Showing posts with label Dissenters. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Dissenters. Show all posts

Friday 14 February 2014

Old orthodox Dissenters and Unitarians in 19° Century London

Aggressive Unitarians.


It is not often that Unitarianism is aggressive, or that it seeks the heathen in our streets perishing for lack of knowledge.  Apparently it dwells rather on the past than the present, and prefers the select and scholarly few to the unlettered many.

  Most Unitarian preachers lack popular power; hence it is that their places of worship are rarely filled, and that they seem tacitly to assume that such is the natural and necessary condition of their denomination.  It is with them as it used to be with the old orthodox Dissenters in well endowed places of worship some thirty or forty years ago.  Of them, I well remember one in a leading seaport in the eastern counties.  I don’t believe there was such another heavy and dreary place in all East Anglia, certainly there never was such a preacher; more learned, more solemn, more dull, more calculated in a respectable way to send good people to sleep, or to freeze up the hot blood and marrow of his youthful hearers.

  Once and but once there was a sensation in that chapel.  It was a cold evening in the very depth of winter.  There was ice in the pulpit, and ice in the pew.  The very lamps seemed as if it was impossible for them to burn, as the preacher in his heaviest manner discoursed of themes on which seraphs might love to dwell.  All at once rushed in a boy, exclaiming “Fire, fire!”  The effect was electric — in a moment that sleepy audience was startled into life, every head was raised and every ear intent.  Happily the alarm was a false one, but for once people were awake, and kept so till the sermon was done.  It is the aim of Mr. Applebee in the same way to rouse up the Unitarians, and in a certain sense he has succeeded.  He has now been preaching some eighteen months in London, in the old chapel on Stoke Newington Green, where, for many years, Mrs. Barbauld was a regular attendant, and where long the pulpit was filled by no less a distinguished personage than Burke and George the Third’s Dr. Price; the result is that the chapel is now well filled.  It is true it is not a very large one; nevertheless, till Mr. Applebee’s advent, it was considerably larger than the congregation.


  Before Mr. Applebee came to town he had produced a similar effect at Devonport; when he settled there he had to preach to a very small congregation, but he drew people around him, and ere he left a larger chapel had to be built.  I take it a great deal of his popularity is due to his orthodox training.  It is a fact not merely that Unitarianism ever recruits itself from the ranks of orthodoxy, but that it is indebted to the same source for its ablest, or rather most effective ministers.

In the morning Mr. Applebee preaches at Stoke Newington; in the evening he preaches at 245, Mile End.  It seems as if in that teeming district no amount of religious agency may be ignored or despised.  In the morning of the Sabbath as you walk there, you could scarce fancy you were in a Christian land.  It is true, church bells are ringing and the public-houses are shut up, and well-clad hundreds may be seen on their way to their respective places of worship, and possibly you may meet a crowd of two or three hundred earnest men in humble life singing revival hymns as they wend their way to the East London Theatre, where Mr. Booth teaches of heaven and happiness to those who know little of one or the other; nevertheless, the district has a desolate, God-forsaken appearance.  There are butchers’ shops full of people, pie-shops doing a roaring trade, photographers all alive, as they always are, on a Sunday.

  If you want apples or oranges, boots or shoes, ready-made clothes, articles for the toilette or the drawing-room, newspapers of all sorts — you can get them anywhere in abundance in the district; and as you look up the narrow courts and streets on your left, you will see in the dirty, eager crowds around ample evidence of Sabbath desecration.

  I heard a well-known preacher the other day say it was easy to worship God in Devonshire.  Equally true is it that it is not easy to worship Him in Mile End or Whitechapel.  The Unitarians assume that a large number of intelligent persons abstain from attending a religious service on Sundays in the most part “because the doctrines usually taught” are “adverse to reason and the plain teaching of Jesus Christ.”  Under this impression they have opened the place in Mile End.

