Evangelicalism and worldliness 1770–1870

Extract

‘Pure religion and undefiled before God and the Father is this, To visit the fatherless and widows in their affliction, and to keep himself unspotted from the world.’ The carrying out of this injunction has been interpreted differently in different ages. Professor Rupp reminded us in an early book that sixteenth-century Puritans and Protestants were not Victorian Christians in period costume. Calvin and Knox would have been hounded by the Lord’s Day Observance Society if their views on Sunday games had been known to Victorian evangelicals. During the years 1770–1870 there was an increasing strictness and rigidity with regard to ‘the world’. First of all there was the question did the world belong to God or the devil. Most evangelicals in 1770 would have said that it belonged to God, but by Victorian times they were not so certain. Abner Brown, speaking of one parson’s wife, says: ‘When her fine manly boys came home for the holidays, she would not allow them to stand at the window of their father’s parsonage without making them turn their backs so as not to look at the romantic views by which the house was encircled, lest the loveliness of “ Satan’s earth” should alienate their affections from the better world to come.’ On the other hand Lord Mount Temple when censured by friends for attending the Queen’s fancy-dress ball replied: ‘This is God’s world by right, and not the devil’s. Our business is to subdue it to its lawful king, and not to abandon it to the enemy.’ With regard to pleasures and amusements there was a growing strictness; I was able to give an example of this with regard to the Venn family in John Venn and the Clapham Sect.