The limits of this short paper will not allow me to give a full account of the question, but only to consider some aspects of the sermons preached on the occasion of the 1745 Jacobite rebellion. There was a spate of sermons published at the time, not only by famous whig bishops, understandably eager to prove their zeal for the house of Hanover, but also by unknown members of the inferior clergy who felt the need to express their loyalty to the establishment. In many cases, the sermons they preached were the only ones they ever published. It is worth noting, in this respect, that the names of only five antijacobite preachers are to be found in the DNB. This phenomenon, namely the crucial part played by humble preachers, is all the more remarkable as it is in marked contrast with other fields of eighteenth-century pulpit oratory. (Charity sermons, for instance, could only be delivered by bishops or archdeacons or by well-known speakers with a good preaching reputation). Besides, nonconformist ministers were as anxious as their Church of England counterparts to be regarded as pillars of the Hanoverian cause, so that they too had many sermons printed for the occasion. From the available evidence, it is reasonable to assume that they sold well. On the flyleaf of any one of these pamphlets, John Hildyard, the York printer, with his usual advertising techniques, set out a list of other sermons published on the same theme, as an incentive to buy further books on the subject.

In november 1789 a notable address was delivered at the meeting-house in Old Jewry in the city of London to the society formed to commemorate the glorious revolution. The overtly political tone of Richard Price’s words to that audience of dissenters and fellow-sympathisers appeared to Edmund Burke to epitomise the democratic and levelling spirit already operating with such devastating results across the Channel. Eight years later the fear of dissenting ambition was if anything enhanced. In a rising tide of clerical polemic dissenters were accused of a variety of evils including anti-establishment activity, schism, covert Jacobinism, regicide and the encouragement of fanaticism and ignorance among the lower classes. At a time when England was embroiled in a long and costly struggle with revolutionary France the real charge was that of siding with the enemy; of implicit disloyalty. The principal difference from 1789, a distinction not always apparent to the accusers, was that those now engaging their attention were evangelicals, men of an entirely different stamp from the provocative rationalists surrounding Priestley and Price.

In an article published over a decade ago, Olive Anderson demonstrated the major contribution made by the Indian mutiny to the growth of Christian militarism in Victorian Britain. The Crimean war had accustomed the British public to the view that Britain’s soldiery had spiritual needs which could and should be met by the exertions of voluntary subscription, but it was the mutiny which established the more ambitious claim that Christian soldiers were the best ones. The military exploits of Henry Havelock and others of similar piety in stemming the tide of the sepoy rebellion enshrined Christian faith of an evangelical stamp as an almost indispensable ingredient in the constitution of the Victorian hero. The intention of this paper is to endorse and amplify Anderson’s conclusions by examining the responses of Christian opinion in Britain to the mutiny at its most alarming stage in the later months of 1857. Specific attention will be given to the reactions of nonconformists, in the light of the generally accepted view that early Victorian nonconformist attitudes to foreign affairs were characterised by a firm commitment to pacific principles and a disinclination for imperial entanglements.

On 13 September 1862, when Abraham Lincoln was awaiting an opportune moment to issue his Emancipation Proclamation, he received at the White House a delegation from a meeting of Chicago Christians of all denominations. In pressing hard the case for immediate emancipation of the slaves, they assured the president that such action would be in accordance with the will of God. In a characteristically wry, tongue-in-cheek reply, Lincoln observed that:

Ulster will fight and Ulster will be right’. Randolph Churchill may never have uttered these emotive words during his visit to Ulster in 1886—they appeared in a public letter to a Glasgow Liberal unionist—but they undoubtedly expressed the belligerence and self-righteousness of the Ulster protestant resistance to the prospect of home rule for Ireland. Joseph Lee has observed correctly that ‘Orangemen did not need to be told that they were right or that they would fight’, but after 1886 it was not only Orangemen who made such claims, nor even opportunist tory politicians like Churchill, but protestant churchmen and solid middle class citizens and farmers who would previously have distanced themselves fastidiously from Orangeism. In this paper we shall examine the encouragement and support given by protestant churches and churchmen—Presbyterians in particular—to the movement to resist home rule by force in the period 1912–14.

The National Mission of Repentance and Hope, launched by the archbishops of Canterbury and York and led by the bishop of London in the autumn of 1916, has not been regarded as one of the more successful episodes in the history of the Church of England. Hensley Henson, who can always be relied upon for a suitable comment, called it ‘a grave, practical blunder’, whilst a very different type of churchman, Conrad Noel, called it ‘the Mission of Funk and Despair’. Its treatment in the secondary sources is curious. Bell has a chapter on it in his life of Randall Davidson, but it says much about Davidson and little about the Mission. The same is true, mutatis mutandis, of Iremonger’s treatment in the life of Temple. S. C. Carpenter chose to omit the chapter on the National Mission from his life of Winnington-Ingram. Lloyd depends heavily on Bell; Wilkinson is more rounded, but the fullest account by Mews remains unpublished.

‘It is the duty of every Christian man to regard his religion as the Expeditionary Force of his soul’.