  In a prospectus widely circulated in the district, they publish a statement of their creed as follows:
  •  1. That “there is but one God, one undivided Deity, and one Mediator between God and man — the man Christ Jesus.” 
  •  2. That “the life and teachings of Jesus Christ are the purest, the divinest, and truest;” His death consecrating His testimony and completing the devotion of His life; his resurrection and ascension forming the pledge and symbol of their own.
  •   3. “That sin inevitably brings its own punishment, and that all who break God’s laws must suffer the penalty in consequence;” at the same time they “reject the idea with abhorrence that God will punish men eternally for any sins they may have committed or may commit.”

  Such is the formula of doctrine, on which as a basis the Unitarian Mission at Mile End has been established, and to a certain extent with some measure of success.  It is charged generally against Unitarians that they have no positive dogma.

  The Unitarianism of Mr. Applebee has no such drawback.  He has a definite creed, which, whether you believe it or not, at any rate you can understand.  In the eyes of many working men, that is of the class to whom he preaches at Mile End, he has also the additional advantage of being well known in the political arena.  As a lecturer on behalf of advanced principles in many of our large towns he has produced a very great effect.

  I confess I have not yet overcome the horror I felt when I saw at the last election how night after night he spoke at Northampton on behalf of Mr. Bradlaugh’s candidature.  Surely a secularist can have no claim as such on the sympathies of a Christian minister.  Yet at Northampton Mr. Applebee laboured as if the success of Mr. Bradlaugh were the triumph of Gospel truth, and as if in the pages of the National Reformer the working men, to whom it especially appeals, might learn the way to life eternal.  But Mr. Applebee is by no means alone.  In Stamford Street Chapel and in Islington you have what I believe the Unitarians would consider still more favourable specimens of aggressive Unitarianism.
- p. 205 - p 209 from The Religious Life of London by J. Ewing Ritchie
Release Date: June 16, 2010  [eBook #32844]

Language: English

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The Project Gutenberg eBook, The Religious Life of London, by J. EwingRitchie 
 
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Thursday 13 February 2014

19° century Londoners, religion and heretical opinions

J. Ewing Ritchie, author ofbritish senators,” “the night side of london,” etc., wrote in his book the Religious Life Of London in 1870 that man is undoubtedly a religious animal.  It seemed that at the time he was living in England at any rate the remark hold good.
St. Alban's, Golders Green Parish Church in Ba...
St. Alban's, Golders Green Parish Church in Barnet, London (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

No one who ignores the religious element in our history can rightly understand what England was, or how she came to be what she is.  The fuller is our knowledge, the wider our field of investigation, the more minute our inquiry, the stronger must be the conviction in all minds that religion has been for good or bad the great moving power, and, in spite of the teachings of Secularism or of Positivism, it is clear that as much as ever the questions which are daily and hourly coming to the front have in them more or less of a religious element.
The author knew it were not often foreigners who perceived this. Several foreigners mastered the English habits and ways, all that the English called their inner life; yet, to Louis Blanc for example, the English pulpit was a piece of wood — nothing more.
According to him, the oracles are dumb, the sacred fire has ceased to burn, the veil of the temple is rent in twain; church attendance, he tells us, in England, besides custom, has little to recommend it.  There is beauty in desolation — in life changing into death —
“Before Decay’s effacing fingers
Have swept the lines where beauty lingers;”

English: Logo of the Church of England
Logo of the Church of England (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Not even of this beauty could the Church of England boast.  Dr. Döllinger — a more thoughtful, a more learned, a more laborious writer — was not more flattering, according to Ritchie.

