This book is about religion, reform, and modernity. More specifically, it is about Thomas Secker (1693–1768), the orthodox church reform effort which he spearheaded, and the lessons that reform effort tells us about eighteenth-century England. Historians need some sort of intellectual glue to hold together the swaths of time we study, or else the past risks becoming just a jumble of chaotic events. Religious change and the attendant political conflict serve as an important cohesive for studies of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England, while the birth of the modern world does so for the eighteenth. Yet where sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English men and women were clearly concerned with Protestantism, popery, and arbitrary government, it is not evident that those living during the eighteenth century were preoccupied by modernity. Put another way, while recent historians of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England have tended to address the historical problems which consumed those whom they study, their counterparts examining the eighteenth century have more often let present-day concerns shape their research agendas: rather than subject the eighteenth century to the ‘historians' question – where did things stand?’, most recent scholars have tended instead to pose the ‘solipsistic question…where did I come from?’ Indeed, the growing interest in the period has coincided neatly with the increasing scholarly conviction that the eighteenth century gave birth to the modern world. It is our very own creation myth.

To question whether the eighteenth century was the crucible of modernity is not to deny that important transformations took place then. It is merely to suggest that the nature, scope, pace, and causes of that change have been either overstated or misconstrued. This book suggests that Thomas Secker’s life possesses a seismographic quality, one which should force us to look afresh at some important aspects of English society during the century after the Glorious Revolution. In particular orthodox church reform – itself hitherto unappreciated and, at once, both a reflection of and a response to societal change – elucidates at least two salient points. Firstly, most, including orthodox reform’s most strident detractors, looked prescriptively to the past for solutions to current societal problems: the answers for the future lay behind them, not in front of them.