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Judging the Nation: Early Nineteenth-Century British Evangelicals and Divine Retribution

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 March 2016

John Wolffe
John Wolffe*
Affiliation:
The Open University
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Extract

      Long had the ‘still small voice’ been spoke in vain,
      But God now thunders in an awful strain!
      Commercial woes brought down our nation’s pride,
      Our harvest fail’d, and yet we God defy’d:
      But now the ‘voice’ cries loud to all the Land,
      The ‘Rod’ is felt, Oh! may we see the Hand.
      ’Tis God who speaks – ’Tis He who ’points the blow,
      ’Tis God who’s laid the pride of Britain low!

In these lines, written in November 1817, a lady member of a Newcastle-upon-Tyne Nonconformist congregation unambiguously attributed the death of Princess Charlotte to specific divine intervention. This conviction reflected that of her minister, James Pringle, in a recent sermon preached on an Old Testament text widely expounded at that time, the chastening rod (or voice) of God in Micah 6: 9. Such a perception of adverse national events as divine retribution for sin, comparable to prophetic interpretations of the history of Old Testament Israel, was a noticeable strand in early nineteenth-century British evangelical discourse.

Type
Research Article
Information
Studies in Church History , Volume 40: Retribution, Repentance, and Reconciliation , 2004 , pp. 291 - 300
Copyright
Copyright © Ecclesiastical History Society 2004

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References

1 Lines by ‘Charintee’ appended to James Pringle, The Lord’s Voice in the Rod: a sermon, preached on the nineteenth of November, 1817, the day of interment of the much-lamented Princess Charlotte of Wales (Newcastle-upon-Tyne, 1817), 63–4.

2 The text goes on to denounce commercial dishonesty, violence and deceit, and to threaten famine, war and desolation. Other sermons on Micah 6: 9 published at the time of Princess Charlotte’s death include East, John, The Voice of God to the Nation (Evesham, 1817)Google Scholar, Scott, Thomas, The Voice of God to Britain (London, 1817)Google Scholar and Whish, Martin Richard, The Lord’s Voice to the British Zion (Bristol, 1817)Google Scholar.

3 Anderson, Olive, ‘The reactions of Church and Dissent towards the Crimean War’, JEH 16 (1965), 209–20, 214–19 Google Scholar; Lovegrove, Deryck, ‘English Evangelical Dissent and the European Conflict 1789–1815’, in Sheils, W. J., ed., The Church and War, SCH 20 (1983), 263–76, 271–4 Google Scholar; Stanley, Brian, ‘Christian Responses to the Indian Mutiny’, in ibid., 277–89, 279–83 Google Scholar.

4 For background on cholera see Morris, R. J., Cholera 1832: the Social Response to an Epidemic (London, 1976)Google Scholar.

5 For a prominent non-evangelical example see Pusey, E. B., Chastisements Neglected, Forerunners of Greater (London, 1847)Google Scholar.

6 Scott, Voice of God, 3, 7–8; Begg, J. A., The True Cause of the Prevalence of Pestilence, and other judgments of God; with the divinely appointed means of deliverance and safety (London and Paisley, 1832), 6 Google Scholar.

7 Smith, John Pye, The Sorrows of Britain, Her Sad Forebodings, and Her Only Refuge (London, 1817), 14 Google Scholar.

8 Ibid., 14, 21–2.

9 MacDonald, William, Jehovah’s Voice to Britain (London, 1818), 9–10 Google Scholar.

10 Scott, Voice of God, 15–19.

11 Anon., An Affectionate Address to the Inhabitants of Newcastle and Gateshead on the Present Alarming Visitation of Divine Province, in the Fatal Ravages of the Spasmodic Cholera (Newcastle-upon-Tyne, 1832). Morris, Cholera 1832, 137–9, notes that there is an objective medical link between alcoholism and susceptibility to cholera.

12 Taylor, James, The Cholera: or God’s Voice in the Pestilence (London, 1832), 8 Google Scholar.

13 Trollope, William, Three Sermons Having Reference to the Prevailing Famine (Cambridge, 1847), 3 Google Scholar.

14 Wilberforce, William, A Letter on the Abolition of the Slave Trade: addressed to the freeholders and other inhabitants of Yorkshire (London, 1807), 4–6 Google Scholar; idem, An Appeal to the Religion, justice and Humanity of the Inhabitants of the British Empire, in Behalf of the Negro Slaves in the West Indies (London, 1823), 74–5.

