A New History of the Sermon: the Nineteenth Century

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A New History of the Sermon

A New History of the Sermon The Nineteenth Century

Edited by

Robert H. Ellison

LEIDEN • BOSTON 2010

Cover illustration: First two sentences from John Henry Newman’s Sermon 336 from the Newman Archives at the Birmingham Oratory. With kind permission of the Birmingham Oratory. This book is printed on acid-free paper. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A new history of the sermon : the nineteenth century / edited by Robert Ellison. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-90-04-18572-2 (hardback : alk. paper) 1. Preaching--Great Britain--History-19th century. 2. Preaching--United States--History--19th century. 3. Sermons, English-19th century--History and criticism. 4. Sermons, American--19th century--History and criticism. I. Ellison, Robert H., 1967- II. Title. BV4208.G7N49 2010 251.009’034--dc22 2010014785

ISBN 978 90 04 18572 2 Copyright 2010 by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands. Koninklijke Brill NV incorporates the imprints Brill, Hotei Publishing, IDC Publishers, Martinus Nijhoff Publishers and VSP. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher. Authorization to photocopy items for internal or personal use is granted by Koninklijke Brill NV provided that the appropriate fees are paid directly to The Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Suite 910, Danvers, MA 01923, USA. Fees are subject to change.

CONTENTS Permissions ................................................................................................vii List of Illustrations .....................................................................................ix List of Contributors ....................................................................................xi Introduction ................................................................................................. 1 Robert H. Ellison PART ONE

THEORY AND THEOLOGY The Tractarians’ Sermons and Other Speeches .....................................15 Robert H. Ellison Richard Whately and the Didactic Sermon ...........................................59 Carol Poster The Rhetoric of Henry Ward Beecher and Frederic W. Farrar Regarding Biblical Criticism ..................................................................115 Thomas H. Olbricht PART TWO

SERMON AND SOCIETY IN THE BRITISH EMPIRE Missions, Slavery, and the Anglican Pulpit, 1780–1850 .....................139 Bob Tennant British Sermons on National Events .....................................................181 John Wolffe Catholic Preaching in Victorian England, 1801–1901 .......................207 Jessica A. Sheetz-Nguyen Anti-Catholic Sermons in Victorian Britain........................................233 Miriam Elizabeth Burstein

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Nineteenth-Century British Sermons on Evolution and The Origin of Species: The Dog That Didn’t Bark? ...............................269 Keith A. Francis The Victorian Sermon Novel: Domesticated Spirituality and the Sermon’s Sensationalization .....................................................309 Tamara S. Wagner PART THREE

SERMON AND SOCIETY IN AMERICA The Anti-dueling Movement..................................................................341 Thomas J. Carmody The Itinerant Pulpit of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU): Teachers or Preachers?..............................................367 Dorothy Lander Midway between Slavery and Citizenship: Black Freedmen in White Protestant Sermons in the Immediate Post-Civil War Period .............................................................................413 David M. Timmerman Sacred Rhetoric and the African-American Civic Sermon ...............437 Joseph Evans The Modern Renewal of Jewish Homiletics and the Occurrence of Interfaith Preaching ................................................457 Mirela Saim “As a Musician Would His Violin”: The Oratory of the Great Basin Prophets .........................................................................................489 Brian Jackson The Antebellum American Sermon as Lived Religion .......................521 Dawn Coleman Bibliography .............................................................................................555 Index .........................................................................................................567

PERMISSIONS Excerpts from letters to Isaac Williams in Chapter 1 are quoted with the permission of the Trustees of Lambeth Palace Library. Excerpts from an unpublished letter from Edward Morton to Renn Dickson Hampden in Chapter 2 are quoted with the permission of the Master and Fellows of Oriel College, Oxford. Excerpts from William Andrews’ “Frederick Douglass, Preacher” in Chapter 13 are reprinted from American Literature, Vol. 54, Issue 4, pp. 592–597. Copyright 1982, Duke University Press. All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission of the publisher. Excerpts from Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” in Chapter 13 are reprinted by arrangement with The Heirs to the Estate of Martin Luther King Jr., c/o Writers House as agent for the proprietor New York, NY. Copyright 1963 Dr. Martin Luther King Jr; copyright renewed 1991 Coretta Scott King. Excerpts from Gardner Taylor’s sermons in Chapter 13 are reprinted from The Words of Gardner Taylor, Volume 4 by Gardner C. Taylor, compiled by Edward L. Taylor, copyright © 2001 by Gardner C. Taylor. Used by permission of Judson Press, 800-4-JUDSON, www. judsonpress .com.

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS 1. Mother Stewart addressing the crowd during the women’s crusades of 1873 .................................................................................388 2. Frances E. Willard, frontispiece of her 1889 autobiography, Glimpses of Fifty Years ..................................................................... 392 3. Hannah Whitall Smith, frontispiece of Woman in the Pulpit ...... 393 4. Letitia Youmans, front cover of Grip, October 1887 .....................401

LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS Miriam Elizabeth Burstein is Associate Professor of English at the College at Brockport, State University of New York. She is the author of Narrating Women’s History in Britain, 1770–1902 (Aldershot, UK, 2004) and is currently working on a book about the Reformation in Victorian popular culture. Thomas J. Carmody is Professor of Communication Studies and Chair of the Department of Communication at Vanguard University of Southern California. His academic specialty is 19th-century sermonic rhetoric, but he has written on such diverse topics as comics and the rhetoric of Mu’ammar Kaddafi. Dawn Coleman is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Tennessee, and, in 2009–10, a Visiting Scholar at the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She is currently finishing a book that examines how mid-19th-century American novels appropriated preaching to establish their cultural and moral authority, and she is beginning a book on 19th-century diary responses to religious experience. Her essays have appeared in American Literature and Studies in the Novel. Robert H. Ellison taught English at East Texas Baptist University from 1995 to 2009 and is now a Visiting Assistant Professor at Marshall University. He has published studies of John Cumming, George MacDonald, Charles Haddon Spurgeon, and many of the leading figures of the Oxford Movement. He is currently a co-director of a digital project called “The British Pulpit Online”, and is working on a book about the Victorian “lay sermon”. Joseph Evans earned the Doctor of Philosophy in Christian Preaching from The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky. His dissertation is entitled African American Sacred Rhetoric: An African American Homiletic Style Informed By Western Tradition. He has been adjunct professor of preaching at Wesley Theological Seminary and The Howard University Divinity School, both located in

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Washington, D.C., and currently serves as senior pastor of Mount Carmel Baptist Church in Washington. He is the author of numerous articles and will soon complete his first book for academic publication: Sacred Rhetoric and the Civic Sermon: An African American Art Form. Keith A. Francis is Associate Professor of History at Baylor University in Waco, Texas. He is the author of Charles Darwin and The Origin of Species (Westport, CT, 2007). He is presently writing a book on the reactions of 19th-century French, British, and American scientists to The Origin of Species and the debate about the unity of the human species. He is also researching the life of Samuel Wilberforce, the son of abolitionist William Wilberforce; he will co-author a new biography of Wilberforce with Bob Tennant. Brian Jackson is Assistant Professor of English and Associate Coordinator of Composition at Brigham Young University, where he teaches courses in rhetorical theory and persuasive writing. His work has appeared in Rhetoric Society Quarterly, Rhetoric Review, and College Composition and Communication. Dorothy Lander is Senior Research Professor in Adult Education at St Francis Xavier University, Nova Scotia. She received her PhD from Nottingham University, England. Her arts-based qualitative research and teaching interests focus on popular and/or faith-based education in women’s social movements including temperance, abolition, suffrage, hospice/palliative care, cooperatives, and peace. Dorothy is working on a book-length biography of Letitia Youmans, first President of the WCTU in Canada, in the genre of creative non-fiction. She gratefully acknowledges the funding support of the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC). Thomas H. Olbricht is Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Religion at Pepperdine University. He has published more than twenty books in biblical studies, church history and rhetoric. His most recent works are “The Rhetoric of Two Narrative Psalms 105 and 106” in My Words are Lovely: Studies in the Rhetoric of the Psalms, ed. Robert L. Foster and David M. Howard (New York, 2008) and “George Kennedy’s Scholarship in the Context of North American Rhetorical Studies,” in Words Well Spoken: George Kennedy’s Rhetoric of The New Testament, ed. C. Clifton Black and Duane F. Watson (Waco, TX, 2008).


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Carol Poster is Associate Professor of English at York University (Canada). She has co-edited Letter-Writing Manuals from Antiquity to Present (Columbia, SC, 2007) and published numerous essays in journals and essay collections. She has received the Gildersleeve Prize from the American Journal of Philology, the Kneupper Award from Rhetoric Society Quarterly, and grants and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Tanner Center for the Humanities, the Huntington Library, St Deiniol’s Library, and other organizations. Mirela Saim is a Canadian scholar, currently working and lecturing in Montreal and associated with McGill University. Her research interests include rhetoric and argumentation history, as well as paradigms of comparative epistemology in literature, religion, anthropology, and popular media. At present, she is focused on the reconstruction of a comparative history of the Jewish rhetorical discourse in the context of modernity, in both its religious and secular configurations. Jessica A. Sheetz-Nguyen is Assistant Professor of History at the University of Central Oklahoma, Edmond, where she teaches and supervises the History Education program. Recent publications include “Calculus of Respectability: Defining the World of Foundling Hospital Women and Children in Victorian London,” Annales de Démographié Historique, 114 (2007), 13–36; “Malaysia Truly Asia: Reflections on the 2004 Fulbright Hays Study Tour,” East-West Connections: Review of Asian Studies 6 (2006), 147–66; and “Foundlings,” The Greenwood Encyclopedia of Love, Sex, and Culture. Ed. Susan Mumm. Vol. 5: The Nineteenth Century (Westport, CT, 2007). Her future research projects focus on the history of the working poor women in Victorian London. Bob Tennant is an honorary research fellow in the Department of English Literature in the University of Glasgow. His current research interests are mainly in the Anglican sermon of the long 18th century. Forthcoming work includes essays on John Tillotson and on sermons about the battle of Waterloo. He is a co-founder of “The British Pulpit Online” and is preparing Conscience, Charity and Consciousness: Joseph Butler’s thought and ministry for the Boydell Press and Corporate Holiness: Pulpit Preaching and the Anglican Missionary Movement, 1760–1870 for the Oxford University Press.

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David M. Timmerman is Professor of Rhetoric and Chair of Humanities and Fine Arts at Wabash College in Crawfordsville, Indiana. His scholarship has focused primarily on the development of rhetoric in Greece in the 4th century b.c. His work has appeared in Philosophy and Rhetoric, Rhetoric Society Quarterly, Advances in the History of Rhetoric, and Argumentation and Advocacy. He has also published work in political communication, religious rhetoric, and homiletics in Presidential Studies Quarterly, Political Communication, and the Journal of Communication and Religion. Tamara S. Wagner obtained her PhD from Cambridge University and is currently Associate Professor at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. Her books include Longing: Narratives of Nostalgia in the British Novel, 1740–1890 (Lewisburg, PA, 2004), Occidentalism in Novels of Malaysia and Singapore, 1819–2004 (Lewiston, NY, 2005), and Financial Speculation in Victorian Fiction: Plotting Money and the Novel Genre, 1815–1901 (Columbus, OH, 2010) as well as the edited collections Consuming Culture in the Long Nineteenth-Century (Lanham, MD, 2007; paperback edition 2010) and Antifeminism and the Victorian Novel: Rereading Nineteenth-Century Women Writers (Amherst, NY, 2009). Current projects include a special issue on Fanny Trollope and a study of Victorian narratives of failed emigration. John Wolffe is Professor of Religious History at the Open University, and, until recently, Associate Dean (Research and Postgraduate Policy) in the Faculty of Arts. His publications include Great Deaths: Grieving, Religion and Nationhood in Victorian and Edwardian Britain (Oxford, 2000) and The Expansion of Evangelicalism: The Age of Wilberforce, More, Chalmers and Finney (Nottingham, 2006). He is currently working on a knowledge transfer project funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council on modern religious history and the contemporary church, and A Short History of Evangelicalism commissioned by Cambridge University Press.

INTRODUCTION Robert H. Ellison In the introduction to The Victorian Pulpit: Spoken and Written Sermons in Nineteenth-Century Britain (Selinsgrove, PA, 1998), I wrote that scholarship on Victorian preaching had been largely personalitydriven, telling much about great preachers’ lives while revealing comparatively little about the form, style, or content of their sermons. My book was intended to redirect that focus, to be one step in the process of moving from biography to rhetorical analysis.1 That process began in 1925, when Herbert A. Wichelns critiqued the biographical approach in an essay entitled “The Literary Criticism of Oratory”. He asserted that focusing on “the man behind the work” often causes critics to think of a speaker “as something other than a speaker”.2 The neglect of the rhetorical dimension inevitably leaves their work incomplete; such critics can therefore make “but an indirect contribution” to our understanding of the people whom they study.3 Wichelns goes on to argue to that a more “literary” approach, one that “combines the sketch of mind and character with some discussion of style”,4 may also be unsatisfactory. If it is not done well, “the critic fails to fuse his comment on the individual with his comment on the artist; and as a result, we get some statements about the man, and some statements about the orator, but neither casts light on the other”.5 The best strategy, then, is to concentrate on the work and “ignore the man”.6 Personality may not be entirely neglected, but it will be relevant only to the extent that it helped to shape the speeches; the vast majority of the critic’s attention will be devoted to examining such matters as “audience”, “arrangement”, “manner of delivery”, and “the effect of the 1 Robert H. Ellison, The Victorian Pulpit: Spoken and Written Sermons in NineteenthCentury Britain (Selinsgrove, PA, 1998), pp. 12–13. 2 Herbert A. Wichelns, “The Literary Criticism of Oratory,” in Methods of Rhetorical Criticism: A Twentieth-Century Perspective, ed. Bernard L. Brock and Robert L. Scott (Detroit, 1980), pp. 42, 43. 3 Ibid., p. 43. 4 Ibid. 5 Ibid. 6 Ibid., p. 42.

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discourse on its immediate hearers” as recorded in “the testimony of witnesses” and “the record of events”.7 With these statements, Wichelns inaugurated a new discipline: he is almost universally regarded as the father of “rhetorical criticism”, the branch of communication studies concerned with “the analysis and appreciation of the orator’s method of imparting his ideas to his hearers”.8 The field has expanded considerably in recent years, and its current state was aptly summarized in a 2006 issue of Rhetoric Review. Richard Leo Enos noted how far we have come, writing that “twentieth-century contributions to rhetorical criticism extend well beyond the field of communication studies to such kindred disciplines as English, linguistics, and religion”.9 In another essay later in the issue, however, Jennifer DeWinter reminded us how far we can still go: despite the recent advances, “almost all of the journals and books” are still “written by and for speech communication scholars”.10 Several recent studies of 19th-century preaching are welcome exceptions to DeWinter’s general rule. In 2004 and 2006, for example, Victor J. Lams, Emeritus Professor of English at California State University, Chico, published Newman’s Anglican Georgic and Newman’s Visionary Georgic. The titles suggest that Newman’s Parochial Sermons belong to a genre that began with Virgil in the 1st century b.c. and includes such works as Lucretius’ De Rerum Natura and Wordsworth’s Prelude, poems about the structure of the cosmos and the evolution of a Romantic poet’s mind.11 Although I do not find this argument entirely convincing, Lams does make other useful observations about the structure of Newman’s work. He argues that each volume of the sermons is not a collection of materials assembled more or less at random, but rather a carefully crafted work with a “rhetorically coherent sequential structure”.12 The global design is often rather explicit; Newman himself linked the sermons in Volume 2 to various saints’ days and those in Volumes 5 and 6 to the seasons of the Christian year. Lams also

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Ibid., pp. 69–70. Ibid., p. 67. 9 Richard Leo Enos, “Introduction: The Inclusiveness of Rhetorical Criticism,” Rhetoric Review 25.4 (2006), 357. 10 Jennifer DeWinter, “A Bibliographic Synthesis of Rhetorical Criticism,” Rhetoric Review 25.4 (2006), 388. 11 Victor J. Lams, Newman’s Anglican Georgic (New York, 2004), pp. 6–10; Victor J. Lams, Newman’s Visionary Georgic (New York, 2006), pp. ix–xiv. 12 Lams, Visionary Georgic, p. ix. 8

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suggests some organizational schemes of his own. He posits, for example, that the book of Hebrews is the “scriptural analogue” to Volume 313 and that it, like the other volumes in the series, can be broken down into four “clusters”, which could be labeled disobedience and schism, religious error versus the love of Christ, restoring order in the church, and the importance of prayer.14 While most studies of Newman’s prose focus on “local rhetorical effects”, Lams suggests that we would do well to also give attention to his “global literary purpose and design”.15 Rhetorical critics of the 19th-century American pulpit include David B. Chesebrough, who has contributed studies of Phillips Brooks, Charles G. Finney, and Theodore Parker to the “Great American Orators” series published under the auspices of Greenwood Press.16 The series is intended both to “memorialize the nation’s greatest” speakers and to offer “a complete analysis of [their] rhetoric”.17 While the “memorial” aspect sometimes becomes almost hagiographic, Chesebrough’s treatment of his subjects’ rhetorical theory and practice is sound. His discussions of works such as Lectures on Preaching (Brooks), Memoirs (Finney), and West Roxbury Sermons (Parker) address the full spectrum of issues: the definition of a sermon; the structure and tone of the discourses; the use of logos, ethos, and pathos; reading from manuscript versus preaching extemporaneously; and the preachers’ physical characteristics, the power of their voices, and their use of gestures in the pulpit. An excellent example of a broad rhetorical survey, as opposed to a study of a single preacher, is J.N. Ian Dickson’s Beyond Religious Discourse: Sermons, Preaching and Evangelical Protestants in NineteenthCentury Irish Society (Milton Keynes, 2007). Dickson’s purpose is to “tell the story” of the sermon – or, more precisely, to discover what stories the sermon can tell us. To that end, he discusses the education of Irish ministers, the rise of the “cult of pulpit personality”, the changes brought by the Ulster Revival of 1859, and the extent to which

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Ibid., p. 41. Lams, Anglican Georgic, pp. 56–67. 15 Ibid., p. 1. 16 The series was launched in 1989 with Craig R. Smith, Defender of the Union: The Oratory of Daniel Webster. Over thirty titles have appeared since then, on figures ranging from Douglas MacArthur to Sojourner Truth. In addition to the titles cited above, Chesebrough also wrote Volume 26, Frederick Douglass: Oratory from Slavery. 17 Bernard K. Duffy and Halford R. Ryan, “Series Foreword,” in Theodore Parker: Orator of Superior Ideas, ed. David B. Chesebrough (Westport, CT, 1999), pp. ix, xi. 14

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preaching actually affected “individual lives and the wider Irish society of the nineteenth century”.18 The research for this project included constructing a database of some 700 Episcopalian, Presbyterian, and Methodist sermons, in both print and manuscript form. The information Dickson compiled allowed him to identify not only the recurring “major” and “minor” themes of Irish evangelicalism, but also the biblical books from which sermons were most often drawn, and even how frequently preachers used a given verse as the basis for multiple sermons. Such analyses, which could once be undertaken only by hand, can now be done much more quickly and thoroughly in an age of digital humanities; Dickson’s model of how such a project might look is perhaps the greatest contribution of his book. If there is a magnum opus in recent sermon scholarship – for the 19th century or any other period – it would be O.C. Edwards’ A History of Preaching (Nashville, 2004). Like The Victorian Pulpit, his approach differs significantly from that of earlier scholars such as Charles Dargan, whose work “reflected a Romantic understanding” of writing as the “product of the genius of an individual”.19 Rather than writing another biographical encyclopedia, Edwards set out to produce a “homiletical genealogy”,20 a survey of the sermon’s evolution over two millennia of Christian history. Individual preachers are, of course, included, but as subpoints of his outlines; Edwards’ overarching concern is the larger issues of genre, religious movements, and cultural phenomena that helped to shape the nature of sacred speech. This collection is intended to be similar to what Dickson and Edwards have done. While some of the essays do focus on one or two major figures, the aim of the volume as a whole is to move away from Thomas Carlyle’s notion that history is “the Biography of Great Men”21 and to examine the theories, theological issues, and cultural developments that defined the 19th-century Anglo-American pulpit. The sixteen essays are divided into three categories: Theory and Theology, Sermon and Society in the British Empire, and Sermon and Society in America. “Theory and Theology” begins with a pair of

18 J.N. Ian Dickson, Beyond Religious Discourse: Sermons, Preaching and Evangelical Protestants in Nineteenth-Century Irish Society (Milton Keynes, 2007), pp. 1, 187, 213. 19 O.C. Edwards, Jr., A History of Preaching (Nashville, 2004), p. xx. 20 Ibid., p. xxi. 21 Thomas Carlyle, On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History (London, 1840), p. 12.

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essays on preaching in the 19th-century Church of England. I explore how several clergy associated with the Oxford Movement worked in many genres: “plain”, “university”, and “visitation” sermons; religious lectures; and episcopal charges. Carol Poster, on the other hand, surveys the ministry of just one man: Richard Whately, who began his career as a fellow of Oriel College, Oxford, and ended it as the Anglican archbishop of Dublin. She examines his views not only of pulpit rhetoric, but also of principles of interpretation, the role of the Anglican Church in Ireland, the sermon’s place in a broader teaching ministry, and the importance of pastoral care. Whately was more sympathetic to both the Low and Broad Church movements than he was to the Tractarians; taken together, these first two essays provide a glimpse into several dimensions of Anglican faith and practice. The first section closes with Thomas Olbricht’s essay on Higher Criticism, the branch of study concerned with authorship, historical context, and other matters that form the background of the biblical texts. The best known expressions of this school of thought in England were probably George Eliot’s translation of David Friedrich Strauss’ Life of Jesus (1846) and a collection entitled Essays and Reviews (1860), which generated enormous controversy and led to two heresy trials.22 These works were largely addressed to specialists; Olbricht shows how Henry Ward Beecher and Frederic W. Farrar, working at approximately the same time on opposite sides of the Atlantic, expressed Higher Critical ideas in terms their congregations could embrace and understand. “Sermon and Society in the British Empire” opens with two essays on politics and national identity. Bob Tennant undertakes a rhetorical history of the British missionary movement, tracing how preaching adapted to a variety of historical circumstances. As the age of Byron bloomed, preachers portrayed missionaries as Romantic heroes; as the empire expanded, they adopted the language of “power politics” employed by the secular authorities; as they preached to the colonized peoples themselves, they shortened and simplified their sermons to make them more accessible to those who had not been raised in a culture of classical rhetoric and Christian faith. Sermons did not, however, merely reflect the “spirit of the age”; they often helped to shape it as well. Tennant argues, in fact, that the sermon, which both helped raise 22 See Essays and Reviews: The 1860 Text and Its Readings, ed. Victor Shea and William Whitla (Charlottesville, 2000).

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support at home and carry the message of the gospel to foreign lands, was the single greatest force responsible for the expansion of Britain’s spiritual empire. The “triumphalist” rhetoric that Tennant identifies in some missionary preaching is also a feature of several works discussed by John Wolffe in “British Sermons on National Events”. Just as preachers speaking to the Church Missionary Society declared that the salvation of the African peoples would be the ultimate testimony to the glories of the empire, some clergy used coronation and jubilee sermons to catalog the many spiritual and temporal blessings God had lavished upon the English people. Such occasions were not, however, purely celebratory: Wolffe shows how the sermons also reminded people that they would be held accountable for how they used the blessings they enjoyed, and warned them that if they proved to be poor stewards, God’s judgement would surely come. Whatever the tone, national-event sermons, like the missionary discourses Tennant analyzes, were important means of “articulating and shaping public responses” to events both glad and tragic; because they tended to draw larger-than-average crowds, they also functioned as a leading form of Victorian mass media, “giving individuals a sense of participation in the ‘imagined community’ of the nation as a whole”. As the Church of England was expanding her presence overseas, the Church of Rome was becoming more prominent in Britain. Jessica Sheetz-Nguyen examines several dimensions of “Catholic Preaching in Victorian England”, beginning with declarations about preaching issued at the Council of Trent and the place of English-language sermons in the 19th-century Latin Mass. She then identifies the chief topics of those sermons: “the Eucharist, almsgiving, and the special place of Mary or the Blessed Mother in the teleology of Roman Catholicism”. Her final section shows how two of the leading figures in the second half of Victoria’s reign worked to put their beliefs into action. In sermons, lectures, and pastoral letters, Nicholas Wiseman and Henry Edward Manning, the first and second archbishops of Westminster, admonished parents to be sure their children received a Catholic education, called for the establishment of Catholic workhouses for children who had no parents, and argued for higher wages and better working conditions for those who labored at the docks and in the factories. Protestant preachers’ response to these developments is the subject of Miriam Elizabeth Burstein’s “Anti-Catholic Sermons in Victorian

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Britain”. Like their Catholic counterparts, Protestant sermons tended to “cluster into recognizable groups: the self-propagation of Catholicism; the spiritual and ecclesiastical histories of Catholicism; the internal failures of modern Protestantism; and, finally, ways of revitalizing Protestantism and beating back the Catholic threat”. The best defense, the preachers suggested, was a “life of intensified piety and discipline”, supported by “a regular program of Bible reading”. People firmly grounded in the scriptures could take their proper place as “mere instruments” in the religious struggle, wielding the Bible itself as “the ultimate weapon … against the Catholic threat”. Eight years after the restoration of the Catholic hierarchy, Charles Darwin published The Origin of Species. Given the challenges it posed to the received interpretations of the book of Genesis, one might think that the book provided ample fodder for pulpit address. As Keith Francis shows, however, this was not the case. While some preachers did protest against it, others, including such prominent figures as Charles Kingsley and Baden Powell, publicly supported Darwin’s views. Many others, moreover, simply did not address the matter, perhaps because they and their congregations had little interest in the issue, or because they felt that such matters should not be discussed in the pulpit. Whatever the explanation, Francis estimates that sermons on science comprised only between 1 and 5 per cent of the total corpus, a statistic he illustrates with a most effective metaphor. Darwinian theory, he writes, may have been a “dangerous dog” lurking in the “neighborhood” of traditional belief, but as far as preaching was concerned, it was a “dog that didn’t bark”. While the other essays in this section deal with actual preachers, Tamara Wagner analyzes the representation of sermons in Victorian fiction. She shows how the “figure of the fraudulent clergyman” is used in novels ranging from Wilkie Collins’ The Moonstone to Charlotte Yonge’s The Clever Woman of the Family, but she does not stop there. Rather, she suggests that that the term “sermon novel” can encompass both works that contain sermons and books that are essentially sermons themselves. Many of the texts in this category functioned as point-and-counterpoint in an extended doctrinal debate, much like a chess game that is played through the mail. Elizabeth Harris’ From Oxford to Rome, for example, spurred John Henry Newman to write Loss and Gain, which in turn “set off a cascade of reactions”, culminating, perhaps, in Eliza Lynn Linton’s savagely anti-Tractarian Under Which Lord. These works, then, are a kind of counterpart to the portraits

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Dawn Coleman examines in Chapter Sixteen: instead of showcasing the best and the brightest that Christianity has to offer, they offer glimpses of the acrimony of doctrinal infighting and the declining status of the clergy in a society that grew increasingly secular as the century progressed. The final section, “Sermon and Society in America”, contains essays on topics ranging from Mormonism to sermons against dueling. Thomas Carmody sees the reaction to the Hamilton-Burr duel of 1804 as the emergence of the American “bully pulpit”, as ministers urged legislators, newspaper editors, parents, and wives to help move society away from the code duello that for many years had allowed men to defend their honor through the use of deadly force. Their efforts led to the formation of anti-dueling societies and the passing of anti-dueling laws; later, as they addressed other social ills as well, these ministers also helped to spur what W.J. Rorabaugh, a scholar cited in the essay, called “a host of [other] reforms, including Sunday schools, missions, temperance, abolition and women’s rights”. The issues Rorabaugh mentioned are virtually identical to those addressed by the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union, the subject of Dorothy Lander’s essay. Although alcohol use and abuse was the organization’s primary focus, the issue was often – and perhaps inevitably – intertwined with other matters such as the slave trade (addiction to liquor was seen as a form of bondage); suffrage (political solutions to the alcohol problems could be achieved only if women were given the right to vote); and women in ministry (could women “preach” on what the Bible said about drinking and other subjects, or were they to be restricted merely to “teaching” roles?). Lander gives ample attention to the many facets of the temperance question, and, much as Carmody does, ends her essay with some thoughts about the enduring significance of her subject. In her view, the WCTU’s achievements in breaking down the barriers between teaching and preaching, secular and sacred space, male and female, and rich and poor, can serve as models for women seeking to minister in the 21st-century church. David Timmerman and Joseph Evans examine preaching by and about African-Americans. Timmerman focuses on preaching in the Reconstruction years, specifically on how “northern white Protestant ministers” addressed the social and legal status of the newly-freed slaves. The ministers were clearly conflicted on the issue: while they thanked God for bringing freedom to the slaves, they were not entirely willing for that freedom to be immediately exercised in the public

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square. When they argued, for example, that former slaves should not be allowed to vote until they could read and write, these ministers helped to create a kind of limbo for the Freedmen, placing them, in the words of Timmerman’s title, “midway between slavery and citizenship”. Joseph Evans’ essay explores how similar issues of citizenship and equality have been addressed by three African-American preachers and political activists. Frederick Douglass secured his freedom by teaching himself how to read and write and then used his oratorical skills to argue for the liberation of other slaves; Martin Luther King helped to shape the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s; and Gardner Calvin Taylor continued the work, serving as an advocate for the rights of African-Americans after King was assassinated in 1968. Each pursued his goals by invoking the values of both the Judeo– Christian tradition and American democracy, using the story of David and Goliath and the Declaration of Independence, Christ’s metaphor of “fishers of men” and the U.S. Constitution, to call for the elimination of the state of limbo Timmerman noted in his essay. They were, in other words, practitioners of a rhetorical form known as the “civic sermon”, which Evans defines as a “hybrid of political-religious oratory” that moves “sectarian congregations to embrace civic responsibility” and “persuades secular audiences to become evangelists for democratic values”. Mirela Saim’s and Brian Jackson’s essays are case studies of the “centripetal pull” that draws institutions from the margins to the center. Saim traces the beginnings of Jewish preaching’s integration into Anglo-American culture to 1773, when a sermon Haym Isaac Carigal preached in Newport, Rhode Island was translated from Spanish into English, and to 1817, when Tobias Goodman preached an Englishlanguage sermon in London in memory of Princess Charlotte. Over the next several decades, Jewish homiletics continued to evolve: shaped by the influx of German-trained rabbis who came to America starting in the 1840s, the sermon retained the expository focus of the traditional derashah while also reflecting the beliefs and aspirations of a pluralistic and democratic nation. The process culminated on 3 March 1867, when Max Lilienthal preached in the First Unitarian Church of Cincinnati, Ohio. His sermon was truly an amalgam of traditions: it was based on texts from both the Hebrew Bible and contemporary political speech; it followed the structural models of classical oratory; and it called for the congregation to practice “peace, toleration, and

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friendship”, values that lay at the heart of both Jewish humanism and the emerging idea of an American “civil religion”. It is also, in Saim’s view, one of the most important early examples of interfaith “pulpit exchanges”, which had probably begun earlier in the century and continue to be practiced throughout North America and Europe. The Latter-Day Saints were not immigrants, but they too underwent the process of adapting to the culture around them. For nearly seventy years – from the beginning of Joseph Smith’s ministry in the 1820s to the end of the 19th century – the Mormons embraced what Jackson calls “the rhetoric of the invisible”, emphasizing the direct inspiration of the Holy Spirit over any kind of human study or preparation. They eventually recognized the importance of formal study; by the 1890s, the church was moving into the homiletic mainstream, establishing its own schools and publishing its own preaching manuals. Finally, Dawn Coleman takes as her subject the nine volumes of Annals of the American Pulpit (1856–69), William Buell Sprague’s tribute to “distinguished clergymen in each of the major American denominations from the 1620s through 1855”. Sprague’s collection of hundreds of letters about ministers from around the country provides, in Coleman’s words, “a window onto popular perceptions of effective preaching”. These descriptions reveal that listeners saw the best ministers less as theological teachers than as almost supernaturally gifted figures who created intense experiences for their audiences. Ministers garnered high praise for delivering extemporaneous addresses that “electrified” or even terrified their congregations. Sprague’s primary goal may have been to produce a kind of biographical encyclopedia, but Coleman demonstrates that the Annals is also rhetorical history, a compendium of responses to preaching that would be difficult, if not impossible, to find anywhere else. In short, the range of approaches represented in this volume shows the importance of bringing a “pluralistic hypothesis”23 to the study of the 19th-century Anglo-American sermon. The phrase comes from William James, whose Varieties of Religious Experience was the first book that came to mind as I was drafting this introduction. James demonstrates that religion is not a “one size fits all” phenomenon: people

23 William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature. Being the Gifford Lectures on Natural Religion Delivered at Edinburgh in 1901–1902 (London, 1915), p. 526.

introduction

11

have different “wants”, “capacities”, psychological profiles, and conversion experiences.24 In the same way, the genre of the sermon is far from monolithic, encompassing much more than could be addressed here; a volume such as this one could also include, for example, essays on apocalyptic sermons, preaching on the American frontier, and the pulpit in continental Europe. There is, then, much more that can still be done. Some, in fact, is already underway: several of the scholars who contributed to this collection are working on other studies of the sermon. Some of these projects involve just one person; others are collaborative efforts. Some will result in the publication of articles and books; others will join a growing body of work in digital humanities.25 The collaborative and digital work is an encouraging indication that the humanities are increasingly moving toward research teams, co-authorship, and other models and practices that have been employed in the sciences for years. It is my hope that additional projects – both in “traditional” forms of scholarship and in these new horizons – will soon be undertaken as well, so that the history of the 19th-century sermon can continue to be written.

24

Ibid., pp. 127, 137. Brief descriptions of individual projects can be found in the List of Contributors. On the digital front, Keith Francis, Bob Tennant, John Wolffe, and I – along with Bill Gibson of Oxford Brookes University and other scholars – are co-directors of “The British Pulpit Online”, a catalogue, portal, and archive of British sermons preached between 1660 and 1901. At first, the materials included will reflect the special interests of the research group; our goal is that all published texts will eventually be accessible from the project’s website. 25

PART ONE

THEORY AND THEOLOGY

THE TRACTARIANS’ SERMONS AND OTHER SPEECHES1 Robert H. Ellison Introduction The Tractarians2 were orators. They would probably object to the use of this term, for it evoked what they saw as the excesses of Evangelical preaching3 and ran counter to the notion of “reserve” that was central to the ethos of the Oxford Movement.4 The fact remains, however, that 1 I wish to thank East Texas Baptist University for granting me a research leave during the Spring 2006 semester, and for providing other financial support through the Faculty Research Grant program and the Jim and Ethel Dickson Research and Study Endowment. The Principal of Pusey House, Oxford, and the staff of Lambeth Palace Library provided invaluable assistance in locating sermons by E.B. Pusey and John Keble, as well as John and Thomas Keble’s letters to Isaac Williams. I am also grateful to Dawn Coleman, Carol Poster, and Bob Tennant for their careful reading of my drafts and very helpful suggestions for improvement. 2 The term “Tractarian” was often used to describe Anglican clergy and laity affiliated with the Oxford Movement (1833–45), an effort to revive interest in and adherence to the teachings of the Church Fathers and the 17th-century English theologians known as the “Caroline Divines”. It derives from the Movement’s flagship publications, the 91 Tracts for the Times issued between 1833 and 1841. A classic history of the movement is Richard William Church, The Oxford Movement. Twelve Years, 1833–1845 (1891; repr. Chicago, 1970); more recent studies include Peter Nockles, The Oxford Movement in Context: Anglican High Churchmanship, 1760–1857 (Cambridge, 1994); George Herring, What Was the Oxford Movement? (London, 2002); Simon Skinner, Tractarians and the ‘Condition of England’: The Social and Political Thought of the Oxford Movement (Oxford, 2004); and James Pereiro, Ethos and the Oxford Movement: at the Heart of Tractarianism (Oxford, 2008). 3 Tractarian critiques of oratorical display can be found in John Henry Newman, The Letters and Diaries of John Henry Newman, 5, ed. Ian Ker and Thomas Gornall (Oxford, 1980), pp. 44–45; John Keble, Occasional Papers and Reviews (Oxford, 1877), pp. 369–70; and Edward Bouverie Pusey, Sermons Preached Before the University of Oxford Between A.D. 1859 and 1872 (London, 1872), pp. 6–7. An occasion on which Keble made a special effort to preach poorly is recorded in Pusey’s Preface to Occasional Papers, pp. xiii–xiv. 4 The word “reserve” had a twofold meaning for the Tractarians. The first is analogous to the Fathers’ concept of the disciplina arcani, or the “discipline of the secret”: God “reserved” spiritual knowledge for those who were capable of properly handling it. The second sense, which is the one I am using here, holds that Christians should be “reserved” in the way they lived their lives, treating sacred matters calmly and soberly, and avoiding irreverent speech and inappropriate displays of religious excitement or emotion. For detailed discussions of these ideas, see Isaac Williams’ Tracts 80 and 87, On Reserve in Communicating Religious Knowledge.

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they delivered hundreds of speeches, many of which were published during their lifetimes or shortly after their deaths. A complete list of titles would run to over fifty collections of sermons, some half-dozen volumes of lectures, and nearly thirty archidiaconal charges.5 Victorianists and other scholars have not entirely neglected these works,6 but they generally have not taken the approaches I will employ here. Interest in these texts has largely been historical or theological, focusing on what they reveal about the speaker’s views on the ancient church, the sacraments, ecclesiastical legislation, or a host of other topics. My concern, however, is rhetorical: I want to know how and why they expressed those views the way they did, tailoring each message to meet the demands and expectations of a certain place and time. When Victorian preachers and their publishers used a variety of labels, they implied that they recognized a variety of genres; analyzing the distinguishing characteristics of each category can illuminate aspects of the texts we have not noticed before. Definitions and Scope This is not intended to be a study of Tractarian oratory, which I would define as those discourses intended to advance the ideas and doctrines of the Oxford Movement.7 Rather, my interest is in the Tractarians’ oratory, the larger body of speeches by those associated with the Movement, whether or not those speeches explicitly addressed its agendas.

5

See the Bibliography for the most important texts in each of these categories. Chapters focusing on the Tractarians’ oratory can be found in Kirstie Blair, ed., John Keble in Context (London, 2004); Yngve Brilioth, The Anglican Revival: Studies in the Oxford Movement (London, 1925); Perry Butler, ed., Pusey Rediscovered (London, 1983); F.L. Cross, Preaching in the Anglo-Catholic Revival (London, 1933); and Ian Ker, The Achievement of John Henry Newman (Notre Dame, IN, 1990). Journal articles include John R. Griffin, “The Meaning of National Apostasy: A Note on Newman’s Apologia,” Faith & Reason 2 (Spring 1976), 19–33; Ronald H. McKinney, “Preaching within the Oxford Movement,” Homiletical and Pastoral Review 85.7 (April 1985), 56–61; Lawrence Poston, “Newman’s Tractarian Homiletics,” Anglican Theological Review 87.3 (Summer 2005), 399–421; and Geoffrey Rowell, “ ‘Remember Lot’s Wife’ – Manning’s Anglican Sermons,” Recusant History 21 (1992), 167–79. 7 In 1840, Pusey identified the Oxford Movement’s chief concerns as “High thoughts of the two Sacraments” (baptism and holy communion); a “High estimate” of the “visible Church” and the Episcopal system of government; “Regard for ordinances” and “the visible part of devotion”; and “Reverence for and deference to the Ancient Church” (Henry Parry Liddon, Life of Edward Bouverie Pusey, 4 vols. [London, 1893–97], p. 2: 140). 6

the tractarians’ sermons and other speeches

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The number of men whose works could be included here is quite large. In its broadest sense, the term “Tractarian” could apply to several hundred Victorian clergymen, most of whom served small, rural parishes in the southern and southwestern parts of England.8 In this essay, however, I will focus on twelve men who contributed to the Tracts for the Times and published significant numbers of speeches. Greatest attention will be given to the three who are generally regarded as the central figures of the Movement – John Henry Newman, John Keble, and E.B. Pusey – along with Benjamin Harrison, Henry Edward Manning, and Isaac Williams. Some mention will also be made of Charles Page Eden, Thomas Keble (John’s younger brother), Charles Marriott, Arthur Philip Perceval, Sir George Prevost, and Robert Francis Wilson.9 John William Bowden, Antony Buller, Richard Hurrell Froude, Alfred Menzies, and William Palmer wrote eleven of the ninety tracts but published few or no orations, and are thus excluded from the study.10 The Tractarians’ Homiletic Theory I begin with the theory of sacred rhetoric, specifically the nature of the sermon. Scholars in fields ranging from history and English to communication and sociolinguistics have produced a large body of scholarship on the analysis and classification of rhetorical texts,11 along with helpful descriptive comparisons between sermons and such related genres as homilies;12 commentaries and treatises;13 catechetical 8

Herring, Oxford Movement, pp. 69–78. The lives of Newman, Keble, and Pusey are well-known, but a brief mention of the other nine may be in order. All were students, tutors, or fellows of various Oxford colleges who went on to become curates (Thomas Keble at Bisley, Wilson at Rowhams, and Williams at Littlemore and St Mary’s); vicars of St Mary’s (Eden and Marriott); archdeacons (Harrison of Maidstone, Manning of Chichester, and Prevost of Gloucester), and royal chaplains (Perceval). 10 Bowden, a commissioner of stamps, wrote a number of religious pieces but published no sermons. Buller, Froude, Menzies, and Palmer were in holy orders, but I have been able to locate only two published sermons by Buller and none at all by the others. 11 For overviews of the major concepts and publications in rhetorical criticism and genre theory, see James Jasinski, ed., Sourcebook on Rhetoric (Thousand Oaks, CA, 2001) and Thomas O. Sloane, ed., Encyclopedia of Rhetoric (Oxford, 2001). 12 Mary B. Cunningham and Pauline Allen, “Introduction,” in Preacher and Audience: Studies in Early Christian and Byzantine Homiletics, ed. Mary B. Cunningham and Pauline Allen (Leiden, The Netherlands, 1998), pp. 1–2. 13 O.C. Edwards, Jr., A History of Preaching (Nashville, 2004), pp. 147, 187–92. 9

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addresses;14 and exhortations.15 The Tractarians were rather sophisticated genre theorists in their own right, and their writings often contain prescriptive statements about what sermons should and should not be. Much of Newman’s homiletic theory can be found in Apologia Pro Vita Sua and “University Preaching”, one of the discourses published in The Idea of a University. He believed that “polemical discussions” should be limited to the lecture hall,16 and he had a self-imposed “rule” against “introduc[ing] the exciting topics of the day into the Pulpit”.17 He adhered to this rule until December 1841, breaking it only because he believed “the moment was urgent”:18 those whose faith had been shaken by the establishment of the Jerusalem Bishopric and the publication of his own Tract Ninety needed to be reassured that it was spiritually safe to remain members of the established church.19 When he prepared the sermons he preached that month for publication in Sermons on Subjects of the Day, he added “a few words…of private or personal opinion”, sentiments that he saw as inappropriate for the pulpit but “unobjectionable in the case of compositions, which are detached from the sacred place and service to which they once belonged”.20 The volume, in fact, is not just a departure from his usual choice of topics; it might actually be regarded as not containing sermons at all. Because of the changes he had made, the collection could not, in his view, “be criticized at all as preachments; they are essays; essays of a man who, at the time of publishing them, was not a preacher”.21 Other Tractarians shared Newman’s views about the kinds of subjects that should – and should not – be discussed from the pulpit. Several collections open with statements similar to one in the preface to a volume Pusey published in 1845: “nothing was further from [his]

14

Yngve Brilioth, A Brief History of Preaching, trans. Karl E. Mattson (Philadelphia, 1965), pp. 10–13. 15 Jerry L. Tarver, “A Lost Form of Pulpit Address,” Southern Speech Journal 31.3 (Spring 1966), 181–89. 16 John Henry Newman, The Idea of a University (1852; repr. Oxford, 1976), p. 337. 17 John Henry Newman, Apologia Pro Vita Sua (1890; repr. New York, 1968), pp. 125, 236. 18 Ibid., p. 125. 19 Ibid., pp. 124–27. For a brief discussion of the Jerusalem Bishopric, see The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church, 3rd ed. revised, ed. E.A. Livingstone (Oxford and New York, 2005), pp. 874–75. 20 Ibid., p. 235. 21 Ibid.


19

mind”, he wrote, “than to enter upon controversy; his one object being to bring solemn truths before the hearers, with the hope and prayer that God would bring them home to their souls”.22 The Tractarians appear to have had a particular distaste for using the sermon as a vehicle for political commentary. They often wrote about the relationship between church and state,23 but they would have agreed with John Keble’s statement that such topics were generally not “fit for the House of God”.24 When they do address these matters in sermons commemorating political occasions such as Guy Fawkes’ Day or the beginning of a judicial term,25 they admonish their congregations not to get caught up in “earthly activity and worldly schemes”.26 Instead, they are to submit to the governing authorities and obey Moses’ command as quoted in Pusey’s Patience and Confidence the Strength of the Church: “Fear ye not, stand still, and see the salvation of the Lord”.27 The Tractarians sought to minimize discussions of potentially divisive issues because any controversy they provoked could detract from the raison d’etre of the sermon: the preacher’s appeals for his people to live more fully Christian lives. The difference between sermons and other forms of religious expression can be summed up in the phrase “to convince and to persuade”, an idea which dates back to at least Augustine’s De Doctrina Christiana28 and appears in the writings of

22 Edward Bouverie Pusey, “Preface,” in A Course of Sermons on Solemn Subjects Chiefly Bearing on Repentance and Amendment of Life, Preached in St. Saviour’s Church, Leeds, During the Week After Its Consecration on the Feast of S. Simon and S. Jude (Oxford, 1845), p. ii. 23 See, for example, “A Trial of Doctrine” and other essays in Keble, Occasional Papers; Manning, Appellate Jurisdiction of the Crown in Matters Spiritual (London, 1850); Newman, Tract 2, “The Catholic Church” (Oxford, 1833); Prevost, The Principles of the English Constitution in Church and State (London, 1848); and Pusey, The Royal Supremacy not an Arbitrary Authority but Limited by the Laws of the Church of Which Kings Are Members (Oxford, 1850). 24 Keble, Occasional Papers, p. 238. 25 For examples of the Tractarians’ political preaching, see John Keble, “National Apostasy” and “Church and State,” in Sermons Academical and Occasional (Oxford, 1847), pp. 127–72; Manning, “Christ’s Kingdom Not of This World,” in Sermons Preached Before the University of Oxford (Oxford, 1844), pp. 67–96; and Pusey, Patience and Confidence the Strength of the Church, 2nd ed. (Oxford, 1838). 26 Pusey, Patience and Confidence, p. 56. 27 Ibid., p. 1. For a discussion of “audience awareness” in Pusey’s, Keble’s, and Newman’s political writing and preaching, see Robert H. Ellison, “The Tractarians’ Political Rhetoric,” Anglican and Episcopal History 77.3 (September 2008), 221–56. 28 Aurelius Augustine, “On Christian Doctrine,” trans. J.F. Shaw, in Augustine, Great Books of the Western World, 18 (Chicago, 1952), IV.13.

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theorists and practitioners from ancient times to the present day.29 The first part of the phrase indicates that sermons, like lectures and essays, must offer some education in the fundamentals of the faith. They must not, however, end there. Instead, the preacher must also resolve, as Newman did in 1824, to “always strive in every pulpit so to … warn people that it is quite idle to pretend to faith and holiness, unless they show forth their inward principles by a pure disinterested upright line of conduct”.30 This resolution is not unique to Newman; all the preachers discussed in this essay insist that practical application is an essential part of all true sermons. Isaac Williams defines a sermon as a discussion “of some great point of Christian truth, with its application to the life of faith”,31 and suggests that some of his own collections might be considered commentaries or lectures rather than sermons because they focus on instruction rather than application.32 In his archidiaconal charges of 1848 and 1849, Manning criticizes Victorian preaching as “too often general and unpractical” and reminds the clergy under his care that It is not enough that the matter of a sermon be true. It needs, so to speak, flesh and blood, human sympathy and the breath of life. The preacher must come down into the midst of his people: he must descend into the detail of every day; into the particulars of trial, the commonplace of duty, character, and personal experience.33

As the “aim of the Apostles was not controversy, but to ‘make disciples of all nations’ ”, Victorian clergy must set debate aside and “firmly

29 For uses of this and similar phrases from the Middle Ages through modern sociolinguistics, see James J. Murphy, Rhetoric in the Middle Ages: A History of Rhetorical Theory from Saint Augustine to the Renaissance (Berkeley, 1974), p. 313; George Herbert, The Country Parson, the Temple (New York, 1981), pp. 84–85; Gilbert Burnet, A Discourse of the Pastoral Care, 14th ed. (London, 1821), pp. 210–11; John Lawson, Lectures Concerning Oratory, ed. E. Neal Claussen and Karl R. Wallace (Carbondale, Ill, 1972), p. 366; J.H. Rigg, “The Pulpit and Its Influence,” Eclectic Magazine 40 (1857), 383; Douglas Biber, “An Analytical Framework for Register Studies,” in Sociolinguistic Perspectives on Register, ed. Douglas Biber and Edward Finegan (New York, 1994), p. 32. 30 John Henry Newman, Letters and Correspondence of John Henry Newman, 2 vols, ed. Anne Mozley (London, 1891), p. 1: 89. 31 Isaac Williams, A Series of Sermons on the Epistle and Gospel for Each Sunday in the Year and the Holy Days of the Church, 1 (London, 1855), p. vi. 32 [Isaac Williams], “Advertisement,” in Plain Sermons, by Contributors to the “Tracts for the Times,” 10 vols. (London, 1839–48), pp. 9: 1–2. 33 Henry Edward Manning, A Charge Delivered at the Ordinary Visitation of the Archdeaconry of Chichester in July, 1849 (London, 1849), p. 79.


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and peacefully teach, leaving to conscience and to God the issue of [their] work”.34 John Keble’s belief that sermons ought not to be “merely speculative”, but address “practical questions of duty”,35 is discussed at length in his 1816 review of sermons by Archibald Alison, a Scottish Episcopal preacher who lived from 1757 to 1839. In Keble’s view, Alison falls short of the expectations of both classical and Christian speech. He does not satisfy the ancients’ threefold test of “conciliating the good opinion of his hearers, of putting them in possession of the question, and lastly, of moving their feelings”,36 nor does he live up to what the 18th-century archbishop Thomas Secker called the “business” of the preacher: to “make men think … of the state of their own souls; and to fix them in the belief and practice of what will render them happy now and to eternity”.37 Keble’s “great objection” to the collection is that Alison “uniformly omits that which, in pulpit eloquence especially, can least conveniently be spared”.38 Because “he does not think it essential to acquaint [the people] why they should entertain the feelings and opinions which he proposes, nor what good purpose it would answer if they did”, it is not possible to receive “any instruction or edification from the sermons”.39 In short, the question Keble attempts to set aside in the opening paragraphs – “whether these discourses would be more properly ranged under the head of sermons or of mere essays”40 – is in fact the central issue of the review. The stylistic flaws of Alison’s speeches keep them from being regarded as good essays, but they are essays nonetheless. “Edification”, on the other hand, is the quality that sets preaching apart from all other species of address; because it is not emphasized to the extent Keble expects, he would say that Alison’s speeches cannot be classified as sermons at all. “Plain” Preaching and “University” Sermons A study of religious oratory must not only examine how sermons compare to essays, lectures, and commentaries; it must differentiate among 34 Henry Edward Manning, A Charge Delivered at the Ordinary Visitation of the Archdeaconry of Chichester in July, 1848 (London, 1848), pp. 54–55. 35 Keble, Sermons, Academical and Occasional, p. i. 36 [John Keble], “Alison’s Sermons,” Quarterly Review 14 (1816), 430. 37 Ibid., p. 443. 38 Ibid., p. 430. 39 Ibid., p. 430. 40 Ibid.

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the many subgenres of the sermon as well. Preachers in pre-Victorian days constructed numerous taxonomies of preaching. Desiderius Erasmus’ Renaissance-era theory, for example, posited “a system of five genera”: he relabeled classical epideictic as “laudatory” preaching and “developed the deliberative genus into four others: the persuasive, the exhortative, the admonitory, and the consolatory”.41 Several centuries later, in Lectures on Systematic Theology and Pulpit Eloquence, George Campbell offered his own list of five “species”: the “explanatory”, “controversial”, “commendatory”, “pathetic”, and “persuasive”.42 The Tractarians likewise used a variety of adjectives to describe their work: “village”, “parochial”, “cathedral”, “occasional”, “lenten”, and so on. The ones they preached and published most often were “plain”, “university”, and “visitation” sermons, subgenres that were intended for three very different types of audiences and therefore open many avenues for rhetorical analysis.43 Calls for plainness in the pulpit were often made as a reaction against the perceived excesses of earlier preaching styles: the “sophistic abuses” of early Christian preaching,44 the “ornate style” of the later Middle Ages,45 or the elaborate wordplay of the “witty” or “metaphysical” sermons of the 16th and 17th centuries.46 Advocates of the plain style encouraged preachers to take the middle way, avoiding pedantry and ornament while not ruining their discourses with “colorless words”,47 “barbarism”,48 or “vulgarity of speech”.49 In the 19th century, preachers 41

Edwards, History of Preaching, p. 277. George Campbell, Lectures on Systematic Theology and Pulpit Eloquence (London, 1807), pp. 356–62. 43 There were not always rigid demarcations between these subgenres; in the next chapter of this collection, for example, Carol Poster notes that Richard Whately was notorious for “self-plagiarism” and for publishing the same essay under a number of different labels. Similarly, at least two of Newman’s university sermons were later delivered before parish congregations, usually with only minor changes. See the Editors’ Notes to Fifteen Sermons Preached before the University of Oxford (Oxford, 2006), pp. 313, 314, and 330. 44 Murphy, Rhetoric, p. 52. 45 John N. Wall, “Godly and Fruitful Lessons: The English Bible, Erasmus’ Paraphrases and the Book of Homilies,” in The Godly Kingdom of Tudor England, ed. John E. Booty (Wilton, CT, 1981), p. 95. 46 W. Fraser Mitchell, English Pulpit Oratory from Andrewes to Tillotson (New York, 1962), p. 352. 47 Alan of Lille, “Art of Preaching,” trans. Gilian R. Evans, in Theories of Preaching: Selected Readings in the Homiletical Tradition, ed. Richard Lischer (Durham, NC, 1987), p. 11. 48 Mitchell, English Pulpit Oratory, p. 100. 49 Augustine, “On Christian Doctrine,” IV.10. 42


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from all traditions made at least some mention of the value of plain preaching; at least two – Harvey Goodwin, Bishop of Carlisle, and Robert Wilson Evans, the vicar of Heversham who would go on to become Archdeacon of Westmorland – published complete essays outlining the necessity and effectiveness of an unadorned pulpit style.50 While most theorists, including Newman,51 suggested that this approach was appropriate for all audiences, a number of Victorians asserted that it was particularly necessary when a congregation was rural, uneducated, or poor.52 If plain preaching is at one end of a homiletic spectrum, the “university sermon” is positioned at the other. The statutes governing the University of Oxford stipulated that a sermon must be preached, generally in the University Church of St Mary the Virgin, “on Sunday mornings and afternoons, major saints’ days, and days of national or university importance”.53 These sermons would be delivered on a rotating basis by “the heads of colleges, by the dean and prebendaries of Christ Church, by the two professors of divinity, and by the professor of the Hebrew tongue”;54 if someone were unable to fulfill his assignment, his place would be taken by one of the ten “Select Preachers” appointed each year by the Vice-Chancellor and other university officials.55 The Victorians published a good deal about plain preaching, but they made only passing comments on the theory of the “university” sermon. These comments largely reinforce what we would infer from the label: that these discourses could be longer and more complex than

50

Harvey Goodwin, “What Constitutes a Plain Sermon?,” in Homiletical and Pastoral Lectures, ed. C.J. Ellicott (New York, 1880), pp. 105–31; Robert Wilson Evans, “Sermons to Be Plain,” in Ecclesiastes Anglicanus: Being a Treatise on Preaching, as Adapted to a Church of England Congregation: In a Series of Letters to a Young Clergyman, ed. W. Gresley (New York, 1844), pp. 320–24. 51 Skinner, Tractarians, p. 161. 52 Brian Heeney, A Different Kind of Gentleman: Parish Clergy as Professional Men in Early and Mid-Victorian England, (Studies in British History and Culture) 5 (Hamden, Conn., 1976), pp. 40–41; John Henry Blunt, Directorium Pastorale: The Principles and Practice of Pastoral Work in the Church of England (London, 1880), p. 142; Goodwin, “What Constitutes a Plain Sermon?” p. 127; Charles Marriott, The Church’s Method of Communicating Divine Truth. A Lecture Delivered at the Diocesan College, Chichester, at the Opening of Lent Term, 1841 (Chichester, 1841), p. 19. 53 “Editors’ Introduction,” in Fifteen Sermons Preached before the University of Oxford, ed. James David Earnest and Gerard Tracey (Oxford, 2006), p. xxiv; Oxford University Statutes, 2, trans. G.R.M. Ward, ed. James Heywood (London, 1851), pp. 43–47. 54 Oxford Statutes, pp. 43–44. 55 Ibid., pp. 49–50.

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other pulpit speeches. The author of an article published in the High Anglican Christian Remembrancer in 1845 stated that a “scholastic attitude” is “tolerable, and indeed frequently desirable” in university sermons,56 and Newman acknowledged that “they certainly would … require a treatment more exact than is necessary in merely popular exhortations”.57 Preachers, however, could – and apparently did – take the academic content too far, leading some observers to complain that many university sermons were too “abstruse”58 or “polemical”59 to give the students the practical spiritual guidance they needed. Visitation Sermons and Charges Plain sermons were meant for rural congregations, university sermons for academic audiences, and visitation sermons for the clergy. A system of episcopal visitation had been in place in England since at least the 8th century: canons issued by the synods of Cloveshoe and Calcuith in 747 and 785 required bishops to go through their dioceses every year to preach, preside over confirmations, “excommunicate the wicked; and restrain soothsayers, fortune-tellers, enchanters, diviners, [and] wizards”;60 by the 13th century, archdeacons were required to undertake such duties as well.61 New requirements published in the 16th century stipulated that bishops were to conduct visitations only “every three years in person”,62 while preserving the annual requirement for archdeacons.63 By Victorian times, the archdeacons’ tours had largely been replaced by single meetings at the cathedral or a large church in the archdeaconry, but the visitation’s function as a time of recordkeeping, correction, and encouragement remained the same.64 56

“English Preaching,” Christian Remembrancer 10 (1845), 608. Newman, Idea, p. 339. 58 W. Sewell, Collegiate Reform. A Sermon Preached Before the University of Oxford, on the First Sunday in Advent, 1853 (Oxford, 1853), p. 36. 59 William Basil Jones, A Letter to the Vice-Chancellor of the University of Oxford, on the Subject of the University Sermons (Oxford, 1853), p. 5. 60 W.P., “On Episcopal Visitations. No. IV.,” Christian Remembrancer ns 3 (1842), 114. 61 Ibid., pp. 116–19. 62 The Anglican Canons 1529–1947, ed. Gerald Bray (Woodbridge, Suffolk, 1998), p. 131. 63 Ibid., p. 183. 64 Arthur Burns, The Diocesan Revival in the Church of England c. 1800–1870 (Oxford, 1999), pp. 23–24, 46–47. For proclamations concerning what was to take place during the visitations, see The Anglican Canons, pp. 131–37, 183. 57


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A 19th-century visitation service was the scene of two significant rhetorical events. First, a sermon was preached, generally by one of the junior clergy.65 We have even fewer theoretical statements about this discourse than about university sermons, but it seems safe to infer that the choice of the term “sermon” suggested it would have the same practical emphasis as other members of the genre, with applications specifically tailored to the clergy. Later in the meeting, the bishop or archdeacon himself would give a “charge”, which could often take as much as two hours to deliver.66 This was an excellent example of what Kathleen Hall Jamieson and Karlyn Kohrs Campbell have called a “rhetorical hybrid”, in which elements of existing genres are “fused” together to create a new category of address.67 At times, the charge would resemble a sermon, as the speaker exhorted his clergy to pursue excellence in the execution of their priestly duties. When the subject turned to administrative matters such as the physical condition of the church buildings, it also took on the flavor of a “state of the diocese” address.68 Finally, it was often essentially a verbal diary of the topics the speaker had been thinking about since the last visitation; one charge delivered in 1832 was described as a “syllabus of ministerial knowledge” that treats on the Church Societies, King’s College, London, cathedral establishments, parochial duties, preaching, schools, clerical deportment, the infamous conduct of the enemies of the Church … the Irish plunderers and traitors, necessity of meekness and firmness on the part of the Clergy, the Ecclesiastical Commission, and the importance of union … among the clerical body.69

These discourses comprise a somewhat small but nonetheless significant part of the Tractarians’ canon – approximately a half-dozen sermons and twenty-five archidiaconal charges – and they will be the final genres considered in this essay.

65

W.P., “On Episcopal Visitations. No. I.,” Christian Remembrancer ns 1 (1841),

38. 66 Peter C. Hammond, The Parson and the Victorian Parish (London, 1977), p. 175. 67 Kathleen Hall Jamieson and Karlyn Kohrs Campbell, “Rhetorical Hybrids: Fusions of Generic Elements,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 68 (1982), 146–47. 68 Hammond, Parson and Parish, p. 176. 69 Review of A Charge Delivered at the Primary Visitation in August and September, 1832, by William Howley, Christian Remembrancer 15 (1833), 20–21.

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robert h. ellison The Tractarians’ Lectures

I will now consider the extent to which the Tractarians’ practices conformed to the theories, beginning with their lectures. The best-known collections are probably Newman’s Lectures on Justification and Lectures on the Prophetical Office of the Church, published in 1837 and 1838. They may also be among the “purest” examples of the lecture because – to return to Augustine’s words – they generally focus on “convincing” their audiences rather than “persuading” them. Newman’s goal in both collections is to establish an Anglican via media, a middle ground between the errors of “Romanism”, which he believes had “perverted” the principles of true religion, and “popular Protestantism”, which he sees as having no principles at all.70 As he pursues this aim, it becomes clear that offering practical application is not his chief concern. In the Introduction to Prophetical Office, he acknowledges that “there certainly is a call upon us to exhibit our principles in action”,71 but he also asserts that one should not proceed without first establishing what those principles are. Consequently, he devotes the fourteen lectures to showing how only the Church of England possesses the right understanding of such matters as the nature of the Scriptures, the authority of ancient tradition, and the notion of “private judgement”, the practice of all believers interpreting the Scriptures for themselves. He does not altogether eliminate exhortations to piety – in the final pages, for example, he reminds his audiences that “the day of judgment is literally ever at hand; and it is our duty ever to be looking out for it”72 – but the volume as a whole has what the introduction says it would: “more reference to religious teaching than to action”.73 Newman’s concern with doctrine is similarly evident in the opening pages of Lectures on Justification. He decided to speak on this subject because some had begun to question the “doctrine of justifying faith” as set forth in the “Formularies” of the Church of England.74 Believing that the best way to counteract this “evil” is to offer “plain statements … argued out from Scripture”,75 he sets out to demonstrate that justification 70 John Henry Newman, Lectures on the Prophetical Office of the Church, Viewed Relatively to Romanism and Popular Protestantism (London, 1837), p. 52. 71 Ibid., pp. 22–23. 72 Ibid., p. 422. 73 Ibid., p. 15. 74 John Henry Newman, Lectures on Justification (London, 1838), p. v. 75 Ibid., p. vi.


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does not come solely by faith, as the “Lutheran” or “Continental view” would have it, nor only by one’s acts of obedience, as Roman Catholicism taught.76 Neither can stand alone, Newman asserts, as “the elementary principle of the gospel system”;77 rather, both must be embraced, along with the belief that baptism and the Holy Eucharist are “generally necessary to salvation”.78 Justification, in other words, “comes through the Sacraments; is received by faith; consists in God’s inward presence and lives in obedience”.79 Henry Chadwick has described the style of this volume as “falling between lectures and sermons”.80 Some “parts of the text”, he writes, “provide masterly and detached analysis, while other parts are like the parochial sermons in being in some degree rhetorical and homiletic”.81 Some of the statements above, and the larger discussion of faith and works of which they are a part, would appear to support this assessment. It is not, however, an even balance, for Newman’s calls to exhibit a “fruitful faith”82 are easily overshadowed by his discussions of the “instrumentality of faith”83 the “formal cause of justification”,84 the “philosophical relation of justification to sanctification”,85 and other complex theological topics. In his final lecture, moreover, he emphasizes that faith, in the sense he is using it there, is a principle, a “sort of philosophical analysis of the Gospel”;86 it is not to be taken as a “rule of conduct”.87 Attempting to do so, he says, is one of the great mistakes made by “the religion of the day”.88 Pusey’s Daniel the Prophet is a collection of lectures very much like Newman’s. Its nine discourses were intended to stem the “tide of scepticism” caused by the 1860 publication of Essays and Reviews, which called into question the historical and scientific accuracy – and

76

Ibid., pp. 2–3. Ibid., p. 1. 78 Ibid., p. 169. 79 Ibid., p. 318. 80 Henry Chadwick, “The Lectures on Justification,” in Newman After a Hundred Years, ed. Ian Ker and Alan G. Hill (Oxford, 1990), p. 289. 81 Ibid., p. 289. 82 Newman, Lectures on Justification, p. 258. 83 Ibid., p. 3. 84 Ibid., p. 32. 85 Ibid., p. 68. 86 Ibid., p. 384. 87 Ibid., p. 382. 88 Ibid. 77

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therefore the divine inspiration – of the scriptures.89 The Essays mentioned Daniel only in passing, but Pusey chose it as the subject of his lectures because “disbelief ” in it “had become an axiom” among the Higher Critics.90 Pusey’s goal, therefore, is to renew people’s faith in the book’s historical and spiritual authenticity. He begins by arguing that Daniel wrote the book “about the middle of the 6th century, b.c.”, not after the death of Antiochus Epiphanes in 164 b.c., as the Higher Critics maintained.91 If this were the case, the events envisioned in Nebuchadnezzar’s dream – the fall of Babylon; the rise of the MedoPersian, Greek, and Roman empires; and the coming of the Messiah – could not be accounts written after the fact, but were in fact prophecies “not out of, but in harmony with, the rest of the Old Testament”.92 This would in turn prove that God had revealed himself by supernatural means, vindicating the historical faith against the attacks of the rationalist schools.93 Pusey’s argument seems fairly straightforward, but the development of his case is anything but simple. Those who were present in the Oxford divinity school would have heard him discourse at length on such topics as the history of commerce between Babylon and Greece, the evolution of Hebrew idiom, the empire-building undertaken by Alexander the Great and his successors, and the formation of the Hebrew canon.94 His readers would be faced not only with the intricacies of the lectures themselves, but also with voluminous footnotes peppered with Hebrew and Greek and over fifty pages of appendices addressing linguistic and semantic matters “more in detail than an oral lecture admitted”.95 Pusey does make several references to the need to choose “between the darkness and the light”,96 between following Jehovah and following Baal,97 but, to use Chadwick’s words, the collection offers far more “detached analysis” than “rhetorical and homiletic” material. A revealing statement about how these discourses should be judged appeared in the Eclectic Review in 1840. In that issue, a critic notes that 89 Edward Bouverie Pusey, Daniel the Prophet: Nine Lectures Delivered in the Divinity School of the University of Oxford (1885; repr. Minneapolis, 1978), p. iii. 90 Ibid., p. v. 91 Ibid., p. 103. 92 Ibid., p. 80. 93 Ibid., p. vii. 94 Ibid., pp. 90–113, 168–80, 270–308. 95 Ibid., p. viii. 96 Ibid., p. 229. 97 Ibid., pp. 453–54.


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if the Lectures on Justification are “any specimen of [Newman’s] preaching, they are all that sermons ought not to be; for the hungry sheep must have looked up and stared to find themselves mystified, but not fed”.98 He probably would have said the same of Prophetical Office and Daniel the Prophet, but the verdict would not be entirely fair, for he would be evaluating discourses in one genre according to the standards of another. He goes on to write, however, that “candor” required him to “view them as theological lectures, which should have been delivered, not from a pulpit in the church, but from the chair in the Divinity Hall”.99 He seems to have reached this conclusion somewhat reluctantly, but it is the most reasonable perspective to adopt. It is, in fact, a distinction made by Newman himself. He gave these talks not from the raised pulpit in St Mary’s, but in a side chapel named for Adam de Brome;100 he believed that “the general object of preaching” is to “make [people] understand their need of pardon”,101 but he wrote the lectures to instruct them in the “theological system” that served as the foundation upon which the established church was built.102 The Eclectic Review article and Newman’s own statements capture the essence of the rhetorical critic’s work. Lectures are not to be assessed in terms of how they fail as sermons, but by the degree to which they succeed as doctrinal or apologetic works. Critics who have judged these collections as successes include Richard Penaskovic, who called Justification “a powerful new synthesis of St Paul and the Greek Fathers”;103 F.L. Cross, who hailed Prophetical Office as “a magnificent apologia for … the Anglican ethos”,104 and a Victorian reviewer who regarded Daniel as an important “contribution to the critical 98 Review of Lectures on Justification, by John Henry Newman, Eclectic Review ns 7 (1840), 633. 99 Ibid. 100 Adam de Brome constructed the chapel in 1328, while he was rector of St Mary’s. It originally functioned as a kind of “courtroom”, where “the Chancellor of the University … fixed rents, fined sellers of bad meat, and even sent a scolding woman to prison” (“The Church Buildings,” http://www.university-church.ox.ac.uk/info/build .htm#, accessed 16 December 2008). Newman’s practice of delivering most of his lectures there may have been a simple matter of capacity: the audience for lectures was almost certainly smaller than the audience for sermons, making the chapel a more appropriate venue. It may also have been a statement about the “rhetoric of space”, a suggestion that the pulpit is best reserved for the delivery of sermons. 101 Newman, Letters and Diaries, p. 5: 47. 102 Newman, Lectures on Justification, p. vi. 103 Richard Penaskovic, “J.H. Newman’s Lectures on Justification: A Forgotten Classic,” Faith & Reason 11.3,4 (1985), 222. 104 Frank Leslie Cross, John Henry Newman (London, 1933), p. 70.

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understanding of the prophet, and as a magnificent protest against the quasi-infidelity that begins to infest our biblical commentaries”.105 This is also the conclusion I am advocating here: these collections may not be sermons, but they were never intended to be. They are instead examples of the speaking the Tractarians did when they – by design rather than by neglect – emphasized education over exhortation. Not all the Tractarians’ lectures, however, are written in Newman’s and Pusey’s style. To varying extents, volumes published by Harrison, Perceval, and Marriott are “hybrid” works, displaying the characteristics of lectures while also incorporating significant amounts of sermonic material. Harrison preached his Prophetic Outlines of the Christian Church and the Antichristian Power in accordance with the will of William Warburton, Bishop of Gloucester from 1759–79, who endowed a series of lectures on “the prophecies relating to the Christian Church, and in particular the apostacy of Papal Rome”.106 Most of the perceived associations between biblical prophecy and the Roman Church appear in the last two discourses, which are based on Revelation 13:5 and 17:1, while the four lectures on Daniel deal with many of the same subjects Pusey addresses: the arguments for and against the traditional interpretations of Nebuchadnezzar’s dream, the harmonies between Daniel’s prophecies and those found elsewhere in the scriptures, and the extent to which Alexander the Great’s imperial efforts were the realization of the visions recorded in Daniel 8.107 Harrison’s arguments, like those in Daniel the Prophet, are buttressed with numerous references to ancient authorities, with footnotes quoting from their works in the original Latin and Greek. Harrison differs from Pusey in the stress he places upon the audience’s responsibilities in handling the prophetic texts. On several occasions, he tells his hearers and readers that they must engage in their own “diligent study”,108 and that it must be a spiritual as well as an intellectual pursuit. The study must be preceded by the cultivation of the 105 Review of Daniel the Prophet, by E.B. Pusey and An Historical Exposition of the Book of Daniel, by William Harris Rule, London Quarterly Review 32.64 (18 July 1869), 512. 106 Benjamin Harrison, Prophetic Outlines of the Christian Church and the Antichristian Power as Traced in the Visions of Daniel and St. John: In Twelve Lectures Preached in the Chapel of Lincoln’s Inn on the Foundation of Bishop Warburton (London, 1849), p. 392. 107 Ibid., pp. 24–70, 86–100. 108 Ibid., p. 10.


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“reverential and self-distrusting spirit”109 necessary for a deep understanding of the Scriptures; then, it must be followed by the holiness and spiritual diligence that would prepare them for life in the “latter days”, when the remaining prophecies would be fulfilled.110 The prominence of practical application in Marriott’s and Perceval’s lectures can be attributed, at least in part, to the texts upon which their discourses are based. Pusey and Harrison dealt with prophecies, which, by definition, were concerned with future events and thus might have had limited relevance for the people who first encountered them. Marriott and Perceval, on the other hand, lectured on epistles – Marriott on Romans and Perceval on Ephesians – in which Paul sought to help people understand what it meant to be “reconciled to God” and to inspire them to “walk worthy of the vocation” to which they had been called (Romans 5:10; Ephesians 4:1). Both lecturers note Paul’s dual purpose, writing “we will … see how St Paul places before us the practical consequences which ought to follow from our being made partakers of Christ’s Resurrection”111 and “The Apostle now … proceeds to impress upon the minds of the Ephesians the practical conclusions to which all the high mysteries and awful truths he had been dwelling upon, were calculated to lead them”.112 They also adopt this purpose themselves, outlining and explaining Paul’s arguments and asserting that the exhortations he offered are as applicable to Victorian believers as they had been to first-century Christians. Perceval both offers definitions of “grace” and “peace”113 and indicates how his listeners should respond to these gifts from God. They should, he said, be quick to repent when necessary, and afterwards strive to live lives characterized by obedience, humility, self-denial, and prayer.114 Marriott’s approach is much the same. The terms and mysteries he addresses include “faith”,115 “righteousness”,116 and “the whole course of God’s dispensations” from Abraham to the resurrection of Christ.117

109

Ibid., p. 158. Ibid., p. 155. 111 Charles Marriott, Lectures on the Epistle of St. Paul to the Romans (Oxford, 1859), p. 141. 112 Arthur Philip Perceval, Plain Lectures on the Epistle of Paul the Apostle to the Ephesians (London, 1846), p. 134. 113 Ibid., pp. 16–17. 114 Ibid., pp. 21–22, 55, 71, 109–10, 232–36. 115 Marriott, Lectures, p. 20. 116 Ibid., p. 21. 117 Ibid., p. 105. 110

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His insistence that “doctrine, in the Apostle’s language, comprehends practical doctrine”118 is at least as strong as Perceval’s: nearly every lecture ends with statements like “We have heard, and it remains for us truly to believe and heartily to obey”.119 Such appeals are precisely what the Victorians expected in their preaching; it would have been almost as fitting for these collections to have been published with “sermons” rather than “lectures” on the title page. Sermons Preached before the University of Oxford The university sermon is the homiletic genre most closely related to the lecture. The best known specimens are Newman’s 1843 Sermons, Chiefly on the Theory of Religious Belief, republished in 1872 as Fifteen Sermons Preached before the University of Oxford; the most numerous are the several dozen Pusey preached from the 1830s through the 1870s. These are also the most academic of all the Tractarians’ spoken works. Newman’s series of talks is indeed theological: he investigates Christianity’s perceived incompatibility with “the advance of philosophy and science”,120 the “connexion between Natural and Revealed Religion”,121 the “distinct offices of Faith and Reason in religious matters”,122 “implicit and explicit reason”,123 and the proper use of “Evidences, Biblical Exposition, and Dogmatic Theology”.124 These are all difficult subjects, and probably better suited for specialists than laity; it is not surprising, therefore, that Newman himself, and numerous scholars and critics since, classified the University Sermons not with his parochial material, but rather with the Grammar of Assent, his 1870 treatise on the nature of religious belief.125

118

Ibid., p. 151. Ibid., p. 292. 120 John Henry Newman, Fifteen Sermons Preached before the University of Oxford (Oxford, 2006), p. 15. 121 Ibid., p. 25. 122 Ibid., p. 131. 123 Ibid., p. 173. 124 Ibid., p. 180. 125 Newman, Fifteen Sermons, p. 10; Wilfrid Ward, Ten Personal Studies (London, 1908), p. 251; David Newsome, The Parting of Friends: The Wilberforces and Henry Manning (Grand Rapids, MI, 1966), p. 88; Edwards, History of Preaching, p. 607; Ian Ker, The Achievement of John Henry Newman (Notre Dame, IN, 1990), p. 46; David Nicholls and Fergus Kerr, “Introduction,” in John Henry Newman: Reason, Rhetoric and Romanticism, ed. David Nicholls and Fergus Kerr (Carbondale, IL, 1991), p. 3. 119


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Pusey’s addresses also include several sermons on the nature of faith, as well as discussions of justification, prophecy, apostolic tradition, the day of judgement, and science and religion. “Dissertation”, a word Pusey used to describe a sermon entitled “Un-Science, not Science, Adverse to Faith”,126 could be applied to virtually all of them, which were written in a scholarly style and published with the notes, appendices, and other academic apparatus we find in many of their lectures. These discourses, then, may often seem to be more “university” than “sermon”, but we should not be too quick to evict them from the homiletic canon. Newman told his sister that his university sermons bore “immediately upon the most intimate and practical religious questions”,127 and a strong hortatory strain is present throughout the volume. He warns the members of the university not to allow intellectual pursuits to take precedence over a life of faith. He insists, moreover, that the faith he has in mind is not a kind of “philosophical analysis”,128 as it was in the Lectures on Justification, but rather a “principle of action”.129 It is “perfected, not by intellectual cultivation, but by obedience”,130 so people must “seek [Christ] in the way of His commandments”,131 always behaving “as if He were sensibly present … to approve or blame [them] in all [their] private thoughts and all [their] intercourse with the world”.132 The volume closes on a practical rather than a theoretical note: Newman asserts that all that “remains” is to “make our prayer to the Gracious and Merciful God … that in all our exercises of Reason, His gift, we may thus use it, – as He would have us, in the obedience of Faith, with a view to His glory”.133 Pusey’s university sermons likewise assert that reason must ultimately be subordinate to faith. Because “The ‘I am’ survives the ‘I think’ ”,134 learned persons possess no a priori “advantage in appreciating The Grammar is perhaps best known for introducing the notion of the “illative sense”, the intellectual faculty that, when “perfected”, pronounces the “sole and final judgment on the validity of an inference” (Newman, An Essay in Aid of a Grammar of Assent, new impression [London, 1903], http://www.newmanreader.org/works/grammar/chapter9 .html, accessed 16 December 2008). 126 Liddon, Life of Edward Bouverie Pusey, p. 4: 333. 127 Newman, Letters and Correspondence, p. 2: 406. 128 Newman, Lectures on Justification, p. 384. 129 Newman, Fifteen Sermons, p. 134. 130 Ibid., p. 172. 131 Ibid., p. 189. 132 Ibid., p. 36. 133 Ibid., p. 235. 134 Pusey, Sermons Preached Between a.d. 1859 and 1872, p. 8.

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the Cross of Christ”.135 Their education, in fact, could wind up leading them astray, into the arrogance of allowing their reason to become the “judge and arbiter” of revelation.136 Pusey is not, I think, being antiintellectual here, but he does insist that the scope of scholarly investigation is never unlimited or absolute. As he puts it in a sermon preached in 1868, “Free enquiry has its place, but in the enfreed soul”.137 Pusey also insists that even a religiously-informed intellect is not to be cultivated simply for its own sake. Instead, believers must take the critical next step of consistently acting upon what they learn. In his university sermons, he therefore not only educates his hearers about the nature of justifying faith, the mystery of the Real Presence, and the nuances of Hebrew idiom, but also exhorts them to demonstrate their convictions through the deeds they perform, to receive the Sacrament in a penitent and humble spirit, and to obey the Messiah whom the Jewish prophets had foretold.138 Some of his addresses, in fact, focus entirely upon pious living. The importance of prayer and the reality of Judgement Day need little theoretical underpinning or patristic support, so he is able to devote entire sermons to calling people to earnest devotion and admonishing them to conduct themselves in a way that would place them on the road to heaven rather than the path to hell.139 Such activities, he declares, are the best defense against the 19th century’s increasing tendencies toward rationalism, skepticism, and atheism. “Live as you believe”, he preaches, “and you will not lose your faith”.140 Calls to a holy life can also be found in university sermons preached by other members of the Tractarian circle. When Manning took his turn as Select Preacher in the 1840s, he delivered sermons that a reviewer named Arthur Hutton described as “less scholarly, but more emotional” than Newman’s, focusing “on considerations that warm the heart and bend the will, rather than on such as force the intellect to assent”.141 Manning did not forget that he was speaking in the university church: he often mentions the unique atmosphere of Oxford’s 135

Ibid., p. 104. Ibid., p. 11. 137 Ibid., p. 226. 138 Ibid., pp. 134–60. 139 Edward Bouverie Pusey, The Miracles of Prayer. A Sermon Preached Before the University in the Cathedral Church of Christ, in Oxford, on Septuagesima Sunday, 1866 (Oxford, 1866); Pusey, Sermons Preached Between a.d. 1859 and 1872, pp. 313–37. 140 Pusey, Sermons Preached Between a.d. 1859 and 1872, p. 30. 141 Arthur Wollaston Hutton, Cardinal Manning (Boston, 1892), p. 219. 136


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educational system and of the careers his hearers would pursue in just a few years’ time. Neither did he allow his audience to forget that their “chief aim” should not be receiving academic recognition or securing professional success, but rather approaching God “with awe” and learning to “know Him by self-abasement, worship, [and] holiness”.142 The seven sermons he published in 1844 are accordingly replete with admonitions to pray as well as study, to avoid succumbing to the temptations of the world, and to consider the eternal consequences of everything they said and did.143 We do not see extended treatments of difficult theological concepts, but this is not necessarily a sign of inferior preaching; as Hutton asserted in 1892, “Manning was at his best in the hortatory style”; and his decision to focus on exhortation rather than on argument was the very “secret of his power”.144 Hutton would probably have said much the same thing about Charles Page Eden and Charles Marriott, the two Tractarians who succeeded Newman as vicar of St Mary’s. A “hortatory style” permeates their preaching, as they admonish their congregations to regularly engage in private devotions, to resist the fleeting pleasures of the flesh, to obey their pastors and other Church authorities, and to faithfully sow the spiritual crops that Christ would harvest when he returned to the earth.145 This emphasis upon practice is particularly evident in sermons on topics that would seem especially amenable to academic or theoretical exploration. Eden and Marriott explicitly set such approaches aside, frequently making statements such as “I cannot bring myself to approach it apologetically”146 or “argument will not make these things plain”.147 Their concern is that Christians focus more on purifying their hearts than on developing their intellects; more on accepting the Bible as God’s revelation to his people than on constructing elaborate theories of inspiration; more on preparing their souls for Christ’s coming than on charting a precise chronology of the last days.148 They do not

142 Henry Edward Manning, Sermons Preached Before the University of Oxford (Oxford, 1844), p. 178. 143 Ibid., pp. 34–38, 103–6, 173–78. 144 Hutton, Cardinal Manning, p. 219. 145 Charles Page Eden, Sermons Preached at S. Mary’s in Oxford (London, 1855), pp. 7–22, 225–39; Charles Marriott, Sermons Preached Before the University, and in Other Places (Oxford, 1843), pp. 332–33, 336–56. 146 Eden, Sermons Preached at S. Mary’s, p. 171. 147 Marriott, Sermons, p. 408. 148 Eden, Sermons Preached at S. Mary’s, pp. 147–73, 196–217; Marriott, Sermons, pp. 320–23, 340–41, 380–82, 404–409.

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maintain that these elements of the faith cannot be proven, but rather that they need not be; they are plainly stated in the scriptures, and the congregants’ duty is to accept them as given, determine what demands they make on their character and conduct, and live out what they learned as faithfully as they are able. Keble’s university preaching contains elements of all of these approaches. Two of his university sermons seem to have been written for parochial rather than academic audiences: “Counsels of Perfection” is a series of “plain observations” on the virtue of “self-sacrifice”,149 while “Endurance of Church Imperfections” cautions the people against allowing “religious perplexities” to undermine their fidelity to the established church.150 Others, however, are clearly academic essays. Sermons Academical and Occasional opens with three discourses in which Keble asserts that intellectual sophistication is not a prerequisite to spiritual maturity; in many cases, he suggests, knowledge can actually do more to hinder faith than to cultivate it. This idea is simple enough, but he develops it in fairly complex ways. He introduces a new theological concept – the idea of “implicit faith” – and discusses it in a highly allusive way, touching upon such varied subjects as Jewish history, the Arian and Socinian heresies, Bishop Butler’s analogies, and even Plato’s and Aristotle’s works.151 His Preface to the collection states that his goal was “to take a popular view” of “great ecclesiastical subjects”,152 but these sermons would have been beyond the grasp of all but the most sophisticated congregations; an editor would not have been out of line in choosing to publish them alongside Newman’s or Pusey’s university sermons. A Collection of “Plain” Sermons From 1839 to 1848, Rivington, a prominent London firm known especially for publishing religious works, issued ten volumes of Plain Sermons, by Contributors to the “Tracts for the Times”. With nearly 200 sermons by Newman, Pusey, and John Keble, along with another 150 by Thomas Keble, George Prevost, Isaac Williams, and Robert Francis

149 150 151 152

Keble, Sermons, Academical and Occasional, p. 277. Ibid., p. 297. Ibid., pp. 1–75. Ibid., p. i.


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Wilson, the series offers scholars an excellent overview of the Tractarians’ parochial work. Victorian readers probably came to this collection with two sets of expectations. On the one hand, the subtitle identifies it with the Oxford Movement, so they could reasonably have anticipated that it would reinforce the doctrines expressed in the Tracts for the Times, most of which had been published by the time the series commenced. On the other hand, these texts were published as sermons, not as tracts, so readers could also expect to find a good deal of exhortation and practical application. They were, moreover, billed as plain sermons, suggesting that both their doctrine and practice would be presented in a simple, straightforward, readily accessible fashion. All of these elements are evident in the collection. The titles of some of the sermons – “The Apostolic Church”,153 “Infant Baptism”,154 “The Church Prayer-Book a Safe Guide”155 – sound very much like those given to the tracts.156 Readers who browsed through these and other sermons would find ample references to sacramentalism, episcopacy, and other leading tenets of the Oxford Movement.157 These concepts are not often discussed in detail, but it is nonetheless clear that the Plain Sermons were written by men committed to the doctrines which the Tracts for the Times were intended to uphold. These documents, however, are plain sermons, not tracts. They are among the shortest and simplest of all the Tractarians’ works: they rarely exceed ten or twelve pages, they offer few references to ancient authorities or 17th-century divines, and there is none of the scholarly apparatus that we find in abundance in the lectures and the tracts. While other discourses often offer applications only near the end, the Plain Sermons’ emphasis upon Christian conduct is evident from the opening page. The Advertisement to the inaugural volume notes that while the contributors had been pleased with the “extensive reception” of the Tracts for the Times, they were concerned that some who

153

[Thomas Keble], “The Apostolic Church,” in Plain Sermons, pp. 1: 295–302. [John Henry Newman], “Infant Baptism,” in Plain Sermons, pp. 5: 139–47. 155 [Isaac Williams], “The Church Prayer-Book a Safe Guide,” in Plain Sermons, pp. 2: 197–205. 156 See, for example, The Episcopal Church Apostolical (#7, Newman); Scriptural Views of Holy Baptism (#67–69, Pusey), and Indications of a Superintending Providence in the Preservation of the Prayer Book and in the Changes which It has Undergone (#86, Williams). 157 Liddon, Life of Edward Bouverie Pusey, p. 2: 140. 154

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embraced Tractarian doctrines “in theory” appeared to be “at no pains to realize them in their daily practice”.158 The sermons were, accordingly, published “in order to show that the subjects treated of in the ‘Tracts’ were not set forth as mere parts of ideal systems”, but were rather “truths of immediate and essential importance, bearing more or less directly on our every day behaviour”.159 The relationship between knowledge and action is twofold. First, people must act upon the religious knowledge that they have. Thomas Keble was not the only contributor who found it “strange and unaccountable that Christians should go on from day to day … reading and hearing the word of God” while making “little or no progress in holiness”.160 His brother warns his congregants that “the knowledge of Christ, without striving to obey Him … is only fit to pervert and ruin the soul”,161 and Pusey notes that “An especial judgement is throughout Scripture denounced on those who have much knowledge, but little love and cold deeds”.162 In keeping with the idea of “reserve”, they also emphasize that obedience is the only way to gain more knowledge.163 The opening Advertisement notes that John 7:17 – “if any one will do His will, he shall know of the doctrine, whether it be of God” – is an “admonition which … we might, many of us, be too apt to forget”.164

158

“Advertisement,” in Plain Sermons, p. 1: 1. Ibid., p. 1: 2. 160 [Thomas Keble], “The Certainty of Judgment,” in Plain Sermons, p. 1: 9. 161 [John Keble], “We Must Have Root in Ourselves,” in Plain Sermons, p. 2: 53. 162 [Edward Bouverie Pusey], “The Cross Borne For Us, and In Us,” in Plain Sermons, p. 3: 2. 163 The corollary of this maxim – that knowledge will not be given to those who are unable or unwilling to obey – also appears occasionally in the Plain Sermons. Its most extended treatment can be found in Robert Francis Wilson’s seven sermons for Passion Week (pp. 7: 45–100), which focus on the mercy Christ showed to all who mistreated him in the days before his crucifixion. The expression of this mercy was twofold: Christ concealed the truth from those who were not “ready to receive it”, lest they reject it and thus “sin against the Holy Ghost” (p. 50). To those who were ready and repented, he offered forgiveness rather than condemnation, restoring Peter to the circle of the Apostles and assuring the penitent thief that he would receive “an immediate place” in heaven when he died (pp. 67–69, 96). 164 “Advertisement,” p. 1: 2. This verse is one of two major changes made in the planning stages of the series. In a letter to Williams, probably written in December 1838, Thomas Keble asked that the title be changed from “village sermons” to “plain sermons” and that the “motto” for the project be 2 Cor. 13:8–9 – “For we can do nothing against the truth, but for the truth. For we are glad, when we are weak, and ye are strong: and this also we wish, even your perfection” (London, Lambeth Palace, MS 4474, fol. 185). His first suggestion was adopted, but John 7:17 was ultimately selected as the “motto”. I have not found the reasons for the changes, but both decisions were 159


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Newman, Pusey, and Williams quote or closely paraphrase this verse,165 and its essence appears throughout the series. Thomas Keble defines “doctrine” as the “truths offered to the hearts … of true believers”;166 John cautions that “Our humble obedience, not our self-willed speculations, will prepare us for the revelation of ‘the mystery of God’ ”;167 and Prevost promises the working classes that if they would “do their duty as in His sight … He will be mindful of them … and make known unto them … the secrets of His love”.168 Additional evidence of the “plain” nature of these sermons can be seen in how they differ from university discourses preached on similar subjects. When Keble spoke on faith before the university, he attempted both to “convince” and to “persuade”, to bring his audience to assent to his historical and theological propositions, and to inspire them to nourish their souls even more zealously than they were developing their minds. In parochial sermons entitled “Justifying Faith” and “Practical Faith, the Condition of Life”, however, persuasion is his sole concern.169 He makes the same appeals to choose “the way of the Cross … before all others”,170 but he does so without also touching upon matters such as “the history of theology”, “Apostolic principle[s] of interpretation”, or the philosophical notion of “Moral Taste”.171 Similar contrasts can be seen in two sermons Newman preached on John 10, in which Jesus portrayed himself as “the good shepherd” who “giveth his life for the sheep” (John 10:11). Both end with calls for people to demonstrate their faith by their obedience, but he arrives at those applications in very different ways. Like all of his university sermons, “Love the Safeguard of Faith against Superstition” deals with the proper relationship of faith and reason. Christians, he says, need a means of ensuring that their faith does not go “to seed” and become

fortuitous: the title and Advertisement in their current forms clearly capture the simple and practical nature of this genre of the sermon. 165 [John Henry Newman], “Inward Witness to the Truth of the Gospel,” in Plain Sermons, p. 5: 245; [Edward Bouverie Pusey], “Obedience the Condition of Knowing the Truth,” in Plain Sermons, p. 3: 137; [Isaac Williams], “The Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost,” in Plain Sermons, p. 9: 226. 166 Keble, “The Apostolic Church,” pp. 297–98. 167 [John Keble], “A Lesson of Humility,” in Plain Sermons, p. 8: 208. 168 [George Prevost], “The Hidden God,” in Plain Sermons, p. 7: 303. 169 [John Keble], “Justifying Faith,” in Plain Sermons, pp. 8: 236–44; [John Keble], “Practical Faith, the Condition of Life,” in Plain Sermons, pp. 4: 25–32. 170 Keble, “Justifying Faith,” p. 241. 171 Keble, Sermons, Academical and Occasional, pp. 5, 10, 74.

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mere “superstition or fanaticism”.172 Some might expect such a “safeguard” to be found in reason, but Newman asserts that it is instead found in a “right state of heart”.173 Those who loved Christ would hear his voice and follow him, and thus be assured of eternal life; they would not be deceived by strangers who would lead them astray and put them in peril of their souls.174 The application Newman offers in a plain sermon entitled “The Shepherd of Our Souls” is grounded not in the tension between the intellectual and spiritual faculties, but in Old Testament prophecy and the realities of pastoral life in 1st-century Palestine. Ezekiel, Zechariah, and the other prophets had long foretold the coming of a shepherd for the lost sheep of Israel. When Jesus came and took that title for himself, being a shepherd was a dangerous task, requiring constant vigilance – and sometimes personal sacrifice – to protect the flocks from predators and thieves.175 These physical dangers may not have been an issue for the members of Newman’s congregation, but Victorian believers were in the same perilous spiritual condition as the ancient Israelites had been: they were as “sheep in the trackless desert, who, unless they follow the shepherd, will be sure to lose themselves, sure to fall in with the wolf ”.176 The task for Newman’s parochial congregation is thus no different from that of his university audience: they must “keep close” to Christ, resolving that whatever may come their way, “He shall be their Lord and Master, their King and God”.177 Perhaps the greatest differences between “plain” and “university” preaching can be seen in Pusey’s sermons on the Eucharist. In “The Holy Eucharist a Comfort to the Penitent” and other academic works, he focuses on “this is my body” and “this is my blood”, the difficult and controversial statements recorded in Matthew 26 and 1 Corinthians 10. As we would expect, he rejects both the Roman Catholic doctrine of Transubstantiation and the Dissenters’ belief that the communion service was “only a thankful commemoration of His redeeming love”.178

172

Newman, Fifteen Sermons, p. 161. Ibid., p. 162. 174 Ibid., pp. 162–63. 175 [John Henry Newman], “The Shepherd of Our Souls,” in Plain Sermons, pp. 5: 316–17. 176 Ibid., p. 324. 177 Ibid. 178 Edward Bouverie Pusey, The Holy Eucharist, a Comfort to the Penitent (Oxford, 1843), p. 18. 173


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In his view, a “solemn” and “literal” exegesis would lead to a via media, the traditional Anglican view that “the outward elements remain, and still that there is the real Presence of the Body of Christ”.179 These discourses illustrate H.P. Liddon’s observation that Pusey “could not easily express himself other than at length”.180 It was not uncommon for his sermons to last for ninety minutes;181 when he published his Eucharistic sermons, he added extensive footnotes and lengthy passages that he had not had time to deliver.182 In one instance, the revisions led to a change in genre: Pusey added so many quotations to “The Presence of Christ in the Holy Eucharist” that it was essentially transformed from a sermon to a catena patrum, an anthology of patristic writings similar to those found in many of the later Tracts. Pusey’s two plain sermons on the topic are virtually the antithesis of these works. The differences are first evident in the titles: instead of “The Holy Eucharist”, Pusey uses the phrase “Holy Communion”, which appears to be the Tractarians’ preferred title for plain sermons on the subject.183 As far as I know, they left no records of why they made this choice, but we can reasonably infer that they regarded “communion” as a somewhat less formal or technical term than “eucharist” and thus better suited to a parochial, perhaps less educated, audience. The subtitles are significant as well, for they are the first indication of Pusey’s hortatory goals. “Privileges” is meant to remind people of the blessings to be gained in a spiritual union with God, while “Exceeding 179 Edward Bouverie Pusey, The Presence of Christ in the Holy Eucharist. A Sermon Preached before the University in the Cathedral Church of Christ, in Oxford, on the Second Sunday After Epiphany, 1853 (Oxford, 1871), pp. 14, 26. 180 Michael Chandler, An Introduction to the Oxford Movement (London, 2003), p. 27. 181 “Dr. Pusey and the Oxford Movement,” Blackwood’s 162 (December 1897), 804. 182 Pusey, Holy Eucharist, pp. vi–vii; Edward Bouverie Pusey, This is My Body. A Sermon Preached Before the University at S. Mary’s, on the Fifth Sunday After Easter 1871 (Oxford, 1871), p. 5; Pusey, Presence of Christ, p. vii. 183 Newman’s sermon in this series for example, is entitled “Attendance on Holy Communion” and stresses the importance of receiving the sacrament often and in the proper spirit (pp. 5: 94–102). His “Eucharistic Presence” is a “parochial” rather than a “university” address, but it is nonetheless a more doctrinal discourse, focusing on how Jesus’ reference to himself as the “bread of heaven” in John 6:50 is an allusion to his mysterious but nonetheless very real presence in the bread served in the communion service (John Henry Newman, Parochial and Plain Sermons [1891; repr. San Francisco, 1997], pp. 1272–81). Other practical sermons with “communion” in the title include Manning’s “Worthy Communion” (Sermons, 4 [London, 1850], pp. 260–72); Williams’ “Self-Examination before Communion” (Plain Sermons, on the Latter Part of the Catechism [London, 1851], pp. 285–96); and Pusey’s own “Increased Communions” (Parochial Sermons, 1 [London, 1868], pp. 392–418).

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Danger in Careless Receiving, Death in Neglecting” serves as a warning against holding those blessings in too low esteem. Pusey “presented” Apostolic doctrine in “The Holy Eucharist a Comfort to the Penitent” and “dwelt” on it in detail in “The Presence of Christ in the Holy Eucharist”,184 but in the plain sermons, exposition is not his central concern. He devotes several pages to the “nature of God’s Sacraments”,185 but he also insists that such matters should not be pursued too far. His congregants’ task, he says, is not to acquire more knowledge, but to “retrace in [their] minds the things which [they] already know”, and to “strive to deepen and keep [them] by thinking and acting thereon”.186 If they were to think devotionally, meditating on the magnitude of God’s sacramental gifts, they would be more apt to behave righteously, spending time each weekday in confession, self-examination and other spiritual disciplines in order to be “worthy partakers” of the Eucharist on Sundays.187 In Pusey’s university addresses, application is not omitted, but it tends to appear only at the end; here, admonitions and exhortations are the entire raison d’etre of the sermons. The Tractarians’ plain sermons are the most homogeneous of all the discourses discussed thus far. This is due in part to the circumstances of their publication. While each volume of university sermons was published as an independent project, the Plain Sermons appeared in a single series overseen by an editorial team. The uniformity was also, and perhaps more importantly, a function of the genre. Lecturers had the greatest freedom in their work: their arguments could be straightforward or complex, and they could vary greatly in the level of practical exhortation they contained. University preachers needed to be more hortatory than lecturers, but they enjoyed much the same liberty in their style. While their sermons were often technical and highly academic, there was nothing in the theoretical literature or Oxford statutes that demanded that this be the case. The clergyman who wished to preach a plain sermon, however, faced limitations of both content and style; according to Harvey Goodwin’s definition, his discourse must be simple in its “words”, “construction”, “thoughts”, “manner”, “doctrine”, and “purpose”.188 184

Pusey, Presence of Christ, pp. iii, vi. [Edward Bouverie Pusey], “Holy Communion – Exceeding Danger in Careless Receiving, Death in Neglecting,” in Plain Sermons, p. 3: 90. 186 [Edward Bouverie Pusey], “Holy Communion. – Privileges,” in Plain Sermons, p. 3: 105. 187 Ibid., p. 3: 120. 188 Goodwin, “What Constitutes a Plain Sermon?,” p. 131. 185


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This is not to say, however, that the Plain Sermons are monolithic. They are based on texts from throughout the scriptures, and every contributor addresses a range of subjects. In addition to the familiar topics of the life of Christ and the importance of holy living, we find discourses on Christian education,189 the angelical orders,190 the consecration of churches,191 and Christianity and the political order.192 A question of genre arises in the ninth volume, which consists entirely of sermons by lead editor Isaac Williams. In the Advertisement to that volume, Williams writes that his works perhaps might come more properly under the name of Catechetical Lectures. For although they have been preached as Sermons, they consist, for the most part, of what had been brought forward in catechizing children after the Second Lesson … These will therefore be found to differ from the ordinary Sermons in this publication, as consisting not so much of deductions drawn from a particular passage, or from the general tenor of Scripture, as of an accumulation of direct texts and Scriptural illustrations in confirmation of some fundamental point of doctrine.193

It is true that Williams is sometimes more wide-ranging than the other contributors in his use of biblical quotations, but this strikes me as a fairly minor issue. More important are the traits that Williams’ sermons have in common with his colleagues’. Some of his topics are also addressed in other volumes; his discussions of the faith of Abraham,194 the divinity of Christ,195 and the communion of the saints196 are similar to what we find in Thomas Keble’s “Fidelity of Abraham”,197

189

[Thomas Keble], “Christian Education,” in Plain Sermons, p. 10: 285–95. [John Keble], “Angelical Order and Obedience,” in Plain Sermons, pp. 6: 165–71. 191 [Isaac Williams], “Anniversary of Consecration,” in Plain Sermons, pp. 10: 89–97. 192 [John Keble], “Kings to Be Honoured for Their Office’ Sake,” in Plain Sermons, pp. 1: 236–47. 193 Williams, “Advertisement,” pp. 1–2. John Keble also had doubts about the suitability of these addresses. In an 1844 letter to Williams, he noted that he saw the Plain Sermons as “a vehicle for what people will not otherwise read”. He evidently saw greater potential in Williams’ catechetical pieces, suggesting that they might “do more good” if they were published separately bearing Williams’ name (London, Lambeth Palace, MS 4474, fols. 152–152v). 194 [Isaac Williams], “God the Father Almighty, Maker of Heaven and Earth,” in Plain Sermons, pp. 9: 78–79. 195 [Isaac Williams], “Jesus Christ, His Only Son, Our Lord,” in Plain Sermons, pp. 9: 82–90. 196 [Isaac Williams], “The Communion of Saints,” in Plain Sermons, pp. 9: 186–95. 197 [Thomas Keble], “The Fidelity of Abraham,” in Plain Sermons, pp. 1: 186–95. 190

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Prevost’s “The Word Made Flesh”,198 and Newman’s “Unity of the Church”.199 Throughout the volume, moreover, Williams does not stop with the doctrinal confirmations mentioned in the Advertisement. He goes on, rather, to ask “what great practical lesson may we derive from this circumstance?”200 or to declare, “Let us bring this awful subject home to ourselves in the most real and practical way”.201 He both examines what it meant to say that baptism made someone “A Member of Christ”202 and notes the “points of duty” given to “baptized Christians”;203 he asserts that keeping “all the laws of God” is at least as important as believing “all the Articles of the Christian Faith”;204 and he writes that while the resurrection of Jesus was of course a miraculous event and a key tenet of the faith, “there is no greater miracle or marvel upon earth than a good Christian, such a one as lives up to the Gospel of Christ in all things”.205 The frequency of these applications in Marriott’s and Perceval’s discourses is almost enough to classify them as sermons. The inclusion of them here is sufficient to keep these addresses from being reclassified as lectures; they are, like all the other addresses in the series, properly regarded as sermons. The Tractarians and Visitations Another significant rhetorical contrast is to be found in the Tractarians’ visitation sermons and episcopal charges. I have not seen any theoretical statements specifically concerned with visitation preaching but, given the educated clerical audience, it seems reasonable to infer that it would be viewed as belonging closer to the “university” end of the homiletic spectrum. This is indeed what we find in John Keble’s and Manning’s work. Their three visitation sermons are heavily doctrinal, dealing with

198

[George Prevost], “The Word Made Flesh,” in Plain Sermons, pp. 7: 294–301. [John Henry Newman], “The Unity of the Church,” in Plain Sermons, pp. 5: 148–56. 200 [Isaac Williams], “The Christian Name,” in Plain Sermons, p. 9: 7. 201 [Isaac Williams], “Jesus Christ, His Only Son, Our Lord,” in Plain Sermons, p. 9: 88. 202 [Isaac Williams], “A Member of Christ,” in Plain Sermons, p. 9: 20. 203 [Isaac Williams], “A Child of God,” in Plain Sermons, p. 9: 31. 204 [Isaac Williams], “All the Articles of the Christian Faith,” in Plain Sermons, p. 9: 57. 205 [Isaac Williams], “He Rose Again from the Dead,” in Plain Sermons, p. 9: 137. 199


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matters of particular importance to the clergy. In “The English Church”, preached in the summer of 1835, Manning follows a long “line of evidence” to establish that Anglican bishops are in fact “the successors, in lineal descent, of the Lord’s Apostles”;206 if this were not so, he declares, the clergy whom they had ordained would have no assurance of the validity of their commissions. Manning’s other visitation sermon – “The Rule of Faith”, preached three years after “The English Church” – and Keble’s “Primitive Tradition Recognised in Holy Scripture”, delivered in the fall of 1836, address an equally crucial matter: the body of beliefs that had been transmitted through that unbroken Apostolic line. Keble’s text is perhaps the most familiar one to speak of those beliefs: 2 Timothy 1:14, in which St Paul exhorts his protégé to “keep” that “good thing which was committed unto [him]”.207 He argues that this “thing”, which Paul elsewhere refers to as a “deposit” or a “commission”, is the “Primitive Tradition” of his title, that oral body of “apostolical doctrines and church rules” that predated the New Testament.208 The Fathers had used this tradition as a “touchstone” to determine which texts were orthodox and thus could be admitted to the canon;209 the Church since then had invoked it as a guide to properly interpreting the Scriptures. Manning uses a different text – Galatians 1:8, 9 – but comes to the same conclusion. The Bible, he says, is “the one sole foundation … of the faith”,210 but its meaning is not self-evident. Because it is “the fixed witness and representative of the apostolic preaching”, it is best viewed through the lens of apostolic tradition as set forth in the creeds, and of “the consent of the Christian Church” as expressed in the Thirty-Nine Articles.211 “Private judgment” is, therefore, to be relied upon only in matters that the Church has not directly addressed.212 206 Henry Edward Manning, The English Church, Its Succession, and Witness for Christ. A Sermon, Preached in the Cathedral Church, July 7, 1835, at the Visitation of the Ven. the Archdeacon of Chichester (London, 1835), p. 10. 207 John Keble, Primitive Tradition Recognised in Holy Scripture: A Sermon, Preached in the Cathedral Church of Winchester, at the Visitation of the Worshipful and Reverend William Dealtry, D.D. Chancellor of the Diocese, September 27, 1836 (London, 1836), p. 5. 208 Ibid., pp. 16, 20. 209 Ibid., p. 27. 210 Henry Edward Manning, The Rule of Faith. A Sermon, Preached in the Cathedral Church of Chichester, June 13, 1838, at the Primary Visitation of the Right Reverend William, Lord Bishop of Chichester (London, 1838), p. 14. 211 Ibid., pp. 20, 39. 212 Ibid., pp. 38–45.

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The practical implications of these arguments are not difficult to discern. Keble’s text contains a command – keep “that good thing” – which suggests that once the nature of the “deposit” has been determined, those who receive it have the responsibility of preserving it. The recipients are, of course, the Anglican clergy, and their duties are twofold. First, they are not to be given to “novelty”, the pursuit of “improvement, discovery, [and] evolution of new truths”.213 Since the Gospel had already “once for all” been “delivered to the saints”,214 such innovations are unnecessary and dangerous, for they could cause the Church to leave the moorings of “primitive tradition” and drift away into the errors of Protestantism or Romanism. They were also to resist “Erastianism”, which Keble defines as “the Church betraying to the civil power more or less of the good deposit, which our Lord had put exclusively into her hands”.215 “Betrayals” Keble condemns in other works include the Irish Church Temporalities Act of 1833, in which Parliament unilaterally reorganized diocesan boundaries and finances, and an 1850 judicial decision that allowed George Gorham to take a post in the diocese of Exeter despite his bishop’s belief that his views on infant baptism were unsound.216 In this sermon, he does not refer to any specific developments, but he does insist that the clergy must not acquiesce in any further efforts to force the Church to “yield one jot or one tittle of the faith”.217 213

Keble, Primitive Tradition, pp. 46, 48. Ibid., p. 27. 215 Ibid., p. 50. Keble’s definition is somewhat unusual, for the term “Erastianism” more commonly refers to the government usurping the authority of the church, not to the church voluntarily surrendering it (the Oxford English Dictionary, for example, defines an Erastian as one who supports “the complete subordination of the ecclesiastical to the secular power”). Keble uses it in this sense in the Advertisement to “National Apostasy” (Sermons, Academical and Occasional, pp. 127–28); the connotation also underlies statements such as government is “to execute the laws of Christ’s Church, not impose laws upon her” ([John Keble], Review of The State in Its Relations with the Church, by W.E. Gladstone, British Critic 26 [October 1839], 375) and the “persecution of the church has begun. Where it is to end, who can tell?” ([John Keble], “Church Reform. No. IV.,” British Magazine 3 [March 1833], 366). 216 For discussions of the Irish Church Act and the Gorham Judgment, see Olive J. Brose, Church and Parliament: The Reshaping of the Church of England 1828–1860 (Stanford and London, 1959), pp. 101–19, and Owen Chadwick, The Victorian Church (New York, 1966), pp. 250–71. Keble published his objections to these developments in his Advertisement to “National Apostasy”; “Church Reform,” pp. 360–78; Occasional Papers, pp. 201–37; and “Letter to the Editor of the British Magazine,” in “The State in Its Relations with the Church”: A Paper Reprinted from the “British Critic,” October 1839, ed. H. P. Liddon (Oxford, 1869), pp. 55–63. 217 Keble, Primitive Tradition, p. 44. 214


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Keble’s application focuses on what the clergy should observe; Manning’s addresses a deed they must avoid. Since the Church has been entrusted with the truth, her spokesmen must not be found to be propagators of error. This warning is as old as the scriptures themselves; his text was Paul’s decree recorded in Galatians 1:8: “If any man preach any other Gospel … than that we have preached unto you … let him be accursed”.218 Manning leaves no doubt of its relevance to Victorian times. Early in the discourse, he tells his fellow clergy that Paul’s “apostolic sentence … is everlasting. We may no more swerve from the pure faith of Christ’s Gospel, and be held guiltless, than the fickle Galatian, or the inflated Gnostic”.219 The consequences of such swerving, he cautions, would be grave indeed: “besides the sinful temper of mind producing the error, the pernicious effects which the error in turn produces on the flock of Christ, involve the ministers of the Church … in the peril of condemnation”.220 In short, Keble’s and Manning’s visitation addresses fulfill both of the terms used to describe them: they contain the features expected of all sermons, and those features are specially tailored for the audience at hand. Keble and Manning may not have been familiar with the phrase “audience awareness”, but their sermons are excellent examples of the concept. To a certain extent, the charges given later in the visitation service read like sermons as well. At times, Harrison and Manning take the role of “the pastors’ pastor”, speaking to the clergy about their character and conduct in much the same way a priest would address his own congregation each Sunday. As was the case with the visitation sermons, these comments are specifically tailored for the audience. The priests are instructed to teach the Apostolic faith,221 be sure parishioners regularly receive the Sacrament,222 distribute alms to the poor, and collect

218

Manning, Rule of Faith, p. 7. Ibid., p. 8. 220 Ibid., p. 9. 221 Benjamin Harrison, The Church the Guardian of Her Children: Her Guide, the Oracles of God. A Charge Delivered to the Clergy of the Archdeaconry of Maidstone, at the Ordinary Visitation, in May, MDCCCL (London, 1850), p. 85; Benjamin Harrison, The Continuity of the Church, and Its Present Position, in England. A Charge Delivered to the Clergy of the Archdeaconry of Maidstone at the Ordinary Visitation in April MDCCCLXXXIV (London, 1886), p. 27; Benjamin Harrison, Visitation Courts and Synods. A Charge Delivered to the Clergy of the Archdeaconry of Maidstone, at the Ordinary Visitation in May, MDCCCLXXI (London, 1871), p. 39. 222 Manning, Charge of 1849, pp. 81–86. 219

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offerings for the support of overseas missions.223 They are not merely to tell their people what the Christian life demands; they are to live it out before them as well. Instead of simply avoiding offenses punishable in the ecclesiastical or civil courts, priests are to be blameless in all their ways: pure in their thoughts, perfect in their spirits, models of “lowliness, zeal, love, devotion” and “deadness” to the world.224 Holiness and unity are the virtues most often mentioned in the charges. Manning often speaks of the importance of ethos, declaring that people will not heed what a priest says in the pulpit if they do not respect the sermons he preaches with his life.225 In many of his published works, Harrison insists that he does not want his visitations to be contentious events and cautions his clergy against creating divisions among themselves.226 Such unity would be desirable in any age, but it is especially important in the times of trial and crisis that often faced the Victorian Church.227 Clergy who find themselves in the midst of such difficulties must beware of those who would attempt to set them against each other, and be prepared to set aside their differences in order to present a united defense against an increasingly hostile world.228 Such a defense, Manning says, should be spiritual and peaceful, not intellectual and combative. “We have too much of rash speculation, and headlong assertion”,229 he declared in 1845. “The deeper movements of men’s hearts need other arguments. Self-denial and silence are overwhelming answers even to the intellect. Controversial reasons weigh little against devotion, or historical difficulties against visible sanctity of life. And these best of arguments are most in our power”.230 223 Henry Edward Manning, A Charge Delivered at the Ordinary Visitation of the Archdeaconry of Chichester in July, 1842 (London, 1842), pp. 23, 31. 224 Henry Edward Manning, A Charge Delivered at the Ordinary Visitation of the Archdeaconry of Chichester in July, 1846 (London, 1846), pp. 24–26. 225 Henry Edward Manning, A Charge Delivered at the Ordinary Visitation of the Archdeaconry of Chichester in July, 1843 (London, 1843), p. 45; Manning, Charge of 1848, p. 57. 226 Harrison, Church the Guardian of Her Children, pp. v-vi; Harrison, Visitation Courts and Synods, p. 10. 227 Harrison, Church the Guardian of Her Children, pp. 74–75. 228 Benjamin Harrison, Prospects of Peace for the Church in the Prayer Book and Its Rules. A Charge Delivered to the Clergy of the Archdeaconry of Maidstone at the Ordinary Visitation in April, MDCCCLXXV (London, 1875), p. 23; Benjamin Harrison, Measures and Means of Unity in the Church at the Present Time. A Charge Delivered to the Clergy of the Archdeaconry of Maidstone, at the Ordinary Visitation, in May 1874 (London, 1874), pp. 17–18. 229 Henry Edward Manning, A Charge Delivered at the Ordinary Visitation of the Archdeaconry of Chichester in July, 1845 (London, 1845), p. 55. 230 Manning, Charge of 1845.


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Churchwardens, the people responsible for a parish’s legal affairs,231 were also present for the charge, and they received specific instructions as well. Both Harrison and Manning thank them for filling what was often a difficult and unglamorous post, and encourage them to faithfully discharge their duty of ensuring “good order in the congregation, and decency in Divine worship”.232 Manning goes on to remind them that exemplary character is just as important for them as for the priests; as he put it in 1846, “if they who bear the vessels of the Lord must needs be holy, they who guard them must not be unworthy of their charge”.233 It would not always be easy to meet such a lofty expectation, but those who succeeded and used their year in office well would “leave a blessing behind [them], and the remembrance of it will endure even to [their] dying day”.234 Charges, then, do have some homiletic elements, but they are not just sermons published under another name. The differences in genre are largely a function of the occasion and the speaker’s office. When an archdeacon presided over a worship service, he was engaging in a pastoral act; we would therefore expect his primary concern to be teaching the people about the faith and exhorting them to live lives marked by repentance, obedience, patience, and other Christian virtues. When he conducted a visitation, however, he was acting in what was essentially an administrative capacity, collecting and reporting information about the churches, interviewing candidates for ordination, assessing the quality of the priests’ and churchwardens’ work, and punishing those who had been found guilty of impropriety.235 The charge was, accordingly, a managerial address; in Manning’s words, its focus was not developing “individual character”, but rather attending to “the institutions and administration of the Church”.236 Some of these administrative discussions would have satisfied the critic who insisted that a charge should be “a guide to the Diocese”, not

231 Frances Knight, The Nineteenth-Century Church and English Society (Cambridge, 1995), p. 182. 232 Benjamin Harrison, Rights and Duties of Churchmen at the Present Time. A Charge Delivered to the Churchwardens and Sidesmen of the Archdeaconry of Maidstone, at the Easter Visitation in April, MDCCCLXXX (London, 1880), p. 9. 233 Manning, Charge of 1846, p. 8. 234 Ibid. 235 Burns, Diocesan Revival, pp. 41–44. 236 Henry Edward Manning, A Charge Delivered at the Ordinary Visitation of the Archdeaconry of Chichester in July, 1841 (London, 1841), p. 9.

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“an essay on the Church”.237 Harrison takes some time, for example, to eulogize clergy who had recently passed away; both he and Manning call for support of local charities and engage in lengthy discussions of the physical condition of church properties. Most of their time is spent commending the people for work already done; many pages of almost every charge are little more than lists of churches that had been built, restored, or re-consecrated since the last visitation. A few charges do call for additional efforts, for greater care and reverence in the maintenance of churchyards,238 or for all future renovations to include replacing private pews with common benches so that the congregation would not be divided during worship.239 Such instructions are always accompanied by expressions of trust and encouragement; the archdeacons express their gratitude that the work would be done because the people loved their churches, not because an outside authority had commanded it.240 This rhetoric is significant because it allowed the speakers to minimize the negative reactions that visitations often provoked. In 1851, John Keble complained that the service was “too commonly mutilated” by the absence of the sacraments, the churchwardens’ reports seldom painted a true picture of their parishes’ moral state, and the charge was often used as “a public reprimand, without a trial, and without a possibility of reply”.241 He was not alone in his opinions: the archdeacon was widely regarded as some kind of dictator or enforcer, sweeping into the area to pry into the people’s affairs and require work that the parishes could ill afford.242 Harrison and Manning did much to try to distance themselves from these perceptions. In 1843, Manning stated that he would rather inspire his people to “fulfil [their] duties freely, and of a willing mind, than obtain the most exact obedience to legal orders and directions”.243 That had been the case throughout the early years of his tenure as archdeacon, and he was confident that “no case for legal steps” would present itself in the future.244 237

Burns, Diocesan Revival, p. 36. Benjamin Harrison, The Religious Care of the Church’s Sanctuaries, and the Religious Education of Her Children. A Charge Delivered to the Clergy of the Archdeaconry of Maidstone at the Ordinary Visitation, MDCCCXLVII (London, 1847), pp. 10–11. 239 Manning, Charge of 1842, pp. 11–23. 240 Harrison, Religious Care, p. 11; Manning, Charge of 1842, p. 7. 241 Keble, Occasional Papers, pp. 272, 273. 242 Knight, Nineteenth-Century Church, pp. 170–71. 243 Manning, Charge of 1843, p. 9. 244 Ibid., p. 8. 238


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Similar statements appear throughout Harrison’s charges as well. He begins his first address by stating that he would prefer to regard the clergy of Maidstone not as his subordinates, but as equals, or even, in the case of the older priests, as his spiritual “fathers and elders”.245 He returns to this idea often, observing that “a willing mind, and a ready zeal” are always to be preferred to “authoritative injunctions”.246 In 1875, he directly challenged the negative opinions of his office, reminding his people that he was the bishop’s administrative assistant, not his “spy or informer”, and expressing his hope that nothing would be permitted to undermine “friendly and brotherly relations … between the clergy and their archdeacons”.247 Like many of their contemporaries, Harrison and Manning also address a host of topics of national, rather than merely local, interest. A favorite topic is the relationship between church and state, which is not at all surprising given the climate of the time: in the space of only about seventy-five years, England went from a country in which Percy Shelley could be expelled from Oxford for writing The Necessity of Atheism to one in which Charles Bradlaugh, an avowed unbeliever, could win the right to take his seat in Parliament.248 The change from parochial administration to political commentary involves shifts in topic and tone. When Harrison and Manning discuss the priests’ and churchwardens’ duties, they are generally complimentary rather than critical; when they speak of the work of legislators and judges, they find far more to bury than to praise. One of Manning’s first protests came in 1845, when he objected to an Act that would create a secular court to oversee almost all of the matters previously decided by Church judges, including the regulation of marriage and divorce. Such a move was unacceptable, he declares, because it would reduce holy matrimony to a merely civil affair and lead to great confusion as the state dissolved unions that the church still recognized as binding.249

245 Benjamin Harrison, A Charge Delivered to the Clergy of the Archdeaconry of Maidstone, at His Primary Visitation, MDCCCXLVI (London, 1846), p. 6. 246 Ibid., p. 11. 247 Harrison, Prospects of Peace, p. 38. 248 Shelley was expelled in the spring of 1811, the year after he entered University College. Bradlaugh was elected to Parliament in 1880 but refused to take the oath of office; six years later, following a series of legal challenges, he was permitted to offer a nonsectarian “affirmation” instead. See Edward Royle’s article on Bradlaugh in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford, 2004). 249 Manning, Charge of 1845, pp. 13–17.

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Later in the century, in 1877, Harrison took issue with another shift of power from ecclesiastical to civil authority. A provision in the Public Worship Regulation Act of 1874250 had combined the archbishops’ ecclesiastical courts into a single office. Although the judge would be nominated by the two archbishops, he could not serve without the consent of the monarch; if some difficulty were to arise in the nomination process, the Crown would have the authority to fill the position on its own. Such an arrangement, Harrison feared, could lead to ecclesiastical affairs ultimately being managed by a layman who had taken office without the consent of the Church.251 Other developments Manning and Harrison criticize in their charges include an attempt to modify the Deceased Wife’s Sister Act;252 the state’s contention that the consecration of bishops was ultimately in the power of the Crown;253 the Gorham Judgment;254 and the 1849 “Bill for the Relief of Persons in Holy Orders”, which would allow clergymen to register as Dissenters in order to avoid church discipline but would not exclude them from “the rites and sacraments of the Church”.255 In 1849 and 1850, they both spoke out against the Church’s decreasing role in the educational system. For the first three decades of the 19th century, schools had been governed by two voluntary organizations: the National Society for Promoting the Education of the Poor in

250 The Public Worship Regulation Act was an attempt to curb the rise of Ritualism – liturgical practices similar to those found in Roman Catholicism – within the Church of England. Rather than enumerating any specific offenses, it stipulated processes to ensure “the better administration” of laws already on the books. See John Shelton Reed, Glorious Battle: The Cultural Politics of Victorian Anglo-Catholicism (Nashville, 1996), pp. 238–56; the text of the Act appears in James Bentley, Ritualism and Politics in Victorian Britain: The Attempt to Legislate for Belief (Oxford, 1978), pp. 129–42. 251 Benjamin Harrison, The Church in Its Divine Constitution and Office and in Its Relations with the Civil Power. A Charge Delivered to the Clergy of the Archdeaconry of Maidstone, at the Ordinary Visitation in May 1877: With Notes (London, 1877), pp. 41–43. 252 Harrison, Church the Guardian of Her Children, pp. 16–21. Laws governing the persons whom one could and could not marry dated back to the 16th century. A bill introduced in 1842 would have amended the laws to allow a man to marry his dead wife’s sister. Many objected to it on the grounds that such a union violated both the Old Testament codes – specifically Leviticus 18:16 – and Anglican law. It was debated and defeated virtually every year after that, finally becoming law in 1907. See Nancy F. Anderson, “The “Marriage with a Deceased Wife’s Sister Bill” Controversy: Incest Anxiety and the Defense of Family Purity in Victorian England,” Journal of British Studies 21.2 (Spring 1982), 67–86. 253 Manning, Charge of 1848, pp. 8–38. 254 Harrison, Church the Guardian of Her Children, pp. 43–75. 255 Manning, Charge of 1849, pp. 6–9.


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the Principles of the Established Church and the nondenominational British and Foreign Schools Society.256 Limited public support began in 1833, and in 1839 Lord John Russell proposed to significantly increase the grants on the condition that the schools be inspected by a committee composed entirely of laymen from all denominations. The measure was defeated, and a compromise reached in 1840: inspections would take place, but would be carried out only by those who had received the approval of the appropriate archbishop.257 In 1846, the government’s Committee of Council on Education modified the agreement by adopting “management clauses” limiting the clergy to providing “religious instruction”, placing all other matters under the control of a lay committee.258 Manning argues that the change created a false and untenable dichotomy: because a school was a “living system … united and penetrated by one common spirit”, it is not feasible to give the clergy control over “the moral and religious instruction of the scholars” while excluding them from the “moral and religious superintendence of the school”.259 Harrison suggests that allowing laymen to oversee the schools could be a violation of Church law;260 he goes on to maintain that matters of governance should be decided locally, not surrendered to a “centralizing power” that threatened the “permanence” and “purity” of Christian education.261 Both contend that the effect of the change would be almost apocalyptic, placing England in the degraded spiritual condition of many countries on the Continent. Manning declares simply that the “greatest disaster which could befall this country would be a State-education like that of France”,262 while Harrison predicts that allowing the management clauses to remain in effect would lead “directly to the establishment of a supreme Minister of Public Instruction, on the ruins of the Church system of education; and eventually to the production among ourselves of those disastrous results to Church and State, which have

256 Graham Balfour, The Educational Systems of Great Britain and Ireland, 2nd ed. (Oxford, 1903), p. 3. 257 G.I.T. Machin, Politics and the Churches in Great Britain 1832 to 1868 (Oxford, 1977), pp. 64–69. 258 R.A. Soloway, Prelates and People: Ecclesiastical Social Thought in England 1783– 1852 (London, 1969), p. 420. 259 Manning, Charge of 1849, p. 18. 260 Harrison, Church the Guardian of Her Children, p. 37. 261 Ibid., p. 41. 262 Manning, Charge of 1849, p. 45.

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been seen and read … on the face of the kingdoms or the anarchies of Europe”.263 Such vehemence is evident in other passages as well. Manning calls giving the power of excommunication to a secular court “a prostitution of the discipline of Christ”264 and describes the clergy relief act as a “truly intolerant measure” that made “a mere mockery of sacred laws”.265 Some of Harrison’s most strident rhetoric appears in his condemnation of the Burial Act of 1880, which essentially erased all distinctions between consecrated and unconsecrated ground. Taken by itself, it was an act of “intolerance, persecution, and tyranny”; as part of a series of bills intended to gradually disestablish the Church, it stood as evidence that England was quickly becoming “a godless State” with “godless policy and law”.266 Some might say that the amount of time Harrison and Manning devote to these topics shows they had lost the audience awareness they demonstrate in other portions of their charges. One commentator described the trend toward political commentary as “peculiar” and “painful”;267 Keble accused the people’s “Chief Pastors” of too often acting like “Members of Parliament”, forsaking “matter that may be properly termed pastoral” in favor of extended reports on legislative affairs.268 The archdeacons themselves, however, believed such discussions to be a proper exercise of their office, not a departure from it. Harrison acknowledges that purely secular matters are unsuited to a “hallowed place”, but he also insists that civic affairs could be discussed when they affect the business of the Church.269 Manning, in fact, sees such discussions as not only appropriate, but mandatory: it would be “new and unnatural”, he says, if he did not speak plainly about how the Anglican position had been affected by political developments that had taken place since the previous visitation.270

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Harrison, Church the Guardian of Her Children, p. 41. Manning, Charge of 1845, p. 18. 265 Manning, Charge of 1849, pp. 8–9. 266 Benjamin Harrison, Disestablishment and Disendowment by Instalment, and Piecemeal. A Charge Delivered to the Clergy of the Archdeaconry of Maidstone at the Ordinary Visitation in May, MDCCCLXXXII, with Notes (London, 1883), pp. 20, 26. 267 Burns, Diocesan Revival, p. 31. 268 Keble, Occasional Papers, p. 274. 269 Harrison, Measures and Means of Unity, p. 15; Harrison, Rights and Duties, p. 13. 270 Manning, Charge of 1848, p. 5. 264


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Their reactions to these developments also show that they realized they were addressing a gathering of priests, not politicians or political activists. The petitions Harrison circulated in 1849 and 1850 to protest changes in the marriage laws271 were something of an anomaly; he and Manning responded to every other bill by calling for spiritual rather than legislative action.272 In times of political unrest, they maintain, clergy should not change what they did, but rather the intensity with which they did it, laboring even more vigorously to be what Manning called “the guide of souls, the almoner of the poor, the comforter of afflicted hearts”.273 Such efforts could be doubly effective, for while political agitation would likely weaken the Church, pastoral endeavors could actually result in God looking favorably upon the government. Harrison ends his charge of 1855 with a note of hope he probably would have sounded in any year of his tenure: “While … we endeavour faithfully to do our duty, fulfilling the responsibilities laid upon us, we shall the more confidently trust that a blessing may attend the counsels of our legislators”.274 Conclusion: Rhetorical Criticism and the Future of Tractarian Studies “What, then, is the point of doing any further studies on the Oxford Movement? Do we not know everything, or almost everything, that is worth knowing about it and about its leaders (at least Newman)?”275 This question was posed by the Swedish scholar Rune Imberg, in the introduction to In Quest for Authority: The “Tracts for the Times” and the Development of the Tractarian Leaders, 1833–1841. He seems to have his doubts at first, suggesting that Newman had been aptly studied and that Pusey and Keble have properly attracted less attention because “their theological production did not have the timeless qualities of Newman’s”.276 Ultimately, however, he acknowledges that more work 271

Harrison, Church the Guardian of Her Children, p. 20. Ibid., pp. 70–71; Harrison, Prospects of Peace, pp. 24–25; Manning, Charge of 1841, p. 45; Manning, Charge of 1843, pp. 18, 39. 273 Manning, Charge of 1841, p. 45. 274 Benjamin Harrison, Church-Rate Abolition, in Its Latest Form. A Charge Delivered to the Clergy of the Archdeaconry of Maidstone, at the Ordinary Visitation in May MDCCCLV (London, 1855), pp. 32–33. 275 Rune Imberg, In Quest of Authority: The “Tracts for the Times” and the Development of the Tractarian Leaders, 1833–1841, (Bibliotheca historico-ecclesiastica lundensis) 16 (Lund, 1987), p. 13. 276 Ibid. 272

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could and should be done, provided that it meets at least one of three criteria: it should “use new sources, work with old sources in a new way, or ask new questions”.277 He suggests that others could study John Keble’s writings on the Eucharist or “Pusey’s contribution to the study of exegetics in England”;278 his own book explores the publishing history of the Tracts in an effort to determine what “their different versions reveal about the development of the leaders of the Movement”.279 The state of affairs now is much as it was then. There is no shortage of scholarship on Newman, and the members of his circle continue to be rather neglected in comparison.280 After more than twenty years, moreover, there are still familiar sources to be reexamined, new materials to be discovered, and new questions to be asked. I propose that we pursue these goals by thinking in terms of “hybrids”. We can speak first of scholarship about hybrids, which examines how a recognized genre is a blend of several others. Campbell and Jamieson take this approach when they note that presidents’ inaugural speeches often employ both “deliberative” and “epideictic” strategies;281 I employed it here when I examined how the episcopal charge functioned as both a sermon and a “state of the diocese” address.282 We can also entertain the notion of hybrid scholarship. Just as crossing breeds can produce more robust varieties of plant and animal life,

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Ibid., p. 14. Ibid. 279 Ibid., p. 20. 280 Newman has been the focus of over 500 books and articles on virtually every conceivable subject: celibacy, romanticism, education, philosophy, ecclesiology, and the circumstances surrounding his conversion to Rome in 1845. In contrast, only a few dozen have been written on Pusey, Williams, and John Keble combined. Titles include David A.R. Forrester, Young Doctor Pusey (London, 1989); Rodney Stenning Edgecombe, “Allegorical Topography and the Experience of Space in Isaac Williams’s Cathedral,” English Studies 80.3 (June 1999), 224–38; and Esther T. Hu, “Christina Rossetti, John Keble, and the Divine Gaze,” Victorian Poetry 46.2 (Summer 2008), 175–89. 281 Jamieson and Campbell, “Rhetorical Hybrids,” pp. 154–55. 282 There may also be times when existing labels are insufficient and new categories must be created. We see this in Teri Reynolds’ and Linda Hutcheon’s use of the terms “imagetext” and “historiographic metafiction” to describe works that blur the boundaries between verbal and visual expression, or that use novels as vehicles for “rethinking and reworking … the forms and contents of the past” (Teri Reynolds, “Spacetime and Imagetext,” Germanic Review 73.2 [Spring 1998], 161; Linda Hutcheon, “Beginning to Theorize Postmodernism,” Textual Practice 1.1 [1987], 12). I have not coined any neologisms here, but it is certainly conceivable that new research will require new language, terms that do not appear in either Victorian genre theory or the vocabulary of 20thand 21st-century rhetorical criticism. 278


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blending schools of thought can create interesting new vistas in the academic landscape. Most of the research on the Oxford Movement has been produced by historians and theologians; expanding the scholarly community to include literary scholars, political scientists, rhetoricians, and others will help to enrich an already vibrant subject. Twenty years after Imberg expressed concerns about the future of the field, a group of scholars gathered in Oxford to mark the 175th anniversary of the Movement; making our future work increasingly multidisciplinary – or “integrative”,283 “interdisciplinary”,284 or “interdiscursive”285 – can help ensure that interest remains sufficiently strong to support a bicentennial celebration in 2033.

283 Julie Thompson Klein, Interdisciplinarity: History, Theory, and Practice (Detroit, 1990), p. 25. 284 For discussions of the various prefixes (e.g., anti-, inter-, multi-, post-, and trans-) and adjectives (e.g., “critical” vs. “instrumental,” “narrow” vs. “broad,” “supplementary” vs. “unifying”), see Julie Thompson Klein, Humanities, Culture, and Interdisciplinarity (Albany, 2005), pp. 55–80; Klein, Interdisciplinarity, pp. 55–73. 285 Linda Hutcheon and Michael Hutcheon, “A Convenience of Marriage: Collaboration and Interdisciplinarity,” PMLA 116.5 (October 2001), 1371.

RICHARD WHATELY AND THE DIDACTIC SERMON1 Carol Poster The notoriously laconic U.S. President Calvin Coolidge, on returning from church, was asked by his wife, Mrs Coolidge, “What was the sermon about?” The President answered, “Sin”. Mrs Coolidge asked, “What did the preacher say about it?” The President responded, “He was against it”.2 Sermons would probably have more effect, if, instead of being, as they frequently are, directly hortatory, they were more in a didactic form; occupied chiefly in explaining some transaction related, or doctrine laid down, in Scripture.3

Richard Whately (1787–1863), successively Fellow of Oriel College, Oxford, Rector of Halesworth, Bampton Lecturer, Principal of St Albans’ Hall, Drummond Lecturer on Political Economy at Oxford, and finally (Anglican) Archbishop of Dublin, was one of the more prolific and significant rhetoricians, sermon theorists, and religious figures of 19th-century Britain. His theories of the sermon itself and its role within Christianity were promulgated in numerous publications, sermons, lectures, diocesan charges, and parliamentary speeches.4 His 1 A much abbreviated version of this chapter was presented at the 2007 meeting of the International Society for History of Rhetoric in Strasbourg; I would like to thank David Timmerman for organizing the panel, and the audience and panelists for useful discussion. Thanks are also owed to Robert Ellison for his work in editing this volume and to the staff of the British Library and the Resource Sharing department of Scott Library at York University. Research for this chapter was supported by a Faculty of Arts Research Grant from York University. 2 This probably apocryphal story concerning President Calvin Coolidge has become an urban legend, and appears in many versions in a variety of print and internet sources. As with all legendary material, urban or otherwise, there is no single authoritative version. 3 Richard Whately, Elements of Rhetoric (1826; repr. Carbondale, IL, 1963), p. 191. 4 No complete bibliographical survey of Richard Whately’s work exists. The task of compiling one is complicated by his numerous anonymous publications, title changes, republications, self-plagiarisms, scattered contributions to periodicals, and collaborations (with his wife, daughters, colleagues, etc.). The total number of his publications probably amounts to well over two hundred individual works, although given his habits of substantial (often, but not always, silent) self-plagiarism and extensive revision, it is somewhat difficult to define precisely what constitutes an individual work. A partial bibliography was compiled by his daughter, Elizabeth Jane Whately, and placed as an

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work on the Irish National Education Board and the textbooks he wrote and edited for schoolchildren insured his ideas would be disseminated to a wide audience, far beyond his own diocese, nation, and denomination. Especially once he had moved outside the hermetic society of Oxford into parish ministry and eventually an archbishopric, he wrote in a lively, lucid, and popular style, successfully appealing to a broad audience. Even those of his contemporaries (who were legion) who strongly disagreed with him on many or all points of theology, politics, and philosophy conceded two things: first, that Whately was, without exception, a clear and candid writer and thinker, constitutionally incapable of dissimulation, reticence, or even diplomacy, whose views were clearly and cogently articulated; and, second, that Whately’s writings could legitimately be credited for substantially increasing 19th-century popular knowledge of and interest in logic (something he is widely acknowledged to have accomplished almost single-handedly),5 political economy,6 and rhetoric,7 and having made significant contributions

appendix to her Life and Correspondence of Richard Whately, D.D., late Archbishop of Dublin (London, 1866). A more detailed, but still not complete, compilation is appended to the major modern biography of Whately, Donald Harman Akenson, A Protestant in Purgatory: Archbishop Whately in Dublin (Hamden CT, 1981). 5 For a detailed discussion of the reception of Whately’s logic, see Raymie McKerrow, “Richard Whately and the Revival of Logic in Nineteenth-Century England,” Rhetorica 5 (1987), 163–85. 6 For the significance of Whately for political economy, see Peter Mandler, “Tories and Paupers: Christian Political Economy and the Making of the New Poor Law,” The Historical Journal 33.1 (1990), 81–103; Salim Rashid, “Richard Whately and Christian Political Economy at Oxford and Dublin,” Journal of the History of Ideas, 38:1 (1977), 147–55; and A.M.C. Waterman, “The Ideological Alliance of Political Economy and Christian Theology, 1778–1833,” Journal of Ecclesiastical History 34.2 (1983), 231–44 and Revolution, Economics, and Religion: Christian Political Economy, 1798–1833 (Cambridge, 1991). 7 Not only was Whately’s Elements of Rhetoric widely reprinted in his own period, but it has remained in print and has continued a significant object of study among rhetoricians in the 20th and early 21st centuries. In contrast to his own period, in which he was regarded primarily as a religious figure, a substantial proportion of recent secondary studies of Whately have been within the context of rhetoric and informal logic, primarily in communication and English departments in North America. Perhaps the single most comprehensive study of Whately’s rhetorical theories is Raymie McKerrow, Whately’s Theory of Rhetoric, Dissertation, University of Iowa, 1974. Although the dissertation has not been published as a monograph, the substance of McKerrow’s work on Whately appeared in a series of extremely informative and astute articles in various journals: “Whately’s Philosophy of Language,” Southern Speech Communication Journal 53 (1988), 211–26; “Ethical Implications of a Whatelian Rhetoric,” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 17 (1987), 321–28; “Whately’s Theory of Rhetoric,” in Explorations in Rhetoric, Studies in Honor of Douglas Ehninger, ed. R.E. McKerrow (Glenview, IL, 1982), pp. 137–56; “Richard Whately, Human Nature and

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in a variety of other fields. The sheer diversity and volume of Whately’s work makes it difficult to assess his specific contributions to the theory and practice of the sermon independent of his wider influence on the Established Church in Ireland, Irish Education, church and national politics, and especially logical and rhetorical theory (of which homiletic theory was a significant part in 18th- and 19th-century Britain).8 Because Whately’s approach to the sermon was a highly contextualized one – he repeatedly insists that sermons alone, apart from other ministerial offices,9 are of little profit to a congregation – it is necessary to examine his work broadly and systematically, for his theories concerning the sermon itself depend heavily upon his understanding of the nature of the Church, ministry, Bible, and Christianity itself. This chapter, therefore, will consist of three parts: first, a survey of the theological issues underlying Whately’s understanding of the sermon; second, an examination of Whately’s specific recommendations concerning the manner of composition, subject matter, arrangement, style, Christian Assistance,” Church History 50 (1981), 166–81; “Richard Whately and the Nature of Human Knowledge in Relation to Ideas of His Contemporaries,” Journal of the History of Ideas 42 (1981), 439–55; “Archbishop Whately, Religious Controversialist of the Nineteenth Century,” Prose Studies 1800–1900 2 (1979), 160–78; “ ‘Method of Composition,’ Whately’s Earliest ‘Rhetoric’,” Philosophy and Rhetoric 11 (1978), 43–58; “Campbell and Whately on the Utility of Syllogistic Logic,” Western Speech Communication Journal 40 (1976), 1–13; and “Probable Argument and Proof in Whately’s Theory of Rhetoric,” Central States Speech Journal 26 (1975), 259–66. 8 The most significant rhetorical texts of the period were authored, overwhelmingly, by ministers, and even when written by laypeople, treated pulpit rhetoric as one of the most important genres of oratory. Congregationalist minister William Enfield’s The Speaker (London, 1774), one of the most successful elocutionary manuals, was reprinted widely through the late 18th and early 19th centuries. Thomas Sheridan’s A Discourse … Introductory to [a] Course of Lectures on Elocution and the English Language (London, 1752; numerous reprints) included a long section on pulpit elocution, which was quoted, approvingly, at length in Whately’s Elements of Rhetoric (Carbondale, 1963), pp. 339–92. The two most influential rhetorical treatises of the late 18th century, Hugh Blair’s Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres (London, 1783; numerous reprints) and George Campbell’s The Philosophy of Rhetoric (London, 1776; numerous reprints) were written by ministers of the Church of Scotland. 9 A discussion of the differing understandings of the ministerial role among the various parties within the Church of England in the mid-19th century can be found in W.J. Conybeare, “Church Parties,” Edinburgh Review 200 (1853), 273–42. Conybeare describes Evangelicals of the “low and lazy” type as emphasizing preaching to the exclusion of other parochial duties, something vehemently denied in a charge by the evangelical James Thomas O’Brien, (Anglican) Bishop of Ossory (one of Whately’s many staunch opponents) in his Episcopal Counsel upon Ministerial Duties … Being Extracts From Visitation Charges Delivered in 1842 and 1845. To which are Prefixed Remarks upon an Incidental Notice of One of Those Charges in the Article on Church Parties in the … Edinburgh Review (Dublin, 1854).

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and delivery of sermons; and, finally, a brief analysis of Whately’s own sermons in light of his theories. Whately’s Theological Context for the Sermon10 The wide variations within Anglican theology are partially due to four distinct, and not entirely compatible, properties of the Church of England. First, it is an Established (national) Church with the English monarch as its secular head; second, it has an elaborate liturgical tradition standardized in the Book of Common Prayer; third, it is a reformed church, but not radically so (famously described as “Roman in her liturgy, Calvinist in her theology, and Arminian in her clergy”); and finally, it strives to balance Scripture, individual human reason, and tradition (within which would be included the institution of the church) as sources of authority. This “Anglican Tripod” of Scripture, reason, and tradition is notoriously precarious; the differences among the major parties within the Church of England in 19th-century Britain can be described in part as leanings, as it were, towards different legs of the tripod, with the Tractarians focusing on tradition, the Evangelicals on Scripture, and the Noetics and Broad Church on reason. Whately and his fellow Noetics were distinguished by a theology which was grounded in Scripture, literally interpreted by means of private judgement guided by reason (especially logic). Although the Noetics shared a Scriptural emphasis with the Evangelicals and a rational method with the Broad Church, they were less a “religion of the heart” and more intellectual than the Evangelical wing of the Church, and more Scriptural (and less influenced by German metaphysics) than the Broad Church.11 The particular controversies within the United Church of 10 Note that throughout this chapter, the theological opinions being summarized, unless explicitly stated otherwise, are those of Whately, even where, for stylistic reasons, I have refrained from repeating Whately’s name in an inordinate number of successive sentences. I also use the masculine pronoun to refer to ministers, as Whately, although thinking that women did, in fact, take on many of the functions of the deaconesses of the primitive church, did not consider the possibility of ordination of women (he left no explicit writings on the topic, and himself always used the masculine pronoun when referring to ordained ministers). 11 For a still useful description of the church parties in mid-19th century Britain, see Conybeare, “Church Parties”. For the high church movement, see Peter Knockles, The Oxford Movement in Context: Anglican High Churchmanship, 1760–1857 (Cambridge, 1997). For Anglican Evangelicals, see, inter alia, Grayson Carter, Anglican Evangelicals: Protestant Secessions from the Via Media, c. 1800–1850 (Oxford, 2001). The literature


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England and Ireland (as Whately was careful to term it after appointed to Dublin) that affected how Whately thought about the role of the sermon included ones over church-state relations, the relationships among tradition, Scripture, and private judgement, and the role of Church and ministry in the economy of salvation. Whately’s positions on these issues were remarkably consistent over his career. The shorthand “sola scriptura Protestant” is far from an unsuitable description of Whately’s position, and one he himself would willingly embrace, but it is too vague to be practically informative. Most Christians claim the Bible as a uniquely authoritative text and most Protestants adhere to some version of the sola scriptura doctrine (the belief that Scripture alone, extra ecclesiam, is sufficient for salvation), but the claim of biblicism specifies neither how the Bible is being read nor the conclusions derived from that reading. Irenaeus famously pointed out that heretics always cite Scripture (something true by definition, as one who did not cite Scripture would have been, to Irenaeus, a pagan rather than a heretic). Moreover, the description of Whately as one who interpreted the Bible “literally”, although quite as apt and accurate as the label of “sola scriptura”, is equally uninformative, as there are numerous writers who attempt to interpret Scripture literally, and yet who still differ in the details of their hermeneutic methods and in the conclusions they derive from their interpretations. Since the task of the sermon for Whately was primarily exegesis and application of Scripture (which he contrasted with technical theology, something he considered as often idolatrously elevating uninspired human deductions from Scripture to a status equal to that of inspired writings12), his methods of scriptural interpretation underlie both his preaching practice and the precepts he set forth for the clergy of his diocese concerning ministerial duties (including preaching). The topics relevant to sermon theory and practice to which Whately regularly returns

on the Tractarians is voluminous; for a counterweight to its predominantly hagiographical tendency, see Frank Turner, John Henry Newman: The Challenge to Evangelical Religion (New Haven, 2002). 12 For the distinction between Scripture as history and technical theology as human deduction, see Whately, The Use and Abuse of Party-Feeling in Matters of Religion (Oxford, 1822). A more heavily theoretical discussion of the topic, and one often cited by Whately with approbation, was that by his protégé and friend, Renn Dickson Hampden, The Scholastic Philosophy Considered in its Relation to Christian Theology (Oxford, 1832).

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concerning methods of scriptural interpretation and the main deductions which can be made from Scripture if properly interpreted, are: 1. Reading Scripture as historical fact rather than theological dogma. 2. Using historical reconstruction as a hermeneutic guide, i.e. “[I]t is … of the first importance to look to the meaning which the [text] appears to have conveyed, at the time, to the persons addressed. … [W]hatever sense the words conveyed to the [original or immediate] hearers, we may fairly presume to be the true one”.13 3. Distinguishing parables and prophecies, which cannot be interpreted literally, from other genres within Scripture. 4. Paying attention to the omissions of Scripture, and the implications of why the inspired writers omitted certain things, especially creeds, general theories, introductory materials, and, in the case of the New Testament, guidelines concerning church governance, ceremonial practices, and specific ordinances concerning moral law (as opposed to general moral principles). 5. Analyzing the implications of the abolition of the Levitical priesthood and its sacrifices under the New Covenant. 6. Understanding the role of the church under the New Covenant as a community of believers rather than authoritative hierarchy. 7. Insisting on the right and duty of private judgement and the concomitant necessity for education to improve the quality of that judgement.

The Church, the Ministry, and Private Judgement The process of scriptural interpretation, for Whately, took place within the context of the Church as a community and institution, which also served to form a framework and provide tools for private study and reflection. Thus, although Whately does discuss such issues as private and family prayer and recommended private study and reflection on Scripture as well as regular self-examination,14 he focuses especially on Scriptural hermeneutics as a pedagogical process, either in the immediate institutional context of the church (especially in those of his works addressed to the clergy) or in public education (especially in reference to Irish National Education). This pedagogical rather than theoretical emphasis derived from Whately’s position that Christianity 13 Whately, The Scripture Doctrine Concerning the Sacraments, and the Points Connected Therewith (London, 1857), p. viii. 14 For private and family prayer, see Lectures on Prayer (London, 1860), and for selfexamination, see Address to a Young Person Who Has Been Confirmed; On the Subject of Self-Examination (London, 1854).


