are clearly displayed as defining points of the Wesleyan attitude to education. Even though many Wesleyans were still quite respectful toward the Church of England as their "mother Church," and even though a number of leading Wesleyans were Conservative in politics, Wesleyanism was becoming more clearly Nonconformist and more radical during the period covered by this book. Wesleyans were suspicious of the educational claims and policies of the Established Church, especially on account of the partial influence of Tractarianism and Ritualism in the latter. Wesleyans tried to retain their own denominational dayschools...