The Church of England, he tells us, is “the Church only of a fragment of the nation,” of “the rich, cultivated, and fashionable classes.”  It teaches “the religion of deportment, of gentility, of clerical reserve.”  “In its stiff and narrow organization, and all want of pastoral elasticity, it feels itself powerless against the masses.”
In the 19° century London the patronage was mostly in the hands of the nobility and gentry, who regarded it as a means of provision for their younger sons, sons-in-law, and cousins.
Our latest critic, M. Esquiros, writes in a more favourable strain, yet even he confesses how the city operative shuns what he deems the Church of Mammon, and draws a picture of the English clergyman, by no means suggestive of zeal in the Master’s service or readiness to bear His yoke.  Dissent foreigners generally ignore, yet Dissent is as active, as energetic as the State Church, and may claim that it has practically realized the question of our time—the Free Church in the Free State.
Life to most of the people living in the 19°century Britain was hard, and it would have been harder still
 if after a day’s toil Paterfamilias had to discuss the three births of Christ, or His twofold nature, the Æons of the Gnostics, the Judaism of the Ebionites, the ancient Persian dualism which formed the fundamental idea of the system of Manes, or the windy frenzy of Montanus, with an illogical wife, a friend gifted with a fatal flow of words, or a pert and shallow child.  We like those with whom we constantly associate.  They are wise men and sound Christians.  They are those who fast and pay tithes, and are eminently proper and respectable.  As to the heretics—the publicans and sinners, away with them.  Let their portion be shame in this life, perdition in the next.  Thus it is heretics have got a bad name.  Church history has been written by their enemies, by men who have honestly believed that a man of a different heresy to their own would rob an orphan, and break all the commandments.
The Rev. Mr. Thwackem “doubted not but all the infidels and heretics in the world would, if they could, confine honour to their own absurd errors and damnable deceptions.”

When looking at English literature of the 19° century I may think we mostly are confronted with classical Christian families, mostly belonging to the mainstream protestant churches England still has to day. The Church of England being the most common denomination.


At that time it was no different probably than today that people would easily say of others they where heretics.
Free Church of England
Free Church of England (Photo credit: Wikipedia)



According to the Articles of the English Establishment,
 “the Church of Christ is a company of faithful people among whom the pure Word of God is preached and the Sacraments rightly administered according to Christ’s institution.”
But on this very matter we also did find the Church divided.
Low Churchmen tell us that the ritualists do not rightly administer the Sacraments, and the latter say the same of their opponents.  The Record suggests that Bishop Colenso is little better than one of the wicked, and charitably insinuates that the late Dean Milman is amongst the lost.  Dr. Pusey places the Evangelicals in the same category with Jews, or Infidels, or Dissenters, and has strong apprehensions as to their everlasting salvation.  Dr. Temple was made Bishop of Exeter, and Archdeacon Denison set apart the day of his installation as one of humiliation and prayer.  Yet all these are of the Establishment.
I am not quite sure if there were more non-trinitarians or unitarians in the 19° century, but we can read about the attitudes taken to such beleivers.
Dr. Parr gladly associated with Unitarians, and went to Unitarian chapels to hear Unitarian ministers preach.  Would Dean Close do so?  Yet Dr. Parr, as much as Dean Close, was of the Church as regards solemn profession, and deliberate assent and consent.  Mr. Melville believes Dissent to be schism, and one of the deadly sins, while the Deans of Westminster and Canterbury hold out to Dissenters friendly hands.
When Ritchie wrote his books there were Ebionites  who regarded Christ as a mere man and Gnostics whom considered Jesus as superhuman; but in that capacity as one of a very numerous class.
The author considered the Monachians, who were divided respectively into Dynamistic and Modalistic as possible heretic.  As the latter held that the whole fulness of the Deity dwelt in Christ and only found in him a peculiar mode of manifestation, it was assumed that the natural inference was that the Father himself had died on the Cross.
Hence to these heretics the name of Patripassians was applied by the orthodox.  Sabellius, who maintained a Trinity, not of divine Persons but of successive manifestations under the names Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, was one of the chief Patripassians.  The Arian controversy, as Dean Stanley shows, turned on the relations of the divine persons before the first beginning of time.
 There was also a lot of division in the many denominations.
If we take the Articles, the Church Establishment is as orthodox as the firmest Christian or the narrowest-minded bigot can desire; if we turn to its ministers, we find them as divided as it is possible for people professing to take their teaching from the Bible can be.  If there be any grace in creeds and articles, any virtue in signing them, if their imposition be not a solemn farce, it is impossible that heresy should exist within the Established Church.  It is in the wide and varied fields of Dissent that we are to look for heresy.
Though he considered the Church of England to be tolerant, to a certain extent, of heresy.  The judicious Hooker writes,
 “We must acknowledge even heretics themselves to be a maimed part, yet a part, of the visible Church.  If an infidel should pursue to death an heretic professing Christianity only for Christian profession’s sake, could we deny unto him the honour of martyrdom?  Yet this honour all men know to be proper unto the Church.  Heretics, therefore, are not utterly cast out from the visible Church of Christ.  If the Fathers do, therefore, anywhere, as often they do, make the true visible Church of Christ and heretical companies opposite, they are to be construed as separating heretics not altogether from the company of believers, but from the fellowship of sound believers.  For where professed unbelief is, there can be no visible Church of Christ; there may be where sound belief wanteth.  Infidels being clean without the Church, deny directly and utterly reject the very principles of Christianity which heretics embrace, and err only by misconstruction, whereupon their opinions, although repugnant indeed to the principles of Christian faith, are notwithstanding by them held otherwise and maintained as most consistent therewith.”
The Privy Council by its Judgment of “Essays and Reviews” has decided that a Churchman may hold heretical opinions.
In popular language, the Congregationalists, the Baptists, the Presbyterians are orthodox; the Quakers, the Methodists, Wesleyans and otherwise, are orthodox; for our purpose popular language is sufficient.
Ritchie wrote.