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was a practical and popular, rather than speculative and elitist, religion. Whately viewed the ministry of the United Church of England and Ireland as communal rather than individualistic, the duties of ministers being to act in such a manner and to preach such doctrines as to foster unity rather than dissension, and his own duty as bishop being to articulate clearly the traditional boundaries of what legitimately constituted the appropriate beliefs and behaviors of the community and what did not.15 This did not mean narrowing doctrinal boundaries. Whately was more willing than most of his contemporaries to accept the legitimacy of varying beliefs about adiaphora (and considered a far greater range of things indifferent than did many)16, but at the same time, he was quite strict about church discipline.17 For example, while Whately himself took a very low position with respect to liturgy, the details of which were not only matters indifferent, but matters of indifference to him personally, he also considered that the forms of service in the Book of Common Prayer, while not constituting the singular acceptable form of liturgy for Christians in general, were what had been legitimately agreed upon within the Established Church, and that ministers of the Established Church, in accordance with their ordination vows, were obliged to follow them as written (even if lobbying for revision); thus, Whately had no sympathy with either extreme Evangelical or Tractarian ministers who, on no warrant but their own beliefs, changed the order of service in radical ways, by introducing either extemporaneous prayer or Romanizing practices (incense, chanting, altar candles, replacing a

15 Whately discussed what he considered his duties and obligations as a bishop, as well as what he did and did not consider suitable topics for his charges to his clergy, in several of his early (1832–35) charges and confirmation addresses, which he originally published as pamphlets and later reprinted in Charges and Other Tracts (London, 1836). 16 Whately’s sense of what did and did not constitute boundaries of the Anglican communion was far broader than that of most other churchmen of the period, as can be seen in Party-Feeling (especially pp. 101–33). Unlike his close friend Thomas Arnold, however, he did not envision a church “broad enough to encompass all of England”, as Arnold phrased it in his Principles of Church Reform (London, 1833), but rather argued that in the case of irreconcilable differences over adiaphora (e.g. presbyterian vs. episcopalian methods of church organization), individual Christian organizations might need separate local administrative structures, while still being parts of the same universal Christian church. For Whately’s views of church governance, see his anonymously published Letters on the Church by an Episcopalian (London, 1826), and his later Kingdom of Christ (5th ed., London, 1851). 17 See Akenson, Protestant in Purgatory, pp. 93–130.

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freestanding movable communion table with an altar at the extreme east end of the church). Whately insisted on, as it were, truth in advertising – i.e. the notion that a person attending a service in an Anglican Church should encounter a recognizably Anglican liturgy, rather than some ad hoc creation, derived from Rome or the “private revelation”, as it were, of an individual minister.18 The same, of course, is true of sermons. For Whately, the pulpit of the Church of England could only be used legitimately to preach doctrines in general agreement with the formularies of the church. Irreconcilable differences with such formularies were both valid and compelling reasons to leave the establishment, a choice which, for Whately, should not be made lightly, but which was not one heretical with respect to Christianity in a larger sense or in any way an obstacle to salvation. In cases of extreme Tractarians and Evangelicals, Whately used his powers of episcopal discipline quickly and decisively.19 He acted equally firmly against preachers who fomented overt discord between Roman Catholics and Protestants, and missions which used food as a bribe to convert Roman Catholics to (nominal) Protestantism. Despite this quite strict enforcement of what he considered acceptable behavior within the Anglican ministry, Whately insisted at the same time on trying to maintain an attitude of “Christian mildness” towards those outside the established church while being loyal to the establishment,20 and 18 A letter congratulating Hampden, a friend and protégé of Whately, on his (controversial) appointment as Bishop of Hereford, shows the importance of this issue even in the 1840s:

…Having the misfortune to live in a village in which the Young Incumbent – a man of very moderate abilities, and less distinction, – by altering the Church (without any legal authority whatsoever) so as, in some respects, to resemble a Roman Catholic place of worship, and, by teaching Romish doctrines, has compelled myself and other churchmen, for some years, to discontinue our attendance in it – that, we may not, by our presence, be supposed to sanction such doctrines – I hail with gratitude the appointment of a learned evangelical Clergyman, like yourself, to be Bishop of Hereford; which, I trust, will be some check, at least in that diocese, to such movements, in future, as I have, here, so deeply to regret. … (Letter from Edward Morton, M.D. to Renn Dickson Hampden dated 3 January 1848, Hampden Papers, Oriel College, Oxford, Letter 204) This issue would become increasingly important in the Ritualist controversies immediately following Whately’s death. 19 See Akenson, A Protestant in Purgatory. 20 Whately discusses how to achieve this balance of loyalty to one’s own communion and charity to others in detail in Party-Feeling and Charges and Other Tracts.


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consistently maintained the position that the Christian religion, and example of its founder, mandated that all disagreements must be conducted, in both substance and rhetorical form, in a spirit of charity.21 As Whately points out repeatedly in his strictures against the “Romanizing” of Tractarians, it is the duty of someone taking the emoluments of a specific communion to propound the doctrines of that communion from the pulpit, and if he finds himself unable to do so sincerely, to resign his position. For Whately, this was as much a matter of character as ideology. Although he could disagree strongly but respectfully with a wide range of ideas, all forms of lying, evasion, dissimulation, and hypocrisy were personally repugnant to him. As Alexander Campbell Fraser points out, “Foremost [in Whately’s character and writings] was his steady incorruptible love of truth, as such, for its own sake. Perhaps, in the actions of no man of his time was this virtue more deeply rooted. It is a very common profession, but really a very rare practice”.22 This love of truth and candor carried over into vehement objections to “the system of reserve in communicating religious knowledge” (i.e. the belief that there were certain parts of Christian truth not fully revealed to all people in Scripture but instead only known to a small circle of the clergy or other initiates and that certain doctrines should be revealed to the laity only rarely or under specific conditions23). Whately, in his addresses to the clergy of his diocese, insists on the importance in sermons and religious instruction, of complete honesty with regard to apparent difficulties of Scripture. He points out: You will be met perhaps by an outcry against the danger of unsettling men’s minds, by allowing them to know that the Scriptures were not originally written in our own language, and that accordingly, what we commonly call the Bible is a translation of the Bible, or that our Translators claimed no infallibility, or that what is called the Authorized Version is

21 Much of Whately’s work was concerned with the problem of what might be termed charitable disagreement, whether in the political sphere (in which he advocated full civil rights for Jews, Roman Catholics, and atheists, while disagreeing with many of their beliefs), or in the religious sphere of controversies among denominations or parties within a denomination, as discussed in McKerrow, “Archbishop Whately, Religious Controversialist of the Nineteenth Century,” pp. 160–78. 22 Alexander Campbell Fraser, Archbishop Whately and the Restoration of the Study of Logic (London, 1864), p. 10. 23 See, e.g., Whately, ed., Cautions for the Times (London, 1853), pp. 84–102 and The Controversy between Tract No. XC and the Oxford Tutors (London, 1841).

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carol poster not (like the Vulgate, to the Church of Rome) the standard and rule of Faith to which our Articles refer; or that there ever existed any differences of opinions among Scholars as to the true reading or true sense of any passage in the Original … Nay, you may even meet with persons who will deprecate your explaining to the People that the divisions into chapters and verses were not the work of the original Writers themselves, but were introduced long after for the convenience of reference. That the mistake exists among many of the unlearned, I have actually known given as a reason, not for correcting that mistake, but for leaving them under this error, for fear of unsettling their minds!24

Against such arguments, Whately insisted on clear discussion of the fallibility of the Authorized translators,25 the presence of manuscript variants, and the existence of other difficulties or inconsistencies in Scripture (miracles, the story of Judas, etc.). In fact, for Whately as sermon theorist and practitioner, frank analysis (and resolution) of such difficulties are central to Christian preaching and instruction, and neglect of (or prevarication concerning) them contributes to the growth of infidelity.26 On a practical level, dissimulation is counterproductive – parishioners who read the Bible carefully will notice for themselves that the psalms in the Authorized Version differ from those in the Book of Common Prayer, and will encounter apparent inconsistencies and improbabilities. These encounters, if the minister has been less than

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Whately, Instruction in the Scriptures, pp. 21–22. The question of whether the Authorized Version could properly be called “The Bible” erupted during the “mutilated Bible” controversies which were part of a larger debate on the role of Scripture in Irish National Education. Typical of the opposition to Whately is the outrage displayed over Whately’s reminder that any English version of the Bible is merely a translation of Greek and Hebrew originals (see, for example, the Rev. John Flanagan in The Bible, the Irish National Board of Education, and the Archbishop of Dublin [London, 1851], especially pp. 4–7). For Whately’s defense of the use of Bible extracts on the very sensible basis that because no schoolchild could be expected to read the entire Bible in a single day, or even school year, a graded reader of extracts, with explanatory philological notes (e.g. concerning unfamiliar places and terms) geared to students’ abilities and knowledge, was needed for the classroom, as well as his more general explanation of National Education, see Charges and Tracts, pp. 125–228. 26 Whately discusses this along with the problems arising from omission of teaching evidences in Essays on Some of the Dangers to Christian Faith, which May Arise from the Teaching or the Conduct of its Professors: To Which are Subjoined Three Discourses Delivered on Several Occasions, 2nd ed. (London, 1847), pp. 69–130. He himself thought evidences should be part of the regular school curriculum and wrote a school text on the subject for use in Irish schools, Easy Lessons on Christian Evidences (London, 1838). 25


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completely open about such issues, are liable to lead to distrust of the minister in particular and the church in general. Besides such dissimulation or reserve being ineffective, especially with respect to the more intelligent and inquiring minds among the congregation, insistence on submission to authority has two other problems. First, it is unscriptural; Whately repeatedly cites St Peter’s injunction that Christians must provide a “reason for their hope”.27 Second, just as mindless repetition leads only to rote learning rather than genuine knowledge, so unreasoned acceptance of Christian truths based on authority rather than understanding can lead only to a sort of nominal Christianity: Supposing even that you could succeed in bringing anyone to lead a life agreeable to every Christian virtue, but without any clear notion of the great doctrines on which our Faith rests, and supposing that you would then have accomplished all that is possible, and all that is desirable, still, it could not be said, even then, that you had taught him the Christian religion: no more than you could say of any sick man who had been restored to health by the skill of his physicians, that he had been taught the art of medicine. He has indeed attained the object he had in view; the medicines he has taken, and the regimen he has observed, are, we will suppose, the best possible; but he was only following blindly and implicitly the advice of those who understand the subject of which he is ignorant. And he still remains ignorant of it. He has proceeded indeed on medical principles, but the knowledge is not his own, but his physician’s. Now as the patient would never become a step nearer to becoming himself a physician, by merely conforming to the directions of a physician, so, if it were possible (which it is not) to practise all the Christian virtues, not on any Christian principles of his own, but merely by doing what he was told by another, he could not be said to have been taught Christianity.28

Just as Whately suggests addressing issues concerning textual criticism of the Bible directly, resolving rather than evading difficult questions, so too he treats the church and its ministry as fallible human institutions, which should acknowledge their own fallibility rather than asserting the sort of authority which no human individual or institu-

27 “But sanctify the Lord God in your hearts: and be ready always to give an answer to every man that asketh you a reason of the hope that is in you with meekness and fear” (1 Peter 3:15). 28 Richard Whately, The Duty of Those who Disapprove of the Education of the Poor on Grounds to Expediency as well as Those who Approve It. Pointed Out in a Sermon Preached At Halesworth, Oct. 7, 1830, Published by the Desire of the Subscribers, for the Benefit of the Halesworth and Chediston National School (London, 1830), pp. 24–25.

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tion can have.29 Despite what might seem an extremely liberal position with respect to free and open inquiry, for which Whately was often accused of secularism or infidelity by his contemporary opponents, Whately was not, in fact, a “liberal” in the Broad Church tradition,30 and his insistence on “lower criticism” did not lead to any form of sympathy with the Higher Critics.31 For Whately, the books of the New Testament were eyewitness accounts written by their putative authors, and the Bible as a whole was an inspired document, albeit one not dictated by God but produced by fallible human authors, editors, and translators, under a guidance from God that might allow minor errors on matters indifferent (geography, chronology, grammar) but not on matters necessary for salvation. The vehemence with which Whately defended biblical literalism (including a “young earth” position and literal reading of Genesis) was based on two things: first, a theory of knowledge which placed immediate empirical evidence, either in the form of personal experience or accurate testimony to personal 29 See Whately’s essay, “On the Dangers of An Erroneous Imitation of Christ’s Teaching,” reprinted in Dangers, pp. 131–238 as well as his The Search after Infallibility, Considered in Reference to the Danger of Religious Errors Arising within the Church in the Primitive as well as in all Later Ages (Dublin, 1848) and Cautions for the Times: addressed to the parishioners of a parish in England, by their former rector (London, 1853). 30 For an excellent analysis of the use (and misuse) of the term “liberal” with respect to 19th-century religious positions, see Robert Pattison, The Great Dissent: John Henry Newman and the Liberal Heresy (Oxford, 1991). 31 In many ways, the Tractarians were closer to the position of the German Higher Critics with respect to the historicity of the Bible, than were the Noetics (as discussed in Frank Turner, Newman); Thomas Arnold was the only major figure associated with the Noetic school with a strong interest in German higher criticism, and much closer to Connop Thirlwall and the nascent Cantabrigian broad church movement than to his fellow Oxonians in many theological matters. In fact, one of the works produced in 19th-century Oxford (as opposed to Cambridge, where the Germans were better understood and appreciated) most sympathetic to German criticism was an early defense of German theology by Edward Bouverie Pusey, An Historical Enquiry into the Probable Causes of the Rationalist Character Lately Predominant in the Theology of Germany (London, 1828; rev. ed. 1830). Pusey refrained from expressing even limited sympathies with German criticism after a virulent response to his book by Hugh James Rose, A Letter to the Lord Bishop of London, in Reply to Mr. Pusey’s Work on the Causes of Rationalism in Germany; Comprising Some Observations on Confessions of Faith, and their Advantages (London, 1829). Whately’s early pamphlet, Historic Doubts Relative to Napoleon Buonaparte (London, 1819), on the other hand, attacks German criticism and defends the historicity of the Bible, and Whately continued to see the Bible as a literally true historical document throughout his career, for reasons analyzed in detail below. The intellectual grounds of the debate between Whately and the Tractarians thus had its roots in the early 1820s, even if it was university politics of the mid to late 1820s and 1830s that added personal animosity to intellectual difference.


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experience, above speculative chains of hypotheses,32 and second, a concern about the consequences of non-literal interpretation. If the Bible were not a clear and straightforward historical text, understandable by ordinary people applying reason and private judgement, but a mysterious document (in the ancient sense of a mystery as not only something veiled but as something exclusively communicable to initiates) only comprehensible in light of some esoteric knowledge or oral tradition to which few people would have free access, then it could not readily serve as the sole authority on religious matters and act as a bulwark against the power of ecclesiastical elites.33 Teaching biblical evidences and the historical truth of the Bible was essential to sustaining the right of private judgement and the priesthood of all believers, as well as being the foundation of Christian faith: Christianity professes to be both a religion founded on evidence, and a religion calculated for the great mass of mankind. It professes to be, (not like the paganism of the ancients) not two systems, one for the learned and another for the vulgar; but one religion, claiming to be understood, and to be received on evidence … by men of all ranks … [The earliest followers of Jesus] were made converts by evidence accessible to themselves.34

Neglect of teaching evidences would lead either to infidelity or to Rome.35 This emphasis on the truth of Scripture and the need for open discussion of it had a parallel in Whately’s attitude towards the Church, which combined open inquiry with staunch discipline. Although Whately certainly was no opponent of those who attempted to reform

32 Whately’s most entertaining discussion of evidence, and the respective claims of theory and experience, can be found in his Napoleon. He also discusses evidence and testimony in Elements of Rhetoric, pp. 53–90. 33 Whately’s strictures against the (quasi-Averroist) notion of there being two separate Christian religions, one for an educated group of “initiates” and the other for average believers, are clearly articulated in “Part II: Vicarious Religion” of his Essays. Third Series. Errors of Romanism. 2nd ed. rev. (London, 1837). 34 Whately, Dangers, p. 87. 35 Whately points out that Hume and the Tractarians are in essential agreement concerning the foundation of Christianity on blind faith or authority rather than on rational evidence and testimony, and thus considers that the Roman and Romanizing grounding of Christianity on faith and authority a tactical as well as theological mistake in combating infidelity. For Whately’s discussion of this, see the entertaining parallels between Hume and the Tractarians in Elements of Logic (London, 1875), Appendix III; Dangers, pp. 69–130; and Cautions for the Times (London, 1853), pp. 198–212.

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the Established Church, and himself was a supporter of many internal reforms (especially revival of Convocation, tithe reform, and redistribution of revenue), he also was immensely loyal to the church, and argued that just as one might criticize the British penal code, as a citizen one was obliged to obey it while agitating for change, so, similarly, a minister or bishop of the Established Church must honestly subscribe to and preach the doctrines generally held by the church – not only those present in Scripture, which are common to all Christians, but the denominationally specific Thirty-Nine Articles, Homilies, Book of Common Prayer, and associated liturgical rubrics. While Whately does not consider that civil society should enforce any religious penalties,36 and he does not consider dissent from denominational formularies (e.g. the Thirty-Nine Articles) heretical, he also points out that any society must have its own rules and the right and duty to specify conditions of membership. Whately explains his position in some detail in a preface to a work in which he collects various tracts addressed to the ministers of his diocese: The distinction [between “what is allowable, or a duty, or an important duty, for every man, and what is such to a member of a certain Community”] is plainly perceived by most persons, in all secular matters. For instance, it is well understood that a citizen of the British Empire owes allegiance to the Sovereign; though he is not bound to condemn all Republics, and to maintain that regal government is essential to every civilized State. The laws of our Country, We are bound in duty to obey; though we need not disapprove the very different laws of some other Countries. But in all that pertains to religion, the distinction is often overlooked. If any one urges, on members of our Church, the duty of complying with its regulations that are not contrary to Scripture, he will perhaps be told in answer, that such and such regulations are not essential to the Gospel scheme. If he objects to something that is at variance with the scheme of our Church, he will perhaps be answered that it is not forbidden in Scripture. And if he maintains the duty, in an Episcopalian Church, of submitting to Episcopal rule, he will perhaps be considered as one of those narrow-minded Churchmen who would exclude from the Universal Church of Christ, all who are not under a system of Episcopacy. 36 For Whately’s general theories concerning the relationship of church and state, see Letters on the Church and Kingdom of Christ. For his support of full civil rights for those not members of the established church, see A Speech in the House of Lords, August 1, 1833. On a Bill for the Removal of Certain Disabilities from His Majesty’s Subjects of the Jewish Persuasion, with Additional Remarks on Some of the Objections Urged Against that Measure (London, 1833) and Reflections on a Grant to a Roman Catholic Seminary; Being a Charge Delivered at the Visitation of the Dioceses of Dublin and Glandelough, June 26, 1845 (London, 1845).


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But surely the most scrupulous fulfilment of our own obligations does not necessarily imply bigoted intolerance. We may have a hearty and zealous attachment to our own Church, without passing uncharitable censure on others. And this hearty zeal should be even more conspicuously manifested by the Clergy and Laity of an endowed Church, in order to guard against the suspicion that their adherence to it is mainly from a regard to the personal advantages they derive from that endowment.37

Thus, unlike the 18th-century Latitudinarians who, in trying to avoid the sort of religious controversy which had led to devastating religious wars in Britain and Europe, often restricted the content of sermons to those things they considered not only non-sectarian, but credible to all “reasonable men”, and which even deists would accept as self-evident or readily derivable from the self-evident truths of natural religion independent of Revelation,38 Whately sees it as his duty as a bishop to inculcate beliefs specific to the Anglican communion in his sermons and diocesan charges, and to enforce church discipline. Behind this was not only abstract reasoning, but personal temperament. Disloyalty, like dishonesty, was utterly repugnant to Whately; his most astringent polemics were aimed at those he considered to practice both: … [A]lthough I presume not to pass any authoritative censure on the members of other communions, I have exerted myself … to banish strange doctrines from our own Communion, and to counteract the disingenuous procedure of those who hold the doctrines of one Church and the emoluments of another.39

Whately was loyal to the Anglican communion and genuinely admired “the scheme of our church”, including the liturgy (and Book of Common Prayer), Thirty-Nine Articles, and Homilies, but felt some ambivalence concerning the principle of Establishment. As a matter of religious principle, he considered that establishing a church violated several scriptural injunctions. The first principle was that of separation of state from church, with the one having a secular function and the other a religious one. As well as supporting administrative separation of church and state for practical reasons (i.e. a belief that Convocation would do

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Whately, Parish Pastor (London, 1893), pp. vii–viii. For discussion of the theological background to the Latitudinarian practical sermon, see G.R. Cragg, Reason and Authority in the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge, 1964). 39 Whately, Reflections on a Grant to a Roman Catholic Seminary, p. 23. Note that the phrase “banish strange doctrines” is from the “Form of Ordaining or Consecrating an Archbishop or Bishop” of the Book of Common Prayer. 38

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a much better job of church governance than Parliament40), Whately also objected to coercive civil penalties in religious matters due to a second principle, that of salvation by faith, which mandates that conversion must be an internal process as well as set of external behaviors. Civil coercion, for Whately, leads to a system of nominal Christianity, under which people would automatically be part of the Established Church for pragmatic reasons, and not actually devote to religious matters the sort of careful attention, that combined with self-examination, produces genuine faith.41 Whately discussed the nature of the relationship between religion and civil government in many different works and contexts42 and frequently cited and preached on three Scriptural passages he saw as central to Church-State relations: Matthew 22:21,43 Luke 12:14,44 and John 18:36.45 As well as having theological doubts about the legitimacy of Establishment, in the case of Ireland, Whately considered Establishment both unjust and unsustainable. To ask an overwhelmingly Roman Catholic population to pay tithes (and the church cess which funded communion bread and wine) to support a Protestant Church struck Whately as unjust; it also struck him as

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See Whately, Letters on the Church and Charges and Other Tracts, pp. 503–25. Whately states that “The only disadvantage [to disestablishment], as some would account it, to counterbalance the benefits of the proposed change, would be one which I should reckon among its advantages; viz. the loss, if it might be so called, of many insincere, nominal members of [the] Church, who have no real attachment to the society – no care for the objects it proposes – and whose conduct tends neither to its credit nor to the support of its true interests” (Letters on the Church, p. 185). For Whately’s comments on the necessity of self-examination, see his Address … on the Subject of SelfExamination. 42 Whately’s major works on church-state relations include Letters on the Church and Kingdom of Christ. Additional theological discussions of the relationship of religion to secular society can be found in Essays on Some of the Difficulties in the Writings of St. Paul, 6th ed. (London, 1849). Whately applies these general theological precepts to advocacy of full civil rights for Jews and Roman Catholics in Reflections on a Grant to a Roman Catholic Seminar and On a Bill for the Removal of Certain Disabilities from His Majesty’s Subjects of the Jewish Persuasion. 43 “Shew me the tribute money. And they brought unto him a penny. And he saith unto them, Whose is this image and superscription? They say unto him, Caesar’s. Then saith he unto them, Render therefore unto Caesar the things which are Caesar’s; and unto God the things that are God’s” (Matt 22:21). Note that all biblical quotations in this chapter are from the Authorized Version. 44 “And one of the company said unto him, Master, speak to my brother, that he divide the inheritance with me. And he said unto him, Man, who made me a judge or a divider over you?” (Luke 12:14). 45 “Jesus answered, My kingdom is not of this world: if my kingdom were of this world, then would my servants fight, that I should not be delivered to the Jews: but now is my kingdom not from hence” (John 18:36). 41


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imprudent, leading not to furtherance of the Protestant cause but to resentment and even rebellion: A payment which you may easily conceive is extremely minute in a whole parish, for the bread and wine to the communion service, is horrifying to the feeling of many [Roman Catholics], and is as galling as if we were called upon to pay a few pence towards the decoration of an idol temple.46

Finally, Whately considered Establishment an impediment, in theory, if not in British practice,47 to the sort of free and open inquiry most likely to lead to discovery of and commitment to religious truth.48 His own opinion was that the Irish Church would inevitably be disestablished (as in fact happened in 1869) and he considered it probable that he might well be the last established Anglican archbishop of Dublin (a prediction within one decade and one successor of complete accuracy). For Whately, therefore, it was far more important to work towards a peaceful transition to a free church, modeled administratively on the Episcopal Church of Scotland, than to conduct a futile rear-guard action against disestablishment. His main efforts in this direction had to do with tithe commutation and conversion of tithes into a permanent endowment for the Irish church, something which would simultaneously reduce a major cause of friction between Protestants and Roman Catholics and guarantee the financial stability of the church when disestablished. The notion of the ministry as a teaching office was the main reason for Whately not strongly advocating immediate disestablishment, despite his qualms concerning the value of establishment in theory and practice. The financial stability of the church and the sources of church

46

Whately, Charges and Other Tracts, p. 302. For Whately’s advocacy of free speech with respect to religion, see Considerations on the Law of Libel, as Relating to Publications on the Subject of Religion (London, 1833) and Removal of Certain Disabilities from His Majesty’s Subjects of the Jewish Persuasion. See his Elements of Rhetoric, pp. xliii–xlv on absence of actual penalties for free discussion of religious matters in Britain. 48 Whately approvingly cites Archdeacon Paley’s argument that if there exists complete religious liberty and freedom of argument and discussion, truth will prevail (Letters on the Church, p. 23), echoing Aristotle’s dictum that justice and truth are naturally stronger than their opposites (Rhet. 1355a24). Although Whately continued to maintain a firm commitment to free and open inquiry in religious matters throughout his life, and considered that in an ideal world, truth would naturally prevail in open debate, he is, at points, pessimistic about what may happen in actual practice, e.g. Elements of Rhetoric, p. 12. 47

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income could not, for Whately, be separated from the issue of the efficacy of the ministry, especially in the area of preaching. Although Whately opposed establishment on principle, he also was concerned with the evils of the “voluntary system” which he saw as transforming preaching into “a sort of begging”.49 Even a tithe system, in which the minister was individually responsible for collecting tithes from members of his parish, participated in some of the ills of the voluntary system and could have a deleterious effect on the relationship between minister and parishioner,50 something Whately pointed out in evidence given to the House of Lords by approvingly quoting a letter to himself from the Reverend Hardy, resident at Kilcullen: I [Hardy] have always considered the present system of collecting church income prejudicial to the successful discharge of our duty. The common and necessary consequences of money transactions between man and man are calculated to generate prejudice against the message we are sent to deliver in the minds of worldly men. If this must be the case with our own flock, what must be the effect on those who have been taught to consider our faith heretical?51

Another way in which church finance affected the nature of the ministry, especially in its educational and preaching office, had to do with the attractiveness of ministry as a profession to the educated. While Whately himself had no taste for luxury, and did not wish to attract to the ministry those whose primary motive was financial gain, he was concerned about the personal and intellectual qualifications of candidates for the ministry.52 Since the function of the ministry was teaching, and in particular, teaching which required a strong academic background in philology, history, and several other areas (as discussed below), ministers needed to be well educated. Their teaching took place in three contexts: sermons, various forms of parish

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Whately, Letters on the Church, p. 133. Whately’s evidence on tithe reform given to the House of Lords was published as a pamphlet and as an appendix to his Lectures on Political Economy. The pamphlet version appears as “The Evidence as Taken before the Select Committee of the House of Lords, Appointed to Inquire into the Collection and Payment of Tithes in Ireland, and the State of the Laws Related thereto, in the Year 1832” in Whately, Charges and Other Tracts, pp. 261–418. 51 Whately, Charges and Other Tracts, p. 301. 52 Whately distinguishes between excessive worldliness and a “degree of care for securing a respectable maintenance, and a provision for a family” (Charges and Other Tracts, p. 39). 50


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schooling (Sunday school, adult lectures, ragged schools), and visits to individual parishioners (which Whately insisted his clergy should do as frequently as possible). This was more than a demanding fulltime job for an individual minister – it was a two-person job. For Whately, the ministerial ideal was not a single person, but a husbandwife collaboration, with the wife (and often unmarried daughters as well) functioning as something approaching deaconesses (a model Whately saw as having Pauline warrant). Thus a clerical salary needed to support not only a well-educated man but also a well-educated wife, who would actively participate in the tasks of schooling children (in Whately’s eyes perhaps the single most important of all ministerial duties) and visiting parishioners. Given the economics and available technology of the Victorian household, this required a salary of at least somewhere between one and two hundred pounds a year.53 Lower salaries might put ministers in a position where financial difficulties would affect their ability to perform their duties, or make them overly dependent on the ad hoc charities of wealthy parishioners and thus unable to pursue their Christian mission without, as it were, fear or favor, or, worse, preclude talented men (and their families) from entering the ministry at all. Thus, Whately’s major concern about disestablishment, unless the financial position of the church had been secured by tithe commutation and endowment, along with redistribution of income to reduce inequities,54 was that poor livings would not be capable of attracting the sort of well-educated and devoted couples necessary for a teaching ministry (of which the didactic sermon was part.)55

53 Whately is far from unique in this regard. There was widespread concern in the period about the issue of clerical incomes and qualifications, as discussed in Alan Haig, The Victorian Clergy (London, 1984). 54 On the issue of Irish bishoprics, for example, Whately was concerned that reducing their number would require individual bishops to be responsible for too large a geographical area, and thus impaired in their ability to conduct confirmation tours and diocesan visits and generally manage their administrative duties in a conscientious fashion. Instead, he recommended substantially reducing episcopal income and redistributing the money to maintain the current number of bishops and better endow poorer livings. Whately discusses these issues in Charges and Other Tracts and Akenson analyzes Whately’s positions in light of specific Irish ecclesiastical circumstances in Protestant in Purgatory. 55 The effects of the inadequacy of many of the poorer livings on the lives and ministries of the clergy were among the standard topics of the Victorian novel. Trollope’s Barset novels, Eliot’s Scenes from Clerical Life, and Oliphant’s The Curate in Charge are among the many examples of the genre.

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carol poster Whately’s Method of Scriptural Interpretation

For Whately, the central aim of preaching, and the main purpose of the ministry, was evangelical, proclaiming and explicating the good news of the Gospel. His work contains specific hermeneutic and rhetorical recommendations for how the minister should accomplish evangelical duties, ranging from specific suggestions about the parish ministry to more general recommendations about how to understand and preach Scripture. Many of Whately’s most important suggestions concerning the purpose and subject of preaching are to be found in his discussions of how to interpret and teach the Bible. His work is deliberately practical and pedagogical, focusing on the specific needs of his audiences of the moment, rather than purely theoretical. Whately’s principles of biblical interpretation were quite complicated, combining literal reading of the text, a certain degree of historical and textual criticism, something approaching what would now be termed form criticism, and belief that what was omitted from Scripture was as interpretively significant as what was present. Scripture, for Whately, was a historical rather than a theological document, setting out actual events rather than specific moral or positive precepts, and inculcating general principles, but leaving it to individual Christians to work out by induction from the examples of Jesus Christ and the apostles, or by deductions from moral metastatements, their own formulations of specific precepts. For example, Christians should reason inductively from the charitable acts of Jesus and his followers and deductively from the general principle of charity to formulate practical precepts concerning whether to donate to ragged schools or individual beggars56 (and then from this precept to decide how to respond to specific individual appeals). Scripture was intended for all people, unlearned as well as learned, laity as well as clergy. Although Whately considered that Scripture was written in a simple and direct fashion, and that no special class of

56 For Whately’s theory of Christian reasoning, see Carol Poster, “An Organon for Theology: Whately’s Rhetoric and Logic in Religious Context,” Rhetorica 24.1 (2006), 37–77. An excellent example of how Whately uses the charity sermon as a vehicle not just to exhort his listeners to contribute to a specific cause but also to provide for his audience an explicit model of how they might reason about charitable decision-making is The Christian Duty of Educating the Poor: a Discourse Delivered in St. Patrick’s Cathedral, 24th November, 1844, in Behalf of the National School of Clondalkin (Dublin, 1845).


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people had any exclusive interpretive authority with respect to it, he was far from advocating naïve reading; in fact, Whately constantly insisted that everyone should learn as much as possible about everything from ancient languages to history, geography, natural science, logic, and political economy to better understand the Bible and apply deductions drawn from it to practical living. The single most important function of the ministry for Whately was to educate people to read the Bible wisely and deeply. In reading the Bible, Whately thought, it was particularly important to keep in mind the genre of the Bible as a whole and of its various parts. Although the Bible was overall a historical document, the New Testament in particular recording the facts of God’s revelation in Jesus (as the Old Testament recorded God’s interactions with the Israelites), it also contained prophecies and parables.57 Prophecies, by their nature, were only completely understandable when they had been fulfilled and because they had deliberately been left incomplete (in the sense of not fully comprehensible) by the inspired writers, were Scriptural evidences of the truth of Christianity, rather than, as it were, future histories. Whately strongly opposed preachers’ efforts to write sermons which explicated Revelation as future history (i.e., predicting that certain biblical symbols or metaphors could be resolved to reveal unambiguously that certain events would occur at certain places and times in the future), insisting that if the inspired writers had wished to tell us the precise dates and circumstances of Armageddon and the Last Judgement they would have done so. Since they did not, for a preacher to attempt what the Apostles deliberately refrained from doing, was not only idle speculation, but harmful to the congregation,58 for several reasons. First, it might prove an obstacle to salvation, as the uncertainty of the timing of personal death and of the Last Judgement motivated Christians to engage in constant vigilance concerning the state of 57 Whately’s standard for determining the genre to which a given passage should be assigned and whether that passage was to be read literally or figuratively was how it would have been taken by its original audience, as he points out in The Scripture Doctrine Concerning the Sacraments (London, 1857), pp. vii–viii. 58 The possibility of accurate interpretation of prophecy before its fulfillment was one of the major points on which Whately differed with John Nelson Darby (who began his career in Dublin) and the Plymouth Brethren. An account of the Plymouth Brethren, written by Elizabeth Jane Whately after her father’s death, condemns the closed Brethren for pre-millenarianism and party-spirit. See E.J. Whately, Plymouth Brethrenism (London, 1877) and Roy Coad, The History of the Brethren Movement (Exeter, 1968).

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their souls.59 Second, the spectacle of unprofitable wrangling among Christians gives argumentative ammunition, as it were, to deists and infidels.60 Finally, false predictive claims based on speculative interpretation of prophecies tend to undermine the credibility of Christianity as a whole. The second genre within the Bible not to be interpreted historically was the parable, a genre particularly significant for Whately’s theory (and practice)61 of preaching. Whately echoes Aristotle’s comment concerning poetry being more philosophical than history because it is more general to explain the special significance of parables as moral exemplars.62 Parables are not accounts of what happened at a given time or place but rather universal truths which, because of their narrative form, make more vivid and memorable impressions on an audience than more abstract formulations. The two main reasons Whately considered Scripture parables such important subjects for preachers were: 1. The parable, like other genres of argument or illustration from probable but fictive example, tends to be extremely effective for instruction, especially for the young and/or uneducated. 2. Like all forms of analogy, parables are readily susceptible to misinterpretation if the points of comparison are not carefully analyzed. Thus, because Scripture parables are liable to be misunderstood or misused, it is important for preachers to model for their parishioners the process of analyzing which aspects of the two cases being compared are actually the point of the analogy and which are not.63

59 Whately addressed what was included in and omitted from Scripture on these matters and what he considers the beneficial salvific effects of the deliberate obscurity of prophecy in a series of lectures originally given to his parishioners at Halesworth and published as A View of the Scripture Revelations Concerning a Future State (London, 1829). 60 Whately treats this issue in great detail in Party-Feeling, and reiterates those conclusions in Charges and Other Tracts and Dangers. 61 See especially Whately, Lectures on Some of the Scripture Parables (London, 1859). 62 Whately’s concept of the parable develops out of a specifically Protestant understanding of Aristotle’s Rhetoric and Poetics, developed in the work of John Gillies and then extended by the Oxford Noetics. For discussion of the British Protestant Aristotle, see Carol Poster, “Pedagogy and Bibliography: Aristotle’s Rhetoric in Nineteenth Century England,” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 31.2 (2001), 5–35 and “Theology, Canonicity, and Abbreviated Enthymemes: Traditional and Critical Influences on Rhetoric in Nineteenth Century Britain,” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 33:1 (2003), 67–103. For Whately on Aristotle and the fictitious or probable example, see Elements of Rhetoric, pp. 48–52 and 103–08. 63 Whately discusses the use of analogy in religious reasoning in some detail in his Elements of Logic, Elements of Rhetoric (especially pp. 90–103), and the extensive


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Whately explains that the New Testament parables were particularly effective because they used things “of actual daily occurrence” in a “familiar, clear, and forcible” manner.64 As well as being useful for instruction of children and the unlearned because of their simplicity and vividness, parables were also necessary because [I]n order to convey to a man some notion of anything that is quite new to him, and foreign from all his experience, it is necessary to illustrate it by a comparison with something else which he does know and has experienced … And even in cases where the same instruction might be conveyed in some other way, the Parable will often be found useful, both by giving us at the time a more lively idea of what is taught, and afterwards by fixing it more deeply in the mind, and affording occasions for recalling it to memory, whenever the objects mentioned in the Parable happen to come to mind.65

For Whately, Scripture parables function not only as topics about which a minister should preach, but also as examples of rhetorical invention and style to be imitated in preaching. If both the subject of Scripture and the examples of evangelical method illustrated by Scripture were crucially important for preachers, so too were the omissions from Scripture, as those omissions,66 in fact, constitute a significant raison d’être for the ministry. What Scripture contains, according to Whately, are evidences for Christianity and an authentic revelation of God’s will. Scripture is not an elementary pedagogical text, but rather has, as it were, prerequisites. At a basic level, it is a written linguistic artefact. A child must understand at least some language into which Scripture has been translated before comprehending Scripture in even the most elementary manner.67 To study the Bible annotations and introduction to his edition of The Right Method of Interpreting Scripture: In What Relates to the Nature of the Deity, and His Dealings with Mankind, Illustrated in a Discourse on Predestination by Dr. King … Preached at Christ Church, Dublin, before the House of Lords, May 15, 1709 (London, 1821). 64 Whately, Parables, p. 3. 65 Ibid., pp. 3–4. 66 The question of the omissions from Scripture and their implications is one Whately emphasizes repeatedly, both as the focus of specific essays and as obiter dicta scattered through many of his works. See especially, Whately, An Essay on the Omission of Creeds, Liturgies, and Codes of Ecclesiastical Canons in the New Testament (London, 1831) and, for omission of “positive precepts,” “Essay V: On the Abolition of Mosaic Law” in Essays on Some of the Difficulties in the Writings of St. Paul, 6th ed., pp. 113–25. 67 Whately recommends that instructors make sure that children comprehend the sense of what they are learning, primarily by means of asking children to paraphrase rather than memorize by rote. He gives several examples of cases where syntax may be a stumbling block to understanding in Charges and Other Tracts, pp. 86–87.

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carefully requires mastery of a written form of language. A reader must either know the original languages in which Scripture was written or have access to a translation of Scripture, access which depended on the activities of multilingual scholars, printers, distributors, etc. More complex understandings of Scripture require advanced verbal skills, including knowledge of original languages, the ability to discriminate among different genres of writing, a sense of figural vs. literal language, logical skills of induction and deduction, historical and cultural knowledge, and much more.68 Although theologically self-interpreting, in the sense that Scripture is its own authoritative interpreter (rather than the Church or Tradition), Scripture is still not pedagogically self-sufficient. Ministers should make accessible to their congregations, in a manner commensurate with parishioners’ individual interests and abilities, those tools necessary for Scriptural interpretation which cannot be found in Scripture itself. Such tools were not, for Whately, theological in nature, but primarily historical and philological. In educational practice, this implied that religious education, rather than indoctrinating students in theology, should instead focus on such matters as linguistic competence (whether the nuances of English or of the Scriptural languages, depending on the specific level and nature of the learners), logic, history, political economy, and all the other tools necessary for understanding the Bible. Whately’s model of education, because of its absence of theological indoctrination, can be (and has been) misunderstood as essentially secular, but even where its overtly religious content was limited to daily readings of the Bible with philological (but not overtly dogmatic) commentary, the purpose behind the program was not secular, but rather a profoundly Protestant method of tackling the difficult pedagogical problem of teaching parishioners to engage actively in the right and duty of private judgement rather than simply being passive recipients of a “banking model” of religious education.69

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Whately discusses the need for human learning in religious matters in Five Sermons on Several Occasions, Preached before the University of Oxford (Oxford, 1823), pp. 105–35. 69 In this way, Whately anticipates some of the issues addressed in Paulo Freire’s classic work, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, trans. Myra Bergman Ramos (New York, 2000). As many scholars have observed, Freire’s work is closely tied to the post-Vatican II “liberation theology” movement in South American Roman Catholicism. Although I have not seen any explicit comparison between Whately and Freire, nor is there likely to have been any significant direct influence, Whately is in some ways representative of an analogous, albeit far earlier, impetus in Protestant pedagogy.


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Although Whately considers Scripture to contain everything needed for salvation, he also observes that the inspired writers were careful to omit those things which might be obstacles to salvation. In other words, the Scriptures were rhetorically constructed under divine guidance in the shape most likely to lead the greatest possible number of its faithful and serious readers to salvation, and least likely to put stumbling blocks in their paths. This was achieved by processes of both inclusion and exclusion of certain materials at certain times in the Bible’s historical development. According to Whately, particularly significant omissions from the New Testament include those of “positive precepts”, creeds, abstract theology, and liturgical and ecclesiastical guidelines, as well as the propaideutic and introductory instruction described above. Whately was especially interested in what these omissions implied concerning the roles in Christian communities of reason, the church, and the ministry. A key omission from Scripture for Whately was that of what he termed “positive precepts” from the New Testament. He emphasized, following St Paul,70 that the detailed behavioral prescriptions of the Old

70 See Essays on Some of the Difficulties in the Writings of St. Paul. Whately’s conclusions concerning the nature of the Sabbath, drawn from his analysis of the Pauline discussion of the abrogation of the law, were first added as an appendix to his Essays on St. Paul, and then reprinted in a separate pamphlet (which went through several significantly revised editions), Thoughts on the Sabbath; being an Additional Note Appended to the Second Edition of “Essays on Some of the Difficulties in the Writings of St. Paul & in Other Parts of the New Testament” (London, 1830; revised editions 1832, 1845, 1854). Strong support for Whately’s position, especially for Whately’s argument that Sabbatarianism leads to people assuming that only one, rather than seven days of the week, need to be devoted to God, can be found in the introduction to an anonymously edited collection of works on the Sabbath, A Brief Exposition of the Origin, Design, and Fulfilment of the Jewish Sabbath; and Remarks on the Christian Sabbath Abridged from the Writings of Dr P. Heylyn, John Calvin, Archdeacon Paley, Dr Whately, William Penn, and Others (London, 1832). More typical were the numerous and often virulent condemnations of Whately’s position, both by Evangelicals and high churchmen, e.g.: William Brudenell Barter, An Answer to a Pamphlet, entitled, “Thoughts on the Sabbath, by Richard Whately” (London, 1833); Charles Richard Cameron, Considerations on the Divine Authority of the Lord’s day, or Christian Sabbath, in Reply to Dr. Whately and Others (Oxford, 1831); Edward Stopford, Bishop of Meath, The Scripture Account of the Sabbath Compared with … the Archbishop of Dublin’s “Thoughts on the Sabbath,” in which the Antiquity of the Sabbath is Maintained; its Permanent Obligation Proved, etc. (London, 1837); John Ward, A Clear Exposition of the Lord’s Day, a Reply to the Mistake of the Archbishop of Dublin in His Pamphlet Entitled ‘Thoughts on the Sabbath’ (Birmingham, 183?); John Walker, The Sabbath a Type of the Lord Jesus Christ, as Shewn in a Complete Refutation of the Errors Promulgated by … Dr. Whately, and Others, on the Subject of “A Christian Sabbath” (London and Plymouth, 1866). Whately makes some attempt to conciliate his opponents in Charges and Other Tracts, pp. 99–119.

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Testament, which specified individual acts to be avoided (adultery, fornication, eating pigs) or committed (keeping the Sabbath holy, making sacrifices in the temple, circumcision) and the concomitant earthly rewards for compliant behavior or punishments for forbidden behavior, had been abrogated under the New Covenant, as they had been established only as temporary expedients in response to the general childishness of the human race71 and the particular lawlessness of the Israelites, for whom a more complex system of morality, based on moral principles and future rewards, would have been unachievable.72 The New Testament, unlike the Old, is suited for the adulthood of humanity. It supplies historical accounts of the actions and sayings of Jesus, and the more general narratives of the parables, from which, along with the aid of reason and the moral sense – both implanted in humanity by God – people can deduce general principles which then can be applied to their particular circumstances. The role of the minister and/or preacher is not simply to reiterate or supply positive prescriptions (as had been the tendency of the so-called “practical sermon” of the 18th century) but rather to help parishioners acquire the skills in hermeneutics and critical reasoning most useful in the exercise of the right and duty of private judgement. Because such things as abstract theology and fixed creeds could easily evolve into a “judaizing” system of positive precepts (which require little of the individual believer beyond doing and avoiding the limited things specified), they are omitted, and instead the Christian must use private judgement to follow the example of Jesus rather than simply obeying human authority.73 Because of this, the “practical sciences” (especially logic, rhetoric, ethics, political science, and political economy) are crucially important for Whately. Whether charity should take the form of giving money to a beggar or supporting a ragged school, what form of government might be most likely to create preconditions for Christian belief and activity, the most effective means of promulgating evangelical

71 Whately presents an extended analogy between the history of humanity evolving from childish to adult in character as portrayed in the Bible and the way each individual develops from child to adult in Lectures on Prayer, pp. 22–29. 72 As I will discuss below, this does not entail, for Whately, an antinomian position, but in fact, a rather more all-encompassing commitment to charity and other forms of Christian morality, as can be seen in his Parish Pastor, pp. 283–326. 73 For Whately’s argument that fallible human ministers should not attempt “authoritative preaching” or pretend to be infallible guides to Scriptural interpretation, see Dangers, pp. 69–233 and The Search After Infallibility.


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doctrine, and all such myriad details of how best to accomplish those ends enjoined by the New Testament, are crucial for Christian practice, but can only be discovered by application of reason (and the appropriate intellectual tools) to the intersection of general Christian principles with specific circumstances.74 The preacher’s duty, though, is to show parishioners how to think through such issues for themselves, rather than to usurp the proper tasks of parishioners’ private judgement. This abolition of the law and omission of positive precepts from the Scripture has, for Whately, significant implications for preaching. Much of the “practical sermon” was comprised of specific recommendations concerning how to live a moral life. While for the 18th-century Latitudinarians the practical sermon might recommend the general civic morality accepted in polite society, and the Evangelical practical sermon would emphasize Mosaic Law, both laid down precisely the sort of positive precepts that the New Testament, and even Jesus himself, refrained from promulgating. Under the New Covenant, Whately argues, specific actions had no salvific significance independent of the intentions or the mental acts associated with them:75 Men should also be reminded that “good works,” in the sense of external acts, are not, in themselves, even virtuous; but can only be so called, as far as they are indications of that inward disposition which alone is strictly to be called virtuous. For it is evident that the same act may be either morally good, or evil, or indifferent, according to the motive it springs from.76

Similarly, immoral actions are not redeemed by incompetent execution. As Whately points out: “A man, for instance, who fires a gun at another, with intent to assassinate him, is, morally speaking, not the less a murderer, though he should chance to miss his aim …”.77 Bad marksmanship is not a moral virtue. The importance of affecting intentions as well as actions is central to Whately’s theory of the sermon. For him, the practical sermon, which urges people to do or refrain from doing specific external acts, addresses

74 See Poster, “An Organon for Theology” for analysis of Whately’s theories of Christian reasoning as enthymematic. 75 Whately discusses the relationship of works and intentions in some detail in Sermons on the Principal Christian Festivals (London 1854), pp. 164–83. 76 Whately, Parish Pastor, p. 301. See also Dangers, p. 19. 77 Whately, Charges and Other Tracts, p. 27.

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external behavior rather than the internal disposition from which that behavior derives, and is thus inferior to the didactic sermon in which people are persuaded to reflect upon Scripture and upon their own lives and from these reflections to cultivate the understanding, will, and intentions which lead to working out for themselves ways to act in their individual circumstances. The didactic sermon follows from the concept of salvation by faith, whereas the practical sermon, for Whately, in laying down positive precepts, reverts to the older system of salvation by works, in which the minister acts not as a teacher but as a sacrificing priest and mouthpiece of the Law. Under the New Covenant, along with the abolition of the positive precepts of the Mosaic laws and the concomitant sacrifices offered by the Levitical priesthood, came the abolition of the priesthood itself, “the great and single oblation of that great High Priest [Jesus Christ] who has no earthly successor”78 having rendered superfluous the priesthood and its “vicarious” sacrifice. Although the Christian minister does perform the two biblical sacraments of Baptism and the Lord’s Supper, these are ancillary to the central function of the ministry, and while conventionally performed by ministers, can, in fact, under certain circumstances, be performed by any baptized Christian. The ministry is not a sacerdotal priesthood, nor does it derive its authority from apostolical succession or share the successional or sacrificing character of the Levitical priesthood in any way. As Whately points out: It is worthy of remark that the notion of Sacerdotal Priesthood in the Christian Church, and that of Apostolical Succession, (in the sense of the Romanists, and of a certain party among Protestants) are generally maintained together. And yet they are not naturally or intrinsically connected … A conceivable supposition it certainly is, though at variance with fact, that the Apostles might have left us directions as precise, and injunctions as strict, respecting the mode of ordaining Christian Ministers, … as were given in the Mosaic Law relative to the Levitical priesthood … This, I say, is what the Apostles might conceivably have done. But it is manifest that they have not. And in the absence of such directions in the New Testament, – which is what the advocates of Apostolical-succession … cannot quite conceal from themselves, they are naturally driven to resort to the analogy of Mosaic law … and in short to judaize Christianity all through.79 78

Whately, Five Sermons, pp. 152–53. Whately, Apostolical Succession Considered or the Constitution of a Christian Church, Its Powers and Ministry. Abridged from Abp. Whately’s ‘Kingdom of Christ,’ ed. E.J. Whately (London, 1877), pp. 40–41. 79


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Instead, Whately argues for a distinctly reformed conception of the Christian ministry 80 as a teaching office within the context of the “priesthood of all believers”: That the Christian Ministry, [unlike the pagan and Levitical priests], were appointed, in great measure, if not principally, for the express purpose of giving religious instruction and admonition, is clearly proved both by the practice of the Apostles themselves, and by St. Paul’s directions to Timothy and Titus.81

A particular challenge for the didactic, as opposed to the practical, sermon was that the manner of such teaching (and thus sermons, as well, which constitute one part of that teaching) should not be such as to treat the hearers as passive receptacles of authoritative discourse, but rather to teach them how to think for themselves: … [T]he Christian Minister must not presume to “teach as one having authority,” like the Lord Jesus, whose miracles were his credentials from Heaven. He must not make himself, or his Church, a substitute for Scripture, or require his interpretations of it to be received on his word, but lead his People to an intelligent and profitable study of Scripture for themselves.82

It was especially important for Whately that ministers should not succumb to the temptation to set themselves up as infallible guides for their parishioners, but rather “to study, to the best of our power, to attain the true meaning of [Scripture] ourselves, and to impart them to our people, but with a full conviction and confession of our own fallibility”.83 While Whately insists repeatedly on “the right and duty of private judgement”, emphasizing the importance of Christians reading, thinking about, and following Scripture for themselves, this does not mean that there is, for him, no role for the Church and its ministry as

80 Whately states “And one of the worst corruptions of Christianity – the converting of the Christian Minister under the Gospel-dispensation into a ‘sacrificing or Sacerdotal-Priest’ (answering to the Levitical) – is fostered by the ambiguity of a word. Throughout our English Bible ‘Priest’ is invariably the rendering of Hiereus, the sacrificing Priest; while in the Prayer-Book the same word invariably answers to Presbyteros (from which indeed it is formed), and which is, in our Bible, always rendered Elder” (Instruction in the Scriptures, pp. 7–8). See also Elements of Logic, pp. 222–23; Five Sermons, pp. 137–69; and Essays on The Errors of Romanism, 2nd ed. (London, 1837), pp. 87–140. 81 Whately, Five Sermons, p. 151. 82 Whately, Instruction in the Scriptures, p. 11. 83 Whately, Sermons on the Principal Christian Festivals, p. 317.

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institutions, nor does this imply that there is no role for various aids to interpretation: It is evidently most irrational to confound together … two things so manifestly different as the employment of human help in any study, and the acceptance of any doctrine on the authority of the Teacher. The distinction is perfectly well understood and universally recognized, in all other departments. The Student, for instance, of Mathematics, or any branch of physical science, is always glad to resort to the aid of a competent instructor; and yet he would have been considered as having studied in vain, if he were to receive scientific truths on his instructor’s word. The office of the Professor or Tutor is, not to be a substitute for demonstration of those truths, but, to teach the Student to demonstrate them himself.84

Whately, in fact, is advocating a model very much parallel to Oxford education, with lectures (sermons) being important in so far as they form a nucleus for tutorial-based education (Sunday schools, private visits, adult classes, etc.). While lectures may be demonstrative in approach and genre, small group work (whether university tutorials, Christian adult or children’s classes, or parochial visits), in which learners speak as well as listen and paraphrase rather than memorize, is essential to active understanding of Christianity. For Whately, this education should not end with confirmation, but continue as a process of life-long learning and growing in faith.85 The minister not only educates his parishioners directly, with respect to both specific knowledge and reasoning skills, but also points them to the tools needed for individual study, e.g. history texts, concordances, dictionaries, critical editions, commentaries, etc. It is not only in its teaching office that the Church and its ministry are necessary institutions. Although the clergy is not a special caste, it does perform necessary and irreplaceable functions; while no class of individuals or specific office holders is crucial for Whately, there are necessary ministerial functions, both administrative and liturgical, of which the sermon is a part.86 It is within a discussion of prayer that Whately defines the nature of the sermon most precisely, by examining functions of the various parts of the liturgy. He begins by

84

Whately, Instruction in the Scriptures, pp. 10–11. Whately, Address … on the Subject of Self-Examination, and Charges and Other Tracts, pp. 63–98. 86 On the respective duties of clergy and laity, see Whately, “Christian Saints,” in Sermons on the Principal Christian Festivals, pp. 331–51. 85


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distinguishing various types of prayer, private vs. public, and fixed forms vs. extemporaneous: … [I]n their private devotions … I would rather encourage [Christians] to form the habit of addressing their “Father who seeth in secret,” in any expressions that are intelligible to themselves, which occur at the moment. But congregational prayer, – common supplication, – joint worship, is a very different thing. And accordingly our Lord supplies to his disciples no form of words for solitary devotion; but only warns them against a public display of what ought to be in secret; and bids them enter each his closet, and shut the door, when about to engage in private devotion. But immediately after, He does teach them a form of prayer evidently designed for joint worship, and accordingly expressed in the plural number. … That pre-composed forms are not contrary to Scripture; – that they were used in the primitive Churches; – that they are more likely to be judiciously framed than extemporary compositions, – these, and other such arguments, I do not disparage or discard as inconclusive: but far more weight than all of them together, has one and obvious simple reason, that our Lord’s especial blessing and favorable reception of petitions, is bestowed on those, who assembling in his name, shall agree … respecting the petitions offered up; which is plainly impossible, in most instances at least, if the hearers … have to learn what the prayer is, at the moment it is being uttered.87

Since, for Whately, prayer cannot be common unless the congregation has had time to think over and understand it prior to the act, he is generally opposed to extemporaneous prayer in church, because it cannot be genuinely common.88 In fact, he argues that extemporaneous prayer, rather than being properly a form of prayer, is actually a sermon in disguise: … [I]n the case of extemporaneous prayer delivered by the minister, it is likely, though understood, not to be so understood by the people as to be adopted as their own address to the Most High, but rather as an address to themselves by their minister. And, accordingly, it generally is very much of the character of a sermon thrown into the form of a prayer; and more of an address to the congregation, than a petition offered up jointly by them.89

Because of this hybrid nature, lacking the thoughtfulness of the sermon and communality of common prayer, extemporaneous prayer fails to

87 Whately, A Letter to a Clergyman of the Diocese of Dublin on Religious Meetings (Halesworth, 1837), pp. 8–9. 88 See Whately, Lectures on Prayer. 89 Whately, Parish Pastor, p. 108.

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be effective either as prayer or as sermon. Although both prayer and preaching are parts of the ceremonial occasion of the church service, their audiences (God vs. congregation) differ, as do their purposes (supplication vs. instruction). To summarize the theological context of Whately’s sermon theory, Whately, unlike the Tractarians, did not consider sacraments and liturgy the central office of the church and its ministry, but rather considered teaching, of which the sermon was part, the single most important duty of ministers. Administratively, Whately considered the Church to be a community existing for the purpose of prayer, worship, and education, and like all other communities, in need of officers, standards of membership, and all the various forms of ordering and regulation necessary for any organization, whether secular or religious. Most importantly, Scripture attests to the need for the Church and its tradition, both directly in its positive precepts90 and indirectly in its historical descriptions of Christianity, as well as implicitly in its omission of introductory and catechetical materials, which the church community must supply to young or new members:91 It is well known that every one of the books of the New Testament was addressed to persons who were already Christians, that they “might know the certainty of those things wherein they had been instructed” [catechized]. No elementary introduction to the knowledge of Christianity – nothing of the character of a Catechism, Creed, or Liturgy, is to be found in the Sacred Writings, though it is manifest that something of the kind – either oral or written – must have been in use from the very first … But the omission is one which it is evident the uninspired Church was designed to supply. The Church’s office is to teach; that of the Scriptures, to prove.92

For Whately, therefore, the sermon is to be understood primarily as part of the teaching office of the Church, as assigned to it, by explicit ordinance and implicit omission, by the inspired writers. The sermon explicates Scripture in such a manner as to enable all people, learned as well as unlearned, children as well as adults, and women as well as men, to read and interpret Scripture for themselves. The sermon functions 90 Whately’s earliest discussion of “tradition” occurs in his “Review of Hawkins, Dissertation on the Use and Importance of Unauthoritative Tradition,” Quarterly Review 21.42 (April 1819), 352–59. He develops this position in several works, including Cautions for the Times, pp. 19–22. 91 See Whately, Essay on the Omission of Creeds. 92 Whately, Instruction in the Scriptures, pp. 12–13.


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not as authoritative preaching, but rather, as it were, as an organon for private judgement. Whately’s Theory of the Sermon In his voluminous practical advice to the clergy about the offices of ministers in general and how sermons contributed to those offices, Whately discusses both form and content of sermons, and recommends things to do and things to avoid with respect to both. Although Whately’s remarks on preaching are scattered over many publications ranging in date from 1822 to 1861, his views were remarkably consistent across a long and prolific career and his writing is extremely clear and well-organized, so it is possible to reconstruct a relatively unified account of his sermon theory.93 Just as Whately understood the main duty of ministers to be educating their congregations,94 so too he saw a significant task of the episcopate, in addition to providing the administrative infrastructure necessary to support Christian education, missionary work, and ministry, to be educating the clergy.95 For Whately, the sermon per se actually filled a fairly minor role in his larger educational mission of the Christian ministry. He makes little effort to distinguish the sermon either in function or literary form, from the lecture, discourse, or religious commentary,96 and, in fact, often takes the same discourse and indifferently preaches it as a sermon, publishes it as an essay, delivers it as a lecture, and repeats it in an episcopal charge. Instead, questions of 93 Whately wrote his Elements of Rhetoric primarily as a manual for preachers. His Parish Pastor provides advice to the clergy on various different aspects of ministerial duties, including preaching. Whately also discusses preaching at some length in many of the essays in Dangers and in several ordination sermons, most importantly, The Search after Infallibility, Considered in Reference to the Danger of Religious Errors Arising within the Church in the Primitive as well as in all Later Ages (Dublin, 1848; rpt. in Sermons on the Principal Christian Festivals, pp. 297–329), Instruction in the Scriptures, and Charges and Other Tracts, pp. 1–98. 94 Although education is perhaps the single most important Christian charity for Whately, and he repeatedly emphasized the need to feed minds and souls, as well as bodies, he personally donated time and money (well over half his annual income) to a large range of charities, both public and personal. Two significant charity sermons in which Whately argues for the importance of educating the poor are The Christian Duty of Educating the Poor and The Duty of Those Who Disapprove of the Education of the Poor. 95 See discussion in Akenson, Protestant in Purgatory, pp. 145–64. 96 See, e.g., Whately, Instruction in the Scriptures, pp. 12–13.

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audience and purpose are far more important for Whately than ones of external form or ceremonial occasion. While Whately was not unaware of the ways in which good sermons could benefit a congregation, he also, sharing with St James a concern that “the tongue … is an unruly evil” (James 3:8), cautions that the sermon can be perilous for both preacher and audience in three ways: 1. Authoritative preaching can undermine the process of private judgement (as discussed above).97 2. Love of fine preaching (and of reputations as fine preachers) can lead ministers to ignore the actual needs of their congregations due to desire for approbation or acclaim as preachers. 3. The uniquely public and visible character of the sermon can lead ministers to succumb to the temptation to overemphasize sermon preparation, and treat their Sunday duties as the main end of the ministerial office rather than properly balancing time devoted to sermon preparation with other duties. Many of Whately’s overt discussions of the sermon are actually cautions against treating the sermon itself as the sole duty of the pastor or believing that the unaided sermon can be of benefit to a congregation, independent of a broader pastoral ministry: If public preaching, and administering of the Sacraments, were all that was needed, there would be no necessity for dividing a Christian Country into any such districts as we call Parishes, and confiding each to the superintending care of its own Pastor.98

Instead, Whately views the parochial system as designed to minister comprehensively to the spiritual (and, where necessary, temporal) needs of Christians (and the general populace) in a specific geographic area, taking “ministering” in the fullest possible sense of the word. Thus, for Whately, “profitable public preaching” within a parochial system depends on regular “private intercourse” with members of the congregation, for “no one can be completely well-fitted to be the instructor of any class of persons, who has not had considerable private intercourse with that class”.99 Whately insists that as well as “speaking to” his people, a pastor must also “listen” to them. Even in the case of those

97 98 99

See, e.g., Whately, Parish Pastor, pp. 18–24. Ibid., p. 2. Ibid., pp. 8–9.


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who appear to be in error on religious matters, it is important to “ascertain the truth in [their] views; since thus there will be some common ground for both parties to stand upon”.100 Although such diligence in visiting and conversing with parishioners will demand much of a pastor’s time (and patience) and may not show immediate results, it will lead to much longer-lasting benefits to the congregation than the sermon unsupported by a broader pastoral foundation. Regular parochial visiting will also enable the preacher to better tailor the sermon to the needs of his specific audience. Whately considers audience awareness as part of a skill set essential for composing the didactic sermon: I have spoken of skill as well as patience, because the art of affording explanatory instruction, requires (like all other arts) a skill which cannot be acquired without diligent practice. Any one who should imagine himself qualified to teach what he does not himself know, would be as much in error as if he should undertake to practice as a Physician from a mere book-knowledge of anatomy and pharmacy, without ever having attended a sick-bed or felt a patient’s pulse. We need a knowledge not only of the things to be taught, but of the persons to whom they are to be taught; – not only the qualities of Medicine, but of the constitution of the patient. And a mere general knowledge of Human Nature is not sufficient. We should understand also the peculiar habits of thought and mental constitution of whatever class of people we are to instruct; – whether children, or adults, – the gentry or the mechanics, – seafaring men, or husbandmen, &c. … In Missionary-work, it has been found that those have been most successful who have confined their attention almost entirely, each to a particular class of unbelievers; one to the Mahometans, another to the Brahminists, another to the Parsees, &c.101

The effectiveness of the sermon, therefore, depended for Whately on its being grounded in a broader context of parochial ministry, which enables the preacher to adapt both sermon form and content to the specific needs of a given congregation. Content of Sermons Whately’s understanding of the sermon was strongly rhetorical rather than literary, in the sense that his major concerns were its purpose and its long-term effect on the congregation; the literary form of the 100 101

Ibid., p. 10. For additional theoretical background, see Whately, Party-Feeling. Whately, Instruction in Scripture, pp. 35–36.

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sermon was only of interest to Whately in so far as it might contribute to rhetorical effect. What was most important was that a sermon have a definite purpose: [A] young preacher … should ask himself … “For what purpose am I going to preach? Wherein would anyone be a loser were I to keep silence? Is it likely that anyone will learn something he was ignorant of, or be reminded forcibly of something he has forgotten … or that some difficulty will have been explained, or some confused ideas rendered clear; or, in short, that I shall at all have edified any one? …. [Do I] preach merely because I want to say something, or because I have something to say?”102

Each sermon, for Whately, should address some particular intellectual or practical difficulty which might be encountered by members of a specific congregation, and should have some immediate, definite, and practical outcome. In fact, he sets out in his 1834 charge to his clergy a typically sensible set of criteria for judging the utility of a sermon: We should ask ourselves on each occasion, not merely whether it is possible for a person to do, or be, or feel, what we recommend, but also whether our recommendations are so far definite, and specific, that it is possible some result may take place, (in those who are willing to listen to us,) in consequence of what we say, and which might have not equally taken place without our suggestion.103

The counterfactual conditional is particularly important. For Whately, if a sermon does not produce a result which would not have been produced had the sermon not been given, then the sermon has failed to achieve its purpose. He therefore argues strongly that preachers should avoid vague generalities: Any general exhortation to active and steady exertion in our several duties, – whether those of the Christian universally, or of Christian ministers, though listened to, perhaps with interest and received with approbation, will usually be too vague to lead to a useful application in practice, either by those who are, or by those who are not, already engaged sincerely and heartily in the discharge of their duties. To the one, such exhortation will generally be superfluous; and to the other, ineffectual. It is easier, indeed, to avoid giving offence to any one, if we keep within these vague generalities; because such remarks and precepts will naturally be applied, (if applied at all,) by each hearer, according to his own

102 103

Whately, Elements of Rhetoric, pp. 329–30. Whately, Charges and Other Tracts, p. 8.


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previously adopted views, and his own habitual practice. To recommend in general terms, sound doctrine and judicious conduct, would be, in fact, to recommend to each man his own; or at least what he himself thinks ought to be recommended: and this would therefore be applied, equally, and in opposite ways, by individuals, differing perhaps the most widely, in doctrine or conduct; and might be, to both, equally acceptable and equally unprofitable.104

Instead, it is important to focus on the faults of the specific congregation being addressed, including those faults to which specific groups or individuals within the congregation are most prone, based on information gathered by regularly talking with and listening to individual parishioners. Whately points out: “Our Lord … did not occupy the Pharisees with an exposure of Sadducean errors, nor the Sadducees with rebukes of Pharisaical hypocrisy… but in his discourses to each, enlarges on such topics as might be, to each, most profitable”.105 Often the duty to address the specific faults into which a congregation might fall will come into conflict with the natural desire of the preacher for popularity; in fact, what parishioners most need to hear might be what they are least open to hearing: The Christian preacher therefore is in this respect placed in a difficult dilemma; since he may be sure that the less he complies with the depraved judgements of man’s corrupt nature, the less acceptable he is likely to be to that depraved judgement.106

This problem can be exacerbated if the preacher appears to assume a superior position from which he talks down to his congregation, especially as, for Whately, the preacher himself is no less a fallible and corrupt human than any member of the congregation.107 The solution to this problem is to be found in Scripture, both as subject matter and methodological model. For rhetorical method, Whately recommends following the precepts of St Paul by emphasizing points of agreement, and approaching censure and disagreement in a meek and instructive manner rather than a controversial one.108 For content, a minister 104 Whately, Dangers, pp. 69–70. He makes a similar point concerning the inutility of “mere general exhortations” in Charges and Other Tracts, p. 5. 105 Whately, Charges and Other Tracts, p. 40. 106 Whately, Elements of Rhetoric, p. 209. 107 See Whately, The Search after Infallibility. 108 In his discussion of this issue in both Elements of Rhetoric and Party-Feeling he frequently cites 2 Timothy: “And the servant of the Lord must not strive; but be gentle unto all men, apt to teach, patient, In meekness instructing those that oppose themselves …” (2 Tim 2:24–25).

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should strive to avoid including his own theological speculations in his sermons, and focus on explication of Scripture, thus not positioning himself as an authority, but instead as ancillary to Scripture. The main purpose of the sermon for Whately, as with all Christian instruction, is introduction to and explication of Scripture. This “solemn duty”109 is one for which ministers must prepare themselves assiduously, not just before ordination but throughout their careers, by study of Scripture itself (in the original languages) and use of all possible ancillary materials, including commentaries, dictionaries, critical editions, and all relevant forms of secular learning (history, philology, literature, logic, etc.).110 As he tells his clergy in an 1837 ordination sermon: … [I]n the instruction bestowed on your people, … make the elucidation of Scripture your principle object; and especially … lead them gradually to understand, and to study with interest and with attention, the whole – and not the least the historical part, which is the basis on which the rest is built, of the New Testament.111

Although Scripture is clear, and was originally composed so as to be comprehensible to the unlearned as well as the learned, and translated into the vernacular in Protestant churches so as to be universally accessible, even the Authorized English translation stands in need of explication with respect to both verbal and historical matters: … [A]s our present Version stands, there is need of explanations to the People of those passages which are made obscure by the use of obsolete, or nearly obsolete words and phrases, as well as of passages (of which there are not a few) in which there are imperfections in the rendering. Under words “nearly obsolete” are to be included not only those seldom in use, but many times more that are as much used as ever, but are obsolete in the sense in which they appear in our Bible-Version”.112

109 Whately states: “That solemn question in the Ordination Service, ‘Are you determined to instruct the people out of Holy Scriptures?’ is one which I trust is never long absent from the mind of any of us; and yet is one which it can hardly ever be out of place to recall and dwell on” (Instruction in the Scriptures, p. 1). 110 See Whately, Five Sermons, pp. 105–39 and Mental Culture Required for Christian Ministers, A Sermon Delivered in St. Patrick’s Cathedral, Dublin, On Occasion of the Consecration of William Fitzgerald, D.D., Bishop of Cork, March 8th, 1857 (London, 1857). 111 Whately, A Sermon Delivered at the Ordination Held at Christ Church, Dublin, on Sunday, 22nd October, 1837 (Dublin, 1837), p. 6. 112 Whately, Instruction in the Scriptures, p. 5.


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Contrary to those who think that overt discussion of difficulties in translation would simply confuse unlearned members of the congregation, Whately recommends that the minister discuss such issues frankly and openly, whether in confirmation classes, adult lectures, written publications, or sermons. Whately always advises ministers that their duty is to stimulate free and open inquiry,113 in a manner which encourages parishioners to think through and assent to (in the Stoic sense) what might otherwise be casual or only nominally held beliefs. More importantly, salvation by faith implied for Whately that acts independent of intentions lacked moral or religious significance and thus a sermon (if such could exist) which led parishioners to change their behaviors while leaving unchristian beliefs and intentions in place, would be ineffective.114 While the practical sermon, according to Whately, tended to judaize Christianity, as it were, by implicitly promoting works as valuable in and of themselves, the didactic sermon emphasized understanding and intention, with moral works following as fruits of faith.115 On a psychological level, therefore, the didactic sermon needed to accomplish three tasks: first educating and convincing the intellect of its audience concerning the truth of Christianity by presentation of evidence; second, illustrating the proper methods for deducing consequences from those truths; and finally, inspiring the audience’s emotions in such a manner as would strengthen their will to lead to them to Christian virtue (said virtue consisting of a internal disposition bearing fruit in external acts).116 Since without the initial step of genuine intellectual conviction and understanding, the process is stillborn, as it were, Whately’s writing emphasizes the intellectual side of the process, especially the development and inculcation of the skills and knowledge necessary for Scriptural interpretation. On a philological level, therefore, the Christian teacher has a duty to point out those places where the English of the Authorized Version renders the original Greek or Hebrew imperfectly

113

See Whately, The Search after Infallibility. Note that for Whately, good works which are intended to buy salvation, as it were, are not Christian but part of a Jewish or judaizing dispensation. See Essays on Some of the Difficulties in the Writings of St. Paul and The Search after Infallibility. 115 See Whately, Sermons on the Principal Christian Festivals, pp. 164–83. 116 Whately’s most significant discussion of audience psychology occurs in his Elements of Rhetoric. I analyze how Whately’s assumptions concerning audience psychology affect his sermon theory below, as well as in my essay “An Organon for Theology”. 114

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or ambiguously, as well as places where terms are translated inconsistently. The second area from which need for explication arises is historical: … [I]n a book written in a distant Age and country, there will be many allusions to customs and to places, and to events, which were familiarly known even to the unlearned among the original readers, which can only be understood (and that sometimes imperfectly) by diligent research. For these reasons, then, there must always be, under any circumstances, a need of explanations of Scripture to the people; …117

Even explanations of seemingly trivial historical or philological points can be useful, in so far as they can make it easier for parishioners to read Scripture, as Whately points out: Let no one presume to say that such points as these [specific details of geography and architecture] are trifles not worth explaining, and that it is of no consequence (since they do not involve essential articles of Christian faith) whether, on such points, the People have correct notions, or incorrect, or none at all … One who has a due reverence for the Scriptures will reckon nothing unimportant that can tend to put the reader at home – if I may so speak – in the Sacred Writings, so as to study them with interest and with intelligence.118

The explanations of Scripture that Whately recommends and proffers are not, however, restricted to the purely linguistic or historical, nor are they chosen for purely antiquarian interest. Instead, Whately normally emphasizes those philological points which have bearing on three sorts of material: 1. Current major debates 2. Potential stumbling blocks 3. Evidences of Christianity Whately’s career coincided with a period of active religious upheaval and controversy of a sort which engaged the general public rather than just an educated elite, controversies over even what might seem fairly arcane doctrinal and ecclesiological points being canvassed widely in daily newspapers as well as the monthlies. No matter how much Whately deplored controversy and sectarian spirit, he therefore could not advise the clergy simply to remain silent on such matters as Jewish

117 118

Whately, Instruction in the Scriptures, p. 9. Ibid., p. 19.


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emancipation, the Gorham case, the Hampden controversy, the Tract XC controversy, Irish National Education, the Maynooth Grant, and the Papal Aggression controversy. Instead, concerning such controversial topics, Whately’s recommendations and practice were primarily rhetorical, emphasizing the ways in which subject and approach should be based on the audience and purpose of a discourse. In other words, rather than addressing contemporary controversies as important simply because it was necessary to have and express an opinion on all topics, Whately was concerned with the degree to which his clergy and their parishioners would benefit from discussion of certain issues. So, for example, discussions of the revival of Convocation and other such matters of church governance (e.g. tithe reform, Irish bishoprics, liturgical reform) were sufficiently important to the professional life of the clergy that it was the duty of a bishop to address these topics in diocesan charges and various pamphlets, but as they had no relevance to salvation, and, in fact, since as a form of dissension over adiaphora they could constitute stumbling blocks, they should not be addressed in parochial sermons.119 The parochial sermon was intended to help remove intellectual or practical obstacles to salvation, in most cases (university chapels being a major exception) for unlearned audiences. For Whately, minute points of theology or issues of church governance were not essential to salvation; both Presbyterians and Episcopalians could be saved, as could those baptized as either infants or adults, and no precise verbal formula concerning the nature of Christ or the Trinity had any bearing on anything practical whatsoever. Thus the only reason for discussing such topics in sermons was to soothe the anxieties of parishioners who might be misled by public controversies to think that these were matters necessary for salvation. In such cases, Whately’s method in his own sermons was to summarize the main Scriptural evidence on both sides of the issue, suggest where the preponderance of evidence seemed to lie, and repeatedly assure his congregation that a variety of views were admissible where Scripture gave no definitive answer, and thus that no point of view which was compatible with Scripture would be an obstacle to salvation.120 There were, on the other hand, venues other than the 119 For Whately’s discussion of how addresses to clergy and laity should differ, see Charges and Other Tracts, pp. 39–40. 120 A good example of how Whately uses this method can be found in A View of the Scripture Revelations Concerning a Future State (London, 1829).

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parish in which theological controversy did have a place (albeit a regrettable one), namely pamphlets, parliamentary speeches, university sermons, and diocesan charges. Although Whately deplored controversy for its own sake, especially on abstract theological matters, there were areas where intervention was necessary. On a practical level, he represented the interests of the Irish Establishment in Parliament, and spoke (and published pamphlets) on those topics which affected the church or to which the church could contribute productively to a national conversation by articulating a uniquely Christian moral viewpoint. These issues, for Whately, included penal reform, abolition of slavery, removal of all civil penalties for religious views (Catholic and Jewish emancipation, religious censorship and libel laws, admission of dissenters to universities), church governance, Irish national education, the Maynooth grant, and poor and tithe law reform. Matters of abstract theology, on the other hand, were appropriate to university sermons in so far as they were often as much lectures as sermons proper (e.g. the Bampton lectures) and general publications. Finally, diocesan charges and ordination sermons, being addressed to the clergy and having as their purpose guidance for ministers (both intellectual and practical, on administrative as well as ideological issues), would necessarily engage in controversies, especially those controversial matters which required some form of episcopal regulation or discipline. For example, questions concerning liturgical reform or the use of extemporary prayer were ones which had immediate practical consequences – a bishop needed to promote, forbid, or tacitly endorse specific forms of conducting services within his diocese. In parochial sermons, speculative theology and divisive issues should be avoided where possible. Whately cautions strenuously against attempts to interpret those things (especially prophecies) in sermons which the inspired writers deliberately left ambiguous: We must not attempt explanations of divine Mysteries which are unrevealed, or partially and dimly revealed, in Scripture. Very acceptable indeed, to some hearers, are bold interpretations of unfulfilled Prophecies – of Prophecies which would have been made quite clear at once, had the Almighty so willed – and speculations on the divine decrees which (as our Article expresses it) are “secret to us.” But of matters beyond human reason, we should seek diligently to know as much, and to be content to know only as much, as the All-Wise has thought fit to disclose to us.121 121

Whately, Instruction in the Scriptures, p. 37.


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Whately had little patience with those who engaged in trying to gloss details of Daniel or Revelations as predictions, clearly understandable in the present, of specific future events; since God and the inspired writers obviously had the ability to make things plain and clear, if they left certain matters irresolvably ambiguous (i.e. not readily comprehensible in light of historical and/or linguistic research combined with fairly straightforward logical deduction) then curiosity about such matters was mere idle speculation, perhaps of natural human interest, but not an appropriate topic for sermons or Christian education. Another possible pitfall for preachers, according to Whately, was predestination. On a practical level, he cautioned that sermons on predestination might deleteriously affect parishioners in two ways. First, if a preacher emphasized that God had predestined certain people to election and others to damnation, hearers who considered themselves elect might be lulled into complacency and those who suspected themselves damned might fall into despair rather than try to amend their lives. Second, parishioners might conclude from sermons emphasizing predestination that good works were not an essential part of Christian life. Whately was, in fact, specifically concerned that a certain type of extreme Calvinistic evangelical preaching could lead to antinomianism, not necessarily in its most pure and extreme theoretical form, but rather “men’s falling practically into a careless attention to their moral conduct”.122 As well as cautioning ministers about potential pitfalls for the unwary preacher, Whately also discussed what matters should be covered in sermons. He was particularly emphatic, for reasons discussed above, concerning the need for treating Christian evidences in both schoolroom and pulpit.123 As well as discussing positive evidences for Christianity, the preacher should attempt to resolve potential stumbling blocks to intellectual assent to or active practice of Christian principles, having discovered by regular parochial visiting what constituted actual

122 Whately, Dangers, p. 19. On a more theoretical level, Whately considered all professed Christians “elect” in the sense of reconciled with God (there being for Whately no special class of “elect” or “saints”), but that this simply established the possibility of salvation, with eventual outcomes depending on the actual moral conduct of the individual (i.e. Whately holds something close to the Arminian doctrine of prevenient grace). See, inter alia, Whately, “Christian Saints,” in Sermons on the Principal Christian Festivals, pp. 331–51. 123 Whately, Dangers, pp. 69–90.

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obstacles for members of the parish and addressing those specifically, in sermons and lectures. Sermon Psychology and Sermon Form For Whately, not only was the rhetorical form of the sermon important because it had a profound psychological effect on the audience independent of content, but also because a preacher’s attitude towards sermon form could affect, often on a subconscious level, his choice of and approach to content; e.g. a preacher striving for dramatic intensity might avoid those topics which were not inherently striking. Whately, therefore, in discussing the form of the sermon, analyzes its psychological effect not only on audience but on the preacher himself. In all cases, literary form is of interest to him only in so far as it affects practical outcome; he rarely concerns himself with the purely aesthetic. His rhetorical method, like his epistemology and theology, is inductive and empirical, starting with paradigmatic situations or problems, and from these progressing to specific and pragmatic recommendations of heuristic strategies. Whately’s specifically rhetorical writings focus on four of the canons of ancient rhetoric: invention, arrangement, style, and delivery. His recommendations synthesize acute common sense and robust practicality, based on his own observations and occasional borrowings, mainly from Aristotle, but also from Cicero, Quintilian, Bacon, and his own contemporaries and near contemporaries (Blair, Butler, Campbell, Copleston, Paley, Reid, et sim.).124 While Whately’s understanding of homiletic invention, in so far as it touches upon the content of sermons and the nature of Christian discourse in general, is interwoven throughout his discussions of various other religious topics, his discussions of arrangement, style, and delivery are confined, for the most part, to his Elements of Rhetoric.

124 For extended discussion of Whately’s rhetorical theories, see Poster, “An Organon for Theology”; Lois J. Einhorn, “Consistency in Richard Whately: The Scope of His Rhetoric,” Philosophy & Rhetoric 14 (Spring 1981), 89–99; “Richard Whately’s Public Persuasion: The Relationship between His Rhetorical Theory and His Rhetorical Practice”. Rhetorica 4 (1986), 47–65; and Raymie McKerrow, “Whately’s Theory of Rhetoric”; “ ‘Method of Composition,’ Whately’s Earliest ‘Rhetoric’ ”; and “Probable Argument and Proof in Whately’s Theory of Rhetoric”.


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Whately’s discussion of style, although typically clear, sensible, and well-presented, offers little specific to his construction of a theory of the didactic sermon. As might be expected, he emphasizes clarity, brevity, and energy, or vividness, as the main components of good prose style, and advises writers to strive for comprehensibility rather than “fine” writing. The sections of his Elements of Rhetoric concerned with arrangement and delivery, however, make important contributions to his theory of the sermon. Sermon Arrangement and Audience Psychology Whately’s treatment of arrangement in his Elements of Rhetoric, as might be expected, begins with an analysis of how order of presentation affects audience psychology. In considering rhetorical arrangement, Whately draws two important distinctions: first, between the order of discovery and the order of presentation, and second, between conviction and persuasion. The first of these distinctions is not only relevant to the rhetorical form of the sermon, but also to the composing process. For Whately, the process of discovery includes, inter alia, finding out new things (or new explanations), making logical deductions from existing materials, proving propositions, and making judgements about the truth or value of certain ideas or actions. All of these processes are prior to rhetoric proper,125 which is an art of communicating material to an audience. It is important to have a clear sense of what one intends to say before writing, in order that the process of discovery not distract one’s attention from the proper focus of composition, which is not the preacher’s own process of learning and composing, but the utility of the discourse to the audience. Whately emphasizes that the type of invention proper to rhetoric is one which focuses on finding arguments to convince or explanations to instruct an audience after the processes of discovery and judgement have been completed, processes which should, like murders in Greek tragedy, be performed, as it were, offstage. Thus the preacher should make sure not to organize a sermon around the order in which he discovered certain things to be the case, but instead, think about

125 See, e.g., Whately on the distinction between inferring and proving, Elements of Rhetoric, p. 5.

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what sort of organization would be most instructive or persuasive to an audience. The second important distinction Whately makes is between conviction and persuasion. Although he points out that the two are closely related, and, indeed often confused, they are, in fact, distinct but interdependent activities, affecting different mental faculties: Persuasion, properly so called [is] the art of influencing the Will … Conviction of the understanding … is an essential part of Persuasion; and will generally need to be effected by the Arguments of the Writer or Speaker.126

Practically, as Whately often points out, some part of the conviction essential to the didactic sermon must build on an instructive foundation established outside the sermon proper, in school, lectures, or parochial visits, but that still does not completely obviate the necessity of argument leading to conviction in the opening of a sermon.127 To attempt to attain conviction without the understanding developed by instruction is to revert to the authoritative preaching of the practical sermon. Rather, instruction and explanation inculcate the truth of the Christian scheme; the examples of Jesus and his disciples form paradigms of the character towards which Christians should strive; and the sermon has the ancillary function of explicating Scripture, demonstrating the expedience (and possibility) of attaining (an always improvable) Christian character, and exhorting the people to do so. Exhorting an audience without convincing them of the truth of the premises and practicality of the ends being recommended is ineffective: For in order that the Will be influenced, two things are requisite; viz. 1. that the proposed Objects should appear desirable; and 2. that the means suggested should be proved to be conducive to the attainment of that object.128

For Whately, expediency is not something to be disdained, but rather courted.129 If the goals recommended by a preacher are not seen as 126

Whately, Elements of Rhetoric, p. 181. Whately’s sermons vary in length from extremely short (under five pages of printed text) to extremely long (over thirty pages). The longer of Whately’s published sermons, especially those with complex introductory instructive sections, may well been revised significantly for publication. For discussion of orality-literacy issues in the study of the Victorian sermon, see Robert H. Ellison, The Victorian Pulpit: Spoken and Written Sermons in Nineteenth-Century Britain (Selinsgrove, PA, 1998). 128 Whately, Elements of Rhetoric, p. 181. 129 For Whately’s views on expediency, see Elements of Rhetoric, pp. 471–73. 127


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attainable, without some extraordinary effort of will or character, the congregation might understand Christian virtue to be a matter for some special class of “saints” rather than something applicable to themselves.130 Showing Christian virtue to be attainable by all people, through steady determination rather than superhuman effort, was not, for Whately, equivalent to encouraging laziness or complacency. Instead, he suggested that preachers should urge their congregations to strive for the highest degree of Christian virtue, in a series of gradual but feasible steps. The sermon attempted to further this goal by proceeding from evidences of the truths of Christianity to the consequent obligations such truths implied. Once intellectual assent was established, it was necessary to motivate the will. This, for Whately, was the most difficult task facing the preacher. He points out that even of those who accepted intellectually the truth of Christianity, few do so with the intensity necessary to inspire Christian virtue, asking, rhetorically, “Do the feelings of … a man, when contemplating, for instance, the doctrines and promises of the Christian religion, usually come up [even] to the standard which he himself thinks reasonable?”131 Whately makes a sharp distinction between the intellectual conviction that certain feelings (gratitude, pity, compassion) are appropriate and the actual experience of those feelings: [T]hough we cannot, by a direct effort of volition, excite or allay any Sentiment or Emotion we may, by a voluntary act, fill the Understanding with such thoughts as shall operate on the Feelings. Thus, by attentively studying and meditating on the history of some extraordinary Personage, – by contemplating and dwelling on his actions and sufferings, – his virtues and wisdom, – and by calling on the Imagination to present a vivid picture of all that is related and referred to, – in this manner, we may at length succeed in kindling such feelings, suppose, of reverence, admiration, gratitude, love, hope, emulation, &c., as we are already prepared to acknowledge are suitable to the case.132

As well as using vivid and concrete imagery (following the example of Scripture parables, as discussed above) to train the emotions, it is also necessary to show how the aims desired can be readily achieved in small steps. Whately, in many ways following Aristotle’s Nichomachean Ethics (which he cites frequently), advocates a model of gradual habituation 130

See Whately, “Christian Saints,” in Sermons on the Principal Christian Festivals, pp. 331–51. 131 Whately, Elements of Rhetoric, p. 181. 132 Ibid., pp. 182–83.

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to virtue combined with regular self-examination as something preachers should recommend. The consequent shape Whately recommended for the sermon, therefore, was: 1. Start with a passage from Scripture. 2. Provide the historical and philological information prerequisite to practical interpretation of that passage. 3. Include any relevant evidences of divine inspiration of the passage in particular and Bible in general. 4. Show the practical consequences which can be deduced from the passage, especially the general moral precepts (e.g. that Christians must be charitable; that Christian duties are incumbent on all, not just on the clergy; that inward intentions as well as external acts are important, etc.) 5. Finally, conclude with exhortation to move the emotions, usually by display of vivid examples. Sermon Delivery With respect to elocution, Whately emphasized the importance of natural delivery.133 In contrast with most elocutionists of the period, he did not consider that this was best achieved through some system of marking written materials to indicate pauses, emphases, and gestures. Whately explains that any such system, even that of Sheridan, whom Whately considered among the best of the elocutionists,134 was inherently flawed in its foundations, namely the underlying assumption that the best way to achieve a natural method of speaking is through some artificial system. He states: Probably not a single instance could be found of any one who has attained, by the study of any system of instruction that has hitherto appeared, a really good Delivery; but there are many, – probably as many as have fully tried the experiment, – who have by this means been totally spoiled; – who have fallen irrevocably into an affected style of spouting, worse, in all respects, than their original mode of Delivery.135 133

Whately’s major treatment of elocution appears in the fourth and final section of his Elements of Rhetoric, pp. 339–90. 134 For the major elocutionary texts of the period, see Carol Poster, ed., The Elocutionary Movement (Bristol, 2003). 135 Whately, Elements of Rhetoric, pp. 339–40.


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There are three reasons, according to Whately, why any artificial system of elocution, or of marking texts for delivery, must fail: 1) any system must be imperfect (i.e. incapable of accounting for the full range of possible emphasis, duration, volume, etc. of which the human voice is capable); 2) even a perfect system would be a circuitous route to its end (i.e. teaching students to imitate a written text which itself is only an imitation of how something would naturally be spoken if uttered spontaneously); and 3) any system which focuses the attention of the speaker on his own voice will inevitably produce a certain degree of stylistic artifice or affectation.136 Whately’s standard of good delivery is that it should be clearly intelligible to its audience, forcible (i.e. not monotonous), agreeable, and free from vulgar and provincial pronunciation – in other words, possessing the same characteristics as what was considered good conversational style, a similarity not accidental, in so far as Whately’s model of good oratory is, in fact, conversational. Whately begins his analysis of elocution by pointing out the difference between “reading aloud” and “speaking”. He remarks that even those whose ordinary conversational manner of speaking is clear and pleasant often became stilted or unintelligible while reading. Moreover, the effects of reading and speaking on their respective audiences are quite different: It is not easy for an auditor to fall asleep while he is hearing even perhaps feeble reasoning clothed in indifferent language, delivered extemporaneously, and in an unaffected style; whereas it is common for men to find difficulty in keeping themselves awake, while listening even to a good dissertation, of the same length, when read, though with propriety, and not in a languid manner. And the thoughts, even of those not disposed to be drowsy, are apt to wander, unless they use an effort from time to time to prevent it; while, on the other hand, it is notoriously difficult to withdraw our attention, even from a trifling talker of whom we are weary, and to occupy the mind with reflections of its own.137

This does not lead Whately to advocate extemporaneous sermonizing, nor, in fact, any form of extemporaneous speech-making (whether in the pulpit or debating societies) because he considers extemporizing productive of various faults in composition. Instead, he recommends that ministers train themselves to read the liturgy, Scripture, and their 136 137

Ibid., pp. 348–52. Ibid., pp. 342–43.

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own sermons as though they were conversing naturally. Whately’s concept of nature, though, depends on accommodation to “subject, place, and occasion”;138 to deliver a sermon in the manner of casual conversation over breakfast would be just as unnatural as to appear in church, as one might at breakfast, in pajamas and a dressing gown, rather than the appropriate (and natural) clothing for a solemn public occasion. Natural reading, for Whately, was not, however, something which comes naturally, but rather takes concentration and practice in keeping the mind fixed on subject matter, audience, and occasion, while speaking, and “carefully avoiding … all thoughts of self ”.139 This method has two advantages, according to Whately: first, it will lead to a natural delivery which will hold the attention of an audience, and second, it will diminish self-consciousness by training the speaker to avoid all consciousness of self.

“Peace on Earth”: Whately’s Sermon Theory in Practice As Whately, of course, was not merely a sermon theorist, but himself composed, preached, and published numerous sermons, his sense of sermon style and arrangement is best illustrated by his own sermons. Whately’s sermons are didactic, purposeful, and clear, aiming at instruction and durable conviction rather than striking effects. His best sermons combine acute intelligence with robust common sense and a lively and lucid style, while his worst can be dry and conventional. Although Whately’s sermons lack the grandeur and emotional intensity found in those of more widely admired popular preachers, they are eminently readable, and worth reading, combining, at their best, profound piety with incisive intellect and characteristic generosity of spirit. Whately’s own sermons, in fact, consistently follow the pattern he recommends in his theoretical works: starting with a passage from Scripture, remarking on any evidences of the divine origin of that passage in particular or Scripture in general, supplying any philological or historical information necessary to interpretation of the passage, removing any possible stumbling blocks to belief occasioned by the

138 139

Ibid., p. 365. Ibid., p. 365.


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passage or its implications, deducing practical consequences from the passage, and finally exhorting hearers towards the Christian virtues implied by the text. This can be observed in a typical example of Whately’s sermon practice, his “Peace on Earth”,140 a Christmas sermon based on Luke 2:14 (“Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, good will toward men”.). “Peace on Earth” begins with a discussion of the Scriptural text on which it is based: The hymn of the angels … appears … to require no explanation. That the religion of Jesus Christ is calculated to promote … universal peace and goodwill among mankind, and that the wars and strifes which have prevailed in the world are inconsistent with the spirit of religion … may appear … to be all that was intended to be conveyed in the angelic annunciation.141

According to Whately, the text does not merely recommend peace, but, in fact proclaims it. There is an obvious contradiction between this proclamation of peace and “the strife and hostile contention which have … continued to prevail in the world”.142 Moreover, not only is there not peace in the world in general, but, Whately reminds his audience, Jesus describes himself as not coming to send peace on earth, but rather division (Luke 12:51), and foretells the persecution and dissension that would await his followers (Matt. 10:36). Following the precept of always including evidences of the divine origin of the passage under consideration, Whately points out: Among the many proofs of [Jesus’] prophetic power, and of the truth of his Gospel … [was that he] foresaw what no enthusiast could have foreseen, – foretold what no impostor would have been willing to foretell, – that his religion would expose his followers to persecution, and would be made an occasion of strife.143

Whately removes the obvious stumbling block of the apparently inaccurate proclamation of peace by close analysis of Luke 12, related passages in both Old and New Testaments, and comparative evidence from pagan religions of the period, to show that the “peace” proclaimed was not one among humans, but rather a reconciliation between God and

140 This sermon was first published in Sermons on Various Subjects. Delivered in Several Churches in the City of Dublin, and in other Parts of the Diocese, 2nd ed. (London, 1835) and subsequently reprinted in Sermons on the Principal Christian Festivals. 141 Whately, Sermons on the Principal Christian Festivals, p. 1. 142 Ibid., p. 1. 143 Ibid., pp. 2–3.

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humanity.144 While this satisfactorily accounts for the apparent contradiction between the proclamation of peace and the existence of strife, it does not, as Whately points out, address the far greater stumbling block of the apparent incompatibility between the existence of an omnipotent and benevolent deity and the existence (even prevalence) of evil (of which war and strife are a part) in the world. Whately’s method of approaching this, as other apparently intractable problems, is to analyze the issue into component parts. Whately separates the general problem of evil from the related problem of whether the existence of evil is grounds for disbelieving Christianity.145 Concerning the first problem, the existence of evil, Whately states: The existence of evil is the one great difficulty, of which most that are brought forward as objections to our religion are only particular instances … To account for the existence of evil is, to Man, totally impossible; and since total impossibility does not admit of different degrees, the smallest amount of misery and the greatest are equally inexplicable. … All that we can say … is that, for some unknown cause, evil is unavoidable …146

The inexplicability of evil is not, for Whately, an obstacle to belief in, or practice of, Christianity, for neither the existence nor the non-existence of some metaphysical account of the causes of evil has any practical applicability to Christian life. How a Christian should behave in light of the fact of evil is crucially important, but abstract speculations about the nature and cause of evil, for Whately, are more likely to lead to unprofitable wrangling than to active virtue. Thus, on the question of the reason for the existence of evil, Whately answers that (1) it is not knowable by humanity in a present state, in which it is only possible to “see through a glass, darkly”, and (2) even were it knowable, such knowledge would not be immediately useful for Christian practice. He summarizes: The Scriptures, instead of leading us into metaphysical questions about the origins of evil, which are beyond the reach of our faculties, lead us to practical inquiries as to the nature of such evils as afflict or threaten ourselves or our neighbours, and as to the means of escaping evil, and rescuing others from it.147 144

Ibid., pp. 3–6. This form of argument, which distinguishes the cause or probability of some X from the reasons why people tend to believe that X is the case, is based on a set of general principles Whately sets forth in some detail in Elements of Rhetoric, pp. 56–57. 146 Whately, Sermons on the Principal Christian Festivals, pp. 6–7. 147 Ibid., pp. 7–8. 145


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On the second problem, of whether the existence of evil actually was an obstacle to belief in Christianity, Whately argues probabilistically. The theoretical principle from which Whately argues is based on his oftenquoted concept of relative probability: It is most important to keep in mind the self-evident, but often-forgotten maxim that Disbelief is Belief; only, they have reference to opposite conclusions. E .G. To disbelieve the real existence of the city of Troy, is to believe that it was feigned; and which conclusion implies the greater credulity, is the question to be decided. To some it may appear more, to others, less, probable, that a Greek poet should have celebrated (with whatever exaggerations) some feats of arms in which his countrymen had actually been engaged, than that he should have passed by all these, and have resorted to such as were totally imaginary. So also, though the terms “infidel” and “unbeliever” are commonly applied to one who rejects Christianity, it is plain that to disbelieve its divine origin, is to believe its human origin; and which belief requires the more credulous mind, is the very question at issue.148

In the case of the problem of evil, Whately also reminds his readers that the issue is one not of absolute, but of relative, probability: [I]t is … a folly to regard [the existence of evil] in the light of an objection, either to our own religion or to any others, since it would lie equally against all. … [T]he ancient heathens were as much perplexed with doubts as to the origin of evil as we are. Even Atheism does not lessen – it only alters the difficulty: for as the believer in God cannot account for the existence of evil, so the believer in no God cannot account for the existence of good; or indeed for the existence of any thing at all that bears marks of rational design.149

After having cited and glossed the selected Scriptural passage, and having shown how the passage itself and its implications function as evidences for rather than stumbling blocks to Christianity, Whately proceeds to the final two parts of his sermon: examination of practical consequences and exhortation. Perhaps the greatest difficulty for Whately’s sermon theory and practice lies in negotiating a middle path between narrow prescriptivism and vague generalizations. In his own practice, he manages this by detailed analysis of Scripture precepts and very carefully showing what deductions could be made concerning Scriptural principles, while generally eschewing simple injunctions to do or refrain from doing

148 149

Whately, Elements of Rhetoric, p. 79. Whately, Sermons on the Principal Christian Festivals, p. 7.

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some specific acts. Thus in his discussion of Christian obligations in response to the proclamation of peace, he specifies that the practice of peace “is the Christian’s duty; not his reward”, and insists that Christians are obligated “to promote universal peace (not with a regard to [their] own interest and convenience), but from Christian benevolence”.150 Whately is very specific about the way in which Christians must think through issues of morality, but leaves to the private judgement of his listeners what this implies for Protestants in Ireland. The sermon concludes with exhortation. After reminding his hearers of the Scriptural injunctions “to universal benevolence, – to meekness, compassionateness, forbearance” and “against party-spirit, strife, and hostile bitterness”, and recommending the cultivation of Christian temper (despite the possibility that it would not be met with in others), Whately turns to another facet of the proclamation of peace, namely that it was part of “good tidings of great joy”. He points out that although “the Gospel may be said to be … good-tidings to all people who have had its gracious offer made to them”, it is possible that some people “may transform it into an evil”, if they choose “to harden their hearts” against it.151 In light of this, Whately recommends that Christmas be treated not as an “occasion for reckless intemperance, or for frivolous dissipation and idle revelry”, nor for self-congratulation, but as an occasion of self-examination.152 The sermon concludes with an exhortation to self-examination: If you are striving so to live as a redeemed Christian, and endeavouring and praying to become daily more conformed to [Christ’s] pattern, and more fit for enjoying his presence in a better world, then may you reckon the Gospel as, indeed, good-tidings to you; … [and] your joy at this festival will not be thoughtless, worldly, sensual, and profane, but such as the angels themselves can partake of; and you may be assured that they will rejoice with you both now and for ever.153

Conclusion There is a major difference, for Whately, between the rather self-effacing role of an effective minister, who glorifies God, and the self-glorifying 150 151 152 153

Ibid., pp. 12–13. Ibid., pp. 13–15. Ibid., p. 16. Ibid., p. 17.


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habit of “fine preaching”. Hearers may enjoy “exciting eloquence” more than “explanation”, because “to learn requires attention and some laborious exercise of the mind”, while excitement is a matter of passive enjoyment. Nonetheless, “patient and skilful instruction” can lead “even those of no superior abilities and imperfect education” to read with “lively interest … books one might have thought beyond their reach”.154 Because of the effect of sympathy on audience psychology, the sermon can be a uniquely powerful tool of Christian ministry: Public instructional exhortation from the Pulpit [has] … an advantage … over private admonitions to an individual. … [A] multitude will often be more easily and more strongly impressed by anything that is forcibly said, than those same persons would have been by the very same words expressed to them singly. Mutual sympathy, and mutual consciousness of that sympathy, tend very greatly to heighten any kind of emotion that may be excited. And thus a powerful effect is often produced on a large audience composed of persons no one of whom could have been equally influenced separately.155

The potential power inhering in the sermon, however, can make it liable to abuse, for as St James points out, in a passage frequently cited by Whately, “the tongue can no man tame; it is an unruly evil, full of deadly poison” (James 3:8). Despite these dangers, a sermon can be extremely useful as part of a teaching ministry if the preacher is always careful to make choices about manner and content of preaching not according to aesthetic criteria, nor in light of what is likely to receive popular acclaim, but on moral and religious grounds. Perhaps the best summary of Whately’s theory and practice of the didactic sermon can be found in his own words: Which of these two objects [having a sermon admired as fine preaching or having the matter of the sermon understood by the audience] ought to be preferred by a Christian Minister on christian principles, is a question not indeed hard to decide … I would not, indeed, undertake (like Quinctilian), that no one can be an Orator who is not a virtuous man; but there certainly is a kind of moral excellence implied in that renunciation of all effort after display, – which is absolutely necessary, both in the manner of writing, and in the delivery, to give the full force to what is said.156 154 155 156

Whately, Instruction in the Scriptures, p. 35. Whately, Parish Pastor, p. 5. Whately, Elements of Rhetoric, p. 367.

THE RHETORIC OF HENRY WARD BEECHER AND FREDERIC W. FARRAR REGARDING BIBLICAL CRITICISM Thomas H. Olbricht In the latter part of the 19th century, newer approaches to interpreting the Scriptures erupted into denominational disputes in both Great Britain and America.1 Other major conflicts had festered in the churches prior to the Higher Criticism controversy as the result of new geological theorems, Darwinian evolution, and the advent of the social gospel. It was only after these battles had raged for some years that disputes regarding higher criticism broke forth.2 In the vocabulary of the times, lower criticism was concerned with the alternate readings in the ancient biblical manuscripts. Higher criticism focused upon authorship, sources, literary features, and historical backgrounds. Biblical critics in Germany and gradually in America and Great Britain challenged such traditional views as the Mosaic authorship of the Pentateuch, the single authorship of Isaiah and Daniel, and the eyewitness accounts of Jesus in the Gospels. In this essay I wish to focus specifically upon the pulpit rhetoric regarding higher criticism. The higher criticism controversy was one aspect of a far-reaching intellectual sea-change. Certain left-leaning 1 The major recent work on developments in New Testament criticism is William Baird, History of New Testament Research: From Jonathan Edwards to Rudolf Bultmann, 2 (Minneapolis, 2003). He has chapters on Great Britain (“The Establishment of Historical Criticism in Great Britain,” pp. 54–84), and America (“The Advance of American New Testament Research,” pp. 288–360). For additional works on the history of American biblical criticism, see Thomas H. Olbricht, “Histories of American Bible Scholarship,” Currents in Biblical Scholarship 7 (1999), 237–56. Also, Thomas H. Olbricht, “Biblical Interpretation in North America in the Twentieth Century,” in Dictionary of Major Biblical Interpreters, ed. Donald K. McKim, (Downers Grove, IL, 2007), pp. 88–102. For Old Testament criticism in England, see John Rogerson, Old Testament Criticism in the Nineteenth Century: England and Germany (Philadelphia, 1985). 2 These developments were set forth by William Newton Clark in Sixty Years with the Bible (New York, 1917). For an account that includes both Britain and America, see Charles D. Cashdollar, The Transformation of Theology: 1830–1890: Positivism and Protestant Thought in Britain and America (Princeton, 1989). See also Thomas H. Olbricht, “Intellectual Ferment and Instruction in the Scriptures: The Bible in Higher Education,” in The Bible in American Education, ed. David L. Barr and Nicholas Piediscalzi (Philadelphia, 1982), p. 97.

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ministers attempted to pave the way for the acceptance of higher criticism among their parishioners through sermonizing. Among the noted clergymen in America and Great Britain who did so were Henry Ward Beecher and Frederic W. Farrar.3 I am especially interested in the rhetorical strategies through which they sought to win their constituencies for these newer critical approaches. I will first lay out the contours of the controversy itself, then take up the approaches of Henry Ward Beecher and Frederic Farrar in their efforts to secure the support of those in the pews. The Higher Criticism Controversy in the 1890s The sources and authorship of the Pentateuch became the storm center of the higher criticism controversy in the 1890s. The belief that Moses authored the Pentateuch was indelibly ingrained in the long history of Judaism and Christianity. Occasional reservations had been expressed from the first century, but it was in the 17th century that Spinoza, Richard Simon, and Thomas Hobbes challenged the Mosaic authorship in some detail.4 In the 19th century the sources and authorship of the Pentateuch came to the forefront in a major way among German professors. Early in the century, fragmentary views held that various sources had been joined together, especially in Genesis, by Moses and that it is only after the introductory chapters in Exodus that Moses wrote from experience. The proposals differed widely, with J.G. Eichhorn and Johann Vater being two of the chief proponents. In the late 1870s, however, a documentary hypothesis developed, suggesting that the Pentateuch consisted of four interwoven documents written by individuals identified as the Priestly writer, the Jahwist, the Eloist, and the Deuteronomic historian. The most famous proponents of the documentary hypothesis were Julius Wellhausen and Adolf Kuenen.5

3 I discussed additional American preachers in an earlier essay, Thomas H. Olbricht, “Rhetoric in the Higher Criticism Controversy,” in The Rhetoric of Protest and Reform 1878–1898, ed. Paul H. Boase (Athens, OH, 1980), pp. 265–92. 4 Cornealius Houtman, “Pentateuchal Criticism,” in DBI, ed. John H. Hayes, 1 (Nashville, 1999), pp. 257–62. For a recent assessment of Pentateuchal criticism since Wellhausen, see Ernest Nicholson, The Pentateuch in The Twentieth Century: The Legacy of Julius Wellhausen (Oxford, 1998). 5 See Douglas A. Knight, “The Pentateuch,” in The Hebrew Bible and its Modern Interpreters, ed. Douglas A. Knight and Gene M. Tucker (Minneapolis, 1985), pp. 263–96.

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The first English translation of Wellhausen’s seminal Prolegomena to the History of Israel (1878) was published in 1885.6 Not many American or British scholars embraced these new views before the 1880s. One of the early American proponents of the Wellhausenian documentary hypothesis was Charles A. Briggs (1841– 1913), who in 1874 became professor of Hebrew and cognate languages at Union Theological Seminary in New York. Briggs spent 1866–70 studying the Old Testament in Germany.7 In 1879, at Briggs’ suggestion, William Adams, president of Union Theological Seminary, wrote A.A. Hodge of Princeton proposing that Union and Princeton launch a new journal. Upon Hodge’s agreement, Presbyterian Review appeared on 11 January 1880, identifying Briggs and Hodge as editors. Briggs commenced publishing essays on the newer German Old Testament criticism in this journal, also making clear his support of the Wellhausenian documentary hypothesis in his own The Higher Criticism of the Hexateuch.8 The acceptance of critical scholarship in England lagged somewhat behind America. But by 1890 several British scholars had embraced these new approaches. John Rogerson has noted that In 1880, the critical method still had only apparently tenuous hold on English Old Testament scholarship. By 1891, not only had the critical method begun to sweep all before it; indeed it had begun to do so in the form of an acceptance of the position of Wellhausen, albeit in a version congenial to English theology and philosophy.9

Frederick W. Farrar likewise reflected on the slow acceptance of frontrunning biblical criticism in Great Britain and argued that had the English moved beyond the conventional views, the Scriptures would had been more acclaimed, not less so: The English Church, since the days of Bede and Alcuin, has rarely, perhaps never, been in the forefront of Scriptural studies … The views of our theologians down to very recent times have been conservative, with a

6 Julius Wellhausen, Prolegomena to the History of Israel with a reprint of the article Israel from the “Encyclopaedia Britannica,” trans. J. Sutherland Black and Allan Menzies (Edinburgh, 1885). 7 Thomas H. Olbricht, “Charles Augustus Briggs,” in Handbook of Major Biblical Interpreters, ed. Donald K. McKim (Downers Grove, IL, 2007), pp. 219–23. 8 Charles A. Briggs, The Higher Criticism of the Hexateuch (New York, 1893). For the acceptance of these views by several American scholars by 1900, see Olbricht, “Biblical Interpretation,” pp. 89–112. 9 Rogerson, Old Testament Criticism, p. 273.

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thomas h. olbricht caution which has not seldom proved itself to be retrogressive. The dogma, which had so long maintained the absolute, supernatural, homogeneous infallibility of every word and letter contained in the Bible, had been weighed for centuries in the balances, and never without being found wanting … its harmonistic methods are casuistical to dishonesty; … its views about the inspiration of the vowel-points and perfect accuracy of the text have been covered with confusion; its whole method of interpretation had been discredited and abandoned. Whenever the systems built upon this dogma have been rejected, the Bible had become more dear and more widely understood. And yet for a considerable period the main body of the English Church, ignoring the philosophy and history of the Continent, clung with tenacity to obsolete conceptions, and failed not only to further the progress of Scriptural study, but even to avail themselves of the sources of knowledge which other Churches so largely used.10

Earlier British proponents of documentary views of the Pentateuch were William Robertson Smith (1846–94) of Aberdeen and later Cambridge, and John William Colenso (1814–83) of Cambridge and Natal, both of whom were summoned before church officials for their alleged heterodox views.11 Smith had written controversial entries for the Encyclopedia Britannica on the formation of the Pentateuch and also wrote a favorable introduction to the translation of Julius Wellhausen’s Prolegomena to the History of Ancient Israel. He turned down a professorship at Harvard, but later held academic posts at Cambridge. He played a significant role in gaining acceptance for the critical analysis of the Scriptures in Great Britain.12 The newly founded Presbyterian Review with Briggs and Hodge as editors was soon denounced by right wing critics as the result of it publishing the proceeds of the Smith libel trial in the Church of Scotland (1876–81). The English scholar who perhaps more than anyone else paved the way for the acceptance of Wellhausen’s conclusions regarding the authorship and composition of the Pentateuch was Samuel Rolles Driver (1846–1914) of Oxford. Driver commenced publishing in the 1870s, but it was his An Introduction to the Literature of the Old Testament (1891) that heralded the ultimate victory of the documentary

10 Frederic W. Farrar, History of Interpretation: Bampton Lectures 1885 (1886; repr. Grand Rapids, 1961), p. ix. 11 Rogerson, Old Testament Criticism, about Smith, pp. 275–80, regarding Colenso, pp. 220–37. 12 J. Andrew Dearman, “William Robertson Smith,” in Handbook of Major Biblical Interpreters, ed. Donald K. McKim (Downers Grove, IL, 2007), p. 360.


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hypothesis among British scholars.13 Driver not only championed critical scholarship in his books and commentaries, but also in his sermons, especially “Evolution Compatible with Faith” and “Inspiration”.14 We have now briefly explored the developments in biblical criticism that furnish a backdrop for the scholarly controversies that eventually came to the attention of interested church members. Beecher and Farrar believed that the critical conclusions of the scholars required pulpit exploration so as to establish guidelines for understanding and acceptance by their parishioners. They proceeded to lay out the grounds on which these developments, as they assessed them, were of benefit to modern Christians rather than to their detriment. The Rhetorical Task What are the rhetorical means whereby Beecher and Farrar sought to gain acceptance for these recently acclaimed results that challenged conventional understandings of biblical authorship and composition? Ancient rhetorical theorists pointed out that speakers argue from major premises commonly accepted by their auditors. These premises form the propositions of their rhetorical syllogisms, that is, enthymemes. We will therefore focus upon the underlying premises in the sermons of Beecher and Farrar, through which they anticipated persuading their auditors. Each of these preachers appealed to presuppositions commonly accepted by the people they hoped to win over. Persons who disagreed with them identified these premises as the crux of the debate, or as rhetoricians put it, the stasis. Beecher and Farrar were far more interested in convincing those who agreed with their beginning points than in refuting those opposed. The Late 19th-Century World View What were the guiding perspectives of the epoch in which Beecher and Farrar lived? The latter half of the 19th century was a time of rapid change. For a century, the British Empire had ruled the commercial 13 Marion A. Taylor, “Samuel Rolles Driver,” in Handbook of Major Biblical Interpreters, ed. Donald K. McKim (Downers Grove, IL, 2007), pp. 387–94. S.R. Driver, An Introduction to the Literature of the Old Testament (New York, 1891). 14 S.R. Driver, Sermons on Subjects connected with the Old Testament (London, 1892).

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and colonial expansion of the world. Now competitors arose on the continent and in the United States. The United States had just undergone an appalling period of internal strife. In the north rapid industrialization ensued. In the south, reconstruction altered the agricultural economy and the changes resulted in substantial periods of stress and financial turndowns. Numerous inventions such as steam and internal combustion engines changed the lives of the working classes as well as travelers at all levels. These engines were utilized at sea, on rails across the land, and in the operation of manufacturing equipment. At the beginning of the 20th century, engines powered individual automobiles and tractors. With the development of the telegraph, communication took a major step toward instant access, soon to be upgraded with the telephone. In the next stage, electricity lighted cities and gave additional flexibility to industrial development. The recently altered workplace challenged conventional means of productivity. Financial fluctuations induced great anxiety among workers in the industrialized nations, resulting in protests and rebellion. Some perceived these innovations as exceedingly beneficial and as adumbrating a brave new world. These developments were the precursors of greater leisure, well-being, morality and peace. Others, however, mourned what they perceived as the loss of age-old moral values and the acceleration of greed and secularization. New insights into the world around about and in the human psyche moved away from traditional positions commonly identified as coming from Scriptures and religion. Blossoming geology offered new perspectives on oceans and land configurations and the chronology of the earth. Not only was the physical universe perceived as evolving, but also biological life as set forth by Darwin and others. These new observations and conclusions, according to the thinking of some, challenged the age-old commitments to divine creation. Forward actions on many fronts heralded historical development that in turn brought dynamic transformation as opposed to static continuity. All aspects of existence, even the church and the Scriptures themselves, were being scrutinized under the lens of history. Hegelian dialectic and social Darwinism as well as new perspectives in psychology and psychiatry proclaimed a reality in flux.15 According to Thomas A. Langford, “By the sixties the 15 On Darwinism in America, and Beecher’s embracing of it, see Gary Dorrien, The Making of American Liberal Theology: Imagining Progressive Religion 1805–1900 (Louisville, 2001), pp. 248–52.


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two compatriots of change, Hegel and Darwin, were on the British scene, and the immediate future belonged to them”.16 These developments likewise impacted theology. Theologians and preachers increasingly turned their backs on the creedal affirmations of the Westminster Confession that had been so widely embraced in Great Britain and in America in the 18th century. Churchmen began to reject original sin, total depravity, irresistible grace, and predestination. Human freedom and love moved to the forefront in preaching as compared with the previous constant haranguing against sin and the constant warnings of eternal condemnation. Authoritarianism, whether it was that of the church, tradition or the Scripture, increasingly came under criticism. In its place the love of Christ, the empowerment of religious experience, and the embracing of the changed reality moved to the forefront. For example, according to Langford: Edward Caird in his Gifford Lectures, The Evolution of Religion, made it plain that the core of Christianity lay in the idea it conveys, not in any single historical person, and the fruition of this idea had come with the resurgence of an idealistic philosophy in which “the principle of Christianity has come to self-consciousness”.17

Beecher and Farrar especially wished to draw upon the worldviews of those in their congregations who embraced the changed reality rather than rebelling against it. They appealed to people who accepted the historical nature of existence, who applauded progress, opted for individual freedom, and located the Christian faith in religious experience and love rather than in the authority of the church and the ecclesiastical specifics of the Scriptures. Gary Dorrien wrote that “The theologians of early American theological liberalism … aspired to a religion of enlightened moral and spiritual feeling. None of them made a convincing claim to speak for the common people; most belonged to a cultural elite”.18 But by the latter years of the 19th century the common people were more amenable to an enlightened moral and spiritual feeling. It is to these newly developing perspectives that Beecher and Farrar turned as they forged a position on Higher Criticism and invited their congregations to share in these revised conclusions.

16 Thomas A. Langford, In Search of Foundations: English Theology 1900–1920 (Nashville, 1969), p. 56. 17 Ibid., p. 77. 18 Dorrien, The Making of American Liberal Theology, p. 179.

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thomas h. olbricht Beecher and Farrar

The American Henry Ward Beecher (1813–87)19 and British preacher Frederic William Farrar (1831–1903) came from different backgrounds, but each was impressed with the need to relate the Christian faith to new developments in their changing worlds. Beecher set out in the latter half of the 19th century to interpret the Scriptures in such a manner that they would be compatible with newly blossoming outlooks in science and psychology. As a youth he opposed traditional Puritan views on election and predestination. As the years went by, he kept abreast of new developments in biblical studies, science, and psychology, and encouraged his Plymouth Congregational Church in Brooklyn, as well as literate Americans through the newspaper printing of his sermons, to investigate the compatibility of these new perspectives. As William G. McLoughlin wrote: Beecher’s optimistic faith in science not only led him to welcome the new-found laws of geology, paleontology, thermodynamics, evolution and microbiology but also the pseudo-scientific fads and frauds of his day, like hydropathy, phrenology, craniology, homeopathy, mesmerism, and Graham bread.20

In his lectures and preaching Beecher supported many of the emerging perspectives in regard to geology, evolution and higher criticism. Farrar was one of the most significant English preachers in the latter half of the 19th century. Educated at Kings’ College in London, and Trinity College, Cambridge,21 he later became an assistant master at Harrow School, and master of Marlborough School. He was appointed a canon of Westminster Abbey and rector of St Margaret’s, Westminster, ending his career as Dean of Canterbury. Farrar drew large crowds when he preached and lectured and his books attracted an immense audience in the English speaking world.

19 Henry Ward Beecher was born in Litchfield, CT, the son of Lyman Beecher, one of the most famous preachers of the time. He studied in Connecticut before graduating from Amherst College in Massachusetts. When Lyman Beecher moved to Cincinnati to take over the presidency of Lane Theological Seminary of the Presbyterian Church, Henry Ward took up his studies at Lane, graduating in 1837. He served as minister of the Second Presbyterian Church in Indianapolis and concluded his career with a long ministry at the Plymouth Congregational Church in Brooklyn beginning in 1847. 20 William G. McLoughlin, The Meaning of Henry Ward Beecher: An Essay on the Shifting Values of Mid-Victorian America, 1840–1870 (New York, 1970), p. 46. 21 Reginald A. Farrar, The Life of Frederic William Farrar (New York, 1904).


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Much like Beecher, he kept abreast of scholarly work in biblical criticism, science and psychology, but he was much more erudite, especially in his detailed pursuit of the history of biblical interpretation. As the result of Farrar’s rhetoric in championing higher criticism, several leading clergymen and church persons in England became more open to these new views. He defended the right of Bishop J.W. Colenso to challenge the Mosaic authorship of the Pentateuch and to allege certain inaccuracies. Farrar also befriended Charles Darwin and his work. Farrar was asked to present the Bampton Lectures in 1885, and he took as his subject the History of Interpretation. About these lectures and his contribution Farrar wrote: In writing these sketches of the History of Biblical Interpretation I have never forgotten that the Bampton Lectures are meant to be apologetic. My sole desire has been to defend the cause of Christianity by furthering the interests of truth. So far as former methods of exegesis have been mistaken they have been also perilous. A recognition of past errors can hardly fail to help us disencumbering from fatal impediments the religious progress of the future.22

In presenting of the declarations of Beecher and Farrar, I have selected those topics on which both essentially agree but on which one of the two develops in greater detail. In regard to inspiration I have focused on Beecher. Farrar had far more to say on progressive revelation and progress in biblical interpretation. I have included a few remarks by both Beecher and Farrar on analogical interpretation. Beecher on the Inspiration and Divine Adaptation of the Scriptures Beecher often directed his sermons on Sunday night to what he perceived as the major contemporary questions. When the controversy regarding the sources and authorship of the Pentateuch began to heat up, Beecher preached a series of sermons in the winter and spring of 1878–79 which were later printed as Bible Studies in the Old Testament.23 In these sermons Beecher both sought to diminish rancor over the newer views and to set forth a viable appreciation of the Old Testament to his contemporaries. In the first sermon he stated: 22

Farrar, History of Interpretation, p. ix. Henry Ward Beecher, Bible Studies in the Old Testament (New York, 1892). These sermons were published in book form after his death. They had been preserved in full stenographic notes. 23

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thomas h. olbricht For the general purpose of bringing home especially the more ancient of the Hebrew Scriptures to your consideration and your confidence, unembarrassed by the theories which have been given and which turn the Bible very largely into a book of disputes, I purpose, in this series of Sunday evening lectures, first, to discuss somewhat the meaning of “inspiration”, as applied to this to this source of our faith, and then to go over with you the chief historical books of the Old Testament, trying to find what there is in them for us of the modern day.24

Beecher’s principal rhetorical premise is that throughout the Bible, which covers some four thousand years, both the form of communication and the theology were adapted to the people of the age to whom it was written. This claim goes back into antiquity and is designated “adaptation”, “accommodation”, or “progressive revelation”. To some extent all religious persons, regardless of where they are situated on the theological spectrum, accept accommodation. Those on the right, however, are inclined to insist that the more primitive texts are Godgiven and by and large the Word of God to later generations. Beecher’s reason for commending accommodation is more in line with the outlook of those on the left, who declare that earlier materials in the Scripture are transitory even though they may contain unchangeable elements.25 So in every age human nature must be dealt with in the best way in which it can be reached; and if there be one thing that is shown all the way through the divinely inspired record it is the adaptation of methods, institutions, and revelations of truth to the weaknesses and necessities of men in each particular age. The garment was made to fit the figure. The manner of teaching was in accordance with the need of the time and nation in which it took place. Not perfection, but right direction, was the aim.26 24

Ibid., p. 11. “Accommodation”, The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church, ed. F.L. Cross and E.A. Livingstone (Oxford, 1997), p. 10. Charles Hodge argued for “the progressive character of divine revelation”, but he saw the earlier stages as less developed, not inferior to the later ones (Systematic Theology, [1872–73; repr. Grand Rapids, 1981], pp. 1: 446–53). 26 Beecher, Bible Studies in the Old Testament, p. 18. Later he stated, “We permit in a child things which, if he were to continue them until he became grown, would deprive him of good standing and throw him out of society. And in the infancy of the race things were permitted which, judged by our modern standards of honor and right, would condemn a man as utterly base. They were bad then, and they would have been worse in every age since, by reason of the growing light that has been brought to bear upon truth and duty: and yet they are narrated in the Word of God without a single 25


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In his second sermon in the series, “The Book of Beginnings”, Beecher employed an analogy of painting a fine portrait to describe how God’s revelation unfolds incrementally: The process by which, in the progressive painting of a fine oil portrait, are brought out, first the rude outline, then the crude filling in, and then the perfecting of every part, is the same process as that by which, under God’s inspiration, the primitive races were developed from their primitive condition, step by step, to higher states, until in these later days we have larger understanding, more comprehensive knowledge, and may hope to be nearing the final or full form of things … We have not come to the end of inspiration yet.27

Beecher argued that in order for modern persons to appreciate the value of the Old Testament, a doctrine of inspiration that comes out of the Scripture itself is imperative, and not one superimposed upon it by a rigid theology. His view of biblical inspiration can be summarized in eight statements:28 1. It [The doctrine] must admit that existing records had been incorporated by Biblical writers and exhibit distinctive styles and language. 2. It must admit that “faulty facts” and errant mental operations are found in these imported records. “It is destructive of any theory of the inspiration of the Bible to claim that every word and letter which it contains is infallibly correct”. 3. Various depictions in the Bible are of historical events both good and bad, without a judgement as to their theological soundness or moral uprightness. 4. Partial statements of truth must be admitted. In explaining to children the federal court system, one does not include multiple details incomprehensible to them. Neither do biblical authors seek to exhaust their subjects. 5. A document, given under inspiration, nevertheless must be interpreted by the rules applied to other documents. 6. Few statements in Scripture are beyond the reach of human investigation, but those that are cannot be understood by employing analogies to other parts of the Scripture, but rather by information exterior to it. For example, one understands the love of a mother mentioned in Scripture by going home to be with one’s own mother.

protest. Conduct was allowed in the past which was far less criminal than it would be in our age: but it was criminal then; and nevertheless, there it stands, apparently unrebuked”. See also the next sermon on “Beginnings,” pp. 53–54. 27 Ibid., p. 55. 28 Ibid., pp. 15–30.

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thomas h. olbricht 7. The Bible contains statements that an earlier age can only apprehend through revelation, but regarding which a later age may not in like manner require inspiration. 8. The Bible does not contain external unity in its numerous books because its unity only resides in a spiritual interiority.29 Some books may be criticized as Luther criticized James, but that does not invalidate the rest.

A second major premise of Beecher is reflected in the above eight features of a biblical doctrine of inspiration. The Bible is still valid as a “counsel and guide to my path and the lamp to my feet”30 despite the fact that certain of its characteristics seem flawed: We know very well that there are modern critics who suppose parts of “Isaiah” were not written by the author of that book, and should not be ascribed to him. We know very well that some of the earlier historical books are supposed by critics to be invalidated because they seem to show traces of being compilations of still earlier documents, and as they say could not have been written by Moses or any single writer. As for myself, I say that if even it should be proved that some of the books of the Bible are not authentic, and must be rejected – as I do not believe it will, and that others though in the main correct contain more or less errors which must be eliminated, it would not destroy the Bible any more than to take a rotten joist from an imperfect place in a house would destroy the house. In taking out from the Bible whatever is false, you simply take out something that does not belong there. Therefore to criticize a single book does not alter the whole canon. The Bible remains.31

In fact, it is only by recognizing the true characteristics of the materials in the Bible, Beecher alleged, that the Bible will become alive to people of his generation.32 Beecher fleshed out his second major premise in the next sermon, “The Book of Beginnings”.33 Toward the end of his sermon he stated, I read the accounts in this old Book with ever-growing pleasure. I read them with more profit than I did in childhood, when I held, in common 29 Beecher’s brother-in-law, who was Henry Ward’s teacher, stated a similar view in his large work, Calvin Stowe, Origin and History of the Books of the Bible both the Canonical and the Apocryphal, Designed to Show What the Bible is Not, What it is, and How to Use it (Hartford, 1868), pp. 13–15. Stowe likewise wrote of progressive revelation, pp. 21–22. 30 Beecher, Bible Studies in the Old Testament, p. 30. 31 Ibid., p. 28. 32 Ibid., pp. 28–30. 33 Ibid., pp. 47–64.


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with the uninstructed church, that they were exact inspirations and revelations. I now walk in these dim aisles of antiquity, and hear the lisping syllables of primitive man, and behold the way of God toward him, and draw lessons as to how we are to deal with the savage and the wants of men from seeing how God dealt with nascent man, for the bottom of society represents the beginnings of the world.34

In the sermon on “Beginnings”, that is, Genesis, Beecher continued his argument that Genesis is the word of God to the people of his age regardless of authorship and problems with the details. The mere name of the author of a book is not half so important as the nature of its contents. The result in my mind is about this, that these books were very largely produced by Moses or under his direction: either compiled – as the first twelve chapters: or, as the subsequent chapters, formed from legends, traditional histories, or other material, giving the same sequences, accounts of the patriarchs down to his own time, and then adding his own personal history, and the history of the different tribes and of their wanderings until they came to the Promised Land. I have no doubt that the substantial basis of the books was from the hand of Moses, or that they were written by some clerk or Levite under his direction. But that there were not corrections and re-editings of them by other hands is not so plain. These may have been made at a comparatively late period, during the regn of the kings, and not far from the Babylonian intrusion.35

Farrar on Progressive Revelation and Progress Farrar also strongly believed that God adapted the message of the Scriptures from the more simple in primitive times to the more complex as humans grew in insight and knowledge. Toward the last of his lectures on Interpretation, Farrar underlined the progressive nature of revelation: The Bible furnishes no exception to this universal law; but it stands alone among sacred books in that it is avowedly the record of a progressive revelation, of a revelation not homogeneous throughout in value and importance, but given fragmentarily and multifariously in many portions and many ways.36

34 35 36

Ibid., pp. 63–64. Ibid., pp. 50–51. Farrar, History of Interpretation, p. 4.

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Farrar, however, criticized those who set out wholesale to reject the basics of the Christian faith. He said he empathized with those who manifested real doubt, but he did not have time for those who thought that progress is realized simply through rejecting what the forefathers believed.37 As a word to those who had genuine reservations about certain items in the Old Testament he stated, Or, again, you feel uncertainties about parts of the Old Testament; about Balaam’s ass, or the sun standing still, or a dead man being raised to life by touching Elisha’s bones, or that Eden was an actual garden, with an actual serpent in it; or a thousand other things … then let them go … These questions have to do with criticisms, with archaeology, with definitions of authenticity and inspiration and Semitic metaphor, and many other complex matters. To hold any particular view about them will not make you, by the millionth part of a scruple, a worse or a better man. They have, therefore, nothing to do with religion. They are not “generally necessary to salvation”.38

The Desirability of Progress One of the main premises by which Farrar supported biblical criticism was that progress is inherently good. He contended that Christians needed to accommodate and relate to progress as it occurs. Beecher likewise extolled progress, but it was not the fundamental premise for him that it was for Farrar. Farrar welcomed the new developments as he apprehended them in scientific investigation, commercial invention, in the new insights gained regarding humankind, and in biblical studies. I will especially highlight those items in his sermons that are pertinent to the higher criticism controversy. Farrar argued that the progress of Christianity as a regenerative force was a warrant for its authenticity. The claim that God sent his Son into the world “had been tested by nineteen centuries of human study and progress … to be the power of God unto salvation to all them that believe”:39 After these nineteen centuries of sanctification, of victory, of wisdom and enlightenment, may we not ask with tenfold force of every sceptic, 37

Ibid., pp. 131–33. Frederic W. Farrar, Sermons and Address Delivered in America (New York, 1886), pp. 134–35. 39 Frederic W. Farrar, The Life of Lives: Further Studies in the Life of Christ (New York, 1900), p. 32. 38


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“Why should it be thought a thing incredible with you that God should have granted to our fallen race the most priceless of all blessing by sending forth His Son into the world, and that he should have done this, not to condemn the world, but that the world through Him might be saved?”40

We learn specifically how Farrar marshaled his claims as he ended his book on Jesus Christ: Ulfila converted the Goths; St. Anskar the Scandinavians; St. Boniface the Germans; St. Patrick the Irish; St. Columba the Northern Britons; St. Aidan the Northumbrians; St. Remigius the Franks; St. Augustine, of Canterbury, the English. Two nations, England and Spain, owed their conversion to Gregory the Great. The heralds of the Cross went forth into every region conquering and to conquer. To prove how the tide of Christianity is ever advancing, it may suffice to say that if at the end of the third century the whole race of mankind had passed by in long procession, not more than one in one hundred twenty would have been a Christian. Had they passed by fifty years ago, not more than one in five; but were they this moment to pass by one by one before our eyes, it is probable that one in three would have heard the name and accepted the faith of Christ. …we may feel an ever-deepening confidence that now the time is not far distant when He who was lifted on the Cross will draw all men unto Him.41

Farrar saw the progressive work of God not simply in the Scripture but even in secular history. For secular History too is a revelation. It is, as Vico called it, “a civil Theology of Divine Providence”. To refuse the plain teaching of advancing experience may be a more essential blasphemy than to reject humanly-invented theories of Inspiration, or methods of explaining Scripture – whether Rabbinic, Alexandrian, Patristic, Scholastic, or Reformed.42

Perhaps Farrar’s clearest statement regarding Christians and progress may be found in his sermon “Things Which Cannot be Shaken”, preached at Holy Trinity Church in Philadelphia on 11 October 1885.43 For his text Farrar took Hebrews 12:27, “And this word, Yet once more, signifieth the removing of those things that are shaken, as of things that are made, that those thing which cannot be shaken may remain”. It is

40 41 42 43

Ibid., pp. 32–33. Ibid., p. 423. Farrar, The History of Interpretation, p. 10. Farrar, Sermons and Address Delivered in America, pp. 128–45.

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Farrar’s conclusion that God works out his ever-increasing purposes in history and therefore the new and the old exist intermingled and the old that is transitory drops by the wayside: To cling to the old when the new demands our attention and our allegiance, has been a constant error and indolence of mankind … So it was with the Jews in the days of Paul and Apollos. Christ had come, and they could not get beyond Moses. The Gospel taught them the spirit of Christ, and they preferred the fires of Elijah. The Gospel offered them freedom, and they hugged yet closer the yoke of bondage. Apostles were preaching, and they preferred Leviticus to St Paul and St. John … An unprogressive church is a dying church; a retrogressive church is a dead church.44

He argued that one should turn from “the non-essential things which can be shaken” in order to embrace those which remain.45 What is significant is believing in God and his Son, Jesus Christ and being pure, holy, temperate, sober, chaste, honest, truthful, sweet, gentle, sincere, just, merciful, and humble. Above all, one must love God with one’s whole heart and one’s neighbor as oneself.46 He then advanced the standard arguments for the existence of God: he was the source of (1) matter, (2) motion, (3) life, (4) design in the universe, (5) consciousness, (6) free-will, and (7) conscience.47 When we are convinced of the existence of God we are led to the simple Gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ. Farrar then concluded that if believers embraced the truths that cannot be shaken, they will not be threatened by those items which can be. The latter would include the observations of the higher critics. In this manner Farrar reduced the anxieties over the new winds blowing in biblical studies. If we are Christians, if we are sincere and good men, there is nothing that can terrify us … We believe in the Father who created, in the Son who redeemed, in the Holy Ghost who sanctifieth us! That faith is sufficient, is more than sufficient whereby to live, wherein to die.48

In this sermon Farrar undertook to delineate those aspects of Christianity which must remain from those that are transitory. The

44 Ibid., p. 129. On the significance of progress see also Frederic W. Farrar, History of Interpretation, p. xv. 45 Ibid., p. 136. 46 Ibid., pp. 135–36. 47 Ibid., pp. 137–40. 48 Ibid., p. 145.


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transitory may be given up.49 After all, Scriptures are both human as well as divine and it is needful for believers to move beyond primitive beliefs which may be discovered in the earlier parts of the Bible: The supremacy of the Scriptures is assured when they are seen to be human as well as divine, and are not regarded as the sole source of revelation, but rather as the record of its progressive development.50

Farrar not only believed in progress or progression of revelation, but likewise in the history of interpretation itself. Farrar presented his own views on the interpretation of the Scriptures in the Preface and the first lecture in the Bampton series His first premise was that methods of interpretation never should remain static. He declared he would draw attention to the inevitable change in the conditions of criticism which has been necessitated alike by the experience of the Christian Church and by that advance in knowledge which is nothing less than a new revelation of the ways and works of God.51

The Bible may not change, neither does nature, but the methods of studying both do: It may be said that the Bible is the same to-day as it was a thousand years ago. Yes, and Nature too is the same now as she was in the day of Pythagoras; but it is as impossible to interpret the Bible now by the methods of Aqiba or Hilary as it is to interpret Nature by the methods of Pythagoras.52

Furthermore, he drew upon the proposals of Darwin and Hegel in declaring that the history of interpretation may actually improve over the span of time: Exegesis has often darkened the true meaning of Scripture, not evolved or elucidated it. This is no mere assertion. If we test its truth by the Darwinian principle of “the survival of the fittest,” we shall see that, as a matter of fact, the vast mass of what has passed for Scriptural interpretation is no longer deemed tenable, and has now been condemned and rejected by the wider knowledge and deeper insight of mankind. If we judge of it by the Hegelian principle that History is the objective

49 In his History of Interpretation, Farrar develops at some length the giving up of those wrong beliefs and interpretation which do not stand the test of time (pp. 5–6). 50 Farrar, Sermons and Address Delivered in America, p. 433. 51 Farrar, History of Interpretation, p. ix. 52 Ibid., p. xi.

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thomas h. olbricht development of the Idea, and that mankind is perfectible by passing through certain phases of thought, which are in themselves the only moments of transition, then we shall see that past methods of interpretation were erroneous, and how they originated, and why they were erroneous, because the course of History has stripped off the accidents which pertained to the enunciation of truth, and given us a nearer insight into the truth itself.53

Farrar offered concrete examples of the manner in which progress in interpretation had benefited the study of the Bible: The growth of criticism helped still more completely to break down the hard superstition on which the whole system of Protestant Scholasticism was based. First among the name of the critics who rendered this service stands that of Ludovicus Cappellus (†1722). His Critica Sacra, published in 1650, marked an epoch. Among the extravagances of reformed theology had been an assertion as to the miraculously perfect integrity of the text … Cappellus admitted that there had been no willful corruption; but from parallel passages, from the differences in numbers, from New Testament quotations, from reference in Philo, Josephus, and the Fathers from the Keri and Kethrib, from the reading of Ben Asher … he proved that the Masoretic text furnished numberless examples of the infirmity, somnolence, and ignorance of Scribes.54

Farrar argued that exegesis tends to become non-natural for two reasons: the growth of religious practices and rites not known in Scripture, and opinions resulting from the natural progress of the intellect or by intercourse with other nations.55 Despite the miscues and distortions, however, Farrar believed that each age of interpretation employed certain praiseworthy methods from which the modern Christian may learn. Later generations may benefit by discerning the mistakes of earlier ones: How then is it possible better to maintain the divine authority of the Holy Scriptures than by pointing out, and by forsaking, the errors whereby men have so often wrested them alike to their own destruction and to the ruin and misery of their fellow men. How can we better prove their sacredness and majesty than by showing that in spite of such long centuries of grievous misinterpretation they still remain when rightly used, a light unto our feet and a lamp unto our paths?56

53 54 55 56

Ibid., p. 9. Ibid., pp. 386–87. Ibid., p. 11. Ibid., p. 42.


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Beecher on Analogical Interpretation In “Beginnings” Beecher adds a third argument regarding statements that seem unbelievable. Such statements need not be taken literally but are allegorical: The next notable passage in the book of Genesis is the account of the Garden of Eden, in which it is said our first parents, Adam and Eve, were placed. This has been held to be a literal statement of fact. I do not so take it. I side with that large number of devout Christian men and scholars who think this to be an allegory, containing a profound spiritual meaning: who think that the man is the fact – not the story in which the meaning of the fact is conveyed … The New Testament is full of parables: and the Old Testament is all alive and glowing with Oriental poetic imagery.57

Beecher did not embrace many of the newer views on the Pentateuch. For example, Wellhausen denied that much of the basic form and content of the Pentateuch should be attributed to Moses, while Beecher contended that Moses was basically the author. Beecher’s understanding of the authorship of the Pentateuch leaned more toward the traditional view of Mosaic authorship than that of the documentary positions. Beecher’s chief contribution was his rhetorical moves through which he sought to allay the fears of those who contended that higher criticism would bring Christianity crashing down. Beecher depicted an understanding of the Pentateuch in his three basic premises that declared that the challenges did not destroy the real significance of the Old Testament. Despite the developing perspectives running counter to conventional conclusions, the proper comprehension of what the Scripture after all is sidesteps the destructive tendencies of higher criticism. Farrar on the Analogical Farrar likewise accepted the possibility that various items in Scripture may be analogical or allegorical. But he cautioned against past attempts to allegorize a considerable portion of the Scriptures. The methods of

57 Beecher, Bible Studies in the Old Testament, p. 57. The claim in the latter part of the 20th century is that the rhetorical genre is that of a myth.

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interpretation he questioned included the Halakhic, the Kabbalistic, the Traditions, the Hierarchic, the Inferential, the Allegorical, the Dogmatic, the Naturalistic, and the Mystical.58 He argued that though the Bible had often been misinterpreted, its divine authority had never been compromised any more than the misinterpretations of nature had disproved divine creation.59 Furthermore, however valuable or distorted exegesis is, it can never injure the word of God contained within the Scriptures: The Bible is not so much a revelation as the record of a revelation, and the inmost and most essential truths which it contains have happily been placed above the reach of Exegesis to injure, being written also in the Books of Nature and Experience, and on the tables which cannot be broken, of the heart of Man.60

Farrar held strongly to the need for human reason to be employed so as to ascertain the meaning, morality and evidence of revelation. He quoted with approval the statement of Herbert Marsh (1757–1839), Lady Margaret Professor of Divinity at Cambridge and author of A History of Sacred Criticism (1809): “No apology can be required for applying to the Bible the principles of reason and learning; for if the Bible could not stand the test of reason and learning it could not be what it is – a work of divine wisdom. The Bible therefore must be examined by the same laws of criticism which are applied to other writings of antiquity.” So wrote Bishop Herbert Marsh.61

Conclusions It is clear that through their preaching that Henry Ward Beecher, an American, and Frederic W. Farrar, an Englishman, hoped to gain acceptance of the newly emerging views of the biblical critics among their parishioners. In the early part of the 20th century those wishing to maintain conventional views engendered great stress in the mainstream churches by launching charges of modernism and heresy against

58 59 60 61

Farrar, History of Interpretation, p. 435. Ibid., p. xiv. Ibid., p. xiv. Ibid., p. xvii.


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the critics. In another decade, realignments occurred in the churches bringing together fundamentalists and liberals and thereby creating major fractures in the Protestant churches. Both Beecher and Farrar were apt rhetoricians. They were successful in gaining acceptance of biblical or higher criticism among those who regularly attended their services. They achieved this end by appealing to the commonplace commitments of the forward-looking people in the pews. Beginning with these presuppositions, they set out to convince their congregations of the merits of higher criticism.62 Their rhetorical arguments were located in the premises of their rhetorical syllogisms, that is, the enthymemes of their listeners. The common premises of Beecher and Farrar are much the same. Beecher argued (1) that revelation from God in the various books of the Bible is adapted to the age and people to whom it is written and that these characteristics differ in various details from the modern age. (2) That the Old Testament is still a word of God for the church, but in regard to its theological and morals principles and not so much pertaining to specific opinions and details. (3) That it is the content of Scripture, not its authorship, that is crucial. (4) Higher Criticism is needed so that those parts of the Scriptures that are foreign to the modern age may be set aside in order that a confident, vibrant appreciation of the Bible emerge. Farrar contended that (1) The church must be progressive to survive. (2) The concept of progress is suitable to Christianity since the manner in which God revealed himself in Scripture is progressive. (3) That which is permanent in Scripture and Christianity is the disposition, commitment, morality and ethics of the believer. Many of the details are transient. (4) The methods of interpreting the Scriptures progress over time. (5) Higher criticism will strengthen the faith of modern Christians. Beecher dwelt more on adaptation and accommodation while Farrar returned again and again to the progressive nature of the church and revelation. Dorrien, in an observation regarding the contribution of Beecher, wrote, “Beecher made a singular contribution to the development and

62 Basil Willey has done an excellent job depicting the common premises of the times. See his More Nineteenth Century Studies: a Group of Honest Doubters (Cambridge, 1980); Nineteenth-century Studies: Coleridge to Matthew Arnold (London, 1973); Nineteenth Century Studies (New York, 1966).

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legitimization of American liberal Protestantism as a whole. In his journalism, lecturing, and preaching, mid Victorian middle-class Americans took heart that religion, science, and American progress all worked together”.63 Much the same may be declared regarding Farrar in England.

63

Dorrien, The Making of Liberal Theology, p. 181.

PART TWO

SERMON AND SOCIETY IN THE BRITISH EMPIRE

MISSIONS, SLAVERY, AND THE ANGLICAN PULPIT, 1780–1850 Bob Tennant Crowds gather round the foreign preacher in China, but this is often a temporary phase, with curiosity for its leading motive. His appearance, mistakes in speech, and attitudes are satirised, jeered at, and mimicked. One of the most popular theatrical performances in Shanghai a few years ago was a clever farce, representing a foreign missionary preaching to a crowd of Chinese.1 [This] meeting, while it sincerely regrets the baneful influence of the revived Slave Trade on the Susoo and Bullorn Missions of the [Church Missionary Society], rejoices in the opportunity of … bringing numbers of [liberated and slave] Negroes to the knowledge and enjoyment of true Religion.2

Introduction The above are salutary passages for the modern reader. Preaching to non-Christians was intended to raise missions’ “profile” – the Salvation Army later called it “drawing the enemy’s fire” – while for even the abolitionists the redemption of souls generally took priority over legal freedom. The above resolution, which might seem to be opportunistic and envisaging a passive political existence for Black Africans, was moved at the 1820 Annual Meeting of the Church Missionary Society by William Wilberforce himself. This was not a mere tactic but a guiding principle: he moved a similar resolution in the following year.3 The present essay is not a history of organizations; indeed, benefiting from excellent recent work,4 it assumes a basic knowledge of the 1

Isabella Bird, The Yangtze Valley and Beyond (London, 1899), p. 518. CMS Annual Report (1820), minutes of Annual General Meeting, p. 7. Italics supplied. 3 For convenience, the acronym “CMS” is used throughout, including for the early years when the Society was actually called “The Society for Missions to Africa and the East”. 4 In the past twenty years studies of the missionary movement have moved decisively out of chronicle and hagiography and into scholarship. Thus there are so many excellent recent scholarly works about the history of missions that it is invidious to 2

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histories of the SPG, SPCK, CMS, LMS, and BMS.5 Rather, it attempts a critical analysis of the missionary movement’s preaching and offers a thesis about the development of the sermon as the chief transformational tool in what may be called British Christianity’s great extroversion, a movement spiritual as well as geographical. It is confined mainly to the Church of England, the biggest contributor of human and financial resources, with the most complex relationship with politics and commerce, and therefore the greatest richness of rhetorical and metaphorical activity. It deals not with historically famous figures but with stylistically and ideologically important texts, given to and on behalf of the missionary societies’ annual and district meetings and other set-piece events and the preaching of the Church in the overseas territories. It is regrettable that major organizational questions such as the Bath controversy, about the legitimacy of the CMS, and the dispute concerning the Serampore Baptist mission fall beyond our scope, because they illustrate important issues of governance in the home base.6 The difficulty of separating attempts to build make a selection, but the following general accounts are of a high standard: Brian Stanley, The Bible and the Flag (Leicester, 1990); Brian Stanley, The History of the Baptist Missionary Society 1792–1992 (Edinburgh, 1992); Andrew Porter, Religion versus Empire? (Manchester, 2004); Susan Thorne, Congregational Missions and the Making of an Imperial Culture in 19th-Century England (Stanford, 1999); Kevin Ward and Brian Stanley, eds., The Church Missionary Society and World Christianity, 1799–1999 (Grand Rapids, 2000); Rowan Strong, Anglicanism and the British Empire (Oxford, 2007). Holgar Bernt Hansen and Michael Twaddle, eds., Christian Missionaries and the State in the Third World (Oxford, 2002) gives valuable perspectives on the influence of mature missionary theology and praxis in the late imperial period. Edmund M. Hogan, The Irish Missionary Movement: A Historical Survey, 1830–1980 (Dublin, 1990) describes the small contribution of the Roman Catholic Church in Britain. K.S. Latourette’s exhaustive A History of the Expansion of Christianity (seven volumes, London, 1938 et seq) is outdated in most respects but is a good starting point, and J. Herbert Kane, A Global View of Church Missions from Pentecost to the Present (Grand Rapids, 1971) is a useful corrective, while Stephen Neill, A History of Christian Missions (Harmondsworth, 1964) remains the best short account. Among his many works, Andrew Walls, The Missionary Movement in Christian History (New York, 1996) is especially good. The International Bulletin of Missionary Studies and The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History are essential reading, as is the website Mundus Gateway. Note: to minimize ambiguity, because of the present lack of an accepted international standard for naming sermons, the scriptural texts have throughout been added to sermon titles. 5 Incorporated Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts (founded 1701); Society for the Promotion of Christian Knowledge (1699); Church Missionary Society (1799), London Missionary Society (1795); Baptist Missionary Society (1792). 6 See Brian Stanley, The History of the BMS, chapter II.iii for the Serampore controversy. Stephen Koss, “Wesleyanism and Empire,” The Historical Journal 18.1 (1975),

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a world-wide community in Christ from the narrower task of ministering to the British inhabitants of the colonies was recognized right from the start, and each Protestant church approached it in its own way.7 Our understanding of crucial aspects of the missionary societies remains inadequate. British anti-slavery preaching is, by contrast, more familiar to us, presenting a smaller corpus and more restricted theory. The relatively short and focused campaign against the slave trade was supported, in the pulpit, mainly by existing missionary and charitable societies, while the ensuing abolitionist campaign was one of tactics rather than principles and driven by secular political organization, albeit by committed Christians. The development of the anti-slavery position as a discrete phenomenon is of great philosophical, theological, and rhetorical interest but, in Britain (in distinct contrast to the USA) belongs almost entirely to the 18th century and therefore lies beyond our scope. At the beginning of our period the institution of slavery was an accepted, if generally regretted, fact; there were virtually no overseas missions; and the Church’s long-existing parochial structures and protocols had been rendered obsolete by dramatic population growth. The Church possessed two national organizations, the SPCK and SPG, dedicated to propaganda and missionary work,8 but the Bishop of London was responsible for all Anglicans outside the home territories and in the absence of sufficient endowments such care was usually nominal: Whitefield’s and Wesley’s American Journals give a fair impression of the state of affairs which still obtained in the late 18th century. Missions could not be projected from the local level – subsequent failures by non-conformist congregations proved that – so the first requirement was the building of a national consensus to shape

105–18, provides a detailed discussion of this problem for the Methodists. Tim Jeal, Livingstone (1973; repr. London, 1975), p. 29, writes of the inhibiting effect on missions of “the autocratic discipline that the central Presbytery continued to enforce on distant churches”. 7 Insufficiently exploited evidentiary material includes Joseph Mullens, Revised Statistics of Missions in India and Ceylon. Compiled at the request of the Calcutta missionary conference (Calcutta, 1852), which is based on a questionnaire distributed to all 250 Indian missions stations. Analysis of the returns would provide objective evidence of differing understandings by the various missionary societies of the roles of priests, convert assistants, and formal preaching. 8 The “President and Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in New England”, founded in 1649 and reformed under Charles I, seems not to have survived.

