The root and branch bill was debated in the house of commons between 27 May and 27 July 1641. The original bill introduced by Sir Edward Dering was short, simply abolishing bishops, deans and chapters with all their dependents. But after the house had wrestled for two months with the business of replacing episcopacy with a new form of church government the bill had grown to more than forty pages. No complete copy of it, as it stood when it was dropped in August, has survived, but its main provisions can be reconstructed from the commons journals and parliamentary diaries. A new system of government was to be set up in two stages: its final form would be determined by a synod of divines, which it was intended should meet in the autumn of 1641 and work fast enough for the new jurisdiction to be established by 1 March 1642; in the meanwhile parliament would take all ecclesiastical jurisdiction into its own hands and proceed with the redistribution of the church’s financial resources. This paper is concerned with the first of these two stages, the commons’s interim programme of action to fill the vacuum left by root and branch. The speeches of MPs on three topics that dominated the June and July debates—church courts, ordination and deans and chapters— strikingly reveal their concern to use a period of temporary control over the church for reform and renewal.

The restoration of Charles II seemed to the men of the church of England the miraculous inauguration of a golden age—‘When the Lord turned again the captivity of Sion: then were we like unto them that dream. Then was our mouth filled with laughter: and our tongue with joy.’ The clerical beneficiaries of the settlement of 1662 had much to rejoice them; the act of uniformity symbolised the secure replanting of the Laudian ideal, an ideal which, as R. S. Bosher has shown, had stiffened and intensified in the years of adversity. The restored church was more certain of itself, more intransigent in its jure divino episcopal claims, than the church of the 1630s. This new assurance was nourished by the flowering of anglican patristic learning which is so striking a feature of the later seventeenth century. The magisterial works of Ussher and Pearson on the Ignatian epistles, of Pearson and Fell on Cyprian, and of Bull on the ante-Nicene fathers, each contributed to a deepening sense of the continuity of the church of England with the catholic church of the first centuries. More and more the appeal to antiquity became the criterion of orthodoxy, and in that antiquity anglicanism found not merely its origins, but, occasionally and increasingly, a mirror image of itself. William Beveridge told his hearers at St Peter’s Cornhill.

In December 1800 the Evangelical Magazine published a ‘Spiritual barometer; or, a scale of the progress of sin and of grace’. Towards the positive pole it was calibrated with the attributes and practices thought to characterise those destined for ‘glory’ and ‘dismission from the body’; at the other extreme, graded in degrees of depravity, were the activities of those assumed to be heading heedlessly to ‘death’ and ‘perdition’. Among the most heinous of sins, even more damning than attendance at the theatre, was ‘love of novels’.

Novel-reading was condemned as a hallmark of worldliness. Evangelicals believed that church and world were diametrically opposed and that the safest route to sanctity lay in separation from the world, its contaminating company and perverting practices: ‘If we are not to think, to feel, to act, and to perish with the world, let a deep and wide interval yet exist between the habits of pleasure of the two parties.’ Ignorance of evil was deemed bliss: to read novels was to become familiar with just such beliefs and behaviour as were avoided in everyday life. Moreover, it was argued that novelists rarely upheld Christian values: they depicted wickedness sympathetically and effectively denied that sin, an affront to God, had dire consequences. They therefore misled their readers in matters of ultimate importance. Evangelicals maintained that the worthiness of characters should be evaluated according to criteria which God might be assumed to adopt. Failure to reflect a biblical outlook on life was a culpable misrepresentation of reality.

The nineteenth-century histories of England were inspired by and reflect the political and religious ideologies of the era; the liberal anglican school described by Duncan Forbes, the varieties of high church scholarship from Christopher Wordsworth to canon Dixon, the optimistic whiggery of Hallam and Macaulay, the protestant high toryism of Southey, the political protestantism of Froudc and the teutomania of Freeman. Most of these writers had two ideas in common; a strong sense of the importance of national history as a reinforcement of the English sense of self identity, and the oneness of English history. This was a view given classic expression m John Richard Green’s Short History of the English People, and has been perpetuated by Trevelyan and Churchill into the twentieth century. Far better than most of his predecessors, Green’s history was more than just a history of the nation written from a partisan point of view, and owed its popularity as much to its breadth of sympathy as to the author’s gift for quicksilver generalisation and narration which move the reader on at the pace of a hare. In this last quality, it was most unlike the most popular nineteenth-century history of England before its publication, the work of a Roman catholic priest John Lingard, though Lingard also professed to rise above the turmoil of parties to write an impartial history.

Storms are more easily studied in tea-cups than in oceans. Early tractarianism was clearly a storm and the Scottish episcopal church was equally clearly a tea-cup. It is assumed for this study that tractarianism was only one aspect of a wider movement which affected the church of England and Roman Catholicism in similar ways, though it affected the church of Scotland in dissimilar ways. Its basic tenet was that God is holy and cannot be approached directly, or known directly, but only through a cultural screen. This screen, which was also a lens, would extend throughout the world as did Christianity. Its specific form might be gothic architecture or language or any other purely ecclesiastical