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Wednesday 12 February 2014

19° Century London Christadelphians

 From

the
RELIGIOUS LIFE OF LONDON.

by
J. EWING RITCHIE,
author ofbritish senators,” “the night side of london,” etc.
LONDON:
TINSLEY BROTHERS, 18, CATHERINE STREET, STRAND.
1870.

What good men have been persecuted and suffered wrong because they bore the name of a sect distasteful to an imperious majority!  How the mob have thirsted for their blood!
  “These are Christians—away with them to the lions,” said they of old Rome.  “Down with the Roundheads!”
 was the cry of country squire and rural parson when a few devout men such as Richard Baxter and others more or less known to fame met in a small room to keep alive the spirit of piety and prayer amongst themselves.  It was the same when Wesley and Whitefield, often at the peril of life, proclaimed in parishes of England sunk in ignorance Gospel truths.  There are thousands who, like the late Isaac Taylor, of Ongar, could tell how a “Church and King mob” kept them in perpetual fear, because they were “Meetingers.”  There are yet parishes in Suffolk and Norfolk where to go to chapel is to insure your being despised as a “Pogram,” and cut by all the dignities of the village, even if you have the learning of a German professor and the piety of a saint.

  In the Babel of London, however, it is different; here, there is a rage for new names, and there are preachers and people ever ready to resort to a new name, as if novelty were a possibility in our day, after eighteen hundred years of theological hair-splitting and threshing of straw.  The Christadelphians are the latest production in this way.  They meet in Crowndale Hall, Crowndale Road, St. Pancras Road, every Sunday; in the morning, at eleven, for the breaking of bread, and worship; in the afternoon at three, when there is a Bible-class especially for inquirers, when opportunity to ask questions respecting the one faith is afforded; and at seven in the evening, when we are told the Word of God is expounded in harmony with the things concerning the kingdom of God and the name of Jesus anointed.

  One of the most active teachers is Mr. Watts, late of Vernon Chapel, King’s Cross Road.  The Athenæum Hall, Temple Road, Birmingham, seems to be the headquarters of Christadelphian publications.  There are published there the Christadelphian Shield, the Biblical Newspaper, and the Ambassador, monthly periodicals, and other publications more expensive, and aiming to be standard works.


This, I take it, is the epitome of their faith:—
One God, the Eternal Father, dwelling in heaven in light of glory inconceivable; one universal irradiant Spirit, by which the Father fills all and knows all, and when He wills, performs all; one Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, begotten by the Spirit of the Virgin Mary, put to death for sin, raised from the dead for righteousness, and exalted to the heavens as a Mediator between God and man; man a creature of the ground, under sentence of death because of sin, which is his great enemy — the devil; deliverance from death by resurrection, and bodily glorification at the coming of Christ and inheritance of the kingdom of God, offered to all men on condition—1, of believing the glad tidings of Christ’s accomplishment at His first appearing, and of His coming manifestations in the earth as King of Israel and Ruler of the whole earth at the setting up of the kingdom of God; 2, of being immersed in water for His name; and 3, of continuing in well-doing to the end of this probationary career.”
This is the teaching of the new sect.  They rejoice in their emancipation from the bondage of orthodoxy.