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what could be described as a mass spiritual awakening.9 The Church’s main tool for this was the pulpit: at first sermons on formal occasions, to speak to and on behalf of the leading elements, and then parochial sermons, extending the consensus into the parishes. By the end of our period slavery had been abolished in law and was being driven, it was hoped, to extinction, while in India alone there were about 450 missionaries (plus several thousand teachers, “native” catechists, and others) from about eighteen missionary Societies and the beginnings of a professional native clergy. It was evident from Scripture that the Apostles themselves had undergone preparation and training for their missions and were therefore supported by some form of theoretical discipline and institutional infrastructure; the recovery and replication of these became a challenge for early British theorists.10 The techniques and procedures of conversion adopted by British missionaries were at first guided by the dominant 18th-century theories of natural religion. The initial assumption that Christianity was not culturally weighted but, as it were, carried mechanisms of persuasion and conviction in its deep structures delayed the development of dialogue with other cultures. An important factor in the development of a more useful theory was a re-assessment of the nature of the sermon: it became better understood that the sermon was an element in the Church’s internal monologue, not the dialogue with non-Christians. A history of pulpit rhetoric of the Church in missionary mode is not, therefore, an account of conversions but of the development of strategies, key symbols, and metaphors and of transformations in understanding. Developing the Home Base The slow pace of missionary endeavor by the Church of England in the 18th century at least allowed thorough discussion of theoretical issues. The SPG’s annual meetings, centering on a sermon and financial accounts alluded to and, in effect presented by, the year’s preacher, 9 This was done Church by Church, as they prepared to engage in missionary societies. A late example, from the Scottish Episcopal Church, is Michael Russell, The Agency of Human Means in the Propagation of the Gospel [John 16:5–7] (Edinburgh, 1828), a sermon preached for the [Scottish] District Committee of the SPCK. 10 For an early appreciation of this, predictably from a colonist, see Nathaniel Appleton, Isaiah’s Mission Consider’d and Applied [Isa. 6:8] (Boston, MA, 1728), p. 19.


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were attended by a fair proportion of very senior clergy as well as prominent lay philanthropists and politicians. The current Archbishop of Canterbury was always its President and from 1750 until 1892 every single preacher was a bishop.11 Its operating deficit was, until 1834, made good largely by parliamentary grants. There was great organizational continuity – only twelve Secretaries from 1701 to 1892 – and the annual sermons were always published at the Society’s expense. The existence of this ecclesiastical-political infrastructure allowed the Church to respond to opportunities to launch missions as the colonial empire developed. On the other hand, the mismanagement of the SPG’s estate in the West Indies, over a century and a quarter, showed the gap between intentions and achievement: the Society couldn’t adequately direct and resource the local personnel and, concerned as it was primarily with governance, did not fully appreciate the misery it perpetuated.12 The SPG’s first great success was arguably not in the pastoral care of colonists or the promotion of missions, which were modest affairs in its first hundred years, but in combating the slave trade. Many annual preachers spoke against slavery and in 1783 the fact that the annual sermon was published by the Society itself was used very effectively: exploiting the convention that he was preaching on behalf of the Society, Bishop Beilby Porteus advanced positions which ran ahead of consensus and provoked change. In possibly the most important of all British anti-slavery sermons, he not only argued that the possession of slaves was incompatible with Bible Christianity and criticized the Society’s own conduct with regard to its plantation but also, once the sermon was published, reprinted it with footnotes, again as a pamphlet and again in cheap form for circulation to West Indian planters and other civilians. For the next quarter century Porteus used his position in the House of Lords and the mandate he had thus wrung from the SPG to bring the House into the orbit of the anti-slavery cause being advanced in the Commons by William Wilberforce: a classic example of the legitimate manipulation of committee structures and procedural precedent. It is notable that his sermon took pains to establish not the

11

Classified Digest of the Records of the [SPG] (London, 1893), pp. 833–35. The estate had been bequeathed to the SPG in its early days, and well before the high tide of the Atlantic slave trade, by General Christopher Codrington (died 1710), with the intention of pioneering education, conversion and social improvement among the slaves. 12

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political case for abolition but the theological and spiritual case against slave ownership by planters and a wider society which were at least nominally Christian. The sermon was a masterpiece: passionate, ironical and embodying a novel, Sentimental, Christology.13 The most progressive 18th-century SPG preachers had taken a broadly Lockean view of slavery, identity, and citizenship, latterly combined with Sentimental ethics. Priest-philosophers like George Berkeley,14 Joseph Butler,15 and John Balguy,16 supported by preachers like William Berriman17 and Josiah Tucker (now best remembered for his support of the American Revolution)18 mapped routes to freedom based on the gradual acquisition of property from the cultivation of allotments and small-holdings. Tucker is worth quoting. Having laid down principles for the progress of charity school children into property-owning citizenship starting with “Working-Schools” (in which the teachers would be paid not a salary but a proportion of the profits from the children’s production of “coarse, low-priced Manufacture”) he moved on to consider slavery, thus explicitly identifying the status of slaves with that of charity children. Slavery “will ever be found to be … repugnant to the Principles of common Justice and Humanity”; for both slaves and charity children, “enjoy[ing] the Fruits of their own Labour” is the way to freedom.19 Legal freedom was, however, not a priority. Martin Benson, preaching in 1740, had presented a formal legal opinion that conversion did not bring freedom with it, and this was emphasized through the century, latterly perhaps as a campaigning tactic when the Societies were concentrating on the conversion of slaves and the abolition of the slave trade rather than slavery as

13

For an analysis of this sermon see Bob Tennant, “Sentiment, Politics, and Empire: A Study of Beilby Porteus’s Anti-Slavery Sermon,” in Discourses of Slavery and Abolition, ed. Brycchan Carey, Markman Ellis, and Sarah Salih (London, 2004), pp. 158–74. 14 George Berkeley, A Sermon Preached before the [SPG] … February 18, 1731 [John 17:3] (London, 1732). Note: 1731 is Old Style; the year was 1732 New Style. 15 Joseph Butler, A Sermon Preached before the [SPG] … February 16, 1738–9 [Matt. 24:14], in Works, ed. W.E. Gladstone, 2 (Oxford, 1897). 16 John Balguy, Sermon Occasioned by a Publick Collection for the Propagation of the Gospel (Gal. 6:10), Sermons, 1, 3rd edition (London, 1790). 17 William Berriman, A Sermon Preached before the Honourable Trustees for Establishing the Colony of Georgia [Deut. 26:9–10] (London, 1739). 18 Josiah Tucker, A Sermon Preached … [at] the Yearly Meeting of the Children Educated in the Charity-Schools …[Prov. 22.6] (London, 1766). 19 Tucker, A Sermon., pp. 11–14, 18, 19. Dickens and Blake (“Holy Thursday”) were Sentimental critics of what was by intention a philosophically progressive policy.


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an institution.20 In 1786, Bishop Thomas Thurlow, while preaching of the urgent need of the slaves for protection from inhumane treatment, remarked, “If the unhappy Africans are, as is generally supposed, the descendants of Ham, how wonderfully is the prophetic voice of Noah accomplished in the lot of his posterity!”,21 a belief much repeated in America for many decades. As late as 1825 H.B. Wilson’s reference to Africans as “sons of Adam” rather than “sons of Ham” was sharply pointed: Wilson, a leading evangelical scholar and Assistant Secretary of the SPG, was preaching about the need and legitimacy of founding overseas dioceses and opening the Church to everyone within the English sphere of influence. Despite the fact that Africans’ perceived moral turpitude was not blamed for their becoming slaves, the metaphors around slavery, spiritual freedom, knowledge, and understanding were so fundamental to inherited thinking that the distinction between slave workers and enslaved souls was never made. This is why Wilson also believed that the plantations and colonies exhibited individual rather than systematic injustice: “[there] is [now] greater deference [among colonials] paid to public opinion. Public opinion is more than ever in accordance with the moral fitness of things …”.22 Given that virtually the entire leading personnel of the SPG was involved in the abolition campaigns, such statements serve to emphasize both the priority of spiritual over legal freedom and the belief that the nation’s morale was developing wholesomely in conjunction with the expansion of the missions and the secular empire. Preaching an important sermon to the 1811 annual meeting of the CMS, Melville Horne, recently returned to Britain from his post of chaplain to the colony of Sierra Leone and only the second CMS annual preacher fresh from the field, demonstrated a full-blown Romantic rhetoric and exegetical method. He developed his text – “I can do all things through Christ which strengtheneth me” – into a portrayal of the missionary as Romantic hero: It is not a temporary, but an everlasting adieu, which he must bid to his native soil … [It] is not even the death of a martyr … which only he is to

20 Martin Benson, A Sermon Preached before the Incorporated Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts [Mal. 1:11] (London, 1740), p. 19. 21 Thomas Thurlow, A Sermon Preached before the Incorporated Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts [Matt. 24:14] (London, 1786), p. 19. 22 H.B. Wilson, A Sermon on Behalf of the [SPG] Preached in … St. Mary Aldermary … February 27, 1825 [Isa. 40:45] (London, 1825), pp. 10, 12, 13, 17.

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bob tennant encounter. To every principle of flesh and blood, he must die daily. His life is one martyrdom; and, with St. Paul, he must bear about, in his body, the dying of the Lord Jesus. Every active and passive virtue, the Hero and the Saint, must be called into habitual exercise. Universal temperance and self-denial – fervent zeal, tempered with the meekness of heavenly wisdom – restless activity … supported by invincible fortitude, and perfected by patient industry – and perseverance full of joyful hope – these graces combine to form the grand outline of the Christian missionary. His labours end only with his life … and that may terminate … in the midst of a ferocious multitude, or alone, unsheltered and without a friend to close his eyes.23

Horne was unusually militaristic24 and willing to engage in constitutional fisticuffs. With a reference to the evangelical push to change the constitution of the East India Company to favor missionary activity he laid out, in a succession of short, simple sentences, the “duty of this Association [which] is neither to be ashamed of Missions, nor to despair of their success, nor to be fastidiously delicate in the exertion of its influences to promote them”;25 welcomed the prospect of the slaves becoming fellow-citizens;26 decried the Church for lagging behind the Baptists, Methodists, Moravians, and Dutch; and ended recalling the battle of Trafalgar: In comparison of [dying “under the immediate eye of the Captain of your Salvation”], how poor is it, to fall, like Nelson, in the arms of Victory – covered with stars, and laurels, and honourable wounds; and to be embalmed with a nation’s tears!27

In Horne we note the evangelical blurring of the categories “slave” and “free heathen” and the reinterpretation of Apostolic missions as a heroic expense – even sanctified profligacy – of energy. What is especially notable is that the sermon’s center of gravity lay not in its exegesis but, as we have seen, in allusion to a doctrine of Christian empire which emerges from contemporary events and sensibilities.28

23 Melville Horne, Anniversary Sermon [Phil. 4:13], in CMS Annual Report, 1811, pp. 187–89. 24 Ibid., p. 181. 25 Ibid., p. 186. 26 Ibid., p. 201. 27 Ibid., pp. 208, 212–13. 28 The cultural relationship between missions and empire has been explored most thoroughly by Andrew Porter, Religion versus Empire? and his earlier article, “ ‘Cultural Imperialism’ and Protestant Missionary Enterprise, 1780–1914,” Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 25.3 (1997), 367–91.


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This development is associated with the Sentimental movement and with a particular type of Christology. Thus Robert Morehead, the Scottish Episcopalian minister and poet, who shipped sermons and other evangelical materials to India and saw two sons become leading figures there: The sacred fountains of sorrow [i.e., Christ’s tears] flow for the purification of the soul. But that Gospel, which represses not the tears of [Christ’s] humanity, lights up the radiance of hope in [Christ’s] eyes from which they fall; it draws the veil of mortality aside, and points to the glories of that region into which the immortal spirit enters. Standing on the holy elevation of the cross of Christ, we now behold the clouds roll away from the valley of the shadow of death; – we see opening beyond them, the innumerable mansions of the virtuous, and, washed from all their earthly stains, in the blood which streamed for their redemption, we see them prepared to enter into the joy of their Lord.29

Delivering a charge on 9 July 1818 to a German SPCK missionary about to depart for India, J.H. Pott seeks a high rhetorical tone. He moves from the adjectival formality of 18th-century language – “the conversion of the heathen [is] one great object of [the SPCK’s] anxious and assiduous regard” – to more fashionable, Flaxmanesque, personification – “Before those blasts [of conquests in India] commerce fled, and agriculture drooped in hopeless indolence” – and on to psychological analysis of the Hindus, who possess “the desperate resolve, the cold, deliberate, yet frantic purpose of the self-devoted zealot [who voluntarily drowns in the Ganges]”. This is a reference not only to alien customs but to the Anglican perception of the Hindu religion as essentially deist. This view was, incidentally, reinforced by a number of early Brahmin converts moving on to Unitarianism. The missionary could only reply, “My duties … are still strange to me, with regard to their particular objects”30; this a century after the SPCK first put a missionary in the field and at a time when the SPCK had already distributed millions of Bibles and other items. Such deficiencies were

29 Robert Morehead, On the Good Name of the Dead [Eccles. 7:1], cited from its most popular edition: vol. 6 of The Sunday Library, ed. Rev. T.F. Dibdin (London, 1831), p. 204. See Bob Tennant, “On the Good Name of the Dead: Peace, Liberty and Empire in Robert Morehead’s Waterloo Sermon,” Religion in the Age of the Enlightenment, no. 1 (New York, forthcoming). 30 Joseph Holden Pott, A Charge Delivered at a Special General Meeting of the [SPCK] … Together with Mr. Sperschneider’s Address to the Board (London, 1818), pp. 3, 9, 14, 33.

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not unique to the Church of England, of course. It is not surprising to find the Presbyterian pioneer John Love, a founder, among other missionary ventures, of the LMS, preaching in similar terms in 1794, mixing Ossianic and Flaxmanesque imagery with that of Classical science: Awaking from the sleep of atheistical carnality, we no longer dream of a self-supported system of matter; or of a chaos of human spirits, like the dance of ungoverned atoms, wandering at random … Mountains, Islands of my country! mansions of care and poverty, retreats of darkness, let my spirit melt over you while I rehearse in the ears of your benefactors the words of ancient prophecy [i.e., Isa. 35:1–2]31

Love’s lack of grounding in the reality of missionary work corresponds to that of the organization to which he is preaching, one of the first of those now coming into existence: the “Corresponding Board in London of the Society in Scotland (incorporated by Royal Charter) for Propagating Religious Knowledge in the Highlands and Islands”. While it might be said that the immediate task was to arouse and channel the organization’s enthusiasm, we find Love preaching to the LMS similarly as late as 1812, still lacking contact with developed theory or practice, the florid language contrasting grotesquely with the old-fashioned Tillotsonian formality of his sermon’s tripartite structure:32 Conveyed as on eagles’ wings, I might quickly throw behind me the horrors of antichristian and hypocritical Europe, to look down into the forests, the cities, and dreary deserts of the scorched Continent of Africa, where ferocity and cunning, like those of the lions and serpents that glare around, render hazardous the approach of the most harmless and benevolent traveller.33

Other picturesque resources were drawn on by such preachers. In 1830, for the benefit of the London Association in Aid of the Missions of the United Brethren, the Anglican Henry Melvill, later a canon of St Paul’s and principal of the East India College, visualized his subject

31 John Love, Benevolence Inspired and Exalted by the Presence of Jesus Christ [Mark 12:41] (1794?), pp. 5, 15. 32 For an analysis of Tillotson’s rhetorical method, see Bob Tennant, “John Tillotson and the voice of Anglicanism,” in Religion in the Age of Reason: A Transatlantic Study of the Long Eighteenth Century, ed. Kathryn Duncan (New York, forthcoming). 33 John Love, The Power of the Bible Operating by the Ministrations of Holy Missionaries [Rom. 10:13–17] (1812?), p. 20.


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in a combination of popular entertainment (the vogue for panoramas being at its height) and Romantic chivalry: But no sooner had the rushing mighty wind, filled the place wherein the Apostles were assembled … than the scales fell away from their spiritual vision and the whole scheme of redemption developed itself like a gorgeous panorama, embracing every land and every lineage in its circuit. With enlightened apprehensions came energetic resolutions … [and] they arose like champions animate with chivalry, and hazarded their lives for the name of the Lord.34

With experience of missionary activity came a dramatic change in rhetoric. Romantic and Sentimental tropes recede and figures arising from exegesis and power politics emerge. We have already noted Wilberforce’s resolution at the CMS’ AGM; the accompanying sermon, by G.T. Noel, taught, in its Application, the Evangelical truths of the fundamental importance of Christian union, mutual charity, and compassion for the heathen.35 But doctrinal postures changed quickly. At the next CMS annual meeting (1 May 1820), again in the presence of Wilberforce, B.W. Mathias preached: The Missionaries of the United Brethren among the Greenlanders began their labours by endeavouring to convince them, by many philosophic arguments, of the existence of God; and to give them some notions of the Divine perfections: but no good followed. The Missionaries changed their ground, and represented Christ dying, the just for the unjust, to bring us to God – they pointed to the crucified Redeemer … – they preached God the Saviour, and they succeeded … they exalted Jesus on his atoning cross, and then they drew these savages unto Him.36

Hidden within this sermon, on the favorite Malachi 1:11 text (“… my name shall be great among the heathen …”), is the conviction that the CMS is fulfilling a scriptural prophecy, and can legitimately exploit the access provided by Britain’s rapidly expanding colonial empire. By now the Bible, mass-produced by the SPCK and exported world-wide by the missionary Societies, is being systematically re-read in such terms: Malachi 1:11, the text of Gilbert Burnet’s 1704 SPG sermon, and of

34 Henry Melvill, A Sermon in Behalf of the London Association in Aid of the Missions of the United Brethren [Acts 15:26], 2nd ed. (London, 1831), p. 15. 35 Gerard Thomas Noel, Anniversary Sermon … May 3, 1819 [Isa. 52:13–15], in CMS Annual Report, 1819, pp. 40–48. 36 Benjamin William Mathias, Sermon Preached … before the Church Missionary Society [Mal. 1:11], in the CMS Annual Report, 1820, p. 28.

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sermons by Benson and Edmund Law, has become loaded with the doctrines of Christian empire.37 Because of the lack of practical, stabilizing co-operation with the heathen and slaves themselves, this rhetoric of global heroic endeavor easily developed into expressions of overt patriotism, the more so because the country was at war. Thus on 19 May 1807, in the annual sermon to the CMS, Basil Woodd deftly fed this ideological assumption into the public domain’s post-abolition euphoria: The grateful sympathy of the British Nation raises a patriotic fund for her brave defenders. Justice and humanity claim this tribute for their faithful services. The valiant commander deserves the love of his country … Never did the philanthropy of Great Britain triumph more gloriously, than when, in full assembly, it brake the fetters of the enslaved, and bade the sons of Africa be free. But the benevolence of a Christian Mission stands on higher ground, and prefers a higher claim. Its object is to proclaim eternal liberty to the spiritual captives, to redeem from sin, from Satan, and from death; to break every yoke of the oppressor, and establish the glorious liberty of the children of God.38

The combination of the language of revolutionary liberty – this in the middle of the Napoleonic War! – Miltonic epic (sin, Satan, death), and 18th–century naval triumphalism is notable only because it fell to Woodd to say it first after the 1807 Act. It is an interesting and triumphalist development of the language used in the previous year’s annual sermon by Edward Burn. Adopting the old Tillotsonian sermon model, developed to establish Whig religious hegemony by analyzing and defeating opposition point by point (in what our word-processing age calls outline form), Burn advocated an aggressive strategy of prioritizing missions above trade in the national agenda – and again, one remembers that this was at a time when Britain was fighting an attempt 37

It is notable that other 18th–century uses of Malachi 1:11 do not concern evangelizing. Indeed, Samuel Clarke, who bases on it his Epiphany sermon about the name of God, remarks, “Whatever be the true Meaning of These and the like Prophecies: Whether there be a time still to come, wherein they shall be accomplished literally; Or whether they are intended only to express the natural and genuine Tendency of the universal and sincere Practice of Christianity in the present World … it becomes not Us to be too curious …” (Of the Meaning of The Name of God [Mal. 1:11], Sermons on Several Subjects, 5 [London, 1749)], p. 65). 38 Basil Woodd, Sermon … before the Society for Missions to Africa and the East [Isa. 40:5], in the Society’s Annual Report for 1807, pp. 165, 172–73. Woodd wrote the Memoirs of Mowhee, an early Maori (New Zealand) convert who died in England. The Patriotic Fund Woodd mentions rewarded meritorious service in the Napoleonic Wars.


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at a Europe-wide blockade against British trade and had an uneasy relationship with the USA, its main trading partner: … considering the access which this country commands to those quarters of the Globe immediately interested, never were the facilities for executing this merciful design [as set out in his text] so obvious or so great, as at the present moment … Besides, … you never hear it objected by those, who think it too soon to evangelize the Heathen, that the time for commercial intercourse with them is not yet. The time is thought strictly proper for the purposes of wealth, of dominion, and of national aggrandisement … [We] might … sit down, under the full ignominy of French reproach, and confess ourselves to be a nation of shop-keepers!39

Thus was the patriotic co-opted and Shelburne’s famous dictum of 1782 – “We prefer trade to dominion”40 – dismissed. Once the 1807 Act was passed it was assumed correctly that abolition of slavery itself was inevitable, but, as a political tool, restraint of trade was legally and philosophically easier than abolition of property rights; in the end the British government cut the Gordian knot by paying large sums of compensation to slave owners. Burn envisages a program of education and development in economic activity and property, the portal being the Christian faith, so that he turns from Romantic rhetoric to practical missionary work. … if we would wish for them a full participation of British privileges, civil and religious; the best pledge of our benevolence for that oppressed race [of African slaves], and the most effectual means of ameliorating their conditions, will be to extend to them, the word of the truth of the Gospel.41

The religious and ethical origins of the anti-slavery movement lie deep in the 18th century, and thus beyond our present scope, but it certainly was seen by the nation as an act of Christian charity, not as a commercial decision or political project.42 This explains why the anti-slavery and missionary movements were so closely related, both in the duplication of personnel and organization and in the development of rhetoric. 39 Edward Burn, Sermon … before the Society for Missions to Africa and the East [Acts 26:17–18], in the Society’s Annual Report for 1806, pp. 36–38. 40 Quoted by J.H. Parry, Trade and Dominion (London, 1974), p. 204. 41 Burn, Sermon, p. 44. 42 Thomas Clarkson’s History of the Rise, Progress, and Accomplishment of the Africa Slave-Trade by the British Parliament (London, 1808) is the definitive account of the view from within the campaign.

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We saw Burn’s sermon turning from patriotism and the campaigner as Romantic hero to the practical questions of education and conversion, while setting aside the national self-satisfaction over the Act. As abolition slowly approached, the situation necessarily worsened, with slave riots, a crescendo of last-ditch beatings and killings of both slaves and white campaigners and the continuing scandal of the SPG’s own Codrington Estate: an 1829 Statement admitted that polygamy there was the norm, literary and numeracy were excluded from the school curriculum, and levels of worship were low. Conditions of service at work were so generous as to suggest that high labor productivity was not considered obtainable in the prevailing political conditions.43 However, as the numbers of free Black West Indians increased, desegregation developed to some extent. In Grenada J.C. Barker, arriving as rector in 1827 (the dioceses of Barbados, which included Grenada, and Jamaica were both established in 1824), preached a stylistically combative sermon in which he noted that his congregation was bi-racial and committed himself to setting up a Sunday school for the children of domestic slaves and to educating “the children of the labouring part of the population employed upon the Estates”.44 Since he acknowledges that these were slaves, this circumlocution must have been aimed at Black sensibilities – which shows a degree of self-respect and, in some sense, of advancing political power, of at least some sections of the free and enslaved black population. In an appendix he claims that there existed schools where children, black and white, slave and free, were admitted equally. A year into his ministry he is even bolder: abandoning the “outline-structure” sermon for the more modern, Romantic “linear” form (less argumentative exegesis, more persuasive rhetoric), he describes the schools’ monitor system45 (developed in India at Porteus’ behest and exported by him as Bishop of London to the West Indies as well as to the new “National” schools in England) and, in a footnote,46 presents statistics from London seeking to demonstrate that 43 [anon.], A Statement Relative to Codrington College (London, 1829), passim. Meal breaks (p. 26) totaled three hours in a 12-hour day, twice the statutory minimum in Britain’s Agricultural Wages Board regulations in 2007. 44 J.C. Barker, The Duty and Means of Promoting Christian Knowledge: a Sermon Preached at St. George’s Church Grenada, on Sunday, June 17th, 1827. Being the Second Anniversary of the Establishment of the Grenada District Committee of the [SPCK] [Matt. 28:19–20] (Grenada, 1827), pp. 10, 11. 45 J.C. Barker, The Education of the Poor, a Religious Duty [Matt. 25:40] (Grenada, 1828), p. 12. 46 Ibid., p. 9.


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education virtually eliminates youth crime. His bi-racial congregation exhibits a definite wish for social cohesion, however stratified by class and race. If the reality outside the church walls was somewhat different, that is, after all, the case at all stages of the history of a Church which seeks to persuade, not command. The emerging new rhetoric is best observed in the preaching of Claudius Buchanan, who was the single most influential priest in the movement’s “heroic” period and who, in 1810, delivered a set of sermons which changed missionary preaching fundamentally. He was both an exemplar and an innovator. Positioned within the Church of England but active as a missionary and organizer, he was subject to the same ideological and doctrinal stresses as the other early missionaries, while finding perhaps sounder solutions to the some of the problems. We will look briefly at three of his sermons. When Buchanan preached to the CMS’ annual meeting in 1810, he was the first person with missionary experience to do so and this made an extraordinary difference to the Society’s sense of purpose and reality. Indeed, this was possibly the single most important sermon ever given in the missionary movement. It was supported by a 295-page account of the condition of India, which was quarried by preachers and pamphleteers for the next generation and marked the beginning of a developing praxis in the home base, which would transform the relationship with the field. Buchanan took as his text Matthew 5:14 – “Ye are the light of the world” – and was to return to the theme of spiritual light in two sermons preached three weeks later (1 July 1810) before the University of Cambridge.47 Images of light and of the city on the hill are sanctioned by Scriptures and central to the Christian imagination, reinforced by a complex of Augustinian metaphors. They are so pervasive and powerful that no one strand of Christian activity could wholly appropriate them (unlike, for example, the word “glorious”, which was virtually shanghaied by a navy-based triumphalism in the second half of the 18th century), but intensified British contact with “black” people gave them additional resonance, so that, as it were, the metaphors of Othello were 47 The three sermons and report are collected in a much-reprinted publication of fundamental importance: Claudius Buchanan, Two Discourses Preached before the University of Cambridge, on Commencement Sunday, July 1st, 1810 [Gen. 1:3], and a Sermon Preached before the [CMS] …, June 12, 1810 [Matt. 5:14]. To which are Added, Christian Researches in Asia (London, 1812). All page references to Buchanan are to this edition. The CMS sermon is also printed in the CMS’ 1810 Annual Report.

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transformed into vehicles for expressing and formulating operational principles for the Church in its new missionary mode. Thus the Church is seen not only as organized light but also, in a somewhat less extended metaphor, a temple. Henry Venn was to develop this in some detail.48 “The term ‘edifying’, he says, “is one peculiar to the Christian Church. It is borrowed from a metaphor very familiar to the Sacred Writers … The members … are hence styled ‘living stones’ …”. Architecturally, churches are buildings designed to play with the metaphor of light and its diffusion; William Goode, preaching the annual CMS sermon in his own church, could draw attention to a missionary and a black African (both unnamed) sitting in the congregation, “[serving] to diffuse the knowledge of Christianity through the Earth”49 and Buchanan, returning from India and speaking with all the authority of the traveller and activist, uses light and City of God texts as the exegetical basis of his sermons:50 Christianity has again, after a lapse of so many ages, assumed its true character as ‘the Light of the world’ … [and will] extend its blessings ‘to all nations.’ … [The] present period [is] a Third Era of Light … [The] Church of England … standing as she does like a Pharos among the nations, [is] to be herself the Great Instrument of Light to the world.

The Church is a lighthouse, a role shared with the University of Cambridge: “… [The] Voice of the Church is to be heard at the Universities. Is it not this University that gave the light of Science to the World? Let it also give the light of religion”. Explicitly adopting the Tillotsonian tripartite, argumentative sermon structure,51 Buchanan starts by dealing with natural religion, a problem, as we have seen, when debated with sophisticated Hindus: Christ is the Fountain of Light; that is, of spiritual light. For, as the light of reason was conferred on the first man, Adam, and is natural to all

48 Henry Venn, Academical Studies Subservient to the Edification of the Church [1 Cor. 14:12] (Cambridge, 1828), especially pp. 18–20. 49 William Goode, CMS Sermon, May 19, 1812 [Ps. 72:17], in CMS Annual Report 1812, pp. 367, 364. Goode lent the CMS his study in its early days, hence its meeting at his church, St Ann’s, Blackfriars. See G.G. Cuthbert, Brief Account of the Jubilee of the [CMS] (Calcutta, 1849), p. x. The following quotations are from pp. 34–38 and 38. 50 Gen. 1:3 (“Let there be light …”) for his Cambridge Commencement sermons and for the CMS sermon Matt. 5:14: “Ye are the light of the world. A city that is set on an hill cannot be hid”. 51 “… We have introduced this doctrine into the exordium of the Discourse …” (p. 84).


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men; so the Light of LIFE cometh by the Second Adam … [The] spiritual light is not poured upon a whole nation, or upon a whole community of men by any system of education, but it is given to individuals; even to such individuals as earnestly pray for it.52

He pays tribute to William Romaine, the great, pioneering evangelical who was the incumbent in this church (St Anne’s, Blackfriars) from 1766 to his death in 1795,53 calls for the Church to support missionaries of all denominations (“[The] Church of England ought to shine upon ALL”),54 and argues for team missions: evangelists, pastors, teachers, catechists, and such “Helps of a secular kind as may be useful”;55 this is said in his sermon’s exegetical section, giving scriptural authority to a radical organizational program. Knowledge of local languages is more important than the classics, but “I have sometimes been ashamed to see the Christian Missionary put to silence by the intelligent Bramin, in some point relating to the history of Eastern nations, or to the present state of mankind …”56 Insisting on the fundamental importance of infrastructures, he emphasizes, time and again, the need for dedicated shipping. The Roman Catholic missions can rely on the Spanish navy and maritime marine, the United Brethren, “that Episcopal Body”57 (as delicate a hit at the Church of England as Buchanan’s robust wit can manage), have for fifty years charted ships for their Labrador mission and the LMS’ ship to the Pacific “will no doubt be recorded in the books of the Heathen World in ages to come”.58 Experience has shewn how difficult it is to procure a passage, in a commercial ship, for a religious family of humble condition. Nor is it proper that a family of pure manners, who never heard the holy name of God profaned in their own houses, should be exposed, during some months, to the contaminating influence of that offensive Language, which is too often permitted on board ships of war and commerce belonging to the English nation.59

This is a most economical analysis of a group of dilemmas: only gentry were acceptable as cabin passengers on merchant shipping; families

52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59

Buchanan, Two Discourses, p. 76. Ibid., p. 86. Ibid., p. 92. Ibid., p. 92. Ibid., p. 88. Ibid., p. 105. Ibid., p. 105. Ibid., p. 101.

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should be sent, not single men; religious instruction on ships was poor; humble, practical people were of most value as missionaries, because they were more inured to poverty.60 This was the first time that a preacher had raised such practical issues with a major missionary society. Buchanan turns back to the metaphors of light and then, in a passage which was adapted by many other preachers throughout the next half-century, testifies to the darkness of the heathen world: “The dark places of the earth are full of the habitations of cruelty:” Psalm lxxiv.20. I have seen the libations of human blood, offered to the Moloch of the Eastern World; and an assembly, not of two thousand only, which may constitute your number [i.e., his listeners], but of two hundred thousand, falling prostrate … before the Idol, and raising acclamations to his name …61

In studiously restrained language he describes the progress of the Juggernaut and the tactical admixture of heathen rites with Roman Catholic rituals: “In some places, the Ceremonies and Rites of Moloch are blended with the Worship of Christ! This spectacle I myself have witnessed at Aughoor …”.62 Glancing at the support available to the Pope’s Inquisition in the East (“ships of war and ships of commerce have ever been under its command; for the Vice-Roy of Goa himself is subject to its jurisdiction …”),63 and praising the “ancient Syrian Christians” in south India for translating the Bible into the “Malayalim Tongue”, he reports that there are three hundred thousand such Christians “in Malabar, Travancore and Cochin”.64 He lists five organizational needs: a dedicated ship, communications with the home base, regular supplies of all sorts, home leave for missionaries (thus emphatically denying the Romantic self-sacrifice enthused over by inexperienced colleagues) and, presumably aware of plans to establish in 1814 the diocese of Calcutta to serve India, visitations to the field “by men of learning, prudence, and piety”.65 He ends by praising what has been done so far, but leaves his listeners in no doubt about the Society’s present inadequacies. Buchanan’s massive simplicity of style, cogency of exegesis, vivid reportage, and succinct program of organizational development are 60 61 62 63 64 65

Ibid., p. 93. Ibid., pp. 95–96. Ibid., p. 97. Ibid., pp. 96–97. Ibid., p. 98. Ibid., pp. 100–105.


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unmatched elsewhere. It will be noticed that Buchanan is in no way an imperialist – indeed, he speculates that just as in Apostolic times the missions “were not associated by any authority of temporal empire”, so “[it] may be the Divine will that the promulgation of the Gospel at this time should be effected partly by the same means”66 – and sees heathen abominations as such because they correspond with scriptural accounts, not because of racial or intellectual inferiority. He is culturally less tolerant than the Roman Catholics, but this is because, in his account, the latter withhold the Bible from converts and thus do not present the hard but necessary choices between collective culture and individual redemption, which Protestants can offer only if the necessary infrastructure is in place. When Daniel Wilson, an associate of Buchanan, was in effect the metropolitan of James Chapman, the first bishop of Colombo, the latter picked up precisely these points by quoting the same Matthew text in a sermon also preached before the University of Cambridge: A stewardship like our’s, in holy things, is no light, no transient responsibility. As a city set upon a hill, we cannot be hid … We cannot divest ourselves of our high and holy trust. Its consequences must flow back in blessing or in judgement day by day upon us, unconscious as we often are; and already are beginning to flow more visibly and palpably than before …67

The metaphors of light create, of course, the most famous phrase of British imperialism: Who can look upon the small space occupied by our native islands on the face of the globe, and then turn his gaze to the vast extent of our foreign possessions, upon which it is literally true that the Sun never sets, and not confess that the lord our God must have gone before us signally and specially …68

There is, however, one exception to Buchanan’s indifference to political empire, and in the long term it proved fatal to the successful development of the theory of Christian empire. When he considers the Juggernaut and suttee, he comments that “these idolators are … our 66 Ibid., p. 111. This was a CMS sermon, hence the replacement of the more natural “propagate” (reminiscent of the SPG) by the less accurate “promulgate”. 67 James Chapman, Church Missions and a Native Ministry [Rom. 10:14–15] (Eton, 1856), p. 14. 68 Isaac Allen, [Sermon] Preached at the Camp near Kabul [Deut. 4:39–40], dated 18 and 25 September 1842, in Diary of a March through Sinde and Affghanistan (London, 1843), p. 389.

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own subjects” – not “our fellow-subjects”.69 Invoking the reproach of having tolerated the slave trade, he asks, What is there in buying and selling men, compared to our permitting thousands of women, our own subjects, to be every year BURNED ALIVE? … The honour of our nation is certainly involved in this matter. But there is no room for the language of crimination or reproach; for it is the Sin of ignorance. These facts are not generally known. And they are not known, because there has been no official enquiry.70

In abolishing the slave trade (but not the legal existence of slaves as such) the British government had not interfered with property rights but only the right to trade, which had traditionally been a matter of government interest (albeit usually of encouragement, not restraint). The powerful argument that if the trade was evil, so was the institution, spills over into Buchanan’s call for a government ban on rites involving bloodshed and death. Whether such rituals were intrinsic or (in the language of English religious toleration) merely “indifferent” to Hinduism was not for a Christian to say, and Buchanan is clear about this. But murder and induced suicide were obviously sinful and the government was actually sponsoring them financially. By taking on a political role in India, the East India Company had created a dilemma which could, finally, be solved only one way. A mood of national optimism built up after the battle of Waterloo, of which two elements are important for us. The battle witnessed perhaps the first spontaneous door-to-door collections for war victims in British history (supported by many sermons, which often published lists of donors, often of single pennies)71 and this was quickly imitated by the missionary societies. Indeed, because of the protests of the archdeacon of Bath about the constitutional illegitimacy of the CMS and the impropriety of its methods,72 a pamphlet war blew up. So, on 20 February 1818, we find the conservative J.B.S. Carwithen writing to the leading evangelical Daniel Wilson that such collections among the poor by the

69

Buchanan, Two Discourses, p. 42. Ibid., p. 43. 71 Rhetorical developments in the corpus of Waterloo sermons are closely connected with missionary sermons. See Bob Tennant, “On the Good Name of the Dead,” “Religion in the Age of the Enlightenment”, vol. 1. 72 See, for example, William Gordon Rees, Observations on the Late Protest of the Rev. the Archdeacon of Bath; and the Defence of the [CMS] by the Rev. Daniel Wilson (London, 1818), pp. 31–33. The policy of street collections was excellent psychology by the CMS, even if not compatible with Church protocols. 70


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CMS only happen “when fanaticism comes forth”.73 An anonymous pamphleteer remarks that The Ministers of the Church do not go out into the highways and hedges to scrape up all they can get, and almost compel the contributions of the poor … [in] the modern practice of urging the lower classes, almost beyond denial, to join in subscriptions, to which, however small, they can very ill afford to contribute.74

The CMS lost the theoretical argument but won the contest: it was legitimized and thus helped secure the Church overseas for the Evangelical party. The second element was satisfaction about what was universally seen as the decisive act against the institution of slavery. This conviction of moral righteousness led to a curious logical elision, which remains a prominent factor in world politics even today. Thus in the 1818 annual CMS sermon, the Rev. Prof. Farish welcomes signs of future missionary success: Shall we mention, as an example, the Abolition of the Slave Trade – long the crying sin of Christendom, and the foulest blot on the character of this Protestant Country? While this remained, could any attempt to propagate the Religion of Christ among the Heathen be considered as any thing better than hypocrisy and insult?75

The 17th-century removal of the sanctions of the civil authorities from canon law had made England essentially a secular country. More crucially, to assume that the “heathen” might regard missions from a slaveowning British people as an hypocrisy, despite slavery being endemic in virtually all parts of the world, was illogical. Specious rhetoric like Farish’s may have been effective but when projected onto missionary endeavors served to nurture the imperialist assumption that British Christian ethical priorities were valid globally. While the activity of the anti-slavery societies peaked in the 1830s, after British abolition of slavery in the Atlantic and the Americas, with massive rallies against American slavery and even calls for economic

73 J.B.S. Carwithen, A Letter to the Rev. Daniel Wilson, M.A. in Reply to his Defence of the [CMS] (London, 1818), p. 40. 74 [Anon], Observations on Mr. Daniel Wilson’s Defence of the Church Missionary Society against the Objections of the Rev. Josiah Thomas, Archdeacon of Bath (London, 1818), p. 24. 75 Rev. Prof. Farish, Sermon … 5 May 1818 [Luke 11:2], CMS Annual Report, 1818, p. 28.

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sanctions, there was little for the pulpit to do exegetically: the argument had in essence been won in 1807, although sermons continued to celebrate it. In 1837 the leading anti-slavery campaigner George Thompson could list the six million slaves in the Americas, noting that half of these were in the USA, and insisting, in block capitals, that “THE REMEDY FOR THE SLAVE TRADE IS THE ABOLITION OF SLAVERY. The market must be annihilated before the supply will cease”, a claim which adroitly avoids the question of projecting imperial power punitively into the lands which provided the unfortunate commodity “sold in the human flesh shambles of foreign Christian (!) countries”.76 But domestically it was felt that Britain had found the practical way towards abolition. Thus James Hook, preaching an annual charity schools sermon in St Paul’s Cathedral back in 1819, had argued that the lack of an established Church in the USA had led to irreligion, financial greed, slavery, and illiteracy, especially in the South,77 and such an Episcopalian analysis did not go away. At the coronation of Queen Victoria, the Bishop of London, necessarily speaking in very reserved terms, preached of “the sovereign of a mighty empire”, of “the bright, and almost cloudless sun-rise, which now gilds our horizon, [being] succeeded by a lengthened day of prosperity and happiness” and of “the glories, not of … outward dominion … but … the pure Gospel preached to all the people of the land”.78 The Dean of Lichfield, preaching in his own cathedral and not constrained by the presence of the monarch, could be more explicit: … And that which she [Victoria] may thus do for peace, may it be her happy lot also to do for freedom. Two fleeting years, at the very utmost, are all that now remain, before the last lingering remnant of what was once indeed the most bitter of oppressions, shall be for ever effaced from 76 George Thompson, An Appeal to the Abolitionists of Great Britain (Edinburgh, 1837), pp. 12, 11. The exclamation mark is Thompson’s. Contrary to Thompson, of course, modern supply-side economists emphasize the ability of supply to create demand and historians note that West African slavery both pre-existed and survived the Atlantic trade. For contemporary documentation of one instance see Tim Coates, ed., King Guezo of Dahomey, 1850–52 (London, 2001). The abolition of the slave trade created a self-sustaining slave population in the West Indies and the USA which rapidly acquired economic and political ambitions like the rest of the working-class. Emancipation was indeed inevitable. 77 James Hook, A Sermon Preached in the Cathedral Church of St. Paul, on Thursday, June 18, 1818 [2 Chron. 17:8–9] (London, 1819), appendix, pp. 53–63. 78 C.J. Blomfield, A Sermon Preached at the Coronation of Her Most Excellent Majesty Queen Victoria [2 Chron. 24:31] (London, 1838), pp. 5, 15, 18. We will return to consider the type of images and metaphors used by here by Blomfield.


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the dominions which she rules: but she has pledged her royal word that she will go on to exert the influence, which, – God be thanked, – she possesses with other rulers, in the same holy cause; will never shrink from persevering mediation, until the work of liberation is accomplished, until Slavery is renounced and put down every where, as we have renounced and put it down, and she shall hear, transmitted over the Atlantic waters, the voice of the grateful multitudes saying unto her, “thou hast loosed our bonds”.79

It was a persuasive argument that Britain’s unique politico-ecclesiastical system, and particularly the developing structures of the rapidlyexpanding empire, offered the prospect of universal freedoms. The abolition of slavery in most British possessions (and its somewhat covert continuation mainly by elements of subject peoples) helped fuel a sense of national, even racial, moral superiority which, while not justified by the reality on the ground, could be maintained as a principle.80 Preaching Overseas The number of British missionary societies is unknown – one is still rediscovered from time to time – but a figure of 200 in the 19th century would not be far out. The major Societies were not overly-centralized, the non-conformist churches often split over the doctrinal questions raised by missions, and it was possible for local groups of nonconformists, instead of forming, say, a district committee of the LMS, to pledge themselves to raising funds in the long term and to send their own missionaries abroad, to cooperate, if necessary (or possible) with pre-existing missions. A whole vast movement, the China Mission, was more a tendency than an organization and formed a congeries of loosely cooperating groups both in China and Britain. Such movements were, of course, crucially dependent on the British imperial establishment for their physical survival, so that the canard about “guns and Bibles” came into existence – even though some colonial authorities would have preferred to use guns on the missionaries than on the 79 Henry Howard, A Sermon Preached in the Cathedral Church of Lichfield, June 28, 1838 [Luke 11:2] (London, 1838), p. 12. 80 George Thompson (An Appeal to the Abolitionists, p. 8) reckoned that there were half a million slaves in Bengal, owned by Muslims and Hindus. Slave-ownership by whites continued to exist, covertly and illegally, in some colonies, even into the 1930s, but this fact was apparently generally unknown in Great Britain. See David Brion Davis, Slavery and Human Progress (Oxford, 1984), Part 3, Chapter 3.

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subject peoples. Such an alliance could have no developed theology and therefore no shared rhetoric. There was much doubt about Britain’s ability to act as the political umbrella for the missions in the way that ancient Rome had done for the successors of the Apostles.81 The CMS was perhaps the organization which most transformed this mindset. Among many possible examples, we will consider the 1809 Annual Sermon preached by Legh Richmond.82 This is of particular interest because of its 18th-century structure (a simplified version of the Tillotsonian “outline” sermon) and language: he speaks, for instance, of “the solicitude and unwearied diligence of the pastoral office”, a prototype of Melville Horne’s projection of the missionary as military, Romantic hero.83 At this early date – his was only the ninth anniversary sermon – building up to a patriotic peroration, he recommends84 that supporters “speak warmly” about missionaries, donate money, and form “subordinate societies … in different districts, under the lay superintendence of pious ministers and laymen … to seek out, train up, and watch over such persons [as might become] missionaries”. It will be noted that Richmond, a very considerable figure in the movement, hasn’t yet thought through the issue of training: he assumes that the CMS will be a means of transmission for doctrine and personnel but also that there is no essential need for central control: that, in effect, even deaneries will be competent to offer these, ready-made, to the overseas territories. Earlier in his Application, however, he makes two points as if they are not merely consensual but commonsensical: The naval and commercial eminence of this country, greater than that of all others at this present time, point it out as a most favourable period for the universal extension of the Gospel of Christ. If we, as a nation, providentially possess the empire of the seas, it becomes peculiarly incumbent upon us to sanctify our political privileges, by carrying the doctrine of salvation to all the various heathen nations, with whom those privileges afford us an intercourse … [In] the late Abolition of the Slave

81 See Indicophilus (pseud.), An Essay on the Propagation of Christianity in India, 2nd ed. (Edinburgh, 1813), who, in listing his sources, reveals how little suitable material was available to prepare missionaries for what they would find. 82 Legh Richmond, Love to Christ the only True Motive to Missionary effort [John 21:16], in CMS Annual Report, 1809. Richmond, who named his younger son Wilberforce, also wrote a popular tale, The Negro Servant. 83 Ibid., p. 407. 84 Ibid., pp. 430–31.


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Trade … Aethopia hath not stretched out her hands in vain to man, for deliverance from the slavery of the body. May she soon learn to stretch out her hands unto God; and seek deliverance from the still more dreadful captivity of the soul!85

The relationship of missions to trade and empire is not fully formulated, but it seems a question of providential obligation and physical access rather than anything more tightly integrated.86 The CMS, accepting that the SPG was at that time concentrating on the Americas, was seeking to assume responsibility for West Africa and the East. The emblematic, passive, and female Black world (presumably visualized fettered and semi-naked) is to be liberated by a (male) movement of heroic energy, led by the laity under the “lay superintendence of pious ministers …”.87 It is ironic that Richmond is unaware that in Ethiopia proper, just as in southern India, a Christian Church founded possibly in patristic times still flourished, in the only African country which would never be brought within the colonial system. It was only five years later that the first Anglican bishop outside the home territories and America began his ministry in India, an event which effected rapid change in doctrine and rhetoric. Thomas Fanshaw Middleton, created Bishop of Calcutta in 1814, found already a large British presence in India: some 30,000 rank and file European troops, plus officers for them as well as for an army of nearly 150,000 sepoys, plus the civilian employees of the East India Company.88 Informal liaisons with Indian women were the accepted norm and the problem of mixed-race children – their baptism, education, and employment (Christian converts being debarred from government and Company work) – was urgent. Middleton was energetic in establishing his diocese, and traveled far and wide delivering a series of charges, but his published sermons are evidence of the undeveloped state of Protestant Christianity in the subcontinent. As we would expect, they are addressed to the European political and economic leadership of the British hegemony, and correspondingly elegant and balanced in their syntax

85

Ibid., pp. 424–25. “Wherever ‘winds can waft, or waters roll’ the commerce of Britain tracks itself a course. To whom much is given, from them is much required” (W. Orger, A Sermon, Preached at the Chapel, Sydenham, Kent, on Sunday, September XX, MDCCCXXVII [Matt. 6:10] [London, 1827], p. 17). 87 Richmond, Love to Christ, p. 431. 88 Douglas M. Peers, Between Mars and Mammon: Colonial Armies and the Garrison State in India 1819–1835 (London, 1995), p. 257. 86

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and easy, sequential form, but there is constantly a reminder that the appeal is to the masses of heathen outside the church buildings:89 How hath Japhet, the ancestor of Europeans, been enlarged by their establishment at different periods among the descendants of Shem, the father of the nations of Asia! but most signally in that widely extended dominion which hath been given by Providence to a distant island in the west … [But] who of us has not been struck with horror at the exhibition of the last few days?90

Middleton is driven away from the Old Testament into the New by the horrors of Hindu ritual. He characterizes love as essentially Christian, a faith whose Christology is distinguished from the religion of Old Testament and Indian heathen alike and, seeking security in beautifully balanced syntax, sees Hinduism as a kind of deism: In what a light does deism, if closely examined, place the deity? It leaves him in possession of perfect attributes, which are, however, but imperfectly exercised: it recognises his sovereignty, but would suspend his functions: it admits and even insists upon his mercy, but in a way which forbids us any longer to consider him as infinitely just, and which affords us no means of asserting his holiness … It is also allowable to ask of those, who profess to admit no test but reason, whether life is rational without religion?91

Middleton moves towards seeing the British, as an imperial force, engaged on a mission: May the Almighty … make you [the congregation] instruments of revealing to those, who are still in darkness, the glory of Zion, that so it may radiate from this favoured spot [the church in the fort in Colombo], and be visible throughout the Eastern world!92

The bishop and his congregation are strictly analogous to Paul and his churches in first-century Roman Asia (for example, “it is yet difficult for us to read such passages as my text … without some application of

89

All quotations from T.F. Middleton, Sermons and Charges (London, 1824). Middleton, National Providence [Acts 17:26–27], p. 54. The sermon was preached on 13 April 1815, on the General Thanksgiving for the peace in Europe. This was, of course, the 1814 abdication of the previous year. The reference to “the last few days” is to the rites of “Seeva”. 91 Middleton, The Manifold Wisdom of God Made Known by the Church … Preached at the Cathedral Church of Calcutta, on the 3rd day of December, 1820 [Eph. 3:10], p. 113. 92 Middleton, Righteousness and Salvation … Preached … October 27, 1816 [Isa. 62:1], p. 75. 90


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[it] to the condition of the church in India”;93 “[No] church since the days of the Apostles has been called to such high destinies”94) and he asserts to the presumably bemused garrison and colonial officials that they are like a primitive Christian society.95 This, however, was evidently a considered tactic: he is deeply concerned about the mixedrace children in the cantonments and even risks subverting military discipline by publicly rebuking officers in front of their men: [Through] the influence of native mothers, the [children] of Europeans, have been lost to the faith of Christ. There are cases, too, in which the father is ordered to Europe, and must leave his children behind him: the camp, or the barrack, or the bazar is their only place of refuge: there have, indeed, been instances of the most generous and exemplary humanity exercised by persons, on whom the orphan has had no natural claims … but [the] operation [of Christian piety] must be partial and fortuitous, where public institutions are wanting, and charity is not organized into system … [Christianity among such children is frustrated by] the habits of Europeans of the lower class, as well as those of their superiors …96

Only officers, not “other ranks”, were ordered home; note also the sting in the order of the last phrases. Middleton takes perhaps the first published step towards defining the non-Christian religions of India as cults, in effect making them pagans, in the classical sense: [The Indian religious system is] completely disproved by its wanting the principle of dissemination and diffusion … and [by Hindus’ claim] that the Almighty is delighted with the variety in the systems of human belief … as if truth and salvation and the will of God were but modes and fashions to be adopted to the convenience or caprice of the believer …97

The claim that Christianity’s missionary and universal status guarantees its authenticity is novel, at least in the terms of post-1688 Anglicanism. Middleton has a clear sense of priorities: first the Europeans, next the mixed-race children, then the quasi-deist Indians. He has East India Company chaplains, a few priests and a handful of missionaries on whom to build, but his evangelicalism is based on an

93 Middleton, A Sermon Preached … in Prince of Wales’s Island … May 16, 1819 [Phil. 1:27], p. 81. 94 Middleton, The Manifold Wisdom of God, p. 125. 95 Middleton, A Sermon Preached … in Prince of Wales’s Island [Phil. 1:27], pp. 83–84. 96 Middleton, A Sermon Preached at St Thomas’s Church, Bombay … 18th March, 1821 [Matt. 7:13], pp. 101, 104. 97 Middleton, The Manifold Wisdom of God, p. 122.

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understanding of the New Testament through the anti-deist strategies of the previous century. Middleton founded the Church in India but it is difficult to see how it could have prospered without a radical transformation of theory. Middleton was remembered as a great bishop, in both doctrine and organization, but Reginald Heber was praised after his death as almost saintly. A prominent hymn-writer, some of whose compositions remain in use, Heber’s career led naturally to the colonial Church: his 1815 Bampton lectures on the subject of The Personality and Office of the Christian Comforter, hymns such as “From Greenland’s icy mountains” (written during a visit to a service on behalf of the SPG), and sermons, mostly in the provinces, on behalf of the British and Foreign Bible Society (BFBS), the SPCK, and the CMS. In the earliest of these, preached in Shrewsbury for the BFBS on 5 September 1813, he expresses the need for the Church of England to become more catholic: “[She] was … baptized in blood, and … she may well be pardoned, if to others the spirit of her establishment should sometimes appear too jealous and exclusive” and praises the Society for the strength it gained by possessing a committee comprising representatives of several sects.98 Although its construction is simple, the underlying outline structures not emphasized, the language is comparatively literary, sprinkled with mannerisms such as double negatives (“Nor [are the members of the Society] the least active …”99), rhetorical questions, and classical allusions. The sermons he preached for the SPCK and CMS in 1820–23 are less labored, and a little shorter, but still of a piece with this, while they extend the treatment of solidarity between Churches and community among Christians. At no stage was Heber’s preaching dominated by exegesis; he does not aim to teach but to mobilize commitment to values he assumes he shares with his listeners. It is notable, however, that when he preaches on “The conversion of the heathen” for the CMS as late as 1820 his sermon still starts with a discussion of apostolic times, a method common to those who spoke without experience of missionary activity: My brethren, there are many millions of men in the world, hundreds of millions, to whom these blessed truths are unknown. Millions who have lost the knowledge of the one true God amid a multitude of false or evil 98 Reginald Heber, The Dispersion of the Scriptures [Rev. 14:6], Sermons Preached in England, 2nd edition (London, 1829), pp. 214, 215. 99 Ibid., p. 221.


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deities; who bow down to stocks and stones; who propitiate their senseless idols with cruel and bloody sacrifices …100

His debt to Buchanan for his material is obvious but in general he is speaking to a public consensus: “Shall we overlook our heavy debt of blood and tears to injured Africa?”101 Once in India, however, his preaching changes profoundly. Sermons are shortened further (to around 2,500 words), all underlying outline structures are abolished in favor of a single argument in linear sequence, and the language is simplified. Note in the following passages the absence of rhetorical resources and the extreme spareness of doctrine: In this country, I need scarcely mention, that it is a custom with those who pretend any degree of holiness, to shrink from the touch of persons of a different religion, or of a character less devoted to the practice of contemplation and piety … [Of calls to repentance:] Nor is this a task confined to any peculiar order or profession. It is the duty of the layman as well as of the priest … When I recommend gentle means, I do not recommend guilty compliances.102

Heber’s sense of a coherent and dynamic Christian community, already expressed in his English sermons, here acquires depth from his experience of Indian cultures, his need to mobilize Christians in India to develop the local base of morale, and the need to present his teaching simply to a wide range of soldiers and colonists who had hitherto little experience of evangelical preaching. There was the same urgency for Heber as for Middleton: the mixed-race children of the bazaars and cantonments who threatened to become a new class of untouchables: … too often the monuments of their [fathers’] vices, who, notwithstanding their English descent, are accessible to instruction through the languages of India alone, and who, though divested of the pride of caste, and not a few of them nominally Christians, have as much need to be instructed in the first rudiments of Christianity as the inhabitants of Polynesia or Japan.103

100 Reginald Heber, The Conversion of the Heathen [Matt. 6:10], Sermons Preached in England, 2nd ed. (London, 1829), p. 200. Preached for the CMS, 16 April 1820. 101 Heber, Sermons Preached in England, p. 204. 102 Reginald Heber, Christ Preaching to Sinners [Luke 15:10], Sermons Preached in India (London, 1829), pp. 76, 82, 87. 103 Reginald Heber, A Charge Delivered … at Calcutta … May 27, 1824; at Bombay, April 29, 1825; at Colombo, September 1, 1825; and at Madras, March 10, 1826, Sermons preached in India (London, 1829), p. 12. Note the itinerary recorded in the title. Heber died in April 1826, still on his visitation.

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This commitment was restated immediately after Heber’s death by his former chaplain, Thomas Robinson, in a sermon preached for the SPG in Madras in which he restates Heber’s conception of modern apostolic Christianity,104 and the pledge was carried through. The ninth annual report of the Calcutta Church Missionary Society is mostly about educational work, for example.105 Unlike other missionary leaders, however, Heber was not at all imperialist, politically or culturally. He regarded the Scilly Isles (in home waters) as a spiritual wilderness every bit as much as Africa; in his sermon on The Law and the Gospel [Gal. 3:19] he discusses Christ’s making Jewish law obsolete but refuses to apply this to the Indian society in which he lives. For Heber the European and Indian cultures have equal access to the gospel: he describes Christianity as “a system studiously distinguished from and unconnected with government” (and hints at criticism of the BMS’ ideology in this regard) and where a “them and us” dichotomy emerges it is for local rhetorical effect: “the nations of this country, our neighbours, our domestics, our fellow-subjects, our fellow soldiers …”.106 Heber was criticized posthumously for the shallowness of his theology107 but the whole point of his ministry in India was to mobilize the maximum forces on the broadest possible consensus, though with a usefully narrow missionary focus. The Church was at this time a combination of a military chaplaincy and a mission, and Heber put practical organization and communal spirituality above theology: “But the religion of Christ, as taught by Christ Himself, and the apostles who were inspired by Him, not only does not command, but expressly discourages all heedless singularity or solitude … Our faith is an active faith”, he said, in explicit rebuttal to the contemplative methods of the surrounding Hindu gurus and not only in definition of Christianity but as a matter of theoretical Christology.108 That this style of preaching was a deliberate strategy is evidenced by his SPG sermon, preached in Bombay, Colombo and Calcutta in 1825, when, delivered to his fellow

104 Thomas Robinson, The Glory of the Church in its Extension to Heathen Lands … Madras … May 14, 1826 [2 Thess. 3:1] (London, 1827), pp. 18–25. 105 The Ninth Report of the Calcutta Church Missionary Association (Calcutta, 1833). 106 Reginald Heber, The Conversion of the Heathen [Acts 2:38–39], Sermons Preached in India (London, 1829), pp. 194, 193. 107 He was defended by T.S. Smyth, The Character and Religious Doctrines of Bishop Heber (London, 1831), in reply to critiques from Calvinist sources. 108 Reginald Heber, Character of Christ and his Religion [Mark 8:9], Sermons preached in India (London, 1829), pp. 67, 69.


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clergy, he reverts to his English style.109 Compared with Middleton, Heber was in a position to envisage a Church more actively and reliably supported by (and supporting) a well-grounded missionary movement, integrated into a program of strengthening faith among the Europeans, drawing in the Eurasians and bringing the Hindus and Muslims into contact with a socially active and extrovert Church organization. The third of the Bishops of Calcutta who will be brought in evidence is Daniel Wilson, who was, in his pre-colonial career, central to the missionary movement in England. Wilson’s abrasive and uncompromising evangelical preaching may be seen as the mirror-image of Heber’s. The rate of attrition of the bishops of Calcutta was high: Middleton had served for nine years, Heber for four, James for two, Turner for three. Wilson, appointed at the age of 54, served twenty-six and put the diocese, out of which during his tenure were formed sees in Madras, Bombay, and Colombo, on a firm basis, with regular visitations and charges which are notable both for their sense of administrative underpinning of an evangelical faith and for their vehement anti-Tractarianism. From his London days he had a love of statistics and a strong sense of the rapidly-expanding British Empire as giving access to potential converts, as in his sermon at the 17th anniversary of the CMS, in 1817, of which this passage is typical: … so large a part of the Heathen World being subject to the British Sceptre … from 100 degrees in the remote West, to Norfolk Island in the East, or from the Shetlands in the North to 33 degrees South of the Line, that is, over 270 degrees of longitude and 94 of latitude, or nearly 20,000 miles by 6 or 7000 … [which] God has entrusted to this Protestant Country … [O]ur whole Empire, at this moment, perhaps exceed, both in extent and population, any one of the Four great Empires of the Antient World … Our rational and constitutional liberty, our wealth, our power, and our commerce, far surpass those of any other people, antient or modern.110

“India is the most promising scene for missionary labour.”111 Preaching of the activity of the Spiritual Church … the invisible and mystical body of true Christians in this country, who hold Christ as the Head, are vitally 109

Reginald Heber, The Conversion of the Heathen, pp. 177–201. Daniel Wilson, Sermon Preached at the Parish Church of Saint Bride … on Tuesday, May 6, 1817 [John 4:35–36], in CMS Annual Report, 1817, p. 367. 111 Ibid., p. 363. 110

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bob tennant united to Him by his Spirit, and obey his laws, though they may differ in minor points of Doctrine and Discipline.112

he lists the principal missionary societies, gives numbers of stations and staff in the field, financial details, and a roll-call of prominent missionaries and then appeals for more clergy. Addressing the meeting as if it consisted largely of young clergy113 he urges that missionary work “will [further] our own salvation”.114 It is notable that before this final appeal he resorts to the Flaxmanesque imagery we have noted before, with regard to slavery: “See the injured Negro whom the crimes of Britons had made to drink deep of the cup of sorrow, now taking the cup of salvation, and calling upon the name of the Lord”.115 Wilson is at all times impatient of theology and church party and totally committed to evangelism. The Roman Empire was a field of corn for Christians to reap116 and he believes that the world is now Britain’s field of corn. Once in India Wilson’s main interest for us lies in his visitations and episcopal charges, in which he reported progress and left his junior clergy in no doubt about the desirability of staying away from the Tractarians. A sermon such as The Sufficiency of Holy Scripture as the Rule of faith [2 Timothy 3:16–17],117 with its vigorous assault on the “tradition scheme”, may seem an oddity in a colonial setting but represents the discipline and focus on objectives which were typical of his ministry. Oddly, Wilson sees tradition as an enemy to the new criticism which was revolutionizing theology and biblical studies; he accuses its adherents of “a fearful apprehension of violating the sanctity of truth” and thus retarding “all real advances”.118 Wilson’s 1818 CMS sermon was virtually duplicated in 1849 when, as the 70-year-old Metropolitan for the four dioceses of India, he preached the CMS jubilee sermon in his cathedral.119 Still preaching in the tripartite Tillotsonian form which was obsolescent even in his

112

Ibid., p. 370. Ibid., pp. 392–93. 114 Ibid., p. 395. 115 Ibid., p. 389. 116 Ibid., p. 361. 117 Wilson, The Sufficiency of Holy Scripture as the Rule of Faith [2 Timothy 3:16–17] (London, 1841). The sermon was preached in St John’s Cathedral, Calcutta on 2 May 1841. 118 Ibid., p. 38. 119 Daniel Wilson, Christian Missions the Blessing of the World [Isa. 2:2–4] (Calcutta, 1849). 113


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youth, and probably drawing on statistics gathered by the CMS’ G.G. Cuthbert,120 he is still battling away with a stubborn world, belaying it with facts and figures and urging that “Christianity ought to be, which the late Dr. Chalmers well called it, an aggressive system. Our Jubilee is not to evaporate in an ebullition of feeling, but to lead to practical results”.121 “In 1799 [when the CMS was founded] almost all Europe was at war with England [sic] … Now the whole world is open. Access to the most distant places is easy by means of steam navigation”.122 He relishes enumerating the 34 million Bibles, their 140 languages, the hundredfold increase in CMS income. He welcomes the estimate that only 6–7 per cent of the world’s population is Protestant (he lists the estimated 21 per cent Popish and Greek separately) as a challenge to the Church.123 His heavyweight statistics, argumentativelystructured form, and short, simple sentences must have had an almost physical effect on his listeners. Wilson’s rhetoric, leaving no room for dissent among his juniors, is the product of a thorough analysis of the situation on the ground and an assessment of the Church’s ability to extend its organization, including the creation of “native churches” and a native clergy. While progress along these lines was not to accelerate until later in the century, Wilson is confident, with some justification, that the Church is already able to become institutionally missionary. This brief study of three bishops, in effect successors in India, has shown how sermon rhetoric changed to express the priorities and ideologies as they developed and to help effect changes in commitment from clergy and senior laity alike. At each stage the Church was forming, and re-forming, a praxis of missions and reporting back on developments, through published sermons and charges, to the general membership of the home base, whose own rhetoric was transformed thereby. As an example we may consider a sermon preached in 1833 by Richard Twopeny, before the joint District Committees of the SPCK

120 G.G. Cuthbert, Brief Account of the Jubilee of the Church Missionary Society … With an Introductory Address to members of the Church of England and Friends of the [CMS] in North India (Calcutta, 1849). 121 Cuthbert, Brief Account, p. 21. American readers should note that the word “aggressive” used in a positive sense (OED, “aggressive, n. 2c”) is unusual in 19th-century British English: there are no OED citations before the twentieth century. Wilson shares it with a handful of contemporary Methodists and Scottish Presbyterians. 122 Wilson, Christian Missions the Blessing of the World, p. 6. 123 Ibid., pp. 6–8.

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and SPG in Kent.124 He offers the survey of the state of the missions by now usual on such occasions, evidently drawing his information from the Societies’ annual reports, noting that “they both uphold the primitive order and discipline maintained by our Church, as the best bond of union and peace in the Christian society”125 – almost the last moment that this could be said before the Tractarian controversy burst on the Church. The sermon is of interest because of the various strands of thought it weaves together. “The Church of Christ does not consist of one body of men; nor is religion the exclusive concern of one order only … The clergy alone are not equal to the great work [of missions]”.126 The Godless slave traders, “[as] if impelled by Mahometan fanaticism … have … extirpated the original inhabitants … In Africa, instead of leaving any trace of civilization or religion behind them, they took advantage of the barbarous and despotic institutions of the savage nations to transport [Africa’s] helpless sons to … slavery”.127

The forthcoming liberation of the slaves is of concern because insufficient effort has been made to prepare them “for that liberty to which it has now been determined to admit them”128 – education in Christianity shading into the idea of earned citizenship. But Twopeny, employing the universal metaphor of sunlight, also puts missions and empire into an order of priority: When I contemplate the history of this nation, deriving its origin from a small tribe of savage warriors, in an obscure corner of Europe … emerging at length by the providence of God, into the full blaze of religious light and freedom, and in the end, spreading our colonies, our arms, our language, and our arts over two-thirds of the globe; I cannot refrain from asking myself for what important purpose this dispensation of Providence (unequalled in the annals of the world) has been effected?129

Twopeny glamorizes the economic, military and political successes of Britain, although he sees empire as a subordinate means to global

124 Richard Twopeny, A Sermon, Preached at Uppingham [2 Cor. 5:14–15] (London, 1833). 125 Ibid., p. 24. 126 Ibid., p. 19. 127 Ibid., p. 11. 128 Ibid., p. 11. 129 Ibid., p. 14.


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evangelism, the secular tools of which he acknowledges to be often evil. In this he is distinguished from, for example, the Unitarian W.J. Fox, preaching in the same year on the death of the prominent Indian convert Rammohun Roy, who is openly racially supremacist: “to what a superior race and nation they [the British] belonged …”.130 The Influence of the Missions on the Home Base Thus far we have seen the church, and particularly the Church of England, trying to develop a policy with regard to missions and overseas expansion as far as possible separated from the increasingly imperial policy of the government. We have given an account of the development of pulpit rhetoric and, in particular, complexes of metaphors, which gave persuasive and projective power to this policy. At the same time the Church at home became preoccupied by a number of liturgical and doctrinal questions, many of which fell within the orbit of Tractarianism (others concerned more directly the non-Episcopal Churches), and which deflected the home base somewhat from the missionary endeavor. The emergence of these controversies coincided with what we may call the heroic period of the missions, the period when the movement was sufficiently undeveloped for individuals to play decisive roles in creating its culture and organization. Fairly quickly, however, the missionary Church “came home”: not only did its demands on the home base increase – in terms of finance, recruitment of personnel, training and logistics – but also in the effect it had on the way the home Churches themselves were organized. We are able to consider only three examples: a visitation sermon; a series of Bampton Lectures; and a collection of sermons by a leading theologian. The title of William Booth’s book Darkest England and the Way Out (1890) best sums up the transformation of the mid-century Church. It gives statistical maps and data of spiritual and social deprivation, using the conceit that Britain is a newly-colonized land, perhaps somewhere in Africa. But it is only an unusually popular version of a line of thought already long-established in episcopal charges.131

130 W.J. Fox, A Discourse on Occasion of the Death of Rajah Rammohun Roy [Gen. 12:1 & Heb. 11:8] (London, 1833), p. 15. 131 Those of Samuel Wilberforce and J.B. Sumner are particularly enlightening.

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Thus in 1832 Augustus Campbell, the Rector of Liverpool, preached a sermon at the visitation of the Bishop of Chester, J.B. Sumner, evangelical and future Archbishop of Canterbury. Junior clergy tend to preach what they know to be acceptable to their bishop and Sumner, who consecrated over two hundred new churches during his tenure of the see, heard Campbell distinguishing between “a Heathen priesthood set up for the exhibition of a weekly ceremony in the public service of the sanctuary on one consecrated day” and a Christian priest: In the untrodden fastnesses of such a region as [Cheshire] he may gain the triumphs, as he may shew forth the zeal of a missionary; planting the seed of the word in the unbroken wilderness of the stony heart … [in] a valley, as dark with the shadows of death, as any that will be found in the remotest wilds of the Heathen world.

He argues the case for deploying financial resources on larger numbers of cheap and relatively small churches and, in the published version, adds statistics about the numbers of churches, beer shops and brothels, as well as the schools of both the Church and the dissenters. With an ecumenism reinforced by a sense of urgent necessity he welcomes the latter as colleagues. His Romantic Hero priest visits door to door, “[pressing doctrines of salvation] upon the people”.132 Such sermons, blending patriotism, statistical evidence, Romantic heroism, salvation theology, and a radical approach to church and secular polity, are ecclesiastical applications of methods pioneered in the verse of Erasmus Darwin (The Botanic Garden, 1789–92), John Sargent (The Mine, 1784),133 some of Wordsworth’s Lyrical Ballads and even Shelley (The Revolt of Islam, 1818), as well as the Baptist missionary William Carey’s famous pamphlet An Enquiry into the Obligation of Christians to use means for the conversion of the heathen (1792). The “Affection between the Church and the Dissenters”134 exemplified in Campbell was a feature of the preaching of missions-minded evangelicals in the 1830s, at home and abroad, just as participation in the missionary societies was a feature of the growing Sunday school movement.135 In the words of the dawning Railway Age,

132 Augustus Campbell, A Visitation Sermon … on the 29th of September, 1832 (1 Pet. 4:7–8) (Liverpool, 1832). The quotations are from pp. 7, 8 and 10 respectively. 133 Sargent’s son, an Anglican minister, was a close associate of Charles Simeon. 134 Charles Girdlestone, Affection Between the Church and the Dissenters (Luke 9:49– 50) (Oxford, 1833). 135 See Frank Prochaska’s classic Women and Philanthropy in Nineteenth-Century England (Oxford, 1980), ch.III, p. 75 and passim; Susan Thorne, Congregational Missions


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… in the contributions of Sunday Schools alone, we might have a motive power of sufficient force to move all the moral machinery needed for the conversion of the world. Set this wheel fairly in motion … and all the other wheels will move with it.136

Mid-century Anglican evangelicals like Hay Aitken and the great F.W. Robertson, both with ministries in Brighton, preached “missionary sermons” and expounded a theology of universal brotherhood and mutual responsibility. Seamen’s Missions were established in many home ports as well as on the imperial trade routes. In 1843 things were changed radically by Anthony Grant, that year’s Bampton Lecturer, whose eight lectures, arguing that the Episcopalian Church was essential to successful missions, made a profound impact. They were thoroughly organized, documented by footnotes and over 120 pages of appendices.137 In their rhetoric, whose austerity expresses a total confidence in episcopal authority, and in their doctrine they may be taken as announcing the post-heroic age, its missionary method based on an understanding of the methods of the Apostolic age, as assessed by a generation of Anglican fieldwork: [The] method whereby the conversion of unbelievers was effected was not the mere distribution of the written word, to which the promise of success in this work is not engaged, but the preaching of the Gospel by living witnesses; – And, lastly, that the place held by the holy Scriptures in the economy of instructing the heathen mind, is that of proving and confirming the previous elementary teaching of the Church, conveyed through its formularies, and the oral expositions of its messengers.138

This, although a position supported by recent experience, was not consensual: many still supposed that distributing the Bible in appropriate languages was virtually a sufficient method. Notably, the Christological aspect of doctrine characteristic of the Romantic period is absent from Grant. He sets out the fatal theoretical weaknesses of Roman Catholicism, analyses the embattled and introverted nature of the Church of England after the Reformation and elaborates a praxis of

and the Making of an Imperial Culture in 19th-Century England (Stanford, 1999), pp. 114–21. A study of preaching, like the present essay, necessarily conceals the fact that women made at least as great a contribution to the work and culture of the missions as did men. 136 Anonymous LMS-affiliated policy pamphlet Sunday Schools, and Missions to the Heathen (London, 1859), p. 12. 137 All quotations from Anthony Grant, The Past and Prospective Extension of the Gospel by Missions to the Heathen, second, corrected, edition (London, 1845). 138 Grant, Lecture 4, p. 101.

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Christian empire. His strictures on the missions of the non-established Churches flow from a conception of Church and State which owes less to Warburton than Coleridge: the danger is that “self-appointed teachers” will be a “dissocialising” force among converts;139 he sees that the Prayer Book’s liturgy “must be obviously unsuited” to “the partiallyinstructed heathen”140 and that colonial bishops must be free to adapt liturgy and catechism to the needs of their dioceses. In a rare excursion into metaphor Grant alludes to contemporary botany: “The Gospel was spread by the propagation of the Church; each fresh seed, so planted, carrying within itself, though in germ, the perfect organization of the parent tree from which it sprang”.141 This reference to propagation is, of course, meant as a validation of the SPG. All missions outside the episcopal system, Roman Catholic or Protestant, are seen as self-defeating, because of an inability to provide an ecclesiastical infrastructure of this organic and scriptural type. Indeed, he anticipates later developments when he calls for the revival of the model used in converting Europe, the creation of “Christian societies”142 as central points from which missionaries can sortie, acting as exemplars of the Christian life. Perhaps this can be traced back to Heber’s preaching to the garrisons of the Indian Army and the early development of the unusual tradition of evangelical piety among its officers. This infrastructure is the main subject of Lecture 8 but Lecture 7143 is especially critical of lay-led missions (the BMS and Scottish societies are identifiable, and possibly the CMS): “the system [is] anomalous in the Church of Christ”.144 In his preface Grant writes: For a long period … Missionary enterprises were, in the minds of many members of our Church, identified with a certain cast of religious opinion and character, which caused offence to sober–minded Christians, while the work itself was discredited by others, because it was disconnected from the authority and direction of the Church … [In] the minds of reflecting Christians … it began to be felt that there was no unity of design, no steadiness of operation … that different Societies, and individuals, had their favourite schemes, or spheres of action, and were

139

Grant, Preface, p. xvii. Ibid., pp. xix, xviii. 141 Grant, Lecture 3, p. 81. 142 Grant, Lecture 7, pp. 242–43. 143 E.g., Grant, pp. 233–40. Grant draws parallels between the problems he perceives in the work of Protestant lay-led missions and Jesuit missions. 144 Grant, Lecture 7, p. 233. 140


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frequently set in rivalry … [so that they could not] compass the various forms and vast systems of Paganism which were to be displaced …145

Thus was the “heroic” period described and dismissed, the nonChristian world seen not as one vast sink of darkness but as a congeries of cultures each of which must be approached discretely. Grant’s basic premise is that the missions are fulfilling apocalyptic prophecies, and his first lecture is an elaboration of this. Thus Britons’ lack of charity and justice has caused the slaughter of native Americans and Australian aboriginals alike; the continent of Australia has been populated by criminals and Africa by settlements founded explicitly to encourage the slave trade.146 Yet “God in His mercy [has] stir[red] up in us this spirit of penitence, and love, and zeal”147 and is preparing the way for events which shall mark a fresh æra in His Church[; He] has now made England the Empress of the Sea … her navies sweep the seas, and her commerce circulates through every land; – with an empire extending over a seventh part of the world’s inhabitants … this nation and Church are specially set to urge on their course the prophetic events which seem to be gathering towards their fulfilment, to hasten and usher in the day of the Lord.148

While not a nationalist, Grant is emphatic about the capacity of Britain’s polity for evil and good: Christianity will “prevent our country from becoming a curse to the pagan world”.149 In the case of the Maoris of New Zealand, [it] is sufficiently seen that European intercourse, unsanctified, tends to their extermination. There is but one power on earth that can save them, and that is the shelter and shield of the Church of Christ. It is a cheering sight to witness the attempt which is made in New Zealand by the Bishop, to rescue the natives from the too probably extinction which they would otherwise suffer from colonial aggression.150

The point is not that the Bishop of New Zealand is well-meaning or good but that the Church in New Zealand is on a secure foundation and can challenge in practice the evils of colonialism. It may not

145

Grant, Preface, pp. vii–ix. Grant, Lecture 1, pp. 31–32. 147 Ibid., p. 33. 148 Ibid., pp. 10–11. 149 Grant, Preface, p. xvi. 150 Grant, Lecture 8, p. 283. The last sentence is printed as a footnote to the preceding ones. Note the standard English pejorative use of “aggression”. 146

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succeed in each case, but it is the only way that the Church can be instituted. “In any revival of principles, or of forgotten forms of polity or truth, it must necessarily be, that, for a time, our practice should fall short of our theory …”151 In their different ways Congregationalists and Roman Catholics alike claim, “each of them, the whole world as his own share and portion”.152 Anglicans claim only their national communion and that portion of the world which voluntarily enters that communion. Thus Grant provides perhaps the final and definitive statement of the 19th-century Anglican doctrine of Christian empire. But his lectures are a moment in a developing ideology. By 1859 he has moved closer to an imperialist position: in his sermon The Church in China and Japan [Acts 16:6–8],153 after considering Xavier’s early 17thcentury mission to Japan and its converts’ extermination, he concludes that the Japanese, in contrast to the 60,000 Indian Roman Catholics who apostatized in Mysore in 1784, are a steadfast people and preaches that the Holy Spirit has guided the Anglican Church to Japan by opening it up through commercial treaties. Thus his awareness that missionary practice must be modified for each target culture and that Christianity is not the same thing as exported Europeanism struggles with an increasingly imperial perspective which, in accordance with current scientific theory, admitted the existence of racial as well as cultural characteristics. Meanwhile, the Christian Socialist theologian F.D. Maurice,154 absorbing the lessons learned by the missionaries abroad, observed that, “You [a missionary] must proclaim Him simply, broadly, absolutely, as the God of salvation … These lessons, I say, we want at home”: You … may be our best instructors at this time. If we can in any degree strengthen your hands, you may much more effectually clear our minds respecting the meaning of the message with which we are entrusted, of the foe which we must encounter … Each of us is prone to be soulish; to be shut up in himself is this not what the Devil would have us be? … The natural heart is prone to slavery; … men, if they follow their own inclinations, sink of course into slaves”.

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Grant, Preface, p. xxi. Grant, Lecture 2, p. 65. 153 London, 1859, passim. 154 For example, F.D. Maurice, The Conflict of Good and Evil in Our Day: Twelve Letters to a Missionary (London, 1865). Quotations from pp. 33, 25–26, 34–37 respectively. 152


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For Maurice the spiritual landscape is one of introverted slavery – a temptation of the spirit – redeemed by the social extroversion of the gospel: witness the impatience with High Church preciousness carried in the word “soulish”. While he is not thinking primarily of slaves in the legal sense, the robustness of the approach should be noted, and its reminiscence of Blake. Struggles for legal emancipation are all very well; but without a spiritual rebirth legal freedom, whether of black or white, will not combat demoralization – a phenomenon which subsequently was plentifully evident in the economically unfree of the urban Western world. Indeed, Maurice redefines “free-thinker”: the white nominal Christian and the God-denying heathen both remain enslaved; it is the missionary, with faithful and intelligent obedience, who is free.155 The question of the damage to morale and culture sometimes wrought by evangelizing is confronted:156 You [the missionary] are to proclaim Him as the Son of God, as the Head and Friend of every nation and every man; therefore you are not to leave an impression upon the minds of any that He is our King and Deliverer more than He is theirs.

Maurice’s thinking was shaped by a study of the missions: his metaphors; his movements between (demoralized) introversion and (healthy) extroversion; his synthesis of questing individual and consensual society. He offers a non-imperialist vision for the preaching of the gospel around the world, from within the Anglican communion but non-sectarian in temper. Unfortunately for Maurice, the profound impact of the mid-century Opium Wars, Indian “Mutiny”, and Crimean War on British attitudes to non-European peoples and civilizations had already tilted the balance of power decisively towards secular imperialism. The pulpit rhetoric developed in the “heroic” period was simply overwhelmed by the triumphalism, glamor and anxieties of secular empire, which became unfairly attached to the missions.157 In the event, theories of Christian 155 Maurice, The Conflict of Good and Evil, p. 41. Cf. L. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations I (Oxford, 1953), §202: “[It] is not possible to obey a rule ‘privately’: otherwise thinking one was obeying a rule would be the same thing as obeying it”. Maurice’s source is likely to have been Joseph Butler’s sermon Upon the Ignorance of Man [Eccles. 8.16, 17], first published in 1726 but never out of print and a university set text. 156 Maurice, The Conflict of Good and Evil, p. 42. The following quotation is from p. 118. 157 Andrew Porter, Religion versus Empire? (Manchester, 2004), passim, explores this phenomenon.

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empire did not re-emerge until fundamentally transformed in the late imperial and post-colonial periods.158 Although the theology was to play a part in the development of indigenous politics in the Anglican communion overseas, the theologians of the Maurice circle were unable to bring missionary praxis into the domestic mainstream. The home missions, however active, remained only an adjunct of the Church rather than becoming the bedrock of its relationship with a growing and increasingly diverse domestic population. Consequently they shared in the process of secularization, promoting the organization and regulation of social activities like team sports159 but also witnessing the heroic figure of the missionary and teacher developing narcissistic and jingoistic features. Twentieth-century satires of late Victorian imperialism are pale imitations of the unabashed real thing, in which Christ is found described as “our first headmaster” and in his peroration the preacher “sees the great England that has been, [and] divines the greater England that is to be”.160 While, in the tremendous optimism of the first decades of the century, the values generating theories of Christian empire could be expressed in the pulpit by new systems of metaphors and forms of rhetoric, the Anglican communion had to relearn the lesson that it was the junior partner in the 1688 settlement and ultimately as little able to resist in practice the rhetoric of imperialism as were the non-established Protestant Churches.

158 The work of Adrian Hastings on post-colonial church history, and in particular The Construction of Nationhood: Ethnicity, Religion and Nationalism (Cambridge, 1997), is of great value, although the theology is relatively lightly discussed. 159 The pioneering academic study is James Walvin, The People’s Game: a Social History of British Football (London, 1975). 160 T.E. Brown, Unity. A Sermon Preached in Clifton College Chapel on the Sunday after Commemoration, July 3rd, 1887. Printed at the Request of the Sixth Form [Matt. 5.17] (Bristol, 1887), pp. 4, 11.

BRITISH SERMONS ON NATIONAL EVENTS John Wolffe Throughout the 19th century, from the Napoleonic Wars (1804–15) to the South African War (1898–1902), numerous national events tested the full spectrum of human emotions. Some were celebratory, such as coronations, jubilees and thanksgivings for victory in war. Some were bitter-sweet, such as delight at the great naval victory at Trafalgar in 1805 clouded by the news that Lord Nelson had fallen in the battle, or the deaths in ripe old age of pillars of the nation such as George III in 1820, the Duke of Wellington in 1852, and Queen Victoria in 1901. Others were isolated tragedies that moved many but directly affected few, such as the death in childbirth of Princess Charlotte in 1817, or the collapse of the Tay Bridge in 1879 that hurled a trainload of passengers to their doom in the stormy waters below. Others again, such as the Crimean War of 1854–56 and the cholera epidemics of 1832 and 1849, had a direct impact on substantial portions of the population, who had to face up to the possibility of imminent sudden death either for themselves or for loved ones. Context This chapter is focused on discrete occurrences that gave rise to sermons on a single day, or within a short, defined period of time.1 The events under consideration here were not political in themselves, although

1 Such material has hitherto attracted only limited attention from scholars, but the following studies should be noted: Olive Anderson, “The Reactions of Church and Dissent towards the Crimean War,” Journal of Ecclesiastical History 16 (1985), 209–20; Deryck Lovegrove, “English Evangelical Dissent and the European Conflict, 1789– 1815,” in The Church and War (Studies in Church History) 20, ed. W.J. Sheils, (Oxford, 1983), pp. 263–76; Brian Stanley, “Christian Responses to the Indian Mutiny,” in The Church and War, pp. 277–89; John Wolffe, “Responding to National Grief: Memorial Sermons on the Famous in Britain 1800–1914,” Mortality 1 (1996), 283–96; Stephen C. Behrendt, Royal Mourning and Regency Culture: Elegies and Memorials of Princess Charlotte (Basingstoke, 1997), pp. 155–76; John Wolffe, “Judging the Nation: Early Nineteenth-Century British Evangelicals and Divine Retribution,” in Retribution, Repentance and Reconciliation (Studies in Church History) 40, ed. Kate Cooper and

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some had obvious political ramifications, but were either lifecycle events concerning the royal family, the deaths of other national figures, or natural disasters and military conflicts. Clergy of all denominations responded to them in part from a sense of civic and national duty, and in part from a recognition of pastoral need and opportunity. Many such sermons were preached on prescribed national days, determined either by a central event such as a funeral ceremony or royal proclamation of a fast, in circumstances of insecurity, or of thanksgiving, in cases of celebration.2 On such occasions, special local church services, reportedly more numerously attended than normal Sunday worship, performed something of the function of radio and television in a later age, giving individuals a sense of participation in the “imagined community” of the nation as a whole.3 Sermons assumed a corresponding oracular significance as the closest thing to an official national statement on the event in question that most people were likely to hear. Motives for attendance could be more secular than religious, as characterized disapprovingly by Thomas Chalmers in his sermon on the death of Princess Charlotte in 1817. There was, he said, a … set of men, whose taste for preaching is very much confined to these great and national occasions – who, habitually absent from church on the Sabbath, are yet observed, and that most prominently, to come together in eager and clustering attendance, on some interesting case of pathos or politics – who in this way obtrude upon the general notice, their loyalty to an earthly sovereign, while in reference to their lord and master, Jesus Christ, they scandalize all that is Christian in the general feeling.4

Such sermons, though, were not solely linked to officially-appointed days and special services. Many clergy also took the initiative themselves in delivering similar sermons on the nearest convenient Sunday Jeremy Gregory (Oxford, 2004), pp. 291–300; Peter Gray, “National Humiliation and the Great Hunger: Fast and Famine in 1847,” Irish Historical Studies, 32 (2006–7), 193–216. 2 Such national days of prayer have hitherto been very insufficiently studied, but are currently the focus for a major AHRC-funded project led by Professor Philip Williamson of the University of Durham. See Philip Williamson, “State Prayers, Fasts and Thanksgivings: Public Worship in Britain 1830–1897,” Past and Present 200 (August 2008), 169–218. 3 John Wolffe, Great Deaths: Grieving, Religion and Nationhood in Victorian and Edwardian Britain (Oxford, 2000), pp. 56, 81–93. Cf. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London, 1983). 4 Thomas Chalmers, A Sermon Delivered in the Tron Church, Glasgow, on Wednesday Nov. 19, 1817, The Day of the Funeral of HRH the Princess Charlotte of Wales (Glasgow, 1817), p. 6.

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to a major event. In 1832 Charles Cator, Rector of Carshalton in Surrey, preached on cholera the Sunday after it arrived in the village, responding bluntly when he noticed his congregation was larger than usual, declaring his unaccustomed hearers especially welcome because they could now be warned of their spiritual peril and their need of repentance.5 Sermons on Nelson and Trafalgar were preached in early November 1805 when the news of the battle first arrived, at a general thanksgiving day on 5 December, and on 12 January 1806, the Sunday after Nelson’s funeral.6 Those on the Duke of Wellington’s death were delivered, not only on the day of his funeral, Thursday 18 November 1852, but on the two Sundays following his death, 19 and 26 September, and the Sunday after the funeral, 21 November.7 Such differences in timing could lead to subtle differences in emphasis and content, with some reluctant to be diverted from the normal spiritual and theological content of their Sunday sermons. Thus Charles Clarke, preaching at the Old Meeting House, Birmingham, on Wednesday 16 April 1854, the fast day following the outbreak of the Crimean War, began by saying: I regard it as the duty of Ministers of the gospel to awaken and sustain, as far as they can, just sentiments in the minds of their hearers respecting these public events which involve the freedom and existence of Nations. On my own part, from the pressure of other subjects, it is rare that I discuss on Sundays those having a passing and popular no less than a permanent interest: on this account I am not at all reluctant to do so on this day, which is set apart for prayer and humiliation.8

Some clergy expressed diffidence about preaching on such events. This was sometimes because they were reluctant to trespass into “political” territory that they considered inappropriate for the pulpit. George Croly, rector of St Stephen Walbrook in the City of London, preaching in St Paul’s Cathedral in 1838, acknowledged the concern, but affirmed

5 Charles Cator, The Cholera Morbus A Visitation of Divine Providence (London, 1832), p. 10. 6 For example, respectively, John Styles, A Tribute to the Memory of Nelson (Newport, IOW, 1806); John Gardiner, A Tribute to the Memory of Nelson (Bath, 1805); John Townsend, Lord Nelson’s Funeral Improved (London, 1806). 7 For example, respectively, John Osmond Dakeyne, Fortis Fortuna Comes (Wolverhampton, 1852); Henry N. Barnett, The Victor Vanquished (London, 1852); Richard Glover, Esdraëlon and Waterloo (Folkestone, 1852); Charles James Blomfield, The Mourning of Israel (London, 1852). 8 Charles Clarke, War (Birmingham, 1854), p. 3.

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that there was a higher kind of politics that richly merited the attention of the preacher: I disclaim all local politics; they are unfit for the pulpit. But politics on the scale of nations; politics reverentially tracing the courses marked on the map of Providence; politics, taking the lights of Heaven for the illustration of its ways among men; form a legitimate purpose of the pulpit and one of the noblest contemplations of the philosopher, the theologian and the Christian.9

For Henry Barnett, a Nonconformist preaching in Evesham on the death of the Duke of Wellington, there was something disingenuous in the stance of conservatives who were content themselves to preach reverence for the existing order, while castigating more critical voices as “political”. For his own part he believed that political and religious motivations could not be easily separated.10 For others, diffidence stemmed from a genuine uncertainty as to what they should say. In the absence of central guidance, or sometimes, of recent precedent, there was an anxiety not inadvertently to step outside a perceived clerical consensus or to offend local dignitaries and members of their congregations. One clergyman in north Devon was thrown into a state of near panic by the death of George III in 1820. As no monarch had died for sixty years, he had no idea what he should do. He initially hoped to prepare an appropriate Sunday sermon at relative leisure, but then found he was expected to preach at a special service on the imminent day of the funeral. He had no time to consult other clergy, but sought advice from “some of the principal persons of the parish” who rather unhelpfully expressed surprise that, in view of the late King’s age and state of health, he had not already prepared a sermon for the eventuality, and suggested simply that he should do the same as adjoining parishes.11 Such frankness was unusual, but it illuminates a situation in which clergy were responding often at short notice, as best they knew how, and without much opportunity for consultation. Hence while many sermons shared common features arising from the events that gave rise to them, they also reflected a rich diversity of personal attitudes, theological convictions, and local circumstances.

9

George Croly, The Reformation A Direct Gift of Divine Providence (London, 1837), p. 27. 10 Barnett, Victor Vanquished, pp. 3–5. 11 R. Frizell, A Funeral Sermon Occasioned by the Demise of Our Late … Sovereign Lord George the Third (Barnstaple, 1820), pp. 1–5.


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The importance of sermons in articulating and shaping public responses was further apparent in their extensive publication, especially during the first two-thirds of the century. Both national and local newspapers carried many column inches of extensive, sometimes verbatim, reports of such pulpit utterances. In common with other sermons, examples from popular preachers were also widely circulated in The Penny Pulpit, which appeared from the 1830s to the 1870s.12 Numerous examples – for instance at least eighty-one on Princess Charlotte’s death in 1817 and at least seventy on Prince Albert’s in 1861 – were also published independently as freestanding pamphlets.13 Some of these, at least, were very widely read, as indicated, for example, by Robert Hall’s sermon on Princess Charlotte, which had run to nine editions before the end of 1818.14 Such material is not only evidence of extensive contemporary interest in the medium, but also provides rich and hitherto under-utilized resources for later scholars, albeit inevitably weighted towards those more privileged preachers who drew newspaper reporters to their sermons or who had the means and connections to secure publication. It is moreover necessary to bear in mind that newspaper accounts may well reflect editorial bias in both the selection of preachers for coverage and of the passages in their sermons included in abbreviated reports; while independently published sermons were often likely to have been revised and expanded after delivery. Clergy thus had an important opportunity to impress the wider readership of subsequent published versions as well as their immediate hearers. The most spectacular experience was that of the recentlyappointed Bishop of Gloucester, William Thomson, whose sermon on Prince Albert’s death in December 1861 was greatly appreciated by the Queen and was reputedly a major factor leading to his translation to York a few months later, at the very early age, for an archbishop, of forty-three.15 An aspiration to climb lower rungs of the patronage ladder was implicit in the inscription on the British Library’s copy of T.F. Bowerbank’s sermon on the Battle of Waterloo to the Bishop of 12

British Library catalogue; Anderson, “Crimean War,” p. 209. These figures are based on the printed British Library [hereafter “BL”] catalogue, but do not take into account examples surviving in other libraries and not in the BL. A systematic listing and enumeration of such published sermons would be a major research project in its own right. 14 BL catalogue. 15 H. Kirk-Smith, William Thomson Archbishop of York (London, 1958), pp. 14–15. 13

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Lincoln, the powerful George Pretyman-Tomline.16 A sense of solidarity with local civil authority was frequently expressed, for instance in Clitheroe, Lancashire, in the local vicar’s sermon on the death of the Duke of York in 1827, and in the Bishop of London’s sermon at St Paul’s Cathedral on the day of humiliation in 1855 for the Crimean War, both explicitly stating that they were published at the request of the respective corporations.17 Clergy often avowed initial reluctance to publish, from professed uncertainty as to the quality of their sermons and consciousness of haste in preparation, and claimed they were merely doing so in response to the pressing requests of others.18 Some, though, published their sermons with a frequency that suggested they were not infected with false modesty.19 Among published sermons, preachers from the Church of England and the Established Churches of Ireland and Scotland predominated. It was natural that ministers of the state churches should see themselves as having a particular responsibility to preach on such occasions, so although the printed record may well exaggerate the imbalance, the reality was probably broadly similar. Nevertheless examples of sermons by Protestant Nonconformists can readily be found, and some such early 19th-century preachers – notably the Unitarian Robert Aspland, the Baptist Robert Hall, and the Congregationalist Joseph Irons – emulated Anglican clergy by publishing their utterances on several occasions. Recorded sermons by Methodists were rare relative to their rapidly growing numbers, but at least three Wesleyan ministers published sermons on the death of Princess Charlotte in 1817.20 Roman Catholics too do not seem to have preached on national events until late in the century, although probable under-reporting may well distort the evidence. On the other hand, several published Jewish sermons 16 T.F. Bowerbank, A Sermon Preached in the Parish Church of Chiswick Middlesex, on Sunday Morning, July 30 1815 (Chiswick, 1815), title page of British Library copy. 17 J.T. Allen, A Sermon Preached in the Parochial Chapel of Clitheroe on Saturday 20th January 1827 (Clitheroe, 1827); Charles James Blomfield, The Grounds and Objects of National Acts of Humiliation (London, 1855). 18 For example W.B. Williams, A Sermon Occasioned by the Much-Lamented Death of HRH the Princess Charlotte Augusta (London 1817), advertisement; John Bedford, Britain’s Loss and Lesson (Stockport, 1852). 19 Metropolitan preachers, for example Charles Blomfield (Bishop of London 1828– 56), John William Cunningham (Vicar of Harrow, 1811–61), and Charles John Vaughan (Headmaster of Harrow 1844–59, Master of the Temple 1869–94), were assured of the largest markets and were particularly prone to prolific publication. 20 James Bromley, William Naylor and William Stones, as listed in the BL catalogue.


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survive from the early 19th century, and although few appeared in its middle decades, they became quite numerous in the 1890s and 1900s.21 Form For most sermons before the 1870s, the initial selection of a biblical text firmly determined the direction of the discourse. Preachers were both industrious and ingenious in their searching of the Scriptures, and choices ranged extensively from Genesis to Revelation, with most books in between represented on one occasion or another. Nevertheless there were perceptible patterns to their selections. There were a few recurrent choices, notably II Samuel 3:38 – “Do you not know that a prince and a great man has fallen this day in Israel?” – an obvious gift to preachers on the deaths of Lord Nelson, the Duke of York, the Duke of Wellington and Prince Albert.22 I Chronicles 29: 20–30 appealed to those who wanted to affirm national solidarity in celebration or commemoration.23 Preachers who explored divine intervention in contemporary events were drawn to texts such as Isaiah 26:9 and Micah 6:9.24 The choice of texts could be revealing of underlying attitudes: whereas I Chronicles 29:28, “Then he died in a good old age, full of days, riches and honour” was deemed appropriate for sermons on the death of George III, more ambivalent attitudes to his son George IV were indicated by the choice of Daniel 2:2, “he [God] removes kings and sets up kings”.25 Old Testament texts predominated, an indication that preachers more readily found parallels and inspiration for interpreting contemporary events in the history of ancient Israel, and in the Psalms and

21 There are Jewish sermons on Princess Charlotte by Raphael Meldola in the BL and by Tobias Goodman in Manchester Central Library; and on the 1803 Fast Day and on Trafalgar in the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York. I am indebted to Rabbi Professor Marc Saperstein for information on this point. 22 E.g. respectively, Styles, Nelson; Allen, Sermon in Clitheroe; J.J. Blunt, A Sermon in Memory of the Late Duke of Wellington (Cambridge, 1852); W.M. Falloon, A Prince and a Great Man Fallen (Liverpool, 1862). 23 E.g. John Rippon, A Sermon Occasioned by the Demise of Our Late Venerable Sovereign, King George the Third, and the Accession of His Majesty George the Fourth (London, 1820); William Marsh, The Coronation (Colchester, 1821). 24 E.g. respectively Blomfield, National Acts of Humiliation; James Pringle, The Lord’s Voice in the Rod (Newcastle-upon-Tyne, 1817). 25 John Ritchie, He Removeth Kings (Edinburgh, 1830); M. Seaman, A Scriptural View of the Doctrine of Divine Providence (Colchester, 1880).

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prophetic books, than in the specifically Christian teaching of the New Testament. When the New Testament was drawn upon, the specific texts chosen tended to suggest similar themes to that of the Old, with Revelation 3:19 prompting exposition of judgement and repentance and I Timothy 2:1–2 and I Peter 2:17 reverence for kingly and national authority.26 A significant minority of preachers drew on New Testament passages such as I Corinthians 15 to explore themes related to the transience of this life and the expectation of judgement and resurrection hereafter. The evangelical R.W. Dibdin preached a striking sermon on the death in office of the Prime Minister Lord Palmerston from Luke 16:2, “Turn in the account of your stewardship, for you can no longer be steward”.27 In general, however, selections from the gospels were rare, and sustained engagement with Jesus’ own teaching even more unusual. Indeed when H.F. Gray, a prebendary of Wells, did choose Luke 18:24, “How hard it is for those who have riches to enter the kingdom of God!” as his text for a sermon on the Prince Consort’s death, the whole thrust of his argument was to demonstrate that Albert’s virtues suggested that in his case at least, Jesus’ view of the negative consequences of material comfort was groundless.28 Until around the 1870s the characteristic, albeit not universal, form of the sermons was an initial concentration on exposition of the selected text. Few preachers were as rigorous as Samuel O’Sullivan in his sermon on the death of George III, the first half of which contained “no particular allusion to the melancholy event that gave rise to it”.29 Many, however, kept such allusion limited and largely implicit until the later portions of their discourses, when current applications were eventually drawn out. This structure caused preachers to look at the experience of contemporary Britain primarily through the lens of paradigms constructed from the experience of Old Testament Israel and Judah. Some more or less explicitly believed “that the British empire …has been constituted by Providence the heir to the duties, the privileges and the

26 E.g. respectively C.S. Hawtrey, A Funeral Sermon on …the Princess Charlotte Augusta (London, 1817); J.C. Ryle, “For Kings” (London, 1887); David Jones, The Diamond Jubilee (Bangor, 1897). 27 Daniel Wilson, Death the Last Enemy of Man (London, 1827); R.W. Dibdin, The Patriot Palmerston: Was He Saved? (London, 1865). 28 H.F. Gray, A Discourse on the Decease of HRH The Prince Consort (London, 1862). 29 Samuel O’Sullivan, A Sermon Occasioned by the Death of His Late Majesty George the Third (Dublin, 1820), advertisement.


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promises of Israel”,30 and nearly all regarded it as axiomatic that biblical history was mirrored in contemporary events. Only in the last quarter of the century was there significant change in the format of the sermons, with a perceptible increase in the popularity of New Testament texts, a noticeable shortening in length, and a blurring of the earlier tight structure of exposition followed by application. Thus Edward Wilkinson, minister of Christ Church, Leamington, in his sermon on the 1887 Golden Jubilee had little to say about the original context of his text, Isaiah 33:17, “Thine eyes shall see the king in his beauty”, and indeed initially seemed to apply it somewhat blasphemously by launching into an adulatory overview of Queen Victoria’s own life.31 Nevertheless, more conservative preachers still persisted in using the older structure. For example J.C. Ryle, the staunchly evangelical Bishop of Liverpool, devoted the first half of his sermon on the Golden Jubilee to an exposition of his text. Only thereafter did he explicitly mention “the special subject which calls us together this day”.32 These sermons offer a rich and neglected source of evidence on the views of preachers, and hence of the influences on their congregations, in relation to topics of central concern to historians of 19th-century religion and culture. Sermons on deaths and jubilees described exemplary lives, asserted ideals of public and private conduct, and explored gender roles. Sermons on disasters such as cholera and famine revealed attitudes to poverty and the social order in times of particular stress. Sermons in time of war revealed a wide spectrum of convictions regarding armed conflict, ranging from the confident assertion of divine sanction for the national cause, through a perception of war as a time of national trial and chastisement, to the advocacy of pacifism, or at least peace-making, as a Christian duty. There is, however, no space here to pursue these themes in detail, and in any case these would be best addressed by utilizing sermons in conjunction with other sources. Accordingly the remainder of this chapter will focus rather on two issues central to the genre itself: first, the place of divine providence in national life, and second, the paradoxical affirmation of temporal loyalty and patriotism alongside vigorous assertion of the spiritual and eternal destiny of the individual. 30

Croly, Reformation, p. 44. Edward Wilkinson, Sermon on the Occasion of the Queen’s Jubilee (London, 1887). 32 Ryle, “For Kings”. 31

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A consciousness of God’s providential dealings with the British/English nation33 was not so much the theme as the very fabric of most of the sermons. To a considerable extent, such content was predetermined by the context. On occasions when the preacher’s raison d’être seemed to lie in elucidating the spiritual significance of a specific national event, only the boldest and most independent-minded of men were prepared to disappoint the expectations of their congregations. Even the Unitarian Robert Aspland began a sermon on the death of Charles James Fox in 1806 with the assertion that “Religion consists, in part, in the observance of the order and course of Divine Providence”.34 There were, however, considerable differences in the ways in which the workings of providence were regarded; the emphases of particular sermons were shaped by the particular events to which they were a response, as well as by the doctrinal presuppositions of the preacher, and the changing cultural and theological climate. Sermons on happier national events could readily become straightforward assertions of the hand of God in British history. Richard Cecil, minister of the fashionable London proprietary chapel of St John’s Bedford Row, hailed the naval victory at Trafalgar in 1805 as a great national deliverance that required special acknowledgement to God.35 Four years later, the missionary publicist Claudius Buchanan delivered a trilogy of sermons on the jubilee of George III.36 While the first and the third, preached on the preceding and succeeding Sundays, focused on biblical themes, the central sermon on the jubilee day itself (25 October 1809), was primarily a triumphalist celebration of British achievements in the last fifty years, viewed as “God’s unbounded mercies to our land”.37 Buchanan began with the bold assertion that since the “great Jubilee” of his text (I Kings 8:66) held on Solomon’s dedication of the temple, “there has not, perhaps, been a more august festival before the Lord than the BRITISH Jubilee, which we celebrate on this day”.38

33

Preachers in this period seldom made any geographical, political or other distinction between “England” and “Britain”. 34 Robert Aspland, The Fall of Eminent Men in Critical Periods A National Calamity (London, 1806), p. 3. 35 Richard Cecil, The Pageant is Over (London, 1852), pp. 9–16. 36 Claudius Buchanan, Three Sermons on the Jubilee (London, 1810). 37 Ibid., p. 67. 38 Ibid., p. 33.


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He went on to enumerate the “temporal blessings” of the reign: an increase in national power, political stability in the face of the turmoil of continental Europe, and the carrying of “the principles of moral civilization and useful knowledge to the remotest nations of the earth”.39 Moreover national wealth was increasing and political liberty was secured through a constitution that he held to be the gift of God. The nation also enjoyed great spiritual blessings, including the preservation of the church, the increase of true religion, the instruction of the poor in Sunday Schools, the diffusion of the Scriptures, and the establishment of other benevolent institutions.40 Two key events that “consecrated” the reign had been the abolition of the slave trade and the institution of the Bible Society.41 Moreover, the King himself was truly the “defender of the faith” and a “bright example” to the nation.42 A similar celebratory tone was apparent in William Marsh’s sermon on the coronation of George IV in 1821. Like Buchanan, he chose a text that led him to make explicit parallels between Solomon and the contemporary British monarchy and saw the event as symbolizing Britain’s role “as dispenser of blessings to an impoverished and expecting world”.43 Despite its immediate somber context, the Duke of Wellington’s death in 1852 similarly stirred affirmations of positive providential purpose in British history. To George Croly, Wellington had been the agent of providence as the supreme protector of England.44 George Steward, preaching at St Thomas’ Church, Glasgow, similarly perceived Wellington as the human means of the Lord’s deliverance for the nation. There should be national gratitude and thanksgiving for his life and ascribing of all greatness to God. Steward believed that every crisis in national history had been “bound up in most singular manner, with the cause of Protestantism, and the purpose of God to bestow on Britain a grand religious and moral ascendancy over the world”.45 Likewise for John Osmond Dakeyne, preaching to the Mayor and Corporation of Wolverhampton, the occasion was an appropriate one on which to

39

Ibid., p. 42. Ibid., pp. 47–61. 41 Ibid., p. 66. 42 Ibid., pp. 66, 69. 43 Marsh, Coronation, p. 21. 44 George Croly, A Sermon on the Death of the Duke of Wellington (London, 1852), p. 6 and passim. 45 George Steward, The Duke of Wellington (Glasgow, 1852), pp. 29, 35, 42. 40

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reaffirm his “most intense and inmost conviction … that our own country has a purposed end to serve, for which He [God] … has brought it … to be … the foremost Empire of the world”.46 This theme recurred in sermons on Queen Victoria’s jubilees in 1887 and 1897. In his sermon in Dundee, W.L. Boase was in no doubt that “the presence and power of God” had been present in the life of the Queen, the nation and the church during the preceding half century. “Nothing” he said “happens by chance” and “it is God alone, who is the builder” who had made Britain great.47 Bishop Ryle’s sermon surveyed similar ground to that of Claudius Buchanan on George III’s jubilee nearly eighty years before, emphasizing the importance of the sovereign’s personal character in presiding over a long period of political stability, enormously increased prosperity and “immense advance” in the cause of “religion and morality”. Despite his evangelicalism, Ryle was more circumspect than Buchanan had been in explicit reference to providence, but the implicit message of thankfulness to God for divine favor was clear enough.48 Ten years later, at the Diamond Jubilee David Jones, preaching at Penmaenmawr in North Wales, affirmed that Britain’s current position in the world was attributable to the favor of God. For him, as for other jubilee preachers, Victoria herself, with her life a focus for “peace, purity and prosperity” was, like George III and Wellington in earlier generations, both symbol and guarantor of divine blessing on the nation.49 Even such essentially celebratory preachers, however, also recognized darker shades in the Almighty’s dealings with Britain. In some concluding passages of his 1809 sermon, Buchanan struck a warning note, acknowledging that the jubilee was also a day of reproach for the continuing widespread neglect of God’s word and worship, and that there was need for mourning and humiliation in the face of the ongoing calamities of war and disease.50 In a sermon marking the Battle of Waterloo in 1815, T.F. Bowerbank pointed out that although God had brought a great victory, he did not interfere to ward off the natural consequences of human agency, and hence there had been a price to pay in

46

Dakeyne, Fortis Fortuna Comes, p. 11. W.L. Boase (attributed in BL catalogue), Sermon Preached in Dundee …on the Occasion of the Queen’s Jubilee (Dundee, 1887), p. 6. 48 Ryle, “For Kings”. 49 Jones, Diamond Jubilee, pp. 11–12. 50 Buchanan, Three Sermons, p. 70. 47


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terms of human loss and suffering.51 In the face of the pomp of George IV’s coronation, Marsh recognized that there would be chastisement for national sins; amidst the joy of Victoria’s jubilee, Ryle saw that there were black clouds looming, even as he urged his hearers to focus their eyes rather on the clear blue sky.52 Both William Howley, then Bishop of London, preaching on Waterloo, and David Jones, preaching on the Diamond Jubilee, cautioned against vainglorious boasting in human strength, a corollary of their conviction that national success came only by divine favor.53 Spanning the century was a general sense of God’s special provision for the nation and of Britain’s consequent accountability to the Almighty. Sermons preached on more challenging and negative occasions inevitably obliged preachers to probe the actual workings of providence more deeply. If God was indeed favoring the British nation, why did bad things happen, and what lessons should be learned from them? Such questions were focused particularly by two untimely royal deaths, those of Princess Charlotte in 1817 and of Prince Albert in 1861; by the cholera epidemics of 1832 and 1849; the Irish Great Famine of 1847; and by war, with France until 1815, in the Crimea from 1854 to 1856, the “Indian Mutiny” of 1857, and the South African War at the turn of the 20th century. Until around 1860, the predominant response of preachers to such events was to see them as a divine judgement on the sins of the nation, or at least as a chastening and spur to repentance. Although such views were apparent during the Napoleonic Wars, they assumed particular prominence in the response to Princess Charlotte’s death. This occurrence was particularly devastating because it disrupted the direct line of succession to the throne, and removed a young woman perceived by the devout as their best hope for the future moral and spiritual regeneration of a royal family and a nation tarnished by the scandals associated with the Prince Regent and his brothers. Thus Thomas Tregenna Biddulph, the leading Bristol evangelical, appears to have spoken for many preachers when he stated that “I am constrained, after mature reflection, to acknowledge, that I consider this bereaving dispensation of Divine Providence, as a manifest token of God’s holy 51

Bowerbank, Sermon on July 30 1815, p. 10. Marsh, Coronation, p. 20; Ryle, “For Kings,” p. 18. 53 William Howley, A Sermon Preached on Thursday January 18 1816 (London, 1816), p. 6; Jones, Diamond Jubilee, p. 11. 52

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displeasure”.54 While Calvinists such as Biddulph were naturally predisposed to this conclusion, it appeared to be a widespread consensus among preachers in 1817. Though preachers agreed that God was at work in these occurrences, precise interpretations differed. Three strands of approach can be identified. First, but quite rare, was the claim that the Almighty was passing judgement on specific national acts or omissions that had incurred His displeasure, particularly the countenancing of false religion. Thus John Pye Smith, a Congregationalist with liberal political views, attributed Charlotte’s death in part to God’s anger at the restoration in 1815 of absolutist Roman Catholic regimes on the Continent; his co-religionist Joseph Irons saw the cholera epidemic of 1832 as a judgement against national encouragement of “Popery” and “infidelity”.55 Preaching on the 1847 Famine, the Liverpool Anglican evangelical Hugh McNeile also held the encouragement of “Romanism” to be a particularly significant national sin. He explained: Individuals, as such, have another arena than this world, in which to meet with righteous retribution, but national prosperity or adversity are confined to this life. Those, therefore, are peculiarly national sins, whose direct tendency, according to the known and ordinary course of events, is to interfere with national prosperity. Can anything more directly interfere with the best interests of a nation, than a compromise of the high principles of civil and ecclesiastical liberty?56

A similar view that the nation was being punished for a compromise with idolatry was also a strong theme in sermons on the “Indian Mutiny”, although this time the perceived false religion was of the Hindu rather than Papal variety.57 Secondly, and more commonly, preachers argued that the nation was being judged not so much for sinful collective acts as for the accumulated sinfulness of individuals, which was countenanced by social convention. Indeed, even the minority of preachers who highlighted collective sins did not neglect such more dispersed and general sinfulness. The catalogues of offenses varied somewhat according to the particular religious and social preoccupations of the preacher, but the one

54

Thomas T. Biddulph, National Affliction Improved (Bristol, 1820), p. 13. John Pye Smith, The Sorrows of Britain (London, 1817), pp. 16–17; Joseph Irons, Jehovah’s Controversy with England (London, 1832), pp. iii–iv. 56 Hugh McNeile, The Famine a Rod of God (London, 1847), p. 23. 57 Stanley, “Indian Mutiny,” p. 280. 55


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offered by John East in his sermon at Chipping Campden on Princess Charlotte’s death was broadly characteristic: “profligate luxury”, “commercial covetousness”, “gross immorality, daring crime, heaven-defying impiety and blasphemy”, the drunkenness of all social groups, lying, “uncleanness”, fraud, neglect of churchgoing and indifference to the evangelization of the world.58 When sabbatarianism was at its height in the middle of the century, the desecration of Sunday was also a widespread feature of such lists.59 Political “sins” could be included: the radical unrest that coincided with the 1832 cholera epidemic led conservative preachers to denounce what James Taylor in Newcastle-upon-Tyne called “the want of contentment with their own condition among the lower orders”.60 The attraction for preachers of such wide-ranging denunciation of sin was twofold. On the one hand, emphasizing God’s general abhorrence of sin enabled them to sidestep the very human controversy almost inevitably raised by preachers who focused on specific national actions, such as Catholic Emancipation, that others might well regard as anything but sinful. On the other, it offered a direct challenge to congregations who might reasonably consider themselves unable to do much to change national policy, but could not abrogate responsibility for their own lives. Thus East challenged his hearers, “Let us enquire, what share has Campden in the national guilt? Let each ask himself, what share have I in the national guilt?”61 Moreover, repentance and amendment of life was presented not merely as a matter of self-interest, with a view to warding off worse judgements to come, but also one of patriotic as well as Christian duty. Taylor explicitly linked the two: “I this day put your patriotism to the test, by inviting you to return unto the Lord”.62 In these sermons God’s actions were presented not so much as merely punitive judgements, but rather as chastenings, designed to puncture national complacency and inspire spiritual revival. Thus William MacDonald, preaching at the Countess of Huntingdon’s Chapel in Brighton on Princess Charlotte’s death, maintained that “Fatherly

58

John East, The Voice of God to the Nation (Evesham, 1817), p. 11. For example John Scott, War God’s Sore Judgement (London, 1854), p. 10; J.W. Brooks, The Rod of the Almighty (Nottingham, 1861), p. 15. 60 James Taylor, The Cholera: Or God’s Voice to Britain (London, 1832), p. 13. 61 East, Voice of God, p. 19. 62 Taylor, Cholera, p. 23. 59

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chastisements and afflictions are ‘the rod’ of God, by which he corrects his people in judgement, tempered with mercy, that they may be brought to a sense of their sin, and reformation in their conduct”. He believed that as representative figures, first the King through his chronic illness, and now the Princess, through her tragic death, were paying the price for the sin of the nation as a whole. God, he thought, “will continue to smite, until we are brought to a sense of our sin; and an acknowledgement of our iniquity”. Paradoxically, however, such punishments were presented as evidence of special divine concern for Britain, as much was required of those to whom much had been given.63 Moreover, further comfort could be derived from the Schadenfreude of observing the greater sufferings of other nations, whether in the ravages of cholera or the turmoil of revolution, an indication that the Almighty was still exercising relative forbearance with the people of Britain.64 A third approach was to decline to identify specific reasons for God’s judgement, but nevertheless to affirm that a providential chastening was taking place. This was the strategy adopted by Robert Hall in his widely-read sermon on the death of Princess Charlotte: That it [the Princess death] ought to be considered as a signal rebuke and chastisement, designed to bring our sins to remembrance, there is no doubt; but to attempt to specify the particular crimes and delinquencies which have drawn down this visitation, is inconsistent with the modesty which ought to accompany all inquiries into the mysteries of Providence: and especially repugnant to the spirit which this most solemn and affecting event should inspire. At a time when every creature ought to tremble under the judgments of God, it ill becomes us to indulge in reciprocal recrimination; and when “the whole head is sick, and the whole heart is faint,” it is not for the members to usurp the seat of judgment, by hurling mutual accusations and reproaches against each other.65

Hall could not resist proceeding to add his own list of sins, but his essential message was clear enough. Judicious caution of this kind was unusual in 1817, but by the 1840s and 1850s it was gaining ground,

63

William MacDonald, Jehovah’s Voice to Britain (London, 1818), pp. 8–13, 20. For example there could be smug satisfaction that the French were suffering worse from cholera than the British (Cator, Cholera Morbus, p. 26) and relief at Britain’s avoidance of revolution in 1848 (George Croly, The Year of Revolutions [London, 1849], p. 14). 65 Robert Hall, A Sermon Occasioned by the Death of Her Late Royal Highness the Princess Charlotte of Wales (Leicester, 1817), pp. 56–57. 64


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notably in the comments of preachers on the Irish famine66 and on the Crimean War. In a sermon on the Fast day that marked the outbreak of war, Charles Vaughan, the headmaster of Harrow, denounced any preacher who saw the event as a pretext to criticize the sins of others or aspects of national policy he happened to dislike as “guilty of the most serious possible neglect of a great opportunity God has given him, and makes that which should have been for their [congregation’s] health, in the saddest sense of all an occasion of falling”.67 At the subsequent day of humiliation in 1855, Charles Blomfield, the Bishop of London, considered gloating over the sudden death of Tsar Nicholas to be distasteful, considering that while it was “providential” it was not “judicial”. Blomfield continued: It is impossible to deny, that, upon the whole, it consists with the principles of the Divine government, as developed in the Word of God, that the Judge of all mankind should reward, even under a covenant of spiritual promise, the piety and virtue of a nation, or punish its sins and vices, by temporal blessings or curses; but that is a very different thing from asserting, of any particular event or train of events, that it is the decreed result of national conduct.68

In earthquakes, he pointed out, the good perished with the wicked. Although the dramatic outbreak of the “Indian Mutiny” in 1857 stimulated a widespread perception that divine retribution was at work, the response to Prince Albert’s death in 1861 indicated that the more cautious providentialism articulated by Blomfield was gaining ground. There were still some preachers who perceived the event as a chastening for the collective sinfulness of the nation,69 but quite as widespread was the approach of preachers who presented it rather as a striking reminder of the transcendent and mysterious purposes and power of God.70 Significantly, one of the preachers who argued most robustly that the Prince’s death was indeed a judgement of God then went on to echo the approach of secular sanitary reporters by identifying the very specific “sin” of failure to clean up the disease-ridden swamps around

66

Gray, “National Humiliation,” pp. 205–206. Charles John Vaughan, A Nation Watching for Tidings … to which is added The Outbreak of War (London, 1854), pp. 28–29. 68 Blomfield, National Acts of Humiliation, pp. 13, 15–16. 69 E.g. Brooks, Rod of the Almighty. 70 E.g. W.R. Clark, A Sermon Preached in St. Mary’s Church, Taunton (Taunton, 1861), pp. 12–13; Maurice P. Day, A Sermon on the Death of the Prince Consort (Dublin, 1861), p. 16. 67

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Windsor as causing the Prince to contract his fatal attack of typhoid.71 Divine “judgement” of this kind operated through the natural order of the world rather than through any special providence. Belief in divine retribution was becoming contentious rather than a consensus. In 1871 Harford Battersby could still believe that in the Franco-Prussian War God had “used Prussia and its confederate powers as His instruments, to humble the pride of France, and carry our His purposes of correction upon that people”.72 On the other hand in a sermon in 1883 W.A. Presland argued that a colliery explosion that had killed over sixty men arose from the operation of natural laws of combustion which God could not suspend any more than He could suspend the law of gravity to stop a man falling down a precipice.73 The Tay Bridge disaster on Sunday 28 December 1879 focused the debate particularly sharply because more militant sabbatarians, such as the leading Edinburgh Free Church of Scotland preachers James Begg and George Macaulay, interpreted the catastrophe as a divine judgement on Sunday traveling. Other saw it at retributive in a more general sense, a divine response to excessive materialism. Providential views of any kind, however, were now becoming less common. Other preachers characterized the disaster not as divine retribution, but rather as dramatic testimony to the fallibility of human achievements and the overwhelming power of God.74 Thomas Knox Talon, an Episcopalian, explicitly distancing himself from “the utterances of certain preachers, in this city [Edinburgh] and elsewhere” with which he had not “the smallest degree of sympathy”, ridiculed the idea that “the Ruler of the Universe … was waiting there at the Tay Bridge, … waiting to destroy the poor remnant of railway travellers that had left Edinburgh and the intermediate stations that afternoon”. Although it had been a Sunday, it was absurd and offensive to see the disaster as a judgement on Sabbathbreakers. Rather, “doubtless” it “was the result of some error in the construction, or in calculating the strength of materials required to resist the combination of forces that might be brought to bear upon them, in such a squall as on that fatal Sunday night”.75 Nevertheless older views 71

Paxton Hood, Words from the Pall of the Prince (London 1862), pp. 22–25. T.D. Harford Battersby, God’s Voice Heard in the War Between Germany and France (London, 1871), p. 6. 73 W.A. Presland, The Divine Providence in Relation to Mining Accidents (Clayton-leMoors, 1883), pp. 6–7. 74 The Scotsman, 5 January 1880, pp. 5–6. 75 Thomas Knox Talon, The Tay Bridge Disaster: Was it Accident or Judgement? (Edinburgh, 1880), pp. 3–4, 12–13. 72


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still persisted in some quarters: as late as 1900, in a sermon at Burgh Castle near Great Yarmouth, George Venables characterized the South African War as “a stinging rod for a sinning nation” and offered a catalogue of sins similar to those in early 19th-century sermons.76 By the early 20th century, however, theodicy of this kind was unfashionable. Earthly and Heavenly Loyalties For much of the 19th century, patriotism was contested political and religious territory, variously radical and conservative, secular and Christian.77 Against this background, preachers not only affirmed the providential purpose of God in national events, but sought to define and assert the legitimacy of Christian patriotism. In Bath, John Gardiner began his sermon on Nelson with a discussion of patriotism, a universal human sentiment, but in his view one particularly powerful in motivating “the virtuous and the good” and especially strong where states enjoy excellent government and promote the happiness of their people. Hence “on this principle, will not Britons feel in the highest degree its invigorating influence?”78 For William Harris, preaching at the Independent Meeting House in Cambridge on the day of Princess Charlotte’s funeral, religion was wholly consistent with the natural ties of social and national life, refining them but not destroying them. Thus “true religion includes the most refined patriotism”.79 A similar sentiment was voiced by an Anglican preacher on the death of George III, who saw the “spirit of our religion” as requiring “the most zealous endeavours” to promote the welfare of “the community of which we are members”.80 For Charles Clarke, who in 1854 vigorously affirmed that it was both the “will of Heaven” that Britain should oppose Russia and that her patriotic duty was to assert herself as a great power, patriotism and Christianity joined together to lead the nation to the battlefields of the Crimea.81

76

George Venables, A Stinging Rod for a Sinning Nation (Norwich, 1900). For a seminal analysis of the changing secular political contexts of patriotism see Hugh Cunningham, “The Language of Patriotism, 1750–1914,” History Workshop Journal 12 (1981), 8–33. 78 Gardiner, Nelson, pp. 3–4. 79 William Harris, Christian Grounds for National Interest in the Death of Princes (Cambridge, 1817), p. 21. 80 A. Barker, The Character of a Good King (Taunton, 1820), p. 34. 81 Clarke, War, pp. 5, 10–13. 77

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Iconic individuals provided models of Christian patriots. Gardiner went on to present Nelson as an outstanding example, with his qualities as a national hero complemented by an “amiable disposition … conformable to [the] spirit of Christianity”.82 Similarly, in 1852 Charles Boutell, preaching at Litcham, Norfolk, portrayed Wellington as both a “Christian Believer” and a model Englishman, “for be it remembered, that the very same qualities and principles which raised him individually to his splendid elevation, are also the vital essence of … national greatness”.83 Long-lived monarchs were seen as personifying a less heroic but still more pervasive ideal of Englishness: according to John William Cunningham, the Vicar of Harrow, George III had a character “minutely and essentially British”, and was “the perfect Englishman”, especially in his “ardent attachment to the joys of home”.84 When Victoria died, Alfred Fawkes, preaching in Brighton, reflected that “she was the representative and embodiment … of the existing order of things” and that “solid rather than brilliant, strong rather than many-sided or versatile, her character was typically English”.85 Such emphasis on prosaic, domestic virtue was further developed in recurrent characterization of the nation as a family, for example in William Marsh’s sermon on the coronation of George IV; in W.M. Falloon’s perception in 1861 that sorrow for Prince Albert was both “universally national” but at the same time “deeply and tenderly domestic”; and in F.H. Thicknesse’s evocation at Victoria’s Golden Jubilee of “the most scattered and the most powerful nation in the world turned back into one family under one mother and one Queen”.86 Also in 1887, James Fleming, in response to the sudden death of the Conservative statesman the Earl of Iddesleigh, claimed that “the kingdom is one – the national family is one”. He believed that Iddesleigh himself had been a “true-hearted patriot”, by which Fleming meant he “who seeks not exclusively the interests of some, but who lives and prays, and acts for the good and happiness of all”.87

82

Gardiner, Nelson, pp. 15, 19. Charles Boutell, The Hero and His Example (London, 1852), pp. 9, 14–15. 84 J.W. Cunningham, A Sermon Preached …on the Death of … George the Third (1820), pp. 7–8, 13. 85 Alfred Fawkes, The Passing of the Queen (London 1901), pp. 4, 11. 86 Marsh, Coronation, p. 20; Falloon, Prince and Great Man, pp. 4–5; F.H. Thicknesse, The Trust of Government (Northampton, 1887), p. 11. 87 James Fleming, The Death of a Patriot (London, 1887), pp. 3, 12–13. 83


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Religious minorities took opportunities to make it clear that political loyalty was entirely compatible with religious dissent or separation. Protestant Dissenters were fulsome in their praise of George III because his reign had seen the advance of toleration and the late King “entertained the most heart-felt respect for all conscientious Nonconformists”.88 A similar view was taken of William IV, extravagantly compared to Moses by one Independent preacher who hailed the reign as “one of the most illustrious which the annals of history ever recorded”, because of the measures taken to extend the liberty and happiness of the people, and to do justice to the Dissenters themselves. He advertised his sermon as “an exposition of the cardinal principles upon which the Protestant Dissenters of this country have always shown their patriotism and loyalty to the House of Brunswick”.89 Unqualified Roman Catholic enthusiasm for the British state was a later development, but it was very much apparent in response to Victoria’s Golden Jubilee. Preaching in Manchester Bernard Vaughan, SJ, recounted the material achievements of the reign and the progress of the Catholic church. Although he urged the outstanding need to restore diplomatic relations with the Holy See, he regarded loyalty to the throne as the “flower” of religion.90 Similarly, an anonymous preacher at Stonyhurst acknowledged that much had been done to remove hatred against Catholics and affirmed that “they who fear God also honour the Queen”.91 Following the untimely death of the Queen’s grandson, the Duke of Clarence, in 1892, the Chief Rabbi, Hermann Nathan Adler, preached a fulsomely sympathetic sermon, noting the interest the deceased had shown when he had attended a Passover service.92 In 1900 Adler’s sermon on the South African War was strikingly bellicose, affirming an “absorbing determination to vindicate the honour of England”, and appealing particularly to Jews who, he said, “enjoy perfect freedom and equality in this sceptred isle”.93 Although preachers normally sought to affirm consensus, the pulpit could also be used to condemn opposition to the existing political

88 John Morison, Patriotic Regrets for the Loss of a Good King (London, 1820), p. 20. 89 John Everitt Good, Britannia’s Tears at the Deceases of Her Sovereign (Gosport, 1837), advertisement, p. 21. 90 Bernard Vaughan, Her Golden Reign (London, 1887), pp. 3, 5–11. 91 Anon., Reverence and Loyalty (London, 1887), pp. 9, 13. 92 H.N. Adler, The Nation’s Lament (London, 1892), pp. 9–10. 93 H.N. Adler, The Queen and the War (London, 1900), pp. 8, 15.

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order and the Established Church. Thus Edward Patteson, preaching at Roehampton Chapel on the coronation of George IV, railed against those “who have drained the very dregs from the poisonous cup of republican disaffection”, although concluding that they were too few in number to spoil the climate of “universal harmony, content and love”.94 Charles Cator used his sermon on cholera in 1832 to denounce those who were “murmuring against the ministers of Christ’s Church”.95 On the other hand, Dissenters were also able to use the medium of such sermons to present their own politically liberal perspectives. One such opportunity arose in response to the death in 1821 of Queen Caroline, the estranged consort of George IV, who had become a figurehead for critics of the King and opponents of the Tory government. In his sermon in London, the radical Unitarian William Johnson Fox defended the late Queen from the charges brought against her and affirmed his own understanding of patriotism as “an admiring and ardent love of the people who really constitute that country… Next to the name of Christian do I glory in that of Englishman”.96 A more conciliatory note was struck by John Evans, preaching at the Independent Chapel in Malmesbury, who, having eulogized the late Queen, urged the congregation: “as Patriots, pray for your country at this eventful crisis; remembering, that national calamities spring not from religion, but from the want of it”. They should pray for the spreading of the “Tree of Liberty”, but also for the King.97 When George IV himself died nine years later, John Ritchie, preaching in Edinburgh, pointedly had little to say about the late monarch and dwelt at length on the vanity of earthly greatness. He then showed his liberal sympathies by reviewing the events of the regency and reign, condemning the war but hailing the repeal of the Test and Corporation Acts, Catholic Emancipation, and progress towards the abolition of slavery.98 In his sermon on the death of William IV, the leading Baptist Edward Steane commended the liberal achievements of the reign, and suggested that residual reactionary forces were standing in God’s way, because the Almighty was working

94 Edward Patteson, A Sermon Delivered … in Reference to the Coronation … of … King George IV (London, 1821), pp. 22–23. 95 Cator, Cholera Morbus, p. 18. 96 W.J. Fox, A Funeral Sermon for Caroline Queen of England (London, 1821), pp. 20, 26. 97 John Evans, A Sermon … Occasioned by the Death of Her Late Majesty Queen Caroline (London, 1821), pp. 22–23. 98 Ritchie, “He Removeth Kings,” pp. 36, 39, 43–45.


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to bring about the “downfal [sic] of every institution inimical to the equal rights of the subjects of this free country”.99 The use of such sermons to make explicitly political points was always the exception rather than the norm, an exception that appears to have become more unusual as the century wore on. Nevertheless, when the Crimean War seemed to be going badly, sermons on the 1855 day of humiliation were used to castigate human misdeeds,100 and as late as 1885, in a sermon at St Stephen’s Westminster, William MacDonald Sinclair denounced the abandonment of General Gordon to his fate at Khartoum. Significantly, though, he suggested that the nation as a whole shared in responsibility for this “heedless and deplorable” conduct, thus affirming a negative solidarity consistent with the usual concern of preachers to articulate consensus rather than division.101 Indeed the more usual counterpoint to patriotic assertion in sermons was not political dissent, but direction of the thoughts of congregations to spiritual realities beyond temporal national affairs. Thus an anonymous preacher on Nelson’s death saw the recognition of his fatal wound as the moment when his hearers should “observe the Christian supersede the hero”.102 Claudius Buchanan followed his midweek sermon on the “British Jubilee” with a Sunday sermon on “the Heavenly Jubilee”, the supper of the Lamb prophesied in the Book of Revelation, an inheritance for which he urged professing Christians to prepare.103 The whole thrust of the sermon by Joseph Irons, an Independent minister, on the coronation of 1821 was to proclaim Jesus as another king, with higher claims than George IV. In saying this he denied any deficiency in earthly loyalty, but on the contrary: … the best instances of loyalty to our earthly sovereign will be found among those who will bear him on their hearts before our heavenly King, praying that the sceptre of Jesus may be swayed in his heart, and that rich grace may prepare him to wear a crown of glory.104

99 Edward Steane, The Eternal King (London, 1837), pp. 31–32. For the political use of sermons on both sides in the Chartist agitation of the late 1830s and 1840s: see Eileen Yeo, “Christianity in Chartist Struggle, 1838–1842,” Past and Present 91 (1981), 109–39. 100 Anderson, “Crimean War,” p. 218. 101 W.M. Sinclair, Gordon and England (London, 1885), pp. 19–20. 102 Anon, A Sermon Preached on the Sunday After the Funeral of the Right Honourable Lord Viscount Nelson (Chelsea, 1806), p. 12. 103 Buchanan, Three Sermons, pp. 33–71, 73–132. 104 Joseph Irons, A Sermon Preached at Grove Chapel, Camberwell, July the 22nd 1821 (London, 1821), pp. 3–4.

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William Marsh, well-known for his millennial convictions, saw the coronation as a reminder to Christians “of that day when the Lord our Saviour shall take upon himself his great power, and reign”.105 It was natural that clergy should use deaths and the prospect of death to prompt their hearers to prepare for their own demise, and to contemplate the afterlife. James Duke Coleridge, preaching in Exeter on the death of George III, also recalled the recent deaths of Princess Charlotte and of the Duke of Kent, as a reminder that no age group should think itself immune from the grim reaper: Be encouraged then – be persuaded – be alarmed, if the threats of the Gospel form a more powerful motive – to think seriously of another life – to acknowledge and to profit by the warning given to youth in the death of our young Princess – to the full season of life in the recent one of her Uncle – and to old age in the departure of our beloved King.106

Charles Vaughan, preaching at Harrow School on the Crimean War, reminded the boys that some of them might well find themselves serving in the army in the near future, and urged spiritual preparedness for sudden death.107 In 1865 R.W. Dibdin posed the question “The Patriot Palmerston: Was He Saved?”, examined the evidence for the late premier’s spiritual state, and reached a charitable conclusion, but then turned the spotlight on his hearers, urging them to review their own lives. After a graphic account of the wrath awaiting the unregenerate, he instructed the organist to play the Dead March in Saul, and the congregation to “meditate on these two things, DEATH and JUDGMENT”.108 In general, though, by the end of the century, such stark warnings, like portrayals of retributive providence, were becoming a minority rather than characteristic response. Interest in death and what lay beyond it persisted, but preachers more normally evoked a heavenly consummation for all, without raising the specter of intervening judgement and possible consignment to Hell. This theme was particularly apparent in sermons on the premature death in 1892 of the Duke of Clarence, Queen Victoria’s grandson and second in line to the throne, a circumstance that invited comparison with Princess Charlotte’s death 105

Marsh, Coronation, p. 23. J.D. Coleridge, A Sermon Preached in the Parish Church of St Sidwell on Sunday Afternoon the 20th February (Exeter, 1820), pp. 21–22. 107 Vaughan, Nation Watching, pp. 3–15. 108 Dibdin, Patriot Palmerston, pp. 12–18. 106


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three-quarters of a century before. However, whereas sermons on Charlotte were replete with reference to divine judgement, those on Clarence tended to dwell on divine consolation and the unclouded prospect of eternal life.109 Indeed, such a vision could be set before congregations even when the occasion did not necessarily require it. Thus when preaching on the 1887 Jubilee, Edward Wilkinson directed the major part of his sermon to reflecting on the Queen’s future, of her prospects of meeting with the King of Kings, and receiving a “crown of glory that fadeth not away”.110 The almost seamless interweaving of earthly and heavenly loyalties in these sermons was a significant source of their rhetorical power. On the one hand, they appealed to a natural human instinct to affirm community and national solidarity in moments of crisis and celebration; on the other they lifted the eyes of their hearers from inevitably imperfect human institutions and communities to the challenge and perfection of the divine order. Faith and patriotism operated in creative symbiosis. Their overall message was, as Thomas Biddulph put it in 1820, that “the most devoted Christian is the best subject and the truest patriot”.111 Conclusion A survey such as that undertaken in this chapter is inevitably a selective one, drawing on only a tiny proportion of the sermons recorded, let alone those preached. A more sustained and extensive analysis would add subtler shades to the picture, and give a sharper quantitative sense of changes over time and variations by denomination and locality than has been possible to achieve here. Nevertheless some significant conclusions can be drawn. The sheer numbers of such sermons, the range of the occasions on which they were preached, their widespread dissemination in print as well as to church congregations all made them an important interface between the discourse of patriotism and that of religion. Moreover, despite differences of emphasis and theology, the predominant common messages of the compatibility of Christianity (and indeed Judaism) and patriotism, and of God’s providential care of

109 E.g., Anon, “He that Comforteth” (London, 1892); Arthur P. Purey-Cust, God’s Ordering, Our Sufficiency (York, 1892). 110 Wilkinson, Sermon on the Jubilee, pp. 7–18. 111 Biddulph, National Affliction Improved, p. 71.

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the British nation, were symptomatic of the seamlessness of that relationship. It will come as no surprise to historians of religious thought that these sermons reflected wider theological trends in the later 19th century, in terms of decline of belief in retributive judgement and hell.112 It is pertinent, however, to consider the implications for the history of British nationalism: a weakening sense of accountability to the Almighty and a lessened fear of retribution for national sin may well help to explain the cultural shift to a harsher imperialism and jingoism in the later Victorian years.

112 Geoffrey Rowell, Hell and the Victorians: A Study of the Nineteenth-Century Theological Controversies Concerning Eternal Punishment and the Future Life (Oxford, 1974); Michael Wheeler, Death and the Future Life in Victorian Literature and Theology (Cambridge, 1990).

CATHOLIC PREACHING IN VICTORIAN ENGLAND, 1801–19011 Jessica A. Sheetz-Nguyen But seeing that the preaching of the Gospel is no less necessary to the Christian commonwealth than the reading thereof; and whereas this is the principal duty of bishops; the same holy Synod hath resolved and decreed, that all bishops, archbishops, primates, and all other prelates of the churches be bound personally – if they be not lawfully hindered – to preach the holy Gospel of Jesus Christ.2 Archpriests, curates, and all those who in any manner so ever hold any parochial, or other, churches, which have the cure of souls, shall, at least on the Lord’s days, and solemn feasts, either personally, or if they be lawfully hindered, by others who are competent, feed the people committed to them, with wholesome words, according to their own capacity, and that of their people; by teaching them the things which it is necessary for all to knew unto salvation, and by announcing to them with briefness and plainness of discourse, the vices which they must avoid, and the virtues which they must follow after, that they may escape everlasting punishment, and obtain the glory of heaven.3

In Ecclesiastical Discourses, Bishop of Birmingham William Bernard Ullathorne (1806–99) argued that “preaching” was more than mere “pulpit declamation”.4 The sermon represented the ministry of the “Divine Word”, and comprised the delivery of God’s message.5 1 I wish to thank Jan Swearingen and Carol Ann Poster for introducing me to the twin themes of rhetoric and preaching, which I learned about through the 2002 National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Seminar, “Reform of Reason: Rhetoric and Religion in Nineteenth Century Britain”; the University of Central Oklahoma Joe C. Jackson Graduate School for funding travel and research at the British Library; Jerome Hall, SJ for his insightful and helpful answers to questions relating to preaching the Gospel in the pre-Vatican II Catholic Church; and editor Robert Ellison for his insightful expertise and infinite patience. 2 James Waterworth, ed. and trans., The Council of Trent: The Canons and Decrees of the Sacred and Oecumenical Council of Trent (London,1848), pp. 27–28. 3 Waterworth, The Council of Trent, p. 28. 4 “Ecclesiastical Discourses,” The Catholic World: A Monthly Magazine 24 (1877), 425–6. 5 William Ullathorne, “Preaching,” in Characteristics from the Writings of Archbishop Ullathorne with Bibliographical Introduction, ed. Michael F. Glancey (London, 1889), p. 214.

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Its purpose was to draw souls to “God’s truth and laws, whether on the altar, in the confessional, in the catechetical class, or while visiting the home of a parishioner”.6 Each occasion for sermon-giving required a unique method, as evidenced by others who went before and “spoke sense of God and not their own; and that divine sense they obtained by meditating on the Holy Scriptures and the traditions of their fathers.… No patching, no parroting will ever make a preacher”.7 Three hundred years before Ullathorne, at the 16th-century Council of Trent, Roman Catholic theologians affirmed the tradition of preaching the Gospel by charging archpriests, curates, and priests with specific responsibilities, including preaching and celebrating ceremonial rites. Sermons, a non-ceremonial part of the Mass, changed to represent the changing face of the church. Early 19th-century English sermons focus on the theology of soteriology, or salvation, while later homilies stress its political nature, urging parishioners to come to the aid of the poor. Increased emphasis on preaching was a reactive papal stance reflecting the larger reform movement spreading across Europe among theologians and monarchs alike. Roman Catholicism “refashioned” its approach to the world by stressing the important link between preaching and teaching. As the papacy grew in significance, partly in a defensive response to Protestant challenges to the authority of Rome, the mission field expanded to include an England that had undergone a deep and unsettling reconfiguration of the church.8 To understand the place of the sermon in the Roman Catholic Church in the 19th century, it is essential to recount the means by which the Catholic population had declined from the reign of the Tudors. Henry VIII (r. 1509–47) promulgated the Act of Supremacy in 1534 and dissolved the monasteries between 1536 and 1540. The English monarch and his successors established authority over the Church of England and prescribed its liturgy with the publication of the Book of Common Prayer in 1549.9 The penal laws issued under monarchs from Elizabeth I (r. 1558–1603) to George III (r. 1760–1820)

6

Ibid., p. 214. Ibid., pp. 215–16. 8 Diarmaid MacCulloch, The Reformation: A History (New York, 2003); John W. O’Malley, Trent and All That: Renaming Catholicism in The Early Modern Era (Cambridge, 2000), pp. 134–37; Robert Bireley, SJ, The Refashioning of Catholicism, 1450–1700 (Washington, DC, 1999), p. 121. 9 John Guy, “Tudor Monarchy and Political Culture,” in The Oxford Illustrated History of Tudor and Stuart Britain, ed. John Morrill (Oxford, 2000), pp. 226–27. 7

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severely circumscribed permission to preach and teach in the tradition of the church of Rome.10 Between the tumultuous era of the Reformation and the turn of the 19th century, Catholics transformed the place of their church in Britain from an illegal and despised institution to one that offered spiritual guidance, education, housing, food, and clothing. This transition occurred in response to the reality that the British army and navy had recruited many Irish men to serve the crown during the Napoleonic Wars (1803–15). The anomaly of Catholics suffering religious disabilities while risking their lives in the service of a church and state spurred Parliament to pass the Catholic Emancipation Act in 1829, opening the door to the rebirth of Catholicism across Britain.11 Curiosity, questions, concerns, and fear increased as Irish immigration rose to new heights by mid-century. It was one thing to accept the belief systems of elite English Catholics, and quite another to admit that the members of the House of Norfolk adhered to the same belief system as the superstitious Irish. The conflation of “false notions” with the Irish presented additional theological and political challenges for the Roman Catholic Church, which on one hand found itself in a defensive posture in relationship to the Church of England, and on the other hand faced the task of educating the great unwashed. These themes thread throughout the age of Victoria in the components of Catholic homilies. This chapter investigates the place of the sermon in the ceremonial rite of the Mass by examining spiritual convictions and the politicization of Catholicism against the backdrop of British history. For over two centuries, the English regarded Catholics as traitors to both church and state, and all things Catholic were regarded with suspicion. Therefore, when a Catholic priest read the Gospel in the vernacular, then clarified doctrinal and moral teachings and commented on the scriptures in a short lecture as part of the celebration of Sunday Mass, everyone who was even slightly aware of the doctrinal conflicts

10 Beginning in 1570, in response to a papal bull releasing Catholics from their fealty to the English monarch, Elizabeth I (r. 1558–1603) issued the first of dramatic penal laws ending ceremonies in the Catholic church, prohibiting the education of children in the faith of their parents, and providing for capital punishment for anyone denying Elizabeth’s authority over the church in England under the Act of Supremacy (Sidney Lee, “The Last Years of Elizabeth,” in The Wars of Religion: The Cambridge Modern History, ed. Lord Acton, A.W. Ward, G.W. Prothero, and Stanley Leathes, 3 [1905; repr. New York, 1909], pp. 349–50). 11 Statute 10 Geo.4, c. 7 s. 26, 28–30, 33–36.

