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Elitist Leadership and Congregational Participation Among Early Plymouth Brethren
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 21 March 2016
Extract
When identifying the ‘catalyst for disaffection’ and the ‘trigger for individual secessions’ from the Establishment in the early nineteenth century, Grayson Carter recently concluded that ‘theological “extremism” was probably a more significant irritant than pastoral exasperation’. It is nevertheless evident that episcopal restraints on any ecclesiastical ‘irregularities’ and the dubious spiritual credentials of some of those controlling the appointment of both higher and lower clergy were also significant factors in the discontent of many who seceded in the 1830s. A quest for freedom from such constraints therefore often accompanied the special doctrinal emphases of those who would sooner or later quit the establishment. This was particularly true of the seceders known as the Plymouth Brethren whose congregations proliferated in the 1830s and ‘40s. With clerical ordination abandoned as unscriptural, their meetings came to be noted for spontaneous prayer and exhortation by any member of the congregation, but such an ‘institutionalizing’ of unprogrammed participation was liable to attract ‘free spirits’ whose orthodoxy and ‘manners’ could be questionable. This paper considers the way in which the precise doctrinal convictions and conservative social assumptions of such seceders could come into conflict with, and sometimes, at least for a while, keep at bay some of the elements unleashed by their professed desire for ecclesiastical freedom. Of particular interest is the interplay of social and doctrinal motivation.
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References
1 Carter, Grayson, Anglican Evangelicals: Protestant Secessions from the Via Media, c. 1800–1850 (Oxford, 2001), 45.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
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4 Ibid.
5 Ibid.
6 Ibid.
7 The Parnell baronetcy dated from 1761, but Sir Henry Brooke Parnell was only raised to the peerage in 1841. John Vesey Parnell succeeded as the second Baron Congleton in 1842.
8 George Vicesimus Wigram was the twentieth child of Sir Robert Wigram of Walthamstowe. His brother, Robert, succeeded as the second baronet, changing his name to Fitz-Wygram in 1832.
9 Lancelot Charles Lee Brenton succeeded his father, Rear-Admiral Sir Jahleel Brenton, in 1844.
10 When Alexander Cockburn succeeded to his maternal grandfather’s title in 1824, he was required to add on his grandfather’s name, Campbell.
11 B[enjamin] W[ills] Newton to Mrs [Anna] Newton, 23 May 1829, Manchester, John Rylands University Library, Christian Brethren Archive [hereafter: JRULM, CBA] 7179 (7). When he resigned his Oxford Fellowship in 1832, Newton had to take pupils for a living, but in later years he was financially comfortable either as a result of a delayed inheritance from his grandfather or following his second marriage.
12 Groves left for Baghdad in 1829, the year of Baynes’s death. On his return to England in 1835 he married Harriet Baynes: see Stunt, Awakening to Secession, 122 and 287.
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