15 Begg, True Cause of Pestilence, 14, 16.

16 East, Voice of God, 13–14.

17 Chalmers, Thomas, A Sermon Delivered in the Tron Church, Glasgow, on the Day of the Funeral of HRH the Princess Charlotte of Wales (Glasgow, 1817), 20, 26–7 Google Scholar.

18 On the wider context of Protestant agitation see Wolffe, John, The Protestant Crusade in Great Britain, 1829–1860 (Oxford, 1991)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

19 Pye Smith, Sorrows of Britain, 17.

20 Pringle, Lord’s Voice, 59–61.

21 Joseph, hons, Jehovah’s Controversy with England: the substance of a sermon preached at Grove Chapel, Camberwell (London, 1832), iii–iv, 13 Google Scholar.

22 Hugh McNeile, The Famine a Rod of God (London and Liverpool, 1847), 23; Trollope, Time Sermons, 36–7.

23 McNeile, Famine, 23.

24 Trollope, Three Sermons, 36–7.

25 McNeile, Hugh, National Sin – What Is It? (London and Liverpool, 1849), 36–7 Google Scholar.

26 McNeile, Famine, 21–2.

27 For example Lewis, Thomas, Murmurs Silenced, or the Righteousness of the Divine Judgments Vindicated (London, 1817), 24–5 Google Scholar.

28 Taylor, Cholera, 12–14.

29 An Appeal to the Inhabitants of Fakenham, in Reference to the Recent Visitation of Cholera, by a Fellow Townsman (Fakenham, 1832), 10–16.

30 Bickersteth, Edward, Parochial and Congregational Fasting, on Occasion of the Cholera in 1849 (London, 1849), 4 Google Scholar.

31 MacDonald, Jehovah’s Voice, 20; Bickersteth, Parochial and Congregational Fasting, 3.

32 Cator, Charles, The Cholera Morbus, a Visitation of Divine Providence (2nd edn, London, 1832), 25–6 Google Scholar.

33 See for example Lewis, Murmurs Silenced, 5–20; Irons, Jehovah’s Controversy, iv; Trollope, Three Sermons, 13, 50.

34 MacDonald, Jehovah’s Voice, 23–6.

35 Pye Smith, Sorrows of Britain, 27–30.

36 Taylor, Cholera, 23–33.

37 Bickersteth, Parochial and Congregational Fasting, 7–10.

38 The Record, 30 May, 2 June 1831.

39 Ibid., 9 June 1831; Wolffe, Protestant Crusade, 57–8.

40 Anderson, ‘Crimean War’, 215–19. In 1853 there was a recurrence of cholera and Lord Palmerston, then Home Secretary, stirred considerable debate and strong Evangelical censure when he rejected demands for a Fast Day, on the grounds that this would be a distraction from endeavours to remove the material causes of cholera: see Buchanan, Robert, The Waste Places of Great Cities (Glasgow, 1853)Google Scholar.

41 Stanley,’Indian Mutiny’, 279–81.

42 Brooks, J. W., The Rod of the Almighty (Nottingham, 1861), 13 Google Scholar; Carr, E. H., The Nation Admonished (London, 1862), 15 Google Scholar.

43 Hood, E. P., Words from the Pall of the Prime (London, 1862), 23 Google Scholar.

44 Cumming, John, From Life to Life (London, 1861), 18–20 Google Scholar.

45 Hilton, Boyd, The Age of Atonement: the Influence of Evangelicalism on Social and Economic Thought, 1785–1865 (Oxford, 1991), 255–70 Google Scholar.

46 Bebbington, D. W., Evangelicalism in Modern Britain: a History from the 1730s to the 1980s (London, 1989), 145 Google Scholar.

47 A Collection of Hymns for General Use Submitted to the Consideration of the Members of the United Church of England and Ireland (London, 1833), No. CXXIX.

48 Hymns Composed for the Use of the Children of the Stockport Sunday School (Manchester, 1848), 31.

49 Cf. Anderson, Benedict, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (revised edn, London, 1991), 7 Google Scholar.