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realized that much preaching served to build and reinforce a Catholic identity. Sermons published in the first half of the 19th century indicate that priests defended the doctrines of Rome, defined and clarified the authority of the papacy and the Petrine doctrine, articulated the efficacy of the seven sacraments, prepared parishioners to participate in and receive the sacraments, highlighted Christ as a role model, established the importance of honoring the saints, especially the Virgin Mother, promoted the value of education through the catechism, and protected the faithful, particularly the Irish. Scholars focusing on Roman Catholicism in England have traditionally examined the Reformation, the differences between the Anglican and Catholic traditions in England, the English Catholic community during the recusant period, the old and new church hierarchy, the Oxford movement, and anti-Catholic sentiment.12 The lives of great churchmen, including Cardinals Nicholas Wiseman (1802–65) and Henry Edward Manning (1808–92), Bishop William Ullathorne (1806–89) and John Henry Newman (1801–90), have also been recounted in long and interesting biographies.13 These men were best known and understood by their preaching, but sermons, particularly Catholic sermons delivered throughout the 19th century in Britain, have received very little scholarly attention. The homily used as a pri12 Classic studies of British Catholicism include Owen Chadwick, An Ecclesiastical History of England: The Victorian Church (New York, 1966); John Bossy, The English Catholic Community, 1570–1850 (London, 1975); E.R. Norman, Roman Catholicism in England from the Elizabethan Settlement to the Second Vatican Council (New York, 1985), and Denis G. Paz, Popular Anti-Catholicism in Mid-Victorian England (Stanford, 1992). Perhaps the most helpful over-arching account of the Reformation, Diarmaid MacCulloch’s The Reformation: A History (New York, 2003), provides a detailed overview of Early Stuart England’s approach to reforming the church. Alec Ryrie, ed., Palgrave Advances in the European Reformations (Houndmills, Basingstoke, 2006), updates and synthesizes the historiographical background covering the last twenty years. Studies focusing on early modern Catholicism in Europe include Robert Bireley’s masterful The Refashioning of Catholicism, 1450–1700 (Washington, D.C, 1999) and John W. O’Malley, Trent and All That: Renaming Catholicism in the Early Modern Era by (Cambridge, 2000). 13 Richard Schiefen, Nicholas Wiseman and the Transformation of English Catholicism (Shepherdstown, WV, 1984); Edmund Sheridan Purcell, Life of Cardinal Manning, Archbishop of Westminster (London, 1896); Shane Leslie, Henry Edward Manning: His Life and His Labours (London, 1921); James Pereiro, Cardinal Manning: an Intellectual Biography (Oxford, 1998); Vincent Alan McClellan, Cardinal Manning: His Public Life and Influence, 1865–1892 (London, 1962); Edward Cuthbert Butler, The Life and Times of Bishop Ullathorne, 1806–1889 (London, 1926); Sheridan Gilley, Newman and his Age (London, 1990); Ernest Edwin Reynolds, Three Cardinals: Newman, Wiseman, Manning (New York, 1958).


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mary source offers a link between language and culture. Published in newspapers, journals, and books, these documents demonstrate how Catholics carved out an identity by distinguishing their belief system from others. By understanding the sermon within the context of the sacrifice of the Mass, and by surveying and sampling the themes present in their orations, we will enter the world of a faith community trying to re-establish its ancient and historic ties to a beloved, if discriminated against, spiritual institution. Mass, Roman Missal, and Sermon in the Roman Catholic Tradition A brief historical overview of the sermon, a term that derives from Hebrew sources and literally means the “service of the word” for holy days, indicates that the homily served as a commentary on the scriptures; texts attributed to Saint Clement of Rome show the homily appeared after the first Epistle in the 2nd century.14 Later texts verify the presence of the sermon in the oldest ritual authority on the sacred liturgy, the Ordines.15 By the 8th century, sermons had disappeared from the ritual, only to reappear when mendicant preachers bent on reform revitalized the practice in the 12th through 14th centuries. Franciscans and Dominicans moved the pulpit from the altar to the center of the church, thereby linking the “ordinary” readings and reflection as a time for repentance with a different spiritual tone, one that was separated from the act of participation in “holy sacrifice of the Mass”, the Eucharist. Responding to changes posed by Protestant reformers, the Council of Trent (1545–47), set in motion a number of important changes in ecclesiastical practices that required priests to teach, or preach, or lecture, in the vernacular to enlighten and provide moral instructions to the faithful.16 In the wake of the reforming spirit, Catholic theologians recognized the close connection between preaching and education. Seminarians preparing to become parish priests took courses in homiletics because public oratory provided a time to nourish one’s community spirituality

14 J.B. Lightfoot and J.R. Harmer, The Apostolic Fathers (Whitefish, MT, 2003), p. 43. 15 Theodor Klauser, A Short History of the Western Liturgy: An Account and Some Reflections, trans. John Halliburton, 2nd ed. (Oxford, 1979), p. 32. 16 Ibid., p. 64.

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in preparation for reception of the Holy Eucharist. Introductory rites included a penitential rite, or the Confiteor, a public prayer of confession, and petitions for mercy; the liturgy of the word preceded the sermon. Priests celebrated the word of God by reading from the letters of Paul, the psalms, a second selection from the Old Testament, and then chapters from the Gospel, or New Testament. The homily concluded the public segment of the celebration, and the recitation of the Nicene Creed signaled preparation for the sacrifice or consecration of bread and wine.17 In a further attempt to arrive at a level of systematic liturgical practices that represented the universal church, the Tridentine hierarchy charged bishops with prescribing preaching cycles that followed a basic pattern, working through the articles of the Nicene Creed, Ten Commandments and the six precepts of the Church, and Gospel readings. A “preaching syllabus” issued by the dioceses for a “year’s worth of Sundays” also guided the parish priest. Beyond these instructions, priests followed the lectionary or breviary, a distillation of the Scriptures that selected the most important passages and assigned them a place in the liturgical year as guidance for sermons. Gospels and ancillary readings cycled through a one-year calendar, beginning the liturgical year at Advent, and progressing through Lent, Easter Sunday, Pentecost, and the remaining Sundays thereafter. Mass on Sunday and feast days required explanations of the mystery and purpose of the gathering in the universal church. The 19th-century solemn High Mass was a highly orchestrated event. The celebrant said prayers in Latin with his back to the congregation while the English faithful read from the Roman missal, or prayer book, which outlined the liturgy and provided specific verses and psalms for the different liturgical seasons. Reading without responding, people said they “heard” the Mass. In this way, church attendance was a private affair that was interrupted only by a sermon and the walk up to the altar where the communicant knelt to receive the Eucharist. Even though it was the responsibility of all consecrated priests to participate in the daily celebration of the Mass, the Church did not require weekday sermons. In fact, a handbook entitled Ceremonial According to the Roman Rite prescribed each step of the sacred performance, but said very little about the preaching. It was mentioned only in phrases such

17

Ibid., p. 69.


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as “after the sermon”, or in footnotes indicating what the concelebrants should be doing during the homily.18 The Politics of the Bible, Gospels, Tracts, and the Sermon in Victorian Britain The above discussion situated and contextualized the place of the sermon in the Mass as distinct from the Latin rituals celebrating the Eucharist. Since the Gospel, in the liturgy of the word, carried significant weight in structuring the theme of the sermon, the question of which Bible English-speaking priests used in the Victorian Catholic Church presented another issue for theologians. Catholics rejected the King James Bible, just as the Protestants had denied the authenticity of the old Vulgate Bible by Saint Jerome. Part of Catholic reform included a new translation named for Douai-Rheims, the seminary town in France where it was published in 1609–10. In the 18th century, Dr Richard Challoner (1691–1781), coadjutor to the Vicar Apostolic of London (a position he held under the direction of the papacy), revised the Douai text so much that it was thought to be a completely new translation; nonetheless, it became the standard Bible for the Roman Catholic English-speaking world. The need for a new translation demonstrated a growing movement among English Catholics to reassert their presence in the British Isles. Historian Kenneth Inglis has observed that the Roman Catholic Relief Act of 1829, also known as Catholic Emancipation, removed most of the civil disabilities that Catholics had suffered for centuries.19 Inglis’ claim may be true, if we look only at political records, but, if we look beyond parliamentary politics and more closely at the social and spiritual exercise of power, we will see that the quest for religious rights did not end with “emancipation”.20 Rather, the struggle for souls played

18 For a detailed 19th-century account of the celebrant’s duties throughout the liturgy, see The Ceremonies of Low Mass According to the Rubrics of the Missal, Decrees of the Popes, and the Opinions of the Most Eminent Rubricists. Translated from French (Dublin, 1846) and Joseph Baldeschi, Ceremonial According to The Roman Rite. Translated from Italian by J.D. Hilarius, 4th ed. (London, 1873). 19 Kenneth Inglis, Churches and the Working Classes in Victorian England (London, 1963), p. 17. 20 Catholic emancipation factionalized the Tory Party and cleared the way for the ascendancy of the Whigs, who agitated for government reforms that culminated in the 1832 Reform Bill and expansion of the voting franchise (R.W. Davis, “Wellington and

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out on the altars of churches, on the podiums of lecture halls, and in the press. In the wake of newfound privileges for Catholics, debates over the legitimacy of Roman Catholicism and whether it was a threat to the Crown and the Church of England moved from Parliament to the colleges of Oxford University. A new cadre of academics, linguistics and textual critics coupled to create increased interest in biblical scholarship, and the Oxford Movement and its Tracts for the Times sought to return the Church of England to her roots in the Fathers and the writings of 17th- and 18th-century “Anglo-Catholic” theologians. Some scholars, such as John Henry Newman and a number of his followers, responded to these developments by converting to the Church of Rome; other intellectuals attempted to explode received tradition, rejecting not only the authority of the Bible, but the very notion that a single truth existed.21 The Diocesan and Parish Sermon in Victorian Britain The place of the sermon in the Mass, the Bible from which the readings were drawn, the Oxford movement, and the important individuals who emerged to lead the Church in the 19th century aid in our understanding of the classical vision of the Roman Catholic Church. Yet, while the elite focused on the authority of the papacy and ideals of the mind, the working poor went to Mass for other reasons: to pray. When they walked into the vestibule and opened the door to the nave – the place where they genuflected before entering the pew for a seat – they moved into a spiritual world that took them away from the profanity of their

the ‘Open Question’: The Issue of Catholic Emancipation, 1821–1829,” Albion 29 [1997], 39–55). For a splendid discussion of the place that the Irish and Roman Catholics had in forging the national character, see Linda Colley, Britons: Forging of National Identity (New Haven, 1992), pp. 332–33. In The Rise and Fall of Liberal Government in Victorian Britain (New Haven, 1993), pp. 50–55, Jonathan Parry discusses the move for Catholic Emancipation and the breakup of the Tory Party in detail. 21 Some Oxford theologians, such as Mark Pattison, editor of Essays and Reviews, rejected the notion of biblical authority on certain issues, particularly atonement and justification. The publication created such a stir that the authors, most of whom were academics, were called to the Ecclesiastical Court of Arches, where judges found that their essays had departed from the Thirty-nine Articles. The essayists appealed their case in front of the Privy Council, where the court reversed the judgement in 1864 (John Fletcher Hurst, “Essays and Reviews,” in Short History of the Christian Church [New York, 1893], pp. 356–57).


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daily lives. The beauty of the altar, the centrality of the crucifix symbolizing the suffering Christ, the mysterious and gilded tabernacle, golden and silver candlesticks, walls hung with silken brocades and tapestries, and ceilings adorned with mosaics and frescoes, all accompanied by the court of Heaven including ponderous statues of Mary, Joseph and the saints, surely inspired the faithful.22 Considering the environment of this sacred space, how did priests connect their parishioners to the mission of the church on earth? Handbooks on how to write sermons provide significant insight to unique themes, focusing for example on the Eucharist, almsgiving, and the special place of Mary or the Blessed Mother in the teleology of Roman Catholicism. Throughout the century, Catholic preaching took a defensive posture in an effort to explain the teachings of the Church. As leaders of a minority community that enjoyed few rights at the beginning of the century, priests felt compelled to teach and defend the difference between one Christian celebration of the Eucharist and the other, and to ensure that baptized Catholics understood the connection between the biblical narrative and Catholic tradition. For the faithful, the authority of Rome and the Petrine doctrine were integrally linked with the validity of the doctrine of transubstantiation, not consubstantiation as held by the Church of England. During the liturgical season of Lent, priests helped parishioners prepare to receive the sacrament. For example, in 1827, Father Francis Martyn (1782–1838) preached a series of sermons dedicated to exploring the divine nature of the Holy Eucharist.23 To open his homily, Martyn chose a couplet from “The Hind and the Panther” by John Dryden (1631–1700), the English poet who converted to Roman Catholicism during the reign of James II (r. 1685–88): “That truth has such an air and such a mien / As to be loved needs only to be seen”.24 In concert with Tridentine directives,

22 See John Timbs, Curiosities of London (London, 1868), pp. 229–33. Since the second Vatican Council the liturgy of the Mass has taken on new life. The Constitution “On the Sacred Liturgy” of the Second Vatican Council, dated 4 December 1963, determined that “We have come to celebrate the Eucharist in a way which in many respects is impossible for the people to understand. Since this is so, it is our duty to restore the clear outlines of the structure of the rite, which have been lost over the years, and to restore to the prayers, in particular the Canon, their original clarity which has likewise become obscured in course of time” (Klauser, A Short History of the Western Liturgy, p. 149). 23 Francis Martyn, A Series of Lectures on the Sacrament and Sacrifice of the Holy Eucharist as delivered in the Catholic Chapel at Walsall, on the Wednesdays and Fridays in Lent, 1827 (London, 1827), p. 2. 24 Ibid., p. 3.

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Martyn needed to emphasize the close links between the Gospels and the sacrifice of the Mass. He accomplished this goal by turning to the most Greek and philosophical of New Testament texts, John 6:54: “Except you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you shall not have life within you”. In explaining the doctrine of Transubstantiation, he used the term “real presence”, a phrase later adopted by Oxford Movement leader E.B. Pusey, to associate the body and blood of Jesus Christ with the communion host after consecration.25 He posited that the “grounds of … Faith in the Blessed Sacrament” resided in the Petrine doctrine or “sacred authority which Jesus Christ appointed to be the Guardian and Interpreter of his truth”. Using the miracle of the loaves and fishes as an example, Martyn stated that such “sublime truths” had remained intact from the age of the Apostles.26 Because ecclesiastical traditions defined so much of what it meant to be Catholic, it was important for Catholic clergymen in England to demonstrate their depth of knowledge of the Bible. Martyn cited the miracle of the loaves and fishes to emphasize that the Church was the seat of the mysteries of faith. Within these mysteries, the sacraments offered spiritual graces. Scorning his challengers as “unbelievers, libertines, freethinkers, and irreverent and bad Christians”, Martyn taught that there was “nothing on which your salvation so much depends, as on the frequent and worthy receiving of the holy Eucharist”. Indeed, the Eucharist was the way to “salvation”.27 Exhorting his listeners to act, to live more pious lives in preparation for reception of Holy Communion, Martyn explained how the Eucharist was both a sacrament and a sacrifice which should inspire the faithful towards a higher level of grace and deeper belief. Drawing on John 6:26, 27, Martyn said: You seek me, said Jesus not because you have seen miracles, but because you did eat of the loaves and were filled. Labour not for a meat which perisheth, but for that which endureth unto life everlasting, which the Son of Man will give you.28

25 See the publication titled The Liturgy of the Mass Concerning the Sacrifice, Real Presence, and Service in Latin under “Anderton, Lawrence, Father S.J. alias John Brereley,” in Joseph Gillow, A Literary and Biographical History or Bibliographical Dictionary of the English Catholics from the Breach of with Rome, in 1534 to the Present Time, vol. 1 (London, 1885), p. 36. 26 Martyn, A Series of Lectures on the Sacrament and Sacrifice of the Holy Eucharist, p. 7. 27 Ibid., p. 9. 28 Ibid., p. 11.


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Mystery and divine faith dominated this sermon, reminding people that God was the source of their belief. Martyn emphasized that the mystery of the Eucharist was beyond their “limited faculties”, but not beyond the reach of God’s power and goodness.29 He advised his listeners that to achieve the blessings of divine faith, they needed to trust in the Gospel of John 6:53, which he paraphrased as “Unless we do eat the flesh of the son of Man and drink his blood, we never shall have life within us”.30 Thirty years after Martyn’s publication, Father John Perry (1804–60), a parish priest who served in Birmingham, Northampton, and then joined the Dominicans in 1850, addressed sacramental matters in Practical Sermons for all the Sundays and Holidays of the Year (London, 1857).31 The volume began with the first Sunday in Advent and a reading from Saint Luke: And there shall be signs in the sun, and in the moon, and in the stars; and upon the earth distress of nations, by reason of the confusion of the roaring of the sea and of the waves; men withering away for fear and expectation of what shall come upon the whole world. For the powers of the heavens shall be moved. Luke 21:25, 26.32

Perry explained that these were some of the signs that would indicate the approach of the end times. He asked: “Now, if the mere signs of that day will be so alarming, as even to make ‘men wither away for fear of what shall come upon the whole world’; what must be that fearful account which is to follow?”33 To avoid damnation, Perry encouraged parish priests to engage listeners in preparation for the sacrament of Penance and Holy Communion.34 His homily template taught priests how to elicit a sense of humility. Perry moved beyond the Confiteor, the community prayer of contrition said at the beginning of the Mass, and established a three-point homily with one or more sub-themes. First, he urged preachers to ask for an examination of conscience, which he defined as thoughts, words, actions, omissions and sins of

29

Ibid., p. 19. Ibid., p. 23. The actual language of the Douai-Rheims Bible reads: “Then Jesus said to them: Amen, amen I say unto you: Except you eat the flesh of the Son of man, and drink his blood, you shall not have life in you” (John 6:53, Douai-Rheims Bible, Biblos.com, [http://drb.scripturetext.com/john/6.htm], accessed 21 March 2008). 31 s.v. “Perry, John,” in Gillow, Literary and Biographical History, p. 269. 32 John Perry, Practical Sermons for all the Sundays and Holidays of the Year (London, 1857), pp. 1–2. 33 Ibid., pp. 1–2. 34 Ibid., pp. 1–2. 30

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commission, or sins that one may have encouraged others to commit, and any other character flaws. In this self-examination, listeners were warned that even though they prayed frequently, the nature of their hearts remained in question.35 Perry relied on verses from the Bible to reinforce each sermon theme. In the spirit of anticipation, he asked: You have prayed and perhaps, frequently; but how? With what attention? With what disposition of heart? – You have abstained and fasted; but in what spirit? You have approached the Sacraments; but was it from a pure intention? With due preparation? With proper dispositions?36

Perry’s second theme reminded priests to tell parishioners that every sin would be publicly exposed. There was, indeed, no place for the sinner to hide: But there is another circumstance in this examination, which will add very much to our distress: for the conscience of each individual will be known, not only to himself and God; but, moreover, to all his relatives, friends, and acquaintances – to the entire world!37

Perry reinforced the “no escape” idea with an apocalyptic verse: “Overwhelmed with confusion, will you not ‘call upon the mountains and rocks to fall upon you, and to hide you?’ (Apoc. Vi.16) But there is no escape”.38 Perry’s third aim brought end times to the fore again, writing that the Judge will pronounce the irrevocable sentence. To the just he will say: “Come ye blessed of my Father, possess the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world”. But to the wicked: “Depart from me, ye cursed, into everlasting fire, which was prepared for the devil and his angels”. “And these shall go into everlasting punishment, but the just into life everlasting”. (Matthew 25)39

In the conclusion, Perry encouraged his listeners to prepare for the sacrament of Penance by repenting so that they would not be judged harshly in the future. Using strong language, Perry wrote: Instead of being banished from God eternally with the reprobate, you will be found worthy to hear from your Judge that consoling sentence:

35 36 37 38 39

Ibid., pp. 2–5. Ibid., p. 5. Ibid., p. 5. Ibid., p. 6. Ibid., p. 6.


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“Come ye blessed of my Father, possess the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world” (Matthew 25:34).40

In addition to Penance, the road to salvation required almsgiving to the poor, or tithing, another theme of the didactic Catholic sermon. Catholic preaching on almsgiving clashed with Victorian self-help mentality in more ways than one, first in principle and secondly in regards to the person giving the sermon. Visiting priests from Ireland delivered special fund-raising homilies to aid the cause of the poor in Ireland. In 1822, Reverend John Briggs (c. 1789–1861), Vicar Apostolic of the Northern District of England, delivered a homily on the serious problem of starvation in Ireland. He argued that God did not judge thoughts, but deeds, charitable deeds, that all members of humanity were brothers and were required to participate in the mission of the Church by offering paternal charity.41 Briggs then offered a narration beginning with the requisite description of the conditions of the Irish poor. Invoking the imagination of his listeners, he exclaimed, “Oh that I could transport you in imagination to yon distressed land”.42 Briggs reported that country folk stripped the bark from trees, uprooted young corn, and harvested wild herbs from fields to feed their children. Worse conditions prevailed in towns where “doors and the streets haunted by walking specters, many fainting for want of food”.43 Briggs reported that the poor were not only members of the human family, but they were also the face of Christ. Following the Catholic tradition of the Stations of the Cross, Briggs urged his listeners to imagine the pain and suffering of the poor. On the way, he stopped to remind the parish of the miseries faced by Jesus as he carried his cross to Golgotha along the Via Dolorosa. A brilliant writer, Briggs carried his listeners to the final judgement day. He engaged listeners on a journey to see themselves as Christ crucified; he said that God would turn to the right and see those who helped the poor, guaranteeing them salvation. Those on the left would surely depart for the everlasting fires of Hell reserved for the Devil and his angels.44 This imaginative connection between those with money and those without, and the depiction of the poor as

40

Ibid., p. 6. John Briggs, A Sermon Preached in the Catholic Chapel, at Chester, on Sunday, May 19, 1822 (Chester, 1822), frontispiece. 42 Ibid., p. 9. 43 Ibid., pp. 10–11. 44 Ibid., pp. 10–11. 41

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representing the Christ, gathered money and support for Briggs’ charity in English, Welsh, or Scottish Catholic chapels.45 The theme of the Blessed Mother, the Virgin and Mother of God, also formed a special genre of sermons in the Victorian Catholic Church. In an unsigned sermon given prior to 1851 at the Saint John’s Wood Church of Our Lady, the preacher sought to persuade believers as to the miraculous nature of faith by reading a verse from Matthew 11:4–5: Go relate to John what you have seen and heard; the blind see, the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead rise again, the poor have the Gospel preached to them, and blessed is he that is not scandalized in me.46

The priest boldly claimed that Perhaps there is nothing so strongly objected against us, as Catholics, than that we give to the Virgin Mother of Jesus as much homage, as much reverence, as much veneration and adoration as we give, and even in a greater degree than to her Divine Son.47

Even though the Church was buffeted with much criticism over this particular point, parishioners understood the intimate connection between the Virgin and her son, and that “the Church which Jesus founded on a rock should last while time itself should endure”.48 Teaching the truths regarding the conception of the Virgin marked the next and important point, that she was conceived without sin by the incarnation of the Holy Spirit, and therefore worthy to become the Mother of God. Since Mary was the handmaid of the Lord, meaning that she was prepared to do what God asked at the annunciation of her

45 There was an underlying trope of contention between Protestants and Catholics that conflated fund raising with something traitorous. Protestants criticized Catholics for their unrelenting requests for money and in the process merged religion and politics, particularly when politicians took up the cause of the poor Irish. For example, The Albion accused Daniel O’Connell of using a plea for “almsgiving” as a suspect, if effective strategy, for fund raising. In one instance, O’Connell had had collected up to £42,000, a considerable sum (Albion, A Journal of News, Politics, and Literature, 6 February 1836, p. 46). 46 The Catholic Pulpit, Containing A Sermon for every Sunday and Holiday in the Year, And for Good Friday With Several Occasional Discourses (Baltimore, 1851), p. 658. For a thoughtful discussion of complexities surrounding Marian devotions as explained by Robert A. Orsi and others, see “Abundant History: Marian Apparitions as Alternative Modernity,” in “ ‘Abundant History”: A Forum’,” Historically Speaking 9 (2008), 12–26. 47 Ibid., p. 659. 48 Ibid., p. 679.


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mission, she served as a role model and an intercessor with her son in Heaven, especially when the faithful found themselves in times of need. The number three, as in the Holy Trinity, played a role in the sermon as well, as three petitions to Mary for help aided in confirming the choice, justification, and perseverance of a vocation.49 In the next part of the sermon, the preacher explained the role of saints in the life of the church. By honoring and venerating Mary and the saints, the faithful were united with God because the saints served as their advocates in Heaven. To do this, the listeners were urged to humble themselves and to forget past “feuds, dissensions, and disquietudes” that kept the loyal Christian from having a contrite heart in that most “degenerate” of centuries, the 19th.50 In parting, the orator petitioned his listeners to “bow down before her shrine” and to invoke and implore her assistance in the journey towards a pure soul and service for God.51 The Roman Catholic belief system tried the patience of some British theologians, as evidenced by the Reverend H. Townsend’s “Roman Fallacies and Catholic Truths”, published in the Church of England Quarterly Review in 1849. In this assessment of the Catholic Church, proof of misguided ways presented itself in the establishment of a Roman Catholic community of women who had migrated from Lancashire to Warwickshire and published a set of tracts that promoted adoration of the Blessed Virgin Mary and the “Host”, worship of angels, religious images, relics, and the canonization of saints.52 Phrases such as “ritualism” and “papism” instantly served as iconic and recognizable code words or markers of prejudice. According to John Henry Newman, Protestants commonly viewed Catholics as weak-minded fanatics subject to “unaccountable persuasion or fancy”.53 Indeed, detractors believed the worst about Roman Catholics. Englishmen knew, according to Newman, that “Catholicism was unpatriotic, usurpatious, despotic, cruel, culturally inferior, superstitious, heretical, and non-biblical”.54 “Superstitious”, a code word for ignorant, or those 49

Ibid., p. 682. Ibid., pp. 683–89. 51 Ibid., pp. 689–90. 52 “Roman Fallacies and Catholic Truths,” The Church of England Quarterly Review 26 (1849), 244. 53 John Henry Newman, Lectures on the Present Condition of Catholics in England (London, 1892), p. 71. 54 Kevin L. Morris, “Rescuing the Scarlet Woman: The Promotion of Catholicism in English Literature, 1829–1850,” Recusant History 22 (1994), 75–77. 50

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believing in fairies, was a term most closely associated with the poor Irish. Catholic theologians wrote, published, and presented lectures and sermons that frequently reflected a defensive posture on behalf of the Irish, and an offensive stance in terms of theology. The clergy wrote sermons in hopes of retaining or retrieving the Irish back into the fold through the sacraments and raising money to provide Catholic education for the working poor. Much work in both the temporal and spiritual worlds needed to be done. Easing the Plight of the Poor: Nicholas Wiseman and Henry Edward Manning Newman’s mid-century conversion had sparked English Catholics to petition Rome for restoration of the hierarchy.55 Pius IX (1846–78) restored the ecclesiastical offices of the Roman Catholic Church in England on 29 September 1850 by translating the regions under the Vicars Apostolic to dioceses headed by bishops. Lord John Russell (1792–1878) and others called the restoration an act of “Papal Aggression”. Members of the Lords ridiculed the pope who invoked the blessings of the Blessed Virgin upon the appointment of English clergy. The challengers called for “any gentleman on the hustings to stand forward” and oppose this infraction against the state, Church of England, and the public conscience of Great Britain.56 By 1865, the estimated Roman Catholic population in England, Scotland, and Wales stood at 7.5 million.57 In the diocese of Westminster, Roman Catholic churches and chapels had increased by 108 per cent. South of the Thames, in the Southwark diocese, the parish size rose by 27 per cent.58 According to The Month, congregations of

55 Thomas Flanagan, A History of the Church in England, from the Earliest Period, to the Re-establishment of the Hierarchy in 1850, 2 (London, 1857), p. 458. Flanagan was born in 1814, educated at Sedgely Park School and proceeded to Oscott College for high studies. He remained at the college until he became a professor. His last post was as canon at Saint Chads, Birmingham. See The Tablet, 29 July 1865 and the Weekly Register, 5 August 1865. 56 “Charles Langdale,” in Bibliographical History of English Catholics, 4, ed. Joseph Gillow (London, 1902), pp. 118–22; Edwin Hodder, The Life and Work of the Seventh Earl of Shaftesbury K.G. 2 (London, 1886), pp. 324–31. 57 “The Religious Statistics of the World,” translated and reprinted from Civiltà Cattolica, The Month 2 (1865), 493. 58 Ibid., p. 491.


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religious women and clergymen in England and Scotland had risen by 137 per cent in twenty-five years.59 The growth of Catholic communities challenged the status quo and resulted in persistent and undeniable bigotry. English biases against Catholics expanded from attacks on superstitious practices to the Catholic tradition of “unfettered” care for the poor. To lay claim to and maintain control of the Poor Law system, guardians of the poor excluded priests and nuns from visiting the incarcerated in jails and inmates of Poor Law workhouses. They baptized Roman Catholic children and educated in them accordance with the Anglican catechism. Guardians resisted the transfer of Roman Catholic children from workhouse boarding schools to certified Roman Catholic Poor Law boarding schools.60 Striking at the heart of Catholic tradition of giving aid to the poor, two bills seeking to curb the work of consecrated women and men went before Parliament. The Law of Superstitious Uses attempted to stop nuns and priests from accepting honoraria for reciting prayers for the dead.61 The second proposed bill required inspection and registration of all convents in England to ensure that “females” were not being forcibly detained therein.62 The “Religious Houses Bill”, which required government inspection of all religious houses, failed because of the concerted efforts of Bishop Ullathorne of Birmingham, who hoped that “manly and gentlemanly” as well as Christian sentiments would finally prevail.63 One of the leading champions of the poor was Nicholas Patrick Wiseman, appointed by the Pope to lead the diocese of Westminster64 and charged with meeting the needs of destitute Irish Catholics who 59

Ibid., p. 493. Bishop Ullathorne, A Plea for the Rights and Liberties of Religious Women with Reference to the Bill Proposed by Mr. Lacy (London, 1851); R.A. Leach, The Legalised Perversion of Catholic Children in the English Workhouses, with a Special Reference to its Practice in the Cuckoo-farm School at Hanwell (London, 1864). 61 David Owen, English Philanthropy, 1660–1960 (Cambridge, 1964), p. 201. 62 Bishop William Ullathorne, A Plea for the Rights and Liberties of Religious Women, pp. 1, 19. See Walter Arnstein, Protestant versus Catholic in Mid-Victorian England (Columbia, MO, 1982), pp. 62–63. 63 Ibid., p. 3. 64 The Westminster Diocese encompassed London and its surrounding regions north of the Thames. The Southwark Diocese comprised districts south of the Thames, including Greenwich, Bermondsey, Lambeth, Richmond, and Kew (Johanna H. Hartring, London Catholic Missions from the Reformation to the Year 1850 [London, 1903], p. xi; The Catholic Directory [London, 1871], p. 95). 60

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could not educate their children, much less go to Mass.65 A few months prior to the official announcement restoring the hierarchy of the Catholic Church to England, Wiseman had delivered a sermon entitled The Social and Intellectual State of England, Compared with Its Moral Conditions at Saint John’s Church, Salford.66 Wiseman opened his sermon with “Amen, I say unto you, that this man went down to his house justified, rather than the other. Luke 18:13”. He explained the purpose of his sermon, to collect money for the parish of Saint John Salford, with the intention of completing the “unfinished pile of rocks and of helping the poor”.67 Drawing on pride and envy, two of the seven deadly sins, Wiseman gave a homily that pulled the strings of guilt in his listeners’ ears. He exhorted them to rid their hearts and minds of prideful thoughts, and warned parishioners not to draw comparisons with others, “as if the rich should compare themselves with the poor or the poor with the rich or nation with nation, or age with age”.68 Wiseman continued to the crux of his concern, which was, in plain speaking, collecting money for the indigent.69 He asked, “As for the really poor, starving, neglected, abandoned, who thinks of them?”70 Wiseman accused his listeners of being arrogant because they considered the destitute as “a class beneath” themselves; and their apathy meant that they were committing sins of omission because they failed to care for the most needy in society. Wiseman’s efforts at relieving the poor were aided by Henry Edward Manning, a recent convert who would become archbishop of Westminster after Wiseman’s death in the spring of 1865. Manning had begun his career at Oxford, where he trained as an Anglican cleric. By 1852, he was giving sermons in London and then Rome, offering his view of faith and placing his spiritual trust under the new umbrella of Roman Catholicism. His early Catholic preaching reflects his rationale for leaving the Church of England; these homilies show the work of a

65 J.P. Marmion, “The Beginnings of the Catholic Poor Schools in England,” Recusant History 17 (1984), 69; Schiefen, Nicholas Wiseman and the Transformation of English Catholicism, pp. 320, 185. 66 Nicholas Wiseman, The Social and Intellectual State of England, Compared with Its Moral Conditions: A Sermon Delivered to St. John’s Catholic Church, Salford, on Sunday 28th July, 1850 (London, 1850), p. 3. 67 Ibid., p. 3. 68 Ibid., p. 3. 69 Ibid., p. 3. 70 Ibid., pp. 15–16.


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theologian, philosopher, and historian. In “The Relations of England to Christianity: England’s Master Heresy”, Manning explained his difficulties as he understood them, beginning with the various forms of religious opinion that had sprung up out of the Anglican Church over three centuries. He blamed England’s monarchs for placing the Church in England in “open contradiction and almost perpetual controversy”. Finding solace and clarity in the Church of Rome, he wrote: “For, as I have said before, the master heresy of the English race is to deny the presence of any infallible authority upon earth”.71 A year later, Manning delivered four sermons on “the grounds of faith” at Saint George’s Church, Southwark. The sermons made three main points: that faith cannot exist without certainty; that even though all men could read scriptures, Christians needed the guidance of Rome because the untrained mind and soul could not properly interpret the texts; and that the scriptures were analogous to a last will and testament, an authentic testimony that required correct interpretation. In sum, he argued, “Holy Scripture is Holy Scripture only in the right sense of Holy Scripture”.72 Two years hence, in Rome, Manning built on this thesis in a set of sermons delivered at the church of Saint Gregory on the feast of Saint Thomas the Apostle. Teaching first about the Gospel story of the doubting saint, Manning claimed that Thomas’ doubts ultimately glorified the “Son of Man”.73 Parishioners heard him teaching as an Englishman, an expatriate in the Eternal City, who established his allegiance by opening his sermon with a litany of ecclesiastical connections between the Holy See and Saint Augustine, the 7th-century restorer of Christianity to England. This lineage was important to Manning because he wanted his listeners to appreciate the work of the Apostles and saints, those who believed in the word of Christ, served his mission and supported the power of the Church. He observed that there were doubters and challengers, ones who were “cold and slow of heart” and who “criticize and object” because they were looking for proof without

71 Henry Edward Manning, “Introduction: The Relations of England to Christianity,” Sermons on Ecclesiastical Subjects: with an Introduction on the Relations of England to Christianity (Dublin, 1863), pp. 55–56. 72 Henry Edward Manning, The Grounds of Faith: Four Lectures Delivered to Saint George’s Church, Southwark (London, 1852), pp. 27–28. 73 Henry Edward Manning, The Certainty of Divine Faith: A Sermon Preached on the Feast of Saint Thomas the Apostle, 1853 in the Church of Saint Gregory the Great, in Rome (London, 1854), p. 5.

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which they could not and would not believe.74 Ultimately, the prelate argued, it was by faith that man united his reason with God, faith that demonstrated itself in simplicity and sincerity. Addressing the lives of the saints, he remarked that it was in this role that Saint Gregory headed to Britain, where he intended to teach the word of God to the Saxons. Yet Gregory was not the apostle who accomplished the Christianization of England. This achievement was left to Saint Augustine, who left Gregory’s home on Caelian hill in Rome to achieve this goal.75 In seeking to carry the idea of the Church’s mission on earth to contemporary Britain, Manning observed that while the Catholic Church had been suppressed for hundreds of years, those who kept the faith, the Irish, were re-entering England to mingle with its people and restore the faith of Rome.76 Celebrating the lives of Saints Gregory and Augustine and their work in England, Manning jubilantly told his listeners – who, more likely than not, were British – “Gregory is still living and giving life. Twelve centuries have passed, but the work of faith is here”.77 Drawing on the liturgical practice of the “antiphon”, he jubilantly exclaimed: O imperishable Church of God! On whom time falls light, over whom man has no power; whence is this undying life? On thy part is the presence of the Incarnate Word; on ours it is a faith that knows no doubt. This is what England needs; not wealth, not intellect, not power (though all be good because gifts of God), but the supernatural grace of faith. Purify our hearts, pluck up every root and fibre of self, and fill us with Thine own unchanging Presence.78

These sermons and lectures demonstrate the broad spectrum of Manning’s interests and lucidly explain why, when he died, he was revered by his colleagues as an ecclesiastical scholar but hailed by

74

Ibid., p. 9. Ibid., pp. 20–22. 76 Ibid., p. 27. 77 Ibid., p. 29. 78 Ibid., p. 29. The tradition of the antiphon – verses from the Psalms sung during Lauds and Evensong – dates from the 8th century. The practice in the Church of England is discussed in J.H. Maude, The History of the Book of Common Prayer, 2nd ed. (London, 1900), pp. 59–60. In the Roman Catholic tradition, seven “O” antiphons were part of the Magnificat that signified preparations for the feast of the Nativity. Each antiphon provided another name for Christ, the son of God (e.g., O Sapientia, O Adonai, O Emmanuel). See Orby Shipley, A Glossary of Ecclesiastical Terms (London, 1872), p. 325, and “O antiphons,” The Catholic Encyclopedia, ed. Charles G. Herbermann et al., 9 (New York, 1911), p. 173. 75


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British Catholics as the “people’s Cardinal”. His greatest interests were practical, not historical, theological, or political. In fact, he turned the table on politics by politicizing spiritual beliefs and turning faith into action. He argued that too many people spent too much energy debating whether the source of wisdom for the church should flow from the Bible. Rather, Manning wanted to know how preaching and the character of the person declaiming his beliefs could shape and influence society. Manning believed, as Joseph Butler argued, that God takes the side of the good or virtuous man, writing, “We must be the thing we preach, before they will believe us”.79 Like Leo Tolstoy and Vladimir Lenin, Manning dared to ask, “What is to be done?” In response, close to the end of his life, Manning wrote, “a starving man has a natural right to his neighbour’s bread”.80 This statement expressed the primary message of Manning’s Anglican and Catholic days: that an individual had an obligation to be faithful to the Church and the Church had a responsibility to work with and on behalf of the poor. In London alone, more than 10,000 Catholic children were reportedly admitted to Poor Law workhouses and boarding schools between 1859 and 1867.81 In 1868 a diocesan report stated that more than 60 percent of the children listed as Catholics in these workhouses had been orphaned, deserted, or born out of wedlock.82 Putting faith into action, Manning embodied the Tridentine teaching that education and religion went hand in hand.83 Upon being appointed inspector of diocesan schools by Cardinal Wiseman, he channeled his energies through his connections with wealthy English Catholics to promote the transfer of all Roman Catholic children from “Protestant Workhouses” to Roman Catholic certified Poor Law boarding schools and to obtain equal funding from Poor Law guardians for their support. Such Catholic schools had been established in the lowliest districts of Central London, on Drury Lane and Charles Street; each 79 Henry Edward Manning, A Charge Delivered at the Ordinary Visitation of the Archdeaconry of Chichester in July 1843 (London, 1843), p. 45. 80 Henry Edward Manning, “Distress in London, II,” Fortnightly Review 43 (1888), 154. 81 House of Commons, “Metropolitan Workhouses (Roman Catholic Children) Return to an order of the House of Commons,” Sessional Papers, 1861, Poor Laws, appendix; Westminster Diocesan Education Fund, Annual Report, 1867–68, p. 8. 82 Commons, “Roman Catholic Children in Metropolitan Workhouses and Schools,” appendix; Westminster Diocesan Education Fund, Annual Report, 1867–68, p. 36. 83 Henry Edward Manning, Westminster Diocesan Education Fund, Annual Report, 1867–68 (London, 1868), p. 10.

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year after the restoration of the hierarchy, a thousand or more children were added to school rolls.84 Manning politicized the place of the Roman Catholic Church in England by protesting against the inequities of the poor law system and by developing a public–private partnership between the poor law guardians and the Church. As director of the Westminster Diocesan Education Fund, he enlisted the help of wealthy English Catholics, whose interests R.A. Leach, a self-identified “Catholic Englishman”, clearly expressed in a lecture with the inflammatory title of the “Legalised Perversion of English Catholic Children in the Workhouse”.85 The Month then published this Sunday afternoon presentation that was delivered in Hanwell. In this talk, Leach argued that Poor Law guardians denied Catholic children their right to learn their catechism and practice the religion of their parents. Further, he claimed, separate was not equal.86 Leach exhorted Catholics to listen, to take his address seriously, and to try to understand the political nature of his cause: Some might object to me, – that the subject being political, was not suited to a church; if it were not, let those be blamed who studiously shut us out of every more availing channel for the public witness of our sentiments.87

Acknowledging the politics of poverty, especially relating to the Catholic poor in the workhouse, Leach claimed that the “cause is one; regarding the inheritance the poor have in the Church of Christ”.88 Others helped Wiseman and Manning too, including the members of the wealthy Brompton Oratory community, who supplied no less than £12,000 for support of poor children.89 Another convert and follower of Newman, Frederick William Faber, who joined the brothers of Saint Philip Neri at the Oratory, directly and poignantly confronted the problem of London workhouse children in a brief outline of a sermon titled “The Workhouse Grievance”. He had prepared this homily for the Lenten season, a time of penitence for all Catholics. Written at the request of Cardinal Wiseman, Faber marveled at the gift of faith, and stated that it taught prayer and increased trust. Yet, he feared the

84 85 86 87 88 89

“Catholic Progress in London,” Catholic World (1865), 703. Leach, Legalised Perversion of Catholic Children in the English Workhouses, p. 25. Ibid., p. 25. Ibid., p. 27. Ibid., p. 28. “Catholic Progress in London,” Catholic World (1865), 703.


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“last times” were near and that he was witness to the days of the Antichrist. These remarks stemmed from a dire description of workhouse life wherein its existence was a “hidden wound” and its evil was so immense that it seemed beyond human strength to ameliorate. Children living in the workhouse were without “kith or kin” and clearly on their “dismal deathbeds”. The only thing humanity could do was to call upon the Father of the fatherless to “get them the light of faith”. Hence, he argued, the workhouse was an object which demanded faith and prayers, because with faith all things were possible.90 After he succeeded Wiseman as archbishop, Manning issued a pastoral to be read by all priests in the diocese of Westminster on 10 June 1866, the feast of the Sacred Heart of Jesus.91 On this Sunday, the second collection would be taken to aid the “Poor School Committee”, the group founded in 1847 to “train up children in the purity and sanctity of the Holy Catholic faith, and to protect them against seduction and robbery by which they may be stripped of their inheritance”.92 According to Manning, somewhere between 7,000 and 12,000 Catholic children in London were without education. For this, good Catholics “ought to do penance” unless they made a bona fide effort to save them. The “ruin and depravity, or the perversion and apostasy of one baptized child is a sorrow which breaks the heart of a father or a mother”. How, Manning queried, could anyone “eat and drink, lie down, and rise up in unconsciousness and insensibility at the spiritual death of thousands before our eyes?”93 These children were hidden, congregating in “our maze of courts”, and largely neglected by their parents. Next, Manning wrote about the plight of workhouse children, who were being educated with Protestant books, catechisms, prayers, and teachers. To deprive them of their faith tradition, Manning claimed, was an act of fraud against God. In closing, he argued: It is no answer to say they would not be there if their parents did not consent. Their parents do not consent. Every Catholic father and mother unless they be sordid, and sell their souls, object with all their heart and strength to the perversion of their child. Hunger and thirst and nakedness drive them to the workhouse, and their helplessness may give way 90 Frederick William Faber, Notes on Doctrinal and Spiritual Subjects, ed. J.E. Bowden (London, 1866), pp. 837–38. 91 “The Education of the Poor Roman Catholic Children of London: Pastoral from The Rev. Dr. Manning,” The Times (London), 11 June 1866, p. 5. 92 Ibid., p. 5. 93 Ibid., p. 5.

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jessica a. sheetz-nguyen under the temptations of meat and drink and warmth, for which their children cry around them. … There is no consent in this, nor in the apathy of a man who is faint with hunger in the midst of hungry children.94

Manning implored his parishioners to remember the bitterness of Catholic parents who would rather see their child in a “parish coffin” than in a Poor Law school, a bitterness that could only be relieved by “prayers to open the doors of these houses of bondage, and by your alms” to aid the poor children of the future.95 More pastoral efforts were forthcoming. Manning went across London, east and west, to carry the message of needed reforms in the Poor Law system, especially in terms of religious rights and equitable funding. In the wake of the 1870 Education Act, Manning delivered a sermon at the Roman Catholic Church on Bunhill Row warning parents and relatives that they had to get their children enrolled in Catholic schools. Manning called for a count of Catholic children attending public schools in order to assess the overall need for Catholic education in London. He wished to ensure that young pupils would learn about the “Holy Scriptures” in keeping with Catholic tradition.96 Catholics argued that receiving the sacraments, from which emanate the spiritual blessings of God, brings the faithful to acts of charity. In 1887 and 1888, Manning engaged in helping the London dock workers settle a lengthy strike with dock owners. Despite Pius IX’s “Syllabus of Errors”, in which the pontiff asserted that socialism should be regarded as heresy, Manning argued for equity and fairness in pay and working hours for these part-time workers. In a lecture entitled The Rights and Dignity of Labour that was delivered at Manchester, he said “In the early morning of society, labour was up and stirring before capital was awake”.97 Manning enumerated the privileges of one’s labor as a capital investment, equal to property. The right of the laborer to work for whom he pleased and to enjoy the fruits of his work was indisputable. When the Cardinal took a stand on political economy, he gingerly broached the subject. Profit should be met and checked by a moral condition, rather than the silent hand of the market and the principle of free trade. For Manning, “capital” was “dead money”, receiving life

94

Ibid., p. 5. Ibid., p. 5. 96 “Archbishop Manning on the School Board,” The Tower Hamlets Independent, 11 March 1871, p. 6. 97 Henry Edward Manning, Rights and Dignity of Labour (London, 1887), pp. 4–5. 95


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only from the power and skill of the laborer.98 Manning, meshing his spiritual credentials with his political power, summarized his concerns in these words: What may be the homes in our great manufacturing districts I do not know, but the homes of the poor in London are often very miserable. The state of the houses – families living in single rooms, sometimes many families in one room, a corner a piece. These things cannot go on; these things ought not to go on. The accumulation of wealth in the land, the piling-up of wealth like mountains in the possession of classes or of individuals, cannot go on if these moral conditions of our people are not healed. No commonwealth can rest on such foundations.99

In keeping with his idea that there was a moral component to the acquisition of great sums of money, Manning expanded his thought in an article published a year later in Fortnightly Review where he claimed: The obligation to feed the hungry springs from the natural right of every man to life, and to the food necessary for the sustenance of life. So strict is this natural right that it prevails over all positive laws of property. Necessity has no law, and a starving man has a natural right to his neighbour’s bread.100

In sum, the pressures of rebuilding the church on earth in England came with very special challenges, which were expressed in the striking brilliance of the language used in English Catholic sermons, pamphlets, and lectures that aimed to serve the needs of the community. Language in the able hands of the Victorians proved a valuable and effective tool for promoting social values. Indeed, for the inspired, the elect, a “small still voice” spoke to them and lit the way for a life of virtue over vice.101 Conclusion From the time of Catholic Emancipation to the re-establishment of the Roman Catholic Church in England, we have seen that Catholic preaching reached out to feed both body and soul by following the injunction from the Council of Trent to nourish the people with 98

Ibid., p. 14. Ibid., p. 23. 100 Henry Cardinal Manning, “Distress in London II: ‘A Note on Outdoor Relief,’ ” Fortnightly Review 43 (1888), 153–56. 101 Joseph Butler, The Analogy of Religion, ed. W.E. Gladstone (London, 1907), pp. 60–61. 99

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wholesome words and to preach the things necessary for salvation through brief and plain discourse in order to obtain the glory of heaven.102 The mystical ritual of the Mass, executed for the most part in Latin, offered a place of peace and safety from the profanity of the world, and the repetition of the liturgy may have offered more solace than the sermon. Nonetheless, priests were expected to become models of virtue, to teach the faithful preparation for the sacraments and to enlist the giving of alms to the poor; these remained a primary goal of all Catholic sermons. After the restoration of the hierarchy, spiking political awareness and clarifying the place of the papacy in the life of the Church and the separation of spiritual and temporal worlds resonated in sermons. However, the politicization of religion, as witnessed through the sermons and publications of Henry Edward Manning, clearly demonstrated the importance attached to faith and works in the Catholic community. So, just as the Council of Trent required priests, as shepherds to tend and feed their flocks, so also did the Victorian leaders of the Roman Catholic Church in England accomplish this goal through preaching and teaching. While not definitive, this initial exploration of Catholic preaching in Victorian Britain offers a sampling of exemplary Catholic sermons. Clearly, more study, research and writing remain in the future.

102

Waterworth, The Council of Trent, p. 28.

ANTI-CATHOLIC SERMONS IN VICTORIAN BRITAIN Miriam Elizabeth Burstein There is no longer that general dislike, dread, and aversion to Popery, which was once almost universal in this realm. The edge of the old British feeling about Protestantism seems blunted and dull. –J.C. Ryle1

The 19th-century reader seeking to arm him- or herself against the blandishments of Rome could turn to a number of useful sources: lecture series, whether attended live or read in their published form; Catholic deconversion narratives written by ex-nuns, ex-priests, and the occasional layman; magazines dedicated to the Protestant cause; anti-Catholic catechisms; tracts and pamphlets galore; reprints of earlier Protestant classics, ranging from John Foxe’s Acts and Monuments (full or abridged) to Anthony Gavin’s The Red Dragon or Master-Key of Popery; potted history; and didactic fiction. In this veritable cacophony of texts competing for the reader’s attention, the sermon came closest to the tract or pamphlet in its ability to respond almost instantly to the ebb and flow of particular Protestant causes. Obviously, there would be some delay between the sermon’s initial oral delivery and its eventual appearance in the press, which might be speeded by a full printing or report in a dedicated journal like The Pulpit. An enterprising preacher like the indefatigable (and apparently inexhaustible) Baptist Charles Haddon Spurgeon could publish a new sermon every week, but even relatively unknown clergymen might see an individual sermon through the press fairly rapidly, and certainly in the same year as they originally delivered it. It is not surprising, then, that the sheer quantity of anti-Catholic sermons tracks fairly closely to the sheer quantity of anti-Catholic uproar in the culture at large. Historians have consistently identified the early 1850s as the high water mark in Victorian anti-Catholic sentiment, thanks to the resentment rapidly compounding on a series of perceived slights to the Protestant establishment: first, in 1829, the Catholic 1

J.C. Ryle, What Do the Times Require? (London, n.d.), p. 1.

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miriam elizabeth burstein

Emancipation Act; then, beginning in 1845, the debate over renewing the Maynooth Grant, which funded the Irish college dedicated to training Catholic priests; and finally, in 1850, the restoration of the Catholic hierarchy in England, widely understood as a subversive, even treasonous invasion of the nation’s boundaries.2 There was also ongoing Protestant angst about the noticeable failure of the so-called Second Reformation in Ireland, which arose and died during the 1820s. By 1860, much of the uproar had died down, although it was temporarily fanned back into flames by the controversy over Ritualism (or AngloCatholicism) within the Church of England itself. The Public Worship Regulation Act (1874), intended to outlaw Ritualist practices, was the last significant attempt at passing anti-Catholic legislation – or, at least, quasi-anti-Catholic legislation – in the 19th century, and politicians soon discovered that it was not actually enforceable without great embarrassment to all concerned. While Sir John Trelawny might write in 1865 that the ardent anti-Catholic campaigner Charles Newdigate Newdegate was definitely receiving a more serious hearing than formerly, thanks to “time and perseverance, with honesty of purpose & courage”, it was still the case that Newdegate’s pet project – inspecting monasteries and convents – conspicuously failed to gain much traction.3 By the end of the century, Catholics could matriculate at Oxford and Cambridge, although such liberalization was not greeted with much enthusiasm by the Catholic hierarchy, who feared that an ecumenical learning environment would undermine students’ faith. In terms of legislation, then, the overall trend in the 19th century was undeniably positive for both Roman Catholics and Anglo-Catholics. The rhythms of anti-Catholic sentiment in the wider culture, of course, did not neatly follow those of anti-Catholic sentiment in high

2

For general overviews, see D.G. Paz, Popular Anti-Catholicism in Mid-Victorian England (Stanford, CA, 1992); Frank H. Wallis, Popular Anti-Catholicism in MidVictorian Britain (Lewiston, NY, 1993); John Wolffe, The Protestant Crusade in Great Britain 1829–1860 (Oxford, 1991); and for the Catholic Emancipation Act, Wendy Hinde, Catholic Emancipation: A Shake to Men’s Minds (Oxford, 1992) and G.I.T. Machin, The Catholic Question in English Politics, 1820 to 1830 (Oxford, 1964). Erik Sidenvall questions the extent of the decline in anti-Catholic sentiments after 1860 in After Anti-Catholicism: John Henry Newman and Victorian Britain, 1845–c. 1890 (London, 2006). 3 Sir John Trelawny, The Parliamentary Diaries of Sir John Trelawny, 1858–1865, ed. T.A. Jenkins (Camden Fourth Series) 40 (London, 1990), p. 318. For Newdegate’s career, see Walter Arnstein, Protestant versus Catholic in Mid-Victorian England: Mr. Newdegate and the Nuns (Columbia, MO, 1982).

anti-catholic sermons in victorian britain

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politics. Hence the ongoing market for anti-Catholic fiction, as evidenced in the work of mid- and late-Victorian novelists like Emily Sarah Holt, Alice Lang, Emma Leslie, George Sargent, Elizabeth Hely Walshe, and Emma Jane Worboise. The Religious Tract Society regularly published anti-Catholic children’s fiction into the early 20th century. Similarly, some anti-Catholic associations, most notably the Scottish Reformation Society, the Church Association, and the Protestant Truth Society, managed to survive the 19th (and indeed the 20th) century intact. And the anti-Catholic and anti-Ritualist agitator John Kensit achieved martyr status – in the eyes of sympathizers, at least – when he was killed during a riot in Liverpool in 1902. Nevertheless, such cultural anti-Catholicism no longer had much use when it came to rousing voters, let alone fellow parliamentarians. This chapter analyzes the most popular themes of sermons published during the hottest years of anti-Catholic sentiment, from the late 1820s into the 1860s, although it occasionally ventures beyond those chronological markers. These themes cluster into recognizable groups: the self-propagation of Catholicism; the spiritual and ecclesiastical histories of Catholicism; the internal failures of modern Protestantism; and, finally, ways of revitalizing Protestantism and beating back the Catholic threat. The argument is based on a sample of over one hundred sermons, most of them evangelical and High Church Anglican. Most of these sermons were delivered in recognizable clusters. Some of them, such as those commemorating the collapse of the Popish Plot on 5 November, were part of the regular calendar. Others responded to specific agitations of the time, including the Catholic Emancipation Act and the Papal Aggression. Still others, delivered in 1835, were part of the international Reformation tercentenary celebrations. Notably, the sermons do not touch on some topics that were popular in other forms of anti-Catholic propaganda – in particular, the emphasis on erotic perversions of various sorts, so common in both nonfictional and fictional anti-Catholic texts (unless, of course, one wishes to count allusions to the Whore of Babylon), and the role of Irish immigrants in strengthening Catholicism’s hold in England. In this sampling, only one clergyman, the Irish evangelical George Croly, blamed the Irish in this matter.4 Finally, the rhetoric of these sermons does not change 4 George Croly, Papal Rome. The Principles and Practises [sic] of Rome Alike Condemned by the Gospel. A Sermon (London, 1849), p. 5. This would appear to confirm Sheridan Gilley’s observation that “the Irish in England do not significantly

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markedly during the period under discussion, although there are significant shifts in emphasis at particular moments of crisis (e.g., sermons on the Royal Supremacy during the debates over the Catholic Emancipation Act). As Peter Toon correctly observes, there is a resounding “negativism” in evangelical responses to the Tractarian challenge, a point that extends to the evangelical response to Catholicism itself.5 That is, evangelicals faced with the Tractarian critique of the post-Reformation Church of England generally resorted to what Toon calls the “reiteration of old Protestant truths”6 as opposed to developing a positive program. Toon’s observation applies to what follows here. While this chapter is intended as a survey, its unifying theme is this: clergymen did not preach anti-Catholic sermons merely to warn against the Other, convert the Other, or advocate persecution of the Other; rather, they preached anti-Catholic sermons to warn their auditors against themselves. At the most literal level, there might well be Catholics in the room. Yet the purpose of a sermon is to expound the Scriptures, not simply to lead the auditor to a right interpretation of the text, but more importantly to guide the auditor to a godly life. Anti-Catholicism, as articulated in the sermons, provided a context within which Protestants (or, in the case of High Churchmen, non-Roman Catholic Catholics) could name what was uniquely Scriptural about Protestantism. In defining the morally compromised nature of Roman Catholic belief, clergymen shaped the ideal Protestant: at war with his or her own fallen nature, a firm believer in the Bible as the sole thing needful for salvation, and conscious of his or her place in the divine, providential drama of salvation. To the Protestant, Roman Catholicism propagated itself not because it was true, but because it answered to a basic, yet perverted, human need. Roman Catholicism was not simply different; in fact, it was all figure in the enormous specifically religious literature of Victorian anti-Catholicism” (“Protestant London, No-Popery and the Irish Poor, 1830–60. I: 1830–50,” Recusant History 10.4 [1969], 212). 5 Peter J. Toon, Evangelical Theology 1833–1856: A Response to Tractarianism (Atlanta, 1979), p. 77. For example, in the early 1870s, C.M. Davies listened to the Rev. Robert Maguire preach two very conventional anti-Catholic discourses to appreciative audiences, noting that he had last heard Maguire criticizing Roman Catholicism two decades previously (Orthodox London: Or, Phases of Religious Life in the Church of England, 2nd ed. [London, 1874; , accessed 6 July 2007], pp. 110, 108–22). My thanks to Arnold Hunt for this reference. 6 Toon, Evangelical Theology, p. 77.


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too familiar, just one more manifestation of man’s postlapsarian nature. It emerged from and was perfectly suited to a “fallen heart”, the “natural heart of poor fallen man”, the “proud and carnal heart”.7 To use a common turn of phrase, Roman Catholicism was a religion of human nature. By “religion of human nature”, Protestants meant that Roman Catholicism derived its authority not from the Scriptures, but from entirely manmade traditions and rituals. As such, tradition draws not on revealed truth, but instead on the minds and souls of postlapsarian man. Whereas, as the prominent Irish evangelical Hugh M’Neile put it in a lecture to the Young Men’s Christian Association, Protestantism expresses “antagonism to human nature as it is, with the high and determined aim to renew it to conformity with God”, Catholic worship falsely consecrates and objectifies man’s impulses – and his worst impulses, at that.8 As Henry Melvill explained, Men would indeed persuade you, that the enlarged intelligence of the times, the diffusion of knowledge, and the increase of liberality, are an ample security against the revival, to any great extent, of a system so absurd and repulsive as Popery. But they quite forget, when they hastily pronounce, that Popery has no likelihood of being revived in an enlightened age, that it is emphatically the religion of human nature; and that he, who can persuade himself of its truth, passes into a position the most coveted by the mass of our race, that in which sin may be committed, with a thorough security that its consequences may be averted.9

Melvill, speaking in 1835, here articulates a position that remains consistent across the Victorian period – and, indeed, itself derives from 16th-century Protestant critiques of Catholic idolatry.10 The intellectual who prides himself upon the effects of progress, here defined

7 Respectively, Edward Bickersteth, The Present Duties of the Protestant Churches. A Sermon Preached before the British Society for Promoting the Religious Principles of the Reformation, on Friday Evening, May 5, 1837, at Percy Chapel, London (London, 1837), p. 38; J.H. Hamilton, The Romish Hierarchy in England: A Sermon Preached in St. Michael’s Church, Chester Square, November 3rd, 1850 (London, n.d.), p. 16; Josiah Pratt, “Perverted Tradition the Bane of the Church. Preached at the Cathedral Church of St. Paul, on Sunday Morning, Oct. 13, 1839,” The Pulpit 36.909 (1839), 219. 8 Hugh M’Neile, “The Characteristics of Romanism and of Protestantism, as Developed in Their Respective Teaching and Worship,” in Lectures to the Young Men’s Christian Association, 1848–49 (London, 1876), p. 14. 9 Henry Melvill, Protestantism and Popery (London, 1839; rpt. from Sermons, 2, 1838), p. 9. 10 On the Reformation antecedents of the “religion of nature,” see, e.g., Carlos M.N. Eire, War Against the Idols: The Reformation of Worship from Erasmus to Calvin (Cambridge, 1986), pp. 203–12, 231–33.

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in pointedly secular terms (“enlarged intelligence”, “diffusion of knowledge”, “increase of liberality”), finds “security” in the postEnlightenment mind. Education slowly but surely perfects human consciousness; at the very least, it renders it less susceptible to the attractions of Catholicism, now represented as self-evidently “absurd and repulsive”. We are now so rational, it appears, that we reject Catholicism well-nigh instinctively. For Melvill and others like him, however, this “enlightened” position mistakes the effect (“Popery”) for the cause. The enlightened intellectual believes, in effect, that Catholicism is unnatural, and therefore easily resisted by the rightly-educated Christian. But Melvill’s rejoinder transfers “security” from the secular improvements purportedly standing in Catholicism’s way to the state of mind characteristic of all fallen selves. Man indeed wants security, and Catholicism promises it: not by turning man away from his worst impulses, but instead by claiming that he may sin with impunity. To regard Roman Catholics as “the Other”, then, would be its own act of sinful pride. For, if we take these clergymen at their word, Roman Catholicism simply institutionalizes the base lusts that lurk in every human soul. As C.S. Hawtrey argued during the debates over Emancipation, [i]n our self-righteous pride, in our love of ostentatious display, in our carnal policy, in our contempt of God’s word, in our attachment to blind traditions, in our formality, superstition, and hypocrisy, in our light thoughts of sin, in our love of cruelty, – in all these things (and the seeds of all these evils are in us) we see the materials of which Popery is constructed.11

By repeating the pronoun “our”, Hawtrey forces the reader or listener to contemplate his unwitting collaboration with the powers that drive Roman Catholicism. But he also tutors the good Protestant in the art of deciphering Roman Catholicism’s true meaning. Interpreted properly, Roman Catholicism leads the Protestant to reflect upon his own fallen nature. Once faced with this objectified vision of his hidden sins, the Protestant will be led to a greater reliance on Christ. Interpreted improperly, however, Roman Catholicism remains deeply, even erotically seductive, precisely because it is a mirror of man’s fondest and 11 C.S. Hawtrey, The Mystery of Iniquity, a Warning to Protestants; Founded on the Analogy Between the Corruptions of Popery, and the Corruptions of the Human Heart. A Sermon, Preached on Sunday, Nov. 5, 1826, at the Episcopal Jews’ Chapel, Cambridge Heath… (London, 1827), p. 12.


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darkest desires. In her reading of the anti-Catholic Scottish novelist Catherine Sinclair, Gabrielle Ceraldi suggests “irresistible contagion” as one way of describing Catholicism’s frighteningly effective appeal; even wearing the cross as a fashion statement, as the sensational antiCatholic lecturer Father Gavazzi told audiences, led Englishwomen on to Popery.12 We might add that the situation is even more threatening if Popish tendencies already reside in every apparently serious Protestant believer. For that reason, as M.R. Whish, the Prebendary of Salisbury, argued in 1829, the boundary between Protestantism and Catholicism was itself far more porous than it might first appear: for what is Popery, but the substitution of the name for the spirit of a Christian? what, but the mistaking the shadow for the substance? what, but the setting up of man in the place of God? what, in short, but the bowing down to the idols of self and the world, instead of prostrating body, soul, and spirit, before the crucified but exalted Redeemer?13

If all men yearn for “idols”, and Roman Catholicism is one of the purest (or impurest) expressions of that yearning, then all men – even purportedly good Protestant men – are effectively Roman Catholics at heart. Whish’s rhetoric is clear enough: manmade images of the divine, material or otherwise, are attractive precisely because they are manmade, and most men would rather engage in the implicit self-worship of idolatry than the total self-abasement of true Christianity. It must follow, then, that the devout Roman Catholic is unconscious of the enormities which he practices. The Roman Catholic epitomizes the bad reader, the nominal Christian, the demoralized slave. Not surprisingly, his spiritual experiences must be immediately ruled out of court; such experiences cannot act as evidence in favor of Catholic truth, because they derive from non-scriptural origins and, in any event, are merely a projection of all-too-human impulses instead of an

12 Gabrielle Ceraldi, “ ‘Popish Legends and Bible Truths’: English Protestant Identity in Catherine Sinclair’s Beatrice,” Victorian Literature and Culture 31 (2003), 367; Father [Alessandro] Gavazzi, “On Relics and Images,” in Father Gavazzi’s Lectures in New York, Reported in Full by T.C. Leland, Phonographer; Also, the Life of Father Gavazzi, Corrected and Authorized by Himself. Together with Reports of His Addresses in Italian, to His Countrymen in New York, trans. and rev. Madame Julie de Marguerites (New York, 1853), p. 226. 13 M.R. Whish, Protestantism, Not Popery, the Religion of the Bible. A Sermon, Preached on Thursday, January 29, 1829; Being the Ninth Anniversary of His Present Majesty’s Accession to the Throne of the Protestant Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, at St. Mary Redcliff Church (Bristol, 1829), p. 21.

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authentic encounter with the divine. Catholics therefore cannot testify.14 Thus, participating in a series of sermons on Catholic errors delivered in the run-up to Emancipation, William Ford Vance argued that [t]he very comfort which many Roman Catholics say they feel in invoking the assistance and intercession of angelic spirits, so far from being an argument in favour of the practice, is, on the contrary, a powerful argument against it; for it shews what a strong tendency our fallen and depraved nature has to take comfort and pleasure in every thing except God himself.15

In this interpretation, Roman Catholic “comfort” is actually the comfort of the damned: the Catholic actively (if unconsciously) desires to avoid God, and therefore takes refuge in the illegitimate consolations of dealing with lesser divinities. (Vance’s auditors would not have missed the implication that Catholicism was polytheistic.) Note that Vance’s position implies that maintaining what would be called “pure” religious belief is difficult. Hugh M’Neile had made this point explicit just two years earlier, complaining that “[t]he spirit of Popery is too congenial to the nature of fallen man to be given up without a desperate struggle, or to be kept at a distance without a perpetual effort”.16 The Protestant maintains a constant spiritual agon, carefully monitoring his desires and avoiding recourse to those “comforts” that would lull, not upbraid, the depraved soul. By contrast, M’Neile makes clear, Roman Catholics exist in a state of permanent spiritual torpor – the equivalent, as it were, of eating the lotus. No clergyman rode this latter hobbyhorse harder than George Croly, a Dublin native who found considerable success with English audiences. Now best-remembered for Salathiel the Immortal (1829), his

14

Speaking of anti-Catholic rhetoric in antebellum American culture, Jenny Franchot notes that “[i]t [Roman Catholicism] played the fiction to Protestantism’s truth, the failure to its progress, the weaker femininity to its superior masculinity. Observers called the Roman church a yarn spinner, turning out ever taller tales to meet the ‘pressing and practical’ demand for miracles in Rome” (Roads to Rome: The Antebellum Protestant Encounter with Protestantism [Berkeley, CA, 1994], p. 14). 15 William Ford Vance, On the Invocation of Angels, Saints, and the Virgin Mary: Two Sermons Preached at Tavistock Chapel, Drury Lane, in the Course of Lectures on the Points in Controversy between Roman Catholics and Protestants; the First on Tuesday, January 29; the Second on Tuesday, February 5, 1828 (London, 1828), p. 58. 16 Hugh M’Neile, The Abominations of Babylon. A Sermon, Preached at the Parish Church of St. Clement’s Danes, Strand, on Monday, May 8, 1826, before the Continental Society (London, n.d.), p. 12.


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successful novel about the Wandering Jew, Croly was also an ardent campaigner against Popery. On the surface, Croly could sound reasonably conciliatory: I call upon the priest of popery, as well as the layman, to inquire. I ask no more. I solicit them to bring their principles not to the judgment of man, but of the scriptures. The maxim of the Christian must be, for error, no mercy; for the erring, all compassion.17

“Inquire” is a key verb in anti-Catholic polemic, albeit not confined to it; as in the Congregationalist John Angell James’ influential The Anxious Inquirer After Salvation Directed and Encouraged (1834), the inquiring Christian above all yearns to understand how to be saved. Such inquiry is not self-reflexive, although it presupposes that the inquirer feels discontented with the state of his soul, but is rather a matter of biblical study. Hence the less-than-conciliatory nature of this apparently conciliatory request, since Croly’s “call” lumps Catholic traditions in with the “judgment of man”. Authentic inquiry must confine itself to the Bible alone, excluding any supplementary teachings. And no wonder, given what Croly thought of such teachings. There is nothing in Catholic theology that “would not discredit the brains of a child”, Croly complained, and he elsewhere indicted the Church for relying on “shallow impostures, obsolete legends, and daring pretences to miracle”, not to mention “palpable absurdities”.18 Roman Catholicism is, in a very real sense, childish, even infantile, in its transformation of hard divine truths into soft, pleasurable fictions. By repeatedly relegating Catholic belief and practice to the world of fantastic make-believe, Croly does not so much argue against Catholicism as deprive it of true theological content; in his sermons, Catholicism becomes a religion of endless pliability, working according to an irrational inner logic that never finds a ground in the Bible’s objective truths. Croly’s Catholicism is a virtual pawnshop of theological rubbish: We may walk through the great Romish Repository, and take up everything in our hands – Image-worship, Relic-worship, Saintship, Penances,

17 George Croly, Popery the Antichrist. A Sermon, Preached in the Church of St. Stephen, Walbrook… (London, 1848), p. 5. 18 Respectively, George Croly, The Popish Primacy. Two Sermons on the Conversions to Popery. And the Coming Trial of Nations. Preached in St. Peter’s Church, Brighton, September 1850 (London, 1850), p. 19; Croly, The Miracles of Scripture Contrasted with the Fictions of Popery. Five Sermons, Preached in the Church of Saint Stephen Walbrook, in October and November 1851… (London, 1852), p. 6; Croly, Papal Rome, p. 9.

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miriam elizabeth burstein Indulgences, Absolution; all lying before us; and though disguised with antique dust, and heaped in studied confusion; all tangible. Here, controversy, in its usual sense of logic and learning, is superfluous.19

Croly transforms what he thinks is Catholicism’s outrageous materialism into a sign of its obvious intellectual decadence. Catholic rituals and doctrines mingle pell-mell, with no regard to classification or relative importance. In their sensual immediacy, loaded with the “dust” that indicates their decrepit and anachronistic state, they are obviously silly. Their possible meanings thus collapse under the burden of their “tangible” materiality. But Catholics, Croly implies, would rather not handle the instruments of their own intellectual and spiritual subjection. Yet contempt for Catholic stupidity (personal or theological) coexisted alongside another thread in anti-Catholic polemic: a sense that Catholicism itself could not be mastered by the Protestant mind – or any other mind. Patrick R. O’Malley has found in the anti-Catholic polemics of a writer like Charles Kingsley an “obsession with the epistemological crisis of language, with the inability of an interpreter to know the stable truth of language’s meaning”, which O’Malley links to anxieties over sexuality.20 But biblical hermeneutics, as much as sexual identity, were at stake. At base, Catholic deceptiveness boiled down to a persistent confusion of the figurative with the literal, whether by substituting the one for the other at strategic moments or collapsing the distinction between the two. Thus, John Grier claimed that the “ignorant and superstitious” are allowed to address the Virgin Mary as “ ‘The Refuge of Sinners’ ” and “ ‘The only hope of Sinners’ ”, with no clarification, whereas elite believers are informed that “they are only figurative expressions”.21 For Grier, such adjustments offend on multiple levels: they deprive Christ of his proper worship; they trim religious belief according to the sophistication of the hearer; and they abuse language itself. Confusing the figurative and the literal can only lead to wild hermeneutical disarray. How can a reader interpret the Scriptures when he cannot even tell the difference between a metaphor and a statement of fact? Protestant clergy frequently pointed to the doctrine

19

Croly, Popish Primacy, p. 19. Patrick R. O’Malley, Catholicism, Sexual Deviance, and Victorian Gothic Culture (Cambridge, 2006), p. 89. 21 John W. Grier, A Sermon on the Worship of Mary, Preached in Amblecote Church, Stourbridge, part first (London, 1851), p. 12. 20


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of transubstantiation as the most egregious case of Catholic confusion on this subject. As David Ruell argued in 1828, the literal meaning of the words would destroy the very nature of a sacrament, and therefore cannot be the true one. – A sacrament is “an outward sign of an invisible grace.” Now, if the bread and wine no longer remain, but are actually turned into the body and blood of Christ, where is the “sign” in this sacrament? It is entirely gone, and nothing remains but the thing signified.22

Note that Ruell’s argument pushes the flaw in Catholic reasoning a step further: not only do Catholics misunderstand the nature of the Real Presence, but also they fail to think through the relationship between the sign and its signified. In this particular case, Ruell is arguing that Catholics improperly substitute a very corporeal, very visible signified for what is supposed to be an “outward sign” – thereby reducing the sacrament to a purely materialist and implicitly cannibalistic act. It was also possible to reverse direction and claim that Catholics also substituted signs (church rituals, for example) for signifieds. In particular, Protestants singled out the role of Latin in the Catholic liturgy: “Is it not, then, infinitely preposterous to draw near to him with unmeaning words; with sounds to which we attach no ideas; with homage which expresses no feeling; and with importunity which knows not what it urges?”23 Unlike the sacrament which becomes what it is supposed to merely signify, the liturgy empties itself of signifieds altogether; in this, the ne plus ultra of meaningless ritual, the Catholic babbles in the mistaken belief that the pure sounds of the words themselves confers some special relationship to God. Catholic ritual perverts the very nature of language itself, stripping it of objective and subjective reference alike. Whichever way the clergyman cared to take this argument, the end was clear enough: Catholics thrashed about in a net of linguistic confusion that was not so much proto-postmodernist as simply a mess. 22 David Ruell, On the Administration of the Lord’s Supper to the Laity in One Kind: A Sermon Preached at Tavistock Chapel, Drury Lane, on Tuesday, March 18, 1828, in the Course of Lectures on the Points in Controversy between Roman Catholics and Protestants (London, 1828), p. 21. 23 Charles Jerram, On Praying in an Unknown Tongue: A Sermon Preached at Tavistock Chapel, Drury Lane, on Tuesday, January 22, 1828, in the Course of Lectures on the Points in Controversy between Roman Catholics and Protestants (London, 1828), pp. 22–23. This critique dates back to the Reformation. David Hawkes argues that for Luther, “[t]he Latin mass is experienced by the laity as ‘secret words,’ and even the priests conceive of their utterances as magical and efficacious” (The Faust Myth: Religion and the Rise of Representation [New York, 2007], p. 28).

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Nevertheless, Ruell’s and Grier’s recourse to the image of the conceptually confused Catholic itself had to share space with the Catholic as master rhetorician, shifting from argument to argument with the ease of a particularly agile mountain goat. M. Hobart Seymour, who inveigled against Roman Catholicism at both sermon- and book-length, complained that they are men who can say and then unsay, who can assert and then deny, with a facility that is peculiarly their own. They at the same time hold directly opposite principles; and when we drive them from one, they immediately have recourse for protection to the other.24

Catholic language appears singularly unmoored from any objective referent; the speaker or writer engages in complex mental gymnastics without sensing any disturbance in the argumentative waters. (It did not help that the canonization of Alfonso Liguori suggested to British Protestants that the Catholic Church had formally approved of lying.25) Even worse, Catholic theology consists of such dizzying rhetorical operations writ large. As John Henry Owen grumbled, To overthrow an argument where the premises are totally inadmissible, and the conclusions obviously false, is a very different matter from detecting a fallacy where the shades of error and of truth sometimes appear almost to amalgamate, and all the arts of sophistry are employed to blend them into one; wherein, moreover, there is, as I am bold to declare in respect of the Romish Church, such a continued shifting of the ground, that, with all her pretensions to unity of faith, it is next to impossible to know upon what place to take our stand, and say, Here is undeniably the Romish doctrine; here is something tangible, something in which, in all its parts, there is an uniformity of opinion and sentiment among the members of an infallible church.26

Catholicism is quite literally confused. It deals in “shades”, not clearcut categories, and does its best to construct an apparently organic whole out of what ought to be clearly-defined parts. The embattled

24 M. Hobart Seymour, “Danger to England from Treacherous Popery and Unwatchful Protestantism. Preached at St. Ann’s Church, Blackfriars, on Sunday Afternoon, Nov. 3, 1839,” The Pulpit 36.909 (1839), 232. 25 See Josef L. Altholz, “Truth and Equivocation: Liguori’s Moral Theology and Newman’s Apologia,” Church History 44.1 (1975), 73–85. 26 John Henry Owen, Christ, Not Peter, the Rock of the Church. A Sermon Preached at Tavistock Chapel, Drury Lane, on Tuesday, December 4, 1827, in the Course of Lectures on the Points in Controversy between Roman Catholics and Protestants (London, 1828), pp. 10–11.


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Protestant, seeking to take his “stand” on Catholicism’s intellectual territory, finds only quicksand. We might quip that Catholicism is self-deconstructing, were it not that the Protestant complaint is that Catholicism is apparently not constructed at all: the controversialist in search of the perfectly authoritative statement, the one thing on which all Catholics agree, is instead thrown into the muck of arguments among different believers. Surely such a thing cannot be possible in an “infallible church”, let alone in one with “pretensions to unity of faith”? Part of the problem, of course, is that Protestant controversialists frequently failed to grasp what “infallibility” actually meant in a Catholic context. But what is also at stake here is uncertainty about the historical development of Roman Catholicism and its theology. Despite all the claims for the sheer confusion of Roman Catholic doctrine, which suggests a jumble accumulated over time, Protestants also argued that any apparent alterations were merely cosmetic. The Church was not just “the Church”; rather, the Pope was the Antichrist and the Church itself the Whore of Babylon. In making such associations (an interpretation of the prophesies so common by this point in the 19th century as to be banal), Protestant preachers reminded their audiences that the local events of Catholic Emancipation or Papal Aggression were not playing out in desacralized, mundane space and time. Instead, they were merely the visible manifestations of the prophesied struggle between Christ and the Antichrist. The battle was therefore not provincial, but universal in its scope.27 Most of the sermons on apocalyptic themes utilize what is known as “historicist” exegesis – that is, as Kenneth G.C. Newport puts it, “it sees the course of history from the time of John the Seer or Daniel the prophet to the apocalyptic return of Christ (and even a little beyond) as being punctuated by prophetic fulfillment”.28 In this exegetical mode, the prophecies of Daniel and Revelation, if properly interpreted, lay out the entire narrative of global history. Victorian interpreters of prophecy such as E.B. Elliot (in

27 The most overly optimistic sermon in this providential vein was perhaps that delivered by J. Alton Hatchard, who argued, among other things, that Napoleon was a divinely ordained punishment for those countries which failed to appropriately reform their churches (“Romanism Overthrown by Wellington.” A Sermon Preached on Advent Sunday, in the Parish Church of Pett, Sussex, on the Death of F.M. the Duke of Wellington [London, 1852]), pp. 11–12). 28 Kenneth G.C. Newport, Apocalypse and Millennium: Studies in Biblical Eisegesis (Cambridge, 2000), p. 7.

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the early Victorian period), John Cumming (midway through), and H. Grattan Guinness (at the end) all found biblical prophesies coming to fruition in current events, suggesting that the millennium might well be at hand. None of this was new – the association of the papacy with Antichrist originated in the 12th century, and evangelicals could point to important, more recent precedents in the historical work of such Reformation worthies as John Bale and John Foxe – but it was part of a more general resurgence of interest in prophecy.29 John Edmund Jones, warning against Emancipation, summed up the danger in a single, rolling sentence: That Popery is the same now it ever was – that its nature is unchanged and unchangeable, Romanists themselves admit; and what that nature is, let the page of history exhibit; let the transactions of Queen Mary’s reign declare; let the valleys of Piedmont testify; let the tortures of the Inquisition teach; let the blood of our martyred forefathers, that blood which still calls aloud for vengeance – let that proclaim: or could the past be blotted out, let the spirit which Popery at present manifests, the doctrines she maintains, the maxims she adopts, and (where opportunity is given) the deeds which she perpetrates – let these things convince us that her true name is “MYSTERY, BABYLON THE GREAT, THE MOTHER OF HARLOTS AND THE ABOMINATION OF THE EARTH”. (Rev. xvii. 5.)30

29 For helpful overviews of apocalyptic historical narratives in Britain, see, e.g., Andrew Escobedo, Nationalism and Historical Loss in Renaissance England: Foxe, Dee, Spenser, Milton (Ithaca, NY, 2004), pp. 81–140; Katherine Firth, The Apocalyptic Tradition in Reformation Britain 1530–1645 (Oxford, 1979); Newport, Apocalypse and Millennium. Paul Misner examines the revival of interest in the Pope as Antichrist during the early decades of the 19th century in “Newman and the Tradition Concerning the Papal Antichrist,” Church History 42.3 (1973): 377–95. Mary Wilson Carpenter and George P. Landow note that obsession with prophecy had reached “an unprecedented peak of popularity by 1860”, without directly connecting the resurgence to antiCatholic agitation; see “Ambiguous Revelations: The Apocalypse and Victorian Literature,” in The Apocalypse in English Renaissance Thought and Literature: Patterns, Antecedents, and Repercussions, ed. C.A. Patrides and Joseph Wittreich (Ithaca, NY, 1984), p. 303. On Cumming’s monumental output devoted to this topic, see Robert H. Ellison and Carol Marie Engelhardt, “Prophecy and Anti-Popery in Victorian London: John Cumming Reconsidered,” Victorian Literature and Culture 31 (2003), 373–89. Richard Waldo Sibthorp, who converted, deconverted, reconverted, and then may have deconverted yet again, was swayed by apocalyptic thought; see Michael Trott, The Life of Richard Waldo Sibthorp: Evangelical, Catholic, and Ritual Revivalism in the Church of England (Eastbourne, 2005), pp. 16, 62–3, 164. 30 John Edmund Jones, York Minster; The Duty of British Christians at the Present Alarming Crisis. A Sermon Preached in the Parish Church of Chilvers Coton, in the County of Warwick, on Sunday Afternoon, February 15, 1829 (London, 1829), p. 16.


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In his series of anaphoristic clauses, Jones proposes that when it comes to the Church, history offers a perversion or inversion of Christian witnessing. After claiming that Catholics themselves “admit” to their Church’s apparently immutable qualities, a choice of verb that suggests a response to an accusation, Jones takes his audience back into a past that apparently speaks for itself. His three chosen events – the reign of Mary I, the Inquisition, and the 17th-century persecutions of the Waldensians – were instantly recognizable way stations of Protestant Reformation and post-Reformation historical narrative, and this dark trinity pointedly associates Catholicism with violent persecution. Catholicism manifests itself in history, that is, by seeking to literally erase those with whom it disagrees – and yet, the mechanisms of persecution themselves inadvertently testify to the Church’s true nature. But Jones moves a step further: the “blood” collapses the distance between past and present, crying out against the Church even as Jones speaks, and the Church itself, even stripped of all its historical baggage, utters its own condemnation. This turn to apocalyptics puts even the humblest listener in the role of a potential hero in the struggle against Romanism: the battle against the Church rages on around the audience, and hewing to Scriptural religion is a form of “fighting” available to every Protestant – man, woman, and child. Preachers did not shy away from urging their audience on to potential martyrdom. In the exalted words of William Bennett, [t]here are many spots in our land, still pointed out and cherished in our memories, where the fierce flames consumed their unresisting and triumphant victims: – bear witness, Smithfield! bear witness, Oxford! bear witness, Gloucester! bear witness, Hadley! – because they would not worship the image of the Beast, nor suffer his mark to brand their foreheads or their hands! And this spirit – the spirit of our sires – we are sure, still lives!31

Bennett progresses from what at first appears like a genteel tourist’s invocation of the picturesque to a far different view of the English landscape, sacralized by the torments of the witnesses to Protestant truth. He imagines a Protestantized pilgrimage, in which the audience 31 William Bennett, Popery, As Set Forth in Scripture: Its Guilt, and Its Doom. A Sermon, Preached in the Parish Church of Walthamstow, Essex; on Tuesday, Nov. 5, 1850, 2nd ed. (London, 1851), pp. 20–21.

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mentally traverses England in search of models for their own good deaths in the Christian cause. Like Jones, Bennett insists that the Reformation is not a matter of accomplished fact, but an ongoing process, requiring all the efforts of present-day Protestants to beat back the threat of Rome. Bennett’s energy is not surprising, given that some fellow Victorians were predicting the imminent fall of Rome and the beginning of the Last Days.32 There was nothing abstract about Catholicism’s threat; if Rome truly was the Antichrist, as Protestant exegetes had been arguing since the 16th century, then resisting Rome was a matter of spiritual life and death. And the entire nation, not just individuals, was at stake. While modern historians may look back at Emancipation as an act that “showed that the constitution was not sacrosanct, that it could be safely amended”, even while acknowledging the very real contemporary objections, it is worth remembering that on the ground, both clergy and lay Protestants warned that any compromise with Catholicism would fatally taint Britain with Romish corruption.33 T.F. Jennings, in a last-ditch effort to ward off Emancipation, told his listeners that we shall thereby become identified with them, as one body politic; and there is reason to fear that, when the judgments of God come upon that corrupt Church, all the kingdoms and States which are polluted with her “mark” will be made partakers of her plagues.34

A decade later, Emancipation in place, the novelist Charlotte Elizabeth grimly surveyed the scene and concluded that, indeed, Britain had allowed itself to be “polluted” – that Catholic Emancipation was “our revolt against our God and against his Christ”.35 Willfully blind to their own self-destruction, the British parlayed with Catholics at the peril of their immortal souls – and, apparently, chose the route of 32 Thus, to take two random but representative examples, the Rev. R.C. Dillon suggested 1864 as the most likely date for the end of the Pope’s rule, while “Nemesis” argued for 1866. See, respectively, “A Sermon Delivered by the Rev. R.C. Dillon, (On the Duration of Popery) at St. James’s Church, Clerkenwell, 1831,” The Preacher 3.57 (Thursday, 1 September 1831), 10; The Fourth and Fifth Vials of the Apocalypse Exemplified in the Late Contest in Italy and the Present Condition of the Roman States (London, 1860), p. 12. 33 Hinde, Catholic Emancipation, 186. 34 T.F. Jennings, England’s Last Effort. A Sermon on the Roman Catholic Question, Preached at St. Thomas Church, Bristol, on Sunday, the 8th Day of MARCH, 1829, 3rd ed., rev., (Bristol, n.d.), pp. 5–6. 35 Charlotte Elizabeth, “Illustrations. No. I,” The Protestant Magazine 1.1 (January 1839), 6.


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political expediency over that of salvation. In the words of Michael Wheeler, [i]n the case of Catholic Emancipation … it was the Protestant constitution itself that seemed to be in danger, as Fortress England, providentially chosen by God as the site of true reformed religion, was penetrated by a foreign power, when Catholics once again took their seats in Parliament.36

For evangelicals like Elizabeth, Emancipation was just the first step on Britain’s path towards open alliance with the Antichrist. On the one hand, then, British Protestants had to recognize that Revelation provided an all-too-clear guide to Rome’s nature and its role in Christian history; on the other hand, Protestants also had to master the perhaps less appetizing details of ecclesiastical history. Prophetic history and ecclesiastical history could hardly be separated, since the latter illuminated the Antichrist’s wiles in the former. The Protestant keywords here were “novelty” and “innovation”, and they were as likely to appear in High Church contexts as they were in evangelical ones. Protestants argued that there had originally been a “pure” apostolic church, but that it had been corrupted by accretions from Jewish and pagan traditions. Thus, in a rather extreme example, John Gore Tipper argued that modern Catholic ritual actually derived from the worship of Semiramis, c. 1900 b.c., and that the symbols on the priest’s vestments referred to the Babylonian fish-god Dagon and Semiramis’ son, Tammuz.37 What defined the pure church was its rejection of anything except the Scriptures as a test of doctrine – in other words, its allegiance to sola scriptura. Protestants usually dated the end of this original apostolic church to the end of the 5th century or beginning of the 6th century a.d., although they also pointed to the Council of Trent as a more recent source of innovation. A standard feature of anti-Catholic sermons is the catalog of innovations – rarely fewer than three items, and sometimes as many as a dozen or fifteen – with transubstantiation, the insufficiency of the Scriptures, the invocation of saints, and papal infallibility coming in at the top of the list. In a sermon originally

36 Michael Wheeler, The Old Enemies: Catholic and Protestant in Nineteenth-Century English Culture (Cambridge, 2006), p. 139. 37 John Gore Tipper, A Sermon Preached in St. Stephen’s Church, Canterbury, on Sunday Morning, February 10, 1867, Being the Day on which the Attention of the Congregations throughout the Parish of Islington was Directed to the Subject of UltraRitualism (London, 1867), pp. 7, 10–12.

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delivered as part of the international celebration of the Reformation tercentenary, Henry Melvill rendered the stakes behind such catalogs quite clear. After time-traveling backwards through a series of authentically “Protestant” believers, Melvill arrives at “the Protestantism of Christ and his Apostles”: The Reformed Religion is no novelty; if it can be proved a day younger than Christ and his Apostles, away with it from the earth as a pernicious delusion. It was no invention of Luther and his fellow-labourers. The Roman Catholics indeed would taunt us with the recent origin of our faith, as though it had sprung up in the sixteenth century, whilst their own is hallowed by all the suffrages of antiquity. There was never a more insolent taunt, and never a more unwarranted boast. Ours, as we have already intimated, is the old religion, theirs is the new … We fix the doctrine of the Papal supremacy to the sixth century – let them prove it older if they can; of seven sacraments to the twelfth century – let them prove it older if they can; of transubstantiation to the thirteenth century – let them prove it older if they can. And yet Protestantism is the spurious manufacture of a late date, whilst Popery is the venerable transmission from the first year of the Christian era. Yes, all that is true in Popery has been transmitted from the earliest days of Christianity; but all that is true in Popery makes up Protestantism. Popery is Protestantism mutilated, disguised, deformed, and overlaid with corrupt additions; Protestantism is Popery restored to its first purity, cleansed from false glosses, and freed from the rubbish accumulated on it by ages of superstition.38

Melvill’s historical narrative deliberately lays waste to any purely secular chronology. Protestantism neither emerges from nor succeeds Catholicism; instead, it is the true faith concealed beneath accumulated layers of historical graffiti. The Reformation is not innovation, but a return to the principles of the original Protestant, Christ himself. In this logic, change over time constitutes not a development of an inwardly consistent principle, but the betrayal of a truth fixed at the moment of its origin. As Melvill’s language suggests, Catholic doctrine constitutes a violent attack on original truths, one that produces unreadable “rubbish”; once again, as in Croly, Catholicism seems to lack a truly intelligible historical narrative of its own, devolving as it does into a gigantic junk heap. From Melvill’s point of view, Catholics hoist themselves by their own petard in even alluding to historicity, since the very possibility of dating a doctrine after the apostolic period actually disproves that doctrine! 38

Melvill, Protestantism and Popery, pp. 7–8.


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By taking Protestantism all the way back to Christ himself, Melvill engages in an extreme form of the proto-Protestant argument – that is, the claim that signs of the Protestant faith underlying Catholic “corruptions” providentially manifest themselves in the so-called heresies of the Hussites, Waldensians, Cathars, Lollards, and so forth.39 In Britain (and America as well), proto-Protestantism had an extra dimension: proving that Christianity existed there prior to the mission of St Augustine of Canterbury in 596. To summarize briefly, either Joseph of Arimathea or (the imaginary) King Lucius had been responsible for evangelizing the Anglo-Saxons. If such were the case, then Catholicism was not just a “novelty”, but was also not of native growth.40 Thus, William Cooke argued that, despite Augustine’s eventual success, “still the English History shows that not a generation passed without some assertion being made of the independence of the English Church – ‘some witness borne by King, or Parliament, or Church to her ancient rights and liberties’ ”.41 Similarly, John Medley triumphantly called on “Gröstete Bishop of Lincoln, Bradwardine, Wickliffe, and others” as exemplars of England’s resistance to Roman ecclesiastical trespass, while I.E.N. Molesworth claimed that not only was there a time when the national church was not yoked to either the dominion or the superstitions of popery, and when she had free access to the word of God, but the very light, which blazed upon her, after a long period of darkness and delusion, always burned, however obscurely and dimly, within herself.42

39 There are a number of excellent overviews of this topic; see especially S.J. Barnett, “Where Was Your Church before Luther? Claims for the Antiquity of Protestantism Examined,” Church History 68.1 (1999), 14–41; Anthony Milton, Catholic and Reformed: The Roman and Protestant Churches in English Protestant Thought, 1600–1640 (Cambridge, 1995), pp. 270–310. 40 I discuss the specifically Victorian manifestation of this historical debate in “Counter-Medievalism; Or, Protestants Rewrite the Middle Ages,” in Beyond Arthurian Romances: The Reach of Victorian Medievalism, ed. Jennifer A. Palmgren and Lorretta M. Holloway (New York, 2005), pp. 149–58; see also Colin Kidd, British Identities Before Nationalism: Ethnicity and Nationhood in the Atlantic World, 1600–1800 (Cambridge, 1999), pp. 99–122, and Hugh MacDougall, Racial Myth in English History: Trojans, Teutons, and Anglo-Saxons (Montreal, 1982), pp. 31–40. 41 William Cooke, “Thou Shalt Not Remove Thy Neighbour’s Landmark.” The Romish Aggression Unscriptural, Uncanonical, & Unconstitutional. A Sermon Preached in the Church of St. Stephen’s, Hammersmith, on the 24th Sunday After Trinity, 1850 (London, 1850), p. 44. 42 John Medley, The Tricentenary of the Reformation. Two Sermons, Preached in Saint John’s Chapel, Truro (Truro, 1835), p. 7; I.E.N. Molesworth, The Reformation Not the Establishment of a New Religion, But the Christian Liberty and Doctrines of the British

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The specifically English Reformation, then, does not just restore the apostolic church in general, but the apostolic church as it was originally preached to the Anglo-Saxons. Despite the apparent subjugation of the English Church to Rome after St Augustine of Canterbury’s mission, in reality an explicitly English and independent spirituality mounts an ongoing resistance to Papal “dominion”. In fact, as Medley’s list of proto-Protestant eminences purports to demonstrate, the English mindset naturally tends to Protestantism; Catholic sentiments simply do not mesh with the “natives’” spiritual tendencies. Moreover, the English actually have the advantage in the Reformation sweepstakes, since everyone on Medley’s list predates Luther. This, too, was part of received proto-Protestant historiography. Protestantism may fulfill a universal prophesy, but it does so with a distinctly nationalist edge. The “Englishness” (or Britishness) of Protestantism thus explains, in part, the sheer rage occasioned by the so-called Papal Aggression, which Protestants saw as an assault on both spiritual and physical territory. If St Augustine was a Roman Catholic invader instead of an authentic evangelist, then the restoration of the hierarchy might look suspiciously like a repetition of that first assault. Arthur F. Marotti has noted that in the early modern period, the Spanish Armada “provided a model of international Catholic threat followed by providential deliverance, incorporated into a national mythology”, and a similar narrative underpins the sermons – with, perhaps, more anxiety about when the “providential deliverance” is to be forthcoming.43 In sermons that explicitly respond to the Aggression, we can see how both prophetic and ecclesiastical history drove the authors’ responses. Nugent Wade did not mince words: But now at length after so long a time the Bishop of Rome affects to attempt to draw us under his yoke again: treats our land pretty much as a heathen country, at least as one in which no such thing existed as a national branch of CHRIST’s Holy Catholic Church, parcels it out into Sees under Bishops of his own appointment, as if no such thing as Bishops, nor Clergy, nor a Christian people had hitherto existed amongst us.44

Church, Vindicated from Romish Usurpation. A Sermon, Preached October 4, 1835, the Third Centenary of the Bible in the English Tongue (Canterbury, 1835), p. 13. 43 Arthur F. Marotti, Religious Ideology & Cultural Fantasy: Catholic and AntiCatholic Discourses in Early Modern England (Notre Dame, IN, 2005), p. 132; emphasis in original. 44 Nugent Wade, Romish Aggression: The Spirit in Which We Should Resist It. A Sermon Preached in the Parish Church of St. Anne, Westminster, on Sunday,


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Wade’s sentiments are representative: the papal aggression is an act of imperial conquest (or re-conquest) that lays claim to actual English territory. The Pope, for Wade and others like him, attempts to erase both ecclesiastical and cartographical history. That it is conquest through language, rather than military might, is no consolation, since the former may lead to the latter. An anguished Charles Girdlestone, preaching on Jeremiah 5:30–31, warned against those who thought conversions (or, as Girdlestone would have put it, perversions) to Catholicism were of little matter. “[I]t is a fact at once ‘wonderful and horrible’ ”, Girdlestone says, quoting from his text, that so many have fallen prey to the “leaven of Romanism” (here probably thinking of Galatians 5.9) and thus cherish a taste for its pomps and ceremonies, for its models of church building and its forms of church furniture, for its fashions of church vestures and its modes of church music; for Romish legends and traditions, for Romish fasts and festivals, for the fond superstitions of Rome, if not yet for its more gross idolatries, and for the spiritual dominion of a home clergy, if not yet for the supremacy of an alien Pope.45

Girdlestone’s mostly parallel clauses are not arranged randomly. The preacher begins with the sensual attractions that seduce the unwary, starting with the spectacular (“pomps and ceremonies”) and culminating with the apparently ethereal (“modes of church music”). The semi-colon marks the break between those attractions that tread a fine line between the religious and the secular, interesting even to random tourists in search of a good show, and explicitly doctrinal issues. Finally, the last four clauses position those who have wandered over to Rome on a dangerous precipice (“for…if not yet”), first between the silly and the genuinely egregious, and then between domestic tyranny and – the climax! – treasonous allegiance to a foreign ruler. Converts quite literally estrange themselves. Looking back on the aggression from the vantage point of nearly fifty years, Morris Fuller’s diagnosis was blunt: While at this hour, in every cathedral and parish church, the old English service books, according to the use of Sarum, are daily and weekly to be November 17…To Which Are Appended the Parochial Addresses to the Queen and the Bishop of London: Together with His Lordship’s Reply (London, 1850), pp. 7–8. 45 Charles Girdlestone, Testimony Against Romanism: A Sermon, on Jeremiah 5. 30, 31, Preached at the Parish Church of Kingswinford, at Wordsley, on Sunday, Dec. 1, 1850 (London, 1850), p. 12.

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miriam elizabeth burstein heard; in the Romanist Chapels, on the contrary, scarcely anything English is to be heard or seen.

Catholicism, still foreign despite its bishoprics, has failed to root itself organically in English culture; it neither speaks the language (literally) nor, Fuller goes on to argue, shows any true affection for the monarchy.46 In that sense, there are Catholics in England, but – to borrow a turn of phrase from Rupert Brooke – there are no Catholics of England. But had weaknesses in Protestantism itself allowed matters to reach such a state in the first place? It is here that the cracks in the Protestant armor, between Low and High Church as well as between Established Church and Dissent, quickly reveal themselves. Readers will not be shocked to discover that both evangelicals and traditional High Churchmen blamed the Tractarians and their followers. J.H. Hamilton did not mince words: “The emissaries of Rome have too long been permitted to play the traitor within the walls of our Zion, and to make some of our own churches so many decoys to the ranks of the enemy”.47 This accusation was a common (if probably inaccurate) one, bolstered by the defection of eminent Tractarians like John Henry Newman to Roman Catholicism.48 As Hamilton’s mix of military and religious metaphors suggests, the presence of Tractarian clergy in the Church of England constituted a double treason against the spiritual and corporeal bodies of English churchmen. What Tractarians represented as a necessary renewal – indeed, in some cases, as a new reformation – of the Church, their opponents interpreted as a full-barrel assault on the Church of England’s independence. Moreover, Tractarian dishonesty was not just a matter of sneaking Roman Catholic rituals in under Anglican pretences. It called the entire Church of England into question through its unsavory example. For some, Tractarianism was part 46 Morris Fuller, The Pope’s Encyclical and the Papal Aggression. Two Sermons Preached at S. Mark’s, Marylebone Road, W., on Sundays, July 5th and 12th, 1896 (London, n.d.), pp. 44, 46. 47 Hamilton, Romish Hierarchy, p. 9. 48 Peter B. Nockles observes that “[t]he lapsed Irish immigrant was more statistically significant in conversion figures than the Oxonian academic”, but also notes that “while Oxford Tractarian converts may not have been representative of converts in general, their importance was necessarily out of all proportion to their numbers on account of their educational, intellectual and cultural status”. See “Sources of English Conversions to Roman Catholicism in the Era of the Oxford Movement,” in By Whose Authority? Newman, Manning and the Magisterium, ed. V. Alan McClelland (Bath, 1996), p. 7.


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of an unlikely ménage-a-trois with Roman Catholicism and an ominous skepticism; John Cade Miller sourly observed that I have been told on good authority, that not very long ago, in the University of Oxford, the Sermon in the morning was on the Historical Inaccuracies of the Books of Moses; and that in the afternoon, on the Advantages of Auricular Confession!49

Tractarian Oxford, thinks Miller, discredits the Scriptures (in what sounds like an unintended prophecy of Bishop Colenso’s The Pentateuch and Book of Joshua Critically Examined [1862]) while encouraging students to engage in behavior both non-scriptural and tending to promote the threatening power of an elite priesthood. One writer for an evangelical magazine found it entirely to the point that John Henry Newman, convert to Catholicism, and Francis Newman, convert to skepticism, were brothers; after all, despite their apparent differences, they simply embodied both sides of the same unholy coin.50 If clergy of a lower churchmanship argued that the Tractarians brought Roman Catholicism in, Dissenters charged that the Reformation had failed to expunge it in the first place. Timothy Larsen has recently praised Dissenters for their willingness to “help those whose religious opinions and practices they considered anathema to find a securer, more equitable place in English society”, and it is true that a number of Dissenters cheerfully acknowledged their debt to Catholicism for their own liberty.51 Moreover, when it came to the aggression, a number of Dissenters were unmoved or even amused by what they regarded as establishment hysteria. As one put it while apparently restraining a yawn, “I observe, secondly, that as a mere matter of offence, it [the aggression] is really of no moment, and that the most dignified course is to bear it with Christian meekness”.52 Still, Dissenters 49

John Cade Miller, “Subjection; No, Not for an Hour:” A Warning to Protestant Christians, in Behalf of the “Truth of the Gospel,” as Now Imperilled [sic] by the Romish Doctrines and Practices of the Tractarian Heresy: Being the Substance of a Sermon Preached in Saint Martin’s Church, Birmingham, on Sunday Evening, September 8, 1850, 3rd ed. (London, n.d.), p. 26. 50 “Truth and Peace.” “Further Thoughts on the Present Controversies,” The Christian Guardian and Churchman’s Magazine 1 (August 1850), 403. 51 Timothy Larsen, Contested Christianity: The Political and Social Contexts of Victorian Theology (Waco, TX, 2004), p. 152. D.G. Paz offers a much less enthusiastic assessment of Dissent’s supposed pro-tolerationist position in Popular Anti-Catholicism, pp. 152–95. 52 John Howard Hinton, The Romish Hierarchy in England. A Sermon Preached at Devonshire Square Chapel, London, on the 3rd November, 1850 (London, 1850), p. 15.

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who supported Catholic civil liberties usually drew the line at supporting Catholicism eo ipso. As far as many Dissenters could tell, both Tractarianism (or Puseyism) and the aggression were the logical outcomes of the Church of England’s residual Popery. The exceptionally popular Congregationalist preacher John Angell James, who thought that the aggression had at least reactivated true Protestant sentiment, gently noted that [i]t is impossible to forget that Puseyism has no doubt led to the present aggression of Rome; and Puseyism is the offspring, illegitimate as it is contended by its evangelical members, of the Church of England. It is indeed a portentous sign for that Church, and one that deserves its most serious reflection, that such a serious leaning towards Rome, should have been felt by so many of its clergy, and that it should possess either no power or no will to rid itself of the evil.53

While James’ logic may not at first be obvious – why should a movement within the Church of England somehow lead to invasion from Rome? – we should remember that the work of E.B. Pusey and the Tractarians was thought to have suggested to the Roman Catholic Church that the Church of England was ready to be reunited with its parent.54 For James, Anglican evangelicals cannot brush off their connections with the hated Tractarians quite as easily as they desire. His indictment of Establishment as an adequate defense for Protestantism goes in two directions: either the Church of England is too politically and affectively weak to maintain its clergy’s Protestant allegiances, or it actually supports that “serious leaning”. James’ charge recurs frequently elsewhere. The Rev. Alexander King, preaching in full apocalyptic mode some years after the aggression, charged that “[t]he system of the established Church is ritually and clerically constituted so as to dishonor and endanger our common Protestantism, while it strangely flatters and succumbs to the anti-christian Priestism of Rome”, while John Hamilton Thom dryly observed that, when it came to dividing up spiritual territory, Rome had treated the Church of England exactly as the Church of England treated Dissenters.55 Indeed, Thom went on to 53 J.A. James, The Papal Aggression and Popery Contemplated Religiously. A Pastoral Address to His Flock (London, 1851), p. 16. 54 A suspicion that was not, in fact, without merit; see, e.g., E.R. Norman, The English Catholic Church in the Nineteenth Century (1984; Oxford, 1985), pp. 208–12. 55 Alex King, Romanism: A Warning to Protestant Churches. Admonitory Sketches of the Papacy, and Glances at Modern Incidents in the Lives of the Popes. A Sermon, Preached in Queen Square Chapel, Brighton, on Sunday Evening, Dec. 14th, 1856 (Brighton, 1856), p. 17; John Hamilton Thom, Ecclesiastical Pretensions, Romish and


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argue of the evangelical wing that it had inadvertently publicized Popery in its vehement assaults on it, and that evangelicals hated Rome because they used similar techniques to maintain their own power.56 Evangelicalism and Romanism are not opponents but unwitting doubles, appropriating each other’s strategies and appealing to similar tastes. In this reading, Establishment anti-Romanism is itself perpetrated on Romanist principles, whereas Dissenters entirely resist the still-priestly foundations on which the Establishment is founded. Those Tractarians and their followers who refused to follow Newman to the Roman Catholic Church, meanwhile, repeatedly pointed to the Church of England’s own institutions in order to identify their own allegiances to the Church, to the Reformation, and indeed to England itself. For them, the Church of England was not Protestant at all, especially if Protestantism apparently encompassed “Jews”, “Socinians”, “Lutherans”, and “Mormonites”.57 As George Body would sigh in the early 1870s, the principles of the English Reformation were Catholic and Sacramental. The doctrine of the Priestly Commission and power we learn from our Ordinal – the doctrine of Holy Baptism and of the Blessed Sacrament from our Book of Common Prayer – the power of Absolution from the express statements of the Church – and the privilege of Confession from her own invitations.58

Body’s support for a specifically English, not British, Reformation rests on the continuity between the Church of England and a native English Christian tradition; for Body, this Reformation was neither Protestant nor related to anything that looks like what he terms “modern Romanism”, by which he means anything post-Council of Trent.59 Body

English; with the Antidote Which a Catholic Protestantism Supplies. A Tract for the Times. Being a Sermon Preached in Renshaw Street Chapel, Liverpool, Sunday, November 17, 1850 (London, 1850), p. 11. 56 Thom, Ecclesiastical Pretensions, pp. 21, 22. 57 G.R. Portal, On Some of the Prevalent Objections to Ritual Observances. A Sermon Preached in S. Barnabas’ Church, Pimlico, on the Second Sunday after Easter, by the Rev. G.R. Portal, M.A., Curate (London, 1854), pp. 18–19. 58 George Body, The Principle of the English Reformation. A Sermon, Preached on Behalf of the English Church Union, in Christ Church, Wolverhampton, on October 29, 1873 (Wolverhampton, 1873), pp. 5–6. 59 Ibid., p. 6. Cf. Bedmore Compton, who argued a decade later that Tractarianism had been itself a “Reformation”, albeit one temporarily derailed by mistaking “Romish fashions” for genuine traditions (The Fiftieth Year of the Reformation of the Nineteenth Century. A Sermon in Three Parts, Preached in Church of All Saints, Margaret Street, on the First Three Sundays of November, 1883 [London, 1883], p. 28).

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could point to a line of Tractarian and Tractarian-influenced commentators in support of this position, of whom the most notable was the Vicar of Leeds, Walter Farquhar Hook. Hook noted in a lecture published in 1847 that he himself was suspected of being “a Papist”, an accusation he regarded with reasonable equanimity; certainly, at least as early as 1825, Hook was taking an irenic position, counseling that the Roman Catholic Church, despite its multifold errors, nevertheless still taught essential truths.60 By the 1840s, however, he became more overtly critical, seeking in particular to distinguish between a universal Catholic Church (to which the Church of England belonged) and the corrupt, Tridentine “Popery”. In his sermons, Hook criticized Anglican evangelicals and Dissenters for their relentless bibliocentrism, arguing that their attempts to jettison all tradition in fact led to fatal confusion: “Now the real fact is, that you may in this way prove almost any Scriptural truth to be Popish, because Popery consists in novel enlargements of old Catholic truths; in novel additions to ancient and true doctrines”.61 That is, modern “Popery” does not exist in a vacuum-sealed container, apart from the universal Catholic Church, the Church of England, or even the Scriptures; it does not reject Scriptural truths so much as it improperly expands those truths into new and distorted forms. But given the Bible’s sheer complexity, we can only discern authentic truth from corrupt innovation by relying on the best traditions of biblical interpretation and scholarship. As it happens, Hook explained elsewhere, the Church of England has provided such interpretive assistance in its “Ritual, Liturgy, Articles, and Formularies”, which are not innovations on Scriptural truth but only “confirmatory of the true meaning of Scripture, whenever Scripture is ambiguous or doubtful”.62 Hook makes a very significant distinction here: the Church 60 Walter Farquhar Hook, “Postscriptum,” in Three Reformations: Lutheran–Roman– Anglican (London, 1847), p. 4; Hook, The Catholicism of the Anglican Church and Its Branches: A Sermon, Preached in the Episcopal Chapel at Stirling, on Sunday, March 20th, 1825, at the Consecration of Bishop Luscombe (Leeds, 1844), p. 48. 61 Walter Farquhar Hook, The Novelties of Romanism: Or, Popery Refuted by Tradition. A Sermon, Preached in St. Andrew’s Church, Manchester (London, 1840), p. 18. For the arguments among so-called “Old” (or Orthodox) High Churchmen, Tractarians, and evangelicals about the Reformation legacy, especially sola scriptura and the concomitant jettisoning of tradition, see Peter B. Nockles, The Oxford Movement in Context: Anglican High Churchmanship 1760–1857 (Cambridge, 1994), pp. 104–45. 62 Walter Farquhar Hook, A Call to Union on the Principles of the English Reformation. A Sermon, Preached at the Primary Visitation of Charles Thomas Lord Bishop of Ripon… With Notes and an Appendix, Containing Copious Extracts from the Reformers, 4th ed. (London, 1839), p. 21.


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of England’s Thirty-Nine Articles are intended to clarify what is already in Scripture, whereas Roman Catholic tradition supplies doctrines entirely absent from Scripture. This was something of a sore point with Anglicans of a similarly High Churchmanship, who felt that their evangelical brethren were simply substituting one “received interpretation” for another, despite all their protestations to the contrary.63 Thus, for example, Hook argued from both Scripture and tradition that auricular confession was an option reserved for those in severe need, not one of the sacraments. By so doing, he demonstrated that far from leading to necessarily Roman Catholic conclusions, deferring to apostolic traditions could actually undermine the Roman Catholic position.64 In a sense, then, Hook and his fellow High Churchmen agreed with the Dissenters on at least one thing: when it came to interpretation, Anglican evangelicals practiced what they claimed the Roman Catholics preached. Almost everyone agreed, however, that Protestant (or Anglican) culture was slowly committing suicide through the exercise of toleration. As E.R. Norman notes, clergymen frequently “interpreted the difficulties of the times as a punishment by God of their own past toleration”.65 Enormities such as the Catholic Emancipation Act, the Papal Aggression, and later the Ritualist movement, they argued, all derived from a uniquely 19th-century unwillingness to call evil things by their proper names. Hook suggested in 1842 that extreme anti-Catholic rhetoric had backfired: too many horrific tales had been disproved, meaning that Protestants were now far less likely to listen to explanations of Roman Catholicism’s true errors.66 Others, however, insisted that Protestants and Catholics were effectively (if perhaps inadvertently) collaborating on a project to redefine the meaning of prejudice. Edward Bickersteth complained that modern Protestantism sugarcoated the Gospels: The Protestant Churches, in their fancied wisdom, gentleness, and liberality, have not only nearly ceased to call the Pope Antichrist and the 63 William Dodsworth, Romanism Successfully Opposed Only on Catholic Principles. A Sermon, 2nd ed. (London, 1839), p. 14. 64 Walter Farquhar Hook, Auricular Confession: A Sermon, Preached in the Parish Church of Leeds, October 29th, 1848, with a Preface, Appendix, and Copious Notes… (London, 1848), e.g., pp. 18–20. 65 Norman, Anti-Catholicism, p. 69. 66 Walter Farquhar Hook, Peril of Idolatry. A Sermon…, 2nd ed. (London, 1842), pp. 7–8.

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miriam elizabeth burstein Man of Sin, but in the doubtfulness of faith engendered by modern disputations, have almost ceased to view any longer Popery in its true scriptural character.67

“Liberality”, a regular keyword in such critiques, encompasses both the political and the sentimental spheres. It is both liberalism, with its overtones of individualism, democratic tendencies, and antagonism to authority, and unthinking generosity, with its reluctance to criticize anyone or anything.68 Bickersteth’s complaint foreshadows our own culture wars over political correctness: the modern Protestant refuses to speak the proper names assigned to the Pope in the Scriptures, and in so doing elevates linguistic sensitivity over an objective truth (howsoever defined). By contrast, Bickersteth’s own sermon – and, by extension, the sermons and writings of authors like him – enacts the Protestant’s right relationship to biblical language. No true Protestant regards anything in the Bible as “unspeakable”; after all, it is not the modern speaker who condemns Popery, but the divinely-inspired Bible itself. True, the contemporary Catholic complained about “what he calls the persecuting spirit of Protestant bigotry”, as Charlton Lane put it, but such complaints had to be taken for what they were worth: the outraged cries of those who resented the truth, not just accusations of Protestants who, by definition, could not be “persecuting” in the act of reiterating biblical truths.69 An enraged Francis Close pointed out the 67

Bickersteth, Present Duties, p. 16. “Liberality” and “liberalism” went in both directions: in 1829, the Congregationalist J.P. Dobson praised the modern “spirit of genuine and open-hearted liberality”, whereas, three years earlier, a far crankier Hugh M’Neile complained about “the whining affectation of that undistinguishing liberalism which neutralizes in our times the principles of the Reformation!” See Dobson, The Advantages and Deficiencies of the Protestant Reformation. A Sermon, Delivered at Kensington, on Thursday, April 10, 1828, Before the Monthly Association of Congregational Ministers (London, 1829), p. 26; M’Neile, The Abominations of Babylon. A Sermon, Preached at the Parish Church of St. Clement’s Danes, Strand, on Monday, May 8, 1826, Before the Continental Society (London, n.d.), p. 25. On the general outlines of Catholic-Protestant debates over liberalism, see Wheeler, The Old Enemies, pp. 245–72. 69 Charlton Lane, “Rule of Faith,” in Protestant Lectures on the Errors and Abuses of Romanism (London, 1851), p. 4. Brad S. Gregory’s observations about the definition of persecution in the sixteenth century and earlier are still to the point here: “True doctrine legitimated prosecution, indeed made it prosecution rather than persecution” (Salvation at Stake: Christian Martyrdom in Early Modern Europe [Cambridge, MA, 1999], p. 88). While the Victorians were not thinking of “prosecuting”, let alone killing, Catholics – Hugh M’Neile, who once suggested that confessors be executed, was a startling exception to the rule (Robert J. Klaus, The Pope, the Protestants, and the Irish: Papal Aggression and Anti-Catholicism in Mid-Nineteenth Century England [New York and London, 1987], p. 229) – the general logic holds. 68


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obvious conclusions to be drawn from modern toleration, namely, that the Reformers then must have been martyred “in defence of MERE MATTERS OF OPINION, NON-ESSENTIALS AND MINOR DIFFERENCES!”70 In representing the differences between Protestantism and Catholicism as a matter of adiaphora (things indifferent), the modern Protestant implicitly rewrote history, displacing the Protestant martyrs from their key positions as witnesses to revealed truth and instead making their deaths into regrettable follies. Such revisionism, which fatally undermined Protestantism’s received historical narratives, called the very nature of Protestant faith into question. Why proclaim a Protestant identity if Protestantism and Catholicism had, after all, so very much in common – if the Reformation was a mistake? If toleration posed a threat to Protestant narratives, it also posed a more pragmatic, political threat to Protestant apologetics and Protestant government alike. For staunch Protestants, toleration neither promoted comfortable Protestant-Catholic relations nor contributed to the nation’s spiritual health. In 1839, Charles Smith Bird, trying to protect the parishioners of Reading from what was apparently a mass distribution of Catholic apologetics, told his auditors that “[w]e must remind Protestants of their peculiar principles, we must build up the weak, and instruct the ill-informed, and enable them to ‘give, to every man that asketh them, a reason of the hope that is in them’ ”.71 Bird’s allusion to 1 Peter 3:15, which urges believers to testify to the truth in the face of persecution, puts modern Protestants in a distinctly embattled position. But Bird also maps out a more long-term goal, one that would reestablish a defined Protestant identity – defined, in part, by its ability (as in Bickersteth’s sermon) to speak the truth to those who would undermine it. Nevertheless, nearly twenty years later, William Harrison complained of “the indifference of all classes in this country to this vital matter”; it appears that Protestants had not yet been awakened to the necessity of asserting their essential differences.72 Nor, from a strong

70 Francis Close, The Protestant Faith, or “The Way Called Heresy.” Being the Substance of a Sermon, Preached in the Parish Church, Cheltenham, on Sunday, December 13th, 1835 (London, 1835), p. 18. 71 Charles Smith Bird, Transubstantiation Tried by Scripture and Reason, Addressed to the Protestant Inhabitants of Reading, in Consequence of the Attempts Recently Made to Introduce Romanism Amongst Them (London, 1839), p. 4. 72 William Harrison, The Blessings of the Reformation. A Sermon Preached at the Church of St. Mary-at-the-Walls, Colchester, on Wednesday, Nov. 17, 1858 (Colchester, 1858), p. 18.

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Protestant point of view, had things changed much by the 1860s. James Hollins, looking back at the aggression and forward to the imminent prospect of the disestablishment of the Church of Ireland, dourly observed that “concessions”, far from “satisf[ying] the Roman Catholic thirst”, had simply made them hungrier for yet more leeway.73 Theological trimming for the sake of peace creates not contented Catholics, but insatiable thirst for the entire country. And, once the inch has been granted, there is little in the way of either theological or political argument to prevent Catholics from taking the proverbial mile. At the base of everything that had gone wrong with Protestantism (and, apparently, right with Catholicism), then, was indifference; and behind that indifference lay a theological amnesia that imperiled the very possibility of Protestantism itself. Protestants failed to read the Bible; they failed to read their Foxe; they failed to relinquish worldly desires; above all, they failed to remember the Reformation. In the words of F.T. Hill, speaking in 1852, “A forgetful man is an unthankful man, but he who recalls to mind his mercies, and thinks upon them, the same will walk before the Lord, and to render unto Him thanks for all his benefits”.74 Without remembrance, there is no salvation – not for the individual, not for the country. John Norman Pearson, preaching on Luke 8:16–18 as part of the Reformation tercentenary, cringed at the thought of how the great English martyrs would react to modern Dissent: How would the spirits of Latimer, and Hooper, and Tyndal [sic], and Taylor burn within them, could they revisit the land in which they sealed their abhorrence of Popery at the stake, to find men of such high pretensions to sanctity as to spurn the Established Church on the ground of its not being thoroughly purged of Romish impurities, – to find these very men linked with the infidel party, and giving “their power and strength unto the Beast”, for objects which, if not purely secular, have confessedly little or nothing to do with the essentials of the Gospel.75

73 James Hollins, The Royal Supremacy: England’s Safeguard Against Rome’s Aggression. A Sermon Preached at St. Mark’s Chapel, Before the Right Worshipful the Mayor of Bristol, on Sunday Morning, May 3, 1868 (London, 1868), p. 21. 74 F.T. Hill, Balaam, A Type of Popery. A Sermon Preached on the 5th November, 1852, in the District Church of St. Philip and St. James, Escot, Ottery St. Mary (London, 1852), p. 8. 75 John Norman Pearson, The Candle of the Lord Uncovered; Or, the Bible Rescued from Papal Thraldom by the Reformation. A Sermon, Preached at the Parish Church of St. Mary, Islington, on Sunday, October 4, 1835 (London, 1835), p. 21.


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In the pun on “burn”, exasperation replaces forgotten martyrdoms. Dissenters, in rejecting the Church of England as insufficiently “reformed”, in fact contribute to the collapse of Protestantism by elevating adiaphora over the “essentials” for which Latimer et al. were martyred. A hint of the Gothic intrudes here as well, so common in other lines of anti-Catholic polemic and so usually missing from the sermons. Pearson asks his audience to, in effect, imagine the martyrs returning from the dead to cast judgement on the modern world – a haunting justified by modern forgetfulness. There is more than a hint of Gothic in William Bennett’s invocation of the Inquisition, “that foul, and dark, and bloody court”: …Have not its dread secrets been but lately brought to light? Were not its sullen chambers and its dungeons dank but recently explored, when Papists hating Popery, drove out in base disguise their Pope? And what was seen? Were there not heaps of calcined human bones – the last faint traces – upon earth – of stedfastness [sic] and cruelty; but neither unremembered before God? Were there not there found, too, the long tresses of womanhood to prove, if proof were wanting, that mercy is unknown, and every lingering trace of human feeling all effaced; that sex and weakness can move no relenting; where such fierce superstition reigns?76

Bennett resorts to a familiar topos of anti-Catholic polemic – namely, that the return of Roman Catholicism necessarily involves a repetition of Roman Catholic persecution. Mapping out the forgotten territory of Catholic wrongdoing, Bennett finds what are, in effect, relics. Such relics, far from going on display in elaborate reliquaries, are instead buried in “heaps”, their individuality eradicated; yet these “traces” of suffering, despite their attempted erasure by human hands, have nevertheless been memorialized by the divine historian. Moreover, the presence of women in the prison (and, presumably, their torture) signals Catholicism’s ultimate depravity: the male inquisitor violates female bodies without compunction and with spectacular disregard for both ideal gender relations and human sympathy itself. In fact, this violence against women suggests the entire collapse of community under Catholic “reign”, since devotion to “superstition” now trumps devotion to one’s weaker fellows. And all this, Bennett warns, has been conveniently forgotten by liberalizing elements in Protestant circles.

76

Bennett, Popery, p. 22.

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How, then, to reverse the “coldness” with which amnesiac Protestants apparently regarded the Catholic onslaught?77 For Dissenters, this question was deeply problematic; after all, any attack on Catholic civil rights might well lead to an attack on Dissenters themselves. Alexander King cleverly argued that Catholic political power would only result in a “despotism that would be equally ruinous to us and to them” – “them” being the Catholics.78 King thus proposed allowing anti-Catholic Dissenters to have their civil liberties cake and eat it too. Other Dissenters proposed renovating the educational system on a secular plan and, not surprisingly, disestablishing the Church altogether.79 Such strategies would purify faith while strengthening those intellectual skills necessary for resisting Romanist propaganda. Meanwhile, some Anglican preachers of a higher churchmanship suggested that it was time for Convocation to be restored and more bishops appointed.80 John Edmund Jones, in the midst of some basic theological advice, thought that petitioning the government would be a good idea.81 Others proposed more local measures. Edward Girdlestone called on his listeners to be on their guard for any attempts, even by their superiors, to alter church doctrines or furnishings in any way that looked vaguely Popish.82 In Girdlestone’s system, the laity would be very much in charge of holding their clerical brethren to the Protestant line – and, in reality, the laity did object strongly, sometimes violently, to any perceived “innovations” in this direction.83 Yet despite these suggestions for Church reform and political or ecclesiastical activism, the clergy most commonly called their parishioners to resist Catholicism through a life of intensified piety and discipline. In particular, the clergy urged Protestants to return to a 77

Seymour, “Danger,” p. 231. King, Romanism, p. 14. 79 Respectively, Charles Berry, Remarks on Popery, and the Present Anti-Papal Agitation. A Sermon Delivered at the Great Meeting, Leicester, December 8, 1850 (Leicester, 1850), p. 23; G.W. Conder, Protestantism for 1850. A Sermon on the Recent Papal Movement, Preached in Belgrave Chapel, Leeds, on Sunday Evening, Nov. 10, 1850 (Leeds, n.d.), pp. 20–21. 80 George Trevor, The Papal Aggression. A Sermon, Preached in York Minster, on Sunday, 17th November, 1850 (York, 1850), pp. 13–14. 81 Jones, York Minster, pp. 25–26. 82 Edward Girdlestone, Tricentenary of the Reformation. A Sermon Preached in Bristol Cathedral, on Wednesday Morning, November 17th 1858 (Bristol, 1858), p. 15. 83 See, e.g., John Shelton Reed, Glorious Battle: The Cultural Politics of Victorian Anglo-Catholicism (Nashville, TN, 1996), pp. 57–59; Nigel Yates, Anglican Ritualism in Victorian Britain 1830–1910 (Oxford, 1999), pp. 169–72. 78


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regular program of Bible reading. Hugh M’Neile, commemorating the accession of Elizabeth I, saw dangers afoot in the popularity of nonScriptural religious books – “interesting tales, or companions to devotion, with illuminated margins and highly-finished woodcuts, and prepared in gaudily ornamented bindings” – which distracted even the well-meaning reader from the Bible and inexorably led him or her on to Popery.84 Such aesthetically-pleasing texts, described in pointedly materialist terms, substitute the sensual pleasure of the book as object for the more demanding encounter with the Word of God. In the textual equivalent of iconoclasm, M’Neile demands that readers jettison their “gaudily ornamented” texts for the Word experienced purely as words. John Stock, addressing his flock on the Reformation tercentenary, blamed the “Sunday Newspapers” for similarly distracting readers from the more substantial, but also more difficult, exercise of Scripture reading.85 Other clergymen, like John Cade Miller, reminded their audiences of the importance of preaching, and warned them to stay away from anyone who did not adhere to recognizably Protestant doctrine.86 Ultimately, however, the best defense against the Catholic menace was also the hardest: recognizing that the fault lay not simply with those who invaded from without, but, just as importantly, with those whose Protestantism was not as purely defined as it should have been. Catholicism could not have made such inroads into a Protestant nation if Protestant faith had not itself faltered. Indeed, Catholicism itself had become attractive only because Protestantism – especially in the form of the Church of England – had ceased to offer a spiritual home: How seldom is the busy hum of life disturbed by the deep bell of the Church, calling her children to pray! How are the bread of life and the waters of salvation withdrawn, even by those commissioned to administer them! Oh! what is the party-spirit of the present day, but an evidence that faith and love have waxed cold among ourselves! This is it that has caused many to feel dissatisfied with our position, – that we 84 Hugh M’Neile, The English Reformation, a Re-Assertion of Primitive Christianity. A Sermon, Preached in Christ Church, Newgate Street, on the 17th of November, 1858, the Tercentenary Commemoration of the Accession of Queen Elizabeth, 2nd ed. (Liverpool, 1858), p. 25. 85 John Stock, A Sermon Preached in the Parish Churches of St. Mary Stratford Bow, and of All Saints, Poplar, Middlesex, on Sunday, October 4th, 1835, in Commemoration of the Third Centenary of the Reformation, and of the Publication of the First Entire Protestant English Version of the Bible, October 4th, 1835 [sic] (London, 1835), p. 18. 86 Miller, Subjection, pp. 30–31.

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miriam elizabeth burstein lack a system of faith and practice which may proclaim a priesthood living wholly unto God.87

Charles Frederick Milner, who is here contemplating his immediate predecessor’s conversion, diagnoses a fatal gap between religious observance and the rhythms of secular life. The Church neither makes demands on the people nor offers its spiritual gifts to them; instead, it has lapsed into a mere echo of the world, and thus failed in its obligations. For Milner and those who thought like him, then, the one true method of combating Roman Catholicism’s appeal was to rejuvenate the universal Catholic Church of England, offering a Protestantism that might be lived organically by both clergy and people. In an irony that would not have been appreciated by most of the clergymen discussed here, modern observers of the Church of England have suggested that it was the Tractarians – for anti-Catholic preachers, the fifth column out to hand England back to Rome – who were primarily responsible for shaping “a viable modern identity” for Anglicanism.88 While Walter Farquhar Hook might have enjoyed that outcome, evangelicals like Edward Bickersteth would have taken a far grimmer view. As we have seen, most Protestants saw the appeal of Roman Catholicism (and, for that matter, Anglo-Catholicism) as the necessary but avoidable consequence of man’s fallen nature. At that level, then, Protestants and Catholics were more alike than not: all men are sinners, but the Catholic fails to resist temptation – and his religion encourages him in this failure. The sermons consistently ask the auditor and reader to return to the sterner, but purified, doctrines contained in the Scriptures. But they also link Protestantism and English national identity; to be Catholic is to be un-English in one’s very essence, in a way that affects the Catholic believer’s emotions and mental processes alike. Over and over again, we see that the anti-Catholic sermons ultimately link Protestantism to a proper way of testifying to religious truth, in which the Protestant speaker becomes unselfconsciously one with Scriptural language. Hence, for example, the exasperation of many clergymen with tolerationist positions: it is impossible to be “intolerant” if the language of and rationale for one’s condemnation of Roman Catholicism 87

Charles Frederick Milner, Departure from the Faith. A Sermon Preached in Shadwell Church, (With Special Reference to the Recent Secession to Rome, of the Late Incumbent,) On the Last Sunday in Trinity, 1851 (Wakefield, n.d.), p. 13. 88 William L. Sachs, The Transformation of Anglicanism: From State Church to Global Communion (Cambridge, 1993), p. 121.


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derives from the Scriptures! By calling for Protestants to live in Scripture, to order both their lives and their utterances by revealed truth, the clergy made the Bible itself the ultimate weapon against Roman Catholicism. Ultimately, Protestants would do nothing themselves against the Catholic threat. The Bible itself was God’s weapon, Protestants the mere instrument. As James Benjamin Gillman joyously proclaimed: Let the Scriptures, full orbed in the completeness of their own beauty, and brightness, and vigour, shine upon the world; and the latter-day glory, – of which prophets wrote and apostles spoke, and for which the sainted of every time and place earnestly pray, – will appear to bless the earth, – chasing away ignorance and superstition, infidelity and heresy, bigotry and prejudice, sin and misery, and causing righteousness and praise to spring forth before all nations!89

89 James Benjamin Gillman, Tricentenary Celebration of the First English Translation of the Whole Bible: Being the Substance of a Sermon, Preached in the Methodist Chapel, Whitefriar Street, on Sunday, October 4, 1835… (Dublin, 1835), p. 14.

NINETEENTH-CENTURY BRITISH SERMONS ON EVOLUTION AND THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES: THE DOG THAT DIDN’T BARK? Keith A. Francis Writing at the end of the 19th century, George Henslow (1835–1925), the son of Charles Darwin’s mentor John Stevens Henslow (1796–1861), noted: Since Darwin published his work, The Origin of Species, in 1859, and brought to the front the old doctrine of the evolution of living things, but on a new basis, this principle has been taken up and applied elsewhere than in the physical world … It was soon thought by some that the time had come to apply it to religions; and Christianity was … tacitly assumed, among other forms of religion, to have been evolved by some natural process out of Judaism or elsewhere; without any great, if any, break in the continuity of moral thought or interference whatever.1

By 1896, the year Henslow’s comment was published, the theory of evolution had gained sufficient acceptance among British scientists and literati that the next task for the intelligentsia was to apply evolutionary theory to other areas of knowledge – history, politics, art, and even religion.2 Henslow’s more famous contemporary Thomas H. Huxley (1825– 95) had noted in the 1880s that the journey to the point in time at which evolution was just another scientific theory with applications outside of science had not been smooth. Commenting on the significance of Darwin’s achievement, Huxley drew attention to what he considered was a major shift in attitude: The contrast between the present condition of public opinion on the Darwinian question; between the estimation in which Darwin’s views are

1

George Henslow, Christ No Product of Evolution (London, 1896), p. 3. See, for example, Walter Bagehot, Physics and Politics; or, Thoughts on the Application of the Principles of “Natural Selection” and “Inheritance” to Political Society (London, 1872); Edward Caird, The Evolution of Religion, 2 vols. (Glasgow, 1893); Anna Swanwick, Evolution and the Religion of the Future (London, 1894); and C. Hubert H. Parry, The Evolution of the Art of Music (London, 1896). 2

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keith a. francis now held in the scientific world; between the acquiescence, or at least quiescence, of the theologians of the self-respecting order at the present day and the outburst of antagonism on all sides in 1858–9,3 when the new theory respecting the origin of species first became known to the older generation to which I belong, is so startling that, except for documentary evidence, I should be sometimes inclined to think my memories dreams.4

Huxley’s description fits into what James Moore has characterized as the “military metaphor” of the reception of The Origin of Species.5 The theory of evolution had been “bound hand and foot and cast into utter darkness during the millennium of theological scholasticism”; “Darwin poured new life-blood into the ancient frame” of the philosophy of evolution”; Darwin’s ideas were opposed by the “dullest antagonists”, including men such as Bishop Samuel Wilberforce who was “a shallow pretender to a Master in Science”;6 “years had to pass away before misrepresentation, ridicule, and denunciation, ceased to be the most notable constituents of the majority of the multitudinous criticisms of his work which poured from the press”; but, in the end, “even theologians have almost ceased to pit the plain meaning of Genesis against the no less plain meaning of Nature”.7 The picture Huxley drew was, to continue his graphic imagery, of dark and malevolent, but ignorant, forces allied against scientific truth and the seekers of scientific truth, particularly Darwin.

3 Huxley’s use of these dates is interesting and surprising. The Origin of Species was not published until 24 November 1859. The joint-paper of Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace (1823–1913) on their evolutionary theory of descent by modification through natural selection, “On the Tendency of Species to form Varieties; and on the Perpetuation of Varieties and Species by Natural Means of Selection”, was presented to the Linnean Society on 1 July 1858; there was no “outburst of antagonism” in the ensuing days and weeks. 4 Thomas H. Huxley, “On the Reception of the ‘Origin of Species,’ ” in The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, including an Autobiographical Chapter, ed. Francis Darwin (London, 1887), p. 2: 181. 5 James R. Moore, The Post-Darwinian Controversies: A Study of the Protestant Struggle to Come to Terms with Darwin in Great Britain and America, 1870–1900 (Cambridge, 1979), pp. 19–49. The title of the book was On the Origin of Species until the sixth edition which was published in 1872. As the book is more commonly known as The Origin of Species, that nomenclature will be used throughout this chapter. 6 Samuel Wilberforce (1805–73) was the son of the English abolitionist William Wilberforce; he became the Bishop of Oxford (1845–69) and the Bishop of Winchester (1869–73). 7 Huxley, “On the Reception of the ‘Origin of Species,’ ” pp. 181, 182, 183.

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While it is possible to argue that Huxley was exaggerating to make a point or indulging in rhetorical flourish, as he was inclined to do,8 he was neither the first nor the last to see a battle between science and religion or between scientist and theologian. Of his contemporaries, John William Draper (1811–82) in his History of the Conflict between Religion and Science (1875) and Andrew Dickson White (1832–1918) in his A History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom (1896) are the best known for giving a similar analysis. The activities of the proponents of various types of creationism in the 20th and 21st centuries have ensured that the military metaphor continues to be used,9 perhaps one of the most intriguing titles being Did the Devil Make Darwin Do It? Modern Perspectives on the Creation-Evolution Controversy (1983).10 Eye-catching or controversial statements may provide fodder for vocal proponents of a pro-evolution or anti-evolution position, but they are not conclusive evidence that an actual “war” was occurring. Other historians have suggested alternative understandings of the reception of Darwin’s theory of evolution in the 19th century which are equally compelling. Famously, Thomas Kuhn in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962) proposed the idea of “paradigm shift” – that new scientific theories replace older ones when the accumulating evidence can no longer be explained using the latter.11 More recently, John Hedley Brooke in his Science and Religion: Some Historical Perspectives (1991) put forward the notion of “complexity” as an historiographical approach. According to Brooke, it is important to recognize that there are no easy categorizations of “proponents” and “opponents” or “right” and “wrong”, or even “winners” and “losers”, with regard to the history of the relationship between science and religion.12 8 See Michael Bartholomew, “Huxley’s Defence of Darwin,” Annals of Science 32 (November 1975), 525–35 and Adrian Desmond, Huxley: From Devil’s Disciple to Evolution’s High Priest (Reading, MA, 1997), pp. 266–85 and 307–08. 9 See Tom McIver, Anti-Evolution: A Reader’s Guide to Writings Before and After Darwin (Baltimore, MD, 1988) for an extensive list of anti-evolution books and tracts published in the 19th and 20th centuries. 10 A group of essays published by Iowa State University Press and edited by David B. Wilson. 11 Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago, 1962), particularly pp. 4–22 and 52–85. 12 See John Hedley Brooke, Science and Religion: Some Historical Perspectives (Cambridge, 1991), particularly pp. 1–6, 16–81, and 321–22. See also John Hedley Brooke and Geoffrey Cantor, Reconstructing Nature: The Engagement of Science and Religion (New York, 2000), particularly pp. 15–41 and 106–38.

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Perhaps more important than the new perspectives on the reception of Darwin’s theory provided by historians such as Brooke is the view of others such as Owen Chadwick. In his magnum opus on the Victorian church, Chadwick argues that understanding the reaction to The Origin of Species in terms of “controversy” is the wrong approach (and ignores the difficulty of establishing exactly what causes people to change their views). There may have been conflict between some scientists and some ministers but the details of Darwin’s arguments were only vaguely known, if at all, by most of British society. “For a decade or two after 1896”, notes Chadwick, some members of the Church of England, especially among the evangelicals, and nearly all official members of the Roman Catholic Church, and most of the simple worshippers among the chapels of the poor, continued to know nothing of evolution or to refuse to accept it on religious grounds, that is, on their faith in the inspired truth of the Old Testament.13

Further, commenting on the impact of scientific theories which supposedly undermined the truth of Christianity, Chadwick remarks: In the pews, no doubt, continued to sit large numbers of worshippers who had never heard of Tylor,14 were indifferent to Darwin, mildly regretted what they heard of Huxley and, if they thought about it all, knew that their faith rested upon moral considerations inaccessible to the physical sciences.15

Given Chadwick’s characterization, the discussion about The Origin of Species and evolutionary theory in the churches seems more like the proverbial “storm in a tea-cup”. Although it may seem an excessive focus on “ordinary” people, the point made by Chadwick and others is valid. If the debate about the theory of evolution was simply among some scientists and some Anglican and Nonconformist ministers, even if the participants numbered a thousand, and they wrote in national publications such as The Times or The Edinburgh Review, the debate ought not to be described as a controversy and certainly not a “war”. When compared to the hundreds of thousands who attended church Sunday after Sunday and 13

Owen Chadwick, The Victorian Church, 2nd ed. (London, 1972), pp. 2: 23–24. Edward Burnett Tylor (1832–1917), a British anthropologist. In Primitive Culture: Researches into the Development of Mythology, Philosophy, Religion, Art, and Custom (1871) he argued that origins of religion could be found in so-called animist cultures and that religion developed from animism to polytheism to monotheism. 15 Chadwick, The Victorian Church, p. 2: 35. 14


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remained unaffected by the debate about evolution, a thousand is a rather small number. One test, then, of the impact of The Origin of Species in the 19th century is the effect it had on the lives of the parishioners with whom the ministers and theologians came into contact. Was Darwin or The Origin of Species a major topic of conversation for “ordinary” people in the church congregations all over Britain? Chadwick suggests not, but is he correct? Substantiating the validity of Chadwick’s characterization presents a major difficulty for the historian: how is it possible to ascertain what “ordinary worshipers” were thinking? Taking the usual means for discovering the thinking of a group – diaries, correspondence, newspapers, and the like – is not sufficient. This runs the risk of falling into the same trap of extrapolation as the controversy between scientists and ministers. Just because some ordinary people were discussing Darwin or The Origin of Species does not mean that the majority were doing so. There was one type of literature in the 19th century with which the majority of people in Britain came into contact: the sermon. (The sermon was literature in the sense that it was written, either in the form of notes or in full, before it was spoken. It was also rhetoric because ministers preached their sermons. It then became a new type of literature if the minister chose to publish it because most, if not all, published sermons were edited versions of the preached sermons.) While the numbers of people attending church declined steadily in the 19th century, the numbers of Anglicans, Nonconformists, and Catholics as a percentage of the population remained steady.16 For 1891, for example, if the membership of the churches in England, Scotland, and Wales was approximately six million and only 20 per cent attended on a given Sunday, this would still mean that more than a million people heard sermons around the country.17 That figure represents a greater

16 See K.D.M. Snell and Paul S. Ell, Rival Jerusalems: The Geography of Victorian Religion (Cambridge, 2000), pp. 395–420; Frances Knight, The Nineteenth-Century Church and English Society (Cambridge, 1995), pp. 201–206, and John Wolffe, God and Greater Britain: Religion and National Life in Britain and Ireland 1843–1945 (London, 1994), pp. 63–74 and 255–61. 17 Robert Currie, Alan Gilbert, and Lee Horsley, eds., Churches and Churchgoers: Patterns of Church Growth in the British Isles Since 1700 (Oxford, 1977), pp. 21–95 and 128–92, and Callum Brown, The Death of Christian Britain: Understanding Secularization, 1800–2000 (London, 2001), pp. 145–61.

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exposure for sermons than the most popular newspapers, journals, or novels. Unfortunately, most of these sermons died with the men, and a few women, who preached them. In the 19th century there was no means to capture all of these utterances and, like the centuries before and after, there was no attempt to record all of them. What there was in the 19th century, even more so than the two previous centuries, was a growing industry in printed sermons. Publishing individual sermons as leaflets and books of sermons became a second career for some ministers, a conspicuous example being the Baptist preacher and author Charles Spurgeon (1834–92). Despite the fact that well-known, not-so-well-known, and virtually unknown clergymen had their sermons published, historians do not know, either precisely or approximately, the total number of published sermons for the 19th or any other century. Charles Spurgeon collated the majority of his published sermons into a new volume of sermons each year from 1855 onwards. This series eventually reached sixtythree volumes and contains approximately 3,600 sermons.18 Alexander Maclaren (1826–1910), perhaps even more influential than Spurgeon in the Baptist Union, published nineteen volumes of sermons including his best-known series Sermons Preached in Union Chapel, Manchester.19 These volumes contain more than four hundred sermons. John Henry Newman (1801–90), known more for his preaching while an Anglican, published his eight-volume Parochial and Plain Sermons between 1834 and 1843; these amounted to 191 sermons.20 An equally well-known and even more prolific preacher such as Samuel Wilberforce published several volumes of sermons; added to his single pamphlet sermons, there are more than three hundred of Wilberforce’s sermons in print. The numbers of sermons published by Spurgeon, Maclaren, Newman, and Wilberforce are suggestive of a large, but unknown, corpus of sermons.21 Nevertheless, they do lend credence to 18 See Charles Spurgeon, A Complete Index to C. H. Spurgeon’s Sermons 1855–1917: In the New Park Street and Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit (Pasadena, TX, 1980); The New Park Street Pulpit: Containing Sermons Preached and Revised by the Rev. C. H. Spurgeon (London, 1856–62); and The Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit. Sermons Preached and Revised by C. H. Spurgeon (London, 1863–1917). 19 Published in 1859, 1869, and 1872 by Dunnill, Palmer & Co. 20 A complete and revised set of the eight volumes was published by Longmans, Green, and Co. in 1901. 21 Scholarly efforts to rectify this lack of knowledge have begun. This volume represents one attempt. A future project, “The British Pulpit Online,” will incorporate a catalog of more than 90 per cent of the sermons published in the 19th century.


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the assertion by Robert H. Ellison and others that the published sermon was one of the most common forms of literature in the 19th century.22 As might be expected, the subject matter of these sermons was diverse. There were sermons on all aspects of the Christian life.23 There were sermons by bishops encouraging their clergy to be diligent ministers.24 There were sermons for special occasions and jubilees such as opening of schools, the 50th anniversary of the promulgation of the doctrine of the immaculate conception, and the death of Queen Victoria.25 There were even sermons on what seem, from the distance of time, to be more unusual or esoteric subjects such as foreign travel or the cholera epidemic of 1866.26 To use a biblical analogy, “our name is Legion for we are many” could apply as well to published

22 Robert H. Ellison, The Victorian Pulpit: Spoken and Written Sermons in NineteenthCentury Britain (Selinsgrove, PA, 1998), p. 13; Robert Nye, ed., The English Sermon: An Anthology, vol. 3, 1750–1850 (Cheadle, UK, 1976); and J.N. Ian Dickson, Beyond Religious Discourse: Sermons, Preaching and Evangelical Protestants in Nineteenthcentury Irish Society (Milton Keynes, UK, 2007). 23 Newman’s Parochial and Plain Sermons is a good example of this genre. See also Francis Foreman Clarke, Plain Sermons Preached to Country Congregations (London, 1839); George Bellett, Parochial Sermons (London, 1853); William Jackson, Parochial Sermons (London, 1881); and Harry John Wilmot Buxton, Bible Object Lessons. Thirty Plain Sermons, Including Many for the Principal Church Seasons (London, 1903). Such sermon collections were also entitled “Village Sermons”. See Alexander R.C. Dallas, The Country Curate’s Offering to His Parishioners: Consisting of Eight Village Sermons (London, 1822); Arthur George Baxter, Village Sermons, 2 vols. (London, 1852); Sabine Baring-Gould, The Sunday Round. Plain Village Sermons for the Sundays of the Christian Year, 4 vols. (London, 1899). 24 Samuel Wilberforce, A Charge Delivered at the Triennial Visitation of the Diocese, November MDCCCLX (Oxford, 1860); Wilberforce, A Charge Delivered to the Diocese of Oxford, at His Eighth Visitation, November 11, 1869 by Samuel, Lord Bishop of Oxford, Lord High Almoner to Her Majesty the Queen, and Chancellor of the Order of the Garter (Oxford, 1869); William Thomson, Seven Years. A Charge to the Clergy of the Diocese of York, Delivered in October 1870, by William, Lord Archbishop of York (London, 1870), pp. 15–28. 25 Thomas Legh Claughton, Godly Teaching: A Sermon Preached on the Occasion of the Reopening of Archbishop Harsnett’s Free Grammar School (London, 1868); Randall Thomas Davidson, The Inheritance of a Great Name. A Sermon Preached in the Chapel of Harrow School on Founder’s Day, October 11, 1883 (London, 1883); Joseph M. Bampton, Instaurare omnia in Christo (London, 1904); Isidore Harris, “Thine is the Kingdom.” Sermon Preached in the West London Synagogue of British Jews, on the Sabbath Following the Death of Her Majesty Queen Victoria, January 25th, 1901 (London, 1901); and Herbert Hensley Henson, A Sermon Preached in Westminster Abbey, January 27th, 1901, on the Occasion of the Death of Queen Victoria of Blessed Memory (London, 1901). 26 See R.W. Church, “Foreign Travel,” in Pascal and other Sermons (London, 1895), pp. 278–97 and Charles Kingsley, “Cholera,” in The Water of Life, and Other Sermons (London, 1867), pp. 260–279.

