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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 December 2011
This article is a contribution to the recent debate in this Journal between Ralph Brown and Boyd Hilton concerning the nature of British nineteenth-century premillennialism.1 It discusses the premillennialists' view of time and argues that a sense of God's involvement with the historical process led them to affirm temporal development and progress as the media for divine activity. It also discusses their view of the destiny of the earth and shows how premillennialist eschatology was fully materialistic, placing a high view on the body and the physical world. These are important factors in accounting for the premillennialist social vision.
1 The relevant articles are Brown, Ralph, ‘Victorian Anglican Evangelicalism: the radical legacy of Edward Irving’, this Journal lviii (2007), 675–704Google Scholar; Hilton, Boyd, ‘Evangelical social attitudes: a reply to Ralph Brown’, this Journal lx (2009), 119–25Google Scholar; and Brown, Ralph, ‘Evangelical social thought’, this Journal lx (2009), 126–36Google Scholar.
2 Brown, ‘Victorian Anglican Evangelicalism’, passim, esp. pp. 679, 684, and ‘Evangelical social thought’, 126–7.
3 Idem, ‘Victorian Anglican Evangelicalism’, 685.
4 Boyd Hilton, The age of atonement: the influence of Evangelicalism on social and economic thought, 1785–1865, Oxford 1998.
5 Ibid. 14.
6 Ibid. 5–7.
7 Ibid. 15–16.
8 Ibid. 10.
9 Ibid. 212.
10 Ibid. 213.
11 Brown, ‘Victorian Anglican Evangelicalism’, passim, esp. pp. 683–5.
12 Ibid. 686.
13 Ibid.
14 Ibid. 687–8.
15 Ibid. 690–2, 679, 690.
16 Hilton, ‘Evangelical social attitudes’, 119.
17 Ibid. 121.
18 Ibid. 122.
19 Ibid. 121.
20 Brown, ‘Victorian Anglican Evangelicalism’, 687; cited in Hilton, ‘Evangelical social attitudes’, 124.
21 Hilton, ‘Evangelical social attitudes’, 124.
22 Idem, Age of atonement, passim, especially pp. 288–97, 332–7.
23 Brown, ‘Victorian Anglican Evangelicalism’, 702.
24 Hilton, ‘Evangelical social thought’, 124.
25 Idem, Age of atonement. Hilton pointed out (p. 298) a link between Edward Irving and F.D. Maurice, but then qualified this by noting that Irving ‘could not break away from the earlier period's soteriological obsession with the Fall’ which, Hilton believed (p. 298), thus placed him more squarely within the ‘age of atonement’.
26 Brown, ‘Victorian Anglican Evangelicalism’, 700–1.
27 Idem, ‘Evangelical social thought’, 132.
28 Idem, ‘Victorian Anglican Evangelicalism’, 679, 682, 687.
29 For accounts of ‘historicist’ prophetic chronology see Stephen Orchard, ‘English Evangelical eschatology, 1790–1850’, unpubl. PhD diss. Cambridge 1968, and J. A. Oddy, ‘Eschatological prophecy in the English theological tradition’, unpubl. PhD diss. 1982.
30 The futurists rejected the ‘year-day’ theory of historicism and argued that a prophetic ‘day’ must be interpreted as meaning literally a day, rather than a year. Futurism had a strong base in Irish Evangelicalism, most notably its supporters included the disillusioned Church of Ireland clergyman John Nelson Darby. On distinctions between historicists and futurists see D.W. Bebbington, Evangelicalism in modern Britain, London 1989, 85–6, and Ernest Sandeen, The roots of fundamentalism: British and American millenarianism, 1800–1930, Chicago 1970, 59–80. On Irish premillennialism see Joseph Liechty, ‘Irish Evangelicalism, Trinity College Dublin and the mission of the Church of Ireland at the end of the eighteenth century’, unpubl. PhD diss. Maynooth 1987, and Grayson Carter, Anglican Evangelicals: Protestant secessions from the via media, Oxford 2001, 195–248. For economy of expression, the term ‘premillennialist’ will henceforth be used in this article to refer to historicist premillennialists, unless otherwise stated.
31 Edward Bickersteth, A practical guide to the prophecies, London 1835, 25. Bickersteth admitted that not everyone needed to know detailed amounts of history to derive profit from prophetic Scripture, although those who believed that they were called to interpret prophecy should indeed, he claimed, ‘have a great proficiency in historical study'.
32 Thomas Rawson Birks, First elements of sacred prophecy, London 1843, 430.
33 CMR (Jan. 1841), 18.
34 Birks, First elements, 436–7.
35 QJP (Jan. 1858), 60. This journal is not to be confused with the Quarterly Journal on Prophecy which was a subtitle given to Edward Irving's periodical, The Morning Watch (1829–33).
