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Internal Church Reform, 1850-1920 67 Internal Church Reform, 1850-1920 An Age of Innovation in Ecclesiastical Reform Frances Knight The previous two chapters have examined reform in Britain in the first half of the nineteenth century. In this chapter we shall examine how reform developed in the second half of the century. The Context of Church Reform For as long as historians of British Christianity have been studying the nineteenth century, they have been talking about church reform. In part, this is because the participants in nineteenth-century British Christianity, and particularly the Anglican ones, became obsessed with it. As Geoffrey Best put it, “Untold dozens of churchmen buckled down to the self-imposed task of communicating to the world their views, and their views on other writer’s views, on this engrossing subject.”1 More recently, Arthur Burns has noted that “‘Church reform’ is one of the most widely deployed concepts in ecclesiastical historiography. In the modern English context, it moved seamlessly during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries from being of central importance in the discussions of ecclesiastical policy-makers to assume a place as a key category in the conceptual apparatus of historical inquiry into the shaping of the Victorian Church of England.” What was true for the Church of England was also true of other ecclesiastical bodies, most of which became caught up in similar processes of reform, readjustment, revival and renewal. Equally, the ‘reform’ motif was widely applied in a whole range of other nineteenth-century British institutions, as they underwent various processes 1 Best, Temporal Pillars, 278. Frances Knight 68 of modernisation. Indeed, in the volume Burns edited with Joanna Innes, the authors explore reform in the context of opera, the London stage and national art institutions, as well as in relation to Ireland and empire, and to more obvious topics such as parliament , the church, medicine and the law. Their volume provides the most methodologically complete treatment of the aspiration for reform in Britain in the first half of the nineteenth century, and its ‘holistic’ approach is much to be welcomed. It echoes at least some of the preoccupations of John Wade, whose Extraordinary Black Book (1831) is often cited as one of the most significant contributors to the reform clamour of the 1830s. Wade dealt with a range of issues including parliamentary representation, the church, the crown establishment and the civil list, diplomats, the peerage, law, debt, taxation, the East India Company, the Bank of England, and sinecures.2 In stimulating ways, then, the Burns and Innes volume provides an interesting British counterpoint to our current endeavour to place the dynamics of ecclesiastical reform in a comparative European perspective. An obvious point about the Burns and Innes volume is that it concludes in 1850. So if ‘the age of reform’ had indeed concluded by about 1850, what was it followed by? From an ecclesiastical point of view, ‘the age of decline’ seems to have been the leading contender for several decades in the recent past, a perspective influenced by what has since become the increasingly complex territory of the secularisation debate. Originally , this phenomenon was accepted as having taken hold by the 1850s, after Horace Mann, who had been responsible for writing the preface to the Report on the 1851 Religious Census, described the working classes as “unconscious secularists”. Then newer thoughts about secularisation led to ‘the age of decline’ being shunted forward. So if, following Simon Green, Callum Brown and others, the age of religious decline in Britain is to be pushed firmly into the twentieth century, and older studies, for example P.T. Marsh’s The Victorian Church in Decline (1969), which argued that the Church of England had “declined unmistakably” by the 1880s, are to be retired from use on the grounds that they are out of date, where does that leave the period 1850-1920? It can be argued that, in ecclesiastical terms at least, the ‘age of reform’, as conventionally defined, was succeeded by a seventy-year period that was characterised by extraordinary energy and innovation, together with what we may begin to discern as the making of the modern religious mind. This is a view that would certainly be endorsed by those with an interest in the intellectual development of the period, for as James C. Livingston has noted, “In the study of religious thought, it certainly would be incorrect to describe it as simply a time of secularization. The late Victorian period can...

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