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sermons in the 19th century as the demon-possessed man in the Gadarenes.27 The 19th century was the age of the sermon. Equally, it would not be inaccurate to describe the 19th century as “the Age of Darwin”. The impact of The Origin of Species and Darwin’s theory of evolution on science, particularly the biological sciences, was profound. Darwin had expressed the hope in 1859 that “when the views entertained in this volume on the origin of species, or when analogous views are generally admitted, we can dimly foresee that there will be a considerable revolution in natural history”.28 Darwin’s hope was realized in ways that he could not have imagined. While his particular theory of evolution, descent by modification through natural selection, was challenged by scientists,29 the theory of evolution became orthodox science by 1900. By the turn of the century, Darwin was generally, although not quite universally, acknowledged as the “father” of evolution. Further, the ground-breaking research on heredity and genes done by scientists such as Gregor Mendel (1822–84), Hugo de Vries (1848–1935), and William Bateson (1861–1926) which resulted in a version of Darwin’s theory becoming the standard explanation of evolution in the 20th century was begun within a couple of decades of the publication of The Origin of Species.30 This confluence of “The Age of Darwin” and the “Age of the Sermon” provides a useful context for testing the impact of both. The idea, the theory of evolution, and the form of rhetoric, the preached and published sermon, were both supposed to influence the thinking and behavior of a large portion of the population. Whether ministers’ sermons were influenced by the ideas in The Origin of Species or descriptions by scientists of the theory of evolution were influenced by what was preached in church are both interesting questions worth examining. This chapter will focus on the former. In 1912, Edwin Charles Dargan (1852–1930), a former professor of Homiletics at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, 27

See Luke 8:26–31. Darwin, On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life (London, 1859), p. 484. 29 The attacks on natural selection are described well in Peter Bowler’s The Eclipse of Darwinism: Anti-Darwinian Evolution Theories in the Decades around 1900 (Baltimore, 1983). 30 Julian Huxley (1887–1925), grandson of Thomas Huxley, and one of the biologists who was involved in bringing together gene theory and Darwinian natural selection, describes this history well in Evolution: The Modern Synthesis (New York, 1942), pp. 14–150. 28


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Kentucky, commented on the impact of the “Age of Darwin” on the “Age of the Sermon”: The wonderful development of physical science and the rise of the British school of scientific speculation about the middle of the nineteenth century made an epoch for preaching as for other departments of human thinking. Materialistic evolution as a theory of all causes and phenomena, not only attacked the foundations of the Christian faith, but threatened to become the substitute of all spiritual thinking, until, toward the end of the century, the inadequacy of so one-sided a view of life began to produce the inevitable reaction. This scientific opposition to historical and spiritual religion was a fearful opponent of preaching and at the same time a powerful stimulus to it. Both phases of this effect are traceable in the sermons of the period.31

Dargan’s analysis is the opposite of Owen Chadwick’s. In terms of time, Dargan was closer to the events he described and, to him, the theory of evolution had a profound effect on the sermons preached in the last half of the 19th century. Was Dargan overstating or Chadwick understating? Darwin’s ideas were controversial: this suggests that Dargan’s interpretation is the more accurate one (and is certainly an analysis that Thomas Huxley would have recognized). Given the importance of Chadwick’s work on the Victorian church and Dargan’s advantage as a witness, it is important to find a way to reconcile these two seemingly contradictory analyses of the period. These two interpretations do draw attention to the fact that some basic questions about sermons on evolution need to be answered. Three are the most obvious. First, who were the ministers preaching sermons about The Origin of Species and evolution, and what exactly did they say? Second, what was the purpose of these sermons? Did the preachers perceive them as one weapon in a war against the theory of evolution, for example? Or, furthermore, what was the expectation for sermons in the 19th century: what did the preacher and the congregation expect would be achieved by the sermon, particularly one that condemned or supported the theory of evolution? Third, what does the content and purpose of the sermons suggest about the reception of Darwin’s ideas and the theory of evolution in the latter half of the 19th century? Would people attending church services have been aware of a

31 Edwin C. Dargan, A History of Preaching, Vol. II: From the Close of the Reformation Period to the End of the Nineteenth Century, 1572–1900 (New York, 1912), p. 357.

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“controversy” or felt that they were participants in a controversy from the sermons they heard? Given his dislike of controversy, it is a slight exaggeration to suggest this, but there is a sense in which Darwin baited his future opponents. Richard Owen (1804–92), the pre-eminent English naturalist of the 19th century until he was overshadowed by Darwin, was mentioned eighteen times in the first edition of The Origin of Species.32 Owen was a disciple of the French naturalist Georges Cuvier (1769–1832) who had dominated the French Academy of Science in the late 18th and early 19th centuries and was partly responsible for the marginalization of transformists, proponents of a theory of evolution, such as JeanBaptiste Lamarck (1744–1829). Darwin might have hoped for it but he realized that support for his theory from men such as Owen was unlikely. Nevertheless, Darwin quoted Owen and Cuvier, the opinions of both men seeming to bolster Darwin’s argument.33 Darwin took the same rhetorical approach to ministers and those with objections to his theory based on religion. “I see no good reason why the views given in this volume should shock the religious feelings of any one”, he wrote in the second edition of The Origin of Species.34 In the next sentence Darwin quoted “a celebrated author and divine” who had written to him noting that it is just as noble a conception of the Deity to believe that He created a few original forms capable of self-development into other and needful forms, as to believe that He required a fresh act of creation to supply the voids caused by the action of His laws.35

The author in question was Charles Kingsley (1819–75) best-known today for writing the children’s book The Water Babies (1863) but who was also a Church of England priest, prolific preacher, and professor of modern history at Cambridge University (1860–69). Kingsley wrote the words Darwin quoted in a letter dated 18 November 1859;36 with

32 Paul H. Barrett, Donald J. Weinshank, and Timothy T. Gottleber, eds., A Concordance to Darwin’s Origin of Species, First Edition (Ithaca, NY, 1981), p. 545. 33 See The Origin of Species, 1st ed., pp. 134, 206, 310. 34 Darwin, On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life, 2nd ed. (London: John Murray, 1860), p. 481. 35 Darwin, On the Origin of Species, p. 515. 36 Charles Kingsley to Darwin, Letter 2534, Darwin Correspondence Project, www .darwinproject.ac.uk/darwinletters/calendar/entry-2534.html, accessed 19 October 2008.


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Kingsley’s permission, Darwin took the bold step of publishing the comments of a private letter:37 Darwin could only have been more provocative if he had named Kingsley as the author. Kingsley’s support for The Origin of Species is well known, as several of Darwin’s biographers have noted.38 Less commented on is an observation made by Darwin in the third edition. “The ‘Philosophy of Creation’ has been treated in a masterly manner by the Rev. Baden Powell, in his ‘Essays on the Unity of Worlds,’ 1855”, noted Darwin. “Nothing can be more striking than the manner in which he shows that the introduction of new species is ‘a regular, not a casual phenomenon’ ”.39 Baden Powell (1796–1860), Anglican priest and professor of geometry at Oxford University, was also the author of the essay “On the Study of the Evidences of Christianity” in Essays and Reviews (1860), which so scandalized some Anglicans that only his untimely death removed the possibility that he might be prosecuted for heresy.40 Darwin quoted more than thirty authors, mainly naturalists, in his historical “sketch of the progress of opinion on the Origin of Species” – only two were clergymen.41 The other clergyman mentioned, William Herbert (1778–1847), a former dean of Manchester (1840–47), had died twelve years before the publication of The Origin of Species. Darwin first wrote his historical sketch as a preface to the third American edition of The Origin of Species which was published in 1860. As Powell did not die until 11 June 1860, Darwin had included the opinion of a

37 Darwin to Kingsley, Letter dated “Nov. 30” [1859], Letter 2561, Darwin Correspondence Project, www.darwinproject.ac.uk/darwinletters/calendar/entry-2561 .html, accessed 19 October 2008. 38 Adrian Desmond and James Moore, Darwin (New York, 1992), pp. 477, 488; Janet Browne, Charles Darwin: Voyaging (New York, 1995), p. 322; Janet Browne, Charles Darwin: The Power of Place (New York, 2003), pp. 95–96, 160–61; Peter Brent, Charles Darwin: A Man of Enlarged Curiosity (New York, 1981), pp. 427, 446. 39 Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life, 3rd ed. (London, 1861), p. xviii. 40 See Josef L. Altholz, Anatomy of a Controversy: The Debate over Essays and Reviews, 1860–64 (Aldershot, UK, 1994), pp. 21, 50–63, and Ieuan Ellis, Seven Against Christ: A Study of ‘Essays and Reviews’ (Leiden, 1980), pp. 157–212. Baden Powell’s son Robert, the future Lord Baden-Powell, was the founder of the Boy Scouts and Girl Guides. 41 Darwin, The Origin of Species, 3rd ed., p. xiv and Darwin, On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life (New York, 1860), pp. v–xi.

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living, controversial, and well-connected clergyman (as well as that of a clergyman in the mainstream, Herbert).42 With regard to Powell and Kingsley, both were known, perhaps notorious, for their unorthodoxy: Baden Powell for his liberal theological views and Kingsley for his support of political causes such as workers’ rights and socialism.43 Darwin was well aware that he was invoking the support of clergymen whose views many Anglicans would find difficult to accept, much less Christians in other churches (and this may explain, in part, why Darwin did not name Kingsley).44 When Darwin wrote that “it is so easy to hide our ignorance under such expressions as the ‘plan of creation’, ‘unity of design’, &c., and to think that we give an explanation when we only restate a fact”,45 it was almost as if he was inviting comment from the pulpit. Without knowing exactly who preached sermons on The Origin of Species and/or evolution, it is clear that those sermons were preached in a specific historical context. Written and published sermons were (and are) important literature of the Victorian period but, in the case of The Origin of Species, it seems that postmodernist theories about literature being beyond the control of the author once published do not apply. In a sense, Darwin had chosen the type of clergyman who would preach on The Origin of Species. The ministers could not be afraid to court controversy; would have more than a fair knowledge of science and the scientific method; would be scientists, amateur scientists (or “naturalists”, in the parlance of most of the 19th century), or philosophers; and would be preaching to congregations amenable to sermons on scientific subjects. The sermons themselves could not be commonplace, preached on any Sunday without a care for the “occasion”. Furthermore, any published sermons on evolution or The Origin of Species

42

Pietro Corsi, Science and Religion: Baden Powell and the Anglican Debate, 1800– 1860 (Cambridge, 1988), pp. 9–20, 73–79, 106–23. 43 See Gregory P. Elder, Chronic Vigour: Darwin, Anglicans, Catholics, and the Development of a Doctrine of Providential Evolution (Lanham, MD, 1996), pp. 122–27 and Corsi, Science and Religion, pp. 5–8 and 124–224. 44 See Darwin to Charles Lyell, Letter dated “Dec 2d,” Letter 2565, Darwin Correspondence Project, www.darwinproject.ac.uk/darwinletters/calendar/entry-2565 .html, accessed 20 October 2008; Darwin to John Murray, Letter dated “Dec. 2,” Letter 2566, www.darwinproject.ac.uk/darwinletters/calendar/entry-2566.html, accessed 20 October 2008; Darwin to John Lubbock, Letter dated “Dec. 14th,” Letter 2584, www .darwinproject.ac.uk/darwinletters/calendar/entry-2584.html, accessed 20 October 2008. 45 Darwin, The Origin of Species, 1st ed., pp. 481–482 and 3rd ed., p. 516.


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could only sell on the basis that there was a public willing to read this special category of sermon. As historians such as James Secord have shown, controversy and debate about evolution did not begin in 1859 or 1860, soon after the publication of The Origin of Species. The publication of Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation in 1844 with its progressivist ideas about nature and society – both were evolving and needed to evolve as a law of life – provoked comment, usually in opposition, from scientists, literati, and clergymen.46 But even before Vestiges, the work of geologists and paleontologists in particular had raised questions about the traditional interpretations about the origins of life and state of the natural world. The 19th-century debate about the relationship between science and religion, of which the question of evolution was one part, preceded Darwin’s birth, beginning in the late 18th-century after the dissemination of the theories of transformists such as Lamarck. In this context, a series of lectures/sermons given by Nicholas Wiseman (1802–65) during Lent in 1835 is worth noting. Wiseman, who in 1828 became the rector of the English College in Rome, an institution created for the training of English Catholic priests, gave these lectures to a congregation consisting of English visitors to Rome, students at the College, his colleagues at the College, and members of the public interested in the lecture topics; in other words, not a group of academics or specialists. Though his talks functioned as both lecture and sermon they were detailed expositions of the science of the day and covered a wide range of topics – the comparative study of languages, the natural history of the human race, the natural sciences, the history of the earliest civilizations, archeology, and oriental languages.47 Taking into account the arguments made by preachers later in the century, three points made by Wiseman stand out. First, and included on the cover page of the published book so that it could not be missed by later readers, “science should be dedicated to the service of religion”.

46 See James A. Secord, Victorian Sensation: The Extraordinary Publication, Reception and Secret Authorship of Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation (Chicago, 2000), pp. 17–24, 495–98. As Secord notes, part of the excitement with regard to Vestiges was its unnamed author. Only after his death did his friend Alexander Ireland reveal that Robert Chambers (1802–71) was the author. 47 Nicholas Wiseman, Twelve Lectures on the Connexion between Science and Revealed Religion, 2 vols. (London, 1836). French editions were published in 1836, 1841, 1842, and 1856.

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Second, no matter the advances in science, “religion has nothing to fear from the legitimate advance of human learning”.48 Third, however it might seem to Christians who were not experts, there was no contradiction between scientific knowledge and revelation. “It has been the malice of superficial men”, Wiseman noted, “who had not patience or courage to penetrate into the sanctuary of nature, that has suggested objections, from her laws, against truths revealed”. “Had they boldly advanced”, Wiseman argued, “they would have discovered … that the depths which serve to conceal her darkest mysteries, may the soonest be changed into fittest places for profound admiration”.49 This tripartite defensive strategy, used by most of those who preached about evolution, existed more than twenty years before the publication of The Origin of Species. Perhaps even more noteworthy in the context of an examination of the impact of evolutionary theory on the average layperson, Wiseman seemed to reserve his strongest arguments for the lectures on oriental languages; the implications for Christian doctrine of the research being done on languages such as Koinē Greek and Hebrew – lower and higher biblical criticism – were more troubling than the work of transformists, paleontologists, or geologists.50 Unsurprisingly, Wiseman was not the only preacher interested in scientific questions such as evolutionary theory before the publication of The Origin of Species. For example, the context of Charles Kingsley’s positive reaction to Darwin’s book was the preceding years in which Kingsley had thought about the natural world, science, and the future of society. In a sermon entitled “God’s World”, preached on the text Psalm 104:24 in the late 1840s or early 1850s,51 Kingsley noted that “contemporary thinking” was that a psalm glorifying natural history was inappropriate for worship – it was not “spiritual” enough.52 But spirituality was about more than living the Christian life, Kingsley explained to his congregation; in fact, thinking that the study of natural history had no place in the pulpit bordered on materialism. The

48 Wiseman, Twelve Lectures on the Connexion between Science and Revealed Religion, 3rd ed. (London, 1849), p. 1: vii. 49 Wiseman, Twelve Lectures, 1st ed., pp. 1: 261–62. 50 Ibid., Lectures X and XI. 51 The text reads: “O Lord, how manifold are thy works! in wisdom hast thou made them all; the earth is full of thy riches” (Authorized Version). 52 Charles Kingsley, Twenty-Five Village Sermons, 2nd ed. revised (London, 1852), pp. 1–3.


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difference between the Psalmist’s and contemporary society was that “David looked on the earth as God’s earth; we look on it as man’s earth, or nobody’s earth”, Kingsley noted.53 In a theme that he would repeat in later sermons, Kingsley stressed that God is behind all the forces and laws of nature. Scientific study reveals how nature works but God is at the heart of nature. Equally important, nature is not static: it is progressive, evolutionary. God looks after the poor gnats in the winter time, that they may have a chance of coming out of the ground when the day stirs the little life in them, and dance in the sunbeam for a short hour of gay life, before they return to dust whence they were made, to feed creatures nobler and more precious than themselves.54

As the sermons of Wiseman and Kingsley show, even before the publication of The Origin of Species preachers were already commenting on theories of evolution to their congregations. Furthermore, they were also developing a strategy of defense, a system of apologetics, with regard to science which they would employ later when reacting to The Origin of Species and evolutionary theory. Thus, in a sermon preached on 4 May 1851 entitled “The Fount of Science”, Kingsley asked the congregation: “Do we give the glory of our scientific discoveries to God, in any real, honest, and practical sense?” Referring to the Great Exhibition going on at the time, he answered his own question: “Our notion of God’s blessing it, seems to be God’s absence from it; a hope and trust that God will leave it and us alone …”. That kind of materialism was dangerous, and odd, Kingsley argued: What madness is this which has come upon us in these last days, to make us fancy that we insects of a day, have found out these things for ourselves, and talk big about the progress of the species, and the triumphs of the intellect, and the all-conquering powers of the human mind.55

Put another way, Wiseman and Kingsley’s defense was: God ordered and orders nature – how intimately or precisely neither of them was willing to say; scientists study nature and so they are examining phenomena over which God has control; scientific discoveries even if they seem contradictory to revealed religion will prove not to be.

53 54 55

Ibid., pp. 4–5. Ibid., p. 8. Charles Kingsley, Sermons on National Subjects (London, 1890), pp. 111, 115.

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That preachers such as Wiseman and Kingsley began to develop the outlines of a philosophy of science which incorporated evolutionary theory well before the publication of The Origin of Species is a reflection of the era. As historians such as Martin Rudwick have shown, there was a lively debate about the implications of geological phenomena such as fossils for an understanding of the natural history of the world in the late 18th and early 19th centuries.56 Also, without overstating the extent to which they should be considered forerunners of Darwin, the ideas of Lamarck, the French zoologist Étienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire (1772– 1844), German philosophers such as Johann Gottfried von Herder (1744–1803) and Immanuel Kant (1724–1804), and even Cuvier and Owen had already precipitated a debate about evolution.57 In fact, given that he had written a review of Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation in 1845,58 it is possible that Kingsley had this book in mind when he referred to evolutionary theory in his sermons. Interestingly, even before having the opportunity to consider the consequences of Darwin’s theory, Kingsley’s view of evolution was different from Darwin’s. Kingsley was orthodox for the time in the sense that he believed some species were superior to others.59 The simplest, one-celled organisms, for example, were vastly inferior to complex organisms such as mammals. This is the reason why the gnats in Kingsley’s sermon “God’s World” died to provide nourishment for “nobler creatures”. Most important, however, humans were at the apex of all organisms. On the other hand, Darwin avoided judgements about superiority in explanations of his theory. His famous “Tree of Life” diagram in The Origin of Species which Darwin used to illustrate the relationship between species, and how varieties diverged to become new species, has no top or bottom.60 Conversely, the Tree of Life diagram

56 Martin J.S. Rudwick, The Meaning of Fossils: Episodes in the History of Palaeontology, 2nd ed. (Chicago, 1985), pp. 83–217. 57 See Bentley Glass, Owsei Temkin, and William L. Straus, Jr., eds. Forerunners of Darwin: 1745–1859 (Baltimore, MD, 1959), pp. 51–355 and Keith Thomson, Before Darwin: Reconciling God and Nature (New Haven, CT, 2005), pp. 59–196. 58 “Art. V. – 2. Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation. Churchill. 4th Edition,” The Westminster Review 44 (September–December 1845), 195–203 and Browne, Charles Darwin: Voyaging, p. 464. 59 In the 19th century, the philosophy of a chain of being as formulated by Aristotle – one group being to superior to another and every organism having its fixed place in the economy of nature – helped to underpin social constructs such as the relationship between the classes and the status of women in society. 60 Darwin, The Origin of Species, 1st ed., diagram between pp. 116 and 117.


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drawn by one of Darwin’s most vocal defenders, the German scientist and philosopher Ernst Haeckel (1834–1919), had amoeba near the bottom and man at the top.61 There is no record of the reaction of the congregation to Kingsley’s and Wiseman’s sermons but it could not have been overwhelmingly negative. Both of the published volumes went through several editions.62 Wiseman became a cardinal and the first archbishop of Westminster in 1850; Kingsley, although he did not receive a clerical preferment as impressive as Wiseman’s, was appointed chaplain to the Queen in 1859 and a canon of Westminster in 1873. Of the two men, however, it was Kingsley who returned at regular intervals in his life to the question of the consequences of evolutionary theory and the relationship between the revelation of the Bible and science. On 26 November 1866, Kingsley preached a sermon entitled “The Meteor Shower” at the Chapel Royal, St James’ Palace. It was three years after the publication of The Water Babies, Kingsley’s novel dealing with evolution, education, industrialization and social progress, and eleven years after the publication of Glaucus: or the Wonders of the Shore, a book on marine biology: the royal audience could not be surprised that Kingsley talked about science in his address. Although Kingsley spent most of the sermon discussing the relationship between providence and science, he made two points that were references to evolutionary theory. First, he noted that people talk about Nature – the word is capitalized in the text of the sermon – as though it has an organic unity. This was a key component of Darwin’s theory of evolution but Kingsley disagreed with it. He suggested that study of nature without the assumption that God was directing or interfering in it was “an extinct science”.63 Second, he pointed out that science, particularly evolutionary theory, freed contemporary humans from the excessive fear experienced by their predecessors which was engendered by the supposed capriciousness of Nature. (Perhaps a little tongue-in-cheek, Kingsley acknowledged that to be crushed “by brute necessity, not by ill-will, but by inevitable law” might be equally terror-inducing.64) Thus it was important to recognize that God’s care of and interference in nature was part 61

Ernst Haeckel, The Evolution of Man: A Popular Scientific Study, 5th ed., trans. Joseph McCabe (New York, 1910), diagram between pp. 2: 418 and 419. 62 Editions of Kingsley’s Twenty-Five Village Sermons were published in 1849, 1852, 1854, and 1862. 63 Kingsley, The Water of Life, pp. 247, 255. 64 Ibid., pp. 247–48.

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of a greater law, “one perpetual and innumerable series of special providences”.65 Clearly Charles Kingsley was able to incorporate Darwin’s evolutionary theory into his theology. Ultimately, Darwin’s theory of evolution was different from Kingsley’s: nature’s laws did not require the direction of God in Darwin’s cosmogony. (Of course, Darwin had confused matters by using the word Creator, with a capital C, eight times in The Origin of Species.66) Earlier in 1866, Kingsley had drawn attention to this difference. In a sermon entitled “Prayer and Science”, Kingsley noted: These are days in which there is much dispute about religion and science–how far they agree with each other; whether they contradict or interfere with each other. Especially there is dispute about Providence. Men say, and truly, that the more we look into the world, the more we find everything governed by fixed and regular laws; that man is bound to find out those laws, and save himself from danger by science and experience.67

The congregation, members of the Corporation of Trinity House, a charitable organization founded by sailors in 1514, in part, to support the investigation of ways to make sea travel safer, was interested in science or, more accurately, the application of science to technology. “I cannot see why we should not allow” the existence of fixed laws and providence, Kingsley told the congregation.68 The use of science (or technology) and reliance on God are complementary; science and religion are “twin sisters meant to aid each other and mankind in the battle with the brute forces of this universe”.69 Gregory Elder has described Kingsley’s approach as a providential theory of evolution.70 This is an accurate characterization. In his preaching, lecturing, and writing, Kingsley seemed determined to build a bridge between evolutionary theory and Christianity. Evolution is an example of the laws of nature at work; God’s intervention in the world demonstrates that Christianity works. Apart from other sermons and the famous example of his novel The Water Babies, Kingsley explicated 65

Ibid., p. 251. Barrett, Weinshank, and Gottleber, A Concordance to Darwin’s Origin of Species, p. 166. 67 Charles Kingsley, Discipline, and Other Sermons (London, 1868), p. 23. 68 Ibid., pp. 24–25. 69 Ibid., p. 37. 70 Elder, Chronic Vigour, pp. 1–8, 121–142. 66


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this theme in detail in two lectures given in 1871: the first was a paper on natural theology read to a group of clergymen meeting at Sion College; the second was entitled “The Study of Natural History” and the audience was a group of soldiers at the Royal Artillery Institution in Woolwich.71 In Kingsley’s thinking, if it – evolution or Christianity – improved society then it must be good (and have originated from God). While Charles Darwin appreciated the fact that he had the support of a well-known clergyman, there is a sense in which Kingsley had not advanced much beyond the natural theology of some of his colleagues not known for their comments on evolution.72 Charles Spurgeon, for example, also in 1871, told his Metropolitan Tabernacle congregation that “there is no quarrel between nature and revelation, fools only think so; to wise men the one illustrates and establishes the other”. Nature was the first book of the revelation of the divine mind, according to Spurgeon, and the Bible the second.73 Arthur Winnington-Ingram (1858–1946), head of the Oxford House, Bethnal Green and a future bishop of London (1901–39), put the idea more poetically in a sermon to a group of teenagers and adolescents: Every law of nature, we are told by science, needs a continual application of force, and we can understand that, for when we whirl a stone round at the end of a string, we are bound to keep our hand moving or the stone falls; so as the little earth speeds on its way, as the great suns flash along without colliding, they sing psalms to the marvelous power of God.74

In fact, many other clergymen shared Kingsley’s view. Samuel Wilberforce, the object of Thomas Huxley’s opprobrium for his opposition to Darwin’s theory of evolution, was among this group. “Between true Science and the Christian Revelation there can be no conflict”, he argued during a charge to the Oxford clergy in 1869. “The Queen of sciences must be at one with her imperial sisters, even though the too 71 See “The God of Nature” in The Water of Life, pp. 317–28; Charles Kingsley, Westminster Sermons (London, 1874), pp. v–xxxii; and Charles Kingsley, The Study of Natural History (Woolwich, 1874). 72 The same could be said of Wiseman but, as his discourses were given after the French transformists had failed to convince their fellows in the Academy of Science of the validity of evolution and before the publication of The Origin of Species, his approach is understandable. 73 Charles H. Spurgeon, “Lessons from Nature” in The Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit. Sermons Preached and Revised by C. H. Spurgeon, during the Year 1871 (London, 1872), p. 446. 74 A.F. Winnington-Ingram, Addresses to Working Lads (London, 1901), p. 35.

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eager and perhaps half-instructed followers of each may indulge in passionate brawls and unseemly contentions”.75 Given the popularity of natural theology in the first half of the 19th century, and its enduring attraction in the latter half of the century, the statements of Kingsley, Spurgeon, Winnington-Ingram, and Wilberforce are not a surprise. What is interesting about Wilberforce’s comment is its context. It appeared in a charge given nine years after the nowinfamous meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science [BAAS] in Oxford, during which Wilberforce had publicly criticized the ideas in The Origin of Species. But the supposed conflict between religion and science or creation and evolution was not the object of Wilberforce’s concern. “Faith amongst us has already endured a far ruder shock from perversions to Rome, than from those scientific discoveries which are by some supposed mainly to endanger its continuance”, Wilberforce noted; the “real and great danger” was “the corruptions, the untruthfulness, and the superstitions of the Papacy”.76 The conversions of friends and his brothers Henry and Robert to Roman Catholicism was one reason why Wilberforce focused on that particular “danger” but, with regard to sermons on The Origin of Species, the fact that Wilberforce was much less concerned about new theories in science than other matters is significant. Wilberforce, Kingsley, and their clerical colleagues could say what they said partly because 19thcentury science, and even evolutionary theory, was not as troublesome to them – or for their congregations – as other matters. Equally important, if the challenges posed by Darwin’s evolutionary theory were not a pressing problem then there was no need to preach sermons about these challenges on a regular or frequent basis. If “God reveals Himself in nature” or “nature’s revelation of God does not differ from revealed revelation” was one reaction of 19thcentury clergymen to evolutionary theory, another was disagreement or opposition. Like seeing Darwin’s theory as part of natural theology, disagreement or opposition was to be expected. Thomas Huxley, John William Draper, and Andrew Dickson White did not invent a controversy: their perceptions were based on actual events. For some preachers, Darwin was wrong: it is why they believed evolutionary theory was incorrect and how they chose to express this which sheds light on the fierceness of the controversy. 75 Wilberforce, A Charge Delivered to the Diocese of Oxford, at His Eighth Visitation, pp. 33–34. 76 Ibid., pp. 33, 34.


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At some time in 1860 or 1861, Christopher Benson (1788–1868), a canon of Worcester, preached a sermon entitled “The First and Second Verses of the Book of Genesis Examined”. The sermon is noteworthy for several reasons: first, because it was preached within a year or two of the publication of The Origin of Species, and second, because Benson seemed more exercised by the ideas of geologists such as Charles Lyell (1797–1875) rather than naturalists of Darwin’s ilk. Focusing on the theory of uniformitarianism made famous by Lyell in his Principles of Geology (1830–33), Benson argued: By these [“Let there be light” and similar phrases in Genesis 1], and by similar modes of expression, does the sacred historian represent the origination of things; thus shewing that it was the result of a divine and special command – not the gradual operation of any settled laws and imparted powers regulating the productive agency of matter – by which the time and order of their appearance was determined.77

Most of the sermon followed the same line of argument. Creation occurred “through the declaration of the divine will carried into effect by the divine power” and the book of Genesis “contains a full and regular narrative of the mode and order in which each part of this world’s creation was effected”.78 Despite his sterling defense of the creative power of God and the veracity of the Genesis account, Benson’s sermon was not simply a rejection of the science of Lyell or Darwin. In the conclusion of the sermon he stated that “the geologist need have no dread of interfering with the declarations of Holy Writ, whilst pursuing his investigations into our globe’s original structure and successive modifications”.79 And this statement was the beginning of more than a minor concession to modern science. Darwin had argued that his theory could not exist without the time-scale and uniformitarian principles explicated by Lyell.80 Benson conceded to both: Scripture neither tells us how long [the Earth’s] crust had existed in the state in which it was found just before the six days’ creation, nor does it reveal to us the times when, or the modes by which it was brought into that state. Geological conjectures and theories may therefore be safely indulged in … whether as to the nature of the revolutions through which

77

Christopher Benson, The First and Second Verses of the Book of Genesis Examined (London, 1861), pp. 34–35. 78 Ibid., pp. 36, 5. 79 Ibid., p. 38. 80 Darwin, The Origin of Species, 1st ed., p. 282.

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keith a. francis our planet has passed, or as to the time, the millions or hundreds of millions of years which those revolutions may have required. For the duration that preceded the period assigned to the creation of the present heavens and earth must have been that of the Eternal.81

It would be interesting to know the reaction of the congregation to Benson’s distinction between the days of creation and the formation of the planet. A cathedral congregation might be more familiar with the newest scientific theories than Charles Kingsley’s country parish of Eversley in Hampshire, for example. Knowledgeable or not, the fact is that Benson made the distinction. Further, Benson’s approach is typical of sermons preached in opposition to The Origin of Species; Darwin was wrong but much of modern science was not. The “false” science had to be separated out from the “true” science.82 Following the modern scientific method as they understood it, some preachers argued that the falsehood of Darwin’s theory was a matter of logic. At some time in 1865 or 1866, Daniel Gilbert (d. 1897), a Catholic priest, gave a series of five discourses on the relationship between miracles and science in the Pro-Cathedral of St Mary’s, Moorfields, London. While admitting that the sermons were not for the scientific or highly educated, at the beginning of each discourse Gilbert stressed that he intended to make an argument rather than rely on Christian tradition or statements of faith.83 Thus, in a point which was the foundation of all the others made in the discourses, Gilbert took a position directly opposite to that of Darwin’s but claimed it was equally tenable for a Christian. “It must be distinctly understood”, he argued, that though the laws of nature are immutable in the sense that they will remain in force till the end of the world, they are not so absolutely, but they are in God’s power, and he can overrule them or act contrarily to them whenever He pleases. That he has done so, Geology, History, and the Bible incontestably prove.84

81

Benson, The First and Second Verses of the Book of Genesis Examined, pp. 38–39. See, for example, C. Gooch, The Record of Creation, Considered in an Examination of Mr. Goodwin’s Essay on Mosaic Cosmogony (Cambridge, Eng., 1862) and Charles Pritchard, “The Continuity of the Schemes of Nature and Revelation” in Occasional Thoughts of an Astronomer on Nature & Revelation (London, 1889), pp. 16–36. 83 D. Gilbert, Five Discourses on Miracles, Prayer, and the Laws of Nature (London, 1866), p. 2. 84 Ibid., p. 2. See also p. 13 [Discourse II]. 82


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Furthermore, as Gilbert noted in his first discourse, the notion that nature’s laws could never be altered, thus ruling out miracles, had farreaching implications for Christianity: For if there has never been a miracle, if there has never been any interposition in the laws of nature, if prayer has no effect where the laws of nature are concerned, then it follows infallibly that there is no Revelation, no Bible, no Redemption, and no Saviour; for if Revelation and the birth and the resurrection of our Saviour be not real miracle, Christianity is a bubble that has deceived us, a fable that has cheated us.85

There could be no spontaneous generation, à la Lamarck, or development of species, à la Darwin, because asserting these two “facts” makes miracles and the efficacy of prayer “more certain” and the “experience of every age” was that miracles occur and prayer works.86 Gilbert did not rely on the argument from necessity which might have struck some in the congregation as not particularly logical. In his first discourse he drew attention to the number of scientists who disagreed with Darwin by quoting a list that Darwin himself provided in The Origin of Species.87 In his second discourse he used a theory of change to argue against Darwin’s theory of modification by immutable laws: “If there is one truth in science, it is that constant modification in natural causes have been and always are taking place, and these modifications of natural causes are sufficient to account for many of the difficulties against miracles and the efficacy of prayer”.88 It is likely that Gilbert’s discourses were an apology for the Catholic view of miracles, particularly with regard to beatification and canonization of saints – Discourse V was a plea for “English fair play” in viewing the actions of the Congregation of Rites89 – and his comments focused on what made sense to a thinking person. He applied the same standard to Darwin’s work: Would you not maintain that such a belief was a greater tax on the intellect or reason, and a greater marvel, than the collection of all the miracles that have ever been recorded? Yet this is the theory which Darwin and his followers offer to supply the place of the miraculous creation of the

85

Ibid., p. 4. Ibid., p. 7. 87 See The Origin of Species, 1st ed., pp. 328, 336; 2nd ed., p. 329; 3rd ed., p. 366, and Gilbert, Five Discourses, p. 8. 88 Gilbert, Five Discourses, pp. 13–14. 89 See ibid., pp. 43–51. 86

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keith a. francis different species of plants and animals by God … Balance the theories of Darwin … against the old, antiquated theories of miraculous creation and revelation, and you will own that the latter are far more in accordance with reason, intellect, and logic.90

Charles Pritchard (1808–93), an ordained priest and future Savilian Professor of Astronomy at Oxford University (1870–93), and Henry P. Liddon (1829–90), chaplain to the Bishop of Salisbury, a future canon of St Paul’s and one of the best-known preachers of the late 19th century, extended Gilbert’s argument further. For Pritchard, Darwin’s theory seemed promising but Darwin did not solve the problem he raised. In a note added to his sermon “The Continuity of the Schemes of Nature and Revelation”, which he preached at the BAAS meeting in Nottingham in 1866, Pritchard commented: On reading Mr. Darwin’s enchanting volume, we seem to be, as it were, in the hands of a great magician, who leads us up and down Elysian fields, pointing out to us on this side and on that new aspects of things which, though true, were beyond the reach of our expectations; nevertheless, when, as we hope, we are nearing the hill-top and getting a sight of the primordial genesis of organised beings, the chariot on which he has mounted us rolls down the hill like the stone of Sisyphus.91

For Liddon, Darwin’s theory, if true, would undermine the bonds that hold human society together. If humans are simply a higher form of animal, “a cultured brute”, then there is no need for any person to obey laws, act altruistically or selflessly, or act morally.92 Whether it was Darwin’s inability or unwillingness to explain the beginning of organic life or Darwin’s placing of humans in too close a relationship to other living beings, for some clergymen Darwin’s assertions could not be substantiated by the evidence given to support them.93 In 1874 Pritchard preached a sermon entitled “Modern Science and Natural Religion”, first at the Church Congress meeting in Brighton

90

Ibid., p. 11 [Discourse I]. Pritchard, “The Continuity of the Schemes of Nature and Revelation,” p. 43. 92 H.P. Liddon, The Honour of Humanity: A Sermon, Preached Before the University, in the Church of St. Mary the Virgin, Oxford, on the First Sunday in Lent, 1868 (London, 1868), pp. 8–9, 20–21. 93 Both Pritchard and Liddon ignored the fact that Darwin did not intend to discuss the origin of life or the origins of morality in The Origin of Species. Darwin addressed both questions in later works. His best-known answer to the criticisms of Pritchard and Liddon is in The Descent of Man, and Selection with Relation to Sex, 2 vols. (London, 1871), pp. 1: 9–213. 91


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and then at the BAAS meeting in Belfast. On both occasions the knowledge and sophistication of the congregations warranted, in Pritchard’s thinking, a detailed analysis of Darwin’s theory of evolution. While he disagrees with Darwin there is also the outline of another kind of reaction to the theory of descent by modification through natural selection: invoking an intelligent God as the prime cause or mover of the changes in nature. At the beginning of the sermon Pritchard addressed the question of the mode of creation. He argued that the “how” of creation did not matter. Quoting Joseph Butler (1692–1752),94 he stated that “an intelligent Author of Nature being supposed, it makes no alteration in the matter before us whether He acts in Nature every moment, or at once contrived and executed his own part in the plan of the world”.95 As a caveat Pritchard added that modern scientists could do much and so creation by evolution might be provable in a laboratory but chemists thus far had been unable to produce living matter from “lifeless molecules”.96 In the next part of the sermon Pritchard commented on theory of evolution based on his scientific specializations, astronomy, geometry, and photography. The eye was too complicated an instrument to be produced through “any amount of evolution”: too much needed to occur correctly. Pritchard declared, There are too many curved surfaces, too many distances, too many densities of the media, each essential to the other, too great a facility of ruin by slight disarrangement, to admit of anything short of the intervention of an intelligent Will at some stage of the evolutionary process.97

Turning to the science of chemistry, Pritchard noted that James Clerk Maxwell (1831–79) had argued that no theory of evolution can be formed to account for the similarity of molecules throughout all time, and throughout the whole region of the stellar universe, for 94 Butler was the bishop of Bristol (1738–50) and Durham (1750–52). The author of The Analogy of Religion, Natural and Revealed, to the Constitution and Course of Nature (1736), Butler is best known as a moral theologian and philosopher. 95 Pritchard, “The Continuity of the Schemes of Nature and Revelation,” p. 124. The italics are Pritchard’s. 96 Ibid., p. 125. 97 Ibid., p. 125. Pritchard made a similar point in notes for the sermon “The Continuity of the Schemes of Nature and Revelation” preached in 1866 and the preface to a sermon preached in 1867 entitled “The Analogy of Intellectual Progress to Religious Growth”. See Pritchard, “The Continuity of the Schemes of Nature and Revelation,” pp. 39–40 and 41.

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keith a. francis evolution necessarily implies continuous change, and the molecule is incapable of growth or decay, of generation or destruction.98

Pritchard admitted that Maxwell could be wrong and that two great scientists could come to opposite conclusions based on the same evidence but he insisted that a major weakness of evolutionary theory was the inability of its proponents to explain the origin of original matter.99 Pritchard was drawing attention to an important criticism of Darwin’s theory by his fellow scientists: making the origin of species subject to natural law was useless unless the same could be done for the origin of life and the origin of matter. As Archibald Campbell Tait (1811–82), the Archbishop of Canterbury, put it in a charge delivered in September 1880: On the hard ground of strictest logical argumentation, we challenge these men [agnostics and atheists] to give any intelligible account of how this bright world and all that lives in it came into existence without the action of a great first cause, that is, God. Do you say it was evolved in the lapse of countless ages? I ask you, as you have been asked a hundred times before, evolved from what, and how? If human life be the refined product of a thousand evolutions from the original protoplasm, how was the protoplasm endowed with this power of an almost endless fecundity? You gain nothing by driving your hypothesis back through the dark mists of an unknown antiquity – at last you must come to something which could not generate itself and endow itself with marvellous powers.

Ronald Numbers has noted that within fifteen or twenty years of the publication of The Origin of Species “scientific defenders of special creation could scarcely be found on the North American continent”.100 That may well be true but, in the case of Britain, it is also true that there were a number of prominent scientists, some clergy and some not, who were not willing to defend Darwin’s theory of evolution either. Pritchard was a scientist preaching to scientists. James Clerk Maxwell, whom Pritchard quoted, was (and is) one of the major British scientists of the 19th century. Perhaps even better known than Pritchard and Maxwell, both as a scientist and for his criticisms of Darwin’s theory, was William Thomson 98

Pritchard, “The Continuity of the Schemes of Nature and Revelation,” p. 129. Ibid., pp. 130, 133–35. See also David L. Hull, compiler, Darwin and His Critics: The Reception of Darwin’s Theory of Evolution by the Scientific Community (Cambridge, MA, 1973), pp. 3–77. 100 Ronald L. Numbers, Antievolutionism Before World War I (Creationism in Twentieth-Century America) 1 (New York, 1995), p. ix. 99


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(1824–1907), the physicist and engineer; Thomson argued that the laws of thermodynamics meant that the Earth was as little as twenty million years old, too little time for the development of species as suggested by Darwin.101 Certainly Thomas Huxley’s note of triumph on the reception of The Origin of Species mentioned in the introduction to this chapter must be tempered by the criticisms of these scientists. More important with regard to sermons is that some of the opponents of Darwin’s theory were developing an alternative to evolution by natural selection: whatever the process which resulted in life or new species, it required an intelligent designer. The designer argument had a long history. William Paley was its doyen in the 19th century, as was Thomas Aquinas in the medieval period. William Thomson (1819–90), the Archbishop of York, and a mathematician and philosopher in his own right, put it simply in a sermon preached at the BAAS meeting in Sheffield in 1879: “There is a God. We see no reason for attributing to accidental variations great changes which have affected the world. Wisdom guided them, not hazard; purpose was in them, not accidental variation”.102 In a sermon preached three years earlier for the Christian Evidence Society – a group founded in 1870 to promote Christian apologetics – Thomson was more expansive: The world is full of facts which, in the case of any human works of like kind, would be conclusive evidence of an intelligent maker: and therefore the mind hastens to the conclusion that intelligence is at work here. Such marks of design are very numerous; they extend over long times; they are found equally in the most vast and in the minutest phenomena. For the fulfilment of these apparent purposes the wills of men and the facts of nature are bent and overruled in a wonderful degree. If it could be shown that there is no being in existence to whom this work of wise design could be attributed, then we might be bound to mistrust our own inferences, and to seek some other hypothesis than that of an intelligent Creator. As this cannot be shown, and as no one denies that it is possible that God

101 See William Thomson, “On the Age of the Sun’s Heat,” Macmillan’s Magazine 5 (March 1862), 388–93 and Thomson, “On the Secular Cooling of the Earth,” Transactions of the Royal Society of Edinburgh 23, Part I (1862), 157–69. Even Charles Kingsley, though he could not claim to be a major scientist, was an above-average amateur. Kingsley’s Scientific Lectures and Essays was published in 1880, five years after his death. 102 William Thomson, A Sermon Preached before the Members of the Association in the Parish Church, Sheffield, on Sunday August 24th, 1879 by William, Lord Archbishop of York, F.R.S., F.R.G.S. (Sheffield, 1879), p. 7.

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keith a. francis exists, then the attraction in our minds between the idea of God and the intelligence that presides in creation is so powerful, that we shall not hesitate to attribute the creation to God …103

While it is unfair to Darwin to state that he argued for “accidental variations” – what he actually said was that the laws of variation are unknown104 – or that he ruled out a designer, Pritchard, Thomson and others, believing that Darwin had done both, proposed their own theory of origins. Even though Pritchard and others had not rejected evolutionary theory outright, their sermons on Darwin or The Origin of Species were rationalizations. Theories of evolution were, in a sense, oppositional to Christianity and needed to be incorporated into a Christian framework and turned into something good (somewhat like an oyster and sand). The same could be said of the sermons of Huxley and others; making evolutionary theory part of natural theology was a rationalization too. In fact, of the sermons mentioned thus far, none of the preachers adopted a single position – evolution as natural theology, opposition to evolution, or evolution with God as its first cause or director – and maintained it throughout their careers. More interesting, elements of all three positions are in some sermons. A sermon preached by Robert Rainy (1826–1906), a United Free Church of Scotland minister, in 1875 at the death of the Reverend William Arnot, one of his fellowministers, is a good example of this “inconsistency”. Taking his cue from evolutionary theory he said: No doubt it is fallen man of whom this is said; he withers and fails, as he is, and because he is, fallen. Nevertheless to avoid embarrassment, it may be as well to admit that this world of ours seems to be ordered as a scene of mutability, and that man’s state was always … harmonised, on some principle, to that condition of the world he lived in.105

Later in the sermon Rainy took a less Darwinian line: “So the plant reaches its glory in the flower – a miracle of design, exquisite in the perfect grace with which it crowns the life from which it springs, but

103 Archbishop of York, “God a Personal Being, not an Impersonal Force,” in Some Modern Religious Difficulties. Six Sermons, Preached by the Request of the Christian Evidence Society, at St. James’s Church, Piccadilly, on Sunday Afternoons, after Easter, 1876 (London, 1876), pp. 8–9. 104 See Darwin, The Origin of Species, pp. 12–14, 466–68. 105 Robert Rainy, “Mutability and Endurance,” in Sojourning with God and Other Sermons (London, 1902), p. 268.


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short-lived and fading”.106 And further on Rainy seems to take an antiDarwinian position: The believers of old were no materialists. It was not that they failed to realise in their own way, amid all the decay and change of which the world is full, principles of persistency, aspects of the world that impressed the mind with the sense of ancient and unchanging order, of mere duration. Yet they found the true root of all in God. He was from everlasting to everlasting. From Him came the being of this material world. By the Word of the Lord and the breath of His mouth, it was made.107

To find out which was the “real” Rainy might be as difficult a task as deciphering whether the Darwin of The Origin of Species in 1859 was more or less “real” than the Darwin of The Origin of Species in 1872. What exactly evolutionary theory was and how it fit with the knowledge of the day was a problem which others, apart from Rainy, found difficult to deal with consistently. There were, however, preachers who approached the question of evolution completely differently. They accepted Darwin’s theory of evolution – although, unsurprisingly, not in every detail – and incorporated their Christian doctrine into the theory rather than vice versa. Foremost among these clergymen in terms of reputation was Aubrey Moore (1848–90) who, at the time of his death, was an honorary canon of Christ Church and dean of divinity at Magdalen College, Oxford. His book Science and the Faith (1889) was an attempt to work out the implications of both “systems” for each other. Evolution was “a real step onwards in the search for truth”, according to Moore and he wanted “to help disentangle evolution both from the materialism which has been too often identified with it, and from the agnosticism of some of its best known champions”.108 In an undated sermon preached at the Chapel Royal, Whitehall, Moore explained what he perceived to be the task for Christians with regard to evolution: A new truth is launched upon the world. We are sure it is established, but it takes perhaps years for that new truth to be realised, to work itself out into all departments of human knowledge. No truth stands alone; it must have real relations with all other truths, and must so far change our views

106

Ibid., pp. 271–72. Ibid., pp. 273–74. 108 Aubrey L. Moore, Science and the Faith. Essays on Apologetic Subjects. With an Introduction (London, 1889), p. xiv. 107

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keith a. francis of them. And this takes time. Think what a change is implied in the acceptance of the Copernican in place of the older astronomy, how the astronomers had to recast their science, how those students of nature who were not astronomers slowly realised the fact that they too had a direct, and not as it seemed at first an indirect, interest in the discovery. Or take such a doctrine as that of Evolution, and see how slowly even those who have accepted it have realised its bearings on our whole view of nature, and then see how the same theory – or, if you will, the same impulse which showed itself in that theory – is gradually affecting politics and theology and morals. We have not “realised” all that Evolution means, even though we may have accepted it as true.109

George J. Romanes (1848–94), a biologist and friend of Darwin’s, described Moore as “the best case that could be pointed to of the possible co-existence in the same mind of an unshaken Christian faith with all the highest elaborations of secular thought”.110 Unfortunately, Moore’s death at a relatively young age is one reason why there are few of his sermons published. A series of Moore’s reviews of scientific works such Alfred Russel Wallace’s Darwinism (1889) and Romanes’ Mental Evolution in Man (1889) were published posthumously in Essays Scientific and Philosophical (1890). In one essay Moore wrote: A real science of man must some day face the fact, which is now persistently put on one side, that in this matter man is a great exception in the order of nature. While every other living thing is striving for its own good, man alone is found choosing what he knows to be for his hurt. No theory of evolution is complete, then, which ignores the fact of the sin of man.111

Moore had anticipated the work of evolutionary biologists on the origins of morality and altruism. With the “loss” of Moore’s sermons, perhaps the works of George Henslow, given his background, are equally illuminating. The son of John Stevens Henslow, one of the Cambridge professors responsible for Darwin’s choice of science as a career, George Henslow, like his father, was an Anglican clergyman and a scientist. Henslow was a fellow of the Linnean Society, like Darwin, a lecturer in botany at St Bartholomew’s Hospital, and the author of several children’s books,

109

Aubrey L. Moore, “The Duty of Realising Religious Truth,” in From Advent to Advent: Sermons Preached at the Chapel Royal, Whitehall (London, 1892), pp. 40–41. 110 G.J. Romanes, “Memoir,” in Aubrey L. Moore, Essays Scientific and Philosophical (London, 1890), p. xxxix. 111 Moore, Essays Scientific and Philosophical, pp. 64–65.


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textbooks, and monographs on botany.112 Although Henslow also wrote several books on the implication of evolutionary theory for Christianity and vice versa – The Theory of Evolution of Living Things and Application of the Principles of Evolution to Religion Considered as Illustrative of the “Wisdom and Beneficence of the Almighty” (1873), Present-day Rationalism, Critically Examined (1904), and The Spiritual Teaching of Christ’s Life (1906) are good examples – there is only one published sermon of his on the subject, preached on 5 November 1871. The title of the sermon was “Genesis and Geology. A Plea for the Doctrine of Evolution”. Though a botanist, Henslow, like fellow clergymen such as Christopher Benson, perceived the challenge of evolution to Christianity to be in two other areas: the veracity of the Mosaic record of creation and the history found in the Pentateuch; and the geological questions about the age and formation of the Earth.113 He chose as his texts Genesis 1:1, “In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth”, and Job 12:8, “Speak to the earth, and it shall teach thee: and the fishes of the sea shall declare unto thee”. Acknowledging that there was a history of “enmity” between science and religion, Henslow based his sermon on the premise that it was an “absolute impossibility” for the Bible and the “works of God” to disagree.114 He made three major points in the sermon. First, “Biblical phraseology is popular but quite unscientific”.115 And so, for example, in the Genesis story God creates but he also orders the earth and the waters to create. In Henslow’s thinking, the geological evidence that the Earth was not created in six literal days was only problematic if a person believes in special creation; the imprecise language of the Bible could support God doing the creating over some period of time or 112 See, for example, Botany for Children. An Illustrated Elementary Text-book for Junior Classes and Young Children (London, 1880); The Origin of Floral Structures through Insects and other Agencies (London, 1888); The Origin of Plant Structures by SelfAdaptation to the Environment (London, 1895); A Little Botany for Little People and the Making of Hills and Valleys (London, 1900); The Story of Wild Flowers (London, 1901). 113 See also J.L. Porter, The Pentateuch and the Gospels; A Statement of Our Lord’s Testimony to Mosaic Authorship, Historic Truth, and Divine Authority of the Pentateuch (London, 1864) and W.C. Magee, The Christian Theory of the Origin of the Christian Life. A Sermon Preached in Norwich Cathedral, on Sunday Morning, August 23, 1868, on the Occasion of the Meeting of the British Association (London, 1868). 114 George Henslow, Genesis and Geology. A Plea for the Doctrine of Evolution: being a Sermon Preached November 5th, 1871 at St. John’s Marylebone (London, 1871), pp. 3–5. 115 Ibid., pp. 18–19.

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a doctrine of evolution.116 Second, the evolution of humans needed “some special interference of the Deity” because, despite the morphological similarities, the intellectual and moral powers of humans was superior to animals. The evolution of the human body seemed to fit natural law but the same could not be said of human capacities (such as creating a religion).117 Last, reiterating his opening premise, the truth of science is the same as the truth of God. “You may rest assured”, Henslow told the congregation, that whatever exposition passes out of [science’s] first and necessary stages of hypothesis and theory, and stands the test of verification, will become dignified by the term of Doctrine, and will then be found to be in perfect harmony with the Word of God.118

What is intriguing about this sermon is what Henslow does not mention. Although it is clear from the context that Henslow has both The Origin of Species and The Descent of Man in mind – and the congregation in a city church such as St John’s, Marylebone would be knowledgeable enough to recognize this – at no time did Henslow name Darwin or his books. The sermon was a sterling defense of the theory of evolution – sans its best-known proponent. One reason for the aforementioned omission is Henslow himself. By about 1871, and certainly before 1873, Henslow began to think that Darwin’s theory of evolution was incorrect. Darwin’s evolution by natural selection seemed to rule out, as in the first edition of The Origin of Species, or assign a minor role to, as in the sixth edition of The Origin of Species, environmental conditions: Henslow thought both positions were wrong. As he put it in 1888: “I have attempted in the present work to return to 1795, and to revive the ‘Monde ambiant’ of Geoffroy Saint Hilaire, as the primal cause of change”.119 Thus it is that one of the few sermons which affirms positively the evolutionary idea of the origin of species does not defend The Origin of Species. There is a similar “silence” in the sermons of John Page Hopps (1834–1911). Hopps, a Unitarian and Free Church minister whose 116

Ibid., pp. 8–9, 9–11, 14, 19. Ibid., pp. 20–21. Alfred Russel Wallace had argued the same in books such as Action of Natural Selection on Man (1871) and Man’s Place in the Universe: A Study of the Results of Scientific Research in Relation to the Unity or Plurality of Worlds (1903). 118 Ibid., p. 22. See also pp. 19–20. 119 Henslow, The Origin of Floral Structures, p. xi. Étienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire (1772–1844), French anatomist and zoologist who proposed a theory of evolution. 117


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varied career as a populist preacher, writer, poet, and social and political activist – he supported anti-vivisection and in 1886 ran against Lord Randolph Churchill in a parliamentary election – made him a larger-than-life figure, became convinced of the validity of the theory of evolution by 1880. The date 1880 is appropriate because Hopps preached a sermon entitled “The Spirit’s Longing for a Living God” some time before 1864 in which he denigrated the scientific achievements of the era – it was better to be a Norse pagan than to reduce the eternal to a “catalogue of scientific terms”120 – but in his book A Scientific Basis of Belief in a Future Life published in 1880 he stated that “the very Science which seems to be destroying is destined to be the glorious upbuilder of our faith”.121 His acceptance of evolution coincided with his interest in spiritualism and his belief that God was a spirit rather than corporeal;122 in other words, Hopps was probably more convinced by the theory of evolution itself than by Darwin’s specific ideas about it. In Hopps’ two published sermons on evolution, Darwin and The Origin of Species are not mentioned at any time although Hopps makes reference to Darwin’s, and others’, ideas about evolution. In a sermon preached in 1889 entitled “The Relation of the Doctrine of Evolution to Theology and Religion”, Hopps remarked that “stripped of all that is not absolutely necessary to a definition, [evolution] is simply the doctrine of the development of life from lower to higher forms of being”.123 Although Darwin discussed lower and higher forms of animals in The Descent of Man, he had studiously avoided the idea of evolution as progress in The Origin of Species: if he had a choice, Darwin would have preferred that Hopps did the same. Conversely, when Hopps stated that evolution is scientific because it fits the laws that we humans see and that “sudden creation” was unscientific because it was “altogether removed from experience”, Darwin would have concurred.124 120

John Page Hopps, Sermons for the Times (London, 1864), p. 102. John Page Hopps, A Scientific Basis of Belief in a Future Life: or, the Witness Borne by Modern Science to the Reality and Pre-Eminence of the Unseen Universe (London, 1880), p. 6. 122 A coincidence: George Henslow became more and more interested in spiritualism towards the end of his life. See The Proofs of the Truths of Spiritualism (London, 1919) and The Religion of the Spirit World, Written by the Spirits Themselves (London, 1920). 123 John Page Hopps, Sermons for Our Day: The Relation of the Doctrine of Evolution to Theology and Religion (London, 1889), n.p. The italics are Hopps’. 124 Ibid., n.p. 121

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Like Daniel Gilbert, and in a reference to the BAAS meeting in Oxford in 1860, Hopps made his congregation aware of the implications of evolutionary theory: The theologians, who once hissed, howled, and raved at the British Association, knew what they were about. They knew well enough that if science explodes the Biblical story of the creation and fall of man, the foundation upon which the whole structure of orthodoxy has been raised will disappear, together with the edifice built upon it. If the story concerning Adam and Eve and the Garden of Eden is not true, what becomes of the Atonement? What becomes of Election? What becomes of Eternal Damnation? What becomes of the deity of Jesus? What becomes of the infallible Bible?125

Unlike Daniel Gilbert, Hopps did not think the aforementioned questions represented insurmountable problems. The difficulty, according to Hopps, was that “the world at present is so much in bondage to the absurdly limited chronology of the Old Testament”.126 All that needed to happen was for theologians and Christians to reverse their understanding of history; the theory of evolution forces Christians to view the history of humankind as progress: Here, then, the great doctrine of development finds its sweet and fruitful blossoming. It teaches us that we are all on the march, and that we are journeying, not from the golden age but to it; that our great Creator has not failed in creating us; that we are not hideous unmanageable discord in the universe, and that the end of us will not be a miserable existence in a miserable Hell, where God will hide His failures and torment forever the victims of them.127

Hopps reiterated the idea of evolution as progress in a sermon preached a few years later. He also emphasized his belief that the death of the body is one stage on the path to the immortality of the human spirit: Think only of the real creation of man – not by magic, in a Paradise. But by a million stages of struggle through countless ages, from protoplasm to beast and from beast to man. What a pathetic history it is! Millions of years God has taken to make man. But has He delayed? Not an hour! The great promotion [occurs at] every stage; and every stage has had God in it …128

125

Ibid., n.p. Ibid., n.p. 127 Ibid., n.p. 128 John Page Hopps, Pessimism, Science, and God. Spiritual Solutions of Pressing Problems, A Message for the Day (London, 1894), pp. 15–16. 126


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Darwin was unimpressed by the claims of spiritualists and spiritualism and so he might have been bemused by the joining of evolutionary theory and spiritualist ideas of progress.129 Hopps remained a popular preacher throughout his career and, as these sermons are only two of many, perhaps his congregations made no particular distinction between these two sermons and the others. What is clear in these sermons and Hopps’ writing on the subject is that his support for evolution was unreserved: Christianity and the Church would have to change, not the science of evolutionary theorists such as Darwin.130 While John Page Hopps’ sermons are representative of one reaction to the ideas in The Origin of Species, Daniel Gilbert’s sermons another, and Charles Kingsley’s sermons a third reaction, their sermons do have several characteristics in common. First, and most notably, although some of the sermons include detailed comments about evolution or the science which led naturalists such as Darwin to propose a theory of evolution, Darwin or The Origin of Species is rarely mentioned explicitly. The congregations were simply supposed to know that the preacher was referencing Darwin or The Origin of Species. Second, there is little in the sermons about the specifics of evolutionary theory or Darwin’s theory of evolution. For example, George Henslow, who was eminently qualified to comment on Darwin’s ideas about the distribution of plant species, said nothing about this in his sermon “Genesis and Geology”. Evolution in general and not the implications of morphology, for example, was the subject matter that preachers chose to focus upon.131 Third, even when claiming otherwise, the real subject of the sermons was “science” rather than Darwin’s theories or evolutionary theory. The challenges presented by the research of geologists, paleontologists, zoologists, and anatomists were all equally problematic for the traditional interpretation of the Bible or traditional ideas about revelation – a point easily forgotten in the twenty-first century because creationists are so vocal about biological evolution – and so preachers preached sermons dealing with all the “new” science not just, to make an artificial distinction, biology and evolutionary theory. While their willingness to talk about evolution in their sermons is fascinating – even those preachers who disagreed with Darwin took his 129

See Desmond and Moore, Darwin, pp. 620–21, 632–64. See Hopps, Pessimism, Science, and God, p. 29 131 One exception was Nicolas Wiseman in his discourses. See, for example, Wiseman, Twelve Lectures, 1st ed., p. 1: 300–6. 130

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claims seriously in a way that means historians should give them more credit for their efforts – the sermons of a Charles Kingsley, Daniel Gilbert, or John Page Hopps cannot hide an important fact: the number of sermons on Darwin, The Origin of Species, and evolution is not very large. Although, as noted previously, the total number of published sermons is not known, a non-comprehensive survey conducted by this author reveals that, compared to the total number, there were relatively few on science, scientific subjects, or the natural world. These “scientific” sermons are certainly less than 5 per cent of the total and are more likely as low as 1 per cent. This percentage includes sermons on anodyne subjects such as God and nature or God and the natural world as well as lectures, addresses, and discourses which were also sermons;132 without these the number of “scientific sermons” would be meager indeed. To use another biblical analogy, published sermons on science and scientific subjects is more like the loaves and fishes given to Jesus to perform a miracle compared to the “Legion” of the total number of sermons. Reflecting on the historiography of religion in the 19th century, the lack of sermons on science is a surprise.133 The Victorian crisis of faith and the supposed conflict between science and religion would seem to be the kind of problem which would warrant extended comment in the pulpit. Surely any minister concerned for the care of his parishioners would be duty-bound to instruct them on the impact of the new science? Put simply, the answer to this question is “no”. In fact, some preachers even drew attention to the unusual “phenomenon” of discussing a scientific subject in the pulpit. In his “Genesis and Geology” sermon, George Henslow recognized that “it may be … thought by some that I have in this sermon stepped too far beyond the usual line of subjects treated of in the pulpit, and dealt with one more suited to

132 These lectures, addresses, and discourses were given in a church or a religious service. It should be noted that some of the preachers were not ordained priests or ministers. 133 Some interesting sermons on evolution not mentioned previously in this chapter include: Robert Rainy, Evolution and Theology: Inaugural Address Delivered in the New College, Edinburgh, at the Opening of the Session 1874–75 (Edinburgh, 1874); Robert Watts, “On the Hypothesis that Animals are Automata. A Reply to Professor Huxley’s Address before the British Association, at the Late Meeting in Belfast,” in Problems of Faith. A Contribution to Present Controversies. Being a Third Series of Lectures to Young Men, Delivered at the Presbyterian College, Queen’s Square House, London (London, 1875), pp. 59–95; William Carruthers, “Scientific Unbelief,” in Problems of Faith, pp. 212–33.


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the lecture-room”.134 In a sermon at the BAAS meeting in 1867, Charles Pritchard told the congregation that he had “endeavoured to avoid the discussion of controverted points, whether in Physics or in Theology”.135 His reason, given that there were a significant number of scientists in his congregation? “The brief hour allotted to the preacher is too sacred for such topics; and there are many simple, yet far-reaching thoughts connected with our Holy Religion and our common being, which come home alike to the Philosopher and Theologian, to the learned and to the man who is unversed in books”.136 What then did the preachers of the (few) sermons on evolution hope to accomplish? In the main, these sermons were apologetic, a defense of Christianity and, in some cases, assurance for the congregation about the validity and relevance of Christianity. More specifically, the preachers attempted to defend the Bible and the unity of revelation. In the case of the Bible, as Thomas Smith (1817–1906), a Free Church minister, jokingly put it, We are not to hold by our Bible as in a state of suspense, as if the next morning’s newspaper, or the next month’s scientific magazine might tear it from our grasp, and prove to us that it is no Bible at all.137

In other words, Darwin’s research and writing did not now mean that Christians could not trust the Bible. The creation stories in Genesis did not have to be jettisoned simply because Darwin and others had put forward a compelling case for evolution. Further, for preachers such as John Page Hopps, new scientific theories about evolution were forcing Christians to rethink their doctrine, theology, and philosophy – “smashing the old idols” – and that was a good thing.138 As for revealed theology and natural theology, there was no conflict between the two. The findings of scientists, including Darwin, could not contradict the revelation of God found in the life of Christ, the Bible, or the traditions of the Church. John H. Gladstone (1827–1902), a fellow of the Royal Society and a vice-president of the Christian 134

Henslow, Genesis and Geology, p. 20. Charles Pritchard, The Analogy of Intellectual Progress to Religious Growth. A Sermon Preached by Request in the Episcopal Church of St. Paul, on the Occasion of the Meeting of the British Association at Dundee (London, 1867), p. v. 136 Pritchard, The Analogy of Intellectual Progress to Religious Growth, p. v. 137 Thomas Smith, “The Bible not Inconsistent with Science,” in Christianity and Recent Speculations. Six Lectures by Ministers of the Free Church (Edinburgh, 1866), p. 30. 138 Hopps, Pessimism, Science, and God, p. 29. 135

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Evidence Society, gave a lecture entitled “Points of Supposed Collision between the Scriptures and Natural Science” in 1872.139 The “supposed” in the title sums up the thinking of Charles Kingsley, Daniel Gilbert, and George Henslow – supporters, opponents, and advocates of the theory of evolution. A sermon entitled “The Life of Intellectual Self-Sufficiency” preached by Richard Church (1815–90), Dean of St Paul’s, illustrates well why preachers said what they said in their sermons but said it so infrequently. Church posed the following questions and the subsequent answers: What is the object of life? Why is it possessed? What is its worth? There is the heathen, the non-Christian estimate of it: in its noblest form, to know, to search, to inquire with the widest imagination and the most delicate methods, to balance and hesitate, to make and unmake hypotheses, to detect mistakes, to accumulate the splendours of discovery and the riches of intellectual satisfaction, – a life to which our partial knowledge gives its highest value, the aspirations of our poetry and art its highest charms, but which knows nothing, and thinks little, of anything beyond. And there is the Christian estimate: life, great for the present, but immeasurably greater for the future, for what it is to be; and it is great now, if, by knowledge and power indeed, yet doubly by faith, and love, and hope, the will is strengthened and directed to all that is most like Him whom we worship and trust in, and expect one day to see.140

Had this statement been made by a person well-known for his opposition to the new learning of the 19th century, its import might be more understandable: but Church was not such a man. Manuel Johnson (1805–59), the astronomer and curator of the Radcliffe Observatory at Oxford, was a close friend; on 15 March 1858, Church wrote Johnson a letter in which he described in detail his observation of a total eclipse of the sun which had occurred that day.141 Furthermore, Church’s friendship with the renowned American botanist Asa Gray (1810–88) lasted nearly thirty-five years.142 Soon after the publication of The Origin

139 J.H. Gladstone, “Points of Supposed Collision between the Scriptures and Natural Science” in Faith and Free Thought. A Second Course of Lectures Delivered at the Request of the Christian Evidence Society (London, 1872). 140 R.W. Church, “The Life of Intellectual Self-Sufficiency,” in Pascal and other Sermons, pp. 251–52. 141 Life and Letters of Dean Church, reprinted edition, ed. by Mary C. Church (London, 1895), pp. 150–151. 142 See D.C. Lathbury, Dean Church (Oxford, 1905), pp. 142, 327–28.


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of Species, Church wrote to Gray that “one wishes such a book to be more explicit [about its impact on theology]. But it is wonderful “shortness of thought” to treat the theory itself as incompatible with ideas of a higher and spiritual order”.143 How then could Church give a description of thinking that most 19th-century scientists would take pride in and call it “heathen” or, later in the sermon, a “rival estimate of life”?144 The distinction that Church made between rationalism, which would include scientific investigation, and the Christian world view was the lack of “otherworldliness” of the former. In another letter to Gray, written in 1861, Church explained what he meant by “shortness of thought”. It was thinking that “what is in itself a purely physical hypothesis on the mode of creation or origination (in which it seems to me very difficult at present to imagine our knowing anything), to be incompatible with moral and religious ideas of an entirely different order”.145 Even with his keen interest in science – during his tenure as a parish priest in Whateley, Somerset, Church took children on walks to search for wild flowers that they could view later under his microscope146 – Church believed that the world of earthly knowledge was secondary or even subservient to the spiritual world and spiritual knowledge. A theory such as Darwin’s was not a threat to Christianity, and could be embraced, because spiritual matters were of a higher order of importance. Thus, later in the aforementioned sermon, Church could say: “Knowledge is God’s precious and wondrous gift … [but] knowledge is the queen of our merely earthly life; … her realm is bounded by the grave: in the next life, she whom we know here is nothing”.147 If the total number of published sermons on evolution is an indication of the level of controversy caused by Darwin’s ideas in The Origin of Species then proponents of “war” between science and religion in the 19th century or, more precisely, evolution and Christianity will be disappointed. Whether it was their ignorance, their lack of interest, or the press of more significant problems, most ministers and priests would have agreed with Church’s assessment. The challenges of biblical

143 144 145 146 147

Life and Letters of Dean Church, p. 154 [Letter dated 12 March 1860]. Church, Pascal and other Sermons, p. 252. Life and Letters of Dean Church, p. 157 [Letter dated 28 March 1861]. Ibid., pp. 138–39. Church, Pascal and other Sermons, p. 253.

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criticism, missions abroad, and church attendance at home were more important, more “spiritual”, that the ideas in The Origin of Species. Owen Chadwick was right. For those interested – and the religious and secular Huxleys of the period were vocal – there was a dangerous dog in the neighborhood. For most preachers and most congregations the dog was not barking.

THE VICTORIAN SERMON NOVEL: DOMESTICATED SPIRITUALITY AND THE SERMON’S SENSATIONALIZATION Tamara S. Wagner “Preaching’s his business … He’s in our employ, and we pays [sic] him well”.1 In Margaret Oliphant’s Salem Chapel (1863), a young dissenting minister finds his aspirations to compose well-researched and wellwrought sermons foiled both by his congregation’s inability to appreciate his often obscure references as well as by his own social ambitions. In order to please an “audience” that pays him and hence believes that it owns him, he feels compelled to write for effect. It is a humiliating experience that is detailed with sympathy – a sympathy primarily premised on a metaphorical alignment of professional preaching with the production of popular fiction. Both are shown to be at the mercy of an increasingly competitive marketplace that can be detrimental to the writer’s and the preacher’s vocation. In “the bloom of hope and intellectualism, a young man of the newest school”, Arthur Vincent is disappointed by the “[g]reengrocers, dealers in cheese and bacon, milkmen, with some dress-makers of inferior pretensions, and teachers of day-schools of similar humble character, [that] formed the elite of the congregation”.2 His attempts to break into more fashionable social circles, claimed at least nominally by the town’s High Church clergy, map the shifting class-alignments of religious communities in Victorian Britain. If this generates chiefly a social panorama of doctrinal differences, it all the more emphatically pinpoints the very pervasiveness of religion as a central aspect of daily life and a pervasive theme in the literature of the time. As it thereby evinces the ready availability of the sermon for discourses on popularity at large, Salem Chapel offers a peculiarly insightful point-of-entry into a much needed reassessment of fictional engagements with the sermon in the Victorian novel. The divergent ways of achieving popularity are pivotal to the novel’s narrativization of pervasive anxieties about both prestige and integrity. Vincent refuses to cater to consumer demands. As a result, he fails to 1 2

Margaret Oliphant, Salem Chapel (London, 1986), p. 239. Ibid., pp. 3, 2.

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adjust to the social requirements of his position, to meet the needs of his flock. Their treatment of the preacher “in their employ” of course sharpens the satire at the expense of all sides. This is not only because his repugnance at the thought of serving in a “preaching shop, where his success was to be measured by the seat-letting, and his soul decanted out into periodical issue under the seal of Tozer & Co”,3 is invested with particular sympathy in its identification with the equivalent struggles faced by the popular writer. While illustrating the divisiveness between divergent denominations of Christianity in Victorian Britain, what remains at the heart of the social panorama is a fondly satirical mapping of provincial society. An additional edge, however, is given to the representation of popularity in the integration of sensational elements in the narrative itself. Divorce, kidnapping, and murder, first introduced in a cursory subplot, upstage Vincent’s writing problems. This bifurcation in the plot structure is the result of Oliphant’s endeavor to boost her own sinking sales figures. Despite her insistent criticism of the sensation genre, she injects some of its most effective devices into her Carlingford series, realist narratives of domestic, provincial life.4 This move indicates both the complexity of market forces and the author’s self-conscious awareness of them. So far from distracting from the main plot, with its emphasis on the eponymous Salem Chapel and its minister, the infiltration of the sensational literalizes his oscillation between sensation’s allure and the integrity of his work. The self-reflexivity with which sermons are evoked in Victorian fiction, in fact, underscores a linkage between the sermon and fiction that articulates variously interlinked concerns. Before analyzing specific texts in more detail, I shall therefore first situate the fictional functions of sermons within representations of religion in Victorian literature. A juxtaposition of still largely ignored non-canonical religious fiction on the one hand and the much better known satires of sermons in

3

Ibid., p. 48. Joseph O’Mealy argues that Oliphant’s revaluative parodies were aimed to “set aside a rival’s vision of reality, [as] a forum for getting back at her literary rivals” (“Rewriting Trollope and Yonge; Mrs Oliphant’s Phoebe Junior and the Realism Wars,” Texas Studies in Literature and Language 39.2 [1997], 125). If Salem Chapel appropriated sensational elements, Phoebe Junior (1876) reasserted Oliphant’s “mastery of the genre that had become identified no longer with George Eliot, whose range had greatly expanded beyond the Dissenting interest, but increasingly with Anthony Trollope and Charlotte Yonge” (p. 127). 4

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canonical novels on the other reveals three major developments in the sermon’s role in the Victorian novel: first, a growing preference for a more generally social, if not necessarily secularized, morality in domestic fiction; second, the domestication of spirituality within the idolized Victorian family as both the effect of and a potential counterpoint to this shift; third, and what is perhaps the most creative articulation of the anxieties underlying these developments, a sensationalization of preachers, both professionals and amateurs, and their sermons in fiction. After an overview of doctrinally inspired novels at the midcentury that draws on a range of narratives to exemplify diverse forms of the “sermon novel”, I shall conclude by looking more closely at the figure of the sensational and often fraudulent clergyman as an embodiment of cultural crises surrounding the sermon’s popularity in Victorian culture. Serial Story Sermons: Religious Fiction at the Mid-Century The vexed issue of popularity constituted not merely the most common, but by far the most easily effected and frequently sensationalized, opening for a fictional use of sermons. Conversely, a growing number of religious writers took to the novel genre as a medium to propagate their agenda by capitalizing on its cultural impact as an easily disseminated form of instruction. In British Novelists and Their Styles (1859), David Masson deplored that “[h]ardly a question or doctrine of the last years can be pointed out that has not had a novel framed in its interest, positively or negatively. To a great extent tales and novels now serve the purpose of pamphlets”.5 Their merit as literary works, he added, was various, as some narratives were produced “so mechanically to the order of the dogma” that they resulted in nothing but “fierce polemical tirade”.6 In a notorious article on “Silly Novels by Lady Novelists”, published in the Westminster Review in 1856, George Eliot even more virulently expressed her derision for their theologically limited fictional visions, no matter by which denomination they were claimed: there was little difference between them in their aesthetic and intellectual limitations, as they ranged from “the oracular, (which are generally

5 David Masson, British Novelists and Their Styles: Being A Critical Sketch of the History of British Prose Fiction (Cambridge, 1859), p. 264. 6 Ibid., pp. 264–65.

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inspired by some form of High Church, or transcendental Christianity)”, to novels of “the white neck-cloth species, which represent the tone of thought and feeling in the Evangelical party […], an Evangelical substitute for the fashionable novel”.7 By 1871, Harriet Beecher Stowe complained that serial fiction had taken over any other mode of preaching on both sides of the Atlantic: “Hath any one in our day, as in St Paul’s, a psalm, a doctrine, a tongue, a revelation, an interpretation, forthwith he wraps it up in a serial story”.8 As expressions of religious experience or interpretation were thus “wrapped up” in fiction, they also became blended with more general moral concerns, divorced from specific doctrine. However, even as “the Novel of Purpose”, as Masson put it, became more and more invested in social or political issues, it was by no means a case of simple substitution, either regarding the absorption of a “purpose” into the conventional paradigms of fashionable fiction, or the secularization, or generalization, of morality.9 On the contrary, the evolution of the Victorian “sermon novel” was an intricate process of juggling and renegotiating a number of changing factors. Despite a range and diversity that cannot be reduced to simple categories, it may be seen as essentially twofold: on a general level, the sermon novel refers to any fictional narrative, of a certain length, that contains or centrally features sermons, their composition, delivery, or reception; more specifically, it operates as a fictionalized sermon itself. The latter is different from more loosely defined “didactic fiction” in that it is concerned primarily with religious communities, while it likewise needs to be distinguished from a novel of religious doubt. More than a fictionalized sermon, it less often tackles spiritual crises than it offers guidelines with reference both to moral behavior and to specific debates arising from doctrinal differences within the expanding heterogeneity of Victorian Protestantism. Hence, it may tangentially address atheism, agnosticism, or the secularization of morality, yet the emphasis continues to rest on moral issues that simultaneously help to express a specific religious agenda. As a result, this form of the sermon novel concentrates on the shifting lines of division between different forms of the Christian faith over the course of the 19th century. It was to a large extent instrumental in 7 8 9

George Eliot, Essays, ed. Thomas Pinney (London, 1963), p. 317. Harriet Beecher Stowe, My Wife and I (New York, 1872), p. 2. Masson, Novelists, p. 264.


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further defining interpretations that in turn additionally solidified party lines – what the popular Tractarian novelist Charlotte Yonge criticized as the socially divisive “party spirit” that could prove so confusing to her young protagonists even as the main agenda of her novels was premised on the very necessity of such a separation. Deploring their sense of uncertainty and dissatisfaction, the heroines of The Castle-Builders; Or, The Deferred Confirmation (1854) maintain that their confusion is “only a result of the uncomfortable disunion and party spirit of the time we live in”.10 Yet as the subtitle firmly establishes, the delay of their confirmation is really to blame. It is almost in a tongue-in-cheek manner that their “sweet innocence of party” is shown to mislead them woefully as they are tempted into unregulated charitable work that does nobody any good.11 Such sermon novels frequently both probed and furthered new directions in religious movements, while addressing the divisiveness that they thereby, to an extent unwittingly, helped to encourage. In a more accentuated vein, they reassessed different angles on religious dissent or lapsed into direct attacks on other denominations. Anti-Catholic, anti-Tractarian, or anti-Evangelical novels consequently accounted for a substantial amount of religious fiction. Catholicism, including Anglo-Catholicism, and Evangelicalism formed the two most dynamic forces in the religious spectrum of Victorian Britain. Their markedly divergent fictionalization testified to this dichotomy within the larger cultural understanding of what was an ever-expanding religious diversity.12 Ideologically invested vilification indisputably played a pivotal part in representations of these “rival” denominations. Yet social panoramas of ecclesiastical micropolitics with their class-conscious landscapes centering on Cathedral towns or competing chapels in Oliphant’s Carlingford series or Anthony Trollope’s Barchester novels just as decisively contributed to what are

10

Charlotte Yonge, The Castle-Builders (New York, 1855), p. 269. Ibid., p. 97. 12 John Wolffe, God and Greater Britain: Religion and National Life in Britain and Ireland 1843–1945 (London, 1994), p. 20. Vineta Colby takes evangelicalism “in its broadest sense, referring not merely to that school of Protestantism,” to embrace the extremes from Low Church to High, from Charlotte Elizabeth (Mrs Tonna) to Charlotte Yonge, even including Jewish novelist Grace Aguilar (Yesterday’s Woman: Domestic Realism in the English Novel [Princeton, 1974], pp. 146–47). By contrast, this discussion of the sermon novel is confined to representations of different denominations within the Christian faith of Victorian Britain. 11

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now considered recognizable types and tropes. Among the most memorable examples of what has been termed “hypocritical and untrustworthy Low-Church clergymen” as literary figures undoubtedly stands scheming Obadiah Slope in Barchester Towers (1853). Yet Slope is prefigured by an equally obnoxious character in The Vicar of Wrexhill (1837) by Fanny Trollope, Anthony’s mother.13 This evinces a markedly revealing confusion within the alignment of literary figures with specific denominations. As Elisabeth Jay has already pointed out, Trollope “made open avowal of the parentage of his Evangelical brood”, telling T.H. Escott, “Dickens gibbeted cant in the person of Dissenters, of whom I never knew anything. I have done so in Mr Slope, an Anglican, but the unbeneficed descendant of my mother’s Vicar of Wrexhill”.14 A somewhat vitriolic warning against the abuses of evangelicalism that drew on readily available stereotypes for the creation of its villains, her novel moreover had its counterpart in her anti-Catholic Father Eustace (1845). The latter revealingly shared most of its elements with a plethora of popular narratives rooted in a Gothic tradition that employed religious typecasting primarily for stylistic effect.15 The most virulent attacks, however, permeated fiction that was specifically invested in religious beliefs and practices rather than simply about religious issues. Now rarely read writers as different as John Henry Newman, Charlotte Mary Yonge, or Eliza Lynn Linton participated in the fictionalization of debates on religious party-lines through satire, sensationalizing melodrama, or both. Robert Lee Wolff refers to a “procession of members of the lunatic fringe of mid 19thcentury English religion” in Newman’s seminal Loss and Gain (1848): it depicts a spectrum of perspectives based either on contemporaries or iconographical representations of religious groups.16 At its most hilarious, such satire provides “not unwelcome comic relief ”, yet it is “also a serious expression of Newman’s intolerant disgust with the proliferating sects”.17 It is in various ways symptomatic of the sermon 13 Robert Lee Wolff, Gains and Losses: Novels of Faith and Doubt in Victorian England (New York, 1977), p. 208. See also Colby, Domestic, p. 150. 14 Elisabeth Jay, The Religion of the Heart: Anglican Evangelicalism and the NineteenthCentury Novel (Oxford, 1979), p. 10. 15 Anti-Catholic fiction makes up a disproportionate number of 19th-century literary representations of religion, yet as Susan Griffin stresses, it tells most about the Protestantisms of the period (Anti-Catholicism and Nineteenth-Century Fiction [Cambridge, 2004], p. 4). 16 Wolff, Gains, p. 59. 17 Ibid., p. 59.


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novel at its most didactic, showing to what extent ridicule, indictment, and preaching of moral or theological concerns could become intertwined. Sermon fiction not only sported the most outrageously overdrawn caricatures of other denominations, but also ridiculed various religious types – especially different forms of hypocrites – with much spite. Newman’s first novel, it is important to note, was in itself provoked by hostile representations of Catholic converts in the fiction of the time. As it was put in the advertisement to the sixth edition of Loss and Gain, the narrative was intended as a “suitable answer” to a “tale, directed against the Oxford converts to the Catholic Faith”.18 It was specifically in reply to From Oxford to Rome: And how it fared with some who lately made the journey. By a Companion Traveller by Elizabeth Harris, published anonymously in 1847. Although Newman’s novel has been read as a personal conversion narrative, a fictionalized autobiographical account of the Oxford Movement, an early university or campus novel, and a social satire of socio-historical more than literary interest, it is therefore vital to remember that it was written with the express purpose of countering anti-Catholic stereotyping. The religious panic that followed Newman’s conversion in 1845 gave rise to a renewed onslaught of anti-Catholic literature. In this, it added new impetus to already prevailing anxieties about the closeness of Anglo-Catholicism, or Tractarianism, to the “Romish” Church, which was considered both foreign and an enemy within.19 As one of the leading Tractarians who was eventually to convert to Roman Catholicism, Newman came to embody the hopes and fears of conversion. His fictional and nonfictional works illuminated the ongoing internal conflicts and divisiveness among the proliferating groups of Victorian Protestantism and their impact on the cultural and literary discourses of the time. Among the founders of the Oxford Movement, launching in 1833 The Tracts of the Times from which Tractarianism took its name, Newman therein helped to instigate a much more acceptable employment of fiction as a means of expressing, and expressively promoting, specific doctrinal interpretations. The remarkable ease with which Tractarian writers turned to literature as the most apposite medium to promulgate their beliefs, in fact, was in contrast to the well-established suspicion of fiction that had pervaded so much of evangelical discourse 18 19

John Henry Newman, Loss and Gain: The Story of a Convert (Oxford, 1986), n.p. Griffin, Anti-Catholicism, p. 8.

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from the previous century onwards.20 The Oxford Movement as “a religious and literary group … headed by preacher-poets whose doctrines and aesthetics alike enchanted writers from Wordsworth to Christina Rossetti and Gerard Manley Hopkins” hence developed a doctrinal system “grounded in poetics as much as theology”.21 Charlotte Yonge, we shall see, succeeded especially well in producing sustained narratives that contained an agenda and yet never descended into explicit preaching – a tendency against which John Keble, her religious and literary mentor, had specifically cautioned her.22 Besides Newman, Keble was perhaps the most vital major figure of the movement. Not only did his Christian Year (1827) form the flagship volume of Tractarian poetry, followed by Lyra Innocentium (1846) and the posthumous Miscellaneous Poems (1869). His Lectures on Poetry (1832–41), it has been remarked, “read like a manifesto designed to educate the reader in religious poetics while teaching him or her how to respond to it correctly”.23 So far from simply boiling down to preaching in literary form, Tractarian writing promoted the simultaneity of aesthetic and religious experience. This welding together in narrative form did not always work seamlessly, of course. It could easily seem a form of “sermonizing”, as it did in so many highly influential, culturally insightful, yet in other ways fundamentally flawed, works. Newman’s Loss and Gain specifically is, in Valentine Cunningham’s words, “a grim enough warning against trying to incorporate in a novel the sort of theological depth and subtlety that was appropriately informative in the Apologia”, Newman’s nonfictional account of his experience.24

20 Evangelical novelists themselves therefore make their “own positive case somewhat uneasily in a form which they always mistrust as such (novels are almost as wicked as stage plays)”, whereas High Anglicans “took naturally to the novel” (Wolff, Gains, pp. 113, 199). 21 Mark Knight and Emma Mason, Nineteenth-Century Religion and Literature (Oxford, 2006), pp. 12, 87. 22 Georgina Battiscombe and Marghanita Laski, A Chaplet for Charlotte Yonge (London, 1965), p. 72. See also William McKelvy, The English Cult of Literature: Devoted Readers, 1774–1880 (Charlottesville, 2007), p. 15; Stephen Prickett, “Tractarian Poetry,” in A Companion to Victorian Poetry, ed. Richard Cronin, Alison Chapman, and Antony H. Harrison (Oxford, 2002), p. 279; Elisabeth Jay, “Charlotte Mary Yonge and Tractarian Aesthetics,” Victorian Poetry 44.1 (2006), 49–50. 23 Knight and Mason, Nineteenth-Century, p. 12. 24 Valentine Cunningham, Everywhere Spoken Against: Dissent in the Victorian Novel (Oxford, 1975), p. 14. Newman’s Apologia Pro Vita Sua (1864), like his fiction, underlines the interchange between religious controversies and their representations in literature as essentially a two-way engagement.


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What is most important to consider in this context, however, is that Newman’s deliberate negotiation of doctrinal issues in fiction helped to generate a new subgenre. Despite its shortcomings as a literary text – or partly perhaps because of its inconsistencies and the problematic typecasting underlying them – Loss and Gain can thus be said to have provided a crucial conduit for the emergence of the Victorian sermon novel. A literary rewriting of prevalent misconceptions, it set off a cascade of reactions, of emulation, satire, and self-reflective reconsiderations. As its ongoing revisions and especially the prefaces Newman prepared for them sought to underline its fictional value, moving further away from its connections to autobiographical experience, it moreover explicitly marked a shift to the narrative exploration of doctrinal doubts both in and through fiction. Loss and Gain, in other words, is not a novel about religious issues; it is a fictionalization of doctrine, in which the emphasis rests firmly on the role of fiction in accomplishing the work of a sermon. As Charlotte Crawford has pointed out, each revision aimed to amplify Newman’s “pointed denial in his preface that Loss and Gain was based on fact, either of contemporary incident or of the author’s experience”, which deliberately “lessened the topical effect of the novel”.25 In expressing a belief system in narrative form that was to resonate beyond an accounting of personal experience, it thereby at once contributed to the formation of a subgenre and countered the secularization of and through fiction.26 In his recent reassessment of Tractarian poetry, Stephen Prickett has shown why the literature of the Oxford Movement was riveted by subtexts that could never be very deeply submerged. It came to the fore with such insistence not only because the movement had been conceived in controversy from the start, but because so many of its original adherents either went over to Rome, like Newman, thereby “confirming what its detractors had always known”, or, like J.A. Froude and

25 Charlotte Crawford, “The Novel That Occasioned Newman’s Loss and Gain,” Modern Language Notes 65.6 (1950), 417–18. 26 As William McKelvy has argued in some detail in his discussion of the “cult of literature” in the long 19th century, that literature was becoming modernity’s functional religion, a sacred vocation with the power to sanctify human experience, was a claim made repeatedly in 19th-century Britain. It was a claim that needs to be reinvestigated, and yet as a belief current at the time, it had an undeniable impact on the functions of religion in fiction and vice versa. It even enlisted Newman: “An implacable enemy to the liberal cult of literature, Newman nevertheless was inducted into it, thereby illustrating the cult’s power to canonize reluctant saints” (McKelvy, Cult, p. 2).

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Mark Pattison, lost their faith altogether.27 Yet Prickett further stresses the popularity of Tractarian literature, especially poetry, at the time: in market terms, it was immensely successful, which makes its lack of posthumous acclaim all the more noticeable.28 This sea change in popularity and influence has been even more extreme with regard to the Tractarian novel. Talia Schaffer’s article on Yonge’s 1879 Magnum Bonum is tellingly entitled “The Mysterious Magnum Bonum: Fighting to Read Charlotte Yonge”, as it explores the challenges readers face when engaging with fiction that pushes an agenda.29 What has instead become the most memorable and often discussed section of religious fiction of the Victorian age is the representation of the evangelical, and then primarily, its satirical renditions. Rev. Brocklehurst in Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847) may have become one of the most notorious religious hypocrites in fiction. Yet doctrinal undercurrents in her sister Anne’s fiction are thus still either considered with discomfort or dismissed as of little interest. If they are rarely mentioned with reference to The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848), what has been seen as their obtrusive centrality in Agnes Grey (1847) has caused the novel to be set aside as “simplistic, conventional, and conservative” despite its challenge of traditional assumptions about sermons as the prerogative of the clergy.30 As Ernest Raymond put it in his 1949 article, its religious and moral tenor “drained the natural lifeblood from Agnes Grey leaving it, not dead, but anæmic and pale”.31 Yet the novel’s pairing of Tractarian rector and evangelical curate brings out issues that accentuate the narrative’s function as an ideal sermon: simple, straightforward, in tune with a wide audience, “useful to some, and entertaining to others”, and guiding the readers to interpret the

27

Prickett, “Tractarian,” pp. 279–80. Ibid., p. 279. 29 See Talia Schaffer, “The Mysterious Magnum Bonum: Fighting to Read Charlotte Yonge,” Nineteenth-Century Literature 55.2 (2000), 245–47. 30 Jennifer Stolpa, “Preaching to the Clergy: Anne Brontë’s Agnes Grey as a Treatise on Sermon Style and Delivery,” Victorian Literature and Culture 31.1 (2003), 225. In this, Stolpa argues, the novel presents an opportunity for Victorian women “to enter into a forbidden zone– theological commentary” (p. 227). By contrast, as Laura Berry has provocatively put it, the heroine of Wildfell Hall simply “proselytizes [her husband] to death” (“Acts of Custody and Incarceration in Wuthering Heights and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall,” Novel 30.1 [1996], 44–45). 31 Ernest Raymond, “Exiled and Harassed Anne,” Brontë Society Transactions 11 (1949): 225–36, rpt. in The Brontë Sisters: Critical Assessments, ed. Eleanor McNees (East Sussex, 1996), p. 102. 28


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moral for themselves.32 This is an emphatically evangelical position, but the connection between its fictional and its religious manifestation needs to be teased out. Wolff, it is important to note, already takes the novel’s criticism of the rector as a starting point for an exploration of references that are now often regarded as obscure: it is “obvious that Anne Brontë thoroughly dislikes Mr Hatfield, but probably not many modern readers can tell why”.33 For her audience in 1847, it would have emerged very clearly that he is a “High Churchman”, or “Tractarian”, or “Anglo-Catholic”, or “Puseyite”.34 More recently, Jennifer Stolpa has argued that the novel’s often dismissively treated form is an example of a “metasermon”, one of the most self-conscious sermon novels that at once features good and bad sermons and works as a sermon itself: the Tractarian rector is interested more in ritual than analysis, while the instructions of his evangelical counterpart, his curate Weston, operate similarly to the idea of the sermon endorsed and indeed exemplified by the novel itself.35 The main distinction between the two clergymen rests in their different sermons. Whereas Weston’s are as simple and straightforward as the novel in which they are embedded, Hatfield’s are artificial, pompous, and it is suggested, informed by a pretended earnestness. Although the choice of subject is criticized as well, it is really his style of delivery that seems to give most offense. It is notably introduced through a negative definition. When his new curate, Weston, arrives, his style of reading and preaching contrasts favorably with that of Hatfield: Agnes comments on Weston’s “style of reading, which appeared to [her] good – infinitely better, at least, than Mr Hatfield’s” and further on “the evangelical truth of his doctrine, as well as the earnest simplicity of his manner, and the clearness and force of his style”.36 Weston’s sermon is “refreshing” after the dry, prosy discourses of the former curate, and the still less edifying harangues of the rector, who would come sailing up the aisle, or rather sweeping along like a whirlwind, with his rich silk gown flying behind him and rustling against the pew doors.37

32 33 34 35 36 37

Anne Brontë, Agnes Grey (Oxford, 1988), p. 3. Wolff, Gains, p. 6. Ibid., p. 6. Stolpa, “Preaching,” pp. 229–33. Brontë, Grey, pp. 83, 85. Ibid., p. 85.

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His rustling gown, “velvet cushion”, “bright lavender glove”, “wellcurled hair”, and “cambric handkerchief ” already condemn him, as the vividly painted manifestations of his opinions on “church, discipline, rites and ceremonies”.38 But if these are all signs of his Tractarian leanings (the words Tractarian or Anglo-Catholic never appear in the narrative itself), they are apparently preferable to the “sermon of a different order” he occasionally delivers, “sunless and severe, representing the Deity as a terrible task-master, rather than a benevolent father”.39 As doctrinal interpretations thus serve as characterization devices, the personal attributes that are thereby drawn into the comparison are more likely to obscure than to highlight the novel’s endorsement of evangelicalism. Similarly, the best testimony to Weston’s excellent sermons may come from a poor, simple, parishioner, who extols “such a sermon”, which made her “so happy”, yet Agnes’ appreciation of what she believes is the final sermon she shall hear from him does more to declare her love for him than to assert its intrinsic excellence: And now, the last Sunday was come, and the last service. I was often on the point of melting into tears during the sermon – the last I was to hear from him … the best I should hear from any one, I was well assured.40

This depiction of the delivery and reception of sermons in the novel ironically anticipates the satirical and sensational representation of preachers and their sermons in later fiction by authors as different as Wilkie Collins and Charlotte Yonge. Still, it is in this narrative engagement with doctrinal differences that the novel’s real depths reside. Read simply as a governess novel that recounts the failure of various methods of instruction, it can be a disappointment.41 The “First Lessons in the Art of Instruction”, as chapter 2 is entitled, all too quickly change from being “the care and education of children” to the “task of instruction and surveillance”.42 Readers familiar with Jane Eyre’s ordeal in the Red Room may well balk at Agnes Grey’s exasperation with a young pupil: Sometimes, exasperated to the utmost pitch, I would shake her violently by the shoulders, or pull her long hair, or put her in the corner, – for

38 39 40 41 42

Ibid., p. 85. Ibid., p. 86. Ibid., pp. 100, 174. Ibid., p. 160. Ibid., pp. 12, 27.


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which she punished me with loud, shrill, piercing screams, that went through my head like a knife.43

In a similar vein, the novel’s second half has been read as the intrusion of a love story into the fictionalized advice manual or, alternatively, as a resurfacing of the governess’ suppressed story, her own marriageplot.44 As it preaches as much on the subject of governesses and their employers as on doctrinal decisions, Agnes Grey forms a particularly insightful example of the integration of sermons into plot and modes of characterization. At the same time, it also provides a good counterexample to the Tractarian novels that had so quickly come to predominate in the subgenre of sermon fiction. In fact, whereas the majority of 19th-century discourses on Tractarians were hostile, the Tractarian novel not only made up a substantial part of popular literature and religious writing, but also extended the confines of domestic realism in intriguing ways that influenced the development of Victorian fiction at large. In a recent article that aims to redirect approaches to largely forgotten and ideologically problematic authors, Gavin Budge seeks to retract the general sidestepping of novelistic presentations of religious belief that extend “far beyond superficial pieties, informing minute details of plot and characterization”.45 A secularist viewpoint that ignores the centrality of doctrine might miss the point altogether: “Yonge’s commitment to Tractarianism would be merely quaint, a failure to move with the times that must call her ability to achieve a truly realist mode of writing into question”.46 With a similar emphasis on plot structure, June Sturrock has detailed how the fears that arose after the flood of conversions at the midcentury were expressed the most imaginatively as narrative foils in novels as different as Elizabeth Sewell’s Margaret Percival (1847), Dinah Mulock Craik’s Olive (1850), and Yonge’s Heartsease (1854).47 Their heroines’ Roman Catholic counterparts act as embodiments of doctrinal differences from Anglo-Catholicism: they are often physically as well as morally weaker.48 43

Ibid., p. 31. Compare Dara Rossman Regaignon, “Instructive Sufficiency: Re-Reading the Governess through Agnes Grey,” Victorian Literature and Culture 29.1 (2001), 101. 45 Gavin Budge, “Realism and Typology in Charlotte M. Yonge’s The Heir of Redclyffe,” Victorian Literature and Culture 31.1 (2003), 193. 46 Ibid., p. 194. 47 June Sturrock, “Catholic Anti-heroines: Craik, Sewell and Yonge,” Women’s Writing 11.1 (2004), passim. 48 Ibid., p. 92. 44

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In turn, anti-Tractarian fiction increasingly attacked not only the doctrines and communities of Tractarians, but specifically their literary output. This reaction not only attests to the effectiveness of religious instruction through fiction, but additionally helps us to track the development of the sermon novel as well as to retrace the marginalization of the genre even in discussions of non-canonical writing. Although Eliza Lynn Linton’s Under Which Lord (1879) has been regarded chiefly as a symptomatic illustration of the “pitch to which anti-Tractarian sentiment could mount”,49 her contribution to religious fiction was wide-ranging, including her controversial projection of Christ’s life into the present-day in the bestselling The True History of Joshua Davidson, Christian and Communist (1872). Its identification of primitive Christianity and communism was nothing new, of course, but it was the basis of mid-Victorian Christian Socialism, and hence the hero’s professions that he is “[g]oing in no isms at all [except] for the truth as it is in Christ” are, not surprisingly, mocked by the representatives of institutionalized religion in the novel.50 His unorthodox ideas can be lumped together all too easily with other disruptive, eccentric, or simply “othered” elements: “Going in for socialism, Joshua? … A little radicalism, a little Methodism, and a great deal of self-assurance – that seems to me to be about where you are!”51 The best-known fictionalizations of Victorian sermons may be embedded in the multiplot social panorama of Dickens, George Eliot, or also Oliphant and the Trollopes, but non-canonical religious – or self-consciously antireligious – writing lays bare the other side of the coin of an increasingly volatile discourse. Linton, it is interesting to remark, combines her exploration of the fundaments of Christian Socialism with a suspicious, even hostile, approach to any forms of religious institutions. Under Which Lord may more extensively focus on opposing and, as the novel suggests, irreconcilable, differences between the proliferating religious communities of the time, yet a degree of balance, as it were, is achieved through Linton’s systematic rejection of all organized religion. As Nancy Fix Anderson 49

Wolff, Gains, p. 192. Eliza Lynn Linton, Joshua Davidson (London, 1872), p. 41. 51 Ibid., p. 41. The novel has been read as a more radical version of Kingsley’s Alton Locke (1850) and, in this, as characteristic of the works of a “next generation of writers” that sought out “their vision of a prophetic biblical call for social transformation” in increasingly more polemical experiments in religious fiction (Knight and Mason, Nineteenth-Century, p. 165). 50


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has phrased it in her biography of Linton, she was a “dedicated agnostic [who] religiously attacked all forms of Victorian Christianity”.52 More precisely, as it is put in Joshua Davidson, she sought to expose all forms of its “modern travesty, this jewelled, ornate, exclusive Ecclesiastical Christianity, who is the ancient Pharisee revived”.53 In a triangulation of cultural intersections between the sermon and the novel, Linton’s engagement with religious doubt engenders “anti-sermon novels” that testify to the cultural centrality of the Victorian sermon novel itself. To an extent, they may be seen as simply taking its doctrinal focus to its extremes. The novel as fictionalized sermon, in fact, was regularly directed against specific doctrinal interpretations even as it pushed others. More pointedly still, the ascendancy of a moral vision that could, yet need not, include a specific religious approach may be most visible in the emergence of social problems fiction at the mid-century. Instead of cleaving onto doctrine, novelists at the mid-century resorted to a “preaching of pity”, as Mary Lenard has put it.54 George Levine has argued that 19th-century realism evolved as a reflection of and contribution to the emergence of modernity as a process of secularization. The Victorian novel’s “characteristic morality” is “a George Eliot-like dissolution of easy moral categories”.55 Yet as commentators at the time

52 Nancy Fix Anderson, Woman Against Women In Victorian England: A Life of Eliza Lynn Linton (Bloomington, 1987), p. 87. 53 Linton, Joshua, p. 57. 54 Mary Lenard, Preaching Pity: Dickens, Gaskell, and Sentimentalism in Victorian Culture (New York, 1999), passim. 55 George Levine, The Realistic Imagination: English Fiction from Frankenstein to Lady Chatterley (Chicago, 1981), p. 180. Cunningham has singled out George Eliot as “a writer who will treat Dissenters with enormous compassion and with a notable measure of fairness. The fact that in the end she does not agree with Christianity is an indication of just how great her openness is” (Dissent, p. 9). More recently, Jude Nixon has highlighted Eliot’s role “in lending shape and definition to all that constitutes religious discourse in the nineteenth century”, referencing the use of sermons in Adam Bede (1859), “Eliot’s highly religious, dissenter novel” (“Framing Victorian Religious Discourse: An Introduction,” in Victorian Religious Discourse: New Directions in Criticism, ed. Jude Nixon [New York, 2004], pp. 4–5). Adam Bede may be classified as a sermon novel only in that it features a well-received sermon by a character who eventually leaves behind her duties as a wandering preacher, and a novel about dissent in that it sympathetically presents Methodists. Compare Jay, Religion, pp. 60–61, 80; Christine Krueger, The Reader’s Repentance: Women Preachers, Women Writers, and Nineteenth-Century Social Discourse (Chicago, 1992), p. 258; Colby, Domestic, pp. 203–9, on “Janet’s Repentance”. McKelvy speaks of “declinist accounts” that “see in the modern cult of literature a reaction to the passing of God, who, after a long illness commencing in the Enlightenment died during Victoria’s reign” (Cult, p. 9).

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rightly diagnosed, social and religious slants were both part of the same development, as fiction came to be seen as a method of both propagating and condemning certain ideals or ideologies. In Masson’s words, its “purpose” could stretch from “Chartism, Socialism, &c., in the sphere of secular politics, [to] Anglo-Catholicism, Evangelicism, Broad Church, &c., in the sphere of ecclesiastical opinion”.56 Their different exponents did not necessarily divorce religion, morality, and politics, even as they imbued them with varying degrees of importance. Close attention to sermons in fiction shows how vital it is to get away from the idea that the ascendancy, or dissolution, of rivaling moralities presented a clear-cut shift.57 It resituates canonical fiction by “doctrinally unconcerned authors” within intricate developments in 19thcentury religious writing and practices, while simultaneously drawing new attention to the significance of sermon novels in presenting alternative literary histories.58 Fictional Sermon-Tasting: Sensationalizing the Preacher In a recent article, Robert H. Ellison and Carol Marie Engelhardt refer to the popularity of “sermon-tasting” in Victorian culture to underline 56

Masson, Novelists, p. 264. What at first sight seems a leaving behind of a matter of doctrine in Gaskell’s North and South (1855), for example, needs to be reassessed within an awareness of the strong hints the text would have supplied to contemporary readers. Rev. Hale’s religious scruples start off the novel’s movement into industrial spaces and Union politics, away from pastoral cares. Finding it irreconcilable with his conscience to make a fresh declaration of conformity to the Liturgy when accepting a preferment, a promotion to a better parsonage, Hale leaves his comfortable vicarage in the South and moves into the industrial North to make a living as a tutor to largely uneducated, but aspiring, industrialists, and by lecturing to workers. This move suggests, as Hilary Fraser has put it, that the novel changes “from one kind of novel into another” as it indisputably shifts its main focus to broader social issue (“The Victorian Novel and Religion,” in A Companion to the Victorian Novel, ed. Patrick Brantlinger and William B. Thesing [Oxford, 2002], pp. 101–102). This does not mean that the doctrinal issues with which the novel opens disappear completely, however. In placing the heroine between her father’s Dissent and the more intuitive faith of the manufacturer she eventually marries, Gaskell not only uses her to express “the assumed astonishment of conformist readers to the conversion”, but deploys the novel “to promote an idea of faith” (Knight and Mason, Nineteenth-Century, pp. 78, 77). Jenny Uglow suggests that J.A. Froude was a possible model for Mr Hale, a connection Froude himself recognized (Elizabeth Gaskell: A Habit of Stories ([London, 1993], pp. 228–29). See also Angus Easson, “Mr Hale’s Doubts in North and South,” Review of English Studies 31 (1980), 30–40. Krueger significantly terms Gaskell an “Evangelist of Reconciliation” (Repentance, p. 157). 58 Jay, Religion, p. 28. 57


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“the role of religion in shaping, consolidating, and challenging that culture”.59 William McKelvy refers to the “familiar history of modernity, the tale of culture’s triumph over religion” to point out that this history was not only “more subtle and sinuous, a bit perverse at times”, but also that it was specifically in the 19th century that “the putative religious function of literature became a self-defining subject for public debate”.60 Ignoring religion’s centrality in the literature of the time, as Mark Knight and Emma Mason have similarly emphasized, erases the “continual slippage between the sacred and the secular” that might be misleadingly subtle in some texts, yet which forms the thrust of a surprising number of works.61 The “doctrinal intricacies of the Church” could be “experienced through texts that were unlikely to appear in a course of formal theology: hymns, tracts, poetry, and fiction”.62 The sermon novel in both its manifestations – as a sermon in narrative form and as a narrative that analyzes fictional sermons – helps to clarify its often obscure centrality in 19th-century literature. It does so in two complementary ways that further underscore the essentially dual nature of the genre itself. This is, primarily, its critical engagement with a more general, social morality through a deliberate domestication of spirituality, of religion as daily practice at home rather than as a metaphysical experience. Conversely, sermons in fiction variously negotiate the proposition of a specific morality. The sizable overlap between the two forms of the sermon novel is most prominent in the critical representation of the preacher as a popular sensation. The metaphorical linkage of sermon-tasting to the dangers of sensational writing implies a much more intricate interconnectedness of fiction and (fictional) sermons than mere referencing of sermons on literature would suggest. Although the novel as a popular genre had been regarded with suspicion in moral, social, and clinical discourses from its beginnings in the 18th century, and had come under additional attack in evangelical writing, sensation’s popularity in

59 Robert H. Ellison and Carol Marie Engelhardt, “Prophecy and Anti-Popery in Victorian London: John Cumming Reconsidered,” Victorian Literature and Culture (2003), 373. See also Robert H. Ellison on a “nation of ‘sermon tasters’ ”, people for whom church attendance was an intellectual and aesthetic ‘delight’ as well as a religious ‘duty’ ” (The Victorian Pulpit: Spoken and Written Sermons in Nineteenth-Century Britain [Selinsgrove, PA, 1998], p. 43). 60 McKelvy, Cult, pp. 3–4, 1. 61 Knight and Mason, Nineteenth-Century, p. 3. 62 Ibid., p. 7.

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the mid-19th century necessarily fuelled such fears.63 With a new defensiveness came a more self-reflective reassessment of modes of writing and reading practices. Cultural anxiety about public sensation incited by sermon-tasting became interlinked with this concern, and both found a catalyst in the literary figure of the sensationalized preacher. In embracing literature as a welcome medium for reaching the imagination and emotions and thereby inspiring belief, the majority of sermon novels sought to counter Puritan reservations about the fictitious and especially fiction for the young. In this, they paralleled one of the most influential reactions to religious fiction that shaped the Victorian novel at large. Most tellingly perhaps, in heavily didactic children’s literature such as Martha Butt Sherwood’s The History of the Fairchild Family (1818; 1847), children simply serve to “demonstrate the effects of non-repentance, or the escape from evil through salvation, and, therefore, had no existence independent of their didactic function”.64 The reading child, as a direct result, became a recurrent theme as realist domestic novels traded on, while often mocking, the parameters of sermon fiction. From Dickens’ Murdstones in David Copperfield (1850) to the bugbears of evangelical childhood in Samuel Butler’s The Way of All Flesh (1903),65 such satirized embodiments are hence regularly counterpoised by the powers of the imagination. It is reading that saves David Copperfield from being “almost stupefied” as it “kept alive my fancy, and my hope of something beyond that place and time … and did me no harm”, and likewise solitary daydreaming over books that makes the childhood passages of Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847) so memorable.66 The Victorian child’s daydreaming is not only harmless,

63 Much has of course been written on the Victorian sensation craze at the midcentury and its primary manifestation in popular serial publications. In the early 1790s, the Evangelical Magazine symptomatically published a “spiritual barometer” assigning levels of wickedness to various pastimes, in which novel reading scored higher than adultery and was considered equivalent to skepticism (Wolff, Gains, p. 207). 64 Susan Ang, The Widening World of Children’s Literature (Houndmills, 2000), p. 22. 65 Jay stresses this essential contradiction: Butler’s novel “dealt the death-blow to the tradition of the portrayal of Evangelicals in the novel”, while it also “talks of Evangelicalism as a childhood memory and appealed to the same response in its readers” (Religion, p. 11). 66 Charles Dickens, David Copperfield (Oxford, 1981), pp. 55–56. As Patricia Meyer Spacks points out, Jane Eyre’s self-enclosure through reading is “a particularly nineteenth-century image”, and if the novel had been published a century before, she “would not have inhabited the same setting or thought of reading in the same way”:


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but salutary. As it is put with particular poignancy in Dickens’ Little Dorrit (1857), although Arthur Clennam has been raised by “[s]trict people as the phrase is, professors of a stern religion, their very religion … a gloomy sacrifice of tastes and sympathies that were never their own”, he has nonetheless retained a “belief in all the gentle and good things his life had been without”.67 It is therefore hardly surprising that Dickens has been seen as notorious for his satirical stabs at evangelicalism.68 The chapter on “Telescopic Philanthropy” in Bleak House (1853) attacks any form of charitable, including missionary, work that looks into the distance, idealizing vaguely perceived ways of doing good afar while ignoring issues at hand. The latter are embodied by the illiterate street-sweep Jo, an uninteresting home-grown savage resting at the door-step of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts, having “no idea, poor wretch, of the spiritual destitution of a coral reef in the Pacific”.69 The omniscient narrator’s often deplored descent into preaching when depicting Jo’s last moments indicates the integration of religious sentiment into social problems fiction, while also proposing a social responsibility that comes close to condemning charity set up as a society. The same novel, moreover, features one of the oiliest fictional preachers of the Victorian age, the heavily satirized Chadband. Discoursing on patronized objects of charity, he “glows with humility and train oil”.70 In a comical twist, his religious accounting issues a backprojection of pecuniary metaphors customarily associated with evangelical discourse and its satires. He identifies the paying of a cab fare with spiritual debt and credit: “It is Mr Chadband’s habit – it is the head and front of his pretensions indeed – to keep this sort of debtor and creditor account in the smallest items, and to post it publicly on the most trivial occasions”.71 Although this aligns him with the more clearly defined evangelical Murdstones and Mrs Clennam, that he does not belong to any particular religious group is further evidence of the “permeable and invisible boundaries of Evangelicalism” itself, which has “If she read for the sake of imaginative stimulation in 1747 or thereabouts, her creator would probably have introduced even into a fictional text some warning about the danger of such stimulation” (Privacy: Concealing the Eighteenth-Century Self [Chicago, 2003], p. 29). 67 Charles Dickens, Little Dorrit (Oxford, 1989), pp. 20–21, 158. 68 See Cunningham, Dissent, p. 11. 69 Charles Dickens, Bleak House (London, 1985), p. 274. 70 Ibid., p. 318. 71 Ibid., p. 318.

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been seen as “a factor that led to distorting caricatures among some commentators”.72 He has got no representative value, or right to set himself up as such: [H]e is, as he expresses it, “in the ministry”. Mr Chadband is attached to no particular denomination and is considered by his persecutors to have nothing so very remarkable to say on the greatest of subjects as to render his volunteering, on his own account, at all incumbent on his conscience; but he has his followers.73

Such indeterminacy renders the preacher an apt embodiment of hypocrisy and prepares for the figure of the fraudulent clergyman in the popular fiction of the century’s second half. Notable exponents of this literary type are as different as Godfrey Ablewhite, the real thief of the eponymous diamond in Wilkie Collins’ detective novel The Moonstone (1868), Rev. Emilius in Trollope’s The Eustace Diamonds (1873) and Phineas Redux (1874), and the converted priest in Collins’ late sensation novel The Black Robe (1881). Their critical, not necessarily always satirical reworking of the paradigms of sermon fiction shows that the representation of sermons in Victorian novels was never fully divorced from a didactic impact, especially as they operated as antisermon novels in exposing the hypocrisies and impasses fostered by specific doctrines or religious outlooks.74 What is perhaps the most revealing in this context is that Trollope’s fraudulent clergyman is generated by, and for, a critical take on sensation fiction. A converted “Bohemian Jew …, an impostor who has come over here to make a fortune”, who has “a wife in Prague, and probably two or three elsewhere”,75 Emilius is a conman, a speculator, a bigamist, and a bogus preacher. He encapsulates the narrative attractions of indeterminate, double-faced, sensational villains with which realist writing engaged critically, while trading on their popularity. The effectiveness of Emilius’ sermons as a social spectacle already condemns him: “He preached his sermon, charming the congregation by the graces of his

72

Knight and Mason, Nineteenth-Century, p. 12. Dickens, BH, p. 315. 74 The most sensational elements in Trollope’s oeuvre are without doubt to be found in He Knew He Was Right (1869), a novel that features, like Oliphant’s Salem Chapel, parental abduction and divorce to juxtapose these intrinsically sensational themes with the micropolitics of a Cathedral town. Deceitful preachers in detective fiction range from suspiciously charming Rev. Miles Mirabel in Wilkie Collins’ I Say No (1884) to the pairing of fake and real clergymen in G.K. Chesterton’s “The Blue Cross” (1910). 75 Anthony Trollope, The Eustace Diamonds (London, 2004), p. 767. 73


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extempore eloquence, – moving every woman there to tears, – and then was after his wife before the ladies had taken their first glass of sherry at luncheon”.76 This tongue-in-cheek presentation renders it mockingly explicit that the feted preacher does not practice what he preaches. To see him simply as an exponent of anti-Semitic stereotyping overlooks the range of Trollope’s play with stereotypes. The willful blindness of those who believe in the popular preacher is symptomatic of society’s double standards at large. Leading a double life, frequently under an assumed name, literalizes the religious hypocrisy that “sermonizing” characters represent in Victorian fiction. In The Moonstone, Godfrey Ablewhite is a philanthropist presiding over various ladies’ committees. He is first introduced in “effigy” in a lady’s bedroom, portrayed in the midst of public speaking: he is “represented speaking at a public meeting, with all his hair blown out by the breath of his own eloquence, and his eyes, most lovely, charming the money out of your pockets”.77 The satire of this “Christian Hero”, as he is repeatedly called by one of his most uncritical adherents, pinpoints the novel’s exposure of conventionalities and seeming conformity, yet his double life also underlines the narrative attractions of the indeterminate preacher as impostor: a “side kept hidden from the general notice” in “a villa in the suburbs which was not taken in his own name, and with a lady in the villa, who was not taken in his own name, either”.78 Like Dickens’ Chadband, Ablewhite is unaffiliated with any denomination, and while this makes their exposure all the more encompassing, it also suggests that this very indeterminacy is the mainspring of their duplicity. But if Ablewhite is a sensational villain who exemplifies the extremes of social and religious hypocrisy, the tract-distributing Miss Clack, his adoring follower, is a figure of fun whose own narrative even more fully exploits the satirical potentials provided by the paradigms of sermon novels. Her reception of Ablewhite’s sermons constitutes a revealing warning, exposing their – fraudulent – value and hence her own unreliability as a narrator of part of the novel: Rachel and I went alone together to church. A magnificent sermon was preached by my gifted friend on the heathen indifference of the world to the sinfulness of little sins. For more than an hour his eloquence (assisted 76 77 78

Anthony Trollope, Phineas Redux (Oxford, 2000), p. 2:40. Wilkie Collins, The Moonstone (London, 1998), p. 68. Ibid., p. 452.

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tamara s. wagner by his glorious voice) thundered through the sacred edifice. I said to Rachel, when we came out, “Has it found its way to your heart, dear?” And she answered, “No; it has only made my head ache”. This might have been discouraging to some people; but, once embarked on a career of manifest usefulness, nothing discourages Me.79

Miss Clack’s refusal to be discouraged reads like a threat. If she annoys Rachel Verinder by discoursing on Ablewhite’s eloquence – an hour’s discourse on “the sinfulness of little sins” delivered in a booming voice – she even more invidiously persecutes Rachel’s dying mother with tracts, even after the doctor has expressively forbidden anything but “light” reading. For Miss Clack, this is a struggle between religion and medical science, a struggle familiar from earlier sermon novels as different as Agnes Grey and The Castle-Builders. In both, clergymen are called in like doctors to deal not only with “religious melancholy”, but with a more sustained world-weariness, or depression of spirits. It is indeed part and parcel of their reaction to the secularization brought about by modernity that they preach the superiority of religious instruction over medical diagnoses of what are spiritual or emotional crises. This is where the divergence of different forms of using sermons in fiction and fiction as sermons becomes particularly accentuated. Even while sporting one of the most idealized portrayals of physicians in Victorian literature, Yonge’s The Daisy Chain (1856) and its sequel, The Trial (1864), differentiate between mind, body, and soul in order to rupture an established duality that favored clinical attention. Repeatedly, it is emphasized that “[m]ind and body may be hurt, [but] to think the soul can be hurt” comes near blasphemy, and that “if body and mind come out unscathed, it is the soundness of the spirit that has brought them through”.80 In Brontë’s novel, it is even rendered explicit that the evangelical Weston accomplishes such a cure easily, whereas the Tractarian Hatfield neither knows nor cares much about his parishioners’ spiritual distress.81 79

Ibid., pp. 253–54. Charlotte Yonge, The Trial; Or, More Links of the Daisy Chain (Doylestown, n.d.), pp. 374–75, 372. 81 When Nancy Brown is “afflicted with religious melancholy”, Hatfield accuses her of having been “among the Methodists,” admonishing her to “come to church, where you’ll hear the scriptures properly explained, instead of sitting poring over your Bible at home” (Grey, pp. 91, 94). Yet Weston reads bits from the Bible and “explained ‘em as clear as the day”, and “that next Sunday he preached such a sermon!” (Grey, pp. 99–100). For the “treatment” of the heroine’s affinity with Tennyson’s Mariana in The CastleBuilders see notes below. 80


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It is in a pointed satire of doctrinal instruction as crisis management that Miss Clack is of no more help than Dickens’ Mrs Jellyby, the telescopic philanthropist of Bleak House, or Mrs Pardiggle, who literally sweeps into the households of the poor in the same novel. The perverseness of Miss Clack’s dissemination of unwanted tracts around the house, a violation of domestic space, constitutes an “anti-robbery” as well as a mockery of district visiting. The satire of her failure effectively explodes the twofold credit system in which she amasses points in heaven and creates debts for which she expects to be repaid by those on whom she bestows her spiritual riches.82 Despite the seriousness both of the moral accounting (and the hypocrisy it may help to engender) and of the impasses of attending to physical illness with tracts or, conversely, to emotional crises with pills, the main effect of Miss Clack’s narrative remains comical. Such anti-sermon novels, however, go beyond satire when their attack on specific denominations becomes integral to the main plot. Collins’ earlier novels are populated with religious as well as other hypocrites as much as the novels of Dickens. His belated The Black Robe is a virulently anti-Catholic work that stands in an older Gothic tradition, while it also takes the sensational potential of the popular preacher to its extremes. Its vilification of international Jesuitical networks capitalizes on a new fascination with secret societies and conspiracies, while a suspicion of celibacy, nunneries, and priesthood denotes them as hostile to ideals of the family and the nation that are seen as peculiarly English and Protestant. Conversion to Roman Catholicism is not only part of a Jesuit priest’s ploy to regain land in England, but it turns a sensitive young intellectual, working on the “Origins of Religions” – no more successfully than George Eliot’s Casaubon on his “Key to All Mythologies” – into a priest. The convert’s sermons on the “dreadful superstition of everlasting torment” cause “hysterical shrieks of women [ringing] through the church”.83 What is fake about his priesthood is that it is the result of a cleverly exploited monomania: his feelings of guilt, after killing his opponent in a duel, are practiced on by manipulative Jesuits. Contrary to the plethora of

82

Ilana Blumberg speaks of this “dissemination of tracts as a kind of anti-robbery”: Miss Clack is seen to slip into the house, leaving her treasures in choice places (“Collins’s Moonstone: The Victorian Novel as Sacrifice, Theft, Gift, and Debt,” Studies in the Novel 37.2 [2005], 172). 83 Wilkie Collins, The Black Robe (London, 1994), p. 214.

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useless advice he receives, he needs neither a doctor nor a priest, but the domestic comforts of a wife and child for whom he should preserve his estate instead of having it seized by priests from Rome. The convert’s own sermon is a symptom and warning of a larger conspiracy. When self-reflective sermon novels trade on the trope of the fake clergyman, he serves as a mouthpiece of ideas or attitudes that need to be excised from the confines of the narrative. Otherwise strikingly different novels, Amelia Edwards’ Hand and Glove (1858) and Charlotte Yonge’s The Clever Woman of the Family (1865) both employ a counterfeit, or would-be, clergyman who is ultimately exposed as an absconded speculator. But whereas Edwards’ novel uses the bogus preacher to highlight the dangers of surface attractions, in Yonge’s novel, a reputedly unordained clergyman’s vague reference to doctrinal scruples masks his twofold fraudulence. A comparison of these two novels hence also illustrates the difference between the two main variations of the sermon novel, and I shall therefore analyze them in more detail as a conclusion to the investigation of the Victorian sermon novel’s twofold nature. The swindling preacher comes to embody the problems as well as the various potentials of both forms. Re-presenting Real and Fake Sermons Hand and Glove introduces its dangerously charming villain through a discussion of his first sermon in a new parish. Its impact on the congregation divorces eloquence from moral instruction, effectiveness from improvement, and the mere sensation of experiencing a stirring sermon from the absorption of its content. More significantly still, the violence he evokes in his account of early church history is posed against the novel’s extended imagery of classical heritage, represented by a recently rediscovered Roman columbarium. The archaeological interest of the villain’s rival thereby provides a revealing counterpoint to the fraudulent clergyman’s speculations on the sensations his sermon inspires. Through this juxtaposition, the novel embraces a morality premised on an essentially ecumenical stance. The sermon’s referencing of religious violence as well as martyrdom is the diametrical opposite of the rival’s rational analysis of history. In short, the faith the novel endorses is a humanism based on the importance of balance. If it preaches at all, it is tolerance. Its setting in France enables a twofold projection of religious prejudice. Finding herself unexpectedly in reduced circumstances, Gartha


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Wylde goes out to a remote village in rural France to work as part companion, part governess in a French Protestant family. A small community of gentry and merchants forms “quite a little Protestant colony”, a mirror-image of Catholics in Britain.84 Despite their minority status and separateness, they are nonetheless integrated into surroundings that are exotic to the English heroine. The very house is alluringly different; its doorway appearing “more like the entrance to a convent than the gateway of a gentleman’s house”.85 Still, while Gartha is fascinated by Catholic ritual, its observance remains confined to the peasantry. Her almost anthropological interest in what is “so new and picturesque” in Catholic prayer at roadside crosses never becomes the threat that the aesthetics of ritual poses in so many anti-Catholic novels of the time.86 In Yonge’s The Castle-Builders, for example, attending mass at a Roman Catholic Chapel is a “running after temptation” that is all the more detrimental as the novel’s Tractarian leanings ensure that one of the heroines, in an emotionally and theologically confused state, finds dangerously little to object to: “with the ordinary ignorance about the Roman Catholic services, she was very much taken by surprise at finding so little that was objectionable, and so much that was extremely beautiful”.87 Famed preaching is part of the ritual. As the heroine puts it to an elder sister recently returned from France: “O such a sermon! And that magnificent service – how you must have enjoyed it abroad”.88 In a stab at just such pseudo-ethnographic observance that defends a fascination with Roman Catholicism in Hand and Glove, the sister, wife of an exemplary Protestant clergyman, asserts that they never attended mass abroad not because they saw any danger in it, but simply because “we had a feeling against treating it as a sight”.89 For Yonge, ritual can be found in Tractarian sermons with their own “beauty of the language”, expressive “of the whole Catholic Church, praying with them, and for them” – of Anglo-Catholicism in a careful division from Roman Catholicism.90 In other words, the prevailing anti-Catholic typecasting

84

Amelia Edwards, Hand and Glove (London, 2000), p. 50. Ibid., p. 35. 86 Ibid., p. 40. 87 Yonge, Castle-Builders, pp. 233–34. 88 Ibid., p. 243. 89 Ibid., p. 243. 90 Ibid., p. 194. The majority of encounters with Roman Catholicism, whether abroad or at home are much more invidious. They range from Lucy Snowe’s desperate recourse to attend confession – a symptom of a breakdown, more than a cure – in Charlotte Brontë’s Villette (1853) to the reuse of traditional Gothic anti-Catholic 85

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of ritual’s perceived threats is sidestepped, or redirected, rather than addressed. In Edwards’ novel, the danger of an exciting service is transferred into a Protestant milieu and ascribed to its minority status, “the expression of an isolated opinion – the resort of a cultivated minority … of an exceptional religion”.91 The sensuality of the new clergyman, Rev. Alexis Xavier Hamel, highlights this alignment. He is “the most striking, if not the handsomest man whom [Gartha] had ever seen [with an] expression of power, both in features and build; a something which was at the same time fascinating and repellent, intellectual and sensuous”.92 His name (which turns out to be assumed) is “[r]ather too romantic [for] a clergyman”.93 If this is a giveaway as regards the danger he represents, his sermon is an extension of just this mixture of allure and repulsion. It is delivered “in a voice totally unlike that in which he had read the previous half of the service – a voice full, sonorous, and deep-rolling as the under notes of an organ”.94 The eloquence is beyond reproduction: I shall not endeavour to reproduce the discourse that followed. It would be useless, since I could only mar the eloquence which I but imperfectly remember – eloquence so rare, so impassioned, so spontaneous … But the substance of his sermon I never can forget; and this, to the best of my power, I will now endeavour to outline. It was a history of Christianity – a history of its darkest and most woful [sic] side, drawn by an iron hand, and delivered not only with the profoundest knowledge of “effect”, but at times with something of a splendid yet terrible irony.95

The narrative then details the effects of the sermon on the audience. There is no question of its impact as “a magnificent piece of spontaneous oratory”, yet it is more than uncertain that the congregation can “feel improved by his sermon”.96 The quiet eloquence of Charles Gautier, an amateur archaeologist engaged to Gartha’s charge, therein contrasts with Hamel’s dangerously alluring ways of extolling both violence in the name of religion and, likewise, “a class of literature which, however admirable in its way, deals too largely with feeling to be quite

typecasting in Collins’ The Black Robe. On Villette see Diana Peschier, NineteenthCentury Anti-Catholic Discourses (Houndmills, 2005), pp. 138–61. 91 Edwards, Hand, p. 64. 92 Ibid., p. 64. 93 Ibid., p. 51. 94 Ibid., p. 66. 95 Ibid., pp. 66–67. 96 Ibid., pp. 72, 71.


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healthy reading for the inexperienced and the young”.97 Recommending history over romance, Gautier speaks of the repose exemplified by the Roman columbarium, discovered in his garden, as evidence of a “wise, and poetical religion” that “turned with a smile from the empty terrors of the Skeleton and the Scythe”.98 In his discourse on fiction as worthy of serious discussion, Hamel’s representation becomes conflicted, however. What renders him suspect is his pliable eloquence itself. As his impressionable fiancée puts it, “All that you say is beautiful”.99 He is a fiction himself, eventually exposed as a failed speculator, a fraudster, responsible also for Gartha’s poverty, a onetime actor and returned convict, who has wrongly assumed the guise of a clergyman. His suicide upon his exposure externalizes the self-destructiveness of his eloquent personality. It is an escape from authorial condemnation as well as from legally enforced punishment: “He has indeed escaped”.100 If Hand and Glove uses a sermon extolling violence to illuminate the fraudster’s violation of domestic space, in The Clever Woman of the Family, the fake clergyman acts as an embodiment of concepts, values, and interpretations of faith that need to be expunged. The villain Mauleverer, alias Maddox, appears in “a sort of easy clerical-looking dress …; his air was that of an educated man, his dress that of a clergyman at large, his face keen”.101 His assumed name is as fanciful as it is deliberately misleading: “The card was written, not engraved, the name ‘Rd. R.H.C.L. Mauleverer;’ and a discussion ensued whether the first letters stood for Richard or for Reverend, and if he could be unconscionable enough to have five initials”.102 The first warning sign is his use of unorthodoxy as camouflage: pretending to be “a clerical gentleman who had opinions”, he hides behind a euphemism that masks a much more extensive duplicity as he turns out to be no clergyman at all, but a skilled fraudster, once a commercial agent and financial speculator, who leads an additional double life in “haunts [where] he plays the philanthropical lecturer” for the benefit of a respectable widow and

97

Ibid., p. 112. Ibid., p. 72. 99 Ibid., p. 108. 100 Ibid., p. 281. 101 Charlotte Yonge, The Clever Woman of the Family (Peterborough, 2001), pp. 206–07. 102 Ibid., p. 210. 98

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a dissenting minister whose “faith in him was genuine”.103 This promiscuity alone is already ominous. This is where the heroine, ambitious Rachel Curtis, is most to blame. It is not gullibility that makes her trust him, but willful dismissal of doctrinal uncertainties: “Modern research has introduced so many variations of thought, that no good work would be done at all if we required of our fellow-labourers perfect similarity of speculative belief ”.104 Like the unconfirmed heroines of The Castle-Builders, she goes wrong in believing that “the details of party difference melt away” in charitable projects.105 But she does not have their excuse; her punishment hence is the more severe. Only after a child dies of neglect in the school Rachel has set up with his assistance, does Mauleverer stand revealed as a villain. The exposure humiliates her as “the Clever Woman of the family, shown in open court to have been so egregious a dupe”, yet this is about much more than “a silly girl who has let herself be taken in by a sharper”.106 She has made herself accountable not only for solicited charity subscriptions, but for the children’s lives and souls. Yet when the dying child pleads to hear of her Saviour, Rachel is at a loss. It is an uncharacteristic deathbed scene in Victorian literature: “ ‘Please tell me of my Saviour,’ she [the child] added to Rachel. It sounded like set phraseology, and she knew not how to begin”.107 More in accordance with the narrative conventions of domestic fiction, Rachel’s own illness, as she contracts the girl’s diphtheria, is as much an opportunity for redemption as a punishment. Still, in contrast to its symbolic functions in Victorian realist novels without such explicit religious agenda, disease is not cathartic in itself. During a recovery “more trying than illness”, Rachel is “exceedingly depressed, restless, and feverish”.108 In another euphemism that spells out her departure from the endorsed doctrine, the reason for her misery is that there has been “much disturbance of her opinions”, which has notably been imbibed by “the literature that paints contradiction as truth”.109 The comforts of faith come together with a firm belief in marriage and the resignation of misguided self-reliance to domesticity. This

103 104 105 106 107 108 109

Ibid., pp. 211, 364, 390. Ibid., p. 226. Ibid., p. 226. Ibid., pp. 387, 346. Ibid., p. 357. Ibid., pp. 373, 417. Ibid., p. 417.


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alignment is at the heart of the novel, marking it out as Tractarian sermon fiction. It is a domestication of spirituality that deploys the promises of domestic fiction to counteract the satires of religious hypocrisy that drive novels by “doctrinally unconcerned” authors.110 What complicates the conversion from self-sufficiency and intellectual pride to a better sense of humility, however, is the revaluation of both literature and religion. It hinges on a doubling of essay-writing heroines as well as on a reassessment of moral instruction through fiction. Sofa-bound Ermine Williams excels in the composition of instructive essays in which Rachel so notably fails. Her resignation is rewarded with success as writer and editor, the restoration of her fortune, love and – and this is rare in Victorian fiction – marriage despite her physical disability. Indeed, Rachel is termed “a grotesque caricature of what [Ermine] used to be” before her accident.111 All of Yonge’s fiction significantly explores the choice of the right texts, while highlighting the importance of reading itself. Although they never lose sight of their religious approach, their agenda is worked into the narrative. Wolff praises them as “[g]enuine novels” that subordinate propaganda to an extent that can be “deceptive to most modern readers, who may miss the earnest Tractarian message”.112 Vineta Colby additionally stresses that Yonge “most gracefully converted the Tractarian impulse into novels of family life” precisely by being concerned with “her characters’ problems of daily living far more than with their problems of dogma and ritual”.113 The Clever Woman of the Family most effectively reconciles a defense of literature with a warning against both intellectual pride and potentially fraudulent paper fictions that may, however, also assist in truth-finding: Mauleverer stands exposed as he forges ostensible wood-carvings for Rachel’s magazine.114 As in Hand and Glove, the 110 As Wolff has already pointed out, “the most valuable possible clues to the Tractarian outlook” are found “not only on doctrine and practice in the Church, but also on family relationships and the mutual obligations of the social classes” (Gains, p. 198). 111 Yonge, Clever, p. 167. 112 Wolff, Gains, pp. 197, 118. 113 Colby, Domestic, pp. 186–87. 114 The Heir of Redclyffe (1853) pairs an assessment of popular novels with the life and death of an exemplary Tractarian hero and his heir, an older cousin who resents him until he learns humility; The Castle-Builders becomes more overt in condemning the distressed heroine’s emulation of Mariana in Tennyson’s eponymous poem instead of sermons on resignation. Her crisis is taken seriously, but her identification with literary world-weariness is ridiculed as something “put on for the sake of poetry” (p. 279). If The Daisy Chain features a crisis of faith inspired by controversial literature on science, it is averted by both missionary zeal and faith in the family.

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fake clergyman moreover has a history, having impoverished the Williamses through fraud and speculation. In both novels, the dangers associated with the popular preacher are symptomatic of numerous, intersecting, cultural anxieties. Sermons and fiction are discussed side by side as complementary, rather than competing, forms of instruction. So far from simply reflecting or expressing specific doctrinal interpretations, the Victorian sermon novel, in fact, engenders an essentially two-way “re-presentation” of belief as well as of the question of its promulgation (through popular fiction in particular) by creatively reassessing the cultural impact of sermons, those who deliver them and those who receive and attempt to live in accordance with them. If Hand and Glove exemplifies most clearly the multiple use of the effective, yet disturbingly startling, sermon that turns out to be by a fake clergyman, The Clever Woman of the Family uses the same tropes to work out its agenda narratively. As diametrically opposed exponents of the sermon novel, they simultaneously cast a different light on the significance of religion in Victorian fiction. Renewed interest in this long neglected area has both brought forgotten writers back to attention and unearthed likewise long ignored aspects in canonical writing.

PART THREE

SERMON AND SOCIETY IN AMERICA

THE ANTI-DUELING MOVEMENT Thomas J. Carmody On 11 July 1804, former Secretary of the Treasury Alexander Hamilton and Vice-President Aaron Burr met in Weehawken Heights, New Jersey to settle a dispute of honor by fighting a duel. Hamilton was fatally wounded in the exchange of pistol shots and died the following afternoon.1 The public was outraged and in the aftermath, Hamilton was publicly eulogized as a martyr, while Burr was derided as a murderer. Many citizens began to view dueling as a wasteful and barbaric system that should be outlawed because it was stripping America of some of its best and brightest citizens.2 It was in the pulpits of the nation that the cry against dueling found its loudest voices. Sermons condemning dueling as a folly against God and a scourge against civilized society began to be preached across the country.3 Ministers of various denominations took up this issue and

1 Richard Brookhiser, Alexander Hamilton, American (New York, 1999), pp. 211–14; Joseph J. Ellis, Founding Brothers: The Revolutionary Generation (New York, 2000), pp. 20–247; Ron Chernow, Alexander Hamilton (New York, 2004), pp. 703–709. 2 Thomas Fleming, Duel: Alexander Hamilton, Aaron Burr and the Future of America (New York, 1999), pp. 333–53 and Chernow, Alexander Hamilton, pp. 710–25. 3 Eliphalet Nott, Miscellaneous Works (Schenectady, NY, 1810), pp. 85–119; John M. Mason, An Oration, Commemorative of the Late Major-General Alexander Hamilton; Pronounced Before The New York State Society of the Cincinnati, On Tuesday, the 31st July, 1804 (New York, 1804); Samuel Spring, A Discourse in Consequence of the Late Duel, Addressed to the North Congregational Society of Newburyport: August 5, 1804 (Newburyport, MA, 1804); Hezekiah N. Woodruff, The Danger of Ambition Considered in a Sermon Preached at Scipio, New York, Lord’s Day, August 12, 1804, Occasioned by the Death of General Alexander Hamilton, who fell in a duel with Aaron Burr, Vice-President of the United States of America, on the 11th of July, 1804 (Albany, NY, 1804); Richard Furman, Death’s Dominion Over Man Considered: A Sermon, Occasioned by the Death of the Honorable Major General Alexander Hamilton, Preached at the Baptist Church in Charleston South Carolina, the Fifteenth Day of August, 1804, Before the State Society of Cincinnati, the American Revolution Society, and Numerous Assemblage of Other Citizens; and Published at the Joint Request of the Two Societies (Charleston, SC, 1804); Timothy Dwight, The Folly, Guilt, and Mischiefs of Duelling, A Sermon Preached in the College Chapel at New Haven, on the Sabbath Preceding the Annual Commencement, September, 1804 (Hartford, CT, 1805); and John M’Donald, A Sermon on the Premature Death of General Alexander Hamilton (Albany, NY, 1804).

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helped to form anti-dueling associations in the years following the Hamilton-Burr duel.4 What is interesting for the rhetorical critic in studying examples of these sermons and the social movement they propagated is not their eloquence in commemorating the life and accomplishments of Alexander Hamilton, but their public indictment of the social practice of dueling known as the “code of honor”.5 Specifically, these ministers attacked this social problem by framing it against the backdrop of the tragic death of an American patriot in the hope that they would be able to symbolically manage the public’s perception of dueling. These antidueling ministers reasoned that if they were successful in accomplishing their goal of societal mediation, then the culturally accepted practice of dueling would elicit public indignation, thus hastening its demise. The Culture of Honor In the 1700s and 1800s, the practice of dueling was a socially accepted method of seeking satisfaction from any individual whom one considered to have impugned one’s honor.6 It was a custom primarily

4 Anson P. Stokes and Leo Pfeffer, Church and State in the United States (New York, 1950), pp. 251–53. 5 The British Code of Duel: A Reference to the Laws of Honour, and the Character of Gentleman (1824; facsimile reproduction, Richmond, UK, 1971); The Art of Dueling, By A Traveller (1836; facsimile reproduction, Richmond, UK, 1971); Joseph Hamilton, The Only Approved Guide Through All the Stages of A Quarrel: Reflections Upon Dueling; And The Outline of A Court For Adjustment Of Disputes; With Anecdotes, Documents and Cases, Interesting To Christian Moralists Who Decline The Combat; To Experienced Duellists, And To Benevolent Legislators (London, 1829); The Code of Honor: or, The Thirty-Nine Articles; with an Appendix, Showing the Whole Manner in which The Duel is to be Conducted; with Amusing Anecdotes, Illustrative of Duelling; to which is prefixed a Dissertation on the Origin and Progress of the Duello (Baltimore, MD, 1847), and John Lyde Wilson, The Code of Honor; or the Rules for the Government of Principals and Seconds in Duelling (Charleston, SC, 1858). Wilson was a former governor of South Carolina and his “code”, originally published in 1838, was the most widely followed procedural manual for dueling in the United States. His book had an especially avid following throughout the South. 6 Some authors go so far as to suggest that the earliest recorded duel took place between Cain and Abel. They argue that according to Genesis 4:8, Cain called his brother Abel out and met him in the field where Abel was slain by Cain. Despite this claim of biblical precedence, the history of dueling is generally linked to the age of chivalry and the concept of judicial combat. It was believed at this time that any victor in a trial by combat must be in the right, for God had seen fit to spare his life and given him victory over his opponent. Victory was equated with being right. See Andrew Steinmetz, The Romance of Duelling in All Times and Countries, 1 (London, 1868),

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exercised by the well-educated male members of society, and the practice was regulated by strict rules of procedure known as the code duello. The failure to follow these rules could cause an offender to be charged with murder or, at the least, to be socially disgraced.7 Boys born of privilege were usually schooled in the proper rules for participating in duels and often given a pair of dueling pistols as a symbol of their rise to manhood. Although duels were usually fought in secluded settings to avoid possible prosecution in jurisdictions that prohibited such action, challenging an individual to a duel was a public demonstration of one man’s moral superiority over another. Failure to accept a challenge was tantamount to being branded a coward and often led to severe societal repercussions.8 The power and influence that public opinion had on the entire culture of honor cannot be emphasized too strongly. Whether actual or implied, public opinion was the lynchpin of the debate over dueling. Advocates of the code and its opponents all claimed that public opinion was the reason that dueling continued.9 The fear of losing one’s

pp. 17–59; Lorenzo Sabine, Notes on Duels and Duelling, Alphabetically Arranged, with a Preliminary Historical Essay (Boston, 1855), pp. 1–4; and Robert Baldick, The Duel: A History of Duelling (London, 1965), pp. 11–48. 7 The most famous case of an individual being prosecuted for dueling occurred in Ireland in 1808. Two British officers, a Major Campbell and a Captain Boyd, had a disagreement over the proper way to issue an order. This disagreement led to a duel held in a small private room without the benefit of seconds. Boyd was mortally wounded in the exchange of shots and indicated to a fellow officer who came to his aid that Campbell had rushed him into the duel and that he had not acted fairly. Subsequently, Campbell was tried for murder and hung despite the best efforts of his wife to gain him a reprieve from the King. His crime was not that he had killed Boyd in a duel but that he had not followed the established rules of the code duello. See Henry Alexander Campbell, Particulars Respecting the Trial, Condemnation and Execution of Major Henry Alexander Campbell, at the Armagh Assizers, August 10, 1808, for Killing, in a Duel, Captain Alexander Boyd: together with Two Letters by Major Campbell, One to his Confidential Friend, Written Several Months Previous to his Condemnation, the Other to His Wife, on the Day Previous to His Execution, and which He Continues Writing and Dating Hour to Hour, Until Within a Few Minutes of His Exit: also a Letter by Mrs. Campbell to Her Condemned Husband in Prison, and a Memorial to His Majesty, Petitioning the Life of Her Husband (Boston, 1808). 8 Alexander Hamilton was concerned about the societal repercussions that he might face if he refused Aaron Burr’s challenge. See Sabine, Notes on Duels, pp. 202–203; Joanne B. Freeman, “Dueling as Politics: Reinterpreting the Burr-Hamilton Duel,” William and Mary Quarterly 53 (April 1996), 292; and Joanne B. Freeman, Affairs of Honor: National Politics in the New Republic (New Haven, CT, 2001), pp. xv–xxiv, 189–90. For a detailed analysis of the culture of honor and its place in shaping national politics in the early years of the United States, see Freeman, Affairs of Honor. 9 Wilson, The Code of Honor, pp. 3–10 and Sabine, Notes on Duels, pp. 38–44.

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personal honor and reputation became such a motivating factor that men opposed to dueling on moral or religious grounds felt themselves impelled to accept a challenge. Hamilton believed that he had to accept Burr’s challenge even if he objected to the custom on religious grounds. It was fear rather than courage that brought Hamilton to the dueling grounds in Weehawken to face Burr.10 The battle to end the social custom of dueling was in essence a rhetorical battle in which the opponents of the code duello sought to symbolically manage the public’s perception of the dueling. Legislation alone could not stop the custom.11 Hence, the war against dueling was waged on the battlefield of public opinion. To win this war, the opponents of dueling understood that they had to convince the public to view the code of honor and all those who subscribed to it as public pariahs. Dueling would only end when the public’s view of the attainment and maintenance of personal honor changed.12 Therefore, it fell to rhetors, whose position in society gave them a moral platform to speak out against the immorality of this social custom. Only the Christian clergy, by their profession, could speak out and lead the battle against the widely accepted practice of dueling without having to fear the consequences of the code duello.13 Clergy from a number of different denominations fought this battle on two fronts. First, they spoke out against dueling in the hope of changing the public’s opinion of the practice, and, second, they helped to form anti-dueling associations that advocated for legislative changes on the local, state, and national level. The clergy sought to influence 10

W.J. Rorabaugh, “The Political Duel in the Early Republic: Burr v. Hamilton,” Journal of the Early Republic 15 (Spring 1995), 18. 11 C.A. Hartwell Wells, “The End of the Affair? Anti-Dueling Laws and Social Norms in Antebellum America,” Vanderbilt Law Review 54.4 (2001), 1831–47. Wells argues that social norms had to change first before the laws enacted to curb the practice of dueling were enforced. 12 This position was echoed by James Sega when he argued, “Public Opinion is not self-created: the various and opposite interests of those, who united themselves in civil society gave it birth. The public opinion, which requires, or sanctions dueling, in no country, is the majority of the individual opinions of a whole community; yet it will always be the reigning one, unless means are resorted to, for to have the whole nation expressing their opinion against that practice” (What is True Civilization, or Means to Suppress the Practice of Duelling, To Prevent, or to Punish Crimes, and to Abolish the Punishment of Death [Boston, 1830], p. 12). 13 Although a few members of the clergy did fight duels, it was generally recognized that they could refuse to participate in caning or dueling without suffering the loss of honor. See Bertram Wyatt-Brown, Southern Honor: Ethics and Behavior in the Old South (New York, 1982), p. 354.


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American culture and politics not from a Federalist or Republican viewpoint, but from a religious perspective. Hence, they offered a sacred option, separate from political partisanship, motivated by their Christian faith and dedicated to reforming American culture.14 The Death of Hamilton and the Beginning of a Social Movement At first glance, Alexander Hamilton seems an unlikely candidate to be the impetus of a social movement led by clergy. Though he was one of the most well known of the founders, having served as Washington’s aide-de-camp during the war and later as the first Secretary of the Treasury and General of the Army, he was also an admitted adulterer. Seven years before his death at the hands of Aaron Burr, Hamilton publicly admitted that he had engaged in an affair with a Mrs Reynolds.15 This disclosure produced universal condemnation by the nation’s clergy as indicated by the many allusions to it in the sermons preached after his death. Considering this radical change in perspective, the rhetorical critic must then ask, “Why did the ministers rise up to praise an admitted adulterer and oppose dueling?” and “How and why was he rhetorically transformed by these ministers from an admitted adulterer to a Christian saint?” The answer to these questions resides in Hamilton’s deathbed confession or homologia.16 14 Abzug and Rorabaugh suggest that dueling was the first “social sin” of the Second Great Awakening that ministers rose up to oppose. Dueling therefore set the foundation for ministers to subsequently oppose drunkenness, Sabbath-breaking, and slaveholding. See Robert H. Abzug, Cosmos Crumbling: American Reform and Religious Imagination (New York, 1994), pp. 43–44 and Rorabaugh, “The Political Duel,” p. 20. The anti-dueling movement began to solidify as a result of Lyman Beecher’s sermon against dueling. See Lyman Beecher, The Remedy for Duelling, A Sermon, Delivered before the Presbytery of Long Island at the Opening of Their Session at Aquebogue, April 16, 1806 (Sag-Harbor, NY, 1809). It is interesting to note that this sermon was adapted thirty-two years later to oppose slaveholding. See Lyman Beecher, A Sermon Entitled “The Remedy for Dueling” by Rev. Lyman Beecher, D.D. Applied to the Crime of Slaveholding by One of his Former Parishioners (Boston, 1838). 15 In August of 1797 Hamilton published a pamphlet in response to charges that he used his position as Secretary of the Treasury to grant favors to James Reynolds, the husband of Maria Reynolds, with whom he had had an affair. He admitted the affair with Mrs Reynolds but vehemently denied that he gave any political or economic favors to Mr Reynolds. In Hamilton’s mind, he was guilty of a personal, not a public, indiscretion. See The Papers of Alexander Hamilton, ed. Harold, C. Syrett, 21 April 1797–July 1798 (New York, 1974), pp. 215–67. 16 Homologia is the Greek term meaning “to affirm or confess”. It is used in the New Testament to indicate when individuals confess their sins in the hope of being granted salvation.