36 W. Fremantle, ‘Christ the heir of all things’, in The priest upon his throne, being lectures delivered during Lent 1849 by twelve clergymen of the Church of England, London 1849, 1–25 at p. 19.
37 QJP (Oct. 1850), 449.
38 E. B. Elliott, Horae apocalyptica, or a commentary on the apocalypse, 2nd edn, London 1846, iv. 244.
39 Ibid. 243.
40 For an introduction see P. J. Bowler, The invention of progress: Victorians and the past, Oxford 1989. For a discussion of how premillennialist views of historical progress were part of the broader nineteenth-century fascination with time see Martin Spence, ‘Time and eternity in British Evangelicalism, c. 1820–c. 1860’, unpubl. DPhil. diss. Oxford 2007.
41 M. Mandelbaum, History, man and reason, Baltimore 1971, 42, cited in Ankersmit, F. R., ‘Historicism: an attempt at synthesis’, History and Theory xxxiv/3 (1995), 143–61CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
42 CMR (May 1841), 288.
43 CMR (Dec. 1846), 941.
44 CMR (July 1844), 473.
45 CMR (Feb. 1841), 69.
46 John Burrow, ‘Images of time: from Carlylean Vulcanism to sedimentary gradualism’, in Stefan Collini, Richard Whatmore and Brian Young (eds), History, religion, and culture: British intellectual history, 1750–1950, Cambridge 2000, 198–223 at p. 199.
47 Ibid. 204.
48 QJP (Apr. 1850), 310.
49 CMR (Apr. 1842), 251.
50 QJP (Oct. 1848), 3.
51 William Pym, ‘The doctrine of the New Testament on the time of the second advent’, in The second coming, the judgment, and the kingdom of Christ: being lectures given during Lent, 1843, at St George's, Bloomsbury, London 1843, 50–83 at p. 56.
52 QJP (Oct. 1855), 362.
53 Hilton, Age of atonement, 298–304.
54 G. Poulett Scrope, Memoir on the geology of central France (1827), 165, quoted in Hilton, Age of atonement, 300. Hilton noted that Scrope made this statement ‘as early as 1827!’, an observation which affirms that the ‘age of incarnation’ was dawning well before Hilton's suggested date of around 1850. In fact, Scrope made the statement at exactly the time that premillennialist thought was winning converts among mainstream Anglican Evangelicals.
55 Thomas Rawson Birks, ‘The resurrection to glory’, in Good things to come: being lectures given during Lent, 1847, at St George's, Bloomsbury, London 1847, 227–72 at p. 253.
56 Acts iii. 20 (AV).
57 William Pym, The restitution of all things, London 1843, p. xii.
58 CLM (Jan. 1845), 50; cf. Pym, Restitution of all things, 73.
59 Thomas Nolan, ‘The Saviour's throne’, in The gifts of the kingdom: being lectures delivered during Lent, 1855, at St George's Church, Bloomsbury, London 1855, 289–344 at pp. 323–4. For a more detailed description of how premillennialists talked about the future life, including the way they imagined life on a restored earth see Martin Spence, ‘The “restitution of all things” in Evangelical premillennialism’, in P. Clarke and T. Claydon (eds), The Church, the afterlife and the fate of the soul (Studies in Church History xlv, 2009), 349–59.
60 Christian Herald (Sept. 1830), 159 (page numbers refers to bound edition).
61 Gerard T. Noel, A brief enquiry into the prospects of the Church of Christ in connexion with the second advent of our Lord Jesus Christ, London 1828, 65.
62 William Wordsworth, ‘The French revolution as it appears to enthusiasts at its commencement’ (1805), in The poems of William Wordsworth, London 1847, 162.
63 H. M. Villiers, ‘The glorious majesty and perpetuity of Christ's kingdom’, in Lift up your heads: glimpses of Messiah's glory: being lectures delivered during Lent, 1848, at St George's, Bloomsbury, London 1848, 404–36 at pp. 421–2.
64 Thomas Boys, God and man considered in relation to eternity past: time that is: eternity future, London 1861, 19–20.
65 Stephen Prickett, Romanticism and religion: the tradition of Wordsworth and Coleridge in the Victorian Church, Cambridge 1976, 127ff.
66 Brown, ‘Victorian Anglican Evangelicalism’, 700.
67 Noel, Brief enquiry, 15.
68 Alexander Dallas, Introduction to prophetical researches, London 1850, 24.
69 CLM (Apr. 1841), 339.
70 Benjamin Philpot, ‘The last invitations of the Gospel’, in The parables prophetically explained: being twelve lectures given during Lent, 1853, at St George's Church, Bloomsbury, London 1851, 103-28 at p. 121.
