Table Of ContentTHE DISSENTERS
The Dissenters
VOLUME III
The Crisis and Conscience of Nonconformity
MICHAEL R. WATTS
With the assistance of Chris Wrigley
and an introductory note by David Bebbington
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In memory of Barbara Andrews
Preface
This book represents an instalment of my history of religious dissent in England
and Wales, which began with the first English Anabaptists, and continued with the
arrival of the Baptists, Independents, Quakers, and English Presbyterians and with
the advent of Methodism in the eighteenth century.
It is an enthralling story which reveals much about the character of English and
Welsh people over the last three hundred years. Nonconformists refused to bow
before a persecuting state church and so guaranteed that Englishmen would
develop, centuries earlier than other major European nations, a pluralist society in
which men would learn to live at peace with those with whom they disagreed,
without resort to the scaffold or the firing squad.
It was a story which saw the pioneer Baptist John Smith reject infant baptism in
favour of believer’s baptism, reject the Calvinist doctrine of original sin, and
espouse the cause of religious toleration.
The present volume begins at a time when religious dissent was in danger of
ossification. The threat was avoided through the enthusiasm of a new generation of
religious radicals, men such as Robert William Dale, Thomas Carlyle, and John
Clifford. But their enthusiasm was soon to be tested by a new and ominous threat
to the assumptions of nineteenth-century Christians: the theories of scientists such
as James Hutton and William Smith, and above all the publication of Darwin’s
Origin of Species.
In writing this book I have to thank the late Barbara Andrews, whose loyalty and
efficiency has been an essential fact in numerous academic ventures and whose
friendship will be sorely missed. The gap left by Barbara’s death has been filled by
the generous support of my daughter-in-law Jeannette and my son Richard. And
as always, my wife Linda has been a tower of strength, without whose love I cannot
imagine that this book could have been written.
Finally I would like to thank Chris Wrigley, Professor of Modern British History
at the University of Nottingham, without whose help this book would not have
been finished. Any errors in the text are, of course, my own.
Contents
List of Tables xi
List of Abbreviations xiv
Introductory Note xv
I. ‘THE VERY FOUNDATIONS OF THE CHRISTIAN
FAITH’: THE CRISIS OF DISSENT
1. ‘The God of the hills’: The Impact of Romanticism 3
2. ‘Destructive of the authority of divine revelation’:
Genesis, Geology, and Evolution 10
3. ‘The ground on which Rational Christianity may firmly take its stand’:
Higher Criticism and the Unitarians 20
4. ‘An inspired communication from the Deity . . . Or . . . Nothing’:
The Dilemma of Evangelical Dissenters 28
5. ‘The seal and servant of Christianity’: The Spiritualist Alternative 36
6. ‘An easy good-natured God’: The Collapse of Calvinism 42
7. ‘The hateful mystery’: The Eclipse of Eternal Punishment 48
8. ‘The sceptical tendencies of modern times’: The Isolation of Spurgeon 59
9. ‘The heresies of the Baptist Union’: The Down Grade 65
10. A ‘conspiracy to undermine our holy faith’: The Liberal Triumph 72
II. ‘THE HUB AND FOUNT OF SOCIAL LIFE’: THE
LIBERALIZATION OF DISSENT
1. Church Membership and Chapel Attendance: The Consequences
of the Crisis 85
2. ‘Conversion is not necessary to regeneration’:
The Failure of Recruitment 92
3. Nonconformity’s Shrinking Constituency: The Evidence of the
Dissenting Registers 101
4. ‘Influential families . . . lost to nonconformity’: The Flight
of the Bourgeoisie 110
5. The Failure of Success: The Loss of the Poor 120
6. The ‘most spiritually destitute and degraded’: Missions to the Poor 125
7. ‘Diversity of opinion . . . no bar to Christian communion’:
The Relaxation of Discipline 142