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Hamilton did not immediately succumb to the wound he received from Burr; rather, he was rowed back to New York accompanied by his surgeon, Dr Hosack, and his second, Nathaniel Pendleton, and taken to the house of his friend, William Bayard. According to the testimony of Dr Hosack, Hamilton knew as soon as he was shot that his injury was fatal, for he said, “This is a mortal wound, Doctor”.17 The General knew that he would not survive long and requested that a runner be sent to bring back first, Episcopal Bishop Benjamin Moore and later, Dutch Reformed minister Reverend John Mitchell Mason.18 It was Hamilton’s desire to reconcile himself to God and the Church before he died. After his death, both these ministers published their accounts of their soteriological conversations with the deceased and his reaffirmation of his Christian faith in the local papers. These accounts were subsequently republished in newspapers across the country.19

17

The Papers of Alexander Hamilton, 26, pp. 344–47. Right Reverend Benjamin Moore, D.D. was the pastor of Trinity Episcopal Church in New York City, and from 1801–1811 was President of Columbia College, Alexander Hamilton’s alma mater. For further biographical information on Bishop Moore see William B. Sprague, Annals of the American Pulpit or Commemorative Notices of Distinguished American Clergyman of Various Denominations, From the Early Settlement of the Country to the Close of the Year Eighteen Hundred and Fifty-five, 5, Episcopalian (New York, 1860), pp. 299–304; The Papers of Alexander Hamilton, 26, pp. 314–16; William Coleman, A Collection of the Facts and Documents, Relative to the Death of Major-General Alexander Hamilton; with Comments: Together with the Various Orations, Sermons, and Eulogies, that have been Published or Written on His Life and Character (1804; facsimile reproduction, Austin, TX, 1972), pp. 48–50; Connecticut Gazette and Commercial Intelligencer, 18 July 1804; and The Maryland Gazette, 19 July 1804. Bishop Moore’s narrative of his meeting with the dying Hamilton was first published in the New York Evening Post on 12 July 1804 and then subsequently republished in newspapers across the country (Mason, An Oration, pp. 37–40). There is some confusion as to whether Mason sent his letter to the editor of the Commercial Advertiser or the editor of the Evening Post. Coleman titles the letter as coming to him at the Post in his book, but in Mason’s own published panegyric it is titled as being sent to the editors of the Advertiser. Reverend John Mitchell Mason, D.D. was ordained in the Associated Reformed Church at the time of Hamilton’s death. In 1822 he transferred his membership to the Presbyterian Church. During his lifetime he held various pastorates, helped found a Reformed Seminary, served as Provost of Columbia College and President of Dickerson College. He was well known as a minister and speaker in America in the early nineteenth century. For further biographical information see William B. Sprague, Annals of the American Pulpit or Commemorative Notices of Distinguished American Clergyman of Various Denominations, From the Early Settlement of the Country to the Close of the Year Eighteen Hundred and Fifty-five, vols. 3 and 4, Presbyterian (New York, 1858), pp. 1–8. 19 Two printed public criticisms of Bishop Moore and Reverend Mason’s testimonies regarding Hamilton’s deathbed declaration were published in the Prospect; or View of 18


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The clergy who ministered to the dying man testified that they did not attend to the general to offer him simple comfort. Nor did they acquiesce to his requests without assurances from Hamilton himself that he was willing to repent from his sins and believe in the saving grace of Jesus Christ. Both Moore and Mason also requested that Hamilton assert that dueling was evil and that he had no ill feelings against Burr. Mason’s and Moore’s statements are not examples of traditional rhetorical apologia but rather of a uniquely religious rhetorical strategy, a homologia or faith confession.20 Their narratives portrayed a penitent suffering as a result of his own actions, who was desperately seeking the Moral World, a forum for Thomas Paine’s and Elihu Palmer’s anti-Christian, deistical perspective. Koch claims that these attacks on Moore and Mason’s testimony were actually written by Thomas Paine (G. Adolf Koch, Religion of the American Enlightenment [New York, 1968], pp. 141–43). However, this claim cannot be substantiated beyond doubt because each letter was signed with a nom de plume. See “To Mr. Moore of New York, Commonly Called, Bishop Moore,” Prospect; or View of the Moral World, 4 August 1804, pp. 276–78 and “To the Rev. John Mason, One of the Ministers of the Scotch Presbyterian Church of New York; With Remarks on his account of the visit he made to the late General Hamilton,” Prospect; or View of the Moral World, 18 August 1804, pp. 290–94. In this last letter addressed to Mason, the author declared, “Between you and your rival in communion ceremonies, Dr. Moore, of the Episcopal church, you have, in order to make yourselves appear of some importance, reduced General Hamilton’s character to that of a feeble-minded man, who in going out of this world wanted a passport from a priest. Which of you was first or last applied to for this purpose is a matter of no consequence” (p. 294). This letter is signed “A Member of the Deistical Congregation”. 20 Homologia varies from the traditional view of apologia because the individuals are not attempting to vindicate their reputations or blame others for their actions. Rather, penitents take full responsibility for their actions and look to God for forgiveness. Homologia implies an “other world” focus and may not involve a public declaration. Kruse argues that sports figures who say “I’m sorry” are using an apologic strategy that is similar to that employed by individuals who publicly recant heresy and pray for salvation. These types of public statements may act as a defense of the accused, or at the least, a strategy for defending their actions. However, a simple declaration of contrition does not meet the classical definition of an apologia. If this was the case, then all acts of public liturgical contrition could be viewed as rhetorical defensive strategies. There is no indication that Alexander Hamilton intended to have his interactions with Bishop Moore or Reverend Mason made public and it is doubtful that he was considering his legacy while dying of a bullet wound. See Noreen Wales Kruse, “Apologia in Team Sport,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 67 (August 1981), 270–83 and Brett A. Miller, Divine Apology: The Discourse of Religious Image Restoration (Westport, CT, 2002), pp. 135–52. Miller, following the perspective of Kruse, argues that Christians, in particular, use mortification in their apologia and often define God as the audience of their apology. Although Miller’s perspective is interesting, it suffers by defining “Christian apologia” in an expansive manner that is not suggested by classical models. In his definition, all prayers of contrition by a Christian become “apologia”, and his perspective loses much of its heuristic value.

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spiritual consolation. Although the ministers’ testimonies complimented the dying Hamilton in their concluding remarks, they offered no defense for his actions. Rather, they demanded that he repudiate them. In Mason’s and Moore’s soteriological perspectives, Hamilton had no defense available for his spiritual condition, nor justification for his previous actions. The only pathway available to the dying general was to confess his sins and throw himself on the mercies of God. In these testimonies, Hamilton became an object lesson against the social custom of dueling and for the saving grace of the Christian faith. A homologia is a powerful motivating force for those who share that particular religious perspective. Hamilton’s homologia, as conveyed by Moore and Mason, portrayed the general as a penitent sinner embracing the Christian gospel. This sacred perspective, combined with the national ethos of its authors, strongly motivated ministers across the country to speak out against the social custom of dueling, for it was as a result of this barbaric social custom that Christianity had lost a “new” and influential advocate. The death of General Alexander Hamilton in a duel, together with the testimonies of the deceased’s final hours as a sincere penitent, combined to create the catalytic event that called the anti-dueling movement into existence.21 The seeds of this movement were brought forth by the Hamilton’s death, but they sprouted and grew because they landed in the fertile ground prepared by the Second Great Awakening. Clerical Calls for Dueling’s Demise As the 18th century came to a close in America, a revival of religious fervor known as the Second Great Awakening began to spread across the country.22 The stale prescriptive religion of many congregations, especially in the East, began to change as ministers and people began to experience the new lively perspective that emphasized a person’s ability to call directly on God for salvation. Reflecting the growing movement

21 James Darsey, “From ‘Gay is Good’ to the Scourge of AIDS: The Evolution of Gay Liberation Rhetoric 1977–1990,” Communication Studies 42 (Spring 1991), 43–66. Darsey argues that social movements and their derivative discourse are often a reaction to a significant historical catalytic event. 22 For an overview of the influence of evangelical Christianity in antebellum America, see Charles I. Foster, An Errand of Mercy: The Evangelical United Front 1790– 1837 (Chapel Hill, NC, 1960).


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of popular democracy, Christianity became the religious partner in the process of encouraging people that they could make a difference in society.23 The ministers preaching their panegyrics on Alexander Hamilton were determined to motivate their audiences to change society through challenging the custom of dueling. They did this by providing specific remedies that the average congregant and citizen could employ. Specifically, the clergy directed their arguments toward influencing parents, women, newspapers editors, and voters. Finally, the clergy advocated for the formation of anti-dueling associations that could take the fight against dueling to the legislative chambers and legally end this barbaric practice. The first of the remedies for dueling that the clergy suggested was directed toward parents and their children. The ministers understood that education and proper modeling were essential to rear a generation of individuals who abhorred the social custom of dueling. That is why Congregational minister Samuel Spring exhorted parents to teach their children to respect and follow the laws of God: Then, O parents, then teach your children early to keep the divine commands; and as they become impressed with a sense of obligation they will tremble while repeating the sixth, which says, “Thou shalt not kill.” But O remember that without this early education children will commence Duellists in miniature before they escape your arms.24

These ministers were attempting to persuade parents that they had a religious obligation to teach their children respect for both divine and common laws. Their goal was to encourage parents to teach their youth 23 Nathan O. Hatch, The Democratization of American Christianity (New Haven, CT, 1989), pp. 3–16. 24 Spring, A Discourse, pp. 26–27. Here and in subsequent quotations taken from this sermon, the spelling of certain words containing the letter “s” has been modernized to make it easier to read. The Reverend Samuel Spring, D.D. was born in 1746 in Massachusetts. He was educated at the College of New Jersey (Princeton) under the tutelage of John Witherspoon, Samuel Hopkins, and Joseph Bellamy. In 1775 he joined the Continental Army and was chaplain for Benedict Arnold’s failed expedition to Canada. He left the army the following year and assumed the pastorate at a Congregational church at Newburyport, Massachusetts. Theologically, he was an “old school” Calvinist and opponent to Unitarianism. He was also one of the founders of Andover Theological Seminary. He died in 1819. For further biographical information on Reverend Spring, see William B. Sprague, Annals of the American Pulpit or Commemorative Notices of Distinguished American Clergyman of Various Denominations, From the Early Settlement of the Country to the Close of the Year Eighteen Hundred and Fifty-five vol. 1 and 2, Trinitarian Congregational (New York, 1856), pp. 85–89.

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“not rashly to sport with life, nor lightly to wring the widow’s heart with sorrows, and fill the orphan’s eyes with tears” by participating in a duel.25 To strengthen his arguments on this topic, Episcopal priest Nathaniel Bowen asked the parents, especially the fathers, to teach their children the proper way “to seek the honor of their names, the dignity of their characters, the tranquility of their lives and the felicity of their souls” and “to despise the folly, abhor the guilt, and deplore the wretchedness of the duelist”.26 Reverend Bowen clarified his comments on honor and dignity by recommending that parents teach their children that they could attain these important traits “through the business of life, and the various service of their country” rather than with a pistol on the dueling grounds.27 In keeping with their view that they had a religious obligation to denounce dueling, the ministers took on a pastoral role to persuade parents in their audience to protect their families from future grief by resisting dueling. It was the clergy’s hope that if parents opposed dueling and made “it a part of the education of our children, to inspire them with a deep abhorrence of this inhuman practice”, this custom would find no new victims to bloody its fields of honor.28 The second rhetorical appeal made by many of these ministers was directed toward women with the hope that they could persuade their fathers, brothers, and husbands not to participate in dueling. Calling women the “gentler” and “more virtuous sex”, these ministers urged them to unite and declare their abhorrence to the code duello. They argued that women had much to lose from “affairs of honor”; as

25

Nott, Miscellaneous, p. 92 and Coleman, A Collection, p. 109. Nathaniel Bowen, Duelling, Under Any Circumstances, the Extreme of Folly: A Sermon, Preached October 1807, in St. Michael’s Church (Charleston, SC, 1823), pp. 24–25. 27 Ibid., p. 25. 28 Frederick Beasley, A Sermon on Duelling Delivered in Christ-Church, Baltimore, April 28, 1811 (Baltimore, MD, 1811), p. 40. Father Beasley was born in North Carolina in 1777 and he graduated with honors from the College of New Jersey (Princeton) in 1797. Bishop Benjamin Moore of New York ordained him a priest in 1802. In 1813 he resigned his position as an associate rector to assume the office of provost of the University of Pennsylvania, a position he held until 1828. Columbia College and the University of Pennsylvania honored him with the degree of Doctor of Divinity in 1815. He died in 1845. For further biographical information on Fr Beasley, D.D., see William B. Sprague, Annals of the American Pulpit or Commemorative Notices of Distinguished American Clergyman of Various Denominations, From the Early Settlement of the Country to the Close of the Year Eighteen Hundred and Fifty-five, 5, Episcopalian (New York, 1858), pp. 477–84. 26


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Lutheran pastor John Bachman explained, “The actors in these bloody scenes are their fathers, their husbands, their brothers, or their lovers”.29 Women gained little from men’s demonstration of honor on the dueling grounds, but they risked their financial and domestic security “for future happiness”.30 The ministers desired to persuade the women of their audience to reject the false concept of honor supported by the duelists and, instead, influence the men in their lives to follow a righteous sense of honor. Roman Catholic Bishop John England suggested that the way women encouraged their men in the Revolutionary War was an example of the propagation of a proper concept of honor. He reminded women that In the day of trial, then, mothers were found faithful to their country and its right; they encouraged their husbands, their brothers, and their sons to exhibit their prowess, not in disgraceful domestic feuds, but in deeds of valor for the defense of their homes, and the vindication of their freedom; they were proud to see them marshaled under the command of Washington, who was too intrepid to accept a challenge.31

Reminding the women of the noble and patriotic actions of those who preceded them and invoking the name of Washington was a powerful persuasive technique, for it implied that the fate of the Revolutionary War and the birth of the nation rested on their influence. The idea that women were the true power in society was elucidated in an 29 John Bachman, Sermon on Dueling (Charleston, SC, n.d.), p. 12. Bachman was a Lutheran minister serving in Charleston, SC. He was instrumental in both the founding of the Lutheran synod of South Carolina and its first Lutheran seminary. He was also a respected naturalist and associate of John James Audubon. These two men collaborated on a number of published works and this resulted in Reverend Bachman being awarded a Ph.D. by the University of Berlin in 1838. For further biographical information see Allen Johnson, ed. Dictionary of American Biography, 1, Abbe-Brazer (New York, 1957), pp. 466–67. 30 Ibid., p. 12. 31 John England, The Works of the Right Reverend John England, First Bishop of Charleston, ed. Sebastian G. Messmer, 7, Address on the Origin and History of the Duel, Delivered Before the Anti-Dueling Society of Charleston, S.C,. in the Cathedral of Charleston, 1828. (Cleveland, 1908), p. 448. John England was born in Ireland in 1786. After becoming a priest he used the Irish press to advocate for changes in the deportation and transportation of Irish prisoners to Australia. In 1820 he was made the first bishop of Charleston, South Carolina, and upon his arrival in the city he set about reorganizing the diocese. During his tenure as bishop he became an advocate for Catholic education, even opening a school for freed slaves. He was a prolific writer and enthusiastic preacher, becoming the first Catholic priest to address the House of Representatives. For more information, see Allen Johnson and Dumas Malone, eds., Dictionary of American Biography. vol. III, part 1 and 2, Cushman-Fraser (New York, 1958), pp. 161–163.

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anti-dueling pamphlet addressed specifically to women that reasoned, “The influence of females on the habits and manners of men has been felt and acknowledged by every enlightened statesman and philosopher. They have been appropriately styled the conservators of manners”.32 This argument claimed that although men may make the laws, women make the manners because they “hold an empire over the habits and manners of society as absolute as it is silent and unobtrusive”.33 This pamphlet argued that only women could truly influence men to stop participating in duels, and its anonymous female author from Mississippi contended If such is the tyranny of popular opinion, that the commanding intellect of Hamilton could not resist though opposed in principle and feelings to the practice to which he fell a victim; if men act in direct opposition to the dictates of nature and of conscience, rather than incur the odium which fashion has attached to a consistent and rational course, it is fully time to turn the current. This will be admitted by all; but who are to be the agents? We answer – females.34

How would women stop the practice of dueling? According to this pamphlet, they would do this by demonstrating to men their disdain for all who practiced dueling and refusing to marry any man who adhered to that code. Finally, this publication suggested a Lysistratan solution to the social problem of dueling by suggesting that women would “incur an awful responsibility if we neglect to ‘use the means which God and nature have put in our hands’, to purify our favored country from this deep stain upon her moral character, and violation of her salutary laws”.35 It appears that the “means” that the author of this work suggested is withholding sex from all who went to the dueling grounds. The author assumed that the remedies women employed would work better to change public opinion and prevent duels than any other type of persuasion or even legislative action.36 Together with the remedies directed toward parents and women, the ministers also advocated that the nation’s newspapers had a

32 On Duelling, Addressed to American Ladies, By A Lady of Mississippi (New York, 1829), p. 1. 33 Ibid., pp. 1, 3. 34 Ibid., p. 7. The italics and punctuation are in the original document. 35 Ibid., p. 7. The internal quotation marks are in the original document. Lysistrata is a play by Aristophanes in which the women of Athens refuse to have sex with their men unless they stop fighting their war with Sparta. The idea is “No Peace, No Sex”. 36 Ibid., p. 3.


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responsibility to join the battle against the code duello. Newspapers played an important role by inciting challenges that often led two parties to meet at the dueling grounds to settle their disagreements. Negative comments made about a rival would be published in a newspaper in the hope that this action would lead to a challenge. If the offended party refused an interview, the challenger often posted a comment in the local papers indicating that his rival was a coward for refusing to settle this affair in an honorable fashion. Once the duel was concluded, then newspapers energetically publicized the details of the interview so both parties, regardless of the outcome, could be portrayed as honorable gentlemen. History tells us that Burr sent Hamilton an article from a newspaper in which a Dr Cooper claimed to be present at a party where the General made despairing comments concerning the Vice-President.37 It is this article that ignited the correspondences that led both men to that fateful interview at Weehawken. For all these reasons, the ministers realized that the nation’s newspapers could be a powerful force to influence public opinion and fight the custom of dueling. Reverend Frederick Beasley called on all newspapers to “cease entirely to give publicity to transactions of this nature, or not fail to communicate them, in such terms as shall excite a general abhorrence and detestation of them”.38 The Reverend John Bachman also reflected this view when he argued that newspapers “should refuse to insert a single line, and leave the combatants, if they take pride in the matter, to trumpet their own praises in the ears of those who approve of such reckless and criminal exploits”.39 Although Beasley and Bachman suggested that newspapers stop publishing accounts of duels, the Reverend John Black and various clergy of the city of Pittsburgh went further and passed an anti-dueling resolution. This resolution asked all newspaper editors to use the power of the press to influence public opinion “against this barbarous and murderous practice, until it shall be stamped with its own proper infamy, and those who shall be guilty of this crime be considered and treated as the basest of murderers”.40 They even requested that “the editors of newspapers, opposed to Dueling, be requested to publish” all their anti-dueling resolutions in 37

Chernow, Alexander Hamilton, pp. 680–83. Beasley, A Sermon on Duelling, p. 39. 39 Bachman, Sermon on Dueling, p. 12. 40 John Black, A Sermon on National Righteousness and Sin. Delivered in the First Presbyterian Church, Pittsburgh, April 3. 1827, Before a Large Assembly, Convened for the Purpose of Adopting Resolutions Against Duelling (Pittsburgh, 1827), p. 15. 38

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the hope that the dissemination of this information would inspire others to join in the eradication of this crime.41 The clergy also proposed legal remedies to end the practice. Many states had anti-dueling laws in place to dissuade participation in “affairs of honor”. Consequently, Hamilton and Burr met for their interview at Weehawken, New Jersey because New York had statutes against dueling. However, despite the existence of these laws, few individuals were ever prosecuted for dueling because the enforcement of the laws often rested with the same individuals who ascribed to the code of honor. The ministers understood that anti-dueling laws were seldom implemented, and, therefore, they called on politicians and civil magistrates to enforce the law. Responding to the death of Hamilton in his panegyric, Reverend Eliphalet Nott appealed to the elected officials of New York when he pleaded, Let, then, the governor see that the laws are executed; let the council displace the man who offends against their majesty; let the courts of justice frown from their bar, as unworthy to appear before them, the murderer of his accomplices.42

Baptist minister Richard Furman requested that “the laws operate, with such precision and force, against the practice, that those who have temerity to infringe them may not escape with impunity”.43 In his

41

Ibid., p. 16. Nott, Miscellaneous, p. 110 and Coleman, A Collection, p. 124. Reverend Eliphalet Nott, D.D., a Presbyterian clergyman, educator, inventor, and president of Union College for sixty-two years, was thirty-one years old when he preached his famous eulogy of Hamilton on 29 July 1804, just eighteen days after that fateful duel. He had resided in Albany for only six years, but his reputation as an eloquent and talented speaker grew during this time until he was considered one of the most gifted preachers in the country. An early and somewhat biased biography of Dr Nott is C[ornelius]Van Santvoord, and Taylor Lewis, Memoirs of Eliphalet Nott, D.D. LL.D. for Sixty-Two Years President of Union College (New York, 1876). However, the most thorough biography on the Reverend Nott is Condman Hislop, Eliphalet Nott (Middletown, CT, 1971). 43 Furman, Death’s Dominion, p. 21. Richard Furman, D.D., was born in the state of New York in 1755. After moving with his family to South Carolina he experienced conversion, joined the Baptist Church and was ordained the pastor of a local congregation before he was nineteen years old. He was such a passionate advocate for the colonies against Britain during the Revolutionary War that Cornwallis is said to have placed a price on his head. Fleeing South Carolina until the end of the war he returned and soon became the leader of the state’s Baptists. In 1789 he accepted the call to pastor the Baptist Church of Charleston and later became an important member of the constitutional convention of his state. From 1790 until his death in 1825, Furman was the most influential religious figure in the South. This sermon was preached at the Baptist Church in Charleston before the South Carolina State Society of the Cincinnati. 42


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Sermon on Duelling, Reverend Beasley exhorted civil magistrates to be examples of proper law-abiding citizens through enforcing the statutes against dueling. He declared, “Let them level against it the several penalties of the law, and let her magistrates be vigilant at their posts, and see that those laws be executed and those severe penalties inflicted”.44 The clergy combined their requests for enforcing existing laws with calls for new laws to prevent the practice. Calling on lawmakers to act out of their respect for the law and their fear of God, Congregational minister Hezekiah Woodruff declared, If laws are not enacted, as effectually to secure the rights of every citizen, to punish every offender, to maintain the dignity … let me call on you, ye Legislators, in the fear and in the name of God, speedily, to enact them.45

The clergy, sharing the vision of a “righteous society”, were motivated to advocate for the cessation of dueling because it violated Divine precepts that they viewed as the foundation for common law. Therefore, the ministers saw it as their duty to encourage their people to follow the nation’s laws, while at the same time they argued that lawmakers must, by example, follow the laws they enact. This idea was expressed by U.S. Navy chaplain Reverend Walter Colton in his anti-dueling sermon when he asked for a national effort to eradicate “affairs of honor”. He pronounced, We appeal to the legislative powers of each state in this Union, for the suppression of this vice within their respective jurisdictions. We call upon them for the enactment and rigid execution of those laws, which may put an end to this growing evil.46

The desire for a national legislative movement against dueling was also affirmed by the clergy of the city of Pittsburgh when they adopted the

For further biographical information see Allen Johnson and Dumas Malone, eds., Dictionary of American Biography, 4, Fraunces-Hibbard (New York, 1932), pp. 76–77 and William B. Sprague, Annals of the American Pulpit or Commemorative Notices of Distinguished American Clergyman of Various Denominations, From the Early Settlement of the Country to the Close of the Year Eighteen Hundred and Fifty-five, 6, Baptist (New York, 1865), pp. 161–65. 44 Beasley, A Sermon on Duelling, p. 39. 45 Woodruff, Danger of Ambition, p. 22. 46 Walter Colton, Remarks on Dueling (New York, 1828), p. 56. In his sermon he also requests that those who kill their challenger in a duel be tried for murder, and those principals and seconds who survive the contest be declared as publicly infamous and treated as felons by society.

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following resolution: “That all good Citizens be requested to unite in petitioning our National Legislature, to enact such laws against Dueling as to them shall appear most effectual, to arrest its progress, and entirely banish it from the nation”.47 Because these clergy understood that dueling was practiced by society’s elite, who viewed themselves as being above the common law, they must not only advocate that legislators enforce existing laws and institute new statutes, but they must also encourage their audiences to impel elected officials to change the status quo through the democratic principle of suffrage. A uniquely American remedy advocated by these clergy was their attempt to persuade the public to withhold their vote from any individual who had participated in a duel. In this way, the ministers intended to force the social and political leaders of society to acquiesce to their demands. The first minister to advocate the withholding of suffrage from any duelist seeking public office was the Reverend Spring. He suggested in his anti-dueling sermon that since dueling was a custom and such customs were only “the offspring of the public mind”, a concerted effort on the part of the public to let their true opinions be known through the ballot box would bring a swift end to the practice.48 Conversely, the failure of the public to arise and oppose dueling would have ominous effects on the country, for, he argued, “Without public influence to punish a Duelist or disqualify him from holding any office in the union except that of a retired penitent we are a ruined nation”.49 Spring continued his warning regarding the appropriateness of duelists serving as public officials when he cautioned his audience: Let us avoid all those who are formed and almost fashioned for Duellists. For can we safely confide in rulers who esteem it the perfection of honor to die like fools? … Let us therefore elect men to govern the nation, who have established self-government. For he who wisely governs himself is the best of rulers and the best of men; and may, with answerable qualifications, be trusted with the government of others. Let him have the direction of millions who has wisdom to manage himself: but never, never invest any one with a responsible office, who had no dominion over his own passions.50

47 48 49 50

Black, National Righteousness and Sin, p. 15. Spring, A Discourse, p. 22. Ibid., p. 22. Ibid., pp. 24–25.


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Spring’s argument that elected officials must be individuals who practice self-control was similar to James Madison’s stance as expressed in the Federalist Papers: “In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed: and in the next place oblige it to control itself ”.51 Since this government was composed of individuals elected by the people from the people, a government was only as moral and as strong as its elected officials. Elect immoral and weak politicians and the country would become weak and immoral, according to ministers like the Reverend Spring. A failure on the part of the people to prevent these duelists from holding public office may cause God to prematurely judge the nation for its sinfulness. The most influential minister to advocate the use of public suffrage against dueling was the Reverend Lyman Beecher. On 16 April 1806, almost two years after the death of Alexander Hamilton, Beecher presented an address entitled “The Remedy for Duelling”, before the Presbytery of Long Island at Aquebogue.52 This sermon was so powerful that the members of the Presbytery immediately requested that Beecher publish it. In this discourse, he argued that all members of society, especially Christians, should rise up and fight this evil.53 However, the most dramatic and important message of Beecher’s sermon was not his case against dueling itself, but his solution to the problem of genteel society’s apparent acceptance of dueling as a method of resolving matters of honor between gentlemen. Beecher argued, 51 James Madison, Alexander Hamilton and John Jay, The Federalist Papers, ed. Isaac Kramnik, (London, 1987), no. 51, pp. 319–20. It is not surprising that Madison and Spring would share this perspective since both men studied under the Reverend John Witherspoon at the College of New Jersey. 52 Beecher, Remedy for Duelling. After the wide publication of Beecher’s sermon other ministers began to incorporate his solution into their own anti-dueling discourses. See Bachman, Sermon on Dueling, pp. 11–12; Black, National Righteousness and Sin, p. 15; and Andrew Wylie, The Sin of Duelling, Preached at Washington Pa., April 1827 (Pittsburgh, 1828), pp. 5–6. At the time that he preached this sermon Wylie was the president of Washington College; however, by the end of 1828 he resigned this post to assume the presidency of Indiana College. Under his direction the college made a transition to university status in 1838 becoming Indiana University. In 1842 he became dissatisfied with the Presbyterian Church and joined the Episcopal Church. He was ordained a priest in this denomination in 1842 while still president of the university. For further biographical information on Fr. Andrew Wylie, D.D., see Dumas Malone, ed., Dictionary of American Biography, X, Troye-Zunser (New York, 1936), pp. 577–78. 53 Beecher, Remedy for Duelling, p. 31.

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“Withholding the public suffrage from duelists is the only method in which there is the least prospect of arresting the practice of dueling”.54 Hence, Beecher became one of the first United States clergymen to advocate that American Christians should actively vote against politicians because of their stand on a social issue. Beecher was not troubled by the “sacred” separation between church and state. Rather, he believed that Christians had a duty and right to confront, influence, and change the inadequacies of society. The job of the minister, in his paradigm, was first of all to be an evangelist for the gospel and, second, to act as a catalyst for societal change.55 According to Beecher, any other position for the Christian was unbiblical and, therefore, unacceptable. As with many sermons published in the early 1800s, Lyman Beecher listed the theme verse for his discourse before the actual text of the sermon began. For his indictment of dueling, he chose a verse from the fifty-ninth chapter of the book of the prophet Isaiah, which reads, “And the judgment is turned away backward, and justice standeth afar off; for truth is fallen in the streets and equity cannot enter”.56 In this verse we see Beecher’s plan of argumentation. He intended to equate “the judgment turned away backward” to the law’s nonchalant attitude toward punishing the duelist; “justice standeth afar off ” to the common people’s, and especially to the Christian’s, lack of moral outrage over dueling; and “truth is fallen in the streets and equity cannot enter” to the overall harm that dueling causes in society. As indicated by his theme verse, Beecher argued that dueling was a social and religious evil that all individuals, particularly members of the church, must rise up and stand against. Furthermore, he explained his solution to this social and spiritual exigence in his sermon’s thesis when he stated, “the object of the ensuing discourse is to exhibit and illustrate the reasons that should induce every man to withhold his vote from any person who has fought or aided in fighting a duel”.57 54

Ibid., p. 22. It seems apparent that Lyman Beecher passed on his paradigm to his children: Catherine Ester Beecher, a pioneer in the education of women; William Henry Beecher, a minister; Edward Beecher, a minister and ardent abolitionist; Mary Foote Beecher, former teacher; George Beecher, a minister; Harriet Beecher Stowe, author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin; Henry Ward Beecher, a nationally known orator and minister; Charles Beecher, minister and author; Isabella Beecher Hooker, an advocate for women’s suffrage; Thomas Kinnicut Beecher, minister; and James Chaplin Beecher, minister and Civil War brigadier general by brevet. 56 Isaiah 59:14 (King James Version). 57 Beecher, Remedy for Duelling, p. 4. 55


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Following his thesis, Beecher began to present his case for withholding suffrage from a duelist. He contended that “The elevation of duelists to power, is an act directly opposed to the precepts of religion”.58 In this argument, he was implying that dueling was both a social and a religious evil. He argued that although government was a divine prescript that derived its particular form from the governed, God directly prescribed the character required of the leaders in power. Therefore, he claimed that since according to God’s law, dueling was murder, “In voting for a duelist, you patronize a criminal whom, in your law you have doomed to die”.59 Society’s leaders were to be Godfearing people who prosecuted the evildoers and championed the righteous. Duelists, according to Beecher, did not meet the divine character requirements needed to be rulers because when challenged on a matter of honor they would forsake God, law, conscience, friendship, family, and all governmental duties to appease the slight to their honor. According to Beecher, a politician’s personal character was of utmost importance to the political process if this person is going to protect the public good. He emphasized this concern when he argued: It is said, I know, that a man’s principles and his private character are nothing to us. If his ability to be adequate, and his politics correct, and his public conduct as yet irreproachable, this is sufficient. But are you prepared to be the dupes of such wild absurdity? According to this sentiment, a man may set his mouth against the heavens – he may be a drunkard in the intervals of official duty, a prodigal, a tyrant, a mere savage in his family; and still be trumpeted by unprincipled politicians and electioneering handbills, as the great champion of liberty, the very Atlas on whose shoulders rests the destiny of his country.60

In Beecher’s perspective, the character of elected officials was more important than the political creeds to which they adhered. Applying this test to dueling politicians would, he argued, demonstrate that the public’s trust in them was misplaced. He reminded his audience that they had no guarantee that dueling officials would not sport with their interests as easily as they did with the life of another person. Therefore, to vote for a duelist was inconsistent with a Christian’s view of God’s plan for society. 58 59 60

Ibid., p. 4. Ibid., p. 16. Ibid., p. 9.

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Beecher also chided his audience for having a nonchalant attitude when it came to opposing dueling. He suggested that if the people did not vigorously fight against the proliferation of dueling by refusing to vote for a duelist, they were guilty of assisting “in the prostration of justice, and indirectly encouraging the crime”.61 Likewise, Beecher claimed that unless the people actively made their united opposition to the code duello known to their elected officials, they would be ignored. He declared that the present state of affairs demonstrated the inadequacy of the people’s current perspective against dueling. He asserted: We disapprove, but we do not sufficiently abhor – we are sorry, but we are not indignant – we wish the officer of the government would execute the law, but we do not compel them. Our rulers and great men know perfectly our debilitated state, and are therefore not afraid to contravene our feeble will. It is not a torrent unmanageable and dreadful, but a puny stream which they dare to oppose, and which they have learned to manage.62

Beecher wanted his audience to understand that their elected officials knew that they had an indifferent attitude toward the social custom of dueling, and, therefore did not consider the issue significant enough for their attention. According to Beecher, it was the people who must shoulder the primary blame for allowing dueling to continue in American society, for he contended, “We blame our rulers, but by whom are such men made rulers, and by whose negligence are they emboldened to wink at this most accursed sin?”63 Since the ultimate responsibility for this crime rested with the people, they must let their opinion of dueling be known through the ballot box, if they wanted to see the custom eradicated. To further demonstrate the personal character of political duelists and their disregard for the will of the people, he discussed how they behaved during elections. Beecher reminded the people that When an election is depending – when they need your votes to gratify their ambition or satiate their avarice, then indeed they sympathize most tenderly with the people. The people are everything; their wishes are sacred, and their voice is the voice of God. But let this end be accomplished, and a challenge or an insult be given, and neither liberty nor patriotism, nor the voice of the people, nor the voice of God, can avail to

61 62 63

Ibid., p. 17. Ibid., p. 17. The italics and punctuation are in the original document. Ibid., p. 18.


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deter them from deeds the most barbarous and despotic. Will you then vote for men who treat with contempt your opinions and your feelings – who basely prostrate your laws, when you have nothing to bestow; and who again creep through all the dirty windings of hypocrisy, when their promotion depends on your will.64

This indictment was designed to provide Beecher’s audience with further evidence of the immorality of those individuals who promised to uphold the will of the people before an election and ignored the people after they assumed office. Hence, Beecher was seeking to persuade the people to reject these candidates for public office because of their position on dueling. He argued, “Withhold your suffrage from the duelist, and the practice of fighting duels will speedily cease”.65 This remedy for dueling would work in Beecher’s view, because it would ensure that new anti-dueling legislators would enforce the laws against the practice. If his strategy were followed, he believed the public’s opinion toward the custom would change to one that saw refusing to fight a duel as more honorable than agreeing to an interview. Once public opinion turned against dueling, the practice was doomed, according to Beecher, because no political party would risk running a candidate for elected office whose stand on this issue was contrary to the will of the people.66 In his sermon, Beecher pleaded for all Christians, regardless of their denominational affiliation, to unite in opposition to this barbaric custom. He believed that it was a Christian’s duty to be a catalyst for social change, but he saw the Church as more concerned with petty sectarian disputes. However, if Christians united to combat this social evil, they would exercise great power in shaping society. Therefore he called on the nation’s Christians to “Arise and stand forth” against the social sin of dueling.67 Dueling is a problem that all Christians, regardless of their particular theological outlook, could unite against because it was a crime with eternal and temporal consequences for its participants and for the greater society. Beecher, though a Presbyterian, was no rigid sectarian. Rather, he believed that, “It is Christians alone who throw away their influence” when they did not unite to confront specific societal issues

64 65 66 67

Ibid., pp. 19–20. Ibid., p. 20. Ibid., p. 7. Ibid., p. 39.

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that threatened their religious perspectives.68 Christians can and must unite to use the power of the ballot box to elect moral, anti-dueling leaders and legislators who would assist in changing the public’s opinion against the code duello. To do otherwise was to neglect their Godgiven responsibility. Toward this end, he advocated the forming of anti-dueling voluntary associations that would aid in coordinating a united movement against dueling and all those who supported the custom.69 These associations were not specifically religious organizations, although their membership often included a number of local Christian clergy. They were composed of like-minded individuals seeking to reform society through an organized campaign of persuasion, advocating legislative action and, in some cases, actively interceding to prevent public disagreements from becoming private feuds.70 Beecher had previously organized the Moral Society of East Hampton, Long Island, in 1803 with the purpose of challenging what its members viewed as the decline in public morality.71 This society had no official legal authority to enforce its ideals of public morals, so it employed persuasion in an attempt to change public opinion. Beecher understood that without public support, any association desiring to reform society was doomed to failure. Likewise, he realized that if Christian clergy wished to influence the direction of society, they must focus their persuasive talents toward shaping public opinion. Many ministers saw their ability to influence the public culture decline as a result of their partisan political activities in the election of 1800. These societies afforded the clergy an opportunity to partially restore their position of influence without becoming mired in partisan politics.72 68

Ibid., p. 39. Ibid., p. 29. 70 Ibid., pp. 41–48. Included in the appendix of this published sermon are the Constitution of the Anti-Dueling Association of New York and a letter from the organization addressed, “To The Electors Of The State of New York”. For information on how such societies intervened in disputes to actively prevent duels, see Savannah Anti-Dueling Association 1826–1837, Documents provided by the Georgia Historical Society, 501 Whitaker Street, Savannah, GA, 31401, and Thomas Gamble, Savannah Duels and Duellists 1733–1877 (1923; facsimile reproduction, Spartanburg, SC, 1974), pp. 181–206. 71 Lyman Beecher, The Practicability of Suppressing Vice, by Means of Societies Instituted for that Purpose: A Sermon Delivered before the Moral Society, in EastHampton, Long Island, September 21, 1803 (New London, CT, 1804). 72 Philip Hamburger, Separation of Church and State (Cambridge, MA, 2002), p. 243. 69


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The Anti-Dueling Association of New York was founded on 8 August 1809, approximately twenty-eight months after Lyman Beecher’s sermon to the Presbytery of Long Island.73 It is clear that this sermon was the inspiration for the association’s founding, as indicated by the publication of its founding documents as an appendix to Beecher’s published sermon in the same year. The members of this organization clearly stated their intent to challenge the practice of dueling by withholding their suffrage from any candidate connected to an “affair of honor” as a principal, second or a treating physician. In their founding documents, the organization’s members pledged the following: WE, whose names are hereunto subscribed, viewing, with alarm, the increase of the practice of Duelling; desirous of opposing to its further prevalence the strongest lawful resistance; and persuaded that a proper use of the Right of Suffrage will have a powerful effect in discountenancing and banishing it; do hereby unite ourselves in an Association, to be called the ANTI-DUELLING ASSOCIATION OF NEW YORK: And do, by our signatures hereunto annexed, solemnly pledge ourselves to each other not to vote at any Election for any man, who, from current fame, or our own private conviction, we shall believe to have sent, accepted, or carried a Challenge to fight a Duel, or to have been in any wise concerned in promoting a Duel, or acting as Second or Surgeon therein, after the date hereof.74

At the time of the organization’s founding, Alexander Hamilton had been dead five years, but the memory of his death and the circumstances surrounding it were still fresh in the audience’s memory. Combining the people’s memory of their fallen general with Beecher’s solution to eliminate the practice of dueling, the association believed that they had a significant opportunity to shape the public’s opinion against the practice of the code duello. The first correspondence of the association was a letter addressed to “THE ELECTORS OF THE STATE OF NEW YORK”, in which they provided initial justification

73 Joseph Hamilton – no direct relation to Alexander Hamilton – in his book on dueling and courts of honor published in London in 1829 states, “I will use my best endeavors to promote the establishment of a Court of Honor, and of an Anti-dueling Society, like that which has already been established in New York”. This statement is indication that the work and reputation of the New York Association had spread across the Atlantic (Hamilton, The Only Approved Guide, p. 48). 74 New York Commercial Advertiser (New York), August 15, 1809; Public Advertiser (New York), August 8, 1809, August 15, 1809; and Beecher, Remedy for Duelling, p. 41. This New York organization was the first recorded anti-dueling association in the United States. The capitalization and punctuation are in the original document.

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for their call to withhold suffrage from any duelist. In the letter they wrote: But what shall be done? Reason has spoken, and she is disregarded. Religion has spoken, and she is mocked. The laws have spoken, and they are defied. Humanity has spoken, and she is insulted. This is unhappily true. One measure, however, still remains. A measure simple, dignified, and probably more effectual than any which has been tried hitherto. It is, in the elective franchise. The freemen of this state have only to refuse their countenance and their VOTE at the elections to every man who shall hereafter be engaged, either as principal or accessory, in a duel, or in any attempt to promote one.75

The anti-dueling association adopted Beecher’s argument and made it the focal point of their legislative agenda. However, they were aware that some political leaders and legislators suggested that the withholding of suffrage from candidates simply because of their stand on a single issue was a misappropriation of a citizen’s duty to vote for what was best for the community. This situation was doubly compounded when an organization publicly advocated that citizens unite around an issue and use their votes to shape the political agenda of society. Anticipating this criticism, the association argued: Instead of interfering with the right of election, the expedient proposed is founded upon the broadest and freest exercise of that right. It is the prerogative of every elector to give or deny his vote to any candidate for any reason which to himself is satisfactory; or for no other reason than his own choice. He enjoys a control over his own vote which no man nor body of men may question. And as he may give or refuse it to whomever he pleases at the time of election, so he is at perfect liberty to declare before hand, what causes shall govern him in its application.76

The association adeptly answered the criticism that their proposal would significantly hinder the political process by making a candidate’s stand on a single social issue the litmus test of their ability to govern. They responded by invoking the sanctity of the right of suffrage and the democratic concept of “one person, one vote”. The politicians who opposed the right of citizens to advocate for a single issue found

75

New York Commercial Advertiser (New York), August 17, 1809 and Beecher, Remedy for Duelling, pp. 45–46. The italics and punctuation are in the original document. 76 Beecher, Remedy for Duelling, p. 47.


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themselves accused of elitism by their constituents, a charge that often carried considerable political ramifications in a country increasingly embracing Jeffersonian Republicanism. The leaders of the New York Anti-Dueling Association, following ideas expressed in Beecher’s sermon, desired to act as the moral stewards of society at the same time they sought to influence the political landscape of their state.77 The clergy portrayed dueling as a heinous sin that violated both the nation’s laws and the laws of God, thereby damaging the well-being of the entire society. The members of antidueling societies shared this viewpoint and advocated for a united movement to end the practice of dueling. The object of their wrath was a social custom that was neither Federalist nor Republican, and their solution for its eradication was framed against an evangelical Christian backdrop. Approximately twelve years after the death of Alexander Hamilton and seven years after the establishment of the Anti-Dueling Association of New York, the state’s legislature passed a law to suppress the practice of dueling. According to this new law, it became illegal for any person who participated in a duel after 1 July 1816 from “holding any office civil or military under the State”.78 The religious and moral implications of dueling provided a perfect opportunity for American clergy to make a transition from the sacred to the secular as they used their pulpit influence to condemn this social problem. Their goals were ultimately accomplished as Christian clergy and like-minded lay leaders united in opposition to the social custom of dueling in the years following Hamilton’s death. Their efforts combined persuasion and social activism directed at public opinion and legislative action. Dueling did not end in America as a result of the unified efforts of the anti-dueling movement, although it ceased to be a major social concern in the Northern States. By the end of the 1820s, many of the Northern clergy that had campaigned against this barbaric social custom shifted their public discourse to address more immediate social problems. The lessons these clergy learned in the cultural battle

77 Clifford S. Griffin, Their Brothers’ Keepers: Moral Stewardship in the United States, 1800–1865 (New Brunswick, NJ, 1960), pp. x–xi. 78 The Recorder (Boston), 19 November 1816.

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against dueling were subsequently employed to fight the new battles against drinking and slavery. Their efforts, according to historian W.J. Rorabaugh, “marked the beginning of the Second Great Awakening’s move toward a host of reforms, including Sunday schools, missions, temperance, abolition and women’s rights”.79

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Rorabaugh, “The Political Duel,” p. 20.

THE ITINERANT PULPIT OF THE WOMAN’S CHRISTIAN TEMPERANCE UNION (WCTU): TEACHERS OR PREACHERS? Dorothy Lander The prevailing norm in the history of the Christian gospel has been: women teach and men preach. My personal history of teachers and preachers of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) offers experiential evidence of this pervasive norm.1 As a teenager in the 1960s, at the urging of our mother, I, along with my two older brothers and sister, participated in WCTU elocution medal contests during Sunday School. Brother David, now an ordained minister, reached the regional speak-off with an allegorical poem, The Calf-Path, by Sam Walter Foss, a New England poet and librarian who celebrated the human condition in his verse. Foss drew on the legend that the streets of Boston had been laid out by a calf to mock people’s willingness to follow tradition and convention uncritically. The irony of the repeated refrain – Many things this tale might teach, But I am not ordained to preach – caught my attention when I came to write this chapter, as it implicitly troubles the categories of teaching and preaching. The poem is reproduced in part below: The Calf-Path Sam Walter Foss (1858–1911) One day, through the primeval wood, A calf walked home, as good calves should; But made a trail all bent askew, A crooked trail as all calves do. Since then two hundred years have fled, And, I infer, the calf is dead. But still he left behind his trail, And thereby hangs my moral tale. … And many men wound in and out,

1 Dorothy A. Lander, “A Feminist Genealogy of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union: Re-membering Ourselves,” Journal of International Women’s Studies 2 (2000). Available: http://www.bridgew.edu/soas/jiws/nov00/geneology.htm

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dorothy lander And dodged, and turned, and bent about; And uttered words of righteous wrath, Because ‘twas such a crooked path. But still they followed – do not laugh – The first migration of that calf. … A moral lesson this might teach, Were I ordained and called to preach; For men are prone to go it blind, Along the calf-paths of the mind; … But how the wise old wood-gods laugh, Who saw the first primeval calf ! Ah! many things this tale might teach – But I am not ordained to preach.

I begin by introducing the concept of the itinerant pulpit, particularly the ambiguous borders of teaching and preaching, exemplified by the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU). The opening pages of Women Preachers and Prophets Through Two Millennia of Christianity use italics to trouble the categories of teaching and preaching, Virginia Cary Hudson Cleveland (1894–1954) ironically labeling it “teaching” when she led Sunday school classes at the Methodist church in Cloverport, Kentucky, or the Women’s Auxiliary and adult classes at Calvary Episcopal Church in Louisville, and “preaching” when addressing the Goodwill Chapel in downtown Louisville. In the latter, she was the authorized voice and had her rector’s permission.2 The rationale for all the essays in Women Preachers is to illustrate how the narrow definition of preaching, and the right to exercise this office from the pulpit, has constrained women’s leadership in Christian communities in every century, including our own. The WCTU pulpit is a further exemplar of women preachers in all but name; they claimed authority inspired directly of God, expressing themselves through alternative forms, including prophecy, writing, song, public speaking, performance, and formal and informal teaching of children and adults. Following the conceptual frame of the itinerant pulpit, I introduce the WCTU teachers and preachers with an overview of my historical research method known as “feminist genealogy”. I apply this method to locating the women’s temperance pulpit historically, spanning its Methodist antecedents in England, its alliances with other social 2 Beverly Mayne Kienzle and Pamela J. Walker, eds., Women Preachers and Prophets through Two Millennia of Christianity (Berkeley, 1998), p. xiii.

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movements, sponsors, and mentors, focusing on North America, where the WCTU flourished in the 19th century under the leadership of Frances Willard. The WCTU founders – all nominally Sunday School teachers – called their organization the “sober second thought” of the 1873–74 Woman’s Crusade against the liquor traffic.3 Frances Willard (1839–98), the president of the (US) National WCTU from 1879 and the World’s WCTU until her death, is the name most associated with the “Do Everything” reforms that demanded a traveling ministry, that is, the transgressive border-crossing of the itinerant pulpit. I provide both visual and textual representations of WCTU speakers crossing the borders of preaching and teaching. My inquiry culminates with historically situated exemplars of the alternative forms of WCTU sermons, drawing out some implications of the women’s temperance pulpit for present-day women preachers and laity addressing similar social and moral issues.

The Borders of the Itinerant Pulpit The WCTU pulpit was itinerant, not only because women traveled to deliver their sermons in sacred and secular spaces in far flung corners of the world, but also because they crossed borders between private and public, between teaching and preaching. The cognate terms of border-crossing and “liminal” in-between space are fundamental to a feminist and post-colonial concept of the itinerant pulpit. The intercultural and transnational encounters of the WCTU move between the sameness and difference that is embedded in the double meaning of the term identity (meaning the same as, but also relationally different from). Homi Bhabha calls this the “hither and thither, back and forth” of the interstitial “in between” spaces – a (not the) propelling force in narrative.4

The itinerant pulpit of the WCTU comes complete with an itinerary. Mobility and encounters with the other are implicit in the everyday acts of going somewhere and visiting someone. Notions of home and

3 Hannah Whitall Smith, “Introduction,” in Frances E. Willard, Glimpses of Fifty Years (Chicago, 1889), p. viii. 4 Susan Stanford Friedman, Mappings: Feminism and the Cultural Geographies of Encounter (Princeton, 1998), pp. 143–44.

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belonging – of dwelling – have not always been “tied to a territory, but rather to an itinerary”.5 Excluded from the territory of the pulpit through the prevailing narrative of “separate spheres”, the WCTU women took their sermons to the people – in the “private” spaces of the Victorian parlor and “public” spaces of streets, saloons, and secular halls. Although predominantly white, middle-class, and Eurocentric,6 they proudly eschewed “fashionable church membership”, boasting that they, unlike established clergy, lectured without fee to all classes and peoples. The Minutes of the National WCTU Convention of 1889 records: “God be thanked that the womanhood of Christendom begins to go out into the highway and hedge, shaking into the laps of the people the rich, ripe fruit of the gospel tree without money and without price!”7 In 1849, a quarter century before the WCTU’s founding, Lucretia Mott delivered a temperance sermon to medical students at the Quaker meeting house in Philadelphia. Although she challenged the Apostle Paul’s injunction against women in the pulpit, she, like many temperance reformers, cited his advice: “It is good neither to eat flesh, nor to drink wine, nor anything whereby thy brother stumbleth, or is offended, or is made weak” (Romans 14:21). She called her speech “A Sermon to the Medical Students”, but the context is teaching, not preaching. Her challenge implicitly includes the message of temperance in the medical education curriculum: Are you willing my young friends … to aid in carrying forward this great movement? Will you be faithful, in this great work, by example and precept, and “walk worthy the vocation unto which ye are called?” [Ephesians 4:1] By practicing total abstinence from that which intoxicates, by ceasing to hand the wine as an act of hospitality to a friend, and by going forward to rescue those who have sunk to the lowest degradation, you may be instrumental in setting the feet of many upon the rock of Temperance, and putting the song of total abstinence into their mouths.8

5 Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Nomadology: The War Machine (New York, 1996), p. 132. 6 See, however, Glenda Gilmore’s Gender and Jim Crow (Chapel Hill, 1996), in which black WCTU women in North Carolina took up the temperance cause to challenge white supremacy and patriarchy. 7 Carol Mattingly, Well-Tempered Women: Nineteenth-Century Temperance Rhetoric (Carbondale, 1998), p. 47. 8 Lucretia Mott, “A Sermon to the Medical Students,” in The Complete Speeches and Sermons of Lucretia Mott, ed. Dana Greene (New York, 1980), pp. 86–87.


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Although the phrase Frances Willard introduced at the 1881 WCTU convention, charging members to “do everything”, applied at that time “only to methods – do whatever you are fitted to do in the service of temperance – it evolved … to indicate the connectedness of temperance with other reforms”,9 including suffrage, prohibition, pay equity, clothing reform for women, poverty, and women in the pulpit. She drew attention to the several thousands of American women serving as superintendents over departments of evangelism, of Bible Readings, of Gospel Work for railroad employees, for soldiers, sailors, and lumbermen; of prison, jail, and police-station workers … They are regularly studying and expounding God’s Word to the multitude, to say nothing of the army in home and foreign missionary work, and who are engaged in church evangelism.10

The itinerant pulpit demanded border-crossing tactics. Frances Willard and Quaker “preacheress” Sarah F. Smiley of Philadelphia were among the WCTU women that evangelist Dwight L. Moody and the Presbyterians tried to exclude from their pulpits during the urban revivals of the 1870s and 1880s. “They could not, as Reverend Joseph Cook put it, stop women like her from ‘preaching in print’ ”.11 Often denied access to the church pulpit, WCTU women could deliver their sermons though novels, poetry, essays, and autobiography, as well as visual rhetoric. Mrs Abby Fisher Leavitt of Indiana often told the story “The Shoemaker and Little White Shoes” in the context of the Women’s Crusades; she claimed that in response, a drunkard would sign the pledge, “after less than two hours of my time to be an ambassador for Christ”.12 Elizabeth Cady Stanton objected to this kind of soap opera element in temperance lecturers, sentimentality that glorified the speaker’s eloquence rather than advocating for women’s rights. The first paragraph of Leavitt’s story supports Stanton’s complaint, but also clarifies the connection to domestic violence and poverty, and illustrates how the past echoes forward to the present day: One morning during the Crusade, a drunkard’s wife came to my door. She carried in her arms a baby six weeks old. Her pale, pinched face was

9 Richard W. Leeman, “Do Everything” Reform: The Oratory of Frances E. Willard (New York, 1992), p. 17. 10 Frances E. Willard, Woman in the Pulpit (Chicago, 1889), p. 57. 11 Edward Blum, “Paul Has Been Forgotten: Women, Gender and Revivalism during the Gilded Age,” Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era 3 (2004), p. 258. 12 Ibid., p. 98.

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dorothy lander sad to see, and she told me this sorrowful story: “My husband is drinking himself to death; he is lost to all human feeling; our rent is unpaid, and we are liable to be put out into the street; and there is no food in the house for me and the children. He has a good trade, but his earnings all go into the saloon on the corner near us; he is becoming more and more brutal and abusive. We seem to be on the verge of ruin. How can I, feeble as I am, with a babe in my arms, earn bread for myself and children?”13

Lizzie Miller’s 1895 autobiography defined her temperance ministry as a “labor of love”. “Her book included a temperance sermon, in which she quoted verses from Proverbs, Leviticus, and Luke to fortify her plea for total abstinence. She concentrated on the dreadful consequences of drinking”.14 Autobiography as a feminist border pedagogy, in which women writers can redefine boundaries and limitations, and experiment with the construction of a female “I”, is the focus of my account of Frances Willard and Canadian leader Letitia Youmans.15 The visuals in their temperance autobiographies also qualify as preaching beyond the pulpit. A Feminist Genealogy Every image of the past that is not recognized by the present as one of its own threatens to disappear irretrievably.16 – Walter Benjamin

Feminist genealogy as a “history of the present” is consistent with the philosopher’s cautionary statement above, and opens with a question posed in the present. Like Maria Tamboukou’s genealogy of 19thcentury UK women schoolteachers, my opening question interrogates the power of the norm: How have women teachers of the Christian gospel come to embody the feminine, whereas women preachers are alternately applauded for their masculine oratory and derided as unbecoming to their sex? What are the possibilities of becoming “other”? The social inclusion purpose of genealogy and its method of posing 13

Ibid., p. 95. Susie C. Stanley, Holy Boldness: Women Preachers’ Autobiographies and the Sanctified Self (Knoxville, 2002), p. 189. 15 Dorothy A. Lander, “The 49th and Other Parallels in the Temperance Auto/biographies of Letitia Youmans (Canada 1893) and Frances Willard (U.S. 1889),” Vitae Scholasticae (2005), 23–41. 16 Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York, 1969), p. 255. 14


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these questions in the present can be applied to the contemporary image of Roman Catholic nuns on Good Friday in 2007, protesting the papal refusal to ordain women priests. “Instead of criticising the past in terms of the present, the Foucauldian histories [genealogies] criticise the present by reflecting upon how past discursive and institutional practices still affect the constitution of the present”.17 I will identify exemplars of visual rhetoric alongside textual stylistic devices, such as italics, footnotes, and lists, which enumerate instances of the WCTU’s itinerant pulpit. Italics as a discursive practice subvert the power of the norm, and denaturalize the gendered authority and portrayal of preaching during the twenty centuries of Christianity. My opening question about the possibilities for becoming otherwise, demands reflexivity in accord with feminist research. I acknowledge that my discursive practices shape the research, and determine what is included and excluded. Vigilance about representing research works “not to situate reflexivity as a confessional act … or a practice that renders familiarity, but rather to situate practices of reflexivity as critical to exposing the difficult and often uncomfortable task of leaving what is unfamiliar, unfamiliar”.18 Genealogical method compares historical time periods to map the effects of prevailing discourses19 on people’s practices in particular places and eras; unlike traditional historical research, this situates bodies in space rather than in time. Genealogy’s take on the origins of the WCTU is directed to the “how” rather than the “when”. How the gendered pulpit came into being – how the designation of who could occupy the temperance pulpit became the norm – may be drawn from discourses about the beginnings of the temperance movement. Tamboukou’s genealogy begins with such a question. “How have we become what we are and what are the possibilities of becoming ‘other’?”20 The associations between 19th-century temperance and abolition movements pertain to a history of the present, posing the question of

17 Maria Tamboukou, “Writing Genealogies: An Exploration of Foucault’s Strategies for Doing Research,” Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education 20 (1999), 205. 18 Wanda S. Pillow, “Confession, Catharsis, or Cure? Rethinking the Uses of Reflexivity as Methodological Power in Qualitative Research,” International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education 16 (2003), 177. 19 Discourses are sets of physical, behavioral and cognitive practices that generate knowledge of bodies, experience, phenomena and subjectivity (identity formation). 20 Maria Tamboukou, Women, Education and the Self: A Foucauldian Perspective (London, 2003), pp. 135–36.

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how the gendered and raced pulpit came into being. A feminist genealogy explores the value of alliances and coalitions with other social movements, and interwoven categories of “difference”, including race and class alongside gender. Methodist preacher John Wesley was associated with the abolitionist pulpit as much as the temperance pulpit. Canadian WCTU leader Letitia Youmans applied the slavery metaphor to the liquor traffic, but not to race relations and divisions within the women’s temperance movement itself. Her first speaking engagement in England, in Liverpool in 1883, was at the Baptist mission church on the very night that she arrived, “still reeling with the motion of the ship”. At the close of her speech, her hosts informed Letitia that she had stood on almost the identical spot where Wilberforce addressed just such a motley group, pleading for the abolition of African slavery; and the crowd surged around him evidently intent on taking his life. I thanked God that African slavery had been abolished and took courage that the still greater slavery of the drink habit would yet be overthrown.21

Frances Willard challenged accepted gendered practices, embedded in a literal interpretation of the Scriptures, particularly St Paul’s directive that women were not “to usurp authority over the man, but to be in silence” (1 Timothy 2:12). She was “troubling categories” of teaching and preaching long before this counter-memory practice was called feminist genealogy. She presented arguments and counter-arguments in her 1889 publication Women in the Pulpit, comparing Scripture with Scripture, annotating as she went. Her counter-arguments to the Apostle Paul’s prohibitions in his Epistles exemplified genealogy’s “unmasking or denaturalizing work … [and its concern] with the ‘small’ stories, the marginalized topics, and the taken-for-granted practices”.22 Genealogy is centered on an analysis of the micro-practices of power – the power of the gender norm related to teachers and preachers in this study. I include Willard’s footnote as a footnote to illustrate critical discourse analysis, a central practice of genealogical method, which calls into question the norms embedded in 19th-century biblical discourses.23

21 Letitia Youmans, Campaign Echoes: The Autobiography of Mrs. Letitia Youmans (Toronto, 1893), pp. 250–51. 22 Daphne Meadmore, Caroline Hatcher, and Erica McWilliam, “Getting Tense about Genealogy,” International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education 13 (2000), 466. 23 Willard, Woman in the Pulpit, pp. 27–28.

the itinerant pulpit of the wctu Paul 1 Tim. ii. 11.

Other Scriptures Judg. iv. 4, 5.

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Paul Gal. iii. 28

“But I permit not “Now Deborah, a prophetess, “There can be no a woman to the wife of Lappidoth, she male and female; teach, nor to judged Israel at that time for ye are all one have domin… And the children of man in Christ ion over a Israel came up to her for Jesus”. man, but to be judgment”. in quietness”.24 1 Cor. Xiv. 34.

Joel ii. 28, 29.

“Let the women “And it shall come to pass keep silence in afterward … that your … the churches; daughters shall prophesy, for it is not … and upon the handpermitted maids will I pour out my unto them to spirit”. speak”. 1 Cor. Xiv. 35.

Luke ii. 36–38

1 Cor. xi. 5. “But every woman praying or prophesying with her head unveiled dishonoreth her head”. Phil. iv. 3.

“And there was one Anna, a “I beseech thee also “It is shameful prophetess, … which for a woman … help these departed not from the to speak in the women, for they temple, worshipping with church”. labored with me fastings and supplications also in the night and day. And comGospel”. ing up at that very hour she gave thanks unto God, and spake of him to all of them that were looking for the redemption of Jerusalem”. [This seems to have been the first theological school.]

24 “I permit not a woman to teach” is a plain declaration. But women constitute more than half the Sunday-school workers of our day. The literalist proves too much by his argument. Perhaps he solaces himself by keeping all the offices in his own hands,

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dorothy lander Locating the Temperance Pulpit within Women’s Rights

The women’s temperance pulpit was imbricated with other social movements. “The woman question” was the phrase of choice to refer to social movements that took up women’s rights, including temperance, suffrage, and public speaking; “feminism” as a term to express the unity of the women’s movement did not emerge in North America until the early 20th century.25 Although Elizabeth Cady Stanton is readily identified as one of the most significant women’s rights advocates of her time – co-organizer of the Woman’s Rights Convention at Seneca Falls in 1848, co-editor of the six volumes of The History of Woman’s Suffrage in 1881, and author of The Woman’s Bible in 1895 – contemporary references rarely point out that she cut her activist teeth on the abolition of slavery and the woman’s temperance movement. Presbyterian/ Calvinist Stanton was joined at Seneca Falls by Quaker co-organizers Lucretia Mott and Susan B. Anthony, who, although remembered for their association with women’s rights, abolition, and peace, also threw their weight and oratory behind the temperance movement. In teaching and preaching, these and other temperance reformers made the connection to suffrage, arguing that the only way to halt the evils of the liquor traffic was to give women the right to vote. The Lily, a folio sheet initiated by temperance lecturer and suffragist Amelia Bloomer,26 a lifelong Episcopalian, blurred the feminine benevolence of sacred space with masculine, secular, electoral politics. The third issue of the paper (March 1849) stated, “We have not much faith in moral suasion for the rumseller”. It advocated legislative solutions to problems associated with drunkenness. Over time, contributors – including the vociferous, although not typical, Elizabeth Cady Stanton – demanded that women

for eye-witnesses can testify that not in Sunday-school conventions only, but in the great national conventions of public school teachers, where nine thousand women assemble, and less than one thousand men, the latter, under the subjection theory, into which they were drilled from the beginning, proceed to distribute the positions of “honor and profit” almost wholly among themselves. These things would be grotesque to look upon if they were not so sad, and laughable if they did not, in the minds of thoughtful women, fatigue indignation and exhaust pity. 25 Sara M. Evans, “The Woman Question” (Book Review), The Nation (1988), 171–72. 26 The reform in women’s fashion, which focused on lifting the burden of corsets and uncomfortable clothing, was popularized by Amelia Bloomer through the paper and named after her, remaining her most enduring legacy.


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have a share in the making of laws to restrict the sale of liquor and to permit wives to divorce intemperate men.27 Owned, edited, and controlled by a woman and published in advance of women’s interests and rights, The Lily was a novel enterprise in the newspaper world, continuing publication for eight years. Like Frances Willard, who called for “women commentators to bring out the women’s side of the Bible”,28 Stanton complained, “We never hear sermons pointing women to the heroic virtues of Deborah as worthy of their imitation”.29 Many members made up for this deficiency. The opening tribute at the funeral service in 1896 for the first Canadian WCTU president, Letitia Youmans, was the cable received from Frances Willard, Anna A. Gordon (Willard’s companion), and Lady Henry Somerset (president of the British Women’s Temperance Association): “Canada’s Deborah has gone. May her mantle rest upon the heroic daughters who fight the Sisera of rum”.30 Deborah, the warrior/judge and mother of Israel, served as both the spiritual and military leader of the Hebrews, promoting a rebellion against the Canaanite army led by a general named Sisera. In the prose version of the story (Judges 5), Barak, the Hebrew general, defeated Sisera’s army, and Sisera fled to Jael’s tent. The reference to “heroic daughters” calls Jael to mind, who drove a tent peg through Sisera’s skull while he slept. Carrie Nation, an early president of a WCTU chapter in Kansas, seized upon the hatchet as her weapon of choice for the war on vice. Claiming God as her speech-writer, she drew on Deborah, and perhaps Jael, as the biblical grounding for “smashing” kegs in saloons: Moses had used the smashing method at Mt. Sinai against idolaters, Jesus Christ had used it in the temple against moneychangers, and now the newly appointed Deborah would use it against “thieving gougers of widows and orphans” in the saloon business.31

27 Lori D. Ginzberg, “ ‘Moral Suasion is Moral Balderdash’: Women, Politics, and Social Activism in the 1850s,” The Journal of American History 73 (1986), 605. 28 Willard, Woman in the Pulpit, p. 21. 29 Shira Wolosky, “Women’s Bibles: Biblical Interpretation in Nineteenth-Century American Women’s Poetry,” Feminist Studies 28.1 (Spring 2002), 195, 191. 30 The Globe and Mail, Canada’s Heritage from 1844, “In Memoriam: An Impressive Funeral Service for the Late Mrs. Youmans.” (Toronto, 22 July 1896), The Globe and Mail archives, www.theglobeandmail.com, accessed 27 May 2007. 31 Frances Grace Carver, “With Bible in One Hand and Battle-Axe in the Other: Carry A. Nation as Religious Performer and Self-Promoter,” Religion and American Culture 9 (1999), 31–65.

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Sheila Tobias’ 2007 essay on women’s rights and women’s worship drew parallels with Stanton’s “anger at the ‘Good Book’ (the Bible), [which] extended to anger at the priests, rabbis, mullahs and shamans for excluding women as persons from the texts and as eligible for various priesthoods”.32 Fast forward to 1929 Canada, when WCTU leaders, suffragists and temperance novelists Nellie McClung and Emily Murphy – the latter under the name Janey Canuck – were among the “Famous Five” Alberta women who petitioned the Canadian government to have women declared “persons” under the British North America Act. Stanton parted company with the WCTU, frustrated with its emphasis on this single issue, to the neglect of related issues (property rights, divorce, and suffrage) and women’s ordination. Her 1853 address/ sermon to the first annual meeting of the Women’s State Temperance Society in Rochester encapsulated her appeal to extend the question of temperance to other rights issues: Again, in discussing the question of temperance, all lecturers, from the beginning, have made mention of the drunkards’ wives and children, of widows’ groans and orphans’ tears; shall these classes of sufferers be introduced but as themes for rhetorical flourish, as pathetic touches of the speaker’s eloquence; shall we passively shed tears over their condition, or by giving them their rights, bravely open to them the doors of escape from a wretched and degraded life? Is it not legitimate in this to discuss the social degradation, the legal disabilities of the drunkard’s wife? If in showing her wrongs, we prove the right of all womankind to the elective franchise; to a fair representation in the government; to the right in criminal cases to be tried by peers of her own choosing, shall it be said that we transcend the bounds of our subject? If in pointing out her social degradation, we show you how the present laws outrage the sacredness of the marriage institution; … who shall say that the discussion of this question does not lead us legitimately into the consideration of the important subject of divorce? …We would fain have all church members sons and daughters of temperance; but if the Church, in her wisdom, has made her platform so broad that wine-bibbers and rum-sellers may repose in ease thereon, we who are always preaching liberality ought to be the last to complain.33

32 Sheila Tobias, “Feminism’s Stormy History with Religion.” Special to the Arizona Daily Star (25 March 2007), http://www.azstarnet.com/allheadlines/174981, accessed 12 May 2007. 33 Elizabeth Cady Stanton, “Address, First Annual Meeting of the Woman’s State Temperance Society, Rochester, New York, June 1, 1853.” Home Page of Ellen Carol DuBois, UCLA History Faculty, http://www.sscnet.ucla.edu/history/dubois/classes/ 995/98F/doc14.html, accessed 12 May 2007.


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Evangelical feminists in 19th-century revivalism stood more in the earlier tradition of popular evangelist Charles Grandison Finney, who in the 1820s and 1830s encouraged women to pray and “testify” publicly. By contrast, women’s expanded role in the 1870s and 1880s revivals, including speaking to mixed audiences, was a source of aggravation to religious evangelist Dwight Moody, who publicly objected to women interpreting the scriptures non-literally, giving out charity, and fighting for legislative temperance reform.34 The injunction against women speaking publicly to “promiscuous audiences” (as audiences comprised of men and women were known in the 19th century) set in motion the Women’s Rights Convention, when delegates at the World’s AntiSlavery Convention in London in 1840, including Lucretia Mott and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, were denied participation. In the run-up to the Seneca Falls Convention, Mott occupied the itinerant pulpit, identifying herself as a Traveling Quaker Minister, as she spoke in Ohio, Indiana, New York, New England, and the South on women’s rights and slavery,35 interwoven with theology, capital punishment, peace, and temperance. Three of the ten resolutions adopted at the Women’s Rights Convention focused on women’s speaking. One resolution troubled the categories of women speaking in public: The objection of indelicacy and impropriety, which is so often brought against woman when she addresses a public audience comes with a very ill-grace from those who encourage, by their attendance, her appearance on the stage, in the concert, or in feats of the circus.36

The final statement clearly addressed the right of women to teach from the pulpit, that is, to preach: Resolved, therefore, That, being invested by the Creator with the same capabilities, and the same consciousness of responsibility for their exercise, it is demonstrably the right and duty of woman, equally with man, to promote every righteous cause by every righteous means; and especially in regard to the great subject of morals and religion, it is selfevidently her right to participate with her brother in teaching them, both in private and in public, by writing and by speaking, by any instrumentalities proper to be used, and in any assemblies proper to be held.37 34

Stanton, “Address,” p. 253. Margaret Hope Bacon, “In Souls There Is No Sex: Pioneers in Antislavery and Women’s Rights,” Pendle Hill Lecture Series (1985). 36 Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage, eds., History of Woman Suffrage, 1 (Rochester, 1889), p. 72. 37 Ibid., p. 72. 35

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The Convention unanimously adopted Mott’s resolution “for the overthrow of the monopoly of the pulpit, and for securing to woman an equal participation with men in various trades, professions, and commerce”.38 At a second Woman’s Rights Convention in Rochester, New York, women in the pulpit was again at the forefront: We had all got our notions too much from the clergy, instead of the Bible … [Mott challenged any person who objected] to read his Bible over again, and see if there was anything to prohibit woman from being a religious teacher.39

Allies and Antecedents John Wesley (1703–91) and English Methodism, allied with both the temperance pulpit and women as preachers, presaged the methods of the WCTU. His itinerant open-air pulpit – he never had a parish of his own – coincided with the excessive gin consumption in London and other industrial centers between the 1720s and 1750s. Supposedly, only the poor drank gin. Capitalist discourses on class and gender were embedded in Wesley’s Sermon 50, “The Uses of Money” (1744 or 1760),40 and William Hogarth’s (1697–1764) engravings entitled Gin Lane and Beer Street (1751), which pitched a morality tale to the lower classes. Hogarth populated Gin Lane with working class people suffering from the excesses of gin drinking – including drunken mothers dropping their nursing babies – whereas Beer Street depicted the “invigorating liquor” that accompanied industry and prosperity. The Women’s Crusade against the liquor traffic and references to “liquid fire” and “liquid damnation” echoed forward from Wesley’s Sermon 50, in which he took as his text the parable of the shrewd manager. “I say unto you, make unto yourselves friends of the mammon of unrighteousness that, when ye fail, they may receive you into the everlasting habitations” (Luke 16:9). Applied to “liquid fire, commonly called drams or spirituous liquors”, Wesley preached that neither may we gain by hurting our neighbour in his body. Therefore, we may not sell anything which tends to impair health … But all who sell 38

Ibid., p. 72. Ibid., p. 72. 40 Wesley Center Online, “Chronology of Sermons.” [n.d., Online]. Available from Wesley Center for Applied Theology, Northwest Nazarene University: http://wesley .nnu.edu/john_wesley/sermons/chron.htm. 39


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them in the common way, to any that will buy, are poisoners general. They murder this Majesty’s subjects by wholesale, neither does their eye pity or spare.41

In 1739 Bristol, Wesley was appointing women as “class leaders”, which expanded to “field preaching” in the eighteenth-century Evangelical Revival.42 Unlike his Quaker contemporaries, Wesley insisted that Methodism respect the Apostle Paul’s injunction against women’s speaking in public on matters of religion, yet he found himself able to acknowledge exceptions for those moved by God to speak through an “extraordinary call” of the Holy Spirit. Wesley came to a very narrow definition of “preaching” as learned interpretation and public exposition of Scripture.43 Primarily women occupied the leadership position of “exhorter”, the designation Wesley used to legitimate these extraordinary messengers of the 1740s, whose activities extended beyond private prayer and testimony in small groups but fell short of those of the lay preacher who “took a text”. “This simple phrase had become synonymous with the transition from exhorting to preaching by 1770”.44 Effectively, many of Wesley’s women itinerants who spread the message of Methodism in England were preachers in all but name. The New Room of John Wesley’s Chapel in Bristol (the oldest Methodist building in the world) displays many artifacts of his itinerant pulpit. In July 2007, when I visited, I was drawn to a caption in a display case that includes his riding crop; for me, it clearly anticipated the Methodist border-crossing between teaching and preaching that marked the temperance pulpit. “John Wesley has been described as the best gatherer and scatterer of useful knowledge that Georgian England knew. He made Methodism an educational force – every traveling preacher’s saddlebags were a book store”. The Wesleyan revival, which drew women to the temperance pulpit, spread to North America. Catherine Brekus has identified 22 Methodists among over 100 female itinerant women preachers active in

41 “Chronology of Sermons,” http://wesley.nnu.edu/John_Wesley/sermons/050 .htm. 42 Donald W. Dayton and Lucille Sider Dayton, “Women as Preachers: Evangelical Precedents,” Christianity Today (1975), 822. 43 Patricia Bizzell, “Frances Willard, Phoebe Palmer, and the Ethos of the Methodist Woman Preacher,” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 36 (2006), 380. 44 Paul Wesley Chilcote, John Wesley and the Women Preachers of Early Methodism (Metuchen, NJ, 1991), pp. 78, 84.

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early 19th-century America.45 Susie Stanley records that numerous Wesleyan/Holiness women preachers, such as Almira Losee, promoted prohibition in America before the Woman’s Crusade of 1873, the year before the founding of the WCTU. Many applied holiness doctrine and Wesley’s “extraordinary call” to temperance work, conflating their temperance baptism with the baptism of the Holy Spirit. “The power of the Holy Spirit enabled women to leave the churches where they were praying and to walk to taverns where they confronted the owners and their customers”.46 Prominent male preachers – Henry Ward Beecher and Dwight L. Moody among them – supported both temperance and women’s rights and stand out as explicit influences in Frances Willard’s trajectory from university teacher to temperance preacher and social reformer. Beecher was pastor of Plymouth Congregational Church of Brooklyn, New York; moral activism suffused his Sunday sermons on what it meant to love your neighbor as yourself (Luke 10:27), illustrated with appeals for freeing slaves, temperance, woman suffrage, and good government.47 Beecher in turn was influenced by English abolitionist William Wilberforce, modeling his early ministry and sermons of 1803 in the Long Island town of East Hampton on Wilberforce’s Society for the Suppression of Vice, especially the premise that “Christians had a positive duty to prevent other people from sinning”.48 Nearly 15 years before she assumed leadership in the WCTU, Willard drew lines at the left and right margins of her journal entry for 21 February 1860 highlighting Beecher’s 1860 address “Woman’s Influence in Politics”,49 including this passage: And Wherever in all equitable & just functions of civil society, woman has power to do as women do it, a thing which man has power to do as men do it, she is as much called to act, & has as much right to act as he has.50

45 Catherine Brekus, “Female Evangelism in the Early Methodist Movement,” in Methodism and the Shaping of American Culture, ed. Nathan Hatch and John H. Wigger (Nashville, 2001), pp. 135–74. 46 Stanley, Holy Boldness, p. 187. 47 Wayne Shaw, “The Plymouth Pulpit: Henry Ward Beecher’s Slave Auction Block,” American Transcendental Quarterly 14 (2000), 335–43. 48 Jessica Warner, The Day George Bush Stopped Drinking: Why Abstinence Matters to the Religious Right (Toronto, 2008), p. 44. 49 Carolyn De Swarte Gifford, Selections from the Journal of Frances E. Willard, 1855–96, Writing Out My Heart (Urbana, IL, 1995), p. 59. 50 Ibid., p. 60.


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By the late 1880s, Willard was shunning the equivocal theology of a very different Beecher after the war; he sought to reconcile Darwinism and Christianity, and had come to accept a scenario in which the liquor trade could continue, albeit in a highly restricted form. … [H]e was still a teetotaler. But he had ceased to expect everyone else to follow suit. …Willard confronted him in the most public of places, right after one of his famous services … [critiquing his] “most inconvenient capacity for seeing both sides”.51

Moody, a religious evangelist with a huge following at urban revival meetings in Brooklyn, Philadelphia, New York and Chicago, sought out Frances Willard to begin his campaign in Boston in 1877, particularly wanting her to help in the women’s meetings. Willard recorded that “Mr. Moody placed my name upon his program to ‘literally preach’ to men and women”. She wondered aloud if the sight of a woman preaching would shock the audience: “Brother Moody, perhaps you will hinder the work among these conservatives’. Moody ‘laughed in his cheery way, and declared that ‘it was just what they needed’ ”.52 Moody’s success in the revivals is attributed to “capitulating to conservative opinions … He maintained the support of the Presbyterian Church, … the largest denomination, … [and his] gender prescriptions sustained interdenominational unity”.53 Although determined to keep out “things we know are controverted” – “Our Presbyterian brethren object to women speaking”54 – he was willing to exploit Willard’s popularity to the point of breaking his own rules. She in turn was quick to challenge Moody’s prescriptions with regard to women taking part in prayer meetings. She maintained that she “did not think prayers should be offered or testimony spoken merely with the bass or tenor, when God had made for purposes of harmony two other qualities of voice”.55 Moody’s situational principles around women speaking, and especially the contrast to Willard’s views, was fodder for journalists. One newspaper reporter commented, Mr. Moody does not believe (or at least, in deference to the feelings of others, does not act upon the belief) that, as Joel and Peter foreshadowed, 51 52 53 54 55

Warner, The Day George Bush Stopped Drinking, p. 101. Blum, “Paul Has Been Forgotten,” p. 247. Ibid., p. 252. Ibid., p. 251. Ibid., p. 263.

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dorothy lander in these last days “that your daughters should prophesy,” except when the “sons” happened to be at some other meeting.

This same writer also observed that Willard “listened more closely to God’s whispers than Moody’s dictates”.56 Willard’s writings spoke to a growing ecumenism and commitment to Christian Socialism, with emphasis on Socialism. Analysts of women’s rhetoric, including Patricia Bizzell and Karlyn Kohrs Campbell, claim Phoebe Palmer, the famed “Holiness” Methodist woman preacher and early temperance advocate, to have been Willard’s most influential mentor. Palmer’s teachings were linked to Willard’s “Do Everything” Socialist reform agenda, which sounds remarkably like “a catalogue of Palmer’s activities”.57 Whereas “Do Everything” signaled for Willard the WCTU commitment to “take on such causes as woman’s suffrage and higher wages and better conditions for industrial workers”,58 Palmer downplayed temperance and a hatred of slavery in her religious revivalist meetings. The social activism of Christian perfection was missing from Palmer’s holiness movement, which she transformed “into a doctrine that was inward-looking and socially neutral”.59 The notable traces of Palmer’s influence were in “the sermon-like qualities in Willard’s speeches and the ways they induced in their hearers an emotional experience similar to religious conversion”; they were replete with Palmer’s evangelical vocabulary of attaining “entire sanctification” by “choosing to exert one’s will to give oneself wholly to God. … Entire sanctification was not complete without this step of public witness”.60 Willard did not, however, follow Palmer in gospel preaching, nor does her journal suggest a “life-changing religious experience occurred … under Palmer’s [Holiness] tutelage”.61 The parallels with the personal and theological trajectory of Willard’s WCTU peer and friend Hannah Whitall Smith, a birthright Quaker, suggest a powerful bi-directional influence. I speculate on the mutuality of Smith’s “transition from the religious perfectionism preached by the Holiness movement and the social perfectionism of the social

56

Ibid., p. 263. Patricia Bizzell, “Frances Willard, Phoebe Palmer, and the Ethos of the Methodist Woman Preacher,” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 36.4 (Fall 2006), 378, 381. 58 Warner, The Day George Bush Stopped Drinking, p. 107. 59 Ibid., p. 106. 60 Bizzell, “Frances Willard,” p. 381. 61 Ibid., p. 382. 57


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gospel [in the 1870s]” and Willard’s “do everything” philosophy.62 Smith worked for the temperance movement on both sides of the Atlantic and was responsible for arranging the November 1891 meeting of her two temperance friends – Frances Willard of the (American) WCTU and Lady Henry Somerset of the British Women’s Temperance Association (BWTA).63 In The Day George Bush Stopped Drinking (2008), mental health and addictions scholar Jessica Warner elaborates the influence of John Stuart Mill on Lady Isabella to contrast the linked commitment to abstinence and the Christian perfection of evangelical Protestantism (a movement born out of John Wesley’s Methodism) in North America to the British alternative. “Where Mill banished virtue from his system, identifying any attempt to impose it as a threat to freedom, American reformers gave it pride of place”.64 Lady Somerset went before the Royal Commission on the Licensing Laws in 1897, and said that she had no intention of imposing abstinence on anyone. Her obituary marked her as a true disciple of John Stuart Mill, stating that she “saw that [whatever may be the case in America] you cannot in England make people sober by Act of Parliament, and she therefore worked mainly by persuasion”.65 Hannah Whitall Smith, although unlike Lady Isabella, a committed abstainer, exemplifies the hybrid influences of John Wesley and John Stuart Mill, emphasizing Wesley’s theology of service and Mill’s case for a competition among ideas, which supports ecumenism and moral suasion over prohibition. Smith’s autobiography, The Unselfishness of God (1903), linked her experiences as mother and grandmother, including the death of her daughter Nellie, to her discovery of God’s maternal nature. She coined the term “organized mother-love” to describe the WCTU’s “religion of compassionate action”.66 Willard attached Smith’s quote to an illustration of the 200,000 signatures to the Petition for Worldwide Prohibition in her 1889 autobiography

62 Debra Campbell, “Hannah Whitall Smith (1832–1911): Theology of the MotherHearted God,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 15 (1989), 96. 63 Ibid., p. 94. 64 Warner, The Day George Bush Stopped Drinking, p. 148. 65 Ibid., pp. 149–50. 66 Nancy G. Garner, “The Woman’s Christian Temperance Union: A Woman’s Branch of American Protestantism,” in Reforming the Center: American Protestantism, 1900 to Present, ed. Douglas Jacobsen and William V. Trollinger (Grand Rapids, MI, 1998), p. 274.

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Glimpses of Fifty Years; she chose Smith to write the introduction to her autobiography and featured her in the frontispiece for her book Woman in the Pulpit published in the same year (see Figure 3). In Willard’s nationwide trip of 1882–83, she was reported to have “won the hearts of hundreds of women, saying to them, ‘Mother love works magic but organized mother love works miracles’ ”.67 As President of the World’s WCTU, she claimed that the organization “was engaged in the uplift of the mother-half of the race”.68 Members worldwide justified the shift to the public arena in terms of their maternal roles. The first crusaders of 1873 and 1874, Eliza J. Thompson and Eliza D. Stewart of Ohio, were known as Mother Thompson and Mother Stewart. This first wave of feminism, also known as maternal feminism, underscores the prevailing discourses of motherhood, mother love, and domesticity to advance women’s rights. Hannah Smith, meanwhile, became “leery of emotional religion and theological partisanship”69 prompted by a scandal in 1874–75 involving her husband and co-preacher, Robert Smith, and several of his “kind young deaconesses … [He apparently had] serious difficulty distinguishing the boundary between the blessings of the Holy Spirit and sexual arousal”.70 Willard’s ecumenism was more gradual. Each drew selectively on John Wesley’s doctrine of love and service to humanity rather than claiming the Holy Spirit as their authority for preaching. However, they took advantage of the charismatic nature of the Methodist revival in both England and North America in the form of the open-air love feast, which opened up “a more public sphere for the exhibition of women’s talents and the open expression of their faith”.71 These testimonial activities encouraged public speaking and autobiographical writing by many WCTU Methodists, and distinguished female exhortation from preaching that proclaimed the gospel by “taking a text”. Willard and Smith were attracted to Wesleyan theology manifested in service to the poor and marginalized, rather than 67

Elizabeth Putnam Gordon, Women Torch-Bearers: The Story of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union (Evanston, 1924), p. 24. 68 Ian Tyrell, Woman’s World/Woman’s Empire: The Woman’s Christian Temperance Union in International Perspective, 1880–1930 (Chapel Hill, NC, 1991), p. 125. 69 Ibid., p. 89. 70 Ibid., p. 88. 71 Chilcote, John Wesley and the Women Preachers of Early Methodism, p. 98.


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the explicitly charismatic forms of heightened emotions and salvation for sinners. To subvert the phrase, they proclaimed the gospel by “living a text”: “Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me” (Matthew 25:31). Working the Borders of the Visual and Oratorical Do all the good you can, By all the means you can, In all the ways you can, In all the places you can, To all the people you can. – John Wesley, Rules of Conduct72

The guiding principles for Wesley’s open-air, itinerant pulpit presaged the border-crossing and fluid space of the temperance pulpit. The relatively static gendered space implied by the 19th-century ideology of separate spheres has been critiqued by feminist scholars who charge “that it replicates patriarchal ideology and reinscribes the binary categories it studies”.73 Visual and oratorical categories of WCTU women often feature together in temperance texts, offering exemplars of how they negotiated the in-between spaces of private/public, sacred/secular, and teaching/preaching. In accord with feminist genealogy, troubling the binary categories in representations of WCTU women opens the way to becoming “other” in the present. Border spaces featured dramatically in the 1873 and 1874 Women’s Crusades, in what might today be called performance art: the women of Ohio challenged the gendered pulpit by taking their sermons to the streets. Eliza Daniel Stewart’s “thrilling account of the great uprising of the women of Ohio in 1873, against the liquor crime”, as her Memories of the Crusade published in 1888 is subtitled, includes a drawing captioned “Mother Stewart Addressing the Crowd from a Carriage”.74

72

Prefixed to Wesley’s first Oxford Diary, 1725–27. Jeanne Halgren Kilde, “The ‘Predominance of the Feminine’ at Chautauqua: Rethinking the Gender-Space Relationship in Victorian America,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 24 (1999), p. 453. 74 Mother Stewart, Memories of the Crusade (Columbus, 1888), p. 368. 73

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Figure 1. Mother Stewart addressing the crowd during the women’s crusades of 1873.75

Mother Stewart linked temperance with sexual violence, and in turn, the need for suffrage to protect women and their families. The border spaces of the women’s temperance pulpit, as the WCTU organized itself in North America, were hardly static. August 1874 was also the inaugural session of the Chautauqua Institute on Lake Chautauqua in upper New York State. The Assembly, as it was called, was organized as a two-week retreat and seminar for Sunday School teachers. The two founders – John Heyl Vincent, a Methodist minister, and Lewis Miller, a manufacturer of agricultural equipment – sought to combine the “influence of nature for effectively teaching Christianity”76

75

Ibid., p. 368. Wendy Harker and Max Allen, Gather Beneath the Banner: Political and Religious Banners of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union 1877–1932 (Toronto, 1999), p. 45. 76


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with “the newest and best methods of Sabbath-school work to be discussed by specialists … from various localities of the United States. Normal classes were to be held each day, and a thorough drill in Bible study”.77 However, Vincent was opposed to women addressing mixedsex audiences, and women speakers were barred in the first two years of Chautauqua. The Assembly was announced in Sabbath-school periodicals; tuition for teachers’ seminars was only six dollars, and special lectures by nationally known speakers were open to the public for a nominal fee. Ninety percent of Sunday School teachers in the late 1800s were women – the majority of the two hundred people who took the final exam in Chautauqua were women. Fresh from the Crusade Pentecost78 – as Willard called the women’s temperance crusades of 1873 and early 1874 – the Sunday School Assembly at Chautauqua was a Pentecostal moment for women teachers as preachers. Wesleyan adherents called on the Scriptural account of Pentecost (Acts 2:17) to justify women preaching – at Pentecost men and women who were filled with the Holy Spirit preached in Jerusalem. Methodist Youmans, who was to become the first President of the Ontario WCTU in 1877 and then for all of Canada in 1885, provided a record in her autobiography of Pentecostal moments for women in the temperance pulpit during the Assembly: Most memorable to me among the varied exercises, was the woman’s temperance meeting announced for each afternoon at four o’clock. A tent, seating some two or three hundred, was the place of resort. The meeting was for women only, to be conducted by themselves. It was understood that St. Paul’s order was reversed, and that a man would not be suffered to speak in the church. Nevertheless, the brethren flocked in large numbers to be silent spectators of the proceedings, and stood in respectful silence outside. The canvas sides were rolled up for ventilation, so that the outside worshippers could see and hear to very good advantage … The earnest prayers and testimonies which constituted the programme soon revealed to me the fact that I was in the midst of the Crusaders … They referred with gratitude to the blessings received while praying in saloons, to perishing ones rescued and sorrowful homes made happy. While they spoke and prayed, hearty responses came from masculine voices outside, and tears streaming down manly cheeks could be perceived on every side.79

77 78 79

Youmans, Campaign Echoes, pp. 96–97. Frances E. Willard, Woman and Temperance (Hartford, CN, 1883), pp. 121–26. Youmans, Campaign Echoes, p. 100.

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Feminist researchers draw on her visually and emotionally graphic account to illustrate “the predominance of the feminine” and liminal space at Chautauqua: In this situation, claiming religious authority required negotiation of spatial meaning; in fact, it required blatant violation of “gendered space.” The tent, intended to contain female authority within a limited “sphere” proved permeable … Thus contested from the beginning, strictures against women’s addressing mixed-sex groups were fairly short-lived, and in 1876 Frances Willard addressed the entire assembly.80

In 1874 Mrs Jane Fowler Willing delivered a lecture during public exercises at Chautauqua, the first time Letitia Youmans had witnessed a woman in the temperance pulpit. Willard describes Willing’s essays, serials, sermons, and orations as all “evincing vigor of thought, in clearcut forms of expression, and abounding in classic, historic, and scientific allusions which could only come from a cultured intellect”.81 A micro-practice of Willard’s writing is that she hammered away at the paradox that women’s theology emerges from both cultured intellect and moral authority of lived experience in the home. Willard and Youmans both used Christian and biblical metaphors and analogies to marry the private and the public, the visual and the oratorical. Youmans devoted a whole chapter of her autobiography to “Haman’s License”, in which she painted Haman as the prototype of the liquor-sellers of the present day and Queen Esther “as the first woman that ever went to a government to ask to have a wicked license law repealed, or to claim home protection”.82 Much as Willard featured these strategies in her autobiography, she sought to strengthen public perception that her changes were rooted in the traditional, that is, the feminine and domestic, and not radical, values. Whereas Youmans would fully develop a biblical story in terms of a current societal situation, Willard inclined to the one-liner, biblical analogy, which, oblique for many today, counted as popular culture in the 19th century. For example, when contrasting towns with saloons against towns with prohibition, Willard argued that “One was the Wilderness, the other is the Promised Land.”… In yet another speech, she called upon her audience to sacrifice themselves to the cause “like Elijah to Horeb, like Isaiah to Exiongeber, like Christ to Calvary!”83 80 81 82 83

Kilde, “The ‘Predominance of the Feminine’ at Chautauqua,” p. 477. Willard, Woman and Temperance, p. 151. Youmans, Campaign Echoes, p. 186. Leeman, The Oratory of Frances E. Willard, p. 99.


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I have written elsewhere how Canadian WCTU women used visual arts, especially domestic needlework, to challenge the ideology of separate spheres, and to differentiate their approaches from the US Women’s Crusades.84 In 1915, Nellie McClung and Emily Murphy persuaded the White Ribbon sisters to take part in a Prohibition Parade through the main streets of Edmonton, suggesting the WCTU banners would dignify the parade, which were perceived as circus-like spectacles. Once convinced, the marching mothers bearing banners embroidered with Christian images and such slogans as “Liquor Enslaves” joined the 12,000-strong procession.85 The description of WCTU quilts in the Visual Arts Curricula at Kentucky State University suggests the sermon was embroidered into the fabric; their quilts featured T patterns, the blue and white Drunkard’s Path and the Goblet Pattern – a Gestalt which, when viewed right side up, showed a goblet holding pure water, or alternately an upside down bottle of alcohol being poured out.86 I draw on the autobiographies of Letitia Youmans and Frances Willard, including the visuals, to elaborate the cross-border differences and parallels of the Canadian and American WCTU.87 WCTU scholar Wendy Mitchinson reports that Canadian women were reluctant to use the attention-seeking tactics of the Crusades, such as holding prayer meetings and singing hymns outside – and sometimes even inside – the saloons: As one member remarked, “We shrank instinctively from the notoriety, and from having our names and our action discussed by vulgar and barroom loafers.” … Rather than approach those who drank directly, as the Crusade leaders did, the temperance women in Picton [the second temperance society in Canada established December 1874 under the leadership of Letitia Youmans] wanted the temptation to drink removed. Consequently, they petitioned the town council to abolish shop licenses which would prevent grocers from selling liquor to their customers and prevent liquor from being available in the most public of places.88

84 Dorothy A. Lander, “Re-membering Mothers as Lifelong Educators: The Art Work of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union,” The Canadian Journal for the Study of Adult Education 18 (2004), 1–32. 85 Harker and Allen, Gather Beneath the Banner, p. 41. 86 Kentucky State University, Visual Arts Unit, “Fire on the Prairie,” http://www .k-state.edu/bma/curricula/prairie/visart.pdf, accessed 19 July 2007. 87 Lander, “The 49th and Other Parallels.” 88 Wendy Mitchinson, “The Woman’s Christian Temperance Union, A Study in Organization,” International Journal of Women’s Studies 4 (1981), 146.

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Willard’s portrait in the frontispiece of her 1889 autobiography Glimpses of Fifty Years, along with the form of the book itself, served to “feminize” her persona and counter her critics who sometimes castigated her images for violation of women’s traditional social boundaries … Printed in dark and light shades of green, the original front and inside covers are decorated in designs of ribbons, flowers, and leaves. The frontispiece pictures Willard in partial profile, blouse decorated with frills and brooch, her hair pulled back. Other illustrations throughout the book are framed in flower designs, banners, or ribbons.89

Figure 2. Frances E. Willard, frontispiece of her 1889 autobiography, Glimpses of Fifty Years.90 89 James Kimble, “Frances Willard as Protector of the Home: The Progressive, Divinely Inspired Woman,” in Lives of Their Own: Rhetorical Dimensions in Autobiographies of Women Activists, ed. Martha Watson (Columbia, 1999), pp. 50, 55. 90 Frances E. Willard, Glimpses of Fifty Years (Chicago, 1889).


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Figure 3. Hannah Whitall Smith, frontispiece of Woman in the Pulpit.91

Willard’s handwritten autograph is a reminder of the letter-writing practice common among literate women of the 19th century, and another largely unrecognized example of preaching in print. Willard used personal letter-writing to her White Ribbon sisters, supporters and critics, both men and women, as a form of advocacy. Also published in 1889, the frontispiece of Willard’s Woman in the Pulpit, portrayed Smith as “a woman preacher”. In contrast to the portraits favored by WCTU women of the day – including Willard in her autobiography and Smith in Woman and Temperance – Smith in Woman in the Pulpit is standing “dressed in Quaker simplicity”, and not in front of an austere podium-style pulpit. Her pulpit is a high table 91

Willard, Woman in the Pulpit, p. 1.

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adorned with a flower brocade cloth, bordered with the Greek key design. Contemporary plays and magazines featured the virtuous Quaker woman as rational, yet sensitive; chaste (even glacial), yet maternal; competent, yet delicate … The distinguishing attribute of the sect – equanimity – … [and the feminine social virtues of] modesty, compassion, privacy, domestic order, passivity, “gentle, peaceable wisdom”, long before the advent of the Victorian “angel in the house”, … evolved in the early 18th century as attributes not only of women but also of the saintly Quaker man.92

For Willard, the temperance movement was an extension of women’s power in the home, and she repeated Smith’s frequent observation that “I learned my theology in the nursery with my children”. She stressed Smith’s maternal traits, including a letter she received from her daughter, the “charming ‘Mariechen’ ”, saying that Mother “never preaches ‘in the bosom of the domestic circle’. We can never get her to repeat her sermons and Bible talks to us”.93 I sense Willard was strategic in choosing a Quaker woman for her opening visual. The Society of Friends led in 17th-century England by George Fox and wife-to-be Margaret Fell, “became the very embodiment of the rights of women to speak in public, to participate in decision-making processes, and to develop and use their gifts”.94 George Fox’s Epistles “resound with the apothegm that women are priests as much as men”.95 Fell’s small tract Women’s Speaking Justified, Proved and Allowed by the Scriptures, all such as speak by the Spirit and Power of the Lord Jesus printed in 1666 – the so-called “pioneer manifesto of women’s liberation”96 – also drew on the same scriptural texts Willard used in 1889 to challenge the Pauline prohibitions and “stoutly defend the ministry of women”.97 This was a century before Susanna Wesley shaped the Methodist temperance pulpit of her sons John and Charles. Often referred to as the Mother of Methodism, Susanna Wesley, in her role as pastor, presaged the early WCTU women preachers.

92 Phyllis Mack, “In a Female Voice: Preaching and Politics in Eighteenth-Century British Quakerism,” in Women Preachers and Prophets through Two Millennia of Christianity, ed. Beverly M. Kienzle and Pamela J. Walker (Berkeley, 1998), p. 251. 93 Willard, Woman and Temperance, p. 199. 94 Chilcote, John Wesley and the Women Preachers of Early Methodism, p. 9. 95 Ibid., p. 10. 96 Ibid., p. 11. 97 Ibid., p. 10.


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H.W.S. (as Willard tells us the world knew Hannah Whitall Smith98) was in England at the time of the (women’s temperance) Crusade of 1873; she wrote to Willard – “My Dear Frank”99 – how she had learned from American newspapers the accounts of the marvellous Pentecostal baptism on the Christian women of our land … In my heart I said, “Those women are my sisters, and their work is my work, from this time forward until my life ends.” … As soon as I returned to America I put my name on the pledge roll of the nearest W. C. T. U., and joined the ranks of the workers.100

Willard recorded that the meetings H.W.S. addressed at Brighton and Oxford in 1875 “each gathered up seven thousand persons from all Europe – men and women of the noblest aims of culture, anxious only to know the way of God more perfectly”.101 Willard also drew on English newspaper reports: So great is the demand to hear Mrs. Smith that she is obliged to deliver her exposition in the Corn Exchange, and then immediately afterward in the Dome, and as each of these gigantic buildings will hold more than 3,000 persons, her congregation is larger than Mr. Spurgeon’s.102 Punctually to the moment, like Mr. Moody, she steps to the front of the platform, dressed in Quaker simplicity, and then speaks for fifty minutes by the clock, without hesitating for a moment. Her freshness, her profound spiritual insight, are as remarkable as her surprising fluency.103

Another correspondent, whom Willard characterized as “listening more critically”, declared: Mrs. Smith has little of the feminine in her style of oratory. Both as to their form and expression her addresses are the most vigorous and masculine of any that are to be heard at these gatherings. Decision marks every sentence she utters. The pathetic element is almost wholly absent. As an expositor of the Bible she is trenchant and often powerful.104 98

Willard, Woman and Temperance, p. 199. Frances Willard’s closest friends called her “Frank”. Hannah Whitall Smith wrote the introduction to Willard’s (1889) autobiography Glimpses of Fifty Years, where she noted that Frances Willard was “a member of my household for weeks together” (p. v). 100 Willard, Women and Temperance, pp. 205–06. 101 Ibid., p. 199. 102 Charles Haddon Spurgeon (1834–92), an English Baptist minister, renowned for his oratorical skills, was considered the most popular preacher of the day. In 1861, he preached in the Metropolitan Tabernacle in Newington Causeway, a venue that accommodated six thousand persons. 103 Willard, Women and Temperance, p. 199. 104 Ibid., pp. 199–200. 99

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The Times of Refreshing contrasted teaching, which is what H.W.S. did, to preaching, which is what men, including clergymen, might object to in a woman on the pedestal: If we might characterize in one phrase the substance and result of her teaching, it would be The Sunshine of True Faith … Her grasp and vigorous use of the types and analogies of the Old Testament Scripture form most useful features of her teaching … Curiously, the clergymen, notwithstanding any scruples as to the preaching of women, are always found the most diligent attenders of her meetings (italics added).105

These reports in the public press support historical research connecting acceptance of Quaker women as ministers while denying them equal rights in public roles with a political edge, including suffrage, abolition, antimilitarism, and Prohibition: The addition of the Victorian pedestal to the Quaker woman’s persona did not imply any diminution of respect for women as ministers, moral arbiters, or helpmeets. Hundreds of women received certificates to preach … What the pedestal did imply was the loss of any right to engage in overtly political behaviour, whether of the nation or of the meeting … A woman could not act like a man in the public spaces reserved for men alone.106

The association of the temperance pulpit with Christianity and the feminine and maternal social virtues provided entrée for Victorian women into political oratory more readily than the suffrage platform. For this reason, temperance was considered the women’s issue, and many more were associated with the WCTU than suffrage organizations in North America: Unlike the pioneers for woman’s rights at the 1848 Seneca Falls convention who found it difficult to speak and designated a man to chair the meeting, the temperance women of 1874 moved confidently toward the establishment of a national association.107

Willard’s speeches and writings commonly valorized WCTU preachers, measuring success in terms of the numbers, attendance, and organizational outcomes reported in the popular press, and dramatically

105

Ibid., pp. 200–201. Mack, “In a Female Voice,” p. 250. 107 Janet Zollinger Giele, Temperance, Suffrage, and the Origins of Modern Feminism: Two Paths to Women’s Equality (New York, 1995), p. 65. 106


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punctuating instances where they “take a text”. At the Second Biennial Convention of the World’s WCTU in October 1893, she reported: “At our last national Convention 35 women on a single Sunday occupied pulpits as preachers in Denver, Colorado. At The Autumn Conference of the National British Women’s Temperance Association in Cardiff, 19 pulpits were occupied by women”.108 Willard quoted from the London Watchword on Mrs. Eliza D. Stewart of Ohio (“known the world over as Mother Stewart”), who spoke at the meeting that resulted in the formation of the British Women’s Temperance Association.109 Willard reported that Mrs Mary A. Woodbridge has spoken in more than fifty Presbyterian churches during the last year from the pulpit; and she speaks from a text! Whisper this in the ear of the New York Presbytery which tried and solemnly warned one of its ablest members for admitting the saintly Miss Smiley into his pulpit. The fact is, even Presbyterian prejudice about women speaking in meeting melts away under the influence of the sweet womanliness, the dignity, the power, and the tender, Christ-like spirit of such a one.110

The exclamation mark for “she speaks from a text” has particular resonance in Methodism, with which Willard and many WCTU members were associated. During the Wesleyan revival, women could engage in modes of public speaking – public prayer, testimony, and exhortation – that fell short of “true” preaching. Willard’s writings suggested that it was only natural that exhortation should evolve, by the logic of events, into preaching, as another mention of the pulpit (also warranting an exclamation mark) in her report of The Woman’s National Temperance Convention founded in Cleveland in November 1874, revealed: At the close of our last mass meeting, one of our ablest speakers, Mrs. Mary T. Lathrop, of Michigan, after a telling address, made a brief prayer, and stretched out her hands and gave us the apostolic benediction. And this in the pulpit of the Presbyterian Church!111

Also in 1874, Mrs Annie Wittenmyer was elected to the post of president of the National WCTU; Willard recorded that she labored tirelessly as a lecturer, speaking up to six evenings in the week, and

108 109 110 111

Ibid., p. 176. Ibid., p. 176. Ibid., pp. 105–106. Willard, Woman and Temperance, p. 134.

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attending all the large conventions, of which “forty-six were held in 1875”.112 Her devotion to women’s rights occasioned several cogent arguments from her pen, to prove that women “have a right to preach or speak in the pulpit,” and she once added to the larger of the two editions of her paper a department headed “Pulpit of The Christian Woman,” in which a “sermon” appeared monthly from the pen of some member of the rapidly-growing sisterhood of evangelists.113

Another discursive strategy that stippled Willard’s biographies of WCTU women was the practice of itemizing instances in which men supported them as preachers, and when husbands, including preacher husbands, supported their wives in this role. Willard acknowledged how Rev. Dr W.C. Willing, minister-husband to Jane Fowler Willing, supported “Jennie”: “Instead of setting himself to stifle the aspirations of his wife toward learning, literary work, and public speaking, he has delighted in and steadily encouraged them”.114 Willard recorded that Letitia Youmans’ husband Arthur, a farmer and miller, took pride in his wife’s oratory, echoing Letitia’s autobiography. Willard recorded that “at nearly all the great summer meetings she has been our invited guest, always accompanied by her husband, a dignified and genial gentleman, who is very proud of her”.115 A subscriber to Sabbath-school periodicals, Youmans learned of an assembly at Lake Chautauqua in 1874; she and Arthur journeyed there by train and steamer to attend what was to become the organizing sessions of the WCTU. As the assembly drew to a close, the US temperance women – including leaders from the Women’s Crusade, Jennie Fowler Willing, Emily Huntington Miller, and Martha McClellan Brown – met to form a Woman’s National Temperance Association, arranging themselves in groups according to the states they represented. In the first of many instances, Letitia acknowledges Arthur’s strategic support from the sidelines: I alone was left out in the cold being the only Canadian woman. My husband standing very near the enclosure or tent, addressed the lady presiding, “Mrs. Willing, could you take in Canada?” She responded smilingly, “Certainly, we will make it international”.116

In the same year, Letitia organized a WCTU chapter in her hometown of Picton, Ontario. She received requests for her platform oratory 112 113 114 115 116

Ibid., p. 165. Ibid., p. 166. Ibid., pp. 148–49. Ibid., p. 602. Youmans, Campaign Echoes, pp. 103–104.


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across Canada, America, England, Scotland, and Ireland. Among the requests for her assistance in organizing WCTU chapters in Ontario, she received an invitation to speak at a convention in Cobourg (near where she grew up and went to school, as did I) for the purpose of uniting two orders of Templars. As Letitia stood to speak, she experienced a “choking sensation”, but managed to present her position, which she was to repeat in speeches throughout her career: I assured the audience that I had not come there to advocate women’s rights, but that I had come to remonstrate against women’s and children’s wrongs. But there is one form of woman’s rights in which I firmly believe, and that is, the right of every woman to have a comfortable home, of every wife to have a sober husband, of every mother to have sober sons.117

Again we see the discursive strategy of enumerating attendance features. This, along with evidence of male support for women speakers, contrasted with the resistance to “time-honoured rules” in the “conservative town” of Cobourg, where “strong-minded women and blue stockings were below par”. Moreover, one officer feared that because “it is as dark as pitch and storming furiously … we will not have a baker’s dozen out tonight”. Letitia made much of this image, noting that this gentleman opened the carriage door for her, exclaiming, “The hall is packed!” She recorded that “the audience numbered some thirteen hundred” and repeats that “the hall was packed to its utmost capacity”.118 Unbeknownst to Letitia, Arthur was in the audience, and the mystery of his intimate knowledge of her lecture afforded an avenue for recording (with feminine modesty befitting the times) the response to her oratory. When he was leaving the hall, a man asked Arthur what he thought of the lecture, to which he replied, “Oh, I suppose it was very good for a woman”. This prompted an “indignant look, as much as to say, ‘I guess you are in league with the traffic’ ”.119 When she reached home, her lady friends plied her with questions, to which, to “her blank amazement”, Arthur responded: “Her voice was clearer and more distinct than any speaker on the platform”.120 Letitia traveled the length of southern Ontario forming WCTU chapters, canvassing in the interest of the “local option” Dunkin Bill, and speaking in “little country churches full to overflowing”.121 She 117 118 119 120 121

Ibid., p. 128. Ibid., pp. 127–29. Ibid., pp. 129–30. Ibid., p. 130. Ibid., p. 161.

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was happy to speak to an audience with mothers and their crying babies. She “considered that some of those mothers could never get out unless they took the infant with them, and they had rights as well as others”. She recalls one instance when the “little tot … mounted the pulpit behind me, and with open music book … commenced to sing something she knew … very loudly, ‘Shoo fly, don’t bodder me’ ”.122 Letitia chose her words strategically: “The term prohibition, when applied to the liquor traffic, was obnoxious, so much so that I would announce my subject as ‘home protection’ ”.123 However, when encountering anti-prohibition forces, she did not hold back anger, a discursive practice not usually associated with maternal feminism. Canadian cartoonist and prohibitionist John Bengough, on the cover of his political satire magazine Grip (29 October 1887), showed Ontario WCTU President Youmans giving cabinet minister Hon. George Foster an “exemplary trouncing”.124 Professor Foster, a “noble knight of prohibition”, came up from Ottawa to address the convention and “his speech was the exasperating platitudes about the country not being ‘ripe’, the wisdom of high license for the present etc. etc.”.125 Invariably, visual and textual references to Youmans associate her considerable girth with her social action. Prohibitionist Bengough told how Mrs Youmans “metaphorically laying him [George Foster] over her ample knee, she gave him the most effective castigation that any public man in Canada has ever received”.126 Anger and indignation is not a typical attribute of the feminine or the private sphere; however, Bengough normalized this emotion by representing Youmans in the maternal act of spanking a boy behaving badly. Willard drew close connections between Letitia’s weight and her oratory, which in today’s environment of size-ism might be considered insensitive, beginning her chapter on “The Canadian Leaders” with this: The briefest possible definition of our Canadian Sister is found in Paul’s sententious words, ‘much, every way.’ Whether we consider her ample

122 123 124

Ibid., p. 162. Ibid., p. 207. John Bengough, Commentary on Editorial Cartoon. Grip, October 29, 1887,

p. 2. 125 126

Ibid., p. 2. Ibid., p. 2.


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Figure 4. Letitia Youmans, front cover of Grip, October 1887 (courtesy of National Library of Canada)

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My impression is that Frances Willard’s praise for temperance women’s public oratory situationally used the language of women “addressing” public meetings or delivering “sermons” from the pulpit. Willard was witness to Youmans’ first public address in the US, at the first anniversary meeting of the WCTU in Cincinnati in 1875 – the first autumn after the memorable crusade year (1874) … She modestly stated that she had “come to learn”, but was courteously invited to address an evening mass meeting, and her powerful voice rang out for the first time over the historic battle-ground of the new and might war. Her American sisters were electrified. What a magazine of power was here, and what an explosion it would cause among the conservatives of the Dominion! … Her addresses founded on the books of Esther and Nehemiah, are among the most forcible appeals ever uttered for prohibitory law.128

For some audiences, naming these addresses rather than sermons disguised the overt political content, which was the unnegotiable of the gendered pulpit. The Itinerant Pulpit of the Present I close with recent instances of the woman’s pulpit in border spaces, and the implications for women teachers and preachers “becoming other” in a way that draws selectively on the experience of different historical eras. Genealogy is oriented to discontinuities, but it also ponders unexpected continuities. The itinerant pulpit of today is consistent with ecumenism but potentially moves beyond the Christian Church; it blurs teaching and preaching, private and public, sacred and secular. Letitia Youmans moved from the Methodist Church to a rented hall for Band of Hope (children’s temperance group) meetings in Picton to allay non-Methodist parents’ fears that their children would be receiving more than temperance instruction;129 in the 21st century, women 127 128 129

Willard, Woman and Temperance, p. 598. Ibid., pp. 601–602. Mitchinson, “The Woman’s Christian Temperance Unions,” p. 145.


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teachers and preachers concerned with social inclusion might choose a venue for delivering their message on similar social and moral issues so as not to constitute non-Christians as “other”. The connection between place and class is instructive for today’s preachers. A Parks Canada pamphlet on the WCTU records that Canadian temperance women preached the gospel of morality as they visited the shut-ins and the sick, provided food and clothing to the poor, established Sunday schools, orphanages, clinics, hospitals and residences, provided kits for workers, new mothers and Christmas. They campaigned against alcohol at fairs, in barber shops and pool halls”.130

The WCTU women were strategic in preaching the gospel of morality in both private and public spaces. The WCTU held “parlor meetings to attract members of the upper classes, and mothers’ meetings and cottage prayer meetings for the lower”.131 In 1890, Mrs Edith Archibald of Cow Bay, Nova Scotia, as Dominion Superintendent of Parlor Meetings, recognized the conservative element, and explained that the WCTU sought not merely to reach the victims of poverty and crime but also the “ignorant or indifferent” among the “rich and cultured” by holding parlor or drawing room social in private homes … Parlor socials were also successful in attracting honorary members, men who paid a small fee and who could attend meetings but were denied voting privileges. The WCTU regarded honorary members as useful to increase influence, gain pledges of abstinence and add to funds.132

These examples are a reminder to Christian women of today who seek ordination that the church as an institution is a masculinist concept and that church women of the WCTU successfully expanded the church to the whole community, crossing class and gender lines. Protestant WCTU members adhered to John Wesley’s belief that Christians should do all they can to respond to the needs of the poor. He traveled the length and breadth of the country to preach Christianity in the open air to the poor and ran a school at The New Room in Bristol 130 Parks Canada, “Backgrounder: Canadian Woman’s Christian Temperance Union” (Ottawa, 1999). Retrieved 29 July 2000 from Parks Canada Web site: http://parkscanada .pch.gc.ca/library/background/20%5Fe.htm. 131 Joanne E. Veer, Feminist Forebears: The Woman’s Christian Temperance Union in Canada’s Maritime Provinces 1875–1900 (doctoral thesis) (Fredericton, NB, 1994), p. 18. 132 Ibid., pp. 18–19.

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for the children of poor families, distributing medicines free alongside teaching and preaching. His Primitive Physic is a preaching text in favor of water as “the wholesomest of all drinks” and against spirituous liquors, malt liquors (exceedingly hurtful to tender persons), and coffee and tea (“extremely hurtful to persons who have weak nerves”).133 The social issue of health and wellness bridges the secular and the sacred – an unexpected (to me) continuity between the past and present of the temperance pulpit. A history of the present must take account of the large body of WCTU scholarship, which analyzes the degree and forms of contact between the women’s temperance movement and other reform organizations. The WCTU abundantly cross-appropriated practices from many other social movements, including suffrage and abolition, but did not make its strategy explicit. Today’s pulpit might reclaim its reform antecedents by “cross-appropriating practices from the subworlds”.134 This postmodern term is alien to the WCTU, but scholars of Mothers against Drunk Driving claim that adaptation of practices from other citizen groups, such as the medical community and feminism, is one factor in the success of this exemplary political action organization. Wendy Mitchinson has distinguished between the Canadian WCTU’s willingness to cooperate with other women’s organizations and its unwillingness to affiliate with them. In particular, the WCTU was reluctant to affiliate with the most influential new organization of the 1880s, the (US) National Council of Women (NCW), in part for fear that the NCW might overshadow them, and in part because of the non-religious nature of the NCW.135 However, WCTU leaders, through their individual membership in other women’s organizations, forged important liaisons at the local and national levels. The resultant crossfertilization of ideas and strategies to promote women’s rights apply to women teachers and preachers in the 21st century. Although the early WCTU women were determined to maintain their status as the leading women’s reform organization, many suffragists entwined the separatespheres argument with the Christian and social gospel rhetoric, which

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Wesley, Primitive Physic, p. xiii. Charles Spinosa, Fernando Flores, and Hurbert L. Dreyfus, Disclosing New Worlds: Entrepreneurship, Democratic Action, and the Cultivation of Solidarity (Cambridge, 1997), p. 99. 135 Mitchinson, “The Woman’s Christian Temperance Unions,” p. 153. 134


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clearly was the mission of WCTU members. “The temperance crusade was acceptable to the vast majority of Victorian women because it was a religious movement, and religion was their province”.136 Yet, temperance historian Jack Blocker records several instances of suffragists taking leadership roles in the Women’s Crusade of 1873 and 1874. The WCTU’s reform inclination, which Jack Blocker believes must entail crossing class lines – and by extension race lines – to bring about social change, defined the prohibition movement up to 1896.137 The lesson for today’s temperance pulpit is to seek rationales that take up the “do everything” approach of the women’s temperance movement while crossing not only class, race, and gender lines but also refusing to draw lines in the sand on the basis of religion. The retreat from the earlier “do everything” platform of WCTU reform and attempts to enforce a middle-class consensus by political means, moved the temperance movement from its historical Wesleyan concern with the poor to today’s emphasis on middle-class values of private ownership. In the Methodist Church of today, the social mandate of temperance has been redrawn with moral boundaries only for the individual, which corresponds to the secular self-help movement and the addictive personality. The concern for the collective or the larger community “has been largely abandoned except as drug abuse intrudes upon middle class values in causing crime, accidental death, broken homes, and job loss”.138 The prohibition against “spirituous liquors”, which featured as early as Wesley’s Rules of Conduct appended to his Oxford Diary for 1725–27, and his 1744/1760 Sermon 50 on “The Uses of Money” has been diluted in present-day Methodism, although the diminished numbers of WCTU members continue their adherence to total abstinence. In the spirit of a history of the present, the itinerant pulpit serves to “become otherwise” by reclaiming the historic concern for the poor on the level of individual struggles as well as social and public policy. Today’s preachers and teachers can take up the self-same social issues of substance abuse, gambling, domestic violence, and

136 P.G. Skidmore, “Crusading and Conforming: The Techniques of Temperance,” Dalhousie Review 56 (1976), 94. 137 Veer, Feminist Forebears, p. 36. 138 Robert Walter Wall, “The Embourgeoisement of the Free Methodist Ethos,” Wesleyan Theological Journal 25 (2007). Wesley Center Online, Northwest Nazarene University, http://wesley.nnu.edu/wesleyan_theology/theojrnl/21-25/25-07.htm, accessed 30 July 2007.

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women’s rights as both individual struggles and matters of concern for religious and secular institutions (social policy) and governments and legislative bodies to take up (public policy). Jessica Warner accounts for the shift in attitudes toward vice and pleasure among today’s conservative evangelicals in this way. The temperance evangelicals in Frances Willard’s day set the bar so high that the only possible direction after that was down. … Nor do today’s conservative evangelicals assume that everyone might be saved. This happy pre-millennial thought … has vanished along with the old belief in human perfectibility.139

The plight of women battered by drunken husbands was the focus of Mother Stewart’s articles and speeches;140 in 1872, she addressed the jury in the first case under the Adair law in Ohio, which encouraged wives to prosecute rumsellers. The local newspaper reported that Mrs. Stewart spoke for a half an hour, and alluded with telling effect to the sneers which had greeted the poor woman, Mrs. Hukins, when on the stand. She also spoke of the moneyed interest which backed up the defense.

The jury returned a verdict in favor of the wife in the amount of $100 and costs.141 Feminist researcher and discourse analyst Mariana Valverde claims that as the link between temperance and feminism frayed and broke, so too did the powerful cultural links that had been forged through temperance discourse – including the link between domestic violence and alcohol. Legal historians tell us that Mother Stewart’s stories of domestic violence ring true today, although written over one hundred years ago. By the 1950s, temperance era social and cultural explanations of the demon rum’s properties, which had linked problem drinking to working-class vice, poverty, immigration, and marginal masculine social roles, had come to be replaced by a curiously classless and genderless, highly psychological model of “the alcoholic personality”.142

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Warner, The Day George Bush Stopped Drinking, pp. 165, 168. Erin M. Masson, “The Woman’s Christian Temperance Union, 1874–1898: Combatting Domestic Violence,” William & Mary Journal of Woman and the Law 3 (1997), 165. 141 Ibid., p. 174. 142 Mariana Valverde, “A Postcolonial Women’s Law? Domestic Violence and the Ontario Liquor Board’s ‘Indian List,’ 1950–1990,” Feminist Studies 30 (2004), 566. 140


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The temperance pulpit of today might adapt a “both/and” approach, joining psychology and sociology. This approach rejects the simplicity of a causal link between drunkenness (generally attributed to the male “drunkard”) and a wide range of social issues in the early WCTU while highlighting the multi-faceted nature of these same issues. In her address before the second biennial convention of the World’s WCTU in October 1893, Willard raised the “suggestive specifications” for a Commission to Investigate the Liquor Traffic, which Mrs. Frances Belford of Denver, Colorado, had tabulated. Willard commended the list as “service to speakers and writers” by virtue of its direct causal link between the liquor traffic and Crime; Divorce; Education; Alms houses; Asylums; Charitable Institutions …; Adulteration; … [T]he status of social drinking; Police expenses; Revenue – Municipal, State, Nation; Disease – Heredity; … Attitude of the Church by denomination; Number of Professors of Religion who are actual Prohibitionists; Number who are not; Statistics of homes ruined; Children at work who ought to be in school, where whiskey is the direct cause of absence; Mortgages; Number of women impoverished and selfsupporting; Ownership of Property by professed Christians, who lease it for saloon and other immoral purposes; Hindrances to Prohibition; Home Missions; and, Sunday Schools.143

In her 1894 and 1895 addresses, Willard suggested for the first time that poverty might be the root cause of intemperance, rather than the reverse. “This constituted a fundamental shift in attitude, implying that such reforms as prohibition were ill-founded … Alcohol would only be alleviated by reducing poverty, not outlawing the sale of liquor”.144 Feminist historian Cheryl Krasnick Warsh believes that the history of alcohol and drug use speaks to contemporary concerns, and she incorporates this into her university teaching in gender studies linked with Canadian history of colonialism. She notes that during the fur trade, alcohol, as the favored instrument of trade, had devastating effects upon Native peoples that persist today: When I read passages from the temperance tracts, nobody laughs any more. So I’ve started asking every class to raise their hands if their own

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Frances E. Willard, “Address Before the Second Biennial Convention of the World’s Woman’s Christian Temperance Union” (October, 1893), Sweet Briar College Web site, Gifts of Speech: Women’s Speeches from Around the World, http://gos.sbc .edu/w/willard.html, accessed 11 May 2007. 144 Leeman, The Oratory of Frances E. Willard, p. 19.

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dorothy lander families, or ones close to them have been affected by alcohol abuse, and the show of hands is never less than eighty percent … The few Aboriginal students in the class were relieved, and surprised, when their hands weren’t the only ones raised.145

Yet, in general, a discontinuity that forms a backlash effect in contemporary Christian teaching and preaching is the persistent absence of a link between alcohol and wife abuse and family violence, which suffused the sin and salvation rhetoric of early WCTU preachers. In the present day, sermons typically address substance abuse and partner abuse or family violence as separate social issues. This is a present day constitutive effect of the “separate spheres” discourse, which manifested in misogynist representations of early WCTU women as unsexed and crazed, as puritanical killjoys, and as unnatural mothers (Nellie McClung in 1940s Canada; Carrie Nation in 1930s US). The presentday gentle language of “dually affected families” in alcohol and batterer treatment programs or social workers’ practice,146 and “diminished capacity” as a legal defense offered in instructions to the jury (New York v. Westergard, 1986),147 (R. v. Daviault, 1994)148 signals the shifting discourse on alcohol abuse and family violence. Karen Wilson’s guide to understanding and ending domestic violence cautions that “the manner in which communities of faith address the concerns of battered women [and dually affected families] will either jeopardize their lives or help them transform their experience”;149 this guide reflects the discursive shift in WCTU sermons from the sin of drunkenness that “caused” domestic violence to a feminist model of empowerment, intervention, and advocacy to address these dual social issues. The temperance pulpit I take up here challenges the enduring images in today’s popular culture of WCTU activists as “tee-totalling moral zealots, 145 Cheryl Krasnick Warsh, “Teaching Alcohol and Drug History to Undergraduates,” The Social History of Alcohol and Drugs 20 (2006), p. 292. 146 Tony Martens, Brenda Daily, and Maggie Hodgson, “Dually Affected Families: Substance Abuse and People Abuse,” in The Spirit Weeps, ed. Tony Martens (Edmonton, 1988), pp. 188–222; Sandra Stith, Rita Crossman, and Gary Bischof, “Alcoholism and Marital Violence: A Comparative Study of Men in Alcohol Treatment Programs and Batterer Treatment Programs,” Alcoholism Treatment Quarterly 8 (1991), 3–20; Karen J. Wilson, When Violence Begins at Home: A Comprehensive Guide to Understanding and Ending Domestic Violence (Alameda, 1997). 147 Mental and Physical Disability Law Reporter (MPDLR). “Case Law Development,” MDLR 11 (1987), 174. 148 Elizabeth Sheehy, “The Intoxication Defense in Canada: Why Women Should Care,” Contemporary Drug Problems 23.4 (1996), 595–630. 149 Wilson, When Violence Begins at Home, p. 181.


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of the turn of the century women’s movement as a single issue for suffrage, and of domestic violence as a new social issue”.150 An insight from WCTU history for today’s women teachers and preachers is the many possible forms and genres that a sermon may take. They might as readily “take a text” from their lived experience as from the Scriptures – including their lived experience as mothers. Hannah Whitall Smith learned her theology in the nursery. In the spirit of 19th-century WCTU women enumerating for effect, I provide a list of forms in which they delivered their sermons: 1. parlor socials; 2. temperance newspapers, e.g., Amelia Bloomer’s The Lily, The Woman’s Journal (begun in Ontario in 1884 and replaced by the national WCTU publication The White Ribbon Tidings that continues today); 3. conversations during visits to shut-ins, hospitals, orphanages, prisons; 4. handwritten letters; 5. courtroom testimony, e.g., Mother Stewart in domestic violence case of 1872; 6. performances, e.g., local talent providing piano interludes and songs; youth medal contests with recitations such as The Calf Path 7. dramatizations, e.g., the temperance pageant;151 8. textile art, e.g. temperance quilts, banners in the Prohibition Parade; 9. venue decoration, e.g., flower arrangements, brocade tablecloth on Hannah Whitall Smith’s “pulpit” (see Figure 3); 10. Women’s bodies and dress fashion, e.g., the white ribbon symbol worn by all members to represent purity and temperance principles; dress reform named after Amelia Bloomer; Willard’s “feminine” persona (Figure 2); Smith’s simple Quaker dress (Figure 3); 11. Temperance novels, e.g., Nellie McClung’s Sowing Seeds in Danny and Purple Springs. Autobiography underpins many of these forms of preaching in print, and was a common genre for early WCTU leaders to deliver their sermons, often intermixing the Scriptures – taking a text – with personal 150

Masson, “The Woman’s Christian Temperance Union,” p. 165. Mrs. Will Pugsley, “Pageant: The March of Prohibition” (Ottawa, 1927). Available from Archives of Ontario, MU8406.6 WCTU Series 2. 151

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narratives that illustrated the feminist slogan from the 1960s: “the personal is the political”. Think of Youmans on “Haman’s License” and “Nehemiah Building the Walls”. Although the content differs, drawing the parallels between the Scriptures and today’s social issues offers an example of continuity with WCTU preachers. It is unlikely that today’s preachers would admonish women, as Youmans did, for refusing to dispense with alcoholic flavorings in their culinary operations, likening this to the lazy excuses offered by the men of Judah who refused to build the walls of Jerusalem. The letters between the White Ribbon Sisters as well as advocacy letters related to temperance and prohibition are commonly referenced in WCTU autobiographies. The best known example of the legacy of letter-writing as the woman’s pulpit in the 19th-century among activist organizations today is Amnesty International. Margaretta Jolly’s edited volume Love and Struggle Letters in Contemporary Feminism152 charts the connections between women’s letter-writing and social movements over the past four decades; the emphasis on the feminist ethic of care and the gift economy drawn from this vast epistolary archive of second-wave feminists is reminiscent of the “organized mother love” that defined the women’s temperance movement and first-wave feminism. A striking discontinuity between the WCTU autobiographies and the autobiographical content of today’s sermons rests on different understandings about truth and memory and construction of self. In the introduction to Willard’s autobiography, Hannah Whitall Smith assured the reader that she wrote her autobiography at the bidding of the white ribbon women. “The women wanted a true story, not a story that, out of a conventional modesty, would tell only half the truth, in the fear of being thought egotistic and full of self ” (emphasis in the original).153 Youmans’ autobiography was a smaller, more modest text. Unlike Willard, who was a prolific essayist and diarist, as well as letterwriter, during extended periods of her life, Youmans’ declaration that she had “the merest fragment of notes to call up the memories of the past” but had “been blest with a most retentive memory” suggested that she believes her memories mirror reality. “I have endeavored truthfully to recall the transactions of the past, and bring prominently to view

152 Margaretta Jolly, Love and Struggle Letters in Contemporary Feminism (New York, 2008). 153 Willard, Glimpses of Fifty Years, p. vii.


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circumstances that might be of benefit to others” (emphasis added).154 These statements exemplify the “autobiographical pact” with the reader, a conception of historical truth that stands in contrast to postmodern reflexivity. Today’s social constructionists theorize on the autobiographical pact, noting that auto/biography “is not and cannot be referential of a life … [A]uto/biography is more properly to be seen as artful construction within a narrative that more often than not employs a variety of methods and tools which imply referentiality”.155 Auto/biography is an important resource for the woman’s pulpit of today, including my own temperance pulpit in this chapter, yet it is discontinuous with the early WCTU auto/biographies. We need to foreground reflexivity; my construction of the women’s temperance pulpit is a product of my content and style choices – which texts, graphics, exemplars, and stylistic devices (e.g., footnotes, italics, lists) to include and exclude. I deliberately chose the cartoon graphic of Letitia Youmans trouncing a Member of Parliament ambivalent about prohibition, to highlight indignation as part of WCTU women’s sermon repertoire, and to balance the sentimentality and family melodrama often associated with the 19th-century cult of domesticity, and to heighten the profile of the Canadian WCTU, which has figured so prominently in my own life experience. Speaking reflexively, I acknowledge the contradictions in my history of the present women’s pulpit, particularly the co-existence of the feminine, the maternal and the masculine in representations of WCTU members. It is not always possible to challenge the cultural norm; uncomfortable as it is, I must leave as is what is unfamiliar and inexplicable. In his well-known text Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Paulo Freire calls revolutionary leaders and adult educators to identify “the principal contradiction of society, and the principal aspect of that contradiction”156 with respect to a subordinated social group. Teaching/ preaching is the principal contradiction in the identities, interests, and needs of the women’s pulpit. Freire further invites oppressors and the oppressed to name [and re-name] their world in order to transform it. By substituting “and” for “but”, I conclude that it is possible to collapse

154

Youmans, Campaign Echoes, p. v. Liz Stanley, The Auto/biographical I: The Theory and Practice of Feminist Auto/ biography (Manchester, 1992), p. 128. 156 Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed (30th Anniversary Ed.) (New York, 2002), p. 176. 155

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and re-name the principal contradiction of teaching and preaching that is repeated in the secular temperance recitation The Calf Path that I remember from my formative years. Ah! many things this tale might teach – And so I am ordained to preach.

MIDWAY BETWEEN SLAVERY AND CITIZENSHIP: BLACK FREEDMEN IN WHITE PROTESTANT SERMONS IN THE IMMEDIATE POST-CIVIL WAR PERIOD David M. Timmerman Christianity played a commanding role in American life during the mid-19th century, as seen in church attendance, denominational affiliation, the ubiquity of religious publications, and the common feature of religious leaders speaking in public venues. As Eugene Genovese put it, “At the least, the country’s most socially and politically influential leaders were either committed Christians themselves or demonstrated that they knew their politically decisive constituents to be so”.1 More specifically concerning the focus of this essay, is the nature of the role Christianity played during the Civil War period. As Mark Noll explains, both North and South, even during the war, maintained a strong sense of the divine calling of the nation: “What was by now the standard American identification of the United States as ‘God’s New Israel’ served only to heighten religious conceptions of the conflict”.2 Noll argues that while religion was not the cause of the Civil War, “Christianity was everywhere present in the crisis”.3 The war did not diminish the role of religion in general and Protestant faith in particular during the war; it may, in fact, have increased it. George M. Frederickson notes that, after the Civil War, “the national government seemed to be giving more support and recognition to Protestantism as the majority religion of the American people”.4 This is seen most

1 Eugene D. Genovese, “Religion in the Collapse of the American Union,” in Religion and the American Civil War, ed. Randall M. Miller, Harry S. Stout, and Charles Reagan Wilson (New York, 1998), p. 75. 2 Mark A. Noll, A History of Christianity in the United States and Canada (Grand Rapids, MI, 1992), p. 317. 3 Ibid., p. 314. 4 Frederickson also contends that this presumed recognition of religion by the government had a counter to it in that “religion itself was in danger of becoming completely identified with the secular interests of the nation and thus losing its critical autonomy” (George M. Frederickson, “The Coming of the Lord: The Northern Protestant Clergy and the Civil War Crisis,” in Religion and the American Civil War, p. 124).

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dramatically in Lincoln’s second inaugural, to quote but just one famous line: “Both read from the same Bible, and pray to the same God; and each invokes his aid against the other”.5 Mark Noll’s The Civil War as a Theological Crisis describes the manner in which American Protestant faith in general and understandings of God’s providence in particular were tested by the events of the Civil War. He begins by documenting the American commitment to providence, that is, God’s sovereign rule over all events in creation, including the choices of human beings. Among 19th-century American Christians there was a strong commitment to God’s providence. What is more, there was confidence in Christians’ ability to see and to understand the operation of God’s providence in the world around them: Standard Christian teaching about God’s control of the world and all events taking place in the world sprang vigorously to life as the dramatic events of the war unfurled. Belief that God controlled events had always been foundational wherever biblical religion prevailed. Yet in nineteenthcentury America confidence in the human ability to fathom God’s providential actions rose to new heights.6

However, as Noll explains, the manner in which American theologians applied their understanding of God’s providence to the events of the Civil War was quite narrow. The result was a theological crisis because “the war – with its clash of armies and ideologies, with its unprecedented moral, legal, governmental, and social complications, with its avalanche of death and destruction – should have posed insuperable difficulties”.7 In a similar fashion, Daniel W. Stowell documents how, specifically in the south, the death of Confederate General Stonewall Jackson created a spiritual crisis for “a people committed to the belief that an omnipotent God controlled the destiny of men and of nations”.8 The case of Jackson was heightened not only by his battlefield successes, but also – and especially – by his personal character and public actions: A Presbyterian deacon and Sunday school superintendent, Jackson had encouraged revivals among his troops and had often inquired about the

5 Sydney E. Alhstrom, A Religious History of the American People (New Haven, CT, 1972), p. 687. 6 Mark A. Noll, The Civil War as a Theological Crisis (Chapel Hill, NC, 2006), p. 75. 7 Ibid., p. 94. 8 Daniel W. Stowell, “Stonewall Jackson and the Providence of God,” in Religion and the American Civil War, p. 187.

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spiritual state of his men. He prayed fervently before and during battles and ascribed all successes to God’s providential assistance.9

Interestingly, Noll makes the case that in the final analysis, in terms of the faith commitment of the nation, the problem was not trust in providence, but rather “trust in providence so narrowly defined”.10 Noll goes on to explain how the rhetoric of Abraham Lincoln helped to ameliorate this disjuncture between events and understandings of providence, and not only helped to save the Union, but also served to deepen American understandings of providence and to bolster Christianity in America at a time when it was in need of bolstering. Thus, the conception of and belief in divine providence was challenged, particularly in the South. We can hear in the surviving sermons of Protestant ministers of the time the struggle to reintegrate their beliefs with the dramatic events of the Civil War period, including the assassination of Lincoln. The situation for the Freedmen and for the country was challenging in many respects. While the ministers were quite clear that it had been providence that had taken the country through the tragic events of the preceding years, it was not clear what providence intended for the years that lay immediately ahead. Along with Christianity generally, the influence of Christian ministers in American life was significant in 19th-century America, particularly at the time of the Civil War. Today, the presence of ministers in the popular press or in prominent social or political events is rare, but this was not so in the middle of the 19th century. As Sydney E. Ahlstrom notes: Both in the North and in the South, moreover, the ministers had the largest and most regular audience, not only at Sunday and weekday meetings, but through a vast network of periodicals. By 1865 the official Methodist papers alone were reaching four hundred thousand subscribers. Even more important was the fact that in an age of great evangelical fervor, the clergy were the official custodians of the popular conscience.11

As one marker of this, Noll documents the fact that during the war Jefferson Davis instituted nine days of fasting for the Confederacy and Lincoln four Thanksgiving Days in the North.12 The focus of this 9 10 11 12

Ibid., p. 187. Noll, Civil War, p. 94. Ahlstrom, Religious History, p. 672. Noll, Civil War, p. 15.

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chapter rests, in part, on this special, significant rhetorical influence of the ministers. We must note the breadth of the rhetorical reach they enjoyed and the manner in which they chose to exercise it. It will also be shown how this reach was tested in the postwar period as the country began the process of reconstruction, a process that was contested at nearly every turn. After the war, as we shall see in the sermons of northern white Protestant ministers, the nation’s religious commitments did not seem to prove strong enough to overcome long-held, racially based attitudes of white Americans toward black Americans. As Sydney Alhstrom put the matter, at the end of the war, “the nation’s endemic racism stood squarely athwart the freedman’s opportunity for genuine freedom”.13 Similarly, a generation after the official end of Reconstruction in 1877, W.E.B. DuBois would sadly conclude: “The Nation has not yet found peace from its sins; the freedman has not yet found in freedom his promised land”.14 After reviewing the many failures of the reconstruction period, Alhstrom returns to this when noting that “perhaps the same racial impasse that had made armed conflict inevitable also made a just reconstruction impossible”.15 To be sure, there were problematic attitudes and positions held by whites in both North and South. While those in the South struggled to enact a new relationship with the Freedmen, others in the North maintained racist attitudes of their own and many were bent on punishing the South, including executing all the leaders of the rebellion and taking complete control of all southern political and social institutions, militarily if necessary. And, as will become clear in this examination of selected sermons from the period, there was diversity in the perspectives held on Reconstruction itself. Northern Christians, Protestant and Catholic, endured tensions and differences within their denominations, between denominations, and with society at large. In fact, scholarship of this period owes a debt to those who have documented the diversity within American Christianity during the 19th century. Catherine A. Brekus summarizes the matter by noting: “Instead of portraying America as a Protestant country that was unified by a set of

13

Alhstrom, Religious History, p. 688. W.E. Burghardt Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (1903; repr. New York, 1995), p. 48. 15 Alhstrom, Religious History, p. 691. 14


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common values, they have emphasized the diversity of nineteenthcentury religion”.16 This examination makes use of two sets of sermon collections. The first is a collection of sermons given in the days following the assassination of Abraham Lincoln in April 1865. While, as we would expect, these sermons focused primarily on Lincoln, they nevertheless often took up the issues of the day, certainly the events of the Civil War, but also those of Reconstruction. As such, several of them proved to be of significance for this examination.17 The second set consists of a selection of 500 Thanksgiving Day sermons given during the decade and a half following the end of the Civil War.18 These sermons were published as pamphlets or in periodicals and thus had a circulation far wider than the specific congregations to which they were given. Many of these sermons explain the history and significance of the national Thanksgiving Day holiday. In 1863 Lincoln issued a proclamation designating its practice nationally, officially recognizing a tradition that had been carried out on a state-by-state basis and making it national. The day, and quite naturally the sermons it inspired, particularly in 19th-century America, exuded the spirit of American Protestant Christianity. These two sets of sermons are also interesting because of what they reveal about the way American Protestant Christianity positioned itself in relationship to America as a country and its government. One cannot help but be struck by the direct engagement of the ministers, at least rhetorically, with every aspect of American political, social, and economic life. In our day, when many religiously inclined Americans worry over the decline of the influence of religion in general and

16 Catherine A. Brekus, “Interpreting American Religion,” in A Companion to 19thCentury America, ed. William L. Barney (Malden, MA, 2001), p. 317. 17 They are housed on the Emory University website. The collection available on the site consists of fifty-seven sermons given in the week following Abraham Lincoln’s assassination. Most were given on the Sunday following his death on Saturday, April 14. http://beck.library.emory.edu/lincoln/, accessed 3 August 2007. 18 Pitts Theological Library of Emory University, http://www.pitts.emory.edu/ Publications/thanksgiving.html, accessed 3 August 2007. The introduction to the collection on the website states that “Each of these sermons was issued as a separate pamphlet, and each usually marked the observance of a public day of thanksgiving designated by political authorities. Many of these sermons commemorate the annual observance of a national Thanksgiving Day holiday that began with Abraham Lincoln’s proclamation in October 1863; others were delivered in connection with holidays proclaimed by state or local officials before 1863 by American presidents”.

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Christianity in particular, while others worry over the ways in which religion in general and Christianity in particular play too great a role in American politics, it is surprising to see such bold political pronouncements, commentary, and ownership in the political realm. In addition, the sermons give us a snapshot into how Christianity both responded to the Civil War and the events following the war, and sought to shape and influence those events. While it was clear to the ministers that God’s hand had been in the war and specifically in the freeing of the enslaved, they struggled to see how this freedom would be actualized in the country’s daily affairs. Hence, as I have here characterized, this was a time when a divinely provided freedom nevertheless left in place a humanly constructed paternalism in the ministers’ sermons. This chapter first takes note of how race itself was presented and discussed in the sermons. As we shall see, in some instances the ministers put forward a case for inclusion or integration, while in others, they presented a case for separate black and white spheres. This essay describes the manner in which a new premise to support the hierarchical construction of white-black relations in America can be seen in the sermons of northern white Protestant ministers in the immediate post-Civil War period. In focusing on the words of northern white ministers, this essay makes no claim to causality concerning the progress toward freedom for black Americans in the postwar period, only claims about the manner in which white ministers spoke about it. Concerning the matter of progress toward freedom, we do well to recognize recent scholarship which has highlighted black agency: It is no longer new or original to see slaves and former slaves as historical agents who seized the initiative in destroying slavery and laying the foundations of the free black community, or to view the destruction of slavery as a revolutionary rendering of American society and ideals in which black people played a pivotal role.19

Before turning to these two points, this chapter first notes the manner in which even at the close of the war and with the assassination of Lincoln, northern ministers maintained a devotion to the presence of the providence of God in American life.

19

John C. Rodrigue, “Black Agency after Slavery,” in Reconstructions: New Perspectives on the Postbellum United States, ed. Thomas J. Brown (New York, 2006), p. 40.


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The Hand of God at Work in the Life of the Nation The providence of God is a foundational belief in the Christian tradition, though the mechanism and the extent of its operation is a matter of continuous discussion and debate. The sermons of Protestant ministers following the Civil War extended that providence to include the activities of nations, most particularly those of the United States. For example, in a sermon preached a week after Lincoln’s assassination, Rev. Robert F. Sample, minister of the Presbyterian Church of Bedford, Pennsylvania, argued that “God’s Providence extends from the dewdrop on the flower, to the most distant world which moves in infinite space” and “It is God who moves the vast machinery of national affairs – gives prosperity and sends adversity – blesses with peace and desolates, with war”.20 Statements like these are extremely common in these sermons, constituting the rhetorical and theological status quo. Yet, the American Civil War was the bloodiest war the United States had experienced and it tested the faith of Christians in America. Over two million men served in battle and the war generated over a million casualties. A fratricidal war, it pitted American against American and in many cases, family member against family member. While both sides anticipated a quick military resolution at the start of the hostilities, the war took four long years to conclude. Nevertheless, three years into the war, Abraham Lincoln presented the basic case for God’s providence in American life in a letter he wrote to A.G. Hodges in April of 1864: I claim not to have controlled events, but confess plainly that events have controlled me. Now, at the end of three years struggle the nation’s condition is not what either party, or any man devised, or expected. If God now wills the removal of a great wrong, and wills also that we of the North as well as you of the South, shall pay fairly for our complicity in that wrong, impartial history will find therein new cause to attest and revere the justice and goodness of God.21

20 Robert F. Sample, The Curtained Throne, A Sermon, Suggested by the Death of President Lincoln: Preached in the Presbyterian Church of Bedford, PA, April 23, 1865 (Philadelphia, PA, 1865), pp. 6, 8. 21 Abraham Lincoln, Letter to A.G. Hodges, Frankfort, KY, from Washington, April 4, 1864, http://www.leaderu.com/humanities/lincolnspeech.html, accessed 7 August 2007.

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Of course, of all living Americans at the time, Lincoln more than any other would have reason to believe that he had controlled events, at least to some extent. From his inauguration to this moment in 1864 he made hundreds of decisions relating to the status of slavery, the war, and related aspects of American politics. Yet, he subsumed even his power as the President of the United States under the supervising hand of providence. This understanding of providence extended, at least in the eyes of the ministers, not merely to the nation as a whole, but also to the North or the South in particular, depending on the observer. For example, in his 1865 Thanksgiving Day sermon, the Rev. A.M. Colton, pastor of First Church, Easthampton, Massachusetts, set out to praise a God who had planted “good seed” in the United States, in particular, in his native New England. In addition, with the victory of the north in the Civil War, it was clear to Rev. Colton that God had caused “New England ideas and institutions” to spread “with marvelous rapidity all over our borders”.22 In contrast, God, in his providence, had turned the tables on the south. As Rev. Samuel G. Buckingham, pastor of the Congregational Church, Springfield Massachusetts, noted in his 1865 Thanksgiving Day sermon, “They resorted to war to perpetuate and extend slavery, and war has swept it all away”.23 Northern ministers explained how God’s providence could be seen even in the long duration of the war: its terrible destruction was orchestrated by a God with a plan to bring his chosen ones to a new and greatly improved reality, a new promised land. As A.S. Twombly, pastor of the State Street Presbyterian Church in Albany, New York stated in his Thanksgiving Day sermon of 1865, the rebuilding and continuance of the South was obviously in God’s plan because “It is not possible that God has brought this people out of Egypt to destroy them from the earth”. Rather, the south would now “find the New Jerusalem towards which they fondly look”. Rather than challenge this commitment to providence, the length and great pain caused by the war was taken as evidence of God’s hand of care for the nation, both North and South. According to Rev. Twombly, God had “lengthened the war, till in its 22 A.M. Colton, God’s Dealings with our Nation: A Discourse Delivered in the Payson Church in Easthampton, Massachusetts, Thanksgiving Day, December 7, 1865 (Northampton, MA, 1866), pp. 3, 5. 23 S.G. Buckingham, A Sermon Preached on the National Thanksgiving for Peace, December 7, 1865, at the United Service in the South Church, Springfield, Massachusetts (Springfield, MA, 1866), p. 9.


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closing there should be perpetual peace”. The reason for this was plain: God did it for the good of the nation. The long-term result would be that north and south would be united as “consolidated bands, more firmly than the mountain, ribbed with granite, holds all parts in one”. 24 The nation had shown itself unable to remain united on its own, and thus providence was now in operation to resolve the issue and restore the nation. The northern ministers also labored to emphasize that both North and South had been on the receiving end of God’s disciplining hand. The reason was that America’s national “sins”, including slavery and the decisions that led to war, had not gone unnoticed by a providential God. Instead, the punishment brought on by this God became itself further evidence of his special love for America as a nation. An oftcited biblical spring for this was Psalm 147:20, which in the King James Bible reads “He Hath Not Dealt so any Nation”. A.M. Colton was just one of many who rephrased and repeated this conception. This included both the punishment of the War – “God has seldom so punished any nation for its sin” – and the ultimate result: “God hath not so prepared any nation for doing good”.25 Many a northern minister emphasized that both South and North had stirred the disciplining hand of God. “God has visited our sins with Judgment”, stated Episcopal Bishop of the Diocese of Iowa, Rev. Henry W. Lee, in his Thanksgiving Day 1865 sermon in the chapel of Griswold College.26 As we might expect, at least some southern ministers took a decidedly different view of how God had worked in and through the war and even in and through slavery. In fact, a full fifteen years after the end of the war, Rev. Atticus Haygood, then president of Emory College, lamented in his 1880 Thanksgiving Day sermon that the “worst features” of slavery “were often cruelly exaggerated, and that its best were unfairly minified”. And he declared that More than all, I will not forget that, in the providence of God, a work that is without a parallel in history was done on the Southern plantations … a work that resulted in the Christianizing of a full half millions of the 24 A.S. Twombly, Escape from Danger, a Cause for National Thanksgiving: A Discourse Delivered in the State Street Presbyterian Church on Thursday Morning, December 7, 1865 (Albany, NY, 1865), pp. 19, 14, 15. 25 Colton, God’s Dealings, pp. 10, 15. 26 Henry W. Lee, The Great Deliverance, A Sermon Preached in the Chapel of Griswold College, Davenport, IA, on the Day of National Thanksgiving, Thursday, December 7, 1865 (Davenport, IA, 1865), p. 5.

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david m. timmerman African people … and of the nearly the whole four or five millions who were brought largely under the all-pervasive and redeeming influence of our holy religion.27

As Noll similarly notes, many in the South “saw in slavery a means of converting blacks who would otherwise have languished in heathendom and preserving the virtues of Christian order”.28 The point here is simply to recognize the continued commitment to providence by the ministers, even in the face of great challenges to it. An examination of the surviving sermons by northern Protestant ministers confirms that for these ministers, God’s providence was actively at work in the events they had witnessed and the future they foresaw. In a sermon preached to the First Baptist Church of Philadelphia four days after Lincoln’s assassination, Rev. George Dana Boardman contended that while prosperity provided a miserable school for learning, adversity “has a wonderful self-revealing power”. According to Rev. Boardman, the nation had learned a good deal about itself and about its need to be more dependent upon God: “We are more humble. We feel more keenly our dependence on God for the happy issue of the struggle”.29 Thus, even the incredible bloodshed and tremendous losses of the war was seen to be evidence of the providence of God. As noted, this chapter focuses on sermons by white, northern, Protestant ministers. However, it is important to note at this point that a vigorous commitment to God’s providence was held by many African-Americans and their ministers at this time as well. This was most certainly true for African-American pastor Alexander Ellis in his 10 April 1870 sermon to the Joy Street Church, site of the founding of the American Anti-Slavery Society in 1833. Five years after the Civil War, Rev. Ellis focused on the providential hand of God in the end of slavery and the passage of the Fifteenth Amendment. Rev. Ellis began his sermon with an extended description of American slavery from 1620 to the Civil War. American slavery was “base and cruel bondage”, and its history was “written in blood”. He saw God’s hand not only in the ending of slavery, but also in the progress secured through Reconstruction. While he noted that “America is still not paradise;

27 Atticus G. Haygood, The New South, Gratitude, Amendment, Hope: A Thanksgiving Sermon for November 25, 1880 (Oxford, GA, 1880), p. 11. 28 Noll, History of Christianity, p. 315. 29 George Dana Boardman, An Address in Commemoration of Abraham Lincoln April 19, 1865 First Baptist Church of Philadelphia (Philadelphia, PA, 1865), pp. 40, 41.