In the autumn of 1950 W. H. Balgarnie, a retired public school-master, was asked to reminisce about his early days in the profession. Balgarnie’s boys certainly remembered him, ‘very young-looking for his age, so much so that on one occasion we were rejoiced by a parent approaching him on the touch-line of the football field and saying: “Can you tell me where Mr. Balgarnie is, my boy?”’ Balgarnie replied from his house in Cambridge:

Three sundays after the outbreak of war, Fr Congreve, aged nearly 79, preached in the society’s church in Oxford, and gave a summary of professor J. B. Mozley’s sermon on war, delivered during the Franco-Prussian War in 1871, ‘for the sake’ he said, ‘of those of us who do not know it’. Fr Benson, the founder of the society, lived until 14 January 1915. At the age of 90 he kept abreast of the news, and was angered by the German bombardment of West Hartlepool and Bridlington; ‘he spoke with scorn of this effort of the enemy, and again and again spoke of its uselessness from a military point of view. ‘

The Superior General of the Society of St John the Evangelist, Fr Maxwell, realised that the war would cause a reduction in subscriptions. While no new work would be undertaken, he urged ‘we are really anxious to impress upon our friends that by far the greater part of our work is not such as can be retrenched without causing much suffering, and without crippling our effort in the future’. For example, they had the care of young children in the missions, who could not wait for ‘their next meal until after the war is over’.

‘Whenever the actual historical situation sharpens the issue, the debate whether the Christian Church is, or ought to be, pacifist, is carried on with fresh vigour both inside and outside the Christian community.’ Thus wrote Reinhold Niebuhr, the American commentator on Christian ethics, in 1940, having himself been converted first to pacifism and then back again in the course of the interwar period. Final agreement in this debate is, of course, improbable. But this paper will argue that the Christian cases for pacifism and non-pacifism alike were clarified, at least in Britain and for several decades, by the extraordinary ‘sharpening’ of the issue afforded by the ‘actual historical situation’ in the era of the two world wars. The shock of the first world war produced unprecedented support for Christian pacifism; and the aggressions of the 1930s, culminating in the crisis of 1940–1 when Britain faced the possibility of invasion and defeat, provided a series of tests which only the most rigorously thought-out version of that faith could survive—but, having survived them, it could survive anything.

In the anxious second half of 1940 certain developments took place which cardinal Heenan, the late archbishop of Westminster, was to describe, somewhat grandly, as ‘the opening chapter of the modern history of religion in Great Britain’. He was referring to an unprecedented series of events which led up to and flowed from a letter to the Times in December extolling the five peace points of pope Pius XII. The letter was signed not only by the Roman Catholic archbishop of Westminster, cardinal Hinsley, but also by the two Anglican primates and the moderator of the Free Church council. Such a public manifestation of religious harmony reflected the national unity of the hour and was further reinforced a few months later by two joint meetings which were each addressed by both catholic and protestant leaders. But the pressures for national and religious cohesion which were at their height in 1940–41 were to decline with the passing of the immediate threat and to be effectively countered by the resurgence of older and more powerful denominational suspicions and susceptibilities. What might have been an ‘opening chapter’ turned instead into little more than an isolated essay in inter-church relations. As such it would hardly justify closer scrutiny but the episode is more significant because it throws light on several problems which arise when religion has to function in a modern society at a time of crisis. More particularly it draws attention to the pressures and constraints involved in the mobilization of religious commitments in the national interest and to the strategic considerations which impelled church leaders to opt for a particular course of action when confronted by a complex web of national needs, institutional inhibitions and popular sentiment. This paper does not attempt a comprehensive analysis of the various facets of the situation but concentrates on those aspects which relate to the Roman Catholic church in England.

‘As for the good things of this life and its ills, God has willed that these should be common to both’ the righteous and the unrighteous. So wrote a well-known north African theologian of the fall of Rome in AD 410, an event which many observers attributed to the abandonment of ancient religious practices and beliefs in favour of Christianity. That they should do so was perhaps natural; it is always easier to claim betrayal than to admit defeat in the field of battle. Even Gibbon, who was judicious enough in assessing the causes of the fall of Rome, held that the main cause was ‘the domestic hostilities of the Romans themselves’, and implied that the city might not have fallen had it not been that, ‘At the hour of midnight, the Salarian gate was silently opened . . . ’ And what was said of the fall of Rome was also said of the fall of France.

A good deal has been written about the response of the mission churches to the guerilla war in Zimbabwe. Much less has been written about their experience of it. Yet it has been persuasively argued that the real significance of the war for the churches lay not at the level of institutional pronouncements upon it but at the level of the participation of churchmen in the sufferings of local rural communities. The war was an embarassment to institutional spokesmen. In the early colonial past the leaders of the catholic and protestant churches in Southern Rhodesia had legitimated war, providing chaplains for the white columns that defeated the Ndebele in 1893 and suppressed the risings in 1896 and preaching the duty of the representatives of Christian civilisation to overthrow barbarism. By the 1960s some churchmen had come to condemn violence—both the institutional violence of the Rhodesian state and the revolutionary violence of the nationalist and liberation movements. As guerilla war spread in the 1970s, hardly any church spokesmen could move beyond this position. It became clearer and clearer that the majority of their African rural flocks supported the guerillas and even clearer that African rural Christians were suffering terribly in the violence of civil war. But no-one was able to articulate a theology appropriate to such a crisis.