  Mr. Watts says:
“My past nineteen years of religious life I regard as so much lost time taken up with the fables and follies of man’s fleshly mind, systematized upon a pagan theology; and although I honestly thought myself right, and strove hard to lead others, yet I am now fully persuaded it was all done in ignorance of the true knowledge of God.”
  He tells us the Evangelical party in the Church or Dissent do not know the Gospel.
  “Nothing can be more clear,”
 he says,
 “than that this (their doctrine of the resurrection) first item of the Gospel as preached by Jesus and the Apostles does not form any part of the teaching either of those who pretend to be the successors of the Apostles, or the sects and parties of Dissenters who have imbibed their system of theology from the same polluted stream.”
  The doctrine of the soul’s essential and inherent immortality is a pagan myth.  For the heathen there is no future life; for them what Macbeth wished has come to pass, and life is indeed
“The be all and the end all here.”
The mere belief of this doctrine relieves orthodoxy of the perplexing problem, What becomes of the heathen? and of course strikes at the foundation of the doctrine of purgatory.  Yet we are not to suppose there will be no punishment for the wicked and the disobedient; they shall beaten with stripes, and then, according to the righteous Judge, enter upon that second death state, from which there shall be no resurrection—an opinion the direct opposite of that of Origen and Archbishop Tillotson, first promulgated in modern times by Dr. Rust, Bishop of Dromore.  The Calvinistic formula is also, in the opinion of the Christadelphians, a mere travesty of the subject of the atonement.  As to man in general, he is born to die.  God treated the first man federally.  He put him on probation, and in him all his successors stood or fell.  We never read of immortal, never-dying souls in Scripture, and to foist such a meaning on 2 Cor. v. 8, as that it proves the existence of a separate state of disembodied spirits, is to handle the Word of God deceitfully.

  Once Mr. Watts believed in a kingdom in the sky, a throne in the heart, a seed of Israel, a New Jerusalem and promised land, all mystically referring to something at present existing in the so-called Christian Church.  He does so no longer.  His eyes are opened, the light is come, and he and his friends, chiefly juveniles, rejoice; and if they have the true light, who shall say they have no reason to rejoice?  Farewell, writes Mr. Watts, in a poem considered poetically of doubtful merit—
“Farewell to the false, I welcome the true,
And begin the year with Christ anew.”
This reference to poetry reminds me that the Christadelphians have a hymn-book of their own, to frame which appears to have been a matter of no little trouble.  With the hymns used by Christian churches in general they find much fault.  They require something manly and robust, whereas the churches of all denominations rejoice in what is sentimental, and their songs of praise and devotion are described as “oceans of slops.”  Whether the Christadelphians have much improved theirs, I leave the reader to judge.  As a specimen I quote one verse from Montgomery’s well-known poem, “The Grave.”  In their hymn-book I find it printed thus.  I quote from memory:—
“There is a calm for saints who weep,
   A rest for weary Weyyah found;
In Christ secure they sweetly sleep,
   Hid in the ground.”
At present the Christadelphians do not seem very flourishing.  In their little room—which is miscalled a hall—there are about forty of them of an evening, quibbling earnestly, and to the best of their ability.

In taking leave of the Christadelphians, let me refer to a passage in our Church history.  It is notorious that the celebrated Henry Dodwell, Camden Professor of History in the University of Oxford, in order to exalt the power and dignity of the priesthood, endeavoured to prove that the doctrine of the soul’s natural mortality was the true and original doctrine, and that immortality was only at baptism conferred upon the soul by the gift of God through the hands of one set of regularly ordained clergy.
p. 300-  p305
File:Women in Industry during the First World War, London, c 1918 Q28553.jpg
Women in Industry during the First World War, London, c 1918
A general view of the central hall of Crowndale Works, an anti-gas mask factory, in Camden Town, London. A mass of women sit shoulder to shoulder on long tables to prepare the glass for the mask eyepieces.
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