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its people are not angels; iniquity still abounds”, nevertheless, there was much to celebrate. That celebration must acknowledge the true source: In the progress of the work of Freedom and Reconstruction, God has not only vindicated the manhood of his people, but has raised some of his once oppressed and down trodden ones, to an equality of social and political rights with the most favored of the sons of the land.30

Thus, in the early years of Reconstruction we see Protestant ministers, both white and black, still championing the providence of God in the events of the war itself and its results. And we also know that these early days of the reconstruction period were deeply contested ones, as the country seemed to swing wildly in its actions as true freedom for African-Americans was sought, but only partly achieved. As Edward J. Blum and W. Scott Poole note: The period produced swirling emotional moods – African-American joy at emancipation and its promise for the future; Southern white fear of social chaos and resentment at the loss of status; confident expectation that Northern moral forces were up to remaking the South and anger at the frequent frustration of these efforts; emotional relief by Southern whites at redemption; and dismay by black Southerners at the violent moral low ground that their fellow Southerners would occupy for the sake of political supremacy.31

The contestations included the economic, political, and social standing of the former slaves. While the Freedman’s Bureau was established, and while it helped to establish schools, hospitals, and housing for the formerly enslaved, its reach beyond these measures was limited. During the balance of 1865, following the end of the Civil War, all the southern states instituted “Black Codes”. These codes significantly restricted African-Americans’ economic capability by restricting their ability to work and move. The codes required African-Americans to have a license to work, required them to sign extended work contracts, and stipulated supplementary penalties if they broke them. The laws also made it illegal for African-Americans to carry firearms or knives unless they secured a special license. 30

Alexander Ellis, Operations of Divine Providence: Abolition of Slavery, and in the enactment and Ratification of the Fifteenth Amendment to the Federal Constitution (Boston, MA, 1870), pp. 7, 10, 13. 31 Edward J. Blum and W. Scott Poole, eds. Vale of Tears: New Essays on Religion and Reconstruction. (Macon, GA, 2005), p. viii.

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In 1866, northern Republicans were able to get these codes repealed at the federal level, but such restrictions and limitations implemented at the state level in the south were prevalent in the postwar period, and African-Americans suffered as a result. These dynamics were made worse as President Andrew Johnson pursued a policy of limited federal intervention in the South.32 As Heather Cox Richardson describes it: From 1865 to 1867, Northern Republicans believed that AfricanAmericans were going to be good workers in a traditional Republican vision of American society. But recalcitrant Southern whites, aided and abetted by a president who clung to the idea of a limited government, were systematically abusing African-Americans, cheating them of wages, assaulting them, and preventing them from accumulating property. Over the next three years, Northern Republicans would work to find a way to guarantee that white Southerners did not impede black Americans’ efforts to join the free labor economy.33

These contestations were rife among Christians as well. Charles Reagan Wilson writes: Black Southerners’ separation from the Southern white Christians who would not offer them spiritual equality marked a turning point in Southern life, but it also bonded African-American Christians across the nation who were members of distinctively black Protestant denominations.34

This examination now turns to take a closer look at sermons given in the balance of the year 1865, after the assassination of Abraham Lincoln. In particular, it focuses on sermons by white, northern, Protestant ministers who addressed the status of freed black Americans (i.e., the Freedmen), black-white relations, and issues related to Reconstruction.

32 Heather Cox Richardson recounts: “Determined to undercut a Republican reworking of the American government, Johnson winked at the virtual reimposition of slavery in the South and at white southern unwillingness to bow to the supremacy of the federal government. He insisted only that southern states repudiate their war debt, nullify their secession ordinances, and abolish legal slavery, convinced that these measures would be enough to destroy any remaining impetus for southern nationhood. By the end of 1865, every state but Texas had done as he requested” (West from Appomattox: The Reconstruction of American after the Civil War [New Haven, 2007], p. 53). 33 Ibid., p. 40. 34 Charles Reagan Wilson, “Foreword,” in Vale of Tears: New Essays on Religion and Reconstruction, ed. Edward J. Blum and W. Scott Poole (Macon, GA, 2005), p. ix.


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Providence, Race, and the Freedmen The sermons given immediately following Lincoln’s assassination and the Thanksgiving Day sermons of the same time period tend to treat a sweep of American history, rehearsing the nation’s status as God’s chosen people and his New Israel. Some focused on the end of the war, the presence of peace, the saving of the Union, and the rebuilding of both North and South. Others speak of God’s material blessings on the country in terms of the increased production and wealth created, even, they note, in the immediate postwar period. Still others focus on the American people’s religious commitment and the need to build on the past with revival in the present. This analysis highlights those sermons which explicitly address the status and future of the Freedmen, as ministers discuss their basic needs, employment, ownership of land, the right to vote, and their relationships with white Americans. Of course, these sermons are, in each case, occasional documents that respond to the events of the day as faced by the ministers themselves, their congregations, and the country as a whole. In each case, much can be learned about the prevailing conditions of the time, including various elements of the political, social, intellectual, and religious context of mid 19th-century America. More specifically for this chapter, the difficult reality faced by freed black Americans after the Civil War is reiterated in dramatic fashion. Given the circumstances, it is not surprising to see the ministers struggle with reconciling the great promise of freedom for the formerly enslaved with the considerable difficulty of creating a just and equitable society with them fully included. The historical, political, and economic circumstances for both whites and blacks in the post Civil War era were complex and difficult. No path forward would be easy. Indeed, historian Vernon Burton lists four schools of thought on the question of whether or not Reconstruction could have been successful. The first contends that its failure was inevitable because southern attitudes concerning southern culture in general and black Americans in particular were so entrenched. The second holds that Reconstruction failed because the federal government did not do enough to insure its success by “compelling the white South to act equitably toward the freedmen” and by doing more to distribute land to them. Another view states that not only did Reconstruction not work, but that in fact at the lived level there was no dramatic change for black Americans: “Serfdom replaced slavery, the Jim Crow legislation replaced the Slave codes, and

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African-Americans, economically, politically, and socially powerless, were still subordinated to whites”.35 Finally, the last school sees Reconstruction continuing on to today, though it officially ended in 1877. This analysis of immediate postwar sermons helps us see quite clearly the steep hill formerly enslaved African-Americans had to climb as they sought to realize their full political and social equality in America. In each of the sermons in which the ministers address the status of freed black Americans, there is a rehearsal of their free status, most typically presented in a celebratory declaration. For example, Congregational minister Rev. Samuel G. Buckingham of South Church finished his sermon with stirring praise for the end of the war and the freeing of the enslaved men and women that had taken place earlier in the year. In the final passage, he offers as passionate a call to full equality and citizenship as one can find: It is a glad day; a fit day for thanksgiving and praise to Almighty God. Four million of freemen have been added at once to our population. Whereas they were chattels, and things, now they are men, with all the rights and dignity of men. They are henceforth to be recognized as made in the same image, and redeemed by the same Savior, and destined to the same immortality, as others. They are lifted from the degradation of bondmen, up to the high plain of manhood, and political rights, and Christian brotherhood.36

Similarly, we see this in a very explicit manner in the Rev. Silas Hawley’s 1865 Thanksgiving Day sermon to a joint meeting of Methodists, Baptists, and Presbyterians in Lockland, Ohio. He notes how God’s hand had given the country the chance to rebuild on a new foundation, one more true to the founding vision of the country. This was made possible by a God who had granted the nation “the opportunity to correct our organic errors – to rectify the mistakes of the Constitution – to re-lay the national foundations – to re-cast, as far as it is needful, the whole form of Society”. As it relates to the status of the black freemen, Rev. Hawley is clear: as of the end of the War, “they are their own masters”.37

35 Vernon Burton, “Civil War Reconstruction, 1861–1877,” in A Companion to 19thCentury America, ed. William L. Barney (Malden, MA, 2001), pp. 54, 55. 36 Buckingham, Sermon Preached, p. 20. 37 Silas Hawley, National Reconstruction the Glory and Shame of a Nation: A Thanksgiving Day Sermon Preached December 7, 1865, At a Union Service in Lockland


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In a sermon to Boston’s Berkeley Street Church given a week after Lincoln’s assassination, the Rev. Henry Martyn Dexter stated that “The freedmen should be recognized as men, should be treated as men, and should be aided to take care of themselves as men”. Dexter then outlined several steps for implementing this foundational principle, including distributing parcels of land to the freedmen that, he argued, the government had the right and responsibility to seize from former slave owners. He provided a dual justification for this. On the one hand, the former slave owners, in their rebellion from the Union and the War, had “staked all and lost all”.38 At the same time, it was right for the land to be distributed to the freemen because they had earned it through their labor. Rev. Hawley responded to those who were uncertain how the country should “handle” the freemen by stating, “They are, thank God … our brave soldiers, their own men; hence it is a question of theirs”.39 But even as they charted a hopeful and positive course forward for the Freedmen, these same ministers raised a number of difficulties and challenges that the Freedmen would face. For example, Hawley recounted and responded to a number of counter arguments he stated were active at the time. Noting these in the text of his sermon helps us to see the other side, the side which those working to help recently freed men and women were up against. He treats them one by one in question and answer fashion. These questions include the following: How are we to determine the legal status of the freedmen? Where would they live? What work would they find to do? When should they receive the right to vote? Was there a natural antagonism between the races?

While it was clear to the Rev. Hawley and to his ministerial contemporaries that God had, in his providence, taken the nation through the horror and pain of the Civil War as a punishment for her sins and to provide the mechanism for the freeing of enslaved blacks, it was now an open question as to how God’s providence would operate in and

Ohio, Made up of The Methodists, Baptist, and Presbyterian Churches (Cincinnati, OH, 1866), p. 17. 38 Henry Martyn Dexter, What Ought to be Done with the Freedmen and with the Rebels? A Sermon Preached in the Berkeley-Street Church, Boston, Massachusetts (Boston, MA, 1865), pp. 9, 13. 39 Hawley, National Reconstruction, p. 16.

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among both white Americans and black Americans in a country without slavery. Similarly, the Rev. Charles Smith, pastor of the Congregationalist South Church in Andover, Massachusetts, addressed “the conditions we have found to be necessary safeguards to the ballot-box”, and thus proposed and defended the withholding of the right to vote until the freedman could be shown to know how to read and write. “He must be educated, intellectually, morally, and religiously, or he will become a greater curse to us, and more wretched, as a freeman, than he has ever been as a slave”.40 Rev. Buckingham, who early in his sermon declared the free status of those who had been enslaved, then moved on to treat an array of difficulties with this proposition. He began his treatment of the Freedmen by stating that he did not wish to “undervalue the difficulties” in instituting their full equality and citizenship. He then continued on to handle what were, we presume, a series of such difficulties as perceived by at least some in his day, including that they were “an inferior race” and that they “must submit to whatever injustice, short of slavery, their old masters may choose to impose”. In addition, he contended that they should not vote, buy, or sell, and that they were “children, but without the full rights of children”.41 And thus, the Freedmen had been so degraded and tyrannized by slavery that they were unable to exercise full citizenship. Rev. Dexter encouraged his congregants to extend the vote to the Freedmen, but not immediately. Rather, while he labeled voting as a natural right for men, in the case of the Freedmen, this important step ought not take place until “his education shall be sufficient”. This was the fourth of Rev. Dexter’s five calls to action on the part of the Freedmen, the last of which was that white America must “conquer and abandon our foolish and wicked prejudice against the negro on account of his color”.42 In his 1865 Thanksgiving Day sermon to Christ Church in Reading, Pennsylvania, Rev. Alexander G. Cummins characterized the current condition of the Freedmen as a “disenthralled race” that “stands at present in a position of utter poverty; homeless, almost naked, shivering with cold, and near starvation; ignorant, with no avenues for

40 Charles Smith, What We Have Secured by War, and What Remains to be Secured: A Discourse Delivered on the Day of National Thanksgiving, December 7, 1865, in the South Church, Andover, Massachusetts (Andover, MA, 1866), pp. 17–18. 41 Buckingham, Sermon Preached, p. 4. 42 Dexter, What Ought to be Done, pp. 15, 16.


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self-sustenance open; the sport of the cunning and the malicious; perishing by disease; bereft of mental, moral, and spiritual instruction…”. This left the Freedmen free of the “peculiar” institution of slavery, but in Cummins’ words they were now bound to a “peculiar position” as a result. The Freedmen were “a race, untutored, ignorant, and poor … suddenly brought out of bondage, and totally unfit to act, think, and provide for self ”. This led to viewing freed black Americans as in a transition state, “midway between slavery and citizenship”.43 This last phrase from Rev. Cummins, “midway between slavery and citizenship”, captures the basic tenor and position taken by white northern Protestant clergy concerning the Freedmen in their sermons. All praised the northern victory in the war, and freedom for the formerly enslaved; nevertheless, we see in their sermons both the positioning of black Americans midway between slavery and citizenship and the construction of a paternalistic structure as a means of handling the situation. This chapter now addresses each of these in turn. Race and Fatherly Supervision for the Freedmen In the sermons, we see not only the raising of these difficulties, but also attempts at resolution. The ministers employed their privileged status in American society to formulate strategies for moving the Freedmen and the country forward. And it is in these attempts at solutions involving whites and blacks, the Christian church, and the country as a whole where race-based differentiation and paternalistic language arose. As these northern ministers envisioned the path forward for the nation and for the Christian church, they took their role quite seriously. There is in their words a depth of thought and reflection that is striking as they wrestled with the question of how to make real the Freedmen’s full citizenship, equality of opportunity, and social standing. Yet we can also see quite plainly that their ability to see a way forward to full political and social equality was hampered by a race-based differentiation they were unable or unwilling to see beyond. That said, it is also the case that a few of the ministers pointed out this differentiation and noted the hypocrisy in it. For example, while many assumed

43 Alexander G. Cummins, The Christian Church’s Duty to the Freedmen: A Sermon Preached on Thanksgiving Day, December 7, 1865 (Philadelphia, PA, 1865), pp. 10–11, 16–17, 15.

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or even argued for the incompatibility of the two races, the precise opposite was proved by the commonness of slave holders’ sexual interaction and childbearing with their female slaves. As Rev. Hawley exclaimed, “Why, look at it. Out of four millions of persons reputed African, few are found of pure blood! This, if natural antagonism, must be a very queer type!” He went on to treat what some whites were contending was a “constitutional repugnance to color” on their part. But Hawley would have none of it: These self-same persons wear many articles of black. A gentleman said this, in a stagecoach, recently; I remarked that he must be mistaken. I point to what he had on, and all selected from his own taste, and I then drew from him the confession, seeing he had intensely yellow whiskers and mustache, that he had paid barbers largely to turn them into black! And yet these gentlemen insisted, that he had a constitutional repugnance to black!

Finally, he treated the claim that the United States was “white man’s country” by deeming such thinking “an aristocracy of color”, and reminding his congregants that the country was first occupied by nonEuropeans.44 Likewise, Rev. Buckingham, speaking in December of 1865, worried because he saw a growing hypocrisy in the way that white Americans were interacting with and treating black Americans. He stated We are saying: “We are no asylum for the weak and oppressed: we are no friends of man as man: we do not see a white soul under a black skin, or a red skin, or a yellow skin: we see only an African, and Indiana, an Asiatie: and we hate him, because he perplexes our politics, or obstructs our mining or our land enterprises, or gluts our labor market.” What then becomes of all our loud-mouthed boasts of American hospitality, of the equality of man, of the fraternity of free men in a new world? I will not say, I wonder at this declension.

All this and yet even during the war, “Whatever prejudices white soldiers may have had against black troops, it did not take them long to find out that a negro would stop a ball as effectually as a white man, and this was no objection to his standing, if ordered there, in the front rank”.45 Both the founding documents of the country and the recent experience of the war put the lie to the race-based differentiation still in existence in the country. What is more, Buckingham 44 45

Hawley, National Reconstruction, pp. 17, 18. Buckingham, Sermon Preached, pp. 5, 18.


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called into question the country’s self perception of a land of freedom and equality for all based on the continued subordination of black Americans. On 17 November 1867, at Metzerott Hall, Washington, D.C., Rev. Charles B. Boynton delivered a sermon entitled “The Duty which the Colored People Owe to Themselves”, in which he outlined the many ways in which “every earnest Christian and Patriot” was united concerning the “future status of the black race” in America. These included having all the rights and privileges of white Americans as well as the same opportunities and access to business pursuits, enjoyment, and social rank. But Boyton then turned to explain how in “the character of American thinking on this subject there are two theories which divide” those who were similarly committed to the rights of black Americans: One theory proposes such an intermingling of the races as shall sweep not only unjust distinctions, but all differences, away, so that the two shall be finally merged into one. To accomplish this, those who adopt the theory would gradually break up all separate organizations for colored people, and in the churches, schools, colleges and associations of all kinds, educational and religious as well as political, merge them in the surrounding mass of the whites. Such persons would have no separate colored schools, seminaries or associations or churches. The other theory proposes to give the black race an independent life and growth, which shall neither be cramped by pressure from the whites nor sunk into inferiority by a subservient imitation of another race, and assuming that God made no mistake when he created the black race, it would take the race as it is, bearing the very impress that God has stamped upon it, and give it a culture and a civilization which shall be a separate growth of its own individual nature. It would hold the race so far separate as to promote its individuality and its life as a race, so that culture should result in a true African civilization, and produce a perfected black man, and not a weak and worthless imitation of the whites.

As is implied, the Rev. Boynton favored the latter approach, and gave further reasons for this. First, he contended, “too little importance is usually given to the distinctions of race”. He took his congregation back to the biblical story of Babel and contended that “a great purpose of God” was and is accomplished by the separation of races. The racial groupings in existence were merely the descendants of those established by God. It would be both presumptuous and impossible for humans to overcome these, even if they tried. These groupings (e.g., Jews, Greeks, and Celts) were God-ordained, each one beautiful in its own way, and “strong enough to resist and dissolve all political

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combinations and tear even Governments asunder”.46 The solution was to enable each to develop and operate in its own sphere. In other ministers we see what must be described as paradoxical remarks on race. Rev. Dexter is a case in point; it is hard to know what to make of his words. On the one hand, he made a strong claim that “Once more, it is our duty to conquer and abandon our foolish and wicked prejudice against the negro on account of his color”, but on the other hand, speaking of whites, he said, “we have a right to our preferences, of course. It is nobody’s business if I think somebody beautiful in whom you see no beauty”. And then again, he made a strong plea stating that only the most “narrow, mean, low-bred” persons failed to “concede that character does not consist in color”. Yet a few sentences later he stated We need not marry them, nor give them in marriage; we need not walk arm in arm with them in the streets; we need not prefer them in any respect to our own color – those are questions regarding social, not political equality.47

The sermon seemed to pitch back and forth, quite uncomfortably at times, as Dexter sought to balance and reconcile quite divergent positions, preferences, and realities. Thus do we see in these sermons a persistent adherence to racial distinction, a persistent attachment to racial homogeneity, and a persistent embrace of a racially constructed separation within American society. True, there were differences among the ministers on these matters as well as efforts to draw distinctions between public and private, social and political. There are ways in which their words would seem to support various means of integration and yet also ways in which their words explicitly embraced segregation. In the end, however, it is clear that for all the pronouncements of full equality and citizenship for the freedmen, one finds an equal number of racially grounded qualifications and constraints. This is the first point to be made by this analysis. The second has to do with the hierarchical framework for black-white relations as constructed in several of these sermons.

46 Charles B. Boynton, The Duty Which the Colored People Owe to Themselves: A Sermon Delivered at Metzerott Hall, Washington, D.C., November 17, 1867 (Washington, D.C, 1867), pp. 2, 3, 5. 47 Dexter, What Ought to be Done, pp. 16, 17.


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By this I refer to the manner in which the master-slave, superiorinferior relationship of whites and blacks morphed into one in which equality was affirmed and even championed but there nevertheless remained a relation of inequality. The manner in which this relationship was most frequently described is that of parent to child. In the end, freed black Americans could not experience full equality or citizenship, not due to an essential inferiority, as had been held in the past, but rather due to their experience of slavery itself, which had left them so degraded and debased that they were seen by some whites as being unable, at least initially, to realize the full extent of their declared, and earned, equality and freedom. Hence, what I here describe as a new premise for a discriminatory status for black Americans was established in the sermons. Rev. Cummins, for example, envisioned a parent-child relation analogous to the manumission of slaves in ancient Rome. In Rome, slaves who had earned their freedom from their masters maintained a “patron-client” relation to their former owners. As such, there remained an economic relation of benefit between the two as well as the positive attachment of freed slave to the patron who had enabled the freedom. In the case of black Americans, that relation must take place not between the free black American and the former slave owner, but rather between the Freedman and the federal government which had caused his freedom. Cummins drew from this analogy the language of the parent-child relationship and its connection to the standing of formerly enslaved black Americans. In fact, he noted that the most appropriate way to characterize the situation of black Americans, “if I may be allowed the use of the word, is a state of orphanage”. This was true, by his calculation, because they had come out of slavery “with most of slavery’s faults and evils still clinging to their garments”. They had been “so long taught to feel dependence”, they were “now quite unprepared to realize independence”.48 The Government and the church must therefore step in and seek to raise the situation of the freedmen in all aspects such that in time, they would be able to fully realize their equality and citizenship. Whereas at one time much of the justification for the enslavement of African-Americans rested on a premise of essential inequality and inferiority between white and black Americans, in their sermons these

48

Cummins, Christian Church’s Duty, pp. 16, 17.

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white northern ministers suggested a new rationale: the experience of slavery itself had so harmed, and degraded, black Americans that they were unable, at least initially, to fully realize social and political equality with white America. Rev. Dexter laid the foundation for this same premise when he noted that the rebellion was ending and thus, “We are so near to it, that those questions which its settlement makes practical are now in order, and indeed press themselves upon every mind”. After noting that the total free population of African-Americans in the country would be close to five million, he wondered where the freedmen would go and in what conditions they would live. Though he argued that they should receive land in the South from the slave owners who had committed treason against the Union, he nevertheless asserted that “They must, for a time, be paternally cared for and aided in their new life”. The paternalistic construction and nature of this relationship is unmistakable; he added that It is wonderful how well they behave, how industrious they are, and with what rapid strides they march up toward some simple learning and some rude independence. But as it would not be a very prudent thing to turn loose four and a half millions of children to their own care, without any oversight, so these adult children will be the better for some proper fatherly supervision, until they shall become accustomed to the new way.49

At that point, the patron-client, parent-child construction could be ended, although the time frame was nowhere mentioned. What drove the construction of this paternalistic structure, in the words of the ministers, was the position of African-Americans after their degrading experience in slavery at the hands of white Americans. That experience, they explained, had left them, at least initially, unable to fully realize their political and social equality and their freedom in American society. Thus we have seen how, in the path envisioned by northern white Protestant ministers, a new premise was laid for racially-based distinctions and constrictions. Whereas at one time the premise had consisted of a racially and biblically based argument for the inferior position of black Americans, these positions were set aside and a new premise 49

Dexter, What Ought to be Done, pp. 7, 14.


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based on the experience of slavery itself was inserted. Thus, as Rev. Smith noted: If slavery is the terrible thing we believe it to be, then the people who have for generations been subject to its demoralizing, degrading, unhumanizing [sic] influences, must be far down in the scale of intellectual and moral character.50

The Rev. Buckingham made the explicit link from the effects of slavery to the color of skin, stating that black Americans were a people “whose old bondage is stained into their very skins”.51 Thus, in this new view of white/ black relations, slavery, rather than an essential characteristic of black Americans, was the premise for supporting a race-based social hierarchy with whites on top. Conclusion Protestant ministers held a privileged rhetorical position in America in the mid 19th century. And, as we have seen in the Thanksgiving Day sermons and those given immediately following the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, the ministers did not shy away from addressing the most important and vigorously debated political and social issues of the day. In so doing, they enacted for their congregations the immensely difficult and recurring struggle persons of faith face: how to negotiate the relationship between their religious faith and their positions within a particular political and social structure at a particular moment in history. For Christian ministers and church members, the mid 19th century, with slavery, the Civil War, Emancipation, the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, and Reconstruction, formed a crucible in which these sometimes competing, sometimes conflicting, and sometimes overlapping faith and political commitments were put under tremendous heat and pressure. And it was in response to this heat and pressure that the ministers’ discussions of race and the condition and future of formerly enslaved African-Americans occurred. In their sermons we see the tension between a faith-based commitment to full social and political equality

50 51

Smith, What We Have Secured, p. 19. Buckingham, Sermon Preached, p. 4.

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expressed within the constraints of a society with deeply embedded race based distinctions and the persistence of a hierarchical relationship between white and black Americans. Ministers who addressed these matters directly in their sermons by and large settled on a process for moving towards full social and political equality, by one means or another. While they pointed to the effects of the institution of slavery on black Americans, it is clear that the institution and experience of slavery had a dramatic effect on white Americans as well. But if the experience of slavery had so degraded the enslaved, we are left to wonder what the ministers made of the effect of slavery on the enslavers. At least in these sermons from the earliest days of American reconstruction, it left, or seems to have left, white Americans unable or unwilling to accept the full political, social, and ontological equality of black Americans. While the ministers saw God’s hand of providence powerfully at work in the results of the Civil War, particularly in the end of slavery, that same providence was not deemed powerful enough to realize the full rights of the Freedmen. A divinely provided freedom left in place a humanly constructed paternalism. The color line was drawn, midway between slavery and citizenship.

SACRED RHETORIC AND THE AFRICAN-AMERICAN CIVIC SERMON Joseph Evans Introduction Henry Louis Gates, Jr., author of Loose Canons: Notes on the Cultural Wars, has pointed to the importance of literacy in African-American oratory and letters. Gates informs his readers of an event that took place near the United States Capitol in 1833 or 1834. Senator John C. Calhoun, of South Carolina, met with a group of men including Samuel E. Sewell and David Lee Child, two prominent Boston lawyers, and either Edward Livingston, of New York, who served as Secretary of State from 1833 to 1834 or John Forsyth, of Virginia, who held the position from 1834 to 1841. He writes, It was a period of great ferment upon the question of Slavery, States Rights, and Nullification; and consequently the Negro was the topic of conversation at the table. One of the utterances of Mr. Calhoun was to this effect, “That if he could find a Negro who knew Greek syntax, he would then believe that the Negro was a human being and should be treated as a man”.1

This passage is significant for at least two reasons. First, it illustrates the climate and conditions that African-Americans endured in their struggle to be considered human and equal to all others regardless of race and status. Second, it aids our understanding of the role literacy played, and continues to play, for all racial groups to achieve equality in the public square. Such a role, in fact, has been a primary concern of African-American orators since the 19th century. The “traditional black church”, for example, “expects and appreciates rhetorical flair and highly poetic language in the preaching of the gospel”:2

1

Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Loose Canons: Notes on the Cultural Wars (Oxford, 1992), pp. 72–73. Also see Alexander Crummell, “The Attitude of the American Mind toward the Negro Intellect,” in Civilization and Black Progress, ed. John R. Oldfield (Charlottesville, 1995), p. 204. 2 Cleophus J. LaRue, The Heart of Black Preaching (Louisville, 2000), p. 9.

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joseph evans There is little fear in black pulpits of being accused of “pretty preaching.” In fact, seasoned pastors from an earlier generation could often be heard admonishing younger ministers not to be afraid “to preach a little.” Such encouragements were intended to free the poet in the preacher and allow the presence of God through the power of language to lift the sermon to higher heights. To this end, the employment of literary devices such as antiphonality, repetition, alliteration, syncopation, oral formulas, thematic imagery, voice merging, and sacred time continues to be a compelling concern of the African-American preacher. Such rhetorical tools in the hands of a skillful black preacher can evoke a sense of God’s awe and mystery in the listening congregation … Unlike many European and mainline American denominations, where architecture and classical music inspire a sense of the holy, blacks seek to accomplish this act through well-crafted rhetoric. The listening ear becomes the privileged sensual organ as the preacher attempts through careful and precise rhetoric to embody the Word. For this reason, the rhythm, cadence, and sound of words, as well as their ability to “paint a picture” in the minds of the hearers, are very important in the African-American sermon. The black preacher’s careful search for the precise words and phrases are continuing evidence of the importance of rhetoric and the modest circumstances that originally gave it a place of primacy in the black sermon.3

These preachers, in turn, used the power of words to seek freedom and equality for their people. As William G. Allen, an African-American professor at New York Central College in McGrawville, New York put it in 1852, Orators worthy of the name must have for their subject personal liberty, and orators worthy of the name must necessarily originate in the nation that is on the eve of passing from a state of slavery into freedom, or from a state of freedom into slavery. How could this be otherwise? Where there is no pressure, the highest efforts of genius must lie underdeveloped.4

Jacqueline Bacon has added a poignant comment to Allen’s words. “The most powerful oratory”, she writes, “arises from oppression … and is fundamentally connected to the transition from slavery to freedom”.5 This transition involved not only preaching the gospel, but engaging the secular culture as well. As Harryette Mullen has noted, An African-American tradition of literacy as secular technology and tool for political empowerment, through appropriation of public symbols, and participation in mainstream cultural discourse, coexists with 3 4 5

Ibid., p. 9 Jacqueline Bacon, The Humblest May Stand Forth (Columbia, SC, 2002), p. 14. Ibid., p. 14.

sacred rhetoric and the african-american civic sermon 439 a parallel tradition of visionary literacy as a spiritual practice in which divine inspiration, associated with Christian biblical tradition, is syncretically merged with African traditions.6

This species of oratory is effective on two different platforms. Through sacred-secular imagery, it moves sectarian congregations to embrace civic responsibility, and through secular-sacred imagery, it persuades secular audiences to become evangelists for democratic values. As a hybrid of political-religious oratory woven into a single address, such a discourse functions as what I am calling the “African-American civic sermon”. This essay will consider, in chronological order, three practitioners of this art: Frederick Douglass, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Gardner C. Taylor. Frederick Douglass Speaking in June 1852, William G. Allen said, “In versatility of oratorical power, I know of no one who can begin to approach the celebrity of Frederick Douglass”.7 “In 1893, two years before Douglass’ death, James Monroe Gregory, professor of classics at Howard University, offered these words of praise: ‘By whatever standard judged Mr. Douglass will take high rank as orator and writer.’ ”8 His rhetorical accomplishments were grounded in both sacred and secular experience and thus provide a useful point of departure for the study of the African-American civic sermon. Douglass’ first lessons in the value of literacy came from his mother, “the only one of the colored people of Tuckahoe who could read”.9 Douglass’ autobiography recounts the extent of her influence upon his life: How she acquired this knowledge I know not, for Tuckahoe was the last place in the world where she would have been likely to find facilities for learning. I can therefore fondly and proudly ascribe to her an earnest love of knowledge. That in any slave State a field hand should learn to read is

6 Harryette Mullen, “African Signs and Spirit Writing,” in African American Literary Theory: A Reader, ed. Winston Napier (New York, 2000), p. 626. 7 James A. Colaiaco, Frederick Douglass and the Fourth of July (New York, 2006), p. 5. 8 Ibid., p. 5. 9 Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life; My Bondage and My Freedom, Life and Times (New York, 1994), p. 484.

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joseph evans remarkable, but the achievement of my mother, considering the place and circumstances, was very extraordinary. In view of this fact, I am happy to attribute any love of letters I may have, not to my presumed Anglo-Saxon paternity, but to the native genius of my sable, unprotected, and uncultivated mother – a woman who belonged to a race whose mental endowments are still disparaged and despised.10

Douglass also records an incident that helped him to see the connection between education and freedom. Mrs. Sophia Auld, the wife of one of his masters, had “very kindly commenced to teach [him] the A, B, C”,11 but when her husband found out, he forbade her to continue. Douglass writes: I well remember when my mistress first announced to my master that she had discovered that I could read. His face colored at once, with surprise and chagrin. He said that “I was ruined, and my value as a slave destroyed, that a slave should know nothing but to obey his master; that to give a Negro an inch would lead him to take it ill; that having learned how to read, I would soon want to know how to write; and that, by and by, I would be running away.” I think my audience will bear witness to the correctness of this philosophy, and to the literal fulfillment of this prophecy.12

Douglass’ memories of Mrs. Auld remained fond: although she could no longer facilitate his learning, she had sparked in him a burning passion to achieve the power of literacy. He pursued this goal by reading a popular schoolroom text called The Columbian Orator. Its influence upon him has been noted by David Blight, the editor of a modern edition of the Orator: Now young Frederick was armed with the same reader his playmates were using; he too could listen to the music of words, recite passages, perform to imaginary audiences, and invent his own uses of words. Most important, the young slave, who had bitterly reminded his playmates about his status as a “slave for life,” could begin to understand the world beyond his thralldom. Destiny is an old-fashioned word; but words were the destiny, and would be the hope, nourishment, and eventually the legacy of this young slave who would become Frederick Douglass, the greatest African-American leader and orator of the nineteenth century.13 10

Ibid., p. 484. Ibid., p. 37. 12 Frederick Douglass, Frederick Douglass: Selected Speeches and Writings, ed. Philip S. Foner (Chicago, 1999), p. 168. 13 David Blight, ed., The Columbian Orator (New York, 1998), p. xiv. 11

sacred rhetoric and the african-american civic sermon 441 Blight’s analysis clearly expressed the power of literacy, which enabled Douglass from his youth to reach his potential as a leader. As Douglass matured, and continued to read, he became a master of the AfricanAmerican rhetorical and literary tradition. His rhetorical mastery, moreover, was grounded not just in his secular education, but also in his religious experiences. Douglass’ Narrative speaks of a process of conversion he experienced during his teenage years: Previous to my contemplation of the anti-slavery movement, and its probable results, my mind had been seriously awakened to the subject of religion. I was not more than thirteen years old, when I felt the need of God, as a [F]ather and protector. My religious nature was awakened by the preaching of a white Methodist minister, named Hanson. He thought that all men, great and small, bond or free, were sinners in the sight of God; that they were by nature, rebels against His government; and that they must repent of their sins, and be reconciled to God through Christ. I cannot say I had a very distinct notion of what was required of me; but one thing I knew very well – I was wretched, and had no means of making myself otherwise. Moreover, I knew that I could pray for light. I consulted a good colored man, name Charles Johnson; and, in tones of holy affection, he told me to pray, and what to pray for. I was, for weeks, a poor broken-hearted mourner, traveling through the darkness and misery of doubts and fears. I finally found that change of heart which comes by casting all one’s care upon God, and by having faith in Jesus Christ, as the Redeemer, Friend and Savior of those who diligently seek Him.14

This series of religious encounters changed Douglass. He went on to write, “After this, I saw the world in a new light. I seemed to live in a new world, surrounded by new objects, and to be animated by new hopes and desires. I loved all mankind slaveholders-not accepted [sic]; though I abhorred slavery more than ever”.15 Douglass came to see himself not only as a convert, but also as a preacher. Jacqueline Bacon’s claim that that Douglass either imitated preachers or was a preacher himself16 has been supported at length in William L. Andrews’ article entitled “Frederick Douglass, Preacher”: We may never know to what extent and in what way Douglass found his voice as a black preacher among Zion Methodists before he began to make his fame addressing white anti-slavery audiences. However, we can

14 15 16

Douglass, Narrative of the Life, p. 231. Ibid., p. 231. Bacon, The Humblest May Stand Forth, p. 63.

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joseph evans document his situation in this all-black church in more detail than has been previously been brought out. Douglass’s preaching role among the Zion Methodists was attested in the Wonderful Eventful Life of Rev. Thomas James (1804–1891), the narrative of a black Rochester, New York Clergyman active in the anti-slavery movement. James recalls Douglass as a member of the New Bedford Zion Methodists in 1840, the year James took charge of the church. Douglass “had been given authority to act as an exhorter by the church before my coming,” wrote James, “and I some time afterwards licensed him to preach. On one occasion, after I had addressed a white audience on the slave question, I called upon Fred. Douglass, whom I saw among the auditors, to relate his story. He did so, and in a year from that time he was in the lecture field with Parker Pillsbury and other leading abolitionist orators.” Since James provides no specifics about the occasion, it is impossible to determine the accuracy of this anecdote or to tell whether this black minister, not the white abolitionists William C. Coffin, was actually the first to steer Frederick Douglass into anti-slavery oratory. Any rate, James’s recollections concur with Douglass’s autobiography in showing him a preacher before he was a polemicist, while also suggesting how the obscure black preacher in New Bedford could have found his way to the abolitionist platform.17

Andrews admits that some scholars are reluctant to substantiate this claim. He does, however, present further evidence from a letter Douglass wrote to Bishop James Hood (1831–1918), an African Methodist Episcopal Zion church historian, in which he briefly reminisced about his past work in the AME Zion Church of New Bedford: My connection with the African Episcopal Zion Church began in 1838 … As early as 1839, I obtained my license from Quarterly Conference as a local preacher, and often occupied the pulpit by request of the preacher in charge. No doubt that the exercise of my gifts in this vocation, and my association with the excellent men to whom I have referred, helped to prepare me for the wider sphere of usefulness, which I have since occupied. It was from this Zion church that I went forth to the work of delivering my brethren from bondage, and this new vocation, which separated me from New Bedford and finally so enlarged my views of duty separated me from the calling of a local preacher. My connection with the little church continued long after I was in the antislavery field. I look back to the days spent in little Zion, New Bedford, in the several capacities of sexton, steward, class leader, clerk, and local preacher, as among the happiest days of my life.18

17 William L. Andrews, “Frederick Douglass, Preacher,” American Literature 54.4 (1982), 594. 18 Ibid., p. 596.

sacred rhetoric and the african-american civic sermon 443 Andrews offers compelling evidence that Douglass was indeed a preacher. In addition, Douglass acknowledged that his antislavery oratory had been influenced by his pulpit rhetoric; it is these religious overtones that make his speeches leading examples of the AfricanAmerican civic sermon. In other words, Douglass’ moral and political worldviews were intertwined in his rhetoric. For instance, he once gave an address responding to racial prejudice he experienced in a church in New Bedford, Massachusetts: “It seems, the kingdom of Heaven is like a net; at least so it was according to the practice of these pious Christians; and when the net was drawn ashore, they had to sit down and cull out the fish; well, it happened now that some of the fish had rather black scales; so these were sorted out and packed by themselves.” Douglass refers to Christ’s advice to the disciples to be fishers of men (Matt 4:19, Mark 1:17), but he revises this image to create a startling statement. Drawing on the influences of a story that would connect to his audience, but recreating the image so that it resonates at a new level, Douglass aptly demonstrates the depths of Northern prejudice.19

The address was given in a secular setting, but according to Bacon, Douglass was still preaching a sermon. She does not provide explicit evidence to support his claim, but she does provide enough context for us to infer its truth. In this passage, Douglass is telling a story, an approach which is often found in African-American oratory and preaching. Slave preachers often preferred it because of their lack of education; literate preachers felt compelled to use it because their educated white audiences, who were generally fairly progressive abolitionists, nevertheless expected them to play the stereotypical role of the “slave story teller”.20 Douglass used narrative because it permitted him to use his personal testimony as a means of gaining the audience’s sympathy and inspiring them to action. By using the same techniques – “storytelling, trickster tales, black preaching, and signifying”,21 – that many African-American preachers of the day employed, Douglass was, in essence, able to transform even a secular platform into a Christian pulpit.

19

Bacon, The Humblest May Stand Forth, p. 63. Ibid., p. 60. 21 Yuval Taylor, “Introduction,” in Frederick Douglass, Frederick Douglass: Selected Speeches and Writings, ed. Philip S. Foner (Chicago, 1975), p. xii. 20

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In a speech delivered on 14 May 1857, in response to the Dred Scott decision, Douglass further expressed what Mullen calls “a visionary Christian Biblical tradition”, which I argue is the religious point of departure in an African-American civic sermon. Once again employing the narrative approach to oratory, Douglass attempted to persuade his audience that still there was hope in emancipation by reminding them that there was a biblical precedent for overcoming challenges to truth: This is one view, it is, thank God, only one view; there is another, and a brighter view. David you know, looked small and insignificant when going to meet Goliath, but looked larger when he had stained his foe. The Malakoff was, to the eye of the world, impregnable, till the hour it fell before the shot and shell of the allied army. Thus hath it ever been. Oppression, organized as ours is, will appear invincible up to the very hour of its fall. Sir, let us look at the other side, and see if there are not some things to cheer our heart and nerve us up anew in the good work of emancipation.22

Illustrating Mullen’s view that African-American intellectuals often blend public symbols and biblical traditions, Douglass invokes an allegorical comparison of the story of David and Goliath to contemporary issues of freedom and slavery. Douglass’ civic preaching is perhaps best seen in his use of the jeremiad in his speeches. Named for the Old Testament prophet, jeremiad depends on a cultural worldview that asserts that a certain group of people were chosen by God, but have strayed from their ethical path: Jeremiadic or prophetic speakers warn audiences that they have sinned and exhort them to change their ways to avoid punishment for their transgressions. Thus, although the prophet’s message may create anger or even hostility in an audience that is being rebuked, the jeremiad in its traditional form ultimately depends upon and reinforces the shared beliefs of the community in their special mission and principles.23

Historically, the jeremiad’s rhetorical purpose has been to accuse the oppressor of exploiting the oppressed. Bacon believes that AfricanAmerican rhetors saw this as a parallel with their human condition. “The plight of African-Americans, then, assumes messianic significance, embodying God’s promise to redeem American society. Thus

22 23

Douglass, Selected Speeches and Writings, pp. 345–46. Bacon, The Humblest May Stand Forth, p. 78.

sacred rhetoric and the african-american civic sermon 445 the African-American jeremiadic rhetor simultaneously offers radical critique of society and draws on dominant cultural topoi”.24 Yuval Taylor has written that “Douglass’ mixture of doom saying with affirmation of America’s potential for greatness fits well into a long tradition of American jeremiads stretching from the seventeenth century to the present day”.25 One example of this rhetoric appears in “The Meaning of July Fourth for the Negro”, a speech delivered in Rochester, New York, on 5 July 1852: By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down! Yea! We wept when we remembered Zion. We hanged our harps upon the willows in the midst thereof. For there, they that carried us away captive, required of us a song; and they who wasted us required of us mirth, saying, Sing us one of the songs of Zion, How can we sing the Lord’s song in a strange land? If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, let my right hand forget her cunning. If I do not remember thee, let my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth.26

In this passage, Douglass invokes Psalm 137 as a metaphor for AfricanAmerican slavery. He follows an Old Testament paradigm, suggesting that America had enslaved a chosen people. However, if America repented and emancipated the slaves, God would forgive the nation. He applies the text in the following manner: Fellow-citizens, above your national, tumultuous joy, I hear the mournful wail of millions! Whose chains, heavy and grievous yesterday, are to-day, rendered more intolerable by the jubilee shouts that reach them. If I do forget, if I do not faithfully remember those bleeding children of sorrow this day, “may my right hand forget her cunning, and may my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth!” To forget them, to pass lightly over their wrongs, and to chime in with the popular theme, would be treason most scandalous and shocking, and would make me a reproach before God and the world.27

Jeremiadic rhetoric appears in the Dred Scott address as well, in which Douglass condemns public opposition to even the idea of emancipating the slaves: To many, the prospects of the struggle against slavery seem far from cheering. Eminent men, North and South, in Church and State, tell us that the omens are all against us. Emancipation, they tell us, is a wild,

24 25 26 27

Ibid., p. 78. Taylor, “Introduction,” p. xii. Douglass, Selected Speeches and Writings, p. 194. Ibid., p. 195.

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joseph evans delusive idea; the price of human flesh was never higher than now; slavery was never more closely entwined about the hearts and affections of the southern people than now; that whatsoever of conscientious scruple, religious conviction, or public policy, which opposed the system of slavery forty or fifty years ago, has subsided; and that slavery never reposed upon a firmer basis than now. Completing this picture of the happy and prosperous condition of this system of wickedness, they tell us that this state of things is to be set to our account. Abolition agitation has done it all. How deep is the misfortune of my poor bleeding people, if this be so! How lost their condition, if even the efforts of their friends but sink them deeper in ruin!28

Douglass emphatically indicts American intuitional power as systemically evil. He asserts that the American people had been led by their emotions, that their hearts were duplicitous and they lacked the courage and desire to change an evil system. Douglass does not cite a biblical text, but he nevertheless associates the citizens of America with immoral practices, a characteristic of jeremiadic rhetoric. Douglass uses another variation of jeremiadic rhetoric in a speech declaring his opposition to capital punishment. He offers three resolutions outlining the limits of governmental power and insisting that federal law must always be subordinate to the laws of God: Resolved, That life is the great primary and most precious and comprehensive of all human rights – that whether it be coupled with virtue, honor, or happiness, or with sin, disgrace and misery, the continued possession of it is rightfully not a matter of volition; that it is deliberately nor voluntarily assumed, nor to be deliberately or voluntarily destroyed, either by individuals separately, or combined in what is called Government; that is a right derived solely and directly from God the source of all goodness and the center of all authority and directly from God – the source of all goodness and the center of all authority – and is most manifestly designed by Him to be held, esteemed, and reverenced among men as the most sacred, solemn and inviolable of all his gifts to men. Resolved, That the love of a man as manifested in his actions to his fellows, whether in his public or private relations, has ever been the surest test of the presence of God in the soul; that the degree in which the sacredness of human life has been exemplified in all ages of the world, has been the truest index of the measure of human progress; that in proportion as the tide of barbarism has receded, a higher regard has been manifested for the God-given right to life, its inviolability has been strengthened in proportion to the development of intellect and

28

Ibid., pp. 345–46.

sacred rhetoric and the african-american civic sermon 447 moral sentiment, and the conscience, reason and revelation unite their testimony against the continuance of a custom barbarous in its tendencies. Resolved, That any settled custom, precept, example or law, the observance of which necessarily tends to cheapen human life, or in any measure serves to diminish and weaken man’s respect for it, is a custom, precept, example and law utterly inconsistent with the law of eternal goodness written on the constitution of man by his Maker, and is diametrically opposed to the safety, welfare and happiness of mankind; and that however ancient and honorable such laws and customs may be in the eyes of prejudice, superstition and bigotry, they ought to be discountenanced, abolished and supplanted by a higher civilization and a holier and more merciful Christianity.29

Douglass strongly condemns capital punishment as a dehumanizing practice characterized by prejudice, superstition and bigotry. He believed that life was a “God-given right”, and thus opposed any and all judicial or legislative action that he believed “tends to cheapen human life”. Placing the laws of the state in opposition to the laws of God was yet another jeremiadic act, implying that the dominant classes had gone against their maker’s will. Douglass was clearly an intellectual and a preacher who deployed secular and sacred visionary rhetoric. His style integrates a black literary worldview with the African-American preaching tradition, both of which rely on letters and literacy as a means of persuasion. His work also provides grounds for expanding the African-American civic sermon to include forms of jeremiadic rhetoric. At times, such rhetoric is spoken from the margins, where orators call for social change while remaining aware that they may be sacrificing all personal expectations of participating in a new society. This approach carries a degree of risk, as speakers must accept the possibility of being subjected to unnecessary and unwanted stereotypes. Their messages are often misunderstood; many who hear them may believe that they want to remain a part of a marginalized social class. As a result, when they do offer reasonable arguments to those whom they wish to persuade, their answers are met with skepticism from the mainstream. Some jeremiadic rhetors, however, perceive themselves as a part of the culture; they see themselves attempting to improve it by critiquing it from within. This seems to be the perspective from which Douglass

29

Ibid., p. 370.

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worked. He appropriated and deployed public symbols alongside parallel traditions, namely Judeo-Christian biblical tradition, to advance African-Americans’ striving toward freedom. It remains helpful to sympathize with Douglass; his culture was oppressive and segregated, and his rhetoric was a radical and appropriate response to AfricanAmerican desperation. We have considerable evidence that his use of literacy as secular technology and a tool for political empowerment was effective in his endeavor for freedom, and his strategy remains effective today for those who deploy it. Martin Luther King, Jr. Like Douglass, Martin Luther King integrated American secularsacred symbols of liberty and freedom with Judeo-Christian symbols and texts. Using those commonly held traditions and beliefs, King created images that made religion, freedom and liberty seem like a single entity, an entity that appealed to the intellectual and the emotional, the human and the divine. For King, Western religious and democratic symbols were a means of reinforcing human commonality and equality. Richard Lischer, the author of The Preacher King, has unusual insight into King’s public and sectarian preaching: King was a creature of contemporary politics, in his element at a press conference or negotiating session, but he never gave in to the pragmatism of politics. There was always something more, some message from another realm – a spiritual standard that informs and judges this world and ultimately promises to save it from corruption. The language with which he clothed his arguments for a better world was invariably sermonic.30

Lischer continues, The substance of these sermons he translated into civil religious addresses and fiery mass-meeting speeches, but it was always preaching that he was doing. Even when no text was cited and the deity was not mentioned, the audiences to these speeches considered themselves no less a congregation.31

30 Richard Lischer, The Preacher King: Martin Luther King Jr. And The Word that Moved America (Oxford, 1995), p. 4. 31 Ibid., p. 4.

sacred rhetoric and the african-american civic sermon 449 Lischer seems to describe an experience that was meant to be transformative – a moral “should be” a demand for a renewal of American society, politics and jurisprudence, further suggesting that the founders wanted and invited public rhetorical debate to protect the fragile underpinnings of democracy. King’s public square oratory was civil discourse for Lischer, but for Cornel West, King’s work was a “civic sermon”, and for a simple reason: as a member of a nonconformist church, with a nonconformist theology, King always meant to be viewed as a Baptist preacher. Thus, his Christian worldview was a primary point of departure for informing the public and engaging the status quo.32 Moreover, this may suggest that biblical texts did not always need to be mentioned; rather, those sacred texts underpinned King and gave him a kind of moral-ethical authority that revealed his convictions and cause. The civic sermon’s use of biblical and democratic traditions and values to argue and appeal for new public opinion can be seen in the following excerpts from “I Have a Dream”: Five score years ago, a great American, in whose symbolic shadow we stand today, signed the Emancipation Proclamation. This momentous decree came as a great beacon light of hope to millions of Negro slaves who had been seared in the flames of withering injustice. It came as a joyous daybreak to end the long night of their captivity. But one hundred years later, the Negro still is not free. One hundred years later, the life of the Negro is still sadly crippled by the manacles of segregation and the chains of discrimination. One hundred years later, the Negro lives on a lonely island of poverty in the midst of a vast ocean of material prosperity. One hundred years later, the Negro is still languished in the corners of American society and finds himself an exile in his own land. And so we come here today to dramatize a shameful condition. In a sense we’ve come to our nation’s capital to cash a check. When the architects of our republic wrote the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, they were signing a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir. This note was a promise that all men, yes black men as well as white men, would be guaranteed the “unalienable Rights of Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” It is obvious today that America has defaulted on this promissory note, insofar as her citizens of color are concerned. Instead of honoring this sacred obligation, America has given the Negro people a bad check, a check which has come back marked “insufficient funds.”

32

Cornel West, Democracy Matters (New York, 2004), p. 22.

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joseph evans …We have also come to this hallowed spot to remind America of the fierce urgency of now. This is no time to engage in the luxury of cooling off or to take the tranquilizing drug of gradualism. Now is the time to make real the promises of democracy. Now is the time to rise from the dark desolate valley of segregation to the sunlit path of racial justice. Now is the time to lift our nation from the quick sands of racial injustice to the solid rock of brotherhood. Now is the time to make justice a reality for all of God’s children.33

In his first paragraph, King demonstrates his purpose by framing his words with the aid of the Lincoln memorial statue. He shows his grasp of the historic significance and moment, reminding his audience why they had gathered at the steps of the memorial, suggesting a similar purpose that necessitated Lincoln’s “Gettysburg Address” one hundred years earlier.34 King’s later words are simple but powerful. Notice that his verb conjugation is in both the past and present tense: “the Negro is still languished in the corners of American society…”. This may have been for amplification of the historical timeline and humiliating distance that Negro citizens had patiently traveled in search for American equality. In the third paragraph, King recites portions of the Declaration of Independence – “the unalienable Rights of Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness” – as a strategy for dramatizing the segregated conditions for most African-Americans. Further, King’s language is an expression of his appreciation and attainment of high culture. This may have been necessary for King, as his critics listened for his depth and understanding of institutional power, and for his personal gaffes. His use of “tranquilizing drug of gradualism” and “from the quick sands of racial injustice to the solid rock of brotherhood” in the final paragraph are powerful examples of democracy, freedom, and religious overtures, suggesting to his opponents that he was aware of their propagandist schemes designed to diffuse the civil rights agenda’s momentum for change in the conditions for many American citizens. King likely knew he was not the first African-American orator to deploy this kind of rhetoric; there are correlations that suggest that both his style and strategy can be traced back to Frederick Douglass.

33

Martin Luther King, Jr., “I Have a Dream,” in The Penguin Book of Historic Speeches, ed. Brian MacArthur (London, 1996), p. 487. 34 William Lee Miller, President Lincoln: The Duty of a Statesman (New York, 2008), p. 312.

sacred rhetoric and the african-american civic sermon 451 One example of Douglass’ influence can be seen in the seamless blend of political and religious rhetoric. King appropriates and affirms the founders’ secular idealism when he suggests that “every American” should benefit from the values expressed in the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence. But by using the physical setting of the Lincoln memorial and the Lincolnesque language found in the “Gettysburg Address”, he refutes the contemporary view that the founders’ idealism did not extend to all. He asserts that the American government had denied the notion that the Negroes’ citizenship was self-evident, making them eligible for the equality and privileges afforded to all Americans. For King, those who wielded institutional power were making a mockery of the ideas expressed in the secular canonical texts. The religious dimensions of the speech, moreover, must not be overlooked. King alludes to a deity in phrases like “sacred obligation”, and explicitly invokes him when he declares that “Now is the time to make justice a reality for all of God’s children”. Such references are not explicitly sectarian, but as the message progresses, it becomes clear that King’s language is firmly rooted in Judeo-Christian tradition. The address is, in short, a classic example of the African-American civic sermon. Gardner Calvin Taylor Gardner Taylor was a contemporary of Martin Luther King, Jr., but in Baptist circles, Taylor has had few peers. His preaching gifts are nearly unparalleled in African-American pulpits, and his style, like Douglass’ and King’s, is firmly rooted in the tradition of the African-American civic sermon. During the 1990s, his prominence and appeal began to be recognized in larger circles outside of African-American religious culture. For instance, The Christian Century has described him as the “Poet Laureate of the Pulpit”, and Christianity Today has called him the “Pulpit King”. Perhaps the highest recognition came in 1996, when Taylor was included in Baylor University’s prestigious list of as one of the twelve greatest preachers in the English-speaking world. Taylor was born exactly 100 years after Douglass and had to endure many of the same prejudices and stereotypes his predecessor faced. Thus, his intellectual pursuits may have been fueled by northern arrogance and by his need to prove his equality with southern and northern whites. Like many other southerners, he found that equality could be

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achieved through education, which itself is always rooted in the power of literacy. Jacqueline Bond has noted that Taylor can also be situated within the tradition of Martin Luther King. He worked with King in the National Baptist Convention USA and later the Progressive National Baptist Convention35 and, like King, often delivered speeches “offering a purposeful synthesis of civil and religious ideas”.36 In 2003, for example, Taylor offered a prophetic commentary on how American culture and commerce pose challenges, if not outright threats, to marginalized people: I think that the African-American community is heading for very uncertain times. For the first time in my life, as I see it, nobody seems to know what the next step ought to be. We were often wrong but we were all convinced that we knew what was next, and what ought to be, and how we’d try to reach it. I’m not sure that exists today… [Apocalyptic] certainty can be the enemy. But I think the history of our struggle will indicate that it was not the enemy of change. Whatever change came, came partly through that kind of vision.37

It seems that Taylor was describing the tradition of African-American civic preaching, an inference that can be supported by Bond’s synopsis of his work: Taylor has great respect for American democratic ideals and Martin Luther King, Jr., and Samuel Proctor, considers that the gospel vision of the American dream can enhance each other, offering a purposeful synthesis of civil and religious ideals. He frequently quotes from the Constitution and from the Declaration of Independence to orient hearers to the foundational vision of sociopolitical life.38

During President-elect Bill Clinton’s first ecumenical worship service, Taylor gained national exposure. The following excerpt is an example of Taylor’s use of religious-political constructs in a civic discourse. Notice that he clothes those constructs in the language of the visionary Christian biblical tradition: You remember how the Declaration begins? “When, in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve their 35

Taylor Branch, Parting the Waters: America During the King Years, 1954–1963 (New York, 1988), p. 502. 36 L. Susan Bond, Contemporary African American Preaching (St Louis, 2003), p. 55. 37 Ibid., p. 57. 38 Ibid., p. 55.

sacred rhetoric and the african-american civic sermon 453 political bands that have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth the separate and equal station which the laws of nature and of nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect for the opinions of humankind requires that they should declare causes which impel them to the separation.” And then these words, “we hold these truths to be self-evident, that all” – people, they really should have said – “are created equal.” That they are endowed, not by any legislative act, not by any parliament, not by any royal edict, but [they] are “endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights.” How tempted they must have been to file exceptions. All except, all except Southern Europeans, all except Catholics, all except Jews. I will not use any more glaring examples. But they dared to placard before history “all people.” They were not dissemblers, and they were not ignorant of the circumstance. They believed that time and God and the intent of the nation would erase the stain in which they lived and about which a man said that that issue of race, of slavery, lay like a sleeping serpent coiled beneath the table of the constitutional convention. If you come down to our earthier document, our Preamble puts it – was it by accident? – “to establish justice” and then, “to ensure domestic tranquility.” That was the order. They refused to put the hated word slavery, the shameful word, in our Constitution. Over and over again the reference is made to persons, even when the reference is made to three-fifths of a person, which I never quite understood. I know who they were, but I don’t know what they were. Three-fifths! They believed, under God, that history and time and justice would erase those stains. This leads me to the belief that this nation, though not divine, is divinely appointed. And I say to you solemnly today, that anybody who speaks or acts against that purpose or against the original intent that this shall be an open democracy with liberty and justice to all, comes close to committing treason against the idea of America.39

Once again, political and religious language is integrated throughout the address. Like King before him, Taylor appropriates and affirms the founders’ claims that all people are created equal. His opening quotations from the Declaration of Independence appeal to the commonly held idea that the nation had been founded in a mysterious, if not providential, way. In the third paragraph, Taylor asserts that the founders were flawed, but he also sees harmony in their belief that “under God, that history and time and justice would erase those stains”. I suggest that Taylor’s rhetorical strategy does not differ significantly from that of

39 Gardner C. Taylor, “Facing Facts with Faith,” in The Words of Gardner Taylor, comp. Edward L. Taylor (Valley Forge, 2001), p. 4: 117.

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Douglass or King. His sermon topoi are an appropriation of public symbols and biblical imagery consistent with an African-American civic sermon. He points his audience toward the hope of the future, using a visionary-apocalyptic parallel tradition to inspire his audience to expect change. In 1968, the same year that Martin Luther King J., was assassinated, Taylor again displayed his rhetorical-literary talent in his presidential address to the Progressive National Baptist Convention. Entitled “The Power of Blackness”, the address is a clear example of a sermon style similar to Douglass’ and King’s: Comrades in the cause of Christ, assembled here in Washington, D.C., a number of considerations impress themselves indelibly upon our minds and clamor insistently for our attention. One feels here in Washington that he stands close to the nerve center of the political arrangements of the whole earth. The ancients once said that all roads lead to Rome; so today all roads seem to lead to Washington as the governmental leaders of the world shuttle in and out of this capital of the mightiest land since Rome spread its Pax Romana over almost all of the known earth.… One feels immediately here in Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln, and Douglass, to name but a few.… Those of us who see the nation as yet unfulfilled in its historic purpose are moved by others’ memories and thoughts when we come to this city. We think of that historic day in August 1963 when a number which it seemed no man could count gathered beneath the likeness of Lincoln and heard our communal leaders issue to the nation in its very capital the anguished cry of the disinherited, the pained pleading of democracy’s forgotten people. Who can ever forget the ringing words of the only authentic spiritual genius America has produced, Martin King, as thundered a paean of hope in his immortal “I have a Dream” address? Who can forget the deafening crescendos of assent as they rose up out of the innumerable hosts of Americans of all races and classes and color and creeds gathered here?40

Taylor skillfully frames the historical significance and setting for his audience. By comparing Washington to Rome, he suggests that America has no world rival in power and influence; for his larger auditors and critics, he further demonstrates that he has read and appreciated Western history. Taylor twice appeals to sentiments and memories associated with Washington. First, in a slight rewording of an earlier statement such as we often find in extemporaneous speech, he says, 40 Gardner C. Taylor, “The Power of Blackness,” in The Words of Gardner C. Taylor, pp. 4: 16–17.

sacred rhetoric and the african-american civic sermon 455 “One feels standing here in Washington that he stands close to the nerve center of political arrangements of the whole earth”. Second, he repeats his appeal, this time to remind his audience of the national purpose. Another example indicates that Taylor implies that he has achieved his attainment and appreciation of high culture, permitting him space to include Martin Luther King among the nation’s icons. He masterfully invokes names of historic figures like Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln and Douglass, placing another African-American, namely Martin Luther King, in their company. Taylor then moves from the national sentiment and history, to an event in history that was especially significant to African-Americans, his primary audience. He reminds his audience that seven years earlier, King stood beneath Lincoln’s figure as symbolism for the great emancipator’s dream of freedom. Taylor draws parallels between the nation’s purposes in Lincoln’s time and the current agenda of securing civil rights for all the people. This agenda, moreover, is sometimes cast in apocalyptic terms, as Taylor goes on to deploy imagery found in the Book of Revelation. For example, his statement When we think of that historic day in August 1963, when a number which it seemed no man can count gathered beneath the likeness of Lincoln and heard our communal leaders issue to the nation in its very capital the anguish cry of the disinherited41

is a clear allusion to Revelation 7:9: “After these things I looked, and behold, a great multitude which no one could count from every nation and all tribes and peoples and tongues standing before the throne and before the Lamb”. This is a fitting strategy, as the events of 1963 were indeed revelatory, helping to disclose God’s plan for equality among all people. Taylor’s rhetorical strategy, therefore, seems to be a form of political theology, but he does not believe himself to be a civil religionist. According to Bond, “He is quick to distinguish his own understandings from the reduction of Christianity to civil religion, and demands that the preacher have some ‘impossible place to stand to identify nationalism as idolatry and civil religion as an enslavement of the culture”.42 41 42

Ibid., pp. 16–17. Bond, Contemporary African American Preaching, p. 55.

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An African-American civic sermon is a refined form of communication that attracts literate classes who recognize oppression as an opponent to equality. For many rhetors, this may restrict the use of the form because it requires high levels of literacy in Western political-religious values. Still, an African-American civic sermon is a mastery of using secular and sacred symbols. Those who deploy this style rely on a visionary Christian biblical tradition as a repeating theme. Another set-piece is references to the Declaration of Independence and other secular-sacred symbols. Because those symbols are an important part of American identity, orators of African-American civic sermons use them to persuade for a sense of harmony and equality for all American citizens. Traditional biblical doctrines are not necessarily a primary focus for the rhetors of this sermon style. In fact, an argument may be made that its proponents avoid conventional dogma, partly, I suggest, because those doctrines may not support their primary purposes to persuade audiences to move toward making effective change in the public consciences that shapes the American identity and agenda. Still, the doctrine of justice is identifiable in Douglass, King and Taylor’s oratory. As Alkebulan asserts, a sense of harmony is a commonplace in African rhetoric, which is a starting point for AfricanAmerican rhetoric – political and religious. Further study will advance the academy’s interest in sacred and secular platform oratory. It may be of further interest to examine those who deploy this style in our contemporary setting.

THE MODERN RENEWAL OF JEWISH HOMILETICS AND THE OCCURRENCE OF INTERFAITH PREACHING1 Mirela Saim “Why should Christian preachers not draw Jews to their churches, and Jewish rabbis draw Christians to their synagogues?”, John Haynes Holmes, a well-known Protestant cleric and social activist, asked in 1931.2 At the time, this sounded more like a rhetorical question because interfaith preaching was fast becoming an accepted practice in the United States, a practice that could already show a respectable tradition, if not a very long one. It started in the years of reconciliation that followed the Civil War, at a time when social and cultural innovations were geared towards an ever-wider social inclusion intended to close the gaps between minority groups, to heal the wounds left by the war, and to extend the benefits of liberal democracy. Against this background, interfaith and interdenominational preaching initiatives appeared as innovative efforts to support and reinforce religious pluralism in American society. By “interfaith preaching” I understand a preaching activity performed within a community of faith different from the preacher’s; it usually has an ecumenical content and aims at improving the communicative situation. The preacher thus has to face a particular type of audience, in a particular type of rhetorical situation: the “exchanged pulpit” is an alien pulpit that forces him to face the religious “other”. This circumstance of change shapes both the content of his discourse and the style of his address, because it involves new sermonic goals and new cultural values; it also imposes a type of discourse that considers anew the basic principles of one’s religious assumptions and commitments.

1 I wish to thank the editor of this book for his patience and care for my text, much improved by his support and encouragement. I am also grateful to the interlibrary loan staff at McGill University, who knowledgeably and generously assisted me in finding many rare and forgotten publications. 2 John Haynes Holmes, “Preaching in the City Church,” in The Varieties of PresentDay Preaching, ed. G. Bromley Oxnam (New York, 1931), p. 135.

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As we shall see, neither the exchange of pulpits nor interfaith sermonic actions are entirely new cultural practices; only their association and their renewal within a democratic configuration of meaning are new. It can also be added that it is only in modern times that this particular type of religious practice became an icon of toleration, satisfying a desire for understanding the religious Other. In 1860, the great civic orator Wendell Phillips (1811–84) commented on the current tendency towards an extended authorization of pulpit discourse. He noted that a pulpit that was “occupied by men and by women, by black men and white men, by the clergy and by laymen”3 was “a platform which recognizes nothing but moral purpose; which ignores, sex, race, profession” and thus fulfilled its main function of moral education.4 In Phillips’ perception, pulpit exchanges were expressions of the Protestant spirit, the logical and final expression of the “Protestant protest against the idea of a priest”,5 fully agreeing with both the counter-dogmatic spirit of the age and the legacy of the founding fathers of American democracy.6 In his commentary, however, he limited his visionary extension of exchanges to the borders of the Christian communitas. Yet, the same “spirit of the age” was confronting the American Jewish communities in their struggle for progress, for modernization and for “Americanization”. It is this struggle that compelled many Jewish leaders to seek forms of ever-broader inclusion and exchange with their Christian fellow citizens. Max Lilienthal’s (1815–82) March 1867 address from a Unitarian pulpit can be said to mark an essential point in this historical evolution: it marked a high point in the development of American Jewish-Christian relations and it contributed to the creation of a new rhetorical (homiletic) genre, representative of the period of integrative movement of many immigrant communities in America.7

3 Wendell Phillips, “The Pulpit,” in Speeches, Lectures and Letters, ed. Theodore C. Pease (Boston, 1891), p. 252. 4 “The theatre amuses, the press instructs, the pulpit improves. Education with the motive of the moral purpose is the essence of the pulpit” (ibid., p. 256). 5 Ibid., p. 252. 6 “…if you come as friends of a neighbor church you are welcome.” That was a fair representation of the original spirit of New England” (ibid., p. 253). 7 According to many histories of communal development, particularly those examining the German and Jewish communities, 1870 was a watershed in that it marked the start of a period of more intense assimilation and full-blown Americanization. See the dissertations by B. Brickner and J.M. White cited in the bibliography.

the modern renewal of jewish homiletics

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Taking the interfaith preaching event of 1867 as a point of reference, this paper will try to retrace this under-researched project of modernity from the Jewish point of view, in order to see how it was first elaborated, how it grew and developed in both its discursive and practical dimensions; accordingly, this essay will examine the first Jewish sermon of interfaith exchange by exploring the 19th-century revolutionary progress of a modernized Jewish preaching. My methodology will privilege a comparative approach, taking into consideration the many strains of homiletics present in the religious discourse of 19th-century American Jews. Attaining Modernity: Towards a New Culture of the Jewish Sermon Modern Jewish preaching has been closely linked to reform movements predicated on the goal of cultural accommodation, movements which sought to achieve the full social integration of a persecuted and segregated minority. This goal was imposed by a long history of discrimination and, quite often, of self-segregation, a history of exclusion that brought about a damaging cultural paralysis. Jewish modernity would thus be defined by a daring movement towards reforming ageold practices, in both religious and political terms. Although distinct, the religious and the political were closely linked and, at times, quite difficult to distinguish. This became obvious when the trend towards change and critique of the past addressed the issue of reforming the liturgy, because this modification challenged the very core of religious commitments to collective identity, to collective memory, and to tradition. Within this context, the sermon became both the target and the icon of change and progress: as a discourse from the pulpit, the sermon was seen as the most efficient tool of public instruction, and thus a powerful instrument for civil and individual betterment. Precisely because it came to be considered a discourse of popular education and authoritative instruction, the sermon was bound to become highly influential in a culture that retained its religious core while constantly promoting and enlarging its secular associations, striving all along to maintain and strengthen its potential for exchange. Situated at the forefront of the movement for Jewish improvement, the renewal of the public religious service polarized opinions and defined the main lines of the struggle for modernization and emancipation. Delivered from the bima (the pulpit), the Jewish sermon became the

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very icon of religious modernity; consequently, it had to be rhetorically reconstructed, re-semantized and, indeed, liturgically resituated. It had to change its general focus, traditionally exegetical – based on commentary and analysis – in order to find a new structure, better suited to its new function. The sermon thus became edifying and instructive, with many changes in its composition, form and – most importantly – language of delivery. At the same time, it was also considered indispensable to align it with the sermonic discourse delivered from neighboring Christian pulpits. The new Jewish sermon was thus part and parcel of an ever progressing trend towards comparison, coordination, and even cooperation with the modernizing liturgical practices of other faiths, for the most part Christian Protestantism(s) that proved to be influential as well as inspirational. Overall, the modern Jewish sermon became the very center of the liturgical structure, supporting the core of the religious experience and communicating an increasingly ethical message. In turn, the place of the rabbinical preacher also changed: he became less of a performer, skilled in the exegetical selection of the appropriate traditional lore, and more of an author and a teacher, increasingly able to develop a discourse of competence, of style, and even of elegance. Between 1808, the accepted date of the first modern Jewish sermon in the vernacular (German),8 and 1890, when Siegmund Maybaum (1844–1919) published his course of lectures on Jewish homiletics, Jüdische Homiletik (Berlin, 1890), the 19th century witnessed the creation of a new religious culture expressed in a variety of innovative sermonic practices, as well as the growth of a new and rich style of eloquence, supported by a broadly defined generic discourse. This trend towards exchange and inclusion brought radical changes in all the elements of the homiletic situation: preacher, audience, sermon, language, and, obviously, the performance itself. Defined and developed as a part of this new ideology, the practice of interfaith preaching required a new and distinctive kind of sermon, addressing the new goals of the changed rhetorical configuration and resulting in the creation of a new rhetorical genre. First started in

8

As we shall see further, this date should be taken under several reservations. For a discussion of the complex question of vernacular choices in the sermonic discourses in early modern Jewish preaching see Marc Saperstein, Jewish Preaching. 1200–1800 (New Haven, 1989), updated concisely in his prefatory examination in Jewish Preaching in Times of War. 1800–2001 (Oxford, 2008), pp. 18–21, 73–109.


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America, against a background of exchanges of the Jewish (Reform) preachers with their liberal Christian colleagues,9 interfaith preaching can be considered an index of the successful transformation of the Jewish tradition of preaching. Before, however, looking to this transformation in more detail, let us have a brief look at the development of the new type of Jewish homiletics. Embracing Modernity: 19th-Century Jewish Preaching From the point of view of changes in homiletic, the most important shift brought about by the modernizing forces first articulated within German Jewry in the second part of the 18th century was the move away from derashah, the traditional discourse of the Hebrew sermon, to a new type of homiletic address. The derashah was expository, had a hermeneutical content, and served mainly to clarify and debate various points of the Scriptural text. The new type of sermon had a different ideology and a different position in the discourse of the synagogue, as was acknowledged with great clarity in the programmatic sermon “A Lecture on the Jewish Pulpit” given by David Woolf Marks (1811–1909) in 1862.10 Observing that “the pulpit had been fostered in the bosom of the synagogue for many centuries”,11 he gives a brief history of the Anglo-Jewish attempts to reintroduce weekly preaching in the vernacular, while also situating these attempts in the wider frame of liturgical adjustments to modernity. In The New Style of Preaching in Nineteenth-Century German Jewry,12 a classic study dedicated to the new discourse, Alexander Altmann showed how the transformations in the modern Jewish sermon started with its definition. Broadly perceived now as “a piece of oratory in the service of religion”, the sermon became “a disquisition on some definite

9 Cf. Benny Kraut, “The Ambivalent Relations of American Reform Judaism with Unitarianism in the Last Third of the Nineteenth Century,” Journal of Ecumenical Studies 23.1 (Winter 1986), 58–68. 10 Sermons Preached on Various Occasions. Second Series (London, 1885), pp. 289– 307. In his seminal text, D.W. Marks provides an outstanding analysis of the elements of modernization engaged by an extensive update of the liturgical practices of the Anglo-Jewish religious institutions and reviews the changes made in the first part of the 19th century. 11 Ibid., p. 291. 12 Studies in Nineteenth-Century Jewish Intellectual History, ed. Alexander Altmann (Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1964), pp. 65–116.

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theme based on a text and presented according to a well-defined pattern of component parts”.13 Using German Protestant models widely available in the published manuals of the first part of the 19th century, the first modern Jewish preachers arrived at the new homiletic form of Predigt (sermon), composed and delivered in the vernacular and expressing the Enlightenment ideal of personal betterment or Bildung. In this way, they adapted the different trends and models of the German Protestant sermon (moralizing, rationalist, or pietistic) to the needs and expectations of Jewish audiences, gradually articulating a discourse aiming at the same oratorical values as their Protestant models. The work of these Jewish reformers thus accomplished a revolution of pulpit discourse; as has already been noted, it is part and parcel of the movement of Jewish Enlightenment, or Haskalah. The beginning of the new homiletic age is considered to be 1808, when Joseph Wolf (1762–1826), a teacher, delivered the first sermon in German, addressing the Dessau community. He was soon followed by Israel Jacobson (1768–1828), a businessman, in Seesen in 1810, and by Gotthold Salomon (1784–1862), a rabbi, in Berlin in 1815. From 1818 on, Salomon (now in Hamburg) established the practice of regular preaching in the vernacular, thus extending to Judaism a practice that became characteristic for the modern pulpit. Other Jewish communities followed suit and soon sermons became a general liturgical element, forming a privileged corpus, directly linked to the transformation of Jewry into a modern collective body. Among the many accomplished and influential German Jewish pulpit orators of the 19th century, Isaac Noah Mannheimer (1793–1865) occupies an important place because he was among the first Jewish preachers to master the new type of discourse, to distance himself from purely prescriptive patterns and to reintroduce elements of the Jewish rabbinical tradition in his sermons. In his sermons, delivered in Vienna, the link between the modern patterns of style and content and traditional Jewish homiletics was clearly reasserted. He acknowledged in no uncertain terms his debt to the normative theory of sermon composition set by the Protestant preachers, writing: we as pupils and disciples in the art of preaching which we have been practising only a little while, can learn a great deal from the masters of

13

Altmann, The New Style of Preaching, pp. 66, 68.


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the art, and are grateful to accept every guidance and instruction offered to us in their schools.14

He, nevertheless, also insisted on the recognition of the traditional Jewish lore as an important resource, using the rabbinic literature, the Talmud, and the midrashim in his sermons. His creative vision was soon endorsed by many other German rabbis, his sermons setting a model of style and structure. At the 1845 Frankfurt Rabbinical Conference, an extensive debate on the liturgical changes acceptable within the movement of modernizing Jewish practices also looked into the necessity of revising and reconstructing the service by rendering many of the prayers, homilies, and readings in the vernacular. For the rest of the century, this remained a hotly debated issue and frequently identified the degree of acceptable “liberalism” of a given congregation. In England, the starting point was rather different, although almost synchronic with Germany in adopting the “new” vernacular as the language of pulpit discourse.15 In 1817, in London, rabbi Tobias Goodman (d. after 1824) delivered the first sermon in English, on the death of the Princess Charlotte; he followed this eloquent but lengthy sermon by another one in English, delivered in Liverpool, in May 1819.16 Later, in 1831, David Aaron de Sola (1796–1860) started preaching occasionally in English in Bevis Mark, the Sephardic synagogue of London. It was, however, David Meyer Isaacs, associated with the synagogue of Liverpool,17 who initiated the regular delivery of sermons in English. Finally, in 1842, David Woolf Marks – a rabbi of Reform tendency who would also prove to be an influential and important preacher18 – also implemented the practice of weekly preaching on Sabbath in London’s 14 Cited by A. Altmann in The New Style of Preaching, p. 71, after a German original published in 1835. Altmann attributes Mannheimer’s independence in homiletic thinking to the influence of Claus Harms (d. 1855), a preacher who stressed the precedence of inner conviction over theological and rhetorical rules. 15 Sporadically, in the 17th and 18th centuries, Spanish and Portuguese, and even German, were used in the discourse from the pulpits of British synagogues, as Saperstein also reminds us (Jewish Preaching in Times of War. 1800–2001, p. 19). 16 Tobias Goodman, The Faith of Israel, or the substance of a discourse delivered at the Jews synagogue, Seel Street, Liverpool, on the 2nd of May, 1819. 17 The Jewish Chronicle, 9 May 1879, p. 12: “he was the first to deliver regular sermons in the vernacular”. 18 There remains an extensive collection of sermons published by him, giving a good image of the new homiletical style in Great Britain. See David Woolf Marks, Sermons preached on various occasions, at the West London Synagogue of British Jews. Series 1–3 (London, 1851– 85).

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West End synagogue. Progressively, many other elements of modernization were also accepted in the Anglo-Jewish pulpit, consistent with the degree of religious liberalization of particular congregations and communities. Summing up the progress made during the century, Morris Joseph (1848–1909) wrote in 1890: The vernacular pulpit is no longer an exotic: it is a thoroughly acclimatised institution. As against the two metropolitan preachers who spoke every Sabbath in 1862, there are now some half a dozen who preach either weekly or on alternate Sabbaths, besides others who regularly occupy the pulpit at slightly longer intervals. The number of preachers in the provinces has also largely increased.19

A parallel development also took place in France, where the rhetoric of the pulpit had a long and flourishing history in both the Catholic and Protestant (Huguenot) streams. In the Jewish pulpit, there were changes and transformations too, illustrating the same tendencies and pressures as in the other European countries; the vernacular, for example, had been recommended in the religious service by consistorial ruling since Napoleonic times. Yet, it is only at the end of the 19th century that Zadoc Kahn (1839–1905), an accomplished orator and the leading rabbinical personality of the age, would be able to impose regular Sabbath preaching. Nonetheless, in France, the curriculum of the rabbinical school included training future rabbis in secular rhetoric and required its students to practice their rhetorical skills after their third year. Expressing Enlightenment ideals, the school expected the future rabbis to show their worth by delivering “moral and religious” discourses.20 In the United States, the situation was somewhat different, because the Jews had to negotiate the constraints of their religious practice in the context of greater diversity, in both language and cultural backgrounds, despite their comparatively small numbers. It was this complex and challenging situation that would give birth to an entirely new homiletic tradition, hardly comparable with its counterparts in Western and Central Europe. The Jewish presence in the New World was, in the first centuries, quite scarce: by the time of the Revolution, there were only five synagogues (in New York, Rhode Island, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, and

19 20

Morris Joseph, “On Preaching,” Jewish Quarterly Review (1890), 128. Archives Israélites, I, pp. 75, 180.


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Georgia). Despite the scarcity of documents, some elements of colonial American Jewish preaching can be reconstructed. The first organizations of American Jews were derived from, but not identical to, the communal organizations of Medieval Europe. The first colonial Jewish settlers were usually merchants who gathered in a few small communities; but even if these small communities gradually grew in number in the 18th century, there were no rabbis. In the absence of the rabbis, communal Jewish life was centered on the synagogue, normally managed by a committee of laymen; the services were usually conducted by a hazan (cantor, reader) and consequently it was the hazan who was the first preacher, generally delivering sermons at the request of the civil authorities.21 The earliest documented discourses delivered in synagogue date to the 1760s in New York. Thus, the New York Gazette publicized the use of two scriptural texts in what was most probably a sermon by the hazan Joseph Jesurun Pinto (1729–82) on 10 January 1761. It followed with an announcement of a “Thanksgiving Sermon” in a special service celebrating the British victory against the French in the Canadian war, a service held in all the churches of the colony on the same day, 11 August 1763.22 After him, between 1776 and 1816, Gershom Mendes Seixas (1746– 1816), the first hazan born and educated in colonial America, also preached repeatedly in New York, usually in English. These sermons were typically devoid of extended references to rabbinical literature, as imposed by the derashah tradition of eloquence (but also requiring skills acquired only through lengthy rabbinical training). As a result, the early American Jewish sermon was essentially focused on the

21 For an interesting description of Jewish conditions in America see J.D. Sarna, American Judaism. A History (New Haven, 2004) and the classic J.R. Marcus The Colonial Jew,1492–1776 (Detroit, 1970). Particularly significant is Sarna’s discussion of the “synagogue-community”, a complex social and cultural formation that “assumed primary responsibility for preserving and maintaining local Jewish life”. This model was “akin to the prevailing Protestant model of the established church” (p.12) and explains many particularities of the American Jewish experience. 22 The language of delivery for these early sermons in colonial America cannot be verified. While some past historians believed that Pinto preached in English, newer research, while improving greatly our knowledge about Pinto and his activity in New York, has not been able to confirm his use of English in preaching (Kaganoff, Traditional Jewish Sermon, pp. 24–25, 207–208; H.P. Salomon, “Joseph Jesurun Pinto [1729–1782]: A Dutch Hazan In Colonial New York,” Studia Rosenthaliana, 13 [1979], 18–29). Salomon, who was able to correct many received errors on Pinto, inclines toward crediting Pinto with using English in writing, while maintaining his synagogal activities in both Hebrew and his native language of (Amsterdam) Portuguese.

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political message of the occasion, eventually progressing towards a well argued exhortation to moral virtue and extolling the practice of justice and charity. This is particularly evident if these early sermons are compared with those delivered by several visiting rabbis. The most interesting of these visitors was certainly Haym Isaac Carigal (or Karigal, 1733–77) from Hebron, in Palestine, who, in 1773, delivered a sermon in Newport, Rhode Island. Preached on the feast of Shavuot,23 “The Salvation of Israel” was impressive in its belabored style, full of quotations from the rabbinic literature and fittingly “adorned” with maxims and sentences from the Bible. The sermon has a measured rhythm in its development of arguments, proceeding from the Talmud-supported introduction to the mid-section that argued for “the excellency of the divine study” and building its last part on a parallel of body and soul; this part of the sermon was structured as a development of metaphors of health, sickness and healing. Delivered in Spanish, apparently ex tempore,24 the sermon was so well received by the audience that it was translated into English and printed, thus becoming the first Jewish sermon published in America.25 Pre-revolutionary and revolutionary America’s best known preacher was Gershom Mendes Seixas, the hazan of the congregation Shearith Israel (The Remnant of Israel) of New York. As already mentioned, he was the first native hazan, author of several sermons delivered on various important occasions, some of which have been published and preserved.26 His sermons displayed the familiar mark of the early Jewish 23

This is the “Feast of Weeks”, of “giving out of the Torah”. Or rather from memory, because Ezra Stiles, a known Hebraist and the future president of Yale, at the time in the audience, wrote in his diary that “the Rabbi told me that he had nothing written when he preached […] but that he had it sealed it first in his head and so delivered it” (The Literary Diary of Ezra Styles, ed. F.B. Dexter [New York, 1901], p. 1: 376–77). Significantly, in his diary, Stiles reports quite extensively on the preaching of five visiting rabbis, giving very colorful and knowledgeable descriptions of their diverse styles. 25 “A Sermon Preached in the Synagogue In Newport, Rhode-Island, Called “The Salvation of Israel”: On the Day of Pentecost, Or Feast of Weeks, the 6th day of the Month Sivan, The Year of the Creation, 5533: Or, May 28, 1773. Being the ANNIVERSARY Of giving the LAW at Mount Sinai: By the Venerable HOCHAM, The Learned RABBI, HAIJM ISAAC KARIGAL, Of the City of Hebron, near Jerusalem, In the HOLY LAND”. 26 His sermon of 1798, further discussed here, and Carigal’s text, are both reproduced in facsimile in Abraham Karp’s series Beginnings (Philadelphia, 1975). Seixas’ sermons and writings are being still rediscovered and published by scholars, as seen in Saperstein, Jewish Preaching in Times of War, pp. 253–58, and in Dan Judson, “The Mercies of a Benign Judge: A Letter from Gershom Seixas to Hannah Adams, 1810,” 24


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American model: sensitivity to the requests of the civil authorities, inspiration from the political events of the day, focused communication, uncomplicated composition and down-to-earth exhortation. Significantly, the compliance with civil demand is characteristic of this newly minted American Jewish tradition and obviously helps to explain the future development of a consistently civic religious rhetoric. “When the colonial or state legislatures or the federal government declared days of fasting, penitence, thanks, humiliation, or celebration, they invariably asked the clergy to participate by leading special services”.27 These special services were usually arranged in an order that integrated various psalms, segments of the festive liturgy, and prayers for the wellbeing of the United States and the government, sometimes a sermon in English. For example, the sermon delivered by Seixas on 9 May 1798 “conformably to a recommendation of the President of the United States of America”28 was an extensive argument for the benefits of peace keeping. The text is clearly organized and, remarkably, includes what might be called the new and original “American topos” – a segment expressing the speaker’s faith in the superiority of the American polity in granting equal Jewish rights: “It has pleased God to have established us in this country where we possess every advantage that other citizens of these states enjoy […] for which let us humbly return thanks for his manifold mercies”.29 Outstanding for his preaching activity in the early United States, giving sermons powerfully highlighted by a new religious ethos of civic meaning, Seixas was also interesting as an early American Jewish leader by virtue of his mixed lineage: born and raised in New York, he belonged, on his father’s side, to a noted Sephardic family, while on his mother’s side he was descended from Ashkenazim. He served a congregation of Sephardic rite, although many of the members of his congregation were, in fact, Ashkenazim. Appropriately, “he was more fluent in Yiddish than in the Iberian languages”.30 In many ways his American Jewish Archives Journal 56.1–2 (2004), 179–89. Some elements of rhetorical critique are also provided in Jacob Rader Marcus’ classic article “The Handsome Young Priest in the Black Gown,” Hebrew Union College Annual, 40–41 (1969–70), 409–67. 27 Friedenberg, Robert, Hear O Israel. The History of Jewish Preaching, 1654–1970 (Tuscaloosa, AL, 1989), p. 9. 28 Discourse Delivered in the Synagogue in New York, New York, on the Ninth of May, 1798, Observed as a Day of Humiliation [.…] by Rev. G. Seixas (New York, 1797 [1798]). 29 Ibid., p. 23. 30 Karp, Beginnings, p. 1: 22.

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homiletic had the merits and deficiencies of the early Jewish American age: it was simple, direct, and rather coarse, although not impolite or unlearned. As a liturgical manifestation of the Jews’ status in the early American period, it confirmed the analysis of Michael Meyer, who observes: “From the start, American Jews were integrated into the general socio-political life to a degree that was only partially achieved in Central Europe even after a long process of modernization”.31 Seixas’ kind of sermon was simple; erudite it was not, nor was it very complex in composition or style. A comparison of Seixas with his Christian contemporaries, such as John Witherspoon or Jonathan Edwards, would not probably be to his advantage.32 On the other hand, it must also be recognized that John Witherspoon, who was an accomplished orator, was extensively trained in an old and sophisticated tradition of oratory, with all the great classical resources at his fingertips, while Seixas was arguably a pioneer starting basically from scratch and confronting head-on the issue of the new preaching requirements. All this would change with the arrival, in the next generation, of European trained preachers. In this respect, the 1830s marked the beginning of a new American Jewish tradition in preaching, this time heavily influenced by the German and Central European modernization of the Jewish liturgical tradition. If, in the words of M. Meyer, “American Jewry did not undergo a multidimensional process of modernization”,33 the German immigration wave of the 1840s is the one that introduced the element of “multidimensionality”, a complexity that would be represented quite well in the multiplicity of preaching programs and sermon models throughout the rest of the century. 1830 was the year of Isaac Leeser’s (1806–68) first sermons. Trained in Germany as a religious teacher, not as a rabbi,34 Leeser became hazan

31

Michael A. Meyer, Judaism Within Modernity (Detroit, 2001), p. 324. See Friedenberg, Hear O Israel, p. 18. 33 Michael Meyer, Judaism Within Modernity, p. 324. 34 Isaac Leeser graduated from the Muenster gymnasium; his religious education was apparently completed privately. Lack of proper rabbinical training was an important issue in the assessment of the religious situation in America, all the more important once European trained rabbis started to arrive. The following rabbis were thus pioneers of the Jewish American institutions: Leo Merzbacher, who arrived in 1842, Max Lilienthal (1845), Morris J. Raphal (1849, from Great Britain), Samuel Adler (1853), etc. It was, however, only after the Civil War that attempts to organize institutions of higher education for rabbinical instruction started in earnest. In this respect, the founding of the Hebrew Union College in 1875, in Cincinnati, by I.M. Wise is an important landmark. 32


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of the congregation Mikveh Israel of Philadelphia in 1828 and, from 1830, was able to include the delivery of sermons in the traditional (Orthodox) liturgy; after 1843, this became a regular practice. While greatly influenced by the modernization of the Jewish sermon in his homeland, Leeser nevertheless remained a staunch orthodox. His sermons, arguably modern in composition, remained nevertheless close to the ideal model of the old derashah. Yet, in every respect, Leeser’s preaching marked a transition in the development of the Jewish American sermonic tradition: the delivery was bilingual and vernacular, using either German or English. Placed at the end of the service, the sermon was in an insecure position and thus effectively exposed to disappearance, since the audience was free to leave before its delivery. Like many preachers of his age, Leeser avoided speaking on political, social or cultural issues from the pulpit and kept close to “purely” religious content. On the other hand, his sermons showed an increased awareness of the modernization already underway in Germany, a modernization that – fully expressed by later Reform preachers – was also accepted in the composition of more traditional preachers. But perhaps his most valuable contribution to the development of Jewish preaching in America was his constant publishing in the pages of his magazine, The Occident, of sermons meant to serve as preaching models. Started in 1843, The Occident integrated the modernization of Jewish preaching into its program of “diffusion of knowledge on Jewish literature and religion”: “we shall endeavour to give every month one sermon by one of the modern Jewish preachers on some topic of general interest”.35 It was, however, only in the 1840s and 1850s, with a new and massive wave of immigration, including the first European-trained rabbis, that the modernization of the American Jewish sermon began its accelerated course. In 1842 New York received the first German rabbi, Leo Merzbacher, followed shortly by Max Lilienthal, I.M. Wise and Samuel Adler. As already explained, the newly arrived rabbis had to adjust to a vastly diversified preaching environment. This was true for all the Jewish public speakers, Orthodox, conservative, or reformed. However, as we shall see, it was the Reform Jewish preacher who, more often than not, had to face the full impact of the changes he was so eager to implement. In this respect, both sermon and periodical press provide rich

35

The Occident, 1.1, p. 4.

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sources for a history yet to be fully retrieved and understood. Such history is a narrative of progress, integration and accommodation, revealing variable trends differentiated by diverse order of priorities. The greatest progress seems to have been achieved in the integration into the American culture of democracy, a goal pursued constantly by Reform Judaism. Despite overwhelming odds, by the end of the 19th century several American Jewish preachers succeeded in aligning themselves with different religious and communal leaders, such as the Unitarians and the Deists of the Free Religious Association. It is within this radical Reform trend that the modernity of the Jewish sermon was reconsidered and given the overwhelming meaning of Americanization. But even orthodox preachers – rabbis like Morris J. Raphall (1798–1868), S.M. Isaacs (1804–78), Bernard Illowy (1814–71), or Sabato Moraïs (1823–77) – clinging closer in various degrees to a liturgical tradition that they perceived as the very key to the preservation of the surviving Jewish identity, were in fact contributing to a vastly changed and transformed type of preaching, one that necessarily incorporated the American acceptance of diversity. Yet, there were representatives of American Reform Judaism who were able to engage most efficiently in a wide array of innovations and to express a newly found awareness of liberalism and pluralism. One of the innovations considered challenging and daring at the time was, I suggest, the interfaith sermon. But first, let us consider briefly the whole extent of what has been appropriately deemed a “revolution” in preaching because it entailed a radical change in the rhetorical ideology of public religious discourse. As we shall see, none of the choices made in the nineteenth century came about without a fight. Acquiring Power in the Pulpit: The Jewish Preaching Revolution The renewal of the Jewish homiletic tradition spread fast and far, its innovations being exported wherever the German Jewish reformers arrived. In this respect, Max Lilienthal’s evolution was, to some extent, representative of an entire generation of modern Jewish preachers. In the beginning, Lilienthal’s opinions were mostly conservative, his innovations clearly aimed at improving the instructive element of a basically orthodox liturgical practice as well as enhancing the decorum of that practice. Arriving in America in 1845, he nevertheless remained in touch with his colleagues and mentors in Germany, so that many of his thoughtfully proposed “improvements” can be assessed by comparison


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with the German program of liturgical reform.36 It was within this sort of traditionalism that his own preaching gave voice to a discourse of religious instruction. When he organized his rabbinical activity in Riga, Latvia, in 1839, he instituted regular Sabbath preaching in German as one of the modernizing reforms in the life of his congregation, mostly composed of German speaking Jews. Furthermore, he presented himself as a “preacher” after the Protestant model, and soon published a volume of his collected sermons, Predigten für Sabbathe und Festtage.37 When he came to the United States, he started by addressing his New York congregations of German-American Jews in German. At first, his sermons still followed the traditional model and promoted an orthodox religious theology. It is only later, after 1855, when he became a rabbi in Cincinnati, that he felt free to introduce some innovations to his preaching. He thus started to preach and publish in English, soon becoming an eloquent English speaker. At his Cincinnati synagogue, Lilienthal chose to deliver his sermons in both English and German, on alternating weekends, and to compose his liturgical service along bilingual lines, thus defining the limits of his congregational inclusiveness as well as the forms of its potential exclusivity. The language of delivery is not only the most revealing cultural link between preacher and audience; in the American context, it was also the link that was culturally mandated with accomplishing the task of inclusiveness in mainstream American society.38 Yet Lilienthal, undoubtedly the most skilled of the American Jewish preachers of his time, was not alone in his “linguistic progress”. In 1945 Adolf Kober published a study of Jewish-German preachers who conducted their preaching activity in the United States in German and showed the full extent of what would constitute, in the end, a process of Americanization.39

36

As will be clear, he further accepted and introduced many, if not all, of the liturgical changes proposed by the Frankfurt Rabbinical Conference of 1845. 37 Sermons for Sabbath and Festival Days (Münich, 1839). 38 In this respect, a comparison is possible with the linguistic evolution of the German ethnic minority that also displayed a great variety of linguistic options in their process of accommodation to a new country. An interesting analysis of this range of commitments to both linguistic and religious choices, motivating association patterns and attitudes, is provided in Religion and Community: Cincinnati Germans, 1814–1870, by Joseph M. White (unpubl. diss., University of Notre Dame, 1980), pp. 147–50. 39 Adolf Kober, “Jewish Preaching and Preachers,” Historia Judaica 7.2 (Oct. 1945), 103–34 provides a detailed list of German preachers in America: Wise, David Einhorn, Kaufmann Kohler, Bernard Felsenthal, etc.

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For many, however, preaching in America meant consistent bilingual activity: Isaac Leeser, I.M. Wise, Max Lilienthal, and J.K. Gutheim (1817–86) preached in both German and English, in addition to those parts of the service that preserved their traditional Hebrew expression. At its most challenging, the American Reform sermon was understood as a tool of a homogenizing Americanization, following an overall strategy of accommodation and partial acculturation. In 1865, Wise wrote: All our synagogal reforms are worthless, if we succeed not in Americanizing the Hebrew institutions. Judaism must not be a foreign plant on this soil; it must not be German, French, Polish or English; it must be American in form, principle and spirit.40

He then, appropriately, asked “How shall it be done?” – in order to answer with clarity: “Organize into religious bodies. Hold meetings for divine worship and instruction, as you generally do for mutual improvement. […] conduct both service and instruction in the vernacular of the country”.41 On the other hand, skilled and liberally-oriented rabbis such as David Einhorn (1809–79), one of the actual participants at the Frankfurt Rabbinical Conference (1845) that established the program of the German-Jewish reform, believed strongly that the use of the vernacular in the synagogue should be specifically limited to German, since this was the language of expression for the “science of Judaism”. Becoming one of the main leaders of American Reform Jewry, Einhorn fought hard for adopting German as the one and only language for the proper expression of both Jewish scholarship and progressive ideas in religion, including sermons.42 Part and parcel of the Americanization of the synagogue and its sermon, the plurilinguism of the liturgical service was as much a sign of departure from tradition as it was a sign of the new place of the

40

The Israelite, 16 June 1865, p. 404. Ibid., p. 404. Repeatedly included in the editorials of The Israelite, the use of English in preaching is an important idea promoted by I.M. Wise in his critique of the American Jewish pulpit; it will gradually become the central issue of Americanization in the Jewish pulpit, coupled for a time with a parallel program of de-Germanization. See in this respect Michael Meyer’s summation in “German-Jewish Identity in Nineteenth-Century America”. 42 In this he was closer to many representatives of the German Christian immigration who centered their religious and community life on their commitment to the German culture and language. 41


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synagogue experience in the life of American Jewish congregations. In this respect, Wise’s untiring reminders that Americanization meant adopting English in preaching carried a particular value. It is in the work of this generation, the generation that consistently built the Reform religious movement between 1850 and 1880, that the new conventions of public communication were better understood and further refined in such a way as to produce and maintain a truly distinctive scene of public listening. In turn, this new awareness led to styles of preaching that were highly personal, while also following various rhetorical and aesthetic trends. Redefined by its instrumentality as a powerful means of popular education, the sermon was discussed, debated, and developed in order to attain its goals: clarity, simplicity, effortless understanding, and – last but not least – aesthetic accomplishment and intellectual achievement. Over and beyond its liturgical function, the new sermon was more and more conceived as an address that could stand on its own, as a discourse of moral exhortation that could be allembracing. Neither Emerson nor Lincoln were alone in their “borderline” rhetorical excellence, forging a rhetoric of “political sublime” that is both sacred and secular in its values and in its models. Keeping up with the age, the Jewish pulpit would also seek to integrate the main sacred-secular context: in a very interesting critique of the Jewish pulpits of New York, Wise wrote in 1865 that the competition of good oratorical events was enhanced by the presence of so many good orators of all kinds: Every now and then a new doctor turns up somewhere in New York and exhibits his elocutionary powers which, after awhile, turn out very unsatisfactory, as the New Yorker almost daily have [sic] chances to hear the best orators in the land.43

As we shall see, several hortatory strategies of discourse, characteristic of American political communication, were also employed in the pulpit. While the biblical citation still anchored the sermon, more and more structural changes were taking place; appropriating issues from social and political discourses, the Reform Jewish sermon became a text that gathered its references from an ever wider secular environment: philosophy, poetry, prose, as well as current affairs. This growing

43

The Israelite, 25 August 1865, p. 6.

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complexity of the referential links of the sermon, its extended connections with a diversified modern cultural background, would ultimately make it possible for the sermon to adjust to the new requirements of the interfaith pulpit. Ubiquitous and varied, Jewish sermons were reported, published entirely or in outline in the main Jewish newspapers – The Israelite, The Occident, The Asmonean, The Jewish Messenger – and collected in anthologies. Some preachers, such as Wise, had Blair’s lectures as their homiletic master text; yet others, like Max Lilienthal, were evidently influenced by Goethe and Heine and achieved a distinctively belletristic tone. Lilienthal’s poetic prose was recognized by his contemporaries; it is undoubtedly due to this excellence in preaching that he was invited to speak before the Unitarian congregation of Thomas Vickers (1835–1917). The Challenge of Pluralism: from Social Interaction to the Interfaith Sermon The inclusion practiced by most Jewish leaders, both religious and secular, embraced many diverse strategies because interactions between Jews and non-Jews took place in various settings and under various degrees of (non)conformity. In the United States in particular, the model followed by the reforming German-Jewish immigrants of the 1840s allowed for a more active interaction with liberal trends of Christianity; in this respect, a reliable model of intense change was provided by the activity of the American Unitarian and Universalist ministers. Thus, it is not surprising that Max Lilienthal’s interfaith sermon was preached in a Unitarian church, within a renewed Unitarian and Jewish project of exchanges, greatly encouraged by the civic effervescence of the postwar years. Within this broad reconstructive project, the exchange of pulpits offered a challenging opportunity for toleration and religious inclusion. Frequent in 18th-century America, the practice of pulpit exchange did, from the beginning, show the extent of acceptable diversity within the system of the congregational units. In the beginning of the 19th century, however, the radicalization of liberal attitudes and the rigidity of some orthodox ministers led to a rift that reevaluated the practice. The “Unitarian controversy” placed the orthodox minister in opposition to his more liberal congregation; it raised questions of authority


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and authorization, ultimately expressing the rights to the discourse from the pulpit.44 As we have seen, Judaism had its own traditional norms for pulpit access, allowing visiting rabbis in colonial America to preach and to conduct services in synagogues during their travels and permitting the general practice of appointing hazanim preachers. Yet, the exchange practice would enter a different dynamic amid the modernization and accelerated Americanization of the second part of the 19th century. This new dynamic ultimately mirrored the Unitarian developments; this became particularly evident towards the end of the century, when, generally speaking, the structural synchronization between Jewish and Protestant pulpits was fully achieved. A notable example of the extensive practice of pulpit exchanges is found in a note published in 1901 in the Jewish Chronicle (London). The editor discussed the extent of the “system of interchange of pulpits” by which ministers of various British provincial synagogues will “at regular intervals, occupy one another’s pulpits”,45 a system “prevalent in London”, adding that due to this broadening of the practice “a new impetus will thereby be given to congregational vitality”.46 As was already the case in the American Unitarian tradition, the pulpit exchange was perceived as an instrument of diversity in preaching, limited only by the goodwill of the ministers. Homiletically, the American Unitarian controversy over pulpit exchanges redefined the possibilities of liberal preaching and effectively prepared the conditions for interdenominational exchanges and, finally, free interfaith speech. By extending the practice of pulpit exchanges, previously confined to the members of their own denomination, the Unitarian ministers steadily exposed their congregations to a plurality of religious attitudes and styles. However, the exchanges were generally limited to fellow Christians; there was a logical progression from intercongregational to inter-denominational. The next step, going beyond Christianity, required a massive change in religious ideas and attitudes, a change that is only understandable in social and clerical terms. The extension of the exchange of pulpits was particularly important for those parts of the United States that harbored a diverse immigrant 44 Cf. Wright, “Unitarian Controversy,” pp. 4, 8–17; Robinson, The Unitarians and the Universalists, p. 26. 45 Jewish Chronicle, 21 June 1901. 46 Ibid.

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population and where religious and ethnic pluralism became a core issue in integration and Americanization. Such a place was Cincinnati, a bustling American town in the middle of the 19th century, a vibrant and actively growing urban center, particularly engaged in the cultural politics of Americanization: host of two large immigrant communities, the German and the Jewish-German, the city became the place of a flourishing culture of pluralism, toleration and freedom of religion. Known as the “Queen City of the West”, and even as “The Jerusalem on the Ohio”, Cincinnati was, between 1840 and 1860, the destination of a fairly large number of German and German-Jewish immigrants, giving rise to many communal associations engaged in a fairly complex and competitive activity,47 where ethnic and linguistic distinctions encouraged freedom to interact and trespass otherwise isolating barriers. There remain many descriptions of the vivid spirit that animated this lively Western metropolis at mid-century, including the reminiscences of Isaac Meyer Wise and Moncure Conway (1832–1907), two prominent preachers, one Jewish and one Unitarian, who appear to have enjoyed a cordial relationship. In the spirit of collegiality, the two men often exchanged ideas and met at various social functions. Conway also had a friendly acquaintance with Max Lilienthal, the other prominent rabbi of the city.48 He also discussed the ideological differences between I.M. Wise and Max Lilienthal, noting that Lilienthal, while more cautious, was, nevertheless able to go farther in his reforms,49 an analysis that concurs with the one Wise gave in his own memoir.50 It is possible, although no documentary source confirms this, that the first interfaith exchange of pulpits might have taken place between 47 Cf. Steven J. Ross, Workers On the Edge. Work, Leisure and Politics in Industrializing Cincinnati, 1788–1890 (New York, 1985), pp. 173–75. Interesting accounts of the social and religious life in mid-century Cincinnati are also given in the dissertations of Stephen Gross Mostov, A “Jerusalem” on the Ohio: The Social and Economical History of Cincinnati’s Jewish Community, 1840–1874 (Brandeis, 1981) and L.M. White, Cincinnati Germans, already cited. 48 Referring particularly to his relationship with the two Jewish Reform clerics of Cincinnati, Conway wrote in his autobiography that the “two rabbis were as able and learned as any in America”, adding “Dr. Isaac M. Wise was a man of great good sense and energy” (Moncure Conway, Autobiography. Memories and Experiences [Boston, 1904], p. 1: 275). 49 “The other Jewish society, that of Dr Lilienthal, was also liberal but more cautiously so” (Conway, Autobiography, p. 1: 275). 50 See I.M. Wise, Reminiscences (New York, 1973), p. 259.


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1856 and 1862, when Conway was in Cincinnati and actively occupied with speaking engagements before various religious audiences. He remembers in his autobiography: “I was invited at times to lecture for Jewish societies and was entertained in their company”.51 This seems to point to an early interfaith lecture or sermon, but it is unclear whether this was indeed a synagogue sermon or just a lecture before one of the very numerous “societies”52 of the time. By his own report, Conway was an eager and adept public orator and preaching was only one of his interests: he was often invited to preach before Methodist audiences and to lecture within a culturally diverse public sphere, including, as already mentioned, Jewish audiences.53 This polyvalence was also in tune with his stand on the issues of the time. A Unitarian cleric sympathetic to the deist ideology of his age, Conway moved steadily towards and beyond the margins of orthodoxy, challenging many religious ideas from the point of view of a Hegelian humanism, all embracing, universalist and liberal.54 A familiar of Emerson, widely read in Thoreau, Conway’s religiosity was increasingly expressed in terms that were as unconventional as they were literary and philosophical, considerably widening the frame of his preaching by using sources of inspiration from diverse areas of the humanities and, basically, moving towards the “free religion” model. This was certainly reflected in his pulpit exchange practice in Ohio: between 1857 and 1862, as minister of the First Unitarian Church in Cincinnati, Conway invited to his pulpit many controversial personalities: Emerson, the embattled “Abbé Miel”, a defrocked and converted Catholic priest, and the Presbyterian cleric Henry Smith, thus considerably broadening the expectations of his congregation and redefining the standards of Protestant pulpit discourse.55 Finally, in 1874, Conway published the Sacred Anthology, a rich compilation of textual sources to be liturgically

51

Conway, Autobiography, p. 1: 275. In many cases, religious communities, including the Jewish ones, called themselves “societies”, thus avoiding a stricter “dogmatic” or theological identification. 53 Conway, Autobiography, pp. 1: 271–73. 54 Conway was one of the first American Hegelians: his religious universalism has to be understood within the frame of this “Ohio Hegelianism” that has a particular configuration in the philosophy of religion. For further discussions of this issue see L. Easton, The Ohio Hegelians, (Athens, Ohio, 1966), pp. 130–50. 55 Conway, Autobiography pp. 1: 274–76. It seems that his Universalist and Humanist leanings were disliked by the more conservative part of his congregation, since his ministry was rejected by some, leading to a split in membership that took place at the beginning of the 1860s. 52

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used in the Free Religious and “Agnostic” services: it includes the Vedas, the Koran, and the Talmud. In 1867, in the aftermath of the Civil War, Thomas Vickers, Conway’s successor to the pulpit of the First Unitarian Church, further broadened the practice of exchanging pulpits in a truly Universalist spirit by offering his pulpit to a Jewish preacher, thus going beyond the confines of Christianity. Vickers, like Conway, was a liberal Universalist Unitarian; he was American-born but German-trained and shared with Lilienthal a series of liberal attitudes and assumptions,56 the two men being colleagues in various educational and municipal institutions and sharing a common appreciation of the German classics. By inviting Max Lilienthal to preach before his congregation, Vickers achieved a cultural and, especially, a homiletic breakthrough, effectively opening a new space of religious publicity: the preacher addressed “the unconverted” in a spirit of sympathetic spirituality, forging a discourse of understanding and goodwill. Lilienthal understood the importance of this new kind of religious exchange and answered its discursive demands by delivering a sermon marked both by its innovative rhetoric and its elegantly reserved style. He was also eminently suited for the task: the first German Jew in America to have both a rabbinical and a university degree, an active participant in many social and educational projects, a gifted and respected public speaker, a perceptive and keen littérateur, Max Lilienthal was the best candidate for an initiative that required the creation of a new homiletic type of speech. A brief discussion of this first interfaith sermon will try to consider the main points of its rhetorical innovation. I will use for this purpose the reports of the sermon published in the religious press at the time.57 56 For example, in 1867, the year of his pulpit invitation to Lilienthal, Vickers also participated in a heated debate with the Catholic Archbishop Purcell; he published his opinions in The Roman Catholic Church and Free Thought (Cincinnati, 1868). In 1870, on the occasion of the vivid public debate on the issues of the Bible reading in the public school (the “Cincinnati Bible wars”) and of the “Christian amendment”, Vickers consistently sided with Lilienthal and with the “Jewish” opinion. 57 To my knowledge, no manuscript of the sermon has been preserved. Instead, extensive reports have been published in the press, giving various audiences access to the text and its context. I am using here the version published in The Radical (April 1867), p. 503, a Unitarian periodical; the version appeared under the title “Religious Liberality”, apparently reproducing the report, identically headlined, in the Cincinnati Daily Gazette of 4 March. The same version of the text is reproduced, from the same source, The Cincinnati Gazette, by Leeser’s magazine The Occident, implying a possible common resource for most, if not all, of the references of the time. On the Occident


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Lilienthal’s Innovative Preaching and Interfaith Communication At Vickers’ invitation, Lilienthal occupied the pulpit of the First Unitarian Church on Sunday, 3 March 1867. He started his service with a prayer affirming the unity of mankind before God and, in a lyrical cadence, evoked the relationship between man and God. It is a solemn oration, with sublime overtones, obviously inspired by Goethe’s poetry. In elevated language, he prayed for the gift of enlightenment: O grant us, in this solemn hour of devotion and instruction, that we may be guarded by the light of truth which Thou has planted into our mind and reason, so that, freed from prejudices and superstition, we may obviate all error, and, enlightened ourselves, assist in enlightening our fellow men.58

The Goethe-like sublime and dramatic expressive smoothness were reinforced and maintained by the transition from prayer to sermon. Preceded by a reading of Isaiah 45, the sermon developed ideas already expressed with intense emotion in the prayer: the omnipotence and reliable truthfulness of God and the promise to gather “the refugees of the nations” in equality and freedom.59 Thus, the prayer was artfully followed by the well-chosen biblical text; in mutual support, the two met and asserted the same idea: the unity of mankind situated by its relationship with a protecting and kindred God. The function of the scriptural citation as an argumentative proof was also seen in Lilienthal’s choice of biblical text, introduced by the citation from Exodus14:13: “Fear ye not; stand still and see the salvation of the Lord”.60 While this theme was certainly chosen in relation to the date of the event – the coming Passover and, respectively, Easter – it is also interesting to see how it was made to fit into the general structure of the sermon: an

reproduction of the text and comment, see further. The event is discussed by R. Friedenberg, in Hear O Israel, pp. 81–83. On p. 156 of this study Friedenberg also mentions a publication of the sermon in pamphlet form, which I was unable to verify or obtain. In any event, the press report of The Radical is quite revealing and I will, conveniently, use it for my analysis. 58 “Religious Liberality,” The Radical, April 1867, p. 503. 59 Isaiah 14:19 and 14:23. 60 It is worth mentioning that this particular citation was frequently used in the abolitionist discourse, a discourse that saw the freedom of the African-Americans as a beginning of a new age, to be considered in appropriate biblical terms; in a famous discourse delivered in 1862 in support of the anti-slavery cause, John Sweat Rock (1825–66) finished his oration by saying: “we will now stand still, and see the salvation of our people”.

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introductory remark exposing the uniqueness of the situation – “I was longing for [this meeting] many and many a year” – leading to a standard captatio benevolentiae in asking the audience’s indulgence while also suggesting the magnitude of the task. Confessing that he had little time for preparation, the preacher closed his introductory remarks with a reiteration of the classical topos of modesty: “I am too much engaged to prepare myself for a sermon worthy to be delivered before your enlightened and liberal audience”.61 But preparation was, in fact, dismissed; in Lilienthal’s view, the times were such that the flow of discourse itself was commanded by the richness of the events and by the technological advent of rapid communication: “it seems that since the Atlantic cable unites the two hemispheres in our time of electricity, our time of philosophy, ideas travel more swiftly”.62 By its evocation of a new and impressive technological accomplishment, the passage was thus skillfully converted into a transitional partition leading to the enunciation of the main idea, also inspired by contemporary “new conceptualizations”: Cavour’s axiom63 “libera chiesa in libero stato” (a free church in a free state) – a maxim that, in 19th-century Europe, consecrated the political principle of separation of church and state.64 As Lilienthal was prompt to note, this principle had already been enshrined in the American Constitution, ensuring freedom of religion and opening the gate for attitudes of tolerance and mutual understanding. The sermon continued by juxtaposing the old and the new in personalized terms, us and them, here and there: “We Americans wonder what their astonishment, what their surprise. We have been reared in the midst of the principles of religious liberty; but they cannot understand it”.65

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“Religious Liberality,” p. 503. Like David Einhorn, another radical preacher representative of Reform Judaism, Lilienthal sees in the laying of the Atlantic telegraphic cable, in 1866, a sign of imminent extension of the universal brotherhood of man, divinely ordered. A perceptive commentary on this particular sermon by Einhorn is in C. Wiese, “Samuel Holdheim’s ‘Most Powerful Comrade in Conviction’: David Einhorn and the Debate Concerning Jewish Universalism in the Radical Reform Movement,” in Redefining Judaism in an Age of Emancipation. Comparative Perspectives on Samuel Holdheim (1806–1860), ed. Christian Wiese (Leiden, 2007), p. 371. 63 Camilio Benso, count of Cavour (1810–61), was a liberal Italian statesman, the architect of modern Italy’s independence and unity. 64 Interestingly enough, Cavour’s words are never matched or even compared by Lilienthal with Jefferson’s own “phrase” about the “wall of separation” between church and state, likewise unmentioned in any of the sermons by Lilienthal that I read. 65 “Religious Liberality,” p. 503. 62


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This antithetic strategy is central to the composition of the sermon, once more aligning it with the central structure of the hortatory rhetoric that was at the core of the political rhetoric of the time. By privileging this textual strategy, Lilienthal was able to foreground the fact that his interfaith sermon was articulated as an appeal to peace, toleration and friendship, urging a politically enlightened attitude. If we remember that his 3 March sermon took place in a growing quarrelsome atmosphere, sparkled by a number of Anti-Semitic measures in some American states, then the hortatory character of the sermon receives its full meaning.66 Lilienthal developed his argument for the separation of church and state in two parts, one narrative, and the second illustrative. First, he drew a sketch of European history from the point of view of the progress of toleration and concluded that the history of the Old World proved the necessity of state-protected religious diversity; slightly paraphrasing the well known sentence from Daniel, he said, “The idea of one only true church has been weighed in the balance and found wanting”.67 Lilienthal developed the second part of his sermon by applying the general principle of toleration to the religious life of his time, in his own city, using short exempla – illustrative anecdotes from his experience as a preacher and as a social activist, frequently interacting with Christian officials. Finally, he ended the sermon by reflecting on the greatness of human nature, stating aphoristically the main tenets of rational religion, already exposed in the initial prayer: “God has created us with mental faculties, and each has to work out the problem of truth for himself. Progress is our watchword and our destiny. It is the title of our nobility”.68 The final peroration, appropriately enough, returned to the mode of prayer, conferring on Cavour’s maxim a sacred and sublime significance: It is my prayer that with one heart and one mind we may work on, in the great task intrusted [sic] to us as a free people, reconciling the human race, and leading them to love one another as brethren, with the motto ever before us: “A free church in a free State, and God one, for ever and ever”.69 66 During February and March 1867 a number of insurance companies recommended the boycott of Jewish merchants, which in turn lead to a counter-boycott. 67 “Religious Liberality,” p. 503. 68 Ibid., p. 503. 69 Ibid., p. 503.

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Many of Lilienthal’s arguments address topics already developed by Unitarians in their own preaching; despite his expressed anxiety, he delivered a sermon quite close to his audience’s expectations, probably even somewhat more convivial and fluent than usual. Homiletically speaking, the most striking aspect of the sermon was its adjustment to both the new scope of the preaching situation – interfaith appeal to understanding – and to the norms of the sermon common in the Unitarian-Universalist circles: clarity, succinct arguments, illustrations from everyday life and a final peroration.70 These stylistic values were revised by molding them in the structure of the new Jewish sermon already developed by Lilienthal in his own American preaching: this was characterized by an ordered argument in the classical style, yet beyond the appeal to reason, there was always an inspired appeal to spirituality, where the poetic and the pathetic were united in a moving affirmation of the vividness of religious experience and emotions. Significantly, many of the elements of this sermon also integrated procedures proper to the new hortatory style of democratic discourse, widespread during the Civil War. But this new rhetoric is yet again resemantized, because Lilienthal stripped it of its aggressive and violent orientation in order to deliberately communicate a peaceful message.71 At the same time, his deeply religious sensibility and devotion to Judaism’s humanistic heritage, in a universalistic key, are often articulated in terms of civic religion. This secular faith in America was appropriately included in the sermon and correlated with its religious themes. In this way, the familiar topos of the American civic religion explicitly carries Mosaic overtones, yet it is reformulated to suit an American universalism that is truly all-embracing: Whenever I am in Philadelphia, and pass the glorious Hall of Independence, it seems to me as a modern Sinai – the Jerusalem, the Mecca – wherein the reconsecration of the human race is celebrated, from whence the doctrine of “Love one another” emanated, not within the

70

For an overview of the Unitarian tradition in homiletics, see Lawrence Buell, “The Unitarian Movement and the Art of Preaching in 19th Century America,” American Quarterly 24 (May 1972), 166–90. 71 The hortatory rhetoric of 19th-century political discourse is examined in Andrew Robertson’s The Language of Democracy: Political Rhetoric in the United States and Britain, 1790–1900 (Charlottesville, VA, 2005). Neither Robertson nor its many critics include a review of, or a correlation with, the sermonic discourse of the time.


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Scriptural limit, (…) but love one another in the spirit of a free Church, a free State, and worthy of the children of one great common Father.72

There was, however, even a more subtle mode of Americanizing the modern Jewish style of sermonic address, one that signaled the importance of this seminal text, placing it unmistakably in its historical context. While the rhetorical center was given by Cavour’s maxim, skillfully matched with the appropriate Scriptural texts, and – as seen above – paraphrased frequently, there is a background that was heavily influenced by Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address, which was already achieving the status of a rhetorical classic and was, indeed, a hugely popular expression of civic religion. Lilienthal knew and admired the address, recognizing its conciliatory meaning and using it as a rhetorical source for the first eulogy of Lincoln he delivered on 22 April 1865.73 In this obituary sermon, Lilienthal gave Lincoln’s well known sentences of the last paragraph – “With malice toward none, with charity for all” – a strong social meaning of healing, stressing, by a repetitive rhetorical pattern, its meaning of comforting solidarity: Hand in hand we will work as thou hast said, “to bind up the Nation’s wounds, and do all that may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.” Hand in hand we will strive that no scar be left; that the Nation revived through all her members, shall begin a new era of unequalled progress and prosperity.74

In the second obituary eulogy for Lincoln, delivered on 10 June 1865,75 Lilienthal paid particular attention to the promise in Lincoln’s inaugural address “to care for him who shall have born the battle, and for his widow and his orphan”. This mission was also mentioned in the sermon of March 1867, but this time it is developed as a narrative illustration, a brief story inspired by Lilienthal’s philanthropic activity: “I have been

72

“Religious Liberality,” p. 503. See “Lincoln–An Appreciation,” in Abraham Lincoln. The Tribute of the Synagogue, ed. Emanuel Hertz (New York, 1927), pp. 122–32. 74 Abraham Lincoln. The Tribute of the Synagogue, p. 132. Lilienthal cites the Second Inaugural in an imprecise manner. In a preceding paragraph he already developed the sentence “to care for him who shall have born the battle, and for his widow and his orphan” (cf. p. 122) referring to the extensive relief work underway in the city. 75 Lilienthal delivered two eulogies for Lincoln, one immediately after the assassination, on 22 April, the other on 10 June 1865, the official day of mourning instituted by President Andrew Johnson. 73

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five years a Director of the Relief Union … dispensing charity to the good people who needed it among the soldiers’ families”.76 In his address to Vickers’ Universalist congregation, Lilienthal thus managed to link two different strains of eloquence in a single sermonic structure: the reformed Jewish sermon and the rearticulated elements of a new secular homiletics, proper to civic religion, displaying modified hortatory overtones. It is, most certainly, not without importance that Max Lilienthal’s landmark address was delivered on 3 March, approximately two years after the Second Inaugural, the political sermon that gave voice to the urgency of practicing the twin virtues of charity and justice. The flourishing discourse of American secular religion, or “political religion”,77 thus integrated into the new genre, shows how post Civil War ideology, the “political theology” of American democracy, was efficiently used to support the articulation of a new and more tolerant commitment to religious spirituality. This particular aspect of the sermon was reinforced by his colleague, Thomas Vickers who, the following week, on 10 March, “answered” with a sermon that stressed the compassionate, humanist and universalistic topoi of Lilienthal’s sermon: it is reported that “He accepted humanity as the grand basis for the future. He accepted one God as the benign father of all, without distinction of sect, country, race or color”.78 But while Lilienthal developed to some length the contrast between the freedom of the New World and the long history of intolerance in Europe, Vickers apparently “entered more particularly into the sad history of Christian fanaticism and Jewish sufferings”.79 Thus the two sermons, sharing a common theme and differing in their ways of composing parallel discourses for the same audience, constitute an implicit, even a complicit, dialogue, establishing an iconic figure of interfaith discursive efforts. In its report of Vickers’ sermon of interfaith “reconciliation”, the Israelite also provided a good evaluation of the new homiletic encounter, observing that the two ministers had the courage to broaden a challenging idea and to “popularize it among the masses at large, to descend from the safe, protecting citadel of abstract thoughts, and bravely enter the dangerous arena of practical

76

“Religious Liberality,” p. 503. See Robert N. Bellah and Phillip E. Hammond, Varieties of Civil Religion (San Francisco, 1980), pp. 14–16. 78 The Israelite, 15 March 1867, p. 6. 79 Ibid., p. 6. 77


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life, of popular prejudice and ancient well-established castes”.80 The author of this report, with its thoughtful assessment, was Maurice Fluegel (1831–1911), a widely traveled multidisciplinary scholar, newly arrived from Europe, soon to become rabbi of the Baltimore Hebrew Congregation.81 His enthusiasm for the interfaith discourse from the pulpit would soon be satisfied in the 1870s, at the arrival in New York of Gustav Gottheil (1827–1903), who had a useful practice in this area, having been engaged already in events of interfaith exchange in Manchester. If the Israelite, unsurprisingly, felt the need to celebrate the whole event in festive and even triumphant terms, other responses were not so kind. Among those, the most significant remains the one published in The Occident by Isaac Leeser. The paper reproduced the text of the sermon from The Cincinnati Gazette – with its ambiguous highlights – but this text followed a critical editorial that displayed a negative and off-putting commentary. Entitled “A New Thing”, the editorial started with a series of rhetorical questions: “Shall one weep or laugh at this strange exhibition? Are all mad? Or is there design on the part of some to mislead others, and have they thus a deep method in their apparent hallucination?”82 and proceeded by construing the whole event as an attack against Jewish religion and Jewish identity. Lilienthal was never mentioned by name, but the antonomastic reference is quite clear (“a learned Jewish theologian and doctor of philosophy” in Cincinnati), followed as it was by a further disparaging remark about the quality of the sermon, sending back to a defining reference to the Shulchan Aruch.83 The sermon was, for Leeser, disappointing, especially if compared with the one delivered by Lilienthal in his inaugural sermon in New York, in 1845.84 Acrimoniously, he tried to attribute this to an alleged unease of the author with the English expression! Significantly,

80

Ibid., p. 6. Maurice Fluegel, who studied at several universities in France, Germany and Great Britain, transformed the topic of interfaith exchanges in a scholarly pursuit by integrating it in the new discipline of comparative religion (with a philosophical bent). His work in this respect is quite impressive, although neglected today. I am currently preparing an essay on this topic. 82 The Occident 25.2 (May, 1867), 49. 83 This was the subject of an all-encompassing dispute between Leeser and Lilienthal in 1856, debating the acceptable limits of Reform Jewish practices. 84 This and other sermons from Lilienthal’s more traditional (conservative) period were published by Leeser in The Occident. The sermon mentioned here is “The Vocation of the Minister,” preached in 1846 and published in the issue of March 1846. 81

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Leeser did not clearly oppose the ideas of Lilienthal’s sermon; instead he redirected its semantic axis at an opposition between an assimilated “New” Judaism, losing its identifying customs and liturgical practices, and a tradition in need of defense and support. In this context, Lilienthal’s preaching in a Christian pulpit was perceived as a dangerous compromise, bowing to the “folly of the age”. The optimistic spirit of the modern “Zeitgeist” is thus reversed according to a pessimistic and limiting vision: 10 years after the publication of Lilienthal’s programmatic article on “The Spirit of the Age” (The Israelite, December 1857), Leeser took the opportunity offered by the interfaith event to reposition himself in his ongoing dispute against the Cincinnati Reformers.85 In a very direct style, Leeser spelled out his criticism of the “revolutionary” efforts, thus preserving his ideological isolation to the “revolutionary” efforts of the Reform Jewish preachers: “We wish no entanglement as Jews with any one else; we are friends to law and order, and can patiently wait the gradual development of the divine scheme”,86 adding sanctimoniously “we still would utter the hope that no Israelite may ever appear again among the most liberal Christians to conduct their worship and to give out their hymns”.87 Yet Max Lilienthal’s preaching in the Unitarian pulpit did not remain an isolated event;88 despite Leeser’s express wishes to the contrary, homiletic interfaith exchanges continued to develop and to give birth to a brilliant rhetorical legacy. In the United States, the Jewish discourse of interfaith preaching attained summits of eloquence still unsurpassed in the preaching of Gustav Gottheil and Emil G. Hirsch, while Wise and Lilienthal expanded their interfaith activity. Newly arrived in New York from Manchester, where he also exercised his preaching skills in Christian environments, Gottheil was able to achieve and polish, during the next decades – 1875–95 – a consistent trend of pulpit exchanges with some of the well known Protestant and Unitarian preachers of the time. E.G. Hirsch (1851–1923), of Chicago,

85 A very good discussion of this debate appeared recently in N. Cohen’s What the Rabbis Said (New York, 2008), pp. 100–105. 86 The Occident, p. 54. 87 Ibid., p. 55. 88 For a discussion of various Jewish reactions to Lilienthal’s preaching from a Unitarian pulpit, see R. Friedenberg, Hear O Israel, pp. 83–84. However, the most significant seems to have been the one expressed in the pages of the Occident, as discussed above.


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became famous for his gift of subtle eloquence in spreading an intensely Jewish message of peace and toleration from various Christian pulpits.89 Despite these successful developments, the interfaith sermon can not be said to have earned an easy victory, since it preserved both a dimension of daring controversy and challenging radicalism, as shown by this ambiguous appreciation in Stephen Wise’s 1923 eulogy for Emil G. Hirsch: Other men before him, like Wise and Gottheil, had addressed themselves to Christian congregations in America, had preached in Christian pulpits, had held forth before every manner of Christian assembly. But Hirsch was the first to speak in ruggedly uncompromising fashion in assemblies of non-Jews. […] He spoke not without appreciation of the things that are high and fine in Christianity and in Christian life, but he spoke the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth, touching the intellectual errors and the moral unworthiness of many of those who call themselves Christians and their faith Christianity.90

Highly controversial at times, interfaith Jewish preaching did, nevertheless, become an important type of homiletic practice and, in time, led to the formation of a new traditional stream of preaching. From its beginnings, it was an important yet challenging tool in the religious politics of the American state, engaged in an intense struggle for the preservation of the First Amendment. As many scholars (Cohen, Sarna, and Diner) have recently shown, the post-war movement to amend the Constitution by a formal recognition of national Christianity grew and threatened the established freedom of religion and equality of rights, giving a particular urgency to the defense of the separation of church and state. This was particularly true for the period between 1863 and 1874, when the movement for “Christian amendment” was quite strong, giving Lilienthal’s sermon its keen political value, partially redirecting the general context of his interfaith preaching activity.91

89 See the collection of sermons in M.A. Hirsch, ed., The Jewish Preacher (Naples, FL, 2003). 90 Stephen Wise, “Memorial Address for Emil G. Hirsch” (1923), in Rabbi Emil G. Hirsch, The Reform Advocate, ed. David Einhorn Hirsch (Chicago, 1968), p. 185. 91 The issue of the “Christian nation” amendment is still relevant, as recent events have proved; for a thoughtful discussion of it and the new challenges engaged, see in particular Barack Obama’s “Call to Renewal Keynote Address, June 28, 2006,” in An American Story: The Speeches of Barack Obama (Toronto, 2008), p. 175.

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While the general development of modern Jewish preaching has been closely influenced by the European model of homiletic discourse, the interfaith sermon started as an original American innovation, inaugurated by a Reform rabbi, Max Lilienthal. In postwar Cincinnati, it appeared as a conscious effort at bridging the “solitudes” of religious communities, within a general project of integration and extended cultural assimilation, the “Americanization” of religious and ethnic identities. This was particularly evident in the period preceding the First World War, when the Social Gospel movement also contributed at a more intense exchange program across confessional and denominational lines. The practice of interfaith preaching would, however, spread to other American pulpits and denominations, to Canada and to Europe, in the aftermath of the First World War, when challenges and assumptions of a new age of social solidarity became once more very important. This tradition of Jewish-Christian interfaith exchange and understanding, toleration and support for a progressive agenda of social and political change would be tested in the following decades, and it would pass its acid test in the common fight against Nazi anti-Semitism: on 27 March 1933, an important mass demonstration in New York was addressed by a representative array of American religious leaders in a concerted effort to stop the racist policies of the Nazi state. On that occasion, as in many others afterwards, the new rhetoric of interfaith exchanges was used, broadened and readjusted. Nowadays, when the practice of interfaith preaching has become quite pervasive, serving as an efficient homiletic tool in the fight against prejudice and intolerance, it is good to remember how and when it all started.

“AS A MUSICIAN WOULD HIS VIOLIN”: THE ORATORY OF THE GREAT BASIN PROPHETS Brian Jackson The Divine Musician One morning in April 1832 in Mendon, New York, Heber C. Kimball sat throwing at his potter’s wheel when Alpheus Gifford, itinerant Mormon missionary, called to invite him to be baptized into the restored gospel of Christ. Heber jumped up from the wheel, threw off his potter’s apron, rolled his clay-caked sleeves up to the shoulder, and followed Gifford out to a stream. Immediately after his baptism, without any formal education and without even having read the Bible, he was ordained an elder in the Holy Priesthood and given a commission to preach the gospel throughout New York and other states, bearing testimony of the Book of Mormon and Joseph Smith. “People called me crazy”, he later recalled, but I continued in this way as though my flesh would consume away .… The Scriptures were unfolded to my mind in such a wonderful manner it appeared to me, at times, as if I had formerly been familiar with them.1

For the next thirty-six years Heber left his wife and children, sometimes in distressful conditions, to serve eight preaching missions in the US, Canada, and England; he also preached over one hundred sermons to the Latter-day Saints in the Great Basin Kingdom of the western United States. During the severe persecution of the Mormons in Far West, Missouri, seven years after his baptism, Heber was ordered by the Spirit of God to write down the words of a special blessing: If thou wilt be faithful and go preach my gospel … thy tongue shall be unloosed to such a degree that has not entered into thy heart as yet and the children of men shall believe in thy words and flock to the

1 Stanley B. Kimball, Heber C. Kimball: Mormon Patriarch and Pioneer (Urbana, 1981), pp. 19–20.

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brian jackson water … thou shalt be great in winning souls for me for this is thy gift and calling.2

An unschooled preacher without any homiletic training, Heber learned to depend on that promise and to stand boldly without hesitation or preparation and simply open his mouth, allowing whatever inspiration graced him with to tumble out upon his audience. His unpolished, extemporaneous style of preaching was a result of his faith that God would provide the sermon through instantaneous inspiration as he trembled on the stump and at the pulpit. “When I arise to speak”, he explained in a sermon he preached in 1857, “I have never a premeditated subject; I let God, by the Holy Ghost, dictate me and control me, just as a musician would his violin”.3 Heber’s metaphor is a colorful attempt to explain the oratorical culture of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (the Mormons) in the 19th century. As the fledgling church began to attract followers, new male converts from humble backgrounds were commissioned as preachers – often even before their hair had dried from baptism – and sent off to spread the restored gospel, trusting that divine intervention would make up for what they lacked in oratorical skill and theological knowledge, trusting that, like Heber, they too would be played upon by the divine musician. This practice of commissioning the unlearned to preach the gospel through inspiration has antecedents in evangelical itinerant, frontier, and folk preaching; yet the Mormons made it a particular point of pride to eschew any human artifice in their sermons, including the classical canon of rhetoric (invention, arrangement, delivery, style, and memory) more widely adopted in Protestant homiletics since Augustine. Their “new school of oratory”, as one Mormon historian called it, represents a point on the spectrum of religious communication where the Spirit of God, rather than the classical arts of persuasion, is exalted in public oratorical practice and any kind of preparation or belletristic study is viewed as human weakness.4 In the revivalist fires of the 19th century, unlikely candidates for public discourse (like women, uneducated and uncredentialed men, and African-American preachers) claimed power outside the established Protestant institutions by casting aside the limitations of the

2 3 4

Ibid., p. 62. Journal of Discourses (hereafter JD), 26 vols. (London, 1855–86), p. 5: 172. B.H. Roberts, The Life of John Taylor (Salt Lake City, 2002), p. 378.

the oratory of the great basin prophets

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conventional sermon, stripping it of its “rhetorical dress”, and inviting a more liberal spiritual inspiration.5 However, as outsider denominations like Methodists and Baptists gained adherents and credibility, these institutions developed educational programs intended to improve the quality of preaching, with sophisticated rhetorical assumptions about invention, human psychology, and aesthetics informing their efforts. Though inspiration, called the “sixth canon of sacred rhetoric” by Russel Hirst, continued to be integrated into the process, preacherly efforts to prepare and develop sermons, and even in some cases to reach for eloquence in a higher register of language use, became standard.6 The Mormon example is unique not only because it deliberately rejected popular forces to institutionalize rhetoric for almost the entire century, but also because it presented to the world a theology, canonized in modern revelations, that put a premium on inspiration alone – the inexplicable force of the Holy Spirit playing on the tongue of the speaker and the hearts of the listeners, as a musician would his violin. This chapter situates the oratorical culture of Mormon leadership in the context of the centuries-old debate about the roles of preacher and Spirit in the act of the sermon. I will rely on insights from linguistic anthropology to articulate what I have called “the rhetoric of the invisible”, the act of religious speech influenced by assumptions about supernatural forces at work beyond rhetoric, the classical art of persuasion through human artifice. It could be argued that by mid-century, the bulk of American Protestant preachers had settled on an Augustinian middle road in which the inspiration of the Holy Ghost is wed with classical rhetoric to “make truth palatable”, as Henry Ward Beecher put it.7 By walking this middle road in homiletic practice, preachers assumed that the human mind needed the assistance of art in order to invent, understand, accept, and be inspired by God’s word. This assumption was rejected by different outer groups in practice, but none more pronounced than the Mormons, who proudly practiced their spiritual rhetoric in the Great Basin from the 1850s to the turn of the century, in spite of its cold reception by outsiders. Their sermonic attitudes and 5

Nathan O. Hatch, The Democratization of American Christianity (New Haven, 1989), p. 138. See also Kenneth Cmiel, Democratic Eloquence: The Fight Over Popular Speech in Nineteenth-Century America (New York, 1990). 6 Russel Hirst, “The Sixth Canon of Sacred Rhetoric: Inspiration in NineteenthCentury Homiletic Theory,” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 25 (1995), 69–90. 7 Henry Ward Beecher, Oratory (Philadelphia, 1897), p. 16.

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practices provide an interesting case study in the sixth canon of sacred rhetoric, especially when situated in the 19th century when religious groups were transformed by democracy, pluralism, and institutionbuilding. Rhetoric of the Invisible William James characterized the general tenor of religious experience as “the belief that there is an unseen order, and that our supreme good lies in harmoniously adjusting ourselves thereto”.8 This unseen order presumably exists and operates “at a level beyond that of human symbol systems”.9 According to linguistic anthropologists, the common denominator in all religious speech is the tension between concrete experience – the audience, the tangible material of the situation, and the agency of the speaker – and the invisible divine forces at work that inform, frame, guide, and often dictate the act of religious speech.10 To properly understand religious communication, and particularly the role of inspiration in the American sermon, we must recognize how belief in the nature and power of God, a power operating from “up there” rather than down here, can inform and influence the persuasive character of a religious speech act like the sermon. I call this divine influence on religious speech the rhetoric of the invisible.11 Linguistic anthropology – the study of the way language functions “as a set of symbolic resources” imbedded in a “social fabric”12 – contributes a descriptive vocabulary for understanding how the invisible divine is invoked in religious speech. Of most interest are the key terms “participant” and “participant roles” used to emphasize that speaking is a social act and that speakers are social actors who by speaking assume a position freighted with social meaning beyond the standard speaker/ hearer paradigm. Erving Goffman provides a taxonomy for a variety of roles for the speaker such as “animator” (the one giving actual voice to 8

William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience (New York, 1902), p. 53. Jeffery L. Bineham, “Consensus Theory and Religious Belief,” Communication Studies 40.3 (1989), 141. 10 Webb Keane, “Religious Language,” Annual Review of Anthropology 26 (1997), 47–71. 11 Anthropologist Webb Keane uses the phrase “forces that are otherwise imperceptible” to describe this quality of rhetoric of the invisible at work in many world religions. See “Religious Language,” p. 53. 12 Alessandro Duranti, Linguistic Anthropology (New York, 1997), p. 3. 9


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a message), “author” (the one responsible for selecting the words or form of the message), and “principal” (the person or institution being represented by the animator).13 Other anthropologists like Stephen Levinson and Judith Irvine offer different terms for mapping participant roles to account for the multiple individuals, institutions, and/or spiritual forces at work beyond the speaker that provide motive, form, or authority to speech in an often complicated context of “multivocality”, to use Bakhtin’s term.14 The concept of participant roles brings to light the rhetoric of the invisible in religious speech by illuminating the way speakers can invoke a divine source or presence at work in the act of speaking, thus complicating other principles of communication like agency and style. For example, when Moses the prophet shrinks at Jehovah’s command to confront Pharaoh by giving the excuse, “I am slow of speech and slow of tongue”, Jehovah declares, “I will be with your mouth and teach you what you are to speak … I am the Lord; tell Pharaoh king of Egypt all that I am speaking to you”.15 In the course of Moses’ ministry to the children of Israel, he uses the phrase “thus sayeth the Lord” to draw attention to the author and principal of the words he uses; his participant role is merely the “relayer” of a message he is not responsible for inventing (a fact that may have brought some measure of comfort to someone so worried about oratorical performance).16 When speakers invoke the invisible divine in Christian speech, they often imply a diminution of their own agency or personal voice in order to make room for the authority of the divine voice. In some Christian traditions, during spirit possession or glossolalia (speaking in tongues), participants may assume a state in which they have no control over speech at all – an invisible dynamis takes control, breathes air out of the lungs, moves the lips, and utters the words. Recent research provides fascinating evidence that some glossolalists experience a marked decrease of activity in the frontal lobe – the part of the brain

13

Ibid., p. 297. Judith T. Irvine, “Shadow Conversations: The Indeterminacy of Participant Roles,” in Natural Histories of Discourse, ed. Michael Silverstein and Greg Urban (Chicago, 1996), pp. 134–5; Stephen C. Levinson, “Putting Linguistics on a Proper Footing: Explorations in Goffman’s Concepts of Participation,” in Erving Goffman: An Interdisciplinary Appreciation, ed. P. Drew and A. Wootton (Oxford, 1988), pp. 161–227. 15 Exodus 4:10, 12 and 6:29. 16 The concept of “relayer” is Levinson’s. 14

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responsible for willful control of behavior.17 This “altered state of consciousness”, as Felicitas Goodman calls it, is evidence to believers that the Spirit of God is not only present but has taken up abode in the speaker’s soul and has become the agent of speech. Other glossolalists report speaking in tongues more deliberately, without relinquishing agency.18 Webb Keane describes how in some patriarchal Pentecostal societies, inspiration allows women “to exert influence that would not be available to them were they to claim full responsibility for their words”, which points to a sociopolitical role for diminutive authorship, a point I will revisit later.19 Glossolalia represents one point on a spectrum of Christian speech where the participant role of the speaker is almost completely diminished. In Christian homiletics, a more likely use of the rhetoric of the invisible is the appeal to “inspiration”, or the power of God that magnifies the gifts of speakers without overwhelming them. Early in the history of Christianity, the term “inspiration” became problematic for what it implied about the loss of agency for the authors of the Bible and for Christian preachers themselves. It has been assumed that the prophets of the Old Testament and the authors of the Gospels spoke or wrote almost involuntarily under the influence of divine ecstasy, but that claim has been challenged.20 According to one source, “The early [Christian] church at first used the image of the inspired author as an instrument (harp or flute) ‘played’ by the Spirit”, but that metaphor implied too much suppression of the human agent.21 Origen (ca. 185–254) and later St Augustine (354–430) argued for a more liberal communication pattern, one that implied not dictation but inspiration or suggestio, which allowed for both spiritual influence and human agency in Christian speech. In this model, “the Spirit provides the inner structure of ideas and understanding, and the human author determines the detail of the

17 Andrew B. Newberg, Nancy A. Wintering, Donna Morgan, and Mark R. Waldman, “The Measurement of Regional Cerebral Blood Flow During Glossolalia: A Preliminary SPECT Study,” Neuroimaging 148.1 (2006), 67–71. 18 Felicitas D. Goodman, Speaking in Tongues: A Cross-Cultural Study of Glossolalia (Chicago, 1972), p. 59; see also Cyril G. Williams, Tongues of the Spirit: A Study of Pentecostal Glossolalia and Related Phenomena (Cardiff, 1981). 19 Keane, “Religious Language,” p. 59. 20 See Abraham J. Heschel, The Prophets (New York, 1962) and Claus Westerman, Basic Forms of Prophetic Speech, trans. Hugh Clayton White (Philadelphia, 1967). 21 Rowan D. Williams, “Inspiration,” The Encyclopedia of Christianity, vol. 2, ed. Erwin Fahlbusch, Jan Milic Lochman, John Mbiti, Jaroslav Pelikan, and Lukas Vischer (Grand Rapids, 2001), p. 714.


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final expression”.22 Inspiration, then, could be coupled with human artifice and effort to influence the way religious speech was performed. In other words, early Christian participant roles invited rhetoric into Christian communication while the church was still in her infancy. The role of rhetoric in the sermon was established fairly early when the Church Fathers came into direct contact with teachers of rhetoric and the texts of Aristotle, Cicero and others.23 Educated in Roman schools of rhetoric, versed in the classical theorists, the early Church Fathers commandeered the arts of persuasion from the pagans and put them in the service of God.24 It could be said that the Church Fathers’ passion for rhetoric simultaneously expanded the participant role of the preacher and shrank the compass of divine participation that had been evident in the relayer-prophets and then later reinforced by the teachings of Jesus. When commissioning the twelve disciples, Jesus instructed them in public preaching to “take no thought how or what ye shall speak: for it shall be given you in that same hour what ye shall speak”. This rhetoric of the invisible shows the diminutive role of the speaker: “For it is not ye that speak, but the Spirit of your Father which speaketh in you”.25 Likewise on the receiving end of spirit preaching, the “Spirit of truth” or the “Holy Ghost” would be the one to “teach you all things, and bring all things to your remembrance”.26 Yet by the end of the patristic era, the “take no thought” approach had been overshadowed by Greco-Roman rhetoric and the accompanying assumption that the Bread of Life must be buttered with artistic strategies in order to be received. Rhetoric put the agent-preacher back in charge of the discourse, with divine inspiration playing a complementary role.27

22

Ibid., p. 714. O.C. Edwards, Jr., A History of Preaching (Nashville, 2004), p. 20. 24 In De Doctrina Christiana, Saint Augustine set the standard for the rest of Christian history when he argued that the sapienta mundi – the worldly language, the art of eloquence – should be studied with as much rigor as the scriptures so that “righteousness, not evil, gain a willing hearing” through “the heights of eloquence”. See Saint Augustine, On Christian Doctrine, excerpted in The Rhetorical Tradition, ed. Patricia Bizell and Bruce Herzberg (Boston, 2001), p. 467; see also James J. Murphy, Rhetoric in the Middle Ages (Berkeley, 1974), p. 60. 25 Matthew 10:19–20. 26 John 14:17, 26. In an excellent article on the subject of divine inspiration, Russel Hirst suggests that this verse and others similar to it (like I Corinthians 2:1,4–5) do not have to be read as universally condemning rhetorical study but as special instruction in a specific context. See “The Sixth Canon of Sacred Rhetoric,” p. 71. 27 There is some evidence that the Church Fathers found that augmenting the word of God with human artifice was troubling, especially in light of the scriptures 23

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In American homiletics we note the same tensions created by the delicate balance of human effort (through reason or eloquence) and divine intervention that the Christian Fathers had tried to practice. Some preachers acknowledged that rhetoric – the classical Greco-Roman study of persuasion – could be serviceable, even necessary in some cases, for proving the word of God through logical argument based on the scriptures. Rhetoric was also seen as a way to make the sermon clearly organized and stylistically compelling based on human psychology and aesthetics. On the other hand, many American preachers advocated a more diminutive participant role for the preacher to make room for what Paul in his epistle to the Romans called “the invisible things of [God]”.28 They saw rhetorical artifice as a lack of faith in divine power; truly inspired preaching needed no human artifice if the inscrutable, invisible power of God was present, as linguist Webb Keane has described: Those who stress sincerity or direct access to divinity tend to be suspicious of language, to the extent that its concrete forms bear evidence of its conventional or social origins outside the individual speaker … Words should offer something to speakers that they would not otherwise have … Human agency is not always something people want entirely to celebrate or claim for themselves; they may prefer to find agency in other worlds.29

Rhetoric of the Invisible in American Homiletics Though a summative history of how the rhetoric of the invisible was practiced in American homiletics is beyond my scope, I will here attempt a pointillistic mapping of different attitudes and trends in order to situate 19th-century Mormon oratory in its proper context, mentioned above. Jerome famously felt so guilty about enjoying the Romans more than the Prophets that he dreamt of standing condemned at the tribunal of God for being more a Ciceronian than a Christian. See Murphy, Rhetoric in the Middle Ages, p. 53. Carol Harrison adds that some of the early church luminaries were actually embarrassed at the unsophisticated and simple words of the scriptures and therefore read them “according to classical exegetical practices, such as allegory” (Carol Harrison, “The Rhetoric of Scripture and Preaching: Classical Decadence or Christian Aesthetic?” in Augustine and His Critics, ed. Robert Dodaro and George Lawless [London, 2000], p. 216). 28 Romans 1:20. 29 Keane, “Religious Language,” pp. 64–65.