71 Dallas, Introduction to prophetical researches, 13.
72 Hilton, Age of atonement, 332.
73 Sandeen, Roots of fundamentalism, 13 and passim; cf. Brown, ‘Victorian Anglican Evangelicalism’, 680.
74 John Cox, The future: an outline of events predicted in the holy Scriptures, London 1862, 27. Cox, a Baptist, was a rare non-Anglican historicist premillennialist.
75 ‘A preacher in the Church of Scotland’, The restitution of all things in the establishment of the Messiah's kingdom during the millennium, London 1829, 16.
76 James A. Begg, A connected view of some of the scriptural evidence of the redeemer's speedy personal return and reign on earth with his glorified saints during the millennium, Paisley 1829, 53. James A. Begg should not be confused with James Begg (1808–83), the Free Church of Scotland minister and social reformer. James A. Begg went on to combine his adventism with Seventh Day Adventism, becoming a leading spokesperson for the Baptist Seventh Day Adventists in Britain and the United States: Seventh Day Baptists in Europe and America: a series of historical papers written in commemoration of the one hundredth anniversary of the organization of the Seventh Day Baptist General Conference (1902), 67–8.
77 Gerard T. Noel, Sermons preached at Romsey, London 1853, 19–20.
78 Christian Herald (Dec. 1832), 261. Emphasis in original.
79 William Cadman, ‘Before the coming of Christ’, in The millennial kingdom: being twelve lectures delivered during Lent, 1852, at St George's Church, Bloomsbury, London 1852, 31–56 at pp. 24–5.
80 Noel, A brief enquiry, 27.
81 Robert Benton Seeley, Remedies suggested for some of the evils which constitute ‘the perils of the nation’, London 1844, 108.
82 Holladay, J. D., ‘Nineteenth-century Evangelical activism: from private charity to state intervention, 1830–50’, Historical Magazine of the Protestant Episcopal Church xx/2 (1982), 53–79Google Scholar at p. 54.
83 Brown, ‘Evangelical social thought’, 134. The phrase was originally contained in Denis G. Paz, Popular anti-Catholicism in mid-Victorian England, Stanford 1992, 143.
84 The Christian Guardian and District Visitors' and Sunday School Teachers' Magazine (Apr. 1842), 156.
85 Labourers' Friend (July 1851), 98–9.
86 John Cox, The claims of the poor, or the duty of Christian benevolence (1843), 10.
87 Catherine Gallagher, The industrial revolution of English fiction: social discourse and narrative form, 1832–1867, Berkeley, Ca 1985, 40–1.
88 Speeches of the earl of Shaftesbury, K.G., London 1868, 360.
89 Seeley, Remedies, 388.
90 Christopher Hamlin, Public health and social justice in the age of Chadwick: Britain, 1800–1854, Cambridge 1998, 5.
91 Norris Pope offers the most substantial treatment of Evangelical involvement in public health reform in this era: Dickens and charity, London 1978. The current author disclaims originality in suggesting the existence of this new Evangelical social agenda and acknowledges this section's debt to Pope for providing what is the most significant, but little recognised, treatment of this aspect of Evangelical history. See also Donald M. Lewis, Lighten their darkness: the Evangelical mission to working-class London, 1828–1860, Carlisle 2001, esp. pp. 151–78.
92 Annual reports and other news of the society, including names of supporters and participants at meetings, can be found in The Labourer's Friend: The Magazine of the Society for Improving the Condition of the Labouring Classes n.s. (1844–73).
93 ‘Labourers’ Friend Society thirteenth annual report', appended to The Labourer's Friend (June 1844), 4; Society for Improving the Condition of the Labouring Classes: a survey, London 1939, 3–4. See also H. E. C. Stapleton, ‘Champneys, (William) Weldon (1807–1875)’, ODNB.
94 Second report of the Society for Improving the Condition of the Labouring Classes, appended to The Labourer's Friend (June 1846), 88.
95 The Labourers' Friend (June 1847), 97.
96 Society for Improving the Condition of the Labouring Classes, Plans for dwelling houses, n.d., n.p.
97 The Labourer's Friend (July 1859), 101.
98 Norris Pope, for example, suggests that Evangelicals came to their understanding of social reform in spite of their theology. Similar examples can be multiplied: Dickens and charity, 200.
99 Hilton, ‘Evangelical social attitudes’, 125. Hilton argued in Age of atonement that ‘homological lumps’ (i.e. ‘age of incarnation’ and ‘age of atonement’) were his preferred historiographical approach. He admitted that ‘splitters’ like Brown are entitled to ‘zap’ such lumps into more complex descriptions of history, but stressed that they must understand the nature of the lumps properly before they begin to split them. It goes without saying that Hilton did not think that Brown had achieved such a proper understanding.