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beginning with the Calvinists who established the Augustinian middle road in America. Though there were theological differences among them, New England Calvinists believed that inspiration had led to the infallibility of the scriptures and that conversion came from the irresistible grace of an internal spiritual manifestation in the adherent.30 In the Puritan preaching manual The Art of Prophecying, William Perkins emphasized the inscrutable role of the Spirit in the sermon as a force that can both inspire the preacher and touch the listener: “While we are thus speaking to you, God many times conveys such a spirit of grace into us, as gives us power to receive Christ [so that] the word that we speak conveys spirit and life into [you]”.31 This force is so strong that “it astonisheth and shivereth the heart of the sinner all in pieces”.32 In Puritan rhetoric, “the supernatural work of the Holy Spirit” prevailed over reason or emotion.33 And further, in this rhetoric of the invisible, the Spirit touched the heart of the listener irresistibly, overriding agency and will, so that the “Spirit overwhelmed the creature”.34 The preacher, on the other hand, experienced no such diminution of agency in the act of preaching, and in fact Puritan theology led to complicated sermonic practices that held American Christian rhetoric in thrall for at least a century. Because Adam’s fall had caused an accompanying fall from right reason, preaching had to harness God’s gift of logic, specifically the logic of Peter Ramus, to demonstrate the objective truth of the scriptures. Seventeenth-century sermons were made up of axiomatic chains of deductive reasoning crafted meticulously by the Calvinist preacher. For 17th-century New England divines, Jesus’ injunction to “take no thought what you might speak” had been replaced with deductive methods of invention (known as technologia) and thorough preparation through study at Harvard College. 30 E. Brooks Holifield, Theology in America: Christian Thought from the Age of the Puritans to the Civil War (New Haven, 2003), pp. 41–47; Teresa Toulouse, The Art of Prophesying: New England Sermons and the Shaping of Belief (Athens, 1987), p. 42. For further discussions of puritan rhetoric see Perry Miller, The New England Mind: The Seventeenth Century (Cambridge, 1954); Eugene E. White, Puritan Rhetoric (Carbondale and Edwardsville, 1972); Harry Stout, The New England Soul: Preaching and Religious Culture in Colonial New England (New York, 1986); and Patricia Roberts-Miller, Voices in the Wilderness: Public Discourse and the Paradox of Puritan Rhetoric (Tuscaloosa, 1999). 31 Quoted in Perry Miller, The New England Mind: The Seventeenth Century (Cambridge, 1939), p. 297. 32 Ibid., p. 297. 33 Stout, The New England Soul, p. 38. 34 Holifield, Theology in America, p. 47.

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Aspiring Calvinist ministers meticulously prepared their sermons to reveal the “invisible realities and metaphysical principles around which the visible universe revolved”.35 Ministers spent hours in their studies with Hebrew and Greek translations of the Holy Scriptures, poring over concordances and commentaries, taking extensive notes in large, leather-bound books. They prepared their sermons much like modern college courses with important biblical themes often stretched out over weeks or months.36 The Spirit may have been present at the moment of conviction, but the content of the sermon was determined by intense and considerate human effort with an active and conscious participant role for the preacher. Later preachers in an emergent evangelical tradition found ways to break out of the confines of technologia to imagine an expansive rhetoric of the invisible through which the Holy Spirit influenced not only the hearer, but the speaker and the speech as well. Jonathan Edwards was one of the first preachers to realize that the Spirit could operate far more powerfully if the usual rational chains were short-circuited through a “divine and supernatural light” coming from the “spiritual operations” of God, laying bare the splendors of the invisible world.37 In order to fan the flames of revival, Edwards and others began to break from their predecessors’ extensive sermon notes and scripts and refer to bare outlines during delivery to make room for inspiration. A more shocking development in spiritual rhetoric came from itinerant preachers, inspired by the Englishman George Whitefield, who challenged accepted practices by ignoring institutional boundaries and rejecting Augustine’s mix of Christian and GrecoRoman rhetoric completely. As an itinerant celebrity of sorts – during his tour of the colonies he preached over 175 extemporaneous sermons, almost always to thousands of people in the open air – Whitefield began a tradition that other outer groups (like the Mormons) would later enjoy when he criticized preachers who prepared or read their sermons as having “lost the old spirit of preaching”.38 The old spirit of preaching, for Whitefield and other itinerants, did not involve a Harvard or Yale education, extensive preparation with the Greek lexicon handy, or the

35

Stout, The New England Soul, p. 89. Ibid., p. 34. 37 Jonathan Edwards, “A Divine and Supernatural Light,” in A Jonathan Edwards Reader, ed. John E. Smith, Harry S. Stout, and Kenneth P. Minekema (New Haven, 2003), p. 109; Stout, The New England Soul, p. 230. 38 Quoted in Stout, The New England Soul, p. 192. 36


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methods of technologia – just a good set of lungs, often a gift for drama, and a willingness to let the Spirit take over. As I noted with women Pentecostals speaking in tongues, there is a sociopolitical dimension to the rhetoric of the invisible that comes out of the debate between sermonic sophistication (i.e., reliance on GrecoRoman rhetoric, preparation, knowledge of human psychology and aesthetics, etc.) and the more free-floating forms of extemporaneous “spiritual” speaking.39 The ministerial elite saw Whitefield’s unlettered, unprepared rhetorical style as a direct threat to the social order. As Timothy Hall explains, in the evangelical imagination itinerancy was a sign of a new birth of religious zeal in which there was “a newfound openness to receive the Spirit of God wherever and however the Spirit willed to appear”.40 This new democratization of inspiration lead to spontaneous itinerant preaching from women, slaves, Indians, and children, and it created a religious landscape “radically open to the free operation of God’s Spirit, which could operate unhindered by human boundaries of space, time, custom, class, race, or gender”.41 Bathsheba Kingsley, just to mention one example, was so infused with the rhetoric of the invisible that in 1741 she stole her husband’s horse and preached from town to town with the intensity of a prophet, in spite of the widespread assumption that women should not preach.42 With a greater role for inspiration and a lesser one for Greco-Roman rhetoric – a body of knowledge available almost exclusively to aristocratic Anglo males in elite colleges – diverse preachers experienced more freedom to claim authority to speak of sacred things with divine powers animating their practice. In the 19th century this threat to the social order by diminutive participant roles for preachers and broader roles for spiritual intervention became even more pronounced, as Nathan Hatch has aptly demonstrated. Untutored, uncredentialed outer groups such as Methodists, Baptists, Millerites, Campbellites, Mormons and African-Americans rose up to “storm heaven by the back door” by denying the rhetorical authority of learned clergy, by exploiting new

39 For this insight I am indebted to several authors including Harry Stout, Russel Hirst, Ann Tarves, and Timothy Hall. 40 Timothy D. Hall, Contested Boundaries: Itinerancy and the Reshaping of the Colonial American Religious World (Durham, 1994), p. 71. 41 Ibid., p. 72. 42 Catherine A. Brekus, Strangers and Pilgrims: Female Preaching In America, 1740– 1845 (Chapel Hill, 1998), p. 25.

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consumer and media culture, and above all by advocating “increased supernatural involvement in everyday life”, including preaching.43 Revivalist Charles Grandison Finney, though belonging to the established Presbyterian church, articulated this radical understanding of spiritual rhetoric when he reflected on an early preaching experience in the 1820s in New York: I had not taken thought with regard to what I should preach, – indeed, this was common with me at that time. I was full of the Holy Spirit, and I felt confident that when the time came for action I should know what to preach … The Spirit of God came upon me with such power, that it was like opening a battery upon them. For more than an hour, and perhaps for an hour and a half, the Word of God came through me to them in a manner that I could see was carrying all before it. It was a fire and a hammer breaking the rock.44

With phrases like “I was full of the Holy Spirit” and “The Spirit of God came upon me”, Finney describes a distinctly diminutive participant role for himself, one that acknowledges an invisible divine author – like Heber C. Kimball’s cosmic musician – who ostensibly controls the form the sermon takes, though Finney himself remains the animator or speaker of the words. Later in life he further acknowledged that this divine authorship existed independent of himself: “the subject [of the sermon] would open up to my mind in a manner that was surprising to myself ” so that “I could see with intuitive clearness just what I ought to say; and whole platoons of thoughts, words, and illustrations, came to me as fast as I could deliver them”.45 And, as Whitefield did in the 18th century, Finney complained that rhetorical training had spoiled the ministry by making preachers either too literary or too dependent on their own participant role. Like preachers from other outer groups, Finney’s methods threatened the established order by circumventing the usual channels of education, experience, and erudition that gave the preacher authority. The elders in the presbytery thought Finney’s extemporaneous preaching was an embarrassment.46 However, in practice many American Protestant preachers showed that preaching did not have to be an either/or

43

Hatch, The Democratization of American Christianity, pp. 13, 11. Charles G. Finney, The Original Memoirs of Charles G. Finney, ed. Garth M. Rosell and Richard A.G. Dupuis (Grand Rapids, 1989), p. 67. 45 Ibid., p. 94. 46 Ibid., pp. 82–83. 44


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dilemma between relying on the spirit or relying on rhetoric, as those in the tradition of Whitefield seemed to believe. Like Augustine, they believed that if indeed there was nothing more important than the Word of God, then preaching should be elevated to a level that reflected that importance. This assumption led to a view of the participant role of the preacher different from the radical evangelical view, one that gave the preacher a more active role in the authoring (inventing, composing, and delivering) of the sermon through rhetorical training and practice. As Hirst puts it in his study of conservative homileticians in the 19th century, to ignore these “vast intellectual resources God had made available” was to surrender the arts of speaking to secular or devilish forces, which was Augustine’s argument 1400 years earlier.47 Even outer groups, once they’d let the fires of post-revolutionary revival burn and then burn out, recognized the need to rein in the radical rhetoric of the invisible that had led to the democratization of preaching. Their “pilgrimage toward respectability”, which Hatch suggests began in the 1840s, included building colleges and seminaries, producing textbooks on theology, printing academic periodicals, and producing preachers trained in rhetoric.48 The centripetal pull of building respectable institutions affected white Methodists and Baptists, the two leading itinerant revival traditions, who established new screening processes for preachers and built seminaries where divinity students would study the arts of Greco-Roman rhetoric as it had been christianized by 18th-century rhetoricians such as George Campbell, Richard Whatley, and Hugh Blair.49 This centripetal institution-building had consequences for other outer evangelical groups, particularly women and African-Americans. Women preachers were silenced and African-American evangelicals were ostracized or simply ignored since, as Mark Noll points out, they continued religious practices that antiformalist white churches had “gradually suppressed, including spontaneous, extempore preaching, trances, visions,

47

Hirst, “The Sixth Canon,” p. 76. Hatch, Democratization of American Christianity, p. 16; see also Holifield, Theology in America, p. 19. 49 For further discussion of these trends, see Mark A. Noll, America’s God (Oxford, 2002), pp. 179–86; John H. Wigger, Taking Heaven by Storm: Methodism and the Rise of Popular Christianity in America (New York, 1998), pp. 124, 180–190; Merrill R. Abbey, “Preaching,” Encyclopedia of World Methodism, ed. Nolan B. Harmon (Nashville, 1974), p. 1945; and O.K. Armstrong and Marjorie M. Armstrong, The Indomitable Baptists: A Narrative of Their Role in Shaping American History (Garden City, NY, 1967), p. 144. 48

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dance, and prophecy” – all aspects of an expansive rhetoric of the invisible that continues to be a significant part of African-American religious experience.50 Finally, one of the most significant evidences that the Augustinian model had become standard is the proliferation of preaching manuals in the 19th century that champion the middle road. Returning the criticism that had been leveled at preachers who studied and practiced rhetoric, writers of the most popular preaching manuals like John A. Broadus (A Treatise on the Preparation and Delivery of Sermons), Austin Phelps (The Theory of Preaching), Phillips Brooks (Lectures on Preaching), and Henry Ward Beecher (Oratory) maintained that inspiration alone would not lead to successful preaching without human artifice, which was in fact a gift from God. “Truth alone is not sufficient”, said Henry Ward Beecher. “For truth is the arrow, but man is the bow that sends it home”.51 For Broadus, preaching was an art intended to move the will through the power of rhetorical invention, without which a preacher “has mistaken his business”.52 Against the “delusion of inspiration” suggested by spiritual preachers, Brooks argued that magnetism of the preacher and the power of refined method was a manifestation of divinity.53 One notes in these authors a marked disdain for ignorant and unlearned preaching, which may suggest a lurking class bias that had been present in criticisms of itinerancy in the 18th century. The point is that these manuals not only maintain the mixture of invisible and Greco-Roman rhetoric established by Augustine, but they also reflect the new respectability that religious institutions gained in part by jettisoning a large portion of supernatural influence in the act of preaching. Rhetorical Culture of the Great Basin Prophets The building of institutions, then, led to homiletic practices that made the rhetoric of the invisible a complementary, rather than totalizing, part of preaching. By walking the road to respectability, evangelicals that once permitted multivocal participant roles in preaching now 50

Noll, America’s God, p. 177. Beecher, Oratory, p. 9. 52 John A. Broadus, A Treatise on the Preparation and Delivery of Sermons (New York, 1926), p. 119. 53 Phillips Brooks, Lectures on Preaching (Grand Rapids, n.d.), p. 92. 51


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formalized their communications in order to take advantage of the persuasive arts and to place controls on the exuberant excesses that followed in revival’s wake. One denomination that resisted the Augustinian middle road to respectability was the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (hereafter called the Mormons, their popular nickname), an outer group that, much like African-American evangelicals, remained “outer” for the entire 19th century. Like revivalist evangelicals, the Mormons practiced a diminutive participant role by rejecting the five canons of classical rhetoric (invention, arrangement, style, memory, and delivery) and commissioning untrained lay preachers, like the humble potter Heber C. Kimball, to spread a restored gospel with nothing to guide them but the faith that a divine power would intervene when they opened their mouths. Like other outer groups, Mormons also criticized other preachers for being too literary, educated, trained or prepared. Such human efforts indicated a lack of faith in the power of God to breathe life into the sermon beyond the capacities of the preacher. I suggest that this stance indicates not only a distinct set of religious values (which I will address soon) but also the Mormon Church’s position as a detested faith outside the networks of institutions and associations of respectable Protestant Christianity. Like outsider evangelicals in post-Revolutionary America, the Mormons’ rhetoric of the invisible gave them the power to challenge established institutions and claim divine authority to speak in the name of God. And just as outsider evangelicals expanded the participant role of the preacher through rhetorical training on the pilgrimage to respectability, the 20th-century Mormons – after forsaking plural marriage, gaining state status for Utah, and placing a Latter-day Saint, Reed Smoot, in the United States Senate in 1904 – established training programs for missionaries that included argumentation and public speaking.54 The Mormon rhetoric of the invisible was unique in its 19th century setting because it was supported by extra-biblical scriptures, both ancient and modern, a fact we must explore before we can fully understand the attitudes and practices that informed their oratorical culture in what has been called the “Great Basin Kingdom” of the west.55 54 Thomas G. Alexander, Mormonism in Transition: A History of the Latter-Day Saints, 1890–1930 (Urbana, IL, 1996), p. 214. 55 Leonard J. Arrington, Great Basin Kingdom: Economic History of the Latter-day Saints, 1830–1900 (Lincoln, NE, 1958).

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brian jackson Scriptural Frameworks for a Rhetoric of the Invisible

The prophetic mission of the farm boy Joseph Smith began in 1820 when he experienced a resplendent vision of God and Jesus in a grove of trees near his log home in upstate New York.56 In 1823, at the age of 17, he had another remarkable visitation by an angel that led to the translation of the Book of Mormon, an account of God’s dealings with ancient Israelites in the New World. Other sacred scripture followed, including a new translation of portions of the Bible and periodic revelations given to individuals through Joseph Smith. Smith’s claim to prophetic visions, immediate revelations, and extra-biblical scripture put him on the fringes of American religious culture along with Elias Hicks and Ann Lee, but it also reinforced his prophetic role by serving as “evidence of the working of forces that are otherwise imperceptible” or invisible.57 To turn again to Keane’s thesis on religious language, the scriptures that Smith produced through divine translation or immediate revelation demonstrate how “the presence and activity of beings that are otherwise unavailable to the sense can be made presupposable, even compelling, in ways that are publicly yet also subjectively available”.58 They also reflect a diminutive participant role for the prophet who serves as animator rather than author, thereby helping Smith establish authority “not limited to the perceptible here and now”.59 These scriptures, brought forth through miraculous means, present narratives of rhetorical culture that provide the authority behind the Mormons’ sermonic practices in the Great Basin in the last half of the 19th century. Both ancient and modern scripture provided the Mormons with the authority to reject the classical rhetorical canon and pursue oratorical practices that relied heavily on spiritual influence rather than human artifice. Published in 1829, the Book of Mormon was originally written

56 For the best account of the life of Joseph Smith, I refer the reader to Richard Bushman’s stunning biography Joseph Smith, Rough Stone Rolling: A Cultural Biography of Mormonism’s Founder (New York, 2006). For accounts of the Mormon experience in America, I recommend Terryl L. Givens’ The Latter-day Saint Experience in America (Westport, CT, 2004) and Jan Shipps’ Mormonism: The Story of a New Religious Tradition (Urbana, 1985). 57 Keane, “Religious Language,” p. 53. 58 Ibid., p. 49. 59 Ibid., p. 58.


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by ancient prophets in the Americas who wrote in a form of Hebrew on gold plates that were then preserved until Smith was led to them by the angel. Nephi, the first prophet-author of the Book of Mormon, writing 600 years before the birth of Christ, had moments of inspiration so powerful that, according to Nephi’s father, “it was the Spirit of the Lord which was in him, which opened his mouth to utterance that he could not shut it”.60 Through the historical narrative, edited and compiled by a 4th-century a.d. prophet named Mormon, prophets testify, preach, exhort, reprove, and prophesy without training or learning, always under the inspiration of a power so strong that some hearers shake or collapse, while others, though hostile to the prophet’s message, cannot resist being persuaded by their words.61 Other Book of Mormon prophets showed multivocality in their participant roles as preachers because they not only had “power and authority given unto them that they might speak”, but they also had “what they should speak given unto them” by the power of God.62 This diminutive role for God’s messengers is uniform throughout the Book of Mormon. In fact, as Gary Hatch has pointed out, when we encounter good orators in the Book of Mormon, they end up being heretics, as in this description of Sharem, an early antagonist of the ancient church: “And he was learned, that he had a perfect knowledge of the language of the people; wherefore, he could use much flattery, and much power of speech, according to the power of the devil”.63 Modern scripture received by immediate revelation through Joseph Smith also played a role in establishing the rhetorical culture of the early Latter-day Saints, both for what it was in itself and also what it revealed to them about divine communication. As early as 1828, Smith received a revelation in response to his losing the first 116 translated manuscript pages of the Book of Mormon. In this revelation, and in subsequent revelations, Joseph Smith speaks words that are not his, just as the words of the Qu’ran are not the words of Mohammad: “The speaker stands above and outside Joseph, sharply separated

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2 Nephi 1:27. See 1 Nephi 2:14, Mosiah 4:1-2, Mosiah 13:6, Alma 11:46, Helaman 5:17-19, and 3 Nephi 7:18. 62 Helaman 5:18, my emphasis. 63 Jacob 7:4. See Gary Layne Hatch, “Saints and Sophists: Rhetoric and the Restored Gospel,” Proceedings for the Third Annual Laying the Foundations Symposium (Provo, 1993), p. 41. 61

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emotionally and intellectually”.64 Smith received over 100 similar revelations that make up the Doctrine and Covenants, each offered as the words of God expressed in the first person. This practice may at first appear to be similar to some kind of spirit possession in which the invisible takes over the physical body and overrides the communicative agency of the speaker, but Smith did not experience revelation in this way, nor did he treat these revelations as infallible. Rather, he saw himself as animated by the Holy Spirit, reciting words in his own language that nevertheless held the same authority as the Bible because they came directly from God.65 Though the words of the revelations were selected and voiced by the Prophet Joseph, the content, purpose, and logical shape were not. These revelations established a new rhetoric of the invisible that ran counter to nearly all theological doctrines of American churches. But the Prophet took it one step further by suggesting that anyone who wished to speak by the influence of the Holy Ghost in a similar manner could do so – as long as they did not contradict what had already been established in the revelations. Once the church was established, Smith began to commission unlearned farmers, artisans, and shopkeepers – regular members all – to go on preaching missions to spread the new restored gospel. Again, modern revelation established the rhetorical culture. At a conference for the elders of the church in 1831, a revelation declared that “every man might speak in the name of God the Lord” for “by mine own voice or by the voice of my servants, it is the same”.66 Humble men alienated by the advance of capitalist culture and agrarian crisis were promised that if they continued to study the scriptures, their tongues would be “loosed” and they would have “the power of God unto the convincing of men”, with words given them “in the very hour” of need.67 When early Mormon preachers opened their unlearned, untrained mouths “when moved upon by the Holy Ghost”, another revelation promised that whatever they spoke “shall be scripture, shall be the will of the Lord, shall be the mind of the Lord, shall be the word of the Lord, shall be the voice of the Lord, and the power of God unto salvation”.68

64 65 66 67 68

Bushman, Joseph Smith, p. 69. Bushman, Joseph Smith, pp. 174–5. Doctrine and Covenants 1:20, 38. Ibid., 11:21, 88:85. Ibid., 68:4.


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Attitudes and Practices With these revelations providing the framework for their preaching practices, Mormons set off to make converts and establish a church, first in upstate New York and then in Kirtland, Ohio, western Missouri, and western Illinois. As the first orators of the new religion, Joseph Smith and his associates practiced the spiritual rhetoric laid out in these scriptures. As far as we know, Smith never prepared a single sermon in his entire life; he never wrote so much as a single note to refer to while preaching. One scholar notes that “he seemed to have in mind only a mental checklist of topics he intended to cover”, but he always felt free to let the Spirit dictate to him the message that would suit the situation and the audience.69 In terms of classical rhetoric, the Prophet did not invent, arrange, or compose speeches beforehand and adapt them for public consumption, as did most Protestant ministers after 1840. In a funeral sermon in Nauvoo in 1843, Smith told the Saints candidly how much he relied on the rhetoric of the invisible rather than the rhetoric of Aristotle: “I am not like other men. My mind is continually occupied with the business of the day, and I have to depend entirely upon the living God for every thing I say on such occasions as these”.70 Joseph Smith also possessed a power that seemed to his adherents beyond words. Several of the saints, like Mary Elizabeth Rollins, Parley P. Pratt, and Brigham Young, noted actual changes in the Prophet’s countenance when he spoke, seen as yet another way religious speech works to invoke an authoritative, invisible presence. In a conference in 1831, Jared Carter marveled that “notwithstanding he was not naturally a talented speaker, [Joseph Smith] was filled with the power of the Holy Ghost, and spoke as I never heard man speak for God before”.71 Early saints like Emmeline B. Wells observed some kind of radiance in Joseph’s appearance or an actual force in his words that evoked a supernatural sensory experience they took to be a manifestation of truth beyond the ability of human language to convey. Wells reflected that the “great power of his manner” tended to “shake the place on which 69

Calvin N. Smith, “A Critical Analysis of the Public Speaking of Joseph Smith, First President of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints” (PhD Dissertation, Purdue, 1965), p. 75. See also Smith’s article, “Joseph Smith as a Public Speaker,” The Improvement Era 69 (April 1966), 277–312. 70 History of the Church, p. 5: 529. 71 Smith, “A Critical Analysis,” p. 66.

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we stood and penetrate the inmost soul of his hearers”.72 On two occasions – one in Richmond Jail and another in Philadelphia – Parley P. Pratt witnessed the Prophet speak with such fierceness and majesty that his voice seemed amplified to a roar.73 For the faithful, these manifestations were testaments of the Prophet’s connection with an unseen divine power. As I have suggested before, 19th-century Mormon oratorical culture was a reflection of both newly-revealed principles of communication and the Saints’ position on the margins of American religious and commercial society. As with other outsider groups, Mormon preachers, in both attitude and practice, demonstrated a clear preference for letting the Holy Ghost make up for what an unlearned, unprepared, ostracized preaching force lacked, i.e., explicit rhetorical literacy. Of course their sermons were “rhetorical” in that they employed strategies of persuasion through the kinds of appeals that can be explained by GrecoRoman rhetorical theory. But Mormons rejected outright the attitude that conscious preparation through invention, arrangement, style, delivery, and memory was a prerequisite for, or even a substantial aid to, speaking in the name of God. They also rejected the argument by sermon scholars like Henry Ward Beecher that divine oratory must illustrate “all the resources of imagination, all the inspirations of feeling, all that is influential in body, in voice, in eye, in gesture, in posture, in the whole animated man”.74 This rejection gave them authority outside established institutions; it was also an expression of their belief that God had opened the heavens again after a long absence, and that every saint was entitled to personal inspiration and the miraculous amplification of speaking gifts that came after baptism. As the first generation of preachers criss-crossed New York, Ohio, and Missouri, gathering converts to Mormon settlements, sermons were given exclusively by inspiration, and the Book of Mormon was evoked as a sign of Joseph Smith’s divine calling.75 Some preachers like

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Madsen, Joseph Smith, p. 90. Autobiography of Parley P. Pratt, Revised and Enhanced, ed. Scot Facer Proctor and Maurine Jensen Proctor (Salt Lake City, 2000), pp. 262, 362. 74 Beecher, Oratory, p. 13. The gendered nature of Beecher’s homiletics, as well as that of the other authors of preaching manuals in the masculine tradition, has been analyzed thoroughly by Roxanne Mountford in her work, The Gendered Pulpit: Preaching in American Protestant Spaces (Carbondale, 2003). 75 For more on how the Book of Mormon – not its text, but its mere existence – served as evidence that Joseph Smith had been called to be a modern-day prophet, 73


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Parley P. Pratt and Sidney Rigdon were natural or trained orators; most others stumbled out into the Protestant landscape with nothing more for support than a few copies of the Book of Mormon and a firm conviction that God would animate them. Converts followed, as did opposition. In Ohio, Missouri, and Illinois, internal dissensions and severe opposition from enemies of the church forced the Mormons out of their homes, often under extreme conditions of duress. The Protestant frontier reacted to Joseph Smith’s revelations (like universal male priesthood, temple worship, and plural marriages) with disdain, anger, and then mob action; Smith was taken to Carthage Jail on charges of treason where he was shot by a pseudo-militia mob. Forced from their homes with the cannon’s muzzle at their backs, and now under the leadership of Brigham Young, thousands of Latter-day Saints trekked across the plains in one of the largest organized exoduses of peoples in US history. After the martyrdom of Joseph Smith, the elders of the church perpetuated the prophet’s rhetoric of the invisible by developing what church historian B.H. Roberts called “a new school of oratory”, a “manner of speech which depends for its success rather upon the presence and operations of the Holy Spirit than upon the cunning or ability of the speaker”.76 This new school of oratory received its most prominent and consistent expression in the Great Basin Kingdom of the Utah Territory, outside the boundaries of the United States, where the Saints believed God had prepared a place “where none shall come to hurt or make afraid”, as the pioneer hymn declared.77 Even before leaving for the Salt Lake Valley, Brigham Young reminded the Saints that it was the right of all members of the church, “both male and female”, to receive revelations for themselves and to preach gospel discourses by the power of the Holy Ghost. In fact, according to Brother Brigham, without the Holy Ghost and revelation, a sermon was technically not a gospel sermon at all.78

see Terryl L. Givens, By the Hand of Mormon: the American Scripture that Launched a New World Religion (New York, 2002), p. 70. 76 The Life of John Taylor (Salt Lake City, 2002), p. 378. See also Eric G. Stephan, “B.H. Roberts: A Mormon Philosophy of Speech” Improvement Era 70 (September 1970), 11. 77 “Come, Come Ye Saints,” Hymns of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (Salt Lake City, 1985), #30. 78 Quoted in The Prophets Have Spoken, 5 vols., ed. Eric D. Bateman (Salt Lake City, 1999), p. 1: 124.

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After arriving in the Great Basin in 1847, the Saints erected a bowery out of branches and wood poles that served as a shelter for preaching until the dome-shaped Tabernacle was completed in 1867. In these two places, the elders of the church preached hundreds of sermons on Sundays and in semi-annual general conferences, none of which had been prepared beforehand. What is most interesting about these speeches, which have been collected and published in the Journal of Discourses, is the way that Mormon orators eschewed the rhetorical canon so deliberately, consistently, and even theologically. In their oratorical practices they reinforced the doctrine of inspiration (the foundation of their rhetoric of the invisible); showed how that doctrine mitigated the common need for human artifice (such as invention, arrangement, style, and delivery); and championed the “unlearned” preacher as the true conductor of divine power. With no agenda for church meetings, missionaries and elders were called to the pulpit with no advance notice to address audiences that often numbered in the thousands. Because of the natural awkwardness of an unplanned performance, elders often began their impromptu sermons by acknowledging the invisible influence of God. Orson Pratt, an early convert to the church and an intellectual force, illustrated this point when he opened a sermon with a personal disclosure: I am perhaps as well aware as any other person living, of the necessity of having that Spirit that is able to give truth to the mind – that Spirit that is able to inspire the heart in the very moment with the words and ideas calculated to benefit the people.79

“I have unexpectedly, to myself, been called upon to address this congregation”, began John Nicholson in an 1881 sermon. “I desire that you shall give me your sympathy and faith, that I may be able to speak in clearness whatsoever may be put into my mind by the inspiration of the Holy Ghost”.80 In his opening remarks to the Saints in Tooele City, apostle George Q. Cannon reminded the congregation that revelation led the church and that immediate, in-the-moment revelation came to the Saints “as they need it” in their public worship.81

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JD, p. 2: 235. Ibid., p. 22: 183. 81 Ibid., p. 22: 120. In these sermons, the words “revelation” and “inspiration” are used interchangeably. In other religious language practices, the terms are not synonymous, as in the Muslim distinction between Muhammad’s revelations (the Quran) and his inspirational writings (the Hadith). 80


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As the elders sought to articulate the connection between inspiration and their oratorical practice, they employed metaphors that greatly diminished their roles as speakers and pointed to a more divine source – a word linguists have used to describe the agent or locale from which a message or sensation emanates that can be distinct from the agent speaking the words.82 “When I am in this stand”, declared Brother Brigham, “I hoist the gate and let the flood run, not caring which way it goes or how”.83 Other preachers spoke of “the Holy Spirit resting upon me”, the mind being “led in a channel” that “the Spirit dictates to me”, being “moved upon by the Holy Ghost”, words being “put into my mind”, “the liberty of the Spirit”, “the outburst of inspiration”, being “guided and inspired by the light of the Holy Spirit”, or “the dictation of the Spirit of the Lord”.84 Heber C. Kimball, the humble potter we met earlier, used metaphors that celebrated his passive participant role in speaking: My feelings are that I may be like clay in the hands of the potter, or like a fiddle in the hands of the performer. I am not going to dictate [to] God, but I, feel to say, Father play through me.85

For Kimball, when preachers stand up and make excuses for their lack of eloquence, “it is like a fiddle’s getting up here to make an excuse for the fiddler. I would knock a fiddle into a cocked up hat, if it should undertake to dictate me”.86 Reflecting on a previous sermon, Kimball told the Saints in the Tabernacle that “the power of God ran through me just as City Creek would run through this city”. And even though he tried to sit down after speaking a while, “I was held by some power, visible or invisible” until “God … said I had spoken long enough”.87 Mormon orators in the Great Basin also expressed indifference, even disdain, for the standard rhetorical practices of the denominational preachers of the day who prepared sermons beforehand using strategies of invention, arrangement, and eloquence. Their rejection of the Greco-Roman tradition can be explained in part by the Mormon conception of conversion as a spiritual transformation that occurs, or at

82 Robert E. Longacre, The Grammar of Discourse, 2nd ed (New York, 1996), p. 161; see also Stephen C. Levinson, Pragmatics (Cambridge, 1983), pp. 68–73. 83 JD, p. 2: 187. 84 Ibid., pp. 2: 235, 15: 275, 21: 45, 22: 183, 23: 282, 15: 303, 13: 292, 16: 301. 85 Ibid., p. 4: 225. 86 Ibid., p. 4: 225. 87 Ibid., p. 4: 169–70.

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least ought to occur, independently of rational or emotional conviction. In an 1857 sermon, Brigham Young argued that in preaching “you might prove doctrine from the Bible till doomsday, and it would merely convince a people, but would not convert them”.88 The assumption, then, was that no rhetorical artifice (such as logical demonstration or aesthetic strategy) could harness the invisible divine emanation that pierced the listener’s heart. Because of this assumption, Mormon orators often explicitly denounced any attempt to rely on rhetorical strategies in language very similar to Charles Grandison Finney’s critique of preachers. In a sermon delivered in 1880, George Q. Cannon knocked down each part of the rhetorical canon by contrasting the homiletics of most ministers with the sermons of the Saints: “We do not cogitate in our private apartments or in our libraries or in our studies what shall be said to the people, and to frame discourses to deliver them”, nor is it right for Mormon preachers “to prepare their discourses and arrange before hand what they say to the people”.89 So much for invention and arrangement. Cannon also attacked style and delivery: “We might tickle your ears, we might say pleasing things to you, we might give utterance to fine moral sentiments which you would think very beautiful”, but “it requires the inspiration of the Almighty to take of the things of God to impart to the people”.90 The Christian world is filled with eloquent speakers like Henry Ward Beecher who “deliver sentiments” very eloquently, but these preachers lack “the power of God”.91 Not everyone has the kind of faith necessary, in the words of Orson Pratt, “to obtain that amount of the Holy Spirit that will bring the subjects, the ideas, the language, and the system of the subject all before his mind at once”.92 In stark contrast to the authors of the sermon handbooks, the Mormons downplayed the power of language and aesthetics significantly, though their own sermons were often rhetorically forceful, if perhaps not elegant. “What does the Lord, the Father of us all, care about our mode of expression?” asked Brigham Young.93 He told the Saints that when men “rise full of the Holy Spirit and power of God, their countenances are sermons to the people” with power beyond 88 89 90 91 92 93

In The Prophets Have Spoken, p. 1: 334. JD, pp. 22: 120–21. Ibid., p. 22: 121. Ibid., p. 22: 121. Ibid., p. 7: 75. Ibid., p. 8: 248.


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words, and they speak with the strength of God “whether they have said five words or five thousand”.94 The inscrutable spirit makes up for deficiencies of language so completely, according to Brother Brigham, that it doesn’t matter if the preacher delivers a sermon “back end forward, as well as if he spoke it straightforward and in picked and choice language. The Spirit of revelation is the best grammar you ever studied”.95 Teasing the rough-talking Heber C. Kimball in a later sermon, he joked that the Saints actually needed the Spirit “in order to understand all that he means by his expressions”.96 “Lay aside the smooth tongue and velvet lips”, counseled Brigham, “and let [your] words be like melted lead, that they may sink into the hearts of the people”.97 “Though the speaker be unable to say more than half-a-dozen sentences, and those awkwardly constructed, if his heart is pure before God, those few broken sentences are of more value than the greatest eloquence without the Spirit of the Lord”.98 In classical rhetoric laid out by Aristotle, a successful orator must recognize and exploit the conditions of the speech situation such as audience psychology, social constraints, historical precedence, appropriate genres, and the timeliness of the topic. In Mormon oratory, the Spirit took over the responsibility of reading and responding to the rhetorical situation in order to “discern what would be most adapted to the wants of those who are present”, as Orson Pratt noted.99 George Q. Cannon also used the word “adapted” to describe the way the Holy Spirit provides those words “that are best adapted to our circumstances and condition”. He continued: How do I know, how does any other man in this congregation know the thoughts and the fears and the wants of you who are here today? … Who shall tell these souls that which they need? Can any man out of his own wisdom, from the depths of his own thoughts, give the needed strength and comfort to those hungry souls? It is impossible. God must do it. God must pour out His Holy Spirit.100

Cannon here describes how preachers relinquish responsibility for trying to guess at the kind of counsel needed by the audience, the kind of 94 95 96 97 98 99 100

Ibid., p. 8: 248. Ibid., p. 9: 141. Ibid., p. 4: 341. Ibid., p. 3: 226. Ibid., p. 8: 284. Ibid., p. 15: 313. Ibid., p. 24: 179–80.

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language that will move an audience, or the shape of reason necessary to bring the audience to conviction; by so doing, he dismisses 2500 years of communication theory. As I have tried to argue in this chapter, the oratory of the Great Basin prophets serves as an example of the way the rhetoric of the invisible can be employed in the service of outer groups who do not have access to established, institutionalized, culturally legitimized forms of rhetorical practice. The rhetoric of the invisible gives the uneducated and disenfranchised the opportunity to speak freely and forcefully, backed by the authority of their intimacy with a divine presence. Brother Brigham told the Saints that “when I began to speak in public, I was about as destitute of language as a man could well be”: Brother Heber [Kimball] and I never went to school until we got into ‘Mormonism:’ that was the first of our schooling. We never had the opportunity of letters in our youth, but we had the privilege of picking up brush, chopping down trees, rolling logs, and working amongst the roots, and of getting our shins, feet, and toes bruised.101

This folksy litany of manual labor reveals a class tension inherent in the relationship between the learned and unlearned in Mormon preaching. As apostle Wilford Woodruff noted, since there was no professionally trained clergy, the preacher “may be a miller, or it may be a mason, it may be a carpenter, or it may be a farmer, a lawyer, a merchant, or otherwise”.102 John Morgan also noted that farmers, artisans, and mechanics put down the tools of their weekly trades on Sunday to address congregations of thousands, relying on the gifts of God to make up for their lack of training.103 Practicing a rhetoric of the invisible had an enfranchising effect on even the most humble worker. The Fortunes of Rhetoric of the Invisible The twenty-six volumes of the Journal of Discourses, published from 1853 to 1886, give us a fair assessment of the shape Mormon oratory took when preacher-Saints were played upon by the divine musician, though it will not give us the full experience of being present at delivery. 101 102 103

Ibid., pp. 5: 96–97. Ibid., p. 23: 124. Ibid., p. 20: 277.


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Though it is true that unity, coherence, and eloquence were virtues not generally valued by the Saints, the collected sermons reveal competent, and often striking, uses of rhetorical flourishes such as analogy, metaphor, hyperbole (plenty of “blessed excess”, to use Stephen Webb’s term for religious hyperbole104), humor, sarcasm, practical reasoning, hypothetical reasoning, folksy aphorism, exhortations, narrative, and seamless biblical language. Not all sermons were cut from the same cloth. Tone and style differed from person to person, and one man may humbly tell stories or explicate doctrine while another (like Brigham Young or Jedediah Grant) would leap on the Saints with sometimes disturbing imagery for effect – “to have it rain pitchforks, tines downwards, from this pulpit”.105 There is no evidence that any such rhetoric was studied or used deliberately as a theoretical principle. And ultimately it didn’t matter to the Saints, so long as the speaker felt inspired and the audience felt that inspiration in a way that confirmed their convictions in the restored Gospel. It is important to note, however, that though the Great Basin prophets believed they spoke with the tongues of angels, non-Mormon visitors to Utah saw little evidence of the invisible divine in their sermons. Historian Davis Bitton has shown that outsiders saw the Mormon rhetoric of the invisible as “strange ramblings”, in the words of one observer. Unitarian minister George Moore described their preaching style as aimless rambling, “just as an old Sailor will tell a long yarn, in which the great essential is to keep talking”.106 Horace Greeley, editor of the New York Tribune, complained after sampling the sermons of the elders that “this mortal life is too short and precious to be wasted in listening to rambling, loose-jointed harangues”.107 Another outsider wrote of the Mormon sermon he suffered in 1861 that the speaker, Bishop Leonard Harrington, “commenced in a tone so low and mumbling that his first utterances, however interesting they may have been to those who were near enough to hear him, were certainly lost to the majority of the congregation; myself included”.108 One woman wrote in 1884 that Mormon sermons “were couched in language so coarse and revolting, that ladies 104 Stephen H. Webb, Blessed Excess: Religion and the Hyperbolic Imagination (NY, 1993). 105 JD, p. 3: 222. 106 Davis Bitton, “ ‘Strange Ramblings’: The Ideal and Practice of Sermons in Early Mormonism,” BYU Studies 41.1 (2002), p. 15. 107 Ibid., p. 16. 108 Ibid., p. 17.

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have told me they hardly knew how to endure it. Rabelais himself could not have surpassed it!”109 Bitton also gives us glimpses from outsiders who recognized a folksy strength in the strange ramblings of inspired Mormons, though their praise was always qualified with aesthetic criticism. British world traveler Richard F. Burton attended a sermon in Salt Lake City in 1860 in which the speaker “made undue use of the regular Wesleyan organ – the nose”.110 Yet he “appeared to speak excellent sense in execrable English”.111 When Brigham Young rose to preach, Burton noted that though his sermon was “rather rambling and unconnected”, his gestures were “not without a certain grace” and “the manner was pleasing and animated, and the matter fluent, impromptu, and well turned”.112 Others were not as complimentary. In 1877 another outside observer commented that all Mormon preachers “seemed quite illiterate, their rhetoric limping badly, and their pronouns and verbs marrying very miscellaneously”.113 From this observer we also catch a hint of rhetorical elitism that we noted in traditional evangelicals who felt threatened by the illiterate itinerants of both the 18th- and 19th-century awakenings: “[Mormon preaching] was noisy and common-place, without logic or symmetry, and would have provoked most eastern audiences to ridicule, rather than led to conviction”.114 Certainly there is nothing new in this criticism of uneducated, rambling preaching. Since Puritan days, educated, elite, sermon-preparing preachers have criticized those who would take upon themselves to preach without proper training and thought – which is one way to control who speaks, and how. In American homiletics as well as in public discourse, rhetoric has served as a gate-keeping discipline not only to preserve the social order but to ensure that the word of God is given its best clothing.115 Underwhelmed outside witnesses of Mormon preaching did not share the spiritual world view of the Latter-day Saints, nor did they seem to understand that for the Mormons, form

109

Ibid., p. 17. Ibid., p. 16. 111 Ibid., p. 16. 112 Ibid., p. 16. 113 Ibid., p. 17. 114 Ibid., p. 17. 115 See Cmiel, Democratic Eloquence, for a thorough treatment of how rhetoric served to define and delineate shifting social barriers in the United States in the 19th century. 110


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and content were secondary to the spiritual quickening that comes upon speaker and audience in the moment of speaking. This special relationship between speaker, audience, and Spirit was an essential element of Mormon belief, worship, and commitment. Back in May 1831, in Kirtland, Ohio, Joseph Smith received a revelation on this relationship: Why is it that ye cannot understand and know, that he that receiveth the word by the Spirit of truth receiveth it as it is preached by the Spirit of truth? Wherefore, he that preacheth and he that receiveth, understand one another, and both are edified and rejoice together. And that which doth not edify is not of God, and is darkness.116

To the outsider, Mormon preachers, regardless of whatever claims they made to inspiration, did not edify and were therefore opaque and obscure. For Mormons, any preaching performed without the power of invisible inspiration, regardless of whatever rhetorical gifts were demonstrated, was in the words of Brigham Young “mere empty, unmeaning sounds to the ears of the people”.117 Brother Brigham’s language that so grated on the ears of the learned carried behind it the force of the invisible: “God can understand it”, he said proudly, “and so could you, if you had the Spirit of the Lord”.118 As powerful and prevalent as was the Saints’ investment in a rhetoric of the invisible, some Mormons believed that it was irresponsible to completely relinquish an active participant role in the process of sermonizing. In the tradition of Augustine, some Saints sought to improve Mormon oratorical practices through instruction, theory, and practice. In 1841, a young woman wrote to the Times and Seasons, an early Mormon publication, arguing that ministers of the gospel should clothe truth in “eloquent language” to be “wise as serpents” and to be fully effective.119 In order to be “instructed more perfectly in theory”,120 as one revelation commanded, the early Saints organized debates and public speaking exercises in the School of the Prophets in Kirtland and later in the lyceums of Nauvoo. During the Nauvoo period, Joseph Smith noted, “debates were held weekly, and entered into by men of the first talents in the city, young and old, for the purpose of eliciting truth, 116 117 118 119 120

Doctrine and Covenants 50:21–23. Ibid., 8:142. Ibid., 9:141. Bitton, “Strange Ramblings,” p. 18. Doctrine and Covenants 88:78.

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acquiring knowledge, and improving in public speaking”.121 Though nothing like a formal rhetorical method was articulated, the Saints occasionally took a keen interest in improving their speaking and writing skills through education and public spectacles of all kinds. By the end of the century, even the Latter-day Saints, the great American rhetorical holdouts, had begun their own pilgrimage to respectability as other evangelical groups had done in the first half of the century. This pilgrimage included not only forsaking plural marriage in order for Utah to become a state, but establishing institutions of learning to improve the speaking skills of both men and women in the church. The Young Men’s and Young Ladies’ Mutual Improvement Associations sponsored speaking contests and debate tournaments that supplemented courses in rhetoric and elocution that had emerged at the University of Utah and the Brigham Young Academy.122 In 1898 Mormon scholar N.L. Nelson, professor of rhetoric and elocution at the Brigham Young Academy, published Preaching and Public Speaking to correct the inadequacies he saw in the rhetoric of the invisible practiced in the first fifty years of the faith. “My purpose has been, not to teach how we may get along without the Spirit”, he wrote, “but how, by accustoming our minds to order and system, we shall offer the least resistance to its guidance”.123 With the invention of radio and television broadcasting, Latter-day Saint leaders began to prepare and compose sermons beforehand for general conference in an effort to streamline preaching for a growing global audience. However the rhetoric of the invisible continued to exert force well into the 20th century, and it still exerts force through the framework of scripture and informal missionary outreach.124 The foregoing can lead us to some interesting but tentative conclusions about the rhetoric of the invisible as I have described it here. Dependence on divine intervention in religious speech has given preachers in American history the opportunity to simultaneously reject the methods and practices of mainstream religious institutions, which are seen as corruptions of faith, and to claim authority for speaking in 121

History of the Church, 4:514. Alexander, Mormon in Transition, pp. 140–44. 123 N.L. Nelson, Preaching and Public Speaking (Salt Lake City, 1898), pp. 435–36. 124 For a few glimpses into this transition, see D. Michael Quinn, J. Reuben Clark: The church Years (Provo, 1983), pp. 101–102; Edward L. Kimball and Andrew E. Kimball, Jr., Spencer W. Kimball (Salt Lake City, 1977), pp. 338–39; Richard G. Scott and Charles Didier, interview, Ensign (June 2004), 6–11. 122


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the name of God without any rhetorical literacy whatsoever. Linguistic anthropologists understand this practice in terms of participant roles in which the speaker demonstrates or professes a marked diminution of agency and authorship, so that God becomes the true source of communication – the divine musician playing upon the speaker. Revivalists like George Whitefield and Charles Grandison Finney, as well as outsider enthusiasts like African-American preachers and Pentecostal women reject dominant sermonic practices in order to free the sermon of what they see as artificial constraints placed upon it by Christian rhetoricians since Augustine. As we have seen with the Mormons, these spiritually-rich practices are almost always backed up by some form of pneumatology: doctrines or principles of the Holy Spirit as laid out in scripture. As a social practice imbued with eternal principles, the oratory of the Great Basin prophets reinforced the idea that teaching the gospel required nothing more than a pure, willing heart and faith that God would make the moment of oral delivery successful, in spite of the infelicities that inevitably poured out. Their pride in their own strange ramblings reflected what they valued as a revelatory people. A helpful analogy can be drawn by referring to Alexis de Tocqueville’s analysis of “parliamentary eloquence” in the 19th-century United States. The “frequently vague and perplexed” speeches of American assemblies, speeches that “drag their slow length along” as they are delivered by “men of slender abilities”, lacked the eloquence of speeches given in more aristocratic world parliaments.125 But the very fact that the raw American orator speaks for all Americans in an egalitarian culture “expands his thoughts and heightens his power of language”.126 Tocqueville concluded that “the political debates of a democratic people, however small they may be, have a degree of breadth that frequently renders them attractive to mankind” for what they represent as speech acts, not for their rhetorical skill.127 Perhaps we could describe this phenomenon more appropriately as “invisible eloquence” – the power and grace of a rhetorical act that cannot be observed in the act itself but are inherent in what the act reveals about the values of a people. In religious discourse, appeals to what cannot be seen are meant to diminish earthly concerns for language 125 126 127

Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, (New York, 1994), p. 2: 92. Ibid., p. 2: 93. Ibid., p. 2: 93.

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practices while refracting attention to more eternal principles. When a Mormon rose to speak to the Saints, however lowly his condition in the world, in that moment he became a prophet of the living God, speaking with inscrutable living power. On the other hand, the need for institutional credibility often leads religious groups to forsake, or at least revise, their rhetoric of the invisible to evolve with changing circumstances in the religious landscape. In an effort to gain respectability, to streamline and consolidate communication through new mass media, or to enhance the aesthetic force of preaching, outsider denominations have adapted their preaching to the rhetorical tradition, thereby yoking “the inspired act of speaking” with the “contrived structure” of art, a forging that Teresa Toulouse describes as the central paradox of the art of prophesying.128 It may be that while the doctrines for a robust rhetoric of the invisible remain intact, religious groups entering the mainstream learn how to employ the art of rhetoric in order to take advantage of centuries’ worth of wisdom and experimentation in public communication. If that is the case, the degree to which religions practice a rhetoric of the invisible is inversely related to their institutional development. Further, we have historical evidence that non-mainline American churches are better off staying relatively unschooled in rhetoric, since a rhetoricallysophisticated clergy tends to stray from the kind of communication that makes American religion vital and spiritual to its adherents.129 For the history of the sermon, the tension between inspiration and human artifice remains central not only for understanding the sermons themselves but for understanding the way power circulates through those whose hopes lay beyond this world.

128 Teresa Toulouse, The Art of Prophesying: New England Sermons and the Shaping of Belief (Athens, GA, 1987), p. 1. 129 See, for example, Roger Finke and Rodney Stark, The Churching of America, 1776–2005: Winners and Losers in Our Religious Economy (New Brunswick, 2007), particularly pp. 53–54. Upstart religions often take the religious marketplace by storm by rejecting more established trends, especially when it comes to communication practices. Controversially, Finke and Stark account for the unlearned success of outsider religions by using economic language: When the religious market is deregulated, “entrepreneurial religions” snatch up market share with “innovations in music, communication, religious education, preaching, revival, and organizational strategies” (p. 12).

THE ANTEBELLUM AMERICAN SERMON AS LIVED RELIGION Dawn Coleman In 1835, Alexis de Tocqueville wrote that the United States was “the place in the world where the Christian religion has most preserved genuine powers over souls”.1 In fact, the cultural dominance of Christianity in the decades following the Second Great Awakening was as much a matter of renewal as of preservation. Church membership increased from an estimated 17 per cent of Americans in 1776 to 37 per cent by 1860, numbers that do not include those who merely attended a church without officially joining.2 Much of this growth was among the Methodists and Baptists, who privileged the call to preach over formal theological training and who placed a conversion experience, often catalyzed by the preached word, at the center of Christian life. Their ascendancy helped fuel a preaching explosion in the young republic. The number of preachers grew from eighteen hundred in 1775 to forty thousand in 1845 – numbers that represented not only a staggering raw increase but also a tripling in the number of preachers per capita, from one preacher for every 1500 people to one for every 500.3 Despite the popularity of antebellum preaching, we know surprisingly little about it as a religious practice. We have, of course, countless printed sermons from the period – tens of thousands in books, newspapers, and pamphlets – but they tell us little about preaching as lived experience. Besides the fact that many preachers carefully revised their sermons before publishing them, distancing us from what

1 Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, ed. Harvey C. Mansfield and Delba Winthrop (Chicago, 2000), p. 278. 2 Roger Finke and Rodney Stark, The Churching of America, 1776–1990: Winners and Losers in Our Religious Economy, 2nd ed. (New Brunswick, 2005), pp. 22–23. The most significant change in American religious affiliation between 1776 and 1850 was the “meteoric rise of Methodism”. In 1850, Congregationalists claimed only 4 per cent of the US’ total church members; Presbyterians, 11.6 per cent; and Episcopalians, 3.5 per cent. In the same year, Baptists enjoyed 20.5 per cent of total church membership; Methodists, 34.2 per cent; and Catholics (not represented in Annals), 13.9 per cent (Finke and Stark, The Churching of America, pp. 56–57). 3 Nathan O. Hatch, The Democratization of Christianity (New Haven, 1989), p. 4.

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congregations actually heard, the texts of most 19th-century sermons come off as uninspired theological position papers, bland statements of predictable Christian teaching. They have neither the intellectual rigor of theological treatises nor the entertaining narratives of the period’s religious novels. They are often, in a word, boring. Understanding how sermons functioned as compelling rituals for antebellum Americans means remembering that they were dynamic rhetorical performances that conveyed meaning not through words alone, but through body, voice, and the context of worship. Nineteenth-century Protestants were themselves keenly aware of the gap between reading sermons and actually hearing them. New York Presbyterian minister Gardiner Spring, for instance, dedicated a chapter in The Power of the Pulpit to extolling the superiority of the “living teacher” over the printed page, stressing that the preacher’s “vividness of voice and gesture often tells even more than his words” and that the preacher’s “warm heart and glowing lips” appealed far more powerfully to reason, to conscience, and to the passions than did cold print on paper. He expressed a sense of loss in only being able to read eighteenth-century sermons: When you read the discourses of Whitfield [sic], you can scarcely be persuaded that he was the prince of preachers; and that the author of those printed pages was the man who collected 20,000 hearers on the open field at Leeds; who fascinated all ranks of society; who held Hume in profound admiration; and who brought the infidel Chesterfield to his feet, with outstretched arms, to rescue the wanderer from the fold of God […]. You read his sermons, but the preacher is not there. That voice, at a single intonation of which a whole audience has been known to burst into tears, is not there. That instant communication between the living speaker and his hearers, which creates so powerful a sympathy, is not there.4

Much in this brief description captures how the 19th century idealized preaching as a unifying, cross-class social experience in which speaker and hearers enjoyed a strong, immediate bond of sympathy. At the same time, it reminds us that just as the experience of standing on a crowded field listening to Whitefield was lost to the 19th century, so that of hearing John Summerfield or Charles Grandison Finney or Joseph Buckminster is lost to ours. Across time and cultural distance, a great deal is irrecoverable. We cannot hear these preachers, nor sit among their crowded audiences. 4 Gardiner Spring, The Power of the Pulpit; or Thoughts Addressed to Christian Ministers and Those Who Hear Them, 2nd ed. (New York, 1854), p. 116.

the antebellum american sermon as lived religion

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How can we hope to understand antebellum preaching as lived experience? One extraordinary and virtually untapped resource for exploring this question is the nine-volume series, Annals of the American Pulpit (1856–69), compiled and edited by Presbyterian minister William Buell Sprague. A widely known and much-published clergyman as well as one of the foremost autograph collectors in 19th-century America, Sprague brought the full force of his networking and collecting talents to bear in assembling Annals.5 His goal was to commemorate the distinguished clergymen in each of the major American denominations from the 1620s through 1855. Annals was to be a memorial of the clerical good and great and, though Sprague did not put a point on it, a testament to America’s preeminence in preaching, one of the few cultural areas in which antebellum America considered itself on a par with Europe. To create this series, he corresponded with dozens of denominational leaders to identify potential candidates, and then with hundreds of colleagues, friends, and family members who knew the ministers personally. Contributors were asked to describe the subject’s character and to relate any anecdotes about him they might remember (for 17th- and 18th-century ministers who lacked living witnesses, Sprague generally contacted local clergy who wrote their accounts using parish records and oral history). Sprague worked denomination by denomination, and as the reminiscences rolled in, the volumes appeared: Trinitarian Congregational (1856), Presbyterian (1858), Episcopalian (1858), Baptist (1859), Methodist (1860), Unitarian Congregational (1864), and, in the final volume (1869), the Lutherans and Reformed Dutch, along with the small Scottish Presbyterian sects – the Associate Synod (Seceder), Associate Reformed, and Reformed (Covenanter) churches.6 Each volume is at least 500 pages long and several are more than 800. The extant volumes follow a consistent format: a brief preface reminding readers that not all of America’s worthy ministers would be 5 John M. Mulder and Isabelle Stouffer, “William Buell Sprague: Patriarch of American Collectors,” American Presbyterians 64.1 (1986), 2–17. 6 These dates are taken from Sprague’s prefaces. The series’ complete title is Annals of the American Pulpit; or Commemorative Notices of Distinguished American Clergymen of Various Denominations, from the Early Settlement of the Country to the Close of the Year Eighteen Hundred and Fifty-Five. With Historical Introductions. I refer to those clergy discussed in volume 2 simply as Congregationalists and those in volume 8 as Unitarians. A tenth volume on the Society of Friends, Swedenborgians, and the German Reformed, Moravian, Cumberland Presbyterian, Freewill Baptist, and Universalist churches was completed but not published. The manuscript is now lost.

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found in the pages that followed, an historical introduction to the denomination written by Sprague himself, then the chronological presentation of ministers, based on the year in which they were licensed to preach or first started preaching in this country. Entries for profiled ministers typically begin with a blandly encomiastic biographical narrative charting childhood religiosity, age of conversion, university or seminary attended, series of pastorates held, and, often, a graphic description of the heroically endured stages of illness leading to death. Sprague typically adapted this short biography from the preface to a published volume of sermons, a funeral sermon, or an obituary notice; sometimes an obliging family member wrote it specifically for Annals. Following this prefatory memoir is the distinctive strength of Annals: one to three solicited letters describing the minister, each at least a page or two long. It is these letters that make Annals, as John Mulder and Isabelle Stouffer have put it, “a type of recorded oral history of the nineteenth century”.7 This essay examines Annals to gain insight into the experience of listening to sermons in antebellum America, focusing on descriptions of preaching in letters written about ministers whose pastoral labors began in 1800 or later. This subset of Annals includes approximately 450 ministers and 750 solicited letters, nearly all of which comment on preaching since, as the “Pulpit” in Sprague’s title suggests, this was a defining dimension of Protestant ministry. These letters provide a thoughtful, detailed, highly literate, and impressively panoramic perspective on antebellum American preaching, sweeping in its denominational scope and geographic range. Letter-writers and profiled preachers were concentrated in the Northeast (like the US population), but contributors hailed from virtually every corner of the US: Boston, New York, Baltimore, Charleston, Talladega, St Louis, Chicago, Indianapolis, and countless points in between. These reports reveal that despite the significant theological, stylistic, and ecclesiastical differences that have defined US Protestant churches, much of the rhetoric used to describe preaching crossed denominational and geographic boundaries. That is, Annals presents antebellum American preaching as a coherent (though certainly not homogenous), nationally recognizable experience. Of course, it has limitations as a window onto American religiosity. It is shocking to today’s sensibilities that its nine volumes

7

Mulder and Stouffer, “William Buell Sprague,” p. 5.


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contain only one report of an African-American preacher (Baptist Lott Cary) and not a whisper of African-American denominations such as the American Methodist Episcopal Church or the A.M.E. Zion Church. Nor does Annals profile any Roman Catholics, Mormons, Jews, or women. Still, if Annals is an imperfect mirror of American religiosity, it provides ample raw material for reexamining white Protestants. As Catherine Brekus has pointed out, the time is ripe for such work, since scholars in the last quarter of the 20th century “virtually ignored the majority of Protestant believers” as they focused on revising consensus-driven narratives of US religiosity in light of the country’s ethnic and theological diversity.8 In excavating the language used to describe preaching, this essay maintains that understanding the religious experience of the past requires paying close attention to the language that mediated and structured that experience. It thus brings a rhetorical perspective to the study of lived religion, a field of inquiry that looks beyond the official theologies and institutional histories of religious movements to analyze the practices that shape people’s actual religious lives. Indebted to the Annales school of sociological investigation, with its ethnographic interest in creating thick descriptions of everyday life, scholars of lived religion try to understand how people appropriate and transform religious traditions. The study of lived religion challenges polarities that have historically defined religious studies, such as sacred/secular, written/oral, official/popular, and high/low, seeking instead to understand religion as working through a social context in which power relations are never as stable as they seem.9 8 Catherine A. Brekus, “Interpreting American Religion,” in A Companion to Nineteenth-Century America, ed. William L. Barney (Malden, Mass., 2001), p. 331. 9 See David D. Hall, ed., Lived Religion in America: Toward a History of Practice (Princeton, 1997), especially Hall’s introduction (pp. vi–xiii), and other work in this vein such as Charles Hambrick-Stowe, The Practice of Piety: Puritan Devotional Disciplines in Seventeenth-Century New England (Chapel Hill, 1982); James O’Toole, ed., Habits of Devotion: Catholic Religious Practice in Twentieth-Century America (Ithaca, 2004); and Laurie F. Maffly-Kipp, Leigh Schmidt, and Mark Valeri, eds., Practicing Protestants: Histories of Christian Life in America, 1630–1965 (Baltimore, 2006). Although the editors of Practicing Protestants write that one of their goals is to “expand the usual scholarly repertoire beyond preaching and the sacraments” (p. 7), there has been relatively little scholarly work on non-revival preaching as practice or lived experience in nineteenth-century America. Aside from studies of individual ministers, notable work on antebellum preaching includes Lawrence Buell, “The Unitarian Movement and the Art of Preaching in 19th-Century America,” American Quarterly 24.2 (1972), 166–90; Catherine Brekus, Strangers and Pilgrims: Female Preaching in America, 1740–1845 (Chapel Hill, NC, 1998); David S. Reynolds, “From Doctrine to

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This essay shares the study of lived religion’s commitment to understanding American religion from the ground up and to destabilizing these traditional dichotomies. In particular, it follows through on unsettling the sharp distinctions between the clergy and laity. Although most contributors to Annals were ministers (though there are scattered lawyers, doctors, educators, and businessmen as well), I have taken the series as a window onto popular perceptions of effective preaching as well. Undoubtedly, the ministers who wrote for Annals had a vested interest in describing the pleasures of good preaching, since in doing so they created a discourse of religious and symbolic power that compensated for the diminution of political and economic power they experienced after the completion of disestablishment. But rather than conclude that Annals speaks only for the clergy, we should assume continuity between the rhetoric that ministers used to describe listening to the sermons of their peers and that which had currency in the lifeworld of lay hearers. More specifically, the effusive descriptions of preachers in Annals can be seen as representative of antebellum Americans’ perceptions of the best preaching they heard. Lay people may have seldom given form to these ideas themselves – for instance, those who kept diaries reporting on sermon-listening often wrote no more than the preacher, text, and a brief comment such as “excellent sermon” – but it is reasonable to assume that they perceived preaching through conceptual categories and vocabularies similar to those of their ministers. The social and linguistic difference between the typical, non-elite, relatively unknown antebellum minister contributing to Annals and his weekly hearers was much smaller than that which had separated clergy and laity a century or two before. The Second Great Awakening had infused American culture with religious leaders drawn directly from the ranks of ordinary people, and even in mainline denominations, ministerial candidates were much more likely to come from the middle class and poor.10 Moreover, across the board, disestablishment meant that ministers had powerful incentives to understand

Narrative: The Rise of Pulpit Storytelling,” American Quarterly 32.5 (1980), 478–89; and Teresa Toulouse, The Art of Prophesying: New England Sermons and the Shaping of Belief (Athens, GA, 1987). 10 See Hatch, The Democraticization of American Christianity; Donald M. Scott, From Office to Profession: The New England Ministry, 1750–1850 (Philadelphia, 1978); and Sidney E. Mead, “The Rise of the Evangelical Conception of the Ministry in America (1670–1850),” in The Ministry in Historical Perspectives, ed. H. Richard Niebuhr and Daniel D. Williams (New York, 1956), p. 234.


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and internalize the expectations of their hearers: popular preaching meant tithers and pew-renters, while lackluster preaching could mean dismissal. It makes sense to assume that if anyone knew how to describe the preaching that people appreciated, it was those who were trying to achieve it. We should also not underestimate the extent to which ministerial discourse shaped the experience of the laity.11 That is, people learned how to experience preaching – how to approach it, respond to it, evaluate it – through language that ministers themselves provided. Annals consolidates this potent ministerial discourse. One sign that the ministers writing Annals were in touch with popular sensibilities, rather than blindly hagiographic, is that they lauded few of their profiled colleagues as pulpit superstars. In fact, Annals contributors could be at times unexpectedly candid. Even as letter-writers avoided anything that would chagrin or dismay a minister’s surviving family, they did not always find it necessary to paint an unrecognizably rosy picture of the sermons of those ministers who distinguished themselves primarily through teaching or denominational service.12 Some ministers were even acknowledged to have been “unequal” in their pulpit efforts or liable to “fall below their own standard”, and a few especially nervous ones come off as clearly mediocre.13 Henry Bellows, for instance, wrote of fellow Unitarian William Ware that the “presence of an audience disconcerted and distressed him”.14 A more common dodge was simply to emphasize the good points one could, such as sincerity, biblical knowledge, and a kindly demeanor, and let the preaching pass with faint praise. Of course, the ministers who penned Annals have little to tell us about abysmal or soporific preaching, but presumably the profiled subjects were a cut above their humdrum brethren. On the whole, then, despite its clerical bias, Annals is one of the most valuable, comprehensive record we have of American preaching as lived experience.

11 Noting the tendency among historians of lived religion to contrast clerical prescription with popular spontaneity, Hall reclaims Baird Tipson’s work on Thomas Shepard’s diary for its emphasis on how clerical models of experience constituted a “repertory” from which practicing Christians drew (“What Is the Place of ‘Experience’ in Religious History?,” Religion and American Culture 13.2 [2003], 241–50). 12 William Buell Sprague, Annals of the American Pulpit, 9 vols. (New York, 1856– 69; rpt. New York, 1969), p. 1: xiii. 13 J.B. Waterbury, 9 May 1848, in Annals, p. 4: 661; Millard Fillmore, 2 June 1857, in Annals, p. 4: 743. 14 Henry W. Bellows, 7 March 1863, in Annals, p. 8: 515.

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What emerges from the descriptions of more than seven hundred early to mid 19th-century ministers profiled in Annals is a distinct picture of antebellum preaching as centered not on the communication of specific theological or scriptural lessons, but on the listener’s imaginative, aestheticized experience of the minister himself. Indeed, the biographical format of Annals highlights the importance of the minister’s perceived character to the experience of listening to sermons.15 Virtually every report stresses the minister’s conviction, seriousness, sincerity, gravity, and honesty; such a man was a “true ambassador of Christ”. Antebellum Americans thus upheld Christian values dating back at least to the fourth book of Augustine’s On Christian Doctrine (426), the first handbook of Christian preaching, which maintained that the preacher had to believe and live by the doctrines he espoused lest his hearers disregard his claims altogether. Yet Annals shows that antebellum Protestants went beyond this traditional respect for ethos and shared the Romantic infatuation with larger-than-life personalities. Most notably, they tended to imagine the most effective preachers as links between the human and the divine, as awesome and often threatening conduits between the visible and invisible worlds.16 These representations were hypothetical, figurative, and – to an extent that challenges our assumptions about the differences between religious and non-religious experience – dependent on the rhetoric of the sublime. Given that listeners also took real pleasure in hearing a minister’s voice and watching his performing body, we see that the appeal of antebellum preaching was far less intellectual than imaginative and even aesthetic. The evidence of Annals thus poses a significant challenge to Ann Douglas’ classic argument in The Feminization of American Culture that the 19th-century Protestant clergy lost power and status as it

15 See Russel Hirst on the centrality of ministerial ethos to nineteenth-century conservative homiletics. Distinguishing between conservative and “revivalist-charismatic” homileticians, he argues that conservatives, who privileged logos over pathos, credited proper ethos primarily to learned ministers who presented Christian truth according to principles of harmony, symmetry, and balance (“Ethos and the Conservative Tradition in Nineteenth-Century American Protestant Homiletics,” in Ethos: New Essays in Rhetorical and Critical Theory, ed. James S. Baumlin and Tita French Baumlin [Dallas, 1994], pp. 293–318). 16 Exceptions to this generalization were the Unitarians, who tended to treat preaching not as an approach to divine realities but as a forum for moral instruction, and to some extent, those denominations in the ninth volume of Annals, which favored a more formal, doctrinal style of pulpit discourse.


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de-emphasized Calvinist doctrine in favor of sentimental pieties.17 Although Douglas’ argument provides a compelling description of the crisis of authority faced by liberal New England ministers, the diverse Protestant ministers profiled in Annals are more representative of 19thcentury American culture as a whole, and Annals gives little hint that these ministers saw themselves as threatened or as incipiently feminized. Rather, the series suggests that they still felt quite confident of their cultural significance and that they approached their primary ministerial function, preaching, with an unshaken faith in its spiritual power. The Seemingly Superhuman Preacher Annals contributors across the theologically conservative denominations described the most intense moments of preaching as those in which the minister seemed to bridge earth and heaven and to speak as a quasi-angelic being with supernatural powers.18 One Baptist who served in Philadelphia and Charleston preached so well that “his mind seemed to soar quite beyond the verge of time, and in high and rapt communion, to mingle with eternity”.19 A Philadelphia Presbyterian “would move in a path of light, as if he had borrowed the strong wings of a seraph, and meant to bear us away to his bright abode”.20 Another Presbyterian in Virginia spent his career memorizing and delivering rather formal sermons until he experienced a spiritual awakening in the last year of his life. Afterward, listeners felt, his preaching took on new power: “he seemed to stand at the very gate of Heaven; … it

17 Ann Douglas, The Feminization of American Culture (New York, 1977), especially pp. 17–43, 121–64. For a powerful critique of Douglas’ argument that nineteenthcentury clerics and women effectively conspired to feminize and sentimentalize American culture, see Karin E. Gedge, Without Benefit of Clergy: Women and the Pastoral Relationship in Nineteenth-Century American Culture (Oxford, 2003). 18 Throughout this essay I use the term “conservative” to refer to all of the Protestant denominations in Annals except the Unitarians. Most would have also endorsed the term “evangelical”, which signified belief in the necessity of a conversion experience for salvation. On how American churches came to emphasize a shared evangelicalism, see Sidney E. Mead, “The Rise of the Evangelical Conception of the Ministry in America (1607–1850),” pp. 207–49. 19 Richard Fuller, 2 April 1848, in Annals, p. 6: 506. Peripatetic nineteenth-century ministers are often difficult to identify with a particular city or even state. I have typically identified them by the city or state in which they ended their pastoral careers. 20 J.B. Waterbury, 9 May 1848, in Annals, p. 4: 661.

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appeared that his mind was so absorbed with the person, offices, and mediatorial glory, of the Redeemer, that his soul was literally on fire”.21 Other remarkable preachers seemed to see the audience with the eyes of God himself. Congregationalist Asahel Nettleton, a leading revivalist who preached in the North and South as well as throughout the British Isles, could be “so close and searching, that the hearer could hardly help feeling that he was in contact with Omniscience”.22 The gifted preacher in his best moments seemed to link God and humanity – to be an angelic or even Christ-like figure who transcended human capabilities. It is significant that hearers consistently posited this communion between the human and the divine as hypothetical: the preacher’s mind “seemed” to soar, it was “as if ” the minister had borrowed the wings of a seraph, the minister “seemed” to stand at Heaven’s gate, the listener could “hardly help feeling”. As much as hearers wanted to imagine the preacher as one uniquely gifted to communicate divine truth, they shied away from dogmatic assertions that he could. As one minister reported on the preaching of North Carolina Episcopalian Jarvis Barry Buxton: “I cannot tell how often I have sat absorbed in his great themes, feeling in the lowest depths of my soul, as if he were inspired”.23 He invoked the key word – inspired – yet framed the possibility as speculative by tagging it with an “as if ” and labeling his impression only a feeling. He did not cross the line and claim that God actually spoke directly to Buxton in the pulpit. To do so would have risked claiming too much for oneself – the ability to distinguish human excellence from an actual infusion of the Holy Spirit – and possibly too much for the minister as well. Nineteenth-century homileticians were divided on the preconditions and extent of the divine inspiration of preachers in the postapostolic age, but in general those in the mainline denominations saw it as less frequent and less all-consuming than those in more charismatic denominations, such as the Methodists.24 What Annals shows is that even traditionalists wanted to perceive the speaker as inspired – that they balanced their reluctance to affirm the reality of inspiration 21

H.G. Comingo, 27 July 1857, in Annals, p. 4: 793. [Bennet] Tyler, “Asahel Nettleton, D.D.,” in Annals, p. 2: 550. 23 Joseph C. Huske, 3 November 1857, in Annals, p. 5: 685. 24 For a discussion of the importance of the idea of divine inspiration in the pulpit to several later nineteenth-century conservative homileticians, see Hirst, “The Sixth Canon of Sacred Rhetoric: Inspiration in Nineteenth-Century Homiletic Theory,” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 25 (1995), 69–90. 22


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with a desire to experience the preacher as an extraordinary individual whose uniquely powerful rhetoric guaranteed the reality of Christian truth. Descriptions of a preacher’s apparent communion with God often centered not on the preacher’s piety but on his mental power. To a surprising extent, non-liberals shared the humanistic spirit of Ralph Waldo Emerson, who declared in his Divinity School Address that “The true preacher can be known by this, that he deals out to the people his life, – his life passed through the fire of thought”.25 Such affirmation of the power of the intellect in preaching coexisted uneasily with the official stance of conservative homiletic literature, repeated endlessly throughout Annals, that the true minister preached “not himself but Christ crucified”. Many of the most enthusiastic and hyperbolic reports of preaching in Annals located a sermon’s intellectual substance not in its doctrinal rigor, biblical expertise, or historical information, but in the preacher’s mental agility. Contributors thrilled to see the process of thinking and wondered at the minister’s mind in motion. A non-clerical friend of David Nelson, a Tennessee medical doctor who became a Presbyterian minister after experiencing a conversion from “infidelity” to Christianity, described him as “preternaturally” alive in the pulpit: “You listened as if to a being who lived in a world of thought and feeling, entirely different from the ordinary children of men – with a genius bold and perfectly original, ranging with burning zest through every field of imagination”.26 It was not the message but the messenger that captivated – not the Christian kerygma but an incredible pulpit style that swept up the hearer in an awe-inspiring rush of thought that somehow, for all the familiarity of the doctrine, seemed “perfectly original”. Morgan John Rhees, a Baptist minister who had studied law but went on to serve churches in New Jersey, Delaware, and New York, was credited with similarly mesmerizing mental prowess. Martin Anderson, the president of the University of Rochester and a man who presumably recognized a fine mind when he saw one, wrote of Rhees that his argumentative sermons always “brought out the best powers of his mind”, and that as he worked through a logical process in his preaching, “he would appear to lose all consciousness of the action of his own

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Ralph Waldo Emerson, Essays and Lectures (New York, 1983), p. 85. J.A. Jacobs, 31 January 1857, in Annals, p. 4: 683.

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mind, and become absorbed in the subject, until he seemed a mere organ through which some inspiring power was uttering thoughts which had caught their glow in the light of a spiritual existence”.27 Here is the familiar sense of divine inspiration, now enabled by the speaker’s own mental power – human reasoning as a warm-up for supernatural visitation. Although Anderson went on to say that Rhees’ listeners dwelled, of course, not on the speaker but on the “surpassing importance” of his subject, the most striking image of preaching in his letter remains that of the enraptured preacher uttering glowing thoughts.28 Occasionally a preacher’s mental greatness was linked not to his skill in reasoning but to his heightened psychological insight, as when Alabama Methodist Stephen Olin was credited with a God-like ability to trace the human heart, the result of his own searching introspection: He has gone through the [spiritual] processes he describes; – only he has gone deeper than you have; has scanned more closely than you could have done, the mysterious inner movements; – is able to describe what you have felt but could not fathom. The region, so shadowy to your perceptions, is luminous as the summer noon to his.29

Again the preacher was imagined as a superhuman being, only this time his power involved making visible not celestial realms but the dark labyrinth of the soul. A preacher’s greatness was also at times attributed to his learnedness or to his study of great writers. Maryland- and Philadelphia-based James Smith, for instance, was lauded for having studied Locke, Drew, the “English Divines”, Bacon, Milton, Butler, Burke, Johnson, and Addison: “In their language he thought and spoke. Is it surprising that his spontaneous utterances on a ‘theme Divine,’ should be lofty, and even sublime?”30 Perhaps what is most interesting about this claim is its implicit secularity, in which sublimity proceeds not from a gift of the Spirit or even from the language of the Bible but from lifelong immersion in the canon of English literature, which included not only theological writers but also essayists, philosophers, and poets. Above and beyond such incidental secularism, the fact is that all of Annals’ descriptions of ministers demonstrating extraordinary genius 27 28 29 30

M.B. Anderson, 28 February 1857, in Annals, p. 6: 783. Ibid., p. 6: 784. William M. Wightman, 25 May 1852, in Annals, p. 7: 695. Thomas B. Sargent, 18 October 1860, in Annals, p. 7: 377.


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or speaking as if in flight to heaven blur the line between the secular and the sacred because they are permeated with the rhetoric of the sublime, which always signifies an experience that stops short of an actual encounter with divinity. Longinus had maintained that the sublime in literature raised a writer “near the majesty of God”, and from Nicolas Boileau’s late 17th-century recovery of this concept forward, it has been associated with the attempt to draw near to God, without actually reaching him.31 More precisely, antebellum Americans’ attitudes toward preaching reflect the early 19th century’s longing for the divine that Thomas Weiskel has called the Romantic sublime, which is a “secondary or problematic sublime … pervaded by nostalgia and the uncertainty of minds involuntarily secular”.32 Although Weiskel assumes that involuntary secularism defines Wordsworth, Blake, and other Romantic poets but not the period’s religious faithful, Annals shows that even the period’s ministers saw their age as one that bore the burden of a hidden or absent God. Time and again the Annals writers invoked defining tropes of the sublime, including, as seen above, verticality, elevation, and the experience of almost attaining transcendence. And despite Burke’s and Kant’s claims for the primacy of nature in conceptions of the sublime, Annals shows preaching functioning as a principal site of sublimity, suggesting the persistent cultural importance in the antebellum US of the 18th-century tradition of the rhetorical sublime.33 For many antebellum Christians, then, listening to a sermon was a religious event experienced through the secular rhetoric of the sublime – a paradox that reveals how intimately faith and doubt were knit together even for religious adherents. The Pleasurable Pain of Sermons Invested in seeing the preacher as a potentially sublime figure, most contributors to Annals gave little evidence of wanting to see him as a friend who came bearing the love of God – the type of persona that

31 [Longinus], “On the Sublime,” Critical Theory Since Plato, rev. ed., ed. Hazard Adams (Ft. Worth, TX, 1992), p. 94. 32 Thomas Weiskel, The Romantic Sublime: Studies in the Structure and Psychology of Transcendence (Baltimore, 1976), p. 3. 33 On the rhetorical sublime in 18th-century Britain, see The Sublime: A Reader in British Eighteenth-Century Aesthetic Theory, ed. Andrew Ashfield and Peter de Bolla (Cambridge, Eng., 1996), pp. 58–126.

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Henry Ward Beecher, for instance, was crafting during this period. Instead, they drew on violent metaphors to dramatize the preacher’s ability to overwhelm, terrify, and pain, all of which were supposed to result in a crisis of spirit or conscience that led to repentance and reformation. Connecticut clergyman James Hodge, for example, threw together several such metaphors in a dizzying encomium for his senior colleague: he would “become so excited by his subject, as to swing off from his previously digested train of thought, and burst forth in a torrent of eloquence by which his audience would be well-nigh electrified”.34 A rushing train, a flood, a bolt of lightning – Hodge piled on the clichés as he struggled to depict the impassioned preacher working toward a crisis-inducing climax. Electricity was the most dominant of these tropes in Annals, with preachers everywhere electric and their sermons electrifying. In one of the more vivid examples, a colleague of Ohio Methodist David Young wrote, [U]nder the ministry of Young, I knew whole assemblies electrified, as suddenly and as sensibly as if coming in contact with a galvanic battery. I have myself, under some of his powerful appeals, felt the cold tremors passing over me, and the hair on my head apparently standing on end.35

Still imperfectly understood, electricity was a complex metaphor for the emotional and sensual impact of a 19th-century preacher on his congregation. Even as Samuel Morse’s invention of telegraphy in 1837 made electricity seem a material phenomenon at least partially under human control, 19th-century Americans often persisted in seeing electricity as “a divine, nearly immaterial spark of life”.36 To call a preacher electric, then, was to open a backdoor for the idea that he was divinely inspired. It also promoted a democratic, egalitarian understanding of preaching, as all hearers were imagined to have identical experiences of the preacher’s rhetoric as immediate, unavoidable, sensory stimulation. Above all, it suggested the preacher’s ability to astonish and pain as he warned of God’s judgement and goaded listeners to repentance. Annals contributors also spoke highly of preachers who seemed to aim arrows at their listeners’ hearts, an image with biblical precedent in 34

James L. Hodge, 4 March 1859, in Annals, p. 6: 673. Thomas A. Morris, 12 April 1860, in Annals, p. 7: 433. 36 Paul Gilmore, “Romantic Electricity, or the Materiality of Aesthetics,” American Literature 76.3 (2004), pp. 467–94. 35


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the verse “He [God] hath bent his bow, and set me as a mark for his arrow”.37 As New York Baptist Rufus Babcock wrote of the wellprepared preacher at ease on a Saturday night: “The bow is unbent, but in hand; the shafts are chosen and ready; and the arm is becoming more vigorous by the temporary relaxation now enjoyed”.38 A minister eulogizing New York Presbyterian Henry Axtell embellished the metaphor: “his weaponry was pointed with holy fire, and often was it both penetrating and barbed”.39 In one particularly powerful sermon to 5,000 at a camp meeting, St Louis Methodist Andrew Jackson Crandall was remembered to have delivered a peroration in which “burning words of warning, like arrows of fire, were hurled, with unearthly power, in the midst of that vast congregation”. He then offset the pain of God’s impending judgement with the means of relieving it, begging them “with the pathos of a woman in his heart, and with gushing tears” to be reconciled to God.40 Behind all of these arrow metaphors lurked the inevitable image of the Native American: it was as if the preacher, too, stood outside Euro-American social norms and could thus speak direct, painful truths unutterable within the confines of “civilized” society. At times, the preacher-as-warrior motif took on a more modern cast, and the minister was likened to a gunman. A friend wrote of Connecticut Presbyterian Benjamin Franklin Stanton: “wo to the wretched subjects who stood under the scathing fire of his pulpit artillery”.41 Southern Methodist Henry Bascom, who preached throughout the United States and served as Chaplain to Congress in the 1820s, was commended for sermon passages “overpowering in their effect – they were like the discharges of heavy ordnance. You cowered under the rush of mighty conceptions”.42 A Brooklyn Presbyterian would “often pick out a case in his audience, like a practiced marksman”.43 These idealizations of the preacher as a military man whose gunning and sniping pierced the stronghold of his hearers’ hearts tried to honor learned, relatively sedentary men by equating their work with the quintessentially masculine realm of warfare. Yet the lack of direct references to 37 38 39 40 41 42 43

Lam. 3:12. Rufus Babcock, 15 February 1855, in Annals, p. 6: 459. Samuel H. Cox, 12 January 1857, in Annals, p. 4: 455. J.P. Newman, 10 May 1858, in Annals, p. 7: 806. Henry R. Weed, 1 May 1857, in Annals, p. 4: 526. William M. Wightman, 23 March 1852, in Annals, p. 7: 539. Melancthon W. Jacobus, 28 February 1853, in Annals, p. 4: 717.

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“manliness” or “manhood” in these comparisons, as well as the relative infrequency of such terms elsewhere in Annals, suggests that most ministers did not yet acutely feel the threat of feminization.44 Even Unitarians, whose sermons were known for their emphasis on human goodness and God’s benevolence, shared the idea that effective preachers caused pain. Recollecting a sermon by Francis W.P. Greenwood, Elizabeth Palmer Peabody gave a twist to the Augustinian notion that the preacher was a physician of the soul by emphasizing Greenwood’s role not as healer but as surgeon: “I at one time attended his church with some young people who were under my care; and their varying colour [sic] and intense consciousness made continual revelations of the deep incisions of the moral surgeon”. She reported having once overheard someone say that Greenwood gathered the flowers of Christianity to entertain people with their beauty, and that a young man who regularly attended his preaching responded, “But the beauty is terrible, and the entertainment an agony of shame and remorse, if the hearer has any conscience”.45 For 19th-century theological liberals, no less than for conservatives, preaching functioned as a means of grace only insofar as it created a conviction that one needed to make spiritual changes. Although all of the Christian denominations covered in Annals endorsed the idea that effective preaching excited productive pain, the Methodists were virtually alone in celebrating the preacher’s ability to create terror, the sensation Burke had called “the ruling principle of the sublime”.46 A hundred-year legacy of revivals had produced preachers who knew how to deliver sermons that played on listeners’ fears. Methodists fondly recalled, as other denominations typically did not, how preachers graphically depicted heaven, hell, and the Day 44 The rhetoric of Christian masculinity became more pronounced after the Civil War, with the rise of “muscular Christianity”, a movement that emphasized men’s health and strength as integral to their Christian lives. See, for instance, Henry Ward Beecher’s Yale Lectures on Preaching, in which he declared that preaching “is the art of inspiring [men] toward a nobler manhood”, that “Manhood is the best sermon”, and that religion “is manhood, on a higher plane” (Henry Ward Beecher, Yale Lectures on Preaching, 3 vols. [New York, 1872; rpt. Boston, 1902], pp. 1: 29–31). For more on the rhetoric of manhood, character-building (often masculinist in focus), and muscular Christianity in mid to late 19th-century homiletic texts, see Roxanne Mountford, The Gendered Pulpit: Preaching in American Protestant Spaces (Carbondale, Ill., 2003), pp. 40–64. 45 Elizabeth P. Peabody, 21 June 1854, in Annals, p. 8: 491. 46 Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry Into the Sublime and the Beautiful and Other Pre-Revolutionary Writings, ed. David Womersley (London, 1998), p. 102.


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of Judgement in their attempts to convert sinners. Such attentiongrabbing scenes seem to have been a Methodist specialty, at least among the denominations in Annals’ nine extant volumes. Indiana preacher John Strange could supposedly transport his hearers one moment to the third heavens, and make its bright glories present and real to them, and the next he could bear them away to the world of wo, and freeze their blood with images of terror.47

Southern itinerant James Russell preached “in a strain of terror that seemed to make the world of despair visible” as well as in one of “thrilling rapture, that placed his hearers beside the Cross, or at the gate of Heaven”.48 Another contributor described the preaching of New York Methodist Lewis Pease: For more than two hours, there was a vast sea of up-turned faces, gazing at him, in breathless silence, as he delivered one of the most alarming sermons I ever heard. It seemed as if the preacher were actually standing between Heaven and Hell, with the songs of the redeemed and the wailings of the lost both vibrating on his ear, and throwing his whole soul into an effort to secure the salvation of his hearers.49

Again, it was as if the preacher was supernaturally gifted with the ability to experience, this time aurally, the invisible world. But whereas preachers of other denominations seemed to transport their hearers to the empyrean, Methodists seemed to lift the veil on heaven and hell, revealing the glories of God and the horrors of divine wrath. The Methodist preacher was imagined less as soaring angel than as suffering Christ – one who had descended into hell, figuratively, and who now wept for his people’s sins. Because the revival preacher’s success hinged on his ability to create a compelling, seemingly irresistible mass event, the Methodists also placed unusual emphasis on ministerial control. It was high praise to say, as one New York Methodist minister did of his colleague, that as the preacher warmed up, “his hearers surrendered themselves to his absolute control”.50 Surrender to the preacher was interpreted as surrender to God himself, an idea reinforced by comparisons of effective preachers to irresistible natural forces. The preacher’s voice sent

47 48 49 50

F.C. Holliday, 18 February 1859, in Annals, p. 7: 505. Lucius Quintus Curtius de Yampert, 27 March 1856, in Annals, p. 7: 410. J.B. Wakeley, 20 November 1860, in Annals, p. 7: 448. Jesse T. Peck, 18 May 1854, in Annals, p. 7: 747.

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“multitudes of hearers waving under its spell like the trees under the gale” or “swayed the multitude as the wind does the wheat in summer”.51 Or he “aroused and swayed [his audience] as seas are moved by storms” or moved 5,000 hearers at a camp meeting with “the momentum of a landslide”.52 These naturalistic metaphors imagined the sermon as an irresistible, often cataclysmic “act of God”, not as the product of human effort. Using violent metaphors to figure the relationship between a preacher and his hearers was not unique to Annals. They appear in the homiletic literature as well, where their theological underpinnings are more visible. For instance, Ebenezer Porter, President of Andover Theological Seminary and Bartlett Professor of Sacred Oratory, told his novice preachers that true pulpit eloquence “makes even the stripling warrior, ‘valiant in fight;’ and enables him to cut off the head of Goliath, with the sword wrested from his own hand”.53 The beheaded Goliath that looms here is less clearly the abstract principle of resistance than the imposing, recalcitrant congregation itself, a possibility embedded in Porter’s theologically orthodox assertion in another lecture that people are naturally inclined to oppose the truth. Dispensing with the biblical rhetoric, Amherst College President and Congregational minister Heman Humphrey steeled young pastors for battle as he directed them to arrive at their first pastorate with a stock of sermons written beforehand: “A soldier should have a good supply of cartridges, or at least should learn how to make them with facility, before he approaches the enemy’s lines”.54 Reformed Dutch minister George Bethune used similarly combative language in warning young pastors not to announce the heads of their sermon: “What would we think of a general, who should advise his adversary of his plan of attack? Yet the hearts of those we address are naturally at enmity with the truth”.55 Such advice may sound needlessly antagonistic, but it found justification both in the 51 Abel Stevens, 22 October 1860, in Annals, p. 7: 671; J.B. Wakeley, 20 November 1860, in Annals, p. 7: 448. 52 Charles F. Deems, 2 July 1856, in Annals, 7: 600; William M. Wightman, 2 March 1860, in Annals, p. 7: 411. 53 Ebenezer Porter, Lectures on Homiletics and Preaching, and on Public Prayer; together with Sermons and Letters (Andover and New York, 1834), p. 182. 54 Heman Humphrey, Thirty-four Letters to a Son in the Ministry (Amherst, New York, and Boston, 1842), p. 17. 55 George Bethune, “ ‘The Eloquence of the Pulpit, with Illustrations from St. Paul.’ An Oration before the Porter Rhetorical Society of the Theological Seminary at Andover, Mass. 1842” (Andover, 1842), p. 36.


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orthodox belief in innate depravity and in an evangelical revival culture that favored charismatic leaders who operated with aggressive self-confidence. The Aesthetics of Body and Voice The sermon began, in a sense, the moment the minister stepped into the pulpit. Nearly all contributors to Annals commented on their subjects’ physical appearance, many in connection with their preaching. One might expect contributors to remark favorably only on stereotypically masculine traits, but in practice, the bodies of the strange, meek, and, most of all, dying were highly valued in that they furthered the ideal of the preacher as one who bridged the visible and invisible worlds. It is no surprise that Annals contains numerous portraits of commanding figures who topped six feet in the pulpit. As a colleague described Congregationalist Elias Cornelius: When Mr. Cornelius arose in the pulpit, the good-will and attention of the audience were at once and effectually secured. A messenger of Divine truth stood before them, whose erect and noble figure and commanding person gave impressions of more than common dignity.56

Tall, confident men were as valued in the church as anywhere else, but it is significant that the reports in Annals praising such figures have little of the stridency that would suggest that contributors were trying to make a special claim for clerical masculinity. In fact, contributors often wrote admiringly of those ministerial bodies that defied masculine ideals. They noted fondly Episcopalian Carlos Wilcox’s “singularly gentle and meek appearance” and Episcopalian Frederick Beasley’s “slightly stooping frame” and “gentle voice”.57 These seemingly ambiguous virtues most likely drew their appeal in part from early 19th-century conceptions of a gentle, almost maternal Christ. More directly powerful were the ungainly preachers who loomed in the pulpit like strange presences charged with otherworldly messages. Alexander Bowie, an Alabama politician, related his impression of Presbyterian William Barr the first time he heard him preach: “If you never saw him, imagine a tall and exceedingly lean man, of a sallow (almost cadaverous) 56

Edward W. Hooker, 18 November 1848, in Annals, p. 2: 639. Joel Hawes, 10 November 1852, in Annals, p. 2: 657; Charles King, 9 May 1854, in Annals, p. 5: 480. 57

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complexion; with as little of the Chesterfieldian in his gait or manners as you can well conceive”. Bowie arrived skeptical of Barr’s reputed oratorical powers but was swept up in his fluent and impressive sermon on the torments of the damned, remarking that “[h]is personal appearance, and the sepulchral tones of his voice, doubtless added much to the effect of his fervid eloquence”.58 The Philadelphia Presbyterian James Patterson derived a similar power from his oddity: At least six feet in height, and so lank that he seemed still taller; eyes black, and set deep in his head; coal black, straight hair; skin dark, and complexion so pale as often to seem cadaverous; high cheek bones and large mouth … he seemed like an old prophet of Israel risen from the dead, – a messenger from another world, come to warn the wicked to flee the wrath to come.59

Such speakers gained power from their apparent otherness, most strikingly their “cadaverous” forms that created the illusion that they bore a message from beyond the grave. Nowhere did the antebellum desire to see the preacher as a link between this world and the next appear more strongly than in the recurrent trope of the minister who preached powerfully while suffering from a terminal illness. Hearers perceived the dying man’s sermon as the consummation of his pastoral labors and personal devotion – a pathetic valediction to his beloved congregation and a precious testimony from one who neared the promised land. One Philadelphia Episcopalian, for example, gained effectiveness from “that aspect of physical debility which indicated a messenger delivering his warnings from the brink of the grave, in near view of the eternal world”.60 A Boston Congregationalist suffering from a protracted illness who had a “frail bodily appearance” spoke with a “voice from behind the curtain of time” – “hard indeed was the heart of that hearer who was not affected”.61 Maine Congregationalist Edward Payson gave an especially moving sermon about a year before his death, while enduring the effects of a paralytic stroke. The contributor described how Payson limped into the pulpit, his palsied arm hanging at his side, and told his congregation that he had faithfully prayed for them for twenty years, that his time on earth neared its close, and that it pained him to see so 58 59 60 61

Alexander Bowie, 21 March 1849, in Annals, p. 4: 385. Thomas Brainerd, 6 August 1857, in Annals, p. 4: 426. Charles P. McIlvaine, 18 February 1851, in Annals, p. 5: 559. Jonathan Clement, 7 April 1852, in Annals, p. 2: 723.


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many still unconverted. As a dying man, he called them once more to repentance: The effect was more than electrical. I looked on that decrepit man, – one half of his body as good as dead, and then on the people, – that immense congregation literally melted into one mass of feeling and sympathy, – not tearful only, but weeping … and I felt what power there is in truth and love, from the throne of Grace, though it be borne in a broken, earthen vessel.62

In fact, the prevalence throughout Annals of the idea that the dying minister had a special ability to sway his congregation suggests that being a “broken vessel” could be a decided asset for a preacher. One of the most dramatic of the many reflections on final sermons came from John Fletcher, a former Presbyterian missionary to South America, who described the last address of Methodist preacher John Strange: I can see now that piercing eye and emaciated form, as he rose to deliver what proved to be his last message. I can still hear that clarion voice, as he made the walls of the church echo his prophetic and impressive text, – ‘I have fought a good fight, I have finished my course’ &c. The recollection of that sermon, – of its well-nigh matchless solemnity and unction, though heard when I was but nine years old, remains as vivid as ever; and, whether pausing amidst the fastnesses of the Alps, or labouring under a Tropic sun, that eye has still looked upon me, and that voice has often rung in my ears.63

For Fletcher, Strange’s last sermon seemed to transcend time and space, with his eye and voice living on for decades afterward. It came to him less as a memory than as a present reality – the eye gazing and the voice ringing in mountain passes and under tropic suns, the sublime extremes of these settings a suitable backdrop for the minister’s quasi-divine, disembodied presence. It was as if the preacher, in all the splendor of his final sermon, still bridged the natural and supernatural worlds. Preachers who were not gaunt or dying could summon moral authority through their tears. By crying, 19th-century ministers demonstrated the earnestness of their longing for their listeners’ salvation and modeled the psychic crisis that was supposed to attend the reception of spiritual truth. Methodists were the most likely to extol a preacher as a “weeping prophet”, but crying may have had special appeal for the ministers of more reserved denominations, who found in tears a relatively 62 63

Absalom Peters, 15 December 1847, in Annals, p. 2: 510. J.C. Fletcher, 19 January 1859, in Annals, p. 7: 510.

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dignified expression of emotion. A seminary-based colleague of Edward Payson admired his sermons for “always expressing the deep feeling of his own heart, and sometimes [being] accompanied with many tears”, a habit, he said, that never failed to make the congregation serious and attentive.64 New York Reformed Dutch pastor Jacob Brodhead would on occasion become so overwhelmed with emotion that he would let the tears “course down his cheeks”, after which he would simply “raise his spectacles on his forehead, wipe the tears from his eyes, and … resume his discourse” – occurrences that moved the congregation to tears as well.65 One New York Associate pastor often cried while preaching yet maintained decorum by not having any “trembling of the voice [or] distortion of the countenance”.66 And a North Carolina Episcopalian would “not unfrequently” be so moved by his message that he would “burst into tears, and pause until his intense emotion had subsided”; at times he sobbed.67 The cultural acceptability, even merit, of these clerical tears is evident in the virtual absence of any compensatory rhetoric of masculinity. Rather than referring to crying as, say, “manly tears”, or assuring readers that such emotion was not out of place in the pulpit, Annals contributors seem to have assumed that it was an appropriate expression of pastoral feeling. If preaching communicated visually, with listeners correlating the minister’s efficacy with his body and tears, it was also, of course, supremely aural. Or as Luther had claimed, “The ears alone are the organs of a Christian man”.68 A good sermon was, at its most basic level, an elaborate, sustained vocal performance, and 19th-century Americans often took a sensual delight in the sound of the sermon that had little to do with its theological content. No one pretended that every minister was a pleasure to hear, but many supposedly had musical, melodious, and thrilling voices. One Annals contributor wrote of a Connecticut Congregationalist that he had “one note on the minor key that was well nigh irresistible”, thus figuring the sermon as a melody with flourishes of pathos.69 Another likened the voice of a South Carolina Presbyterian

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Jonathan Cogswell, 24 November 1849, in Annals, p. 2: 511. Cornelius Van Santvoord, 3 August 1863, in Annals, “Reformed Dutch,” p. 9: 159. 66 William M. McElwee, 3 December 1863, in Annals, “Associate,” p. 9: 120. 67 Joseph C. Huske, 3 November 1857, in Annals, p. 5: 685. 68 Martin Luther, Luther’s Works, ed. Jaroslav Pelikan, 54 vols. (St Louis, 1968), p. 29: 224. 69 Joel Hawes, 10 November 1852, in Annals, p. 2: 657. 65


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to the instrument most often associated with sacred music: his “grand monotone… swell[ed] like a deep note of the organ through the spacious dome of his church”.70 A contributor reporting on a Baltimore Methodist wrote that his voice had “great compass and sweetness, sending out, at times, notes as solemn as those of the organ, and at other times as soft and musical as the gentle rill down the sides of the mountain”.71 Occasionally contributors gave a glimpse of the vocal structure of sermons as they described how preachers would begin slowly and sedately, then move toward a louder, more emphatic peroration. One New Jersey Presbyterian, for example, would begin to preach in a calm, low voice, then “[a]s the subject opened before his mind, he grew animated, raising the tone of his voice, speaking more rapidly, throwing his whole energies into the subject, and rising often to a very lofty and commanding style of pulpit oratory”.72 Building to a crescendo in this way was deliberate and conventional pulpit practice. In fact, to begin with animation was a fatal misstep. As Porter warned, “The discourse that begins in ecstasy, to be consistent with itself, must end in phrenzy”.73 Preachers were not supposed to begin in ecstasy, but listeners loved it when they ended up there. The reports in Annals reveal how sermon listening could be an intense and satisfying aesthetic experience in and of itself, a verbal performance one appreciated without necessarily experiencing any spiritual change. Across denominations, Annals contributors associated the most varied, natural, aesthetically satisfying range of vocal expression with extemporaneous delivery, a preference reflected in the homiletic literature as well. Although homileticians debated the respective virtues of preaching from a written text, an outline or “skeleton”, or simply thoughtful preparation, there was increasing consensus that it was better to speak than read. One argument against written sermons was that the vast majority of listeners did not need to trouble themselves with the theological intricacies one tended to find in written texts – that what people wanted and needed was practical spiritual guidance for their daily lives, not careful reasoning.74 More often, though, preachers 70

B.M. Palmer, 16 April 1857, in Annals, p. 4: 346. William Hamilton, 20 June 1859, in Annals, p. 7: 394. 72 James Scott, 9 April 1857, in Annals, p. 4: 431. 73 Porter, Lectures on Homiletics, p. 89. 74 As an example of how widespread the move toward extemporaneous preaching had become, the Presbyterian General Assembly issued a directive in 1841 strongly discouraging ministers from reading in the pulpit. A follow-up handbook chided that 71

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were warned against reading simply because it was dull. Scottish minister and rhetorician Hugh Blair, whose Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres (1783) went through twenty-six editions in Great Britain and thirty-seven in the US in the century after its first publication, strongly discouraged reading in the pulpit, on the grounds that no persuasive discourse could “have the same force when read, as when spoken”.75 Most preachers should speak from notes, he counseled, except for novices who needed to learn the art of sermon construction and experienced ministers who wanted to work through a theological issue for their own edification. He stressed that even ministers who wrote their sermons should speak rather than read by delivering the written discourse from memory. Extemporaneous preaching received a major boost with Unitarian Henry Ware, Jr.’s Hints on Extemporaneous Preaching, an influential treatise among liberals and conservatives alike, in which Ware argued that preaching without a manuscript gave the minister more “immediate contact with the hearts of his fellow men”.76 His description of the advantages of extemporaneous preaching over manuscript reading presented sermon delivery as a kinetic and mesmerizing performance: There is more natural warmth in the declamation, more earnestness in the address, greater animation in the manner, more of the lighting up of the soul in the countenance and whole mien, more freedom and meaning in the gesture; the eye speaks, and the fingers speak, and when the orator is so excited as to forget every thing but the matter on which his mind and feelings are acting, the whole body is affected, and helps to propagate his emotions to the hearer.77

The official line, then, from Blair, Ware, and the many homileticians who followed their lead was that extemporaneous preaching brought

the gospel was “announced to the great mass of the people, who are neither great readers nor thinkers” (Hints on Preaching Without Reading [Philadelphia, 1844], p. 30). As this wording suggests, preaching from a manuscript was increasingly seen as undemocratic. For a discussion of the debate over manuscript-based versus extemporaneous preaching in 19th-century England, where manuscript preaching was also on the wane, see Robert H. Ellison, The Victorian Pulpit: Spoken and Written Sermons in NineteenthCentury Britain (Selinsgrove, PA, 1998), pp. 33–42. 75 James L. Golden and Edward P.J. Corbett, The Rhetoric of Blair, Campbell, and Whately, with Updated Bibliographies (Carbondale, IL, 1990), p. 25. Hugh Blair, Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres (Philadelphia, 1844), p. 322. 76 Henry Ware, Jr., Hints on Extemporaneous Preaching, 3rd ed. (Boston, 1831), p. vii. 77 Ibid., p. 6.


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the preacher to life, allowing him to transmit the religious affections at the core of Christian belief and practice directly to his hearers. But what is remarkable in Ware’s description of the extemporaneous preacher, at least, is that there is a focus not on the effects of such preaching, such as reformation or conversion, but on the spectacle of the exemplary man of faith in the pulpit – on the excited preacher’s lit soul, free gesture, and speaking eyes and fingers. Many Annals contributors, especially among the Methodists and Baptists, shared this delight in the extemporaneous preacher’s display of emotion. Methodist William Wightman, a prolific contributor who sent Sprague numerous letters lavishly eulogizing his colleagues, described the “almost superhuman” effort of thought, imagination, and passion that marked the extemporaneous preaching of Henry Bascom, whose sermons, “unfettered by manuscript or brief ”, featured “the living voice with its ‘ring of a clear, uplifted, angel trumpet;’ and the flashing eye with its arrowy glance of piercing power”.78 For Methodists such as Wightman, preaching without notes created a sense of immediacy that reinforced the sense that the minister channeled divine power in the fervor of sermonic proclamation. But other denominations valued extemporaneity as well, whether because it suggested divine inspiration or merely a preacher’s spiritual earnestness and mental power. Contributors frequently mentioned a preacher’s ability to speak well with minimal notes – those who ascended the pulpit with only scraps of paper (e.g., one “scarcely larger than a man’s hand”79) or the briefest of outlines. They revered fluency, commending ministers who supposedly never hesitated for the right word and extemporaneous sermons that “would have needed no correction for the press”.80 Such praise rather paradoxically implied that the best extemporaneous preachers talked like books, an assumption that makes sense in light of the continuity of the stylistic virtues associated with orality and print in this period.81 78

William M. Wightman, 23 March 1852, in Annals, p. 7: 539. Tobias Spicer, 28 May 1859, in Annals, p. 7: 566. 80 Henry Ruffner, 28 January 1848, in Annals, p. 4: 289. 81 Walter Ong has described how the persistent orality of Western literate cultures meant that fluency and volubility were long perceived to be merits of print as well: “Concern with copia remains intense in western culture so long as the culture sustains massive oral residue – which is roughly until the age of Romanticism or even beyond. Thomas Babington Macaulay (1800–59) is one of the many fulsome early Victorians whose pleonastic written compositions still read much as an exuberant, orally composed oration would sound, as do also, very often, the writings of Winston Churchill 79

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Even letters describing ministers who spent their careers writing manuscript sermons offer evidence for the popularity of extemporaneous preaching. These ministers, many of whom established their careers early in the century or belonged to liturgical denominations, were often defended as having preached written sermons that were just as good as extemporaneous performances. Philadelphia Episcopalian Gregory Bedell was praised for sermons delivered “with great freeness of manner, and with the ease and animation of extempore address”.82 Similarly, Benjamin Butler, the United States Attorney General, wrote of New York Presbyterian John Chester’s sermons that they were “read from his manuscript, but freely and with a good deal of action”.83 Yet it was difficult for even a minister’s most enthusiastic memorialists to maintain that manuscript preaching packed the emotional punch of extemporaneity. When a colleague of Edward Payson praised his printed sermons for displaying a rich mind, biblical knowledge, brilliant powers of illustration, and other virtues, he also stressed that they had so much feeling that it was clear that “the living man who uttered them, was by no means confined to his manuscript”, as if anyone who could write so well must also have extemporized.84 This comment reversed the notion that the speech of a gifted extemporaneous preacher was fit to print as is; here, the emotion captured in a fine manuscript evidenced the minister’s ability to speak freely from the heart. As the antebellum ministry transitioned from manuscript preaching to more extemporaneous styles, Americans wanted bravura sermons that captured the best of both worlds – well-developed ideas that flowed forth in passionate, seemingly artless speech. Dynamics of Response Annals contributors recalled as particularly effective those sermons that elicited visible audience response. Not surprisingly, Methodist preachers drew the most dramatic reactions, with hearers mirroring the preacher’s heightened emotionalism. Contributors described Methodist ministers whose rousing sermons at camp meetings made (1874–1965)” (Walter Ong, Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word [London, 1982], p. 41). 82 Charles P. McIlvaine, 18 February 1851, in Annals, p. 5: 559. 83 B.F. Butler, 18 May 1856, in Annals, p. 4: 408. 84 Absalom Peters, 15 December 1847, in Annals, p. 2: 509.


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listeners shriek when they heard of the horrors of hell, fall on their knees crying to heaven for mercy, flee the camp meeting in terror, rush unthinkingly from their seats and swarm the pulpit when God’s love was extended, and shout for joy when they felt sure of their salvation.85 What Annals underscores is how peculiarly Methodist such occurrences were, at least among the preachers and denominations profiled in its extant volumes.86 Listeners’ bodily manifestations of spiritual experience were common in descriptions of Methodist ministers but rarely appeared in accounts of preachers in other denominations. For non-Methodist congregants, the only noted, visible evidence of a sermon’s efficacy was crying, which even then was seldom mentioned. Virginia Baptist John Kerr seems to have been one of the few nonMethodists with a gift for exciting tears. A fellow minister reported that when he had seen Kerr addressing large assemblies in the open air, thousands at a time had been “bathed in tears”,87 and a lawyer describing Kerr’s skill in delivering a funeral sermon reported that though the sermon itself displayed little if any original thought, the delivery was so tender and serious that the only appropriate response seemed to be “to let the heart grow liquid under his ardent breath, and pour itself out like water”. Listening to Kerr, he said, he wanted nothing more than to “indulge without restraint the luxury of tears, – a fresh gush being drawn forth with every stroke of the magician’s wand”.88 Although one suspects that funeral sermons were often accompanied by crying, regardless of the preacher’s skill, this report shows a preacher milking the occasion for all it was worth, as well as the intense, even sensual pleasure that a listener could experience at being moved to tears by a sermon. Certainly not all antebellum men experienced crying in church as a release. Although Virginia Presbyterian Nicholas Murray, for instance, reportedly called forth tears even from “hardened unbelievers and scoffers”, some men, “who were unused to weep, – alleged that they staid away because they could not control their feelings”.89 Eliciting 85 See William M. Wightman, 26 December 1855, in Annals, p. 7: 463; Jesse Peck, 18 May 1854, in Annals, p. 7: 747; Thomas A. Morris, 12 April 1860, in Annals, p. 7: 433; John McFerrin, 12 April 1860, in Annals, p. 7: 663. 86 For more on bodily responses to preaching, largely among the Methodists and the nineteenth-century’s new religious movements, see Ann Taves, Fits, Trances, and Visions: Experiencing Religion and Explaining Experience from Wesley to James (Princeton, 1999). 87 Jeremiah B. Jeter, 19 September 1848, in Annals, p. 6: 448. 88 William Hooper, 1 June 1858, in Annals, p. 6: 451. 89 Henry G. Comingo, 27 July 1857, in Annals, p. 4: 794.

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tears thus seems to have been a special marker of a sermon’s power, but relatively uncommon except among the Methodists. The picture of antebellum preaching that Annals brings into focus, then, is one with a gap between the visible passion of the preacher and the silence and introspection of his hearers. Even if the preacher successfully converted, instructed, or inspired his listeners, most white Protestant worship rituals did not require listeners to display any immediate sign of their spiritual change. This asymmetry suggests a certain balance of power between a preacher and his hearers. Listeners granted the preacher a special ability to see and experience divine realities and credited him with the ability to create experiences both wounding and rapturous. But in the moment of pulpit performance, they typically returned nothing except silent attention: no tears, cries, groans, shouts, or applause. Their still, silent bodies announced their dignity and autonomy while harboring a thousand ambiguities – respect, contemplation, apathy, ennui, judgement, and more. Ultimately, this inscrutable silence said that the minister was not responsible primarily to them, or they to him, but that each stood, first and foremost, before God. Slavery and Politics Annals also shows how thoroughly the antebellum US clergy sought to distance their vocation from the contentious issue of slavery. Annals is notably silent on this topic, though perhaps no more so than one would expect, given the reluctance of most antebellum US churches to take a unified stand against the institution.90 The very organization of Annals reflected Sprague’s desire to minimize slavery-inspired ecclesiastical discord; the series embraced the broadest denominational categories possible, with little regard for the sectional and ideological schisms of the Methodist, Baptist, and Presbyterian churches. Letter-writers largely avoided the issue, even when the profiled minister had been active in the antislavery cause. For instance, New England Baptist 90 For an analysis of the many reasons that most US churches implicitly supported slavery, see John R. McKivigan, The War Against Proslavery Religion: Abolitionism and the Northern Churches, 1830–1865 (Ithaca, NY, 1984) and John R. McKivigan and Mitchell Snay, “Religion and the Problem of Slavery in Antebellum America,” in Religion and the Antebellum Debate over Slavery, ed. John R. McKivigan and Mitchell Snay (Athens, GA, 1998), pp. 1–32.


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Gustavas Fellowes Davis served for the last two years of his life as a vice-president of the American Anti-Slavery Society (1834–36),91 but his Annals profile mentioned only his involvement in founding the Connecticut Literary Institution, his work on behalf of ministerial education and foreign missions, and the fact that “[a]ll our Benevolent Societies shared his sympathies”.92 Similarly, none of the four letters describing Presbyterian David Nelson mentioned that he had held executive positions for eight years in the AASS and the American and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society, and only one noted that while serving a church in Missouri, he had refused to allow slaveholders to participate in Communion.93 Reflecting Annals’ implicit investment in preserving the status quo, including slavery, the writer introduced this episode in Nelson’s ministry not to praise it but to hint at its unfairness, since some of the slaveholding members had been admitted to the church during Nelson’s own ministry. Although Annals contributors gave every indication of wanting to leave this most controversial of topics well enough alone, at times there was no avoiding it. For instance, Sprague rather inexplicably requested Abel Stevens to write a letter about the minister Orange Scott, who had broken from the Methodist Episcopal Church to help found the antislavery Wesleyan Methodist Church. In many ways, Stevens was the worst possible person to write in praise of Scott, since he had actively opposed Scott’s attempts to convince the Methodists to take a strong antislavery stand and had even been, as he put it, the “Editor of the Methodist organ of New England [during the controversy] and therefore his most public antagonist”. On the surface, his letter struck a conciliatory note of grudging respect, as he praised Scott for his energy, leadership, integrity, and boldness and testified that he had preached at camp meetings with “almost superhuman power”. Yet the antagonism generated by the slavery debates evidently lingered on, as he sniffed that Scott lacked “mental discipline” and “intellectual power” and critiqued him for an inordinate love of polemic. Nor could he refrain from saying that he believed that Scott had “erred most lamentably in the extreme positions he took”. Significantly, though, Stevens never mentioned “slavery” or “abolitionism” by name, instead referring euphemistically to “Methodist public 91

McKivigan, The War Against Proslavery Religion, p. 207. Robert Turnbull, 18 June 1856, in Annals, p. 6: 640. 93 McKivigan, The War Against Proslavery Religion, p. 214. William S. Potts, 27 July 1848, in Annals, p. 4: 686. 92

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controversies”.94 Here he captured the spirit of Annals, whose contributors made a concerted effort to memorialize the 19th-century ministry as a purely religious vocation, safely above divisive political issues such as slavery. Indeed, slavery is most visible in Annals in the commentary on Southern ministers who preached to slaves. North Carolina Presbyterian Richard B. Cater was praised as an excellent and tireless preacher to slaves, with many of them “delivered from the thraldom [sic] of Satan, and made free men in Christ”, metaphors that conveniently cast Satan and sin as the true enslavers.95 Other white preachers met with less success when they tried to carry the gospel to African-Americans. The slaves whom Virginia Presbyterian James Wharey addressed judged him “cold and weak” despite his supposed kindness, mainly because he did not preach extemporaneously.96 Similarly, Tennessee Episcopalian Stephen Patterson toiled fruitlessly when he took a pastorate at a country church with a predominately black membership. His style supposedly produced the same feeling of tranquil admiration that one experienced gazing upon a beautiful landscape; it did not consist of “words burning with God’s truth” that, like swords, “riv[e] up the human soul”. The “intellectual treats” he offered did not appeal to this congregation, and he never quite adapted his language “to their capacity”.97 These and one or two other instances aside, reports of preaching to slave or free black populations are almost entirely absent from Annals, even in the letters from Methodists and Baptists, the two denominations with the largest number of African-Americans.98 Such silences highlight how thoroughly antebellum whites deemed AfricanAmericans irrelevant to the construction of American Christianity. If Annals sought to memorialize the American ministry as a fundamentally apolitical institution, it also compensated for this renunciation of worldly power by reveling in any sign that a sermon had visibly moved political leaders. Such reports did little to create the impression that preachers were indirectly influencing politics or jurisprudence.

94

Abel Stevens, 22 October 1860, in Annals, pp. 7: 670–71. R.H. Chapman, 10 April 1857, in Annals, p. 4: 523. 96 William S. White, 18 January 1855, in Annals, p. 4: 606. 97 James H. Otey, 30 January 1858, in Annals, p. 5: 798. 98 Among the Methodists, a notable exception is Wightman’s glowing description of the South Carolina-based itinerant William Capers, whom he credited with starting a system of missions to the slaves on the rice and cotton plantations in Georgia and the Carolinas (26 December 1855, in Annals, p. 7: 463). 95


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Rather, since the sermons’ content was always more or less irrelevant in these anecdotes, it seems that magistrates were invoked for their social capital, or ability to lend prestige via association. Sprague claimed this capital for his entire project when his introduction to the seventh volume started its acknowledgements by thanking John McLean, a United States Supreme Court justice, for commending Annals to the “favourable regard” of the Methodists and for writing letters about ten Methodist preachers.99 Above and beyond the compliment paid by McLean’s letters, the Methodists could boast of at least making an impression on President Andrew Jackson, a lifelong Presbyterian, who was reportedly visibly moved under the preaching of Baltimore minister Joseph Frye. As Jackson listened, “tears ran down his face like a river”. Afterward he threw his arms around Frye’s neck and, “in no measured terms of gratitude and admiration, thanked him for his excellent discourse”.100 Presbyterian Sylvester Larned, a youthful wonder from Massachusetts who spent his short career in New Orleans, had a similar effect on a Louisiana Supreme Court judge. The judge attended out of curiosity, sure that the public had overestimated the young preacher, and “the effect upon him was perfectly overwhelming”.101 He was riveted to his seat, reduced to copious tears, and convinced that he would never listen to such preaching again until he had conformed his life to the Gospel requirements. Other contributors told of ministers powerfully affecting local eminences or, in the case of a Congressional chaplain, national lawmakers.102 Such reports demonstrate the symbolic power one could gain not merely from one’s own eloquence but from the political position and class standing of one’s listeners. Whereas the descriptions of preachers as, in their grandest moments, nearly superhuman beings with seemingly inspired insight into the unseen world claimed a specifically religious power for sermons, reports of politically and socially prominent hearers circulated coin in the secular economy of prestige. A monumental enterprise, Annals of the American Pulpit provides an unparalleled look at how antebellum Americans constructed the value of preaching in an age that gave it virtually no official sanction and little economic reward. The many ministers who contributed to 99

William B. Sprague, Preface, in Annals, p. 7: vi. Alfred Griffith, 18 March 1860, in Annals, p. 7: 472. 101 Alfred Hennen, 1 February 1854, in Annals, p. 4: 657. 102 See Joseph Hurlbut, 20 January 1857, in Annals, p. 4: 580; Herman M. Johnson, 24 December 1860, in Annals, p. 7: 710. 100

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Annals implicitly defended their chosen vocation, but they also show us the period’s criteria for successful pulpit performance. Exemplary preachers were those who seemed to see more clearly than ordinary mortals the divine realities of Christian faith and who spoke with eloquence, fervor, mental agility, and – so it seemed – inspiration. Their sermons generated a productive pain that led listeners to repentance, and yet, at the same time, listening to a master preacher could be a fascinating and indeed pleasurable visual and aural experience. At times, great preachers allowed listeners to experience nothing short of sublimity, an intense combination of fear and hope that transcended the emotions of everyday life. Annals drives home the centrality of actual preaching, as opposed to print or manuscript sermons, to Americans’ religious lives. Lacking the minister’s ethos, body, and voice, written sermons often became so much rubbish once the moment of delivery had passed. One Annals contributor told of visiting a minister who lay on his deathbed sifting through a large pile of manuscript sermons. Picking them up one by one, he selected only a few for preservation and directed his son to throw the rest into the fire.103 Another minister left fourteen hundred manuscript sermons, none written out in full because he had preached almost entirely extemporaneously; the value of these incomplete texts was effectively nil.104 Annals tried to bridge the gap between lived experience and the inadequacies of the written record by mining the repository of listeners’ memories. Although necessarily imaginative reconstructions, these reminiscences were essential to commemorating preaching as a significant, pleasurable, potentially life-transforming religious experience. Annals’ celebratory perspective can provide only part of the total picture of antebellum preaching. There is much yet to be learned from newspapers, memoirs, church records, letters, and manuscript diaries. In the spirit of this larger endeavor, it seems fitting to end with a voice of radical opposition – that of Robert Ingersoll, 19th-century America’s most famous free thinker. He recalled with marked antipathy his experience of listening to preaching as a boy before the Civil War: I had no desire to be “converted,” did not want a “new heart” and had no wish to be “born again.”

103 104

See Horace Webster, 18 May 1858, in Annals, p. 5: 529. Clark Bissell, 13 August 1850, in Annals, p. 2: 488.


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But I heard one sermon that touched my heart, that left its mark, like a scar, on my brain. One Sunday I went with my brother to hear a Free Will Baptist preacher. He was a large man, dressed like a farmer, but he was an orator. He could paint a picture with words. He took for his text the parable of “the rich man and Lazarus.” He described Dives, the rich man – his manner of life, the excesses in which he indulged, his extravagance, his riotous nights, his purple and fine linen, his feasts, his wines, and his beautiful women. Then he described Lazarus, his poverty, his rags and wretchedness, his poor body eaten by disease, the crusts and crumbs he devoured, the dogs that pitied him. He pictured his lonely life, his friendless death. Then, changing his tone of pity to one of triumph – leaping from tears to the heights of exultation – from defeat to victory – he described the glorious company of angels, who with white and outspread wings carried the soul of the despised pauper to Paradise – to the bosom of Abraham. Then, changing his voice to one of scorn and loathing, he told of the rich man’s death. He was in his palace, on his costly couch, the air heavy with perfume, the room filled with servants and physicians. His gold was worthless then. He could not buy another breath. He died, and in hell he lifted up his eyes, being in torment. Then, assuming a dramatic attitude, putting his right hand to his ear, he whispered, “Hark! I hear the rich man’s voice. What does he say? Hark! ‘Father Abraham! Father Abraham! I pray thee send Lazarus that he may dip the tip of his finger in water and cool my parched tongue, for I am tormented in this flame.’ ” . . For the first time I understood the dogma of eternal pain – appreciated “the glad tidings of great joy.” For the first time my imagination grasped the height and depth of the Christian horror. Then I said: “It is a lie, and I hate your religion. If it is true, I hate your God.” From that day I have had no fear, no doubt. For me, on that day, the flames of hell were quenched. From that day I have passionately hated every orthodox creed. That Sermon did some good.105

Ingersoll captures the emotional roller-coaster ride that the more dramatic 19th-century preachers took their hearers on – the dizzying ascent from Lazarus’ dejection to his heavenly triumph, the plunge from Dives’ worldly riches to his torments in hell. As in Annals, the minister seems to witness spiritual scenes that his listeners cannot. If the reformed and liturgical denominations were less histrionic and more inclined to elucidate theological or moral complexity, Annals shows that they, too, placed a premium on a minister’s ability to present Christian teaching with emotional force. In a backhanded compliment 105

Robert Ingersoll, Works, 12 vols. (New York, 1909), pp. 4: 15–17.

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to the 19th-century sermon, Ingersoll rejected Christianity precisely because, at last, through a powerful sermon, he understood it on a gut level – and hated it. Ingersoll’s account reminds us how polarizing preaching could be, and like Annals, it points to the power of the antebellum ministry. Far from neutered or feminized, preachers could still provoke strong reactions, whether the various religious and aesthetic satisfactions of those who listened appreciatively, or the visceral antipathy of those who did not. As Annals shows, sympathetic listeners augmented the minister’s eloquence with their own vivid and surprisingly secular interpretations of pulpit performance. Their complex rhetoric provides a window on the lived religion of America’s past, allowing us to experience, in some measure, the 19th-century pulpit through the eyes and ears of the worshippers in the pews.

BIBLIOGRAPHY This bibliography is divided into five major sections: Religious History, History of Preaching, Homiletic and Rhetorical Theory, Leading Preachers, and Selected Primary Sources. Providing an exhaustive list in any of these categories – or even a comprehensive bibliography of a single leading preacher – would require a lengthy volume of its own. This bibliography thus focuses primarily on the major sources mentioned in this collection. Religious History General Cashdollar, Charles D., The Transformation of Theology: 1830–1890: Positivism and Protestant Thought in Britain and America (Princeton, 1989). Kane, J. Herbert, A Global View of Church Missions from Pentecost to the Present (Grand Rapids, MI, 1971). Lang, Bernhard, Sacred Games: A History of Christian Worship (New Haven, 1997). Latourette, K.S., A History of the Expansion of Christianity, 7 vols. (London, 1938 etc). Meyer, Michael, Judaism Within Modernity (Detroit, 2001). Moore, James R., The Post-Darwinian Controversies: A Study of the Protestant Struggle to Come to Terms with Darwin in Great Britain and America, 1870–1900 (Cambridge, 1979). Neill, Stephen, A History of Christian Missions (Harmondsworth, 1964). Newport, Kenneth G.C., Apocalypse and Millennium: Studies in Biblical Eisegesis (Cambridge, 2000). Walls, Andrew, The Missionary Movement in Christian History (New York, 1996). Britain Bray, Gerald, ed., The Anglican Canons 1529–1947 (Woodbridge, Suffolk, 1998). Burns, Arthur, The Diocesan Revival in the Church of England c. 1800–1870 (Oxford, 1999). Chadwick, Owen, The Victorian Church (New York, 1966). Church, Richard William, The Oxford Movement. Twelve Years, 1833–1845, ed. Geoffrey Best (Chicago, 1970). Corsi, Pietro, Science and Religion: Baden Powell and the Anglican Debate, 1800–1860 (Cambridge, 1988). Currie, Robert, Alan Gilbert, and Lee Horsley, eds., Churches and Churchgoers: Patterns of Church Growth in the British Isles Since 1700 (Oxford, 1977). Dennis, Barbara, Charlotte Yonge (1823–1901) Novelist of the Oxford Movement: A Literature of Victorian Culture and Society (New York, 1992). Elder, Gregory P., Chronic Vigour: Darwin, Anglicans, Catholics, and the Development of a Doctrine of Providential Evolution (Lanham, MD, 1996). Etherington, Norman, ed., Missions and Empire, in the Oxford History of the British Empire Companion Series (Oxford, 2005). Flanagan, Thomas, A History of the Church in England, from the Earliest Period, to the Re-establishment of the Hierarchy in 1850, vol. 2 (London, 1857). Gill, Sean, Women and the Church of England from the Eighteenth Century to the Present (London, 1994).

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Gillow, Joseph, A Literary and Biographical History or Bibliographical Dictionary of the English Catholics from the Breach with Rome, in 1534 to the Present Time, vols. 1 and 4 (London, 1885, 1902). Griffin, Susan M., Anti-Catholicism and Nineteenth-Century Fiction (Cambridge, 2004). Hansen, Holgar Bernt, and Michael Twaddle, eds., Christian Missionaries and the State in the Third World (Oxford, 2002). Hastings, Adrian, The Construction of Nationhood: Ethnicity, Religion and Nationalism (Cambridge, 1997). Herring, George, What Was the Oxford Movement? (London, 2002). Hinde, Wendy, Catholic Emancipation: A Shake to Men’s Minds (Oxford, 1992). Hogan, Edmund M., The Irish Missionary Movement: A Historical Survey, 1830–1980 (Dublin, 1990). Imberg, Rune, In Quest of Authority: The “Tracts for the Times” and the Development of the Tractarian Leaders, 1833–1841, (Bibliotheca historico-ecclesiastica lundensis) 16 (Lund, 1987). Inglis, Kenneth, Churches and the Working Classes in Victorian England (London, 1963). Jay, Elisabeth, The Religion of the Heart: Anglican Evangelicalism and the NineteenthCentury Novel (Oxford, 1979). Klaus, Robert J., The Pope, the Protestants, and the Irish: Papal Aggression and AntiCatholicism in Mid-Nineteenth Century England (New York, 1987). Knight, Frances, The Nineteenth-Century Church and English Society (Cambridge, 1995). Larsen, Timothy, Contested Christianity: The Political and Social Contexts of Victorian Theology (Waco, TX, 2004), Machin, G.I.T., The Catholic Question in English Politics, 1820 to 1830 (Oxford, 1964). ——, Politics and the Churches in Great Britain 1832 to 1868 (Oxford, 1977). Nockles, Peter, The Oxford Movement in Context: Anglican High Churchmanship, 1760–1857 (Cambridge, 1994). Norman, E.R., Anti-Catholicism in Victorian England (New York, 1968). ——, The English Catholic Church in the Nineteenth Century (1984; repr. Oxford, 1985). O’Malley, Patrick R., Catholicism, Sexual Deviance, and Victorian Gothic Culture (Cambridge, 2006). Paz, D.G., Popular Anti-Catholicism in Mid-Victorian England (Stanford, CA, 1992). Pereiro, James, Ethos and the Oxford Movement: at the Heart of Tractarianism (Oxford, 2008). Peschier, Diana, Nineteenth-Century Anti-Catholic Discourses (Houndmills, Basingstoke, 2005). Porter, Andrew, “ ‘Cultural Imperialism’ and Protestant Missionary Enterprise, 1780– 1914,” Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 25.3 (1997), 367–91. ——, Religion versus Empire? (Manchester, 2004). Reed, John Shelton, Glorious Battle: The Cultural Politics of Victorian Anglo-Catholicism (Nashville, 1996). Rogerson, John, Old Testament Criticism in the Nineteenth Century: England and Germany (Philadelphia, 1985). Rowell, Geoffrey, Hell and the Victorians: A Study of the Nineteenth-Century Theological Controversies Concerning Eternal Punishment and the Future Life (Oxford, 1974). Sidenvall, Erik, After Anti-Catholicism: John Henry Newman and Victorian Britain, 1845–c. 1890 (London, 2006). Skinner, Simon, Tractarians and the ‘Condition of England’: The Social and Political Thought of the Oxford Movement (Oxford, 2004). Snell, K.D.M., and Paul S. Ell, Rival Jerusalems: The Geography of Victorian Religion (Cambridge, 2000).

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Stanley, Brian, The Bible and the Flag (Leicester, 1990). ——, ed. Church Missions and the Enlightenment (Grand Rapids, MI, 2001). ——, The History of the Baptist Missionary Society 1792–1992 (Edinburgh, 1992). Stevens, Laura M., The Poor Indians: British Missionaries, Native Americans, and Colonial Sensibility (Philadelphia, 2004). Stock, Eugene, The History of the Church Missionary Society. 3 vols. (London, 1899). Strong, Rowan, Anglicanism and the British Empire, c.1700–1850 (Oxford, 2007). Studdert-Kennedy, Gerald, Providence and the Raj: Imperial Mission and Missionary Imperialism (Delhi, 1998). Thorne, Susan, Congregational Missions and the Making of an Imperial Culture in 19thCentury England (Stanford, 1999). Toon, Peter, Evangelical Theology 1833–1856: A Response to Tractarianism (Atlanta, 1979). Wallis, Frank H., Popular Anti-Catholicism in Mid-Victorian Britain (Lewiston, NY, 1993). Ward, Kevin, and Brian Stanley, eds., The Church Missionary Society and World Christianity, 1799–1999 (Grand Rapids, 2000). Warren, Max, The Missionary Movement from Britain in Modern History (London, 1965). Wheeler, Michael, The Old Enemies: Catholic and Protestant in Nineteenth-Century English Culture (Cambridge, 2006). Wolff, Robert Lee, Gains and Losses: Novels of Faith and Doubt in Victorian England (New York, 1977). Wolffe, John, God and Greater Britain: Religion and National Life in Britain and Ireland 1843–1945 (London, 1994). ——, The Protestant Crusade in Great Britain 1829–1860 (Oxford, 1991). Yates, Nigel, Anglican Ritualism in Victorian Britain 1830–1910 (Oxford, 1999). America Abzug, Robert H. Cosmos Crumbling: American Reform and the Religious Imagination (New York, 1994). Alhstrom, Sidney E., A Religious History of the American People (New Haven, CT, 1972). Brickner, Barnett R., The Jewish Community of Cincinnati. 1817–1933. (Unpubl. Diss., University of Cincinnati, 1933). Brown, Candy Gunther, The Word in the World: Evangelical Writing, Publishing, and Reading in America, 1789–1880 (Chapel Hill, NC, 2004). Carwardine, Richard J., Evangelicals and Politics in Antebellum America (New Haven, 1993). Cohen, Naomi W., Encounter With Emancipation. The German Jews in the United States 1830–1914 (Philadelphia, 1984). ——, Jews in Christian America. The Pursuit of Religious Equality (New York, 1992). Conway, Moncure Daniel, Autobiography, Memories and Experiences (Boston, 1904). Dorrien, Gary, The Making of American Liberal Theology: Imagining Progressive Religion 1805–1900 (Louisville, 2001). Finke, Roger, and Rodney Stark, The Churching of America, 1776–1990: Winners and Losers in Our Religious Economy. 2d ed. (New Brunswick, 2005). Foster, Charles I., An Errand of Mercy: The Evangelical United Front 1790–1837 (Chapel Hill, NC, 1960). Franchot, Jenny, Roads to Rome: The Antebellum Protestant Encounter with Protestantism (Berkeley, 1994). Garner, Nancy G., “The Woman’s Christian Temperance Union: A Woman’s Branch of American Protestantism,” in Reforming the Center: American Protestantism, 1900 to

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INDEX Abolition of slavery: 100, 141, 144, 145, 151, 152, 159, 160, 202, 373, 376, 396, 404, 446 Adler, Herman Nathan: 201 Adler, Samuel: 468, 469 African-American sermon: 422, 423, 436, 438, 439, 441, 443, 447, 451, 454, 456 African-American preacher: 9, 438, 443, 490, 519, 525 Ahlstrom, Sydney: 415 Allegory: 133, 496 Allen, William G.: 438 Altmann, Alexander: 461–462, 463 Americanization (process of ): 458, 470–473, 475, 476 Anderson, Benedict: 182 Anderson, Martin: 531, 532 Analogy: 80, 86, 125, 390, 515 Anglo-Catholicism: 52, 234, 264, 265, 313, 315, 321, 333, 334 Anti-Catholicism: 6, 210, 233–267, 314–315, 333, 334 Anti-slavery Movement: 141, 143, 151, 159, 160, 441–442, 480, 488 (see also Slavery) Aristotle: 80, 102, 284, 495, 507, 513 Augustine, Aurelius: 19, 490, 494, 501, 502, 517, 519, 528 De Doctrina Christiana: 19, 22, 495, 528 Asmonean (The): 474 Augustine of Canterbury: 129, 224–226, 251, 252 Beecher, Henry Ward: 5, 115–136, 358, 382, 491, 502, 508, 512, 534 Beecher, Lyman: 122, 345, 357, 358, 362 Benson, Christopher: 289, 290, 299 Benson, Martin: 144, 145, 150 Biblical Criticism: 115–136, 282 Biblical Interpretation: 78, 115–136, 259 Bill for the Relief of Persons in Holy Orders: 52 “Black codes”: 423 Blair, Hugh: 102, 474, 502, 544 Bowden, John William: 17 Bradlaugh, Charles: 51

British and Foreign Schools Society: 53 Brooks, Phillips Lectures on Preaching: 3 Buller, Antony: 17 Burial Act, 1880: 54 Campbell, Augustus: 174 Campbell, George: 501, 544, 559 Lectures on Systematic Theology and Pulpit Eloquence: 22, 559, 574 Canada: ix, xii, xiii, 349, 372, 378, 389, 391, 398, 399, 400, 401, 403, 408, 413, 488, 489 Canadian War: 474 Carigal, Hayim Isaac: 9, 466 Carlyle, Thomas: 4 Catholicism: 6, 7, 27, 52, 82, 175, 207–232, 234–267, 288, 313, 315, 321, 324, 333 (see also Anglo-Catholicism and Anti-Catholicism) Chadwick, Owen: 46, 210, 272, 308 Chalmers, Thomas: 182 Church Missionary Society: 6 Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints: 10 (see also Mormons) Church-State relations: 63, 74 Cincinnati: 9, 122, 341, 402, 468, 471, 476, 477, 485, 486, 487 Citizenship: 9, 144, 172, 413–436, 451 Civil War: 413–436, 457, 478, 482, 484, 536 Collins, Wilkie: 7, 328, 331, 334 The Moonstone: 7, 320, 328, 329 Columbian Orator (The): 440 Committee of Council on Education: 53 Conway, Moncure Daniel: 476, 477, 478 Crimean War: 179, 181, 183, 185, 186, 197, 203, 204 Crisis of faith: 304, 337 Croly, George: 183, 184, 191, 196, 235, 240, 241, 242, 250 Cuvier, Georges: 278, 284 Darwin, Charles: 120, 121, 123, 131, 269, 270, 271, 273, 276, 278, 279, 280, 284, 286, 287, 288, 289, 290, 295, 296, 300, 301, 304, 305

568

index

On the Origin of Species: 7, 273, 276, 289, 291, 293, 295, 296, 300, 303, 304 Deceased Wife’s Sister Act: 52 Derashah: 9, 461, 465, 469 De Sola, David Aaron: 463 Dexter, Henry Martyn: 427, 428, 432, 434 Domesticity: 336, 386, 411 Douglass, Frederick: 3, 9, 439–451, 454, 455, 457 Dueling: 331, 341–366 Eden, Charles Page: 17 Sermons Preached at S. Mary’s in Oxford: 35 Edwards, Jonathan: 468, 498 Edwards, O.C.: 4, 17, 22, 32, 495 Einhorn, David: 471, 472, 480 Eliot, George: 310, 311, 322, 323 Life of Jesus: 5 Eloquence: 22, 31, 113, 329, 334, 335, 342, 371, 460, 465, 484, 486, 491, 495, 511, 515, 520, 538, 540, 551, 552, 554 Emancipation: 160, 179, 423, 435, 444, 445 The Emancipation Proclamation: 449 Emancipation, Catholic: 195, 202, 209, 213–214, 231, 234–236, 238, 244, 246, 248, 249, 259 Emancipation, Jewish: 99, 100, 459, 480 Emerson, Ralph Waldo: 473, 477, 531 Enthymeme: 119, 135 Erasmus, Desiderius: 22 Essays and Reviews: 5 Evangelism: 173, 371 Evans, Robert Wilson: 23 Evolution, concept of, in the sermon: 270–308 Exegesis: 63, 131, 152, 156, 166, 245 Farrar, Frederick William: 5, 116–123, 127–132, 135, 136 Fiction: 311, 314–334 Finney, Charles G. Memoirs: 3 Fluegel, Maurice: 485 Friedenberg, Robert: 467, 468, 479, 486 Froude, James Anthony: 317, 324 Froude, Richard Hurrell: 17

Gates, Henry Louis, Jr.: 437 Genesis (Book of ): 7, 116, 127, 133, 187, 270, 289–290, 299, 303–305 Genovese, Eugene D.: 413 Goodman, Tobias: 9, 187, 463 Goodwin, Harvey: 23 Gorham Judgment: 52 Gottheil, Gustav: 485–487 Harris, Elizabeth From Oxford to Rome: 7 Harrison, Benjamin: 17, 30, 47–55 Prophetic Outlines of the Christian Church and the Antichristian Power: 30–31 Haskalah (Jewish Enlightenment): 462 Hazan: 465, 475 Henslow, George: 269, 298, 299, 301–304, 306 High Church: 62, 179, 235, 249, 254, 309, 312 Higher Criticism: 70, 114 Higher Criticism Controversy: 70, 116–118 Hirsch, Emil G.: 486–487 Holmes, John Haynes: 457 Homiletics: 10, 32, 33, 49, 61, 102, 458, 461, 488, 490, 502, 538, 543 (see also Preaching and Sermon) Jewish: 461–488 Tractarian: 17, 18–23, 44 Homiletic Situation: 460, 491, 502 Hortatory rhetoric: 33, 35, 42, 473 Israelite (The): 470, 472, 473, 484 James, William: 10–11, 492 Jeremiad: 444–447 Judaism: 116, 205, 458–488 Keble, John: 15, 16, 17, 21, 36, 38, 39, 44, 55, 56, 316 Occasional Papers: 19, 50, 54 Primitive Tradition Recognised in Holy Scripture: 45–46 Sermons, Academical and Occasional: 36, 39 Keble, Thomas: 17, 36, 38, 43 King, Martin Luther: 9, 439, 448–458 Kingsley, Charles: 7, 242, 275, 278–288, 295, 304, 305, 499

index Lecture: 26, 28, 32, 90, 176, 177, 209, 228, 230, 233, 237, 258, 281, 307, 389, 477, 538 Leeser, Isaac: 468–470, 485–486 Lilienthal, Max: 9, 468, 470, 474, 476, 478–488 And interfaith sermon: 479–484 Lincoln, Abraham: 415, 417, 418, 419, 420, 421, 424, 435, 450, 451, 454, 455, 483, 503 Rhetoric of: 415, 473 Linton, Eliza Lynn Under Which Lord: 7, 314 Literalism, Biblical: 70 Low Church: 313–314 Manning, Henry Edward: 6, 17, 19–21, 32, 34, 44–55, 210, 222–232, 254 The English Church: 45 The Rule of Faith: 45, 47 Sermons Preached before the University of Oxford: 35 Marks, David Woolf: 461–463 Marriott, Charles: 17, 23, 30–35 Lectures on the Epistle of St. Paul to the Romans: 31–32 Sermons Preached before the University, and in Other Places: 35 Maybaum, Siegmund: 460 McKerrow, Raymie: 60 Menzies, Alfred: 17, 117 Metaphor: 7, 9, 154, 172, 242, 270–271, 445, 490, 515, 534, 535 Methodism: 322, 380, 381, 382, 383, 385, 386, 397, 405, 501, 521 Meyer, Michael: 472, 473 Ministry: 5, 8, 10, 60, 63, 65, 66, 69, 75, 76, 79, 86–91, 122, 153, 163, 207, 372, 394, 477, 501, 524, 526, 529, 546, 549, 550, 554 Mormons: 489, 490, 491, 496, 503–520 (see also Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints) Book of Mormon: 489, 505, 508, 509 Mormon Preachers: 506, 508, 512, 516, 517 Morris, Joseph: On Preaching: 464 Mott, Lucretia: 370, 376, 379, 380 Mullen, H.: 438, 439, 444 Narrative: 80, 215, 245, 289, 310–317, 346, 369, 481, 483

569

Biographical: 411, 441–444, 524 Historical: 247–250, 505, 515 National Society for Promoting the Education of the Poor: 52 Nelson, Horatio: 146, 181, 183, 187, 199, 200, 203 Newman, John Henry: 7, 17, 20, 23, 26, 29, 32, 33, 36, 39, 40, 44, 55 Apologia Pro Vita Sua: 18 Fifteen Sermons Preached before the University of Oxford: 32, 33, 40 The Idea of a University: 18, 24 Lectures on Justification: 26–27, 29, 33 Parochial Sermons: 2–3 Parochial and Plain Sermons: 41 Sermons on Subjects of the Day: 18 Noll, Mark: 423, 414, 415, 422, 501, 502 Obama, Barack: 487 Occident (The): 469, 474, 478, 485–486 Oratory: 1, 3, 9, 16, 21, 22, 61, 107, 211, 228, 334, 371, 372, 376, 390, 395, 396, 398, 399, 400, 401, 407, 437, 438, 439, 443, 444, 450, 454, 456, 461, 468, 490–519, 538, 543 Owen, Richard: 278, 284 Oxford Movement: 15, 16, 70, 255 Palmer, William: 17 Parable: 80–81, 380 Biblical: 380, 553 Parker, Theodore: 3, 442 Penny Pulpit (The): 185 Perceval, Arthur Philip: 17, 30 Plain Lectures on the Epistle of Paul the Apostle to the Ephesians: 31 Phillips, Wendell: 458 The Pulpit: 458 Pinto, Joseph Jesurun: 465 Prevost, George: 17, 36, 44 Princess Charlotte: 9, 181, 182, 185, 186, 187, 193, 196, 204, 463 Plain Sermons, by Contributors to the “Tracts for the Times”: 20, 36–44 Plymouth Congregational Church, Brooklyn: 122, 382 Preaching (see also Homiletics and Sermon): Antebellum: 551–553 Catholic: 6, 207–232 Christian: xi, 22, 68, 528 Evangelical: 101, 167, 169

570

index

Interfaith: vi, 457, 458, 460,461, 486, 487, 488 Jewish: 459–488 University: 11, 36, 40 Presbyterian: 4, 65, 117, 122, 148, 304, 346, 347, 353, 354, 357, 361, 376, 383, 397, 414, 419, 421, 427, 477, 500, 522, 523, 529, 531, 535, 539, 540, 541, 542, 543, 546, 547, 549, 550, 551 Pritchard, Charles: 290, 292–294, 296, 305 Prophecy: 30, 33, 40, 79, 80, 148, 149, 245, 246, 255, 325, 368, 440, 502 Public Speaking: 329, 368, 376, 386, 397, 398, 503, 507, 517, 518 Public Worship Regulation Act: 52 Pusey, Edward Bouverie: 15–19, 31, 36, 38, 39, 40, 41, 55, 56 A Course of Sermons on Solemn Subjects: 18–19 Daniel the Prophet: 27–28, 30 The Miracles of Prayer: 34 Patience and Confidence the Strength of the Church: 19 Sermons Preached between A.D. 1859 and 1872: 33, 34 Race: 124, 129, 151, 153, 163, 165, 167, 173, 225, 237, 281, 374, 386, 405, 418, 425, 428, 429–432, 435–437, 440, 453, 458, 484, 494 Rationalism: 70, 299, 307 Reconstruction (period): 8, 120, 416, 422, 423, 424, 425, 426, 430, 435 Repetition: 438, 483 Rhetoric: 3, 5, 6, 17, 50, 54, 60, 84, 102, 103, 115, 123, 142, 145, 149, 150, 151, 152, 153, 159, 171, 173, 179, 180, 236, 239, 273, 276, 373, 404, 437–438, 443, 447, 455, 453, 464, 467, 473, 478, 485–488, 489, 491, 492, 495, 498, 499, 500, 501, 515, 516, 524, 531, 533, 534, 554 Rhetoric of the invisible: 492–494, 496–499, 502, 503, 507, 509, 510, 514, 515, 518, 520 Rhetorical criticism: 1–2, 25, 56 Rhetorical genre: 16, 133, 460 Rhetorical strategy: 116, 347, 453–455, 512 Russell, John: 53, 222 Saperstein, Marc: 187, 460, 463, 466 Sarna, Jonathan D.: 465, 460, 463, 466 Secularization: 180, 312, 318, 323, 330

Seixas, Gershom Mendes: 465, 466, 467, 468 Sermon: 17–22, 42 (see also Homiletics and Preaching) Anglican: 62 Anti-Catholic: 233–267 Black: 438 Catholic: 210–232 Didactic: 59–108 Form of: 102–103, 187 Jewish: 459–470, 473, 482, 484 Plain: 22–23, 40, 42 University: 23–24, 32 Visitation: 5, 24–25, 44, 173, 174 Sermon composition: 102–103, 462 Sermon, theory of: 59, 91–101, 462, 463 Sermon novel: 309–338 Shelley, Percy B.: 51, 174 Slavery: 9, 100, 139–180, 366, 374, 376, 379, 413–436, 438, 445–447, 548–550 (see also Anti-slavery Movement) Smith, Joseph: 10, 489, 504–509, 517 Social Gospel (movement): 115, 404, 488 Sprague, William Buell: 10, 346, 523, 524, 527, 545, 549, 551 Annals of the American Pulpit: 346, 349, 350, 523, 527, 551 Talmud: 463, 466, 478 Taylor, Gardner Calvin: 9, 439, 451–456 Text (Scriptural, in sermon): 45, 46, 47, 52, 109, 129, 145, 149, 153, 187–189, 190, 253, 282, 358, 380, 387, 462, 479 Tocqueville, Alexis de: 519, 521 Tractarian: 15, 17, 65, 66, 67, 70, 255–6, 313, 315, 316, 319, 331, 337 Tractarian controversy: 172 Tractarian novel: 318, 321 Tractarian poetry: 318 Tractarian sermon: 333 Tracts for the Times: 15, 17, 20, 37, 38, 41, 55, 214 Unitarian controversy: 474 Unitarian minister: 173, 186, 190, 202, 303 Unitarianism: 147, 349, 461 Unitarian-Universalism: 482 Vickers, Thomas: 474, 478, 479, 484 Warburton, William: 30, 176 Wesley, John: xi, 374, 380, 381, 385, 386, 387, 394, 547

index Wesley, Susanna: 394 Whately, Richard: 5, 22, 59–114 And sermon composition: 92–102, 102–113 Elements of Rhetoric: 59, 60, 61, 71, 75, 102, 103, 110, 111, 112, 113 Five Sermons on Several Occasions: 82 Theology of: 62–64 Wilberforce, Samuel: 173, 270, 274, 275, 287, 288 Wilberforce, William: 139, 143, 149, 270, 382 Willard, Frances E.: xi, 369, 371, 372, 374, 377, 382–386, 389–395, 397, 398, 400, 402, 407, 410 Woman in the Pulpit: 374, 377, 393, 402

571

Williams, Isaac: 15, 17, 20, 36, 39, 43, 44 A Series of Sermons on the Epistle and Gospel: 20 Wilson, Robert Francis: 17, 36 Wise, Isaac Meyer: 468, 469, 471,472, 473, 474, 476, 487 Wiseman, Nicholas: 6 Witherspoon, John: 349, 357, 468 Woman’s Christian Temperance Union: 8 Yonge, Charlotte: 310, 313, 314, 316, 318, 320, 330, 337 The Clever Woman of the family: 335, 337 Young, Brigham: 507, 509, 512, 515, 516, 517 Youmans, Letitia: ix, xii, 372, 374, 377, 389, 390, 391, 398, 400–402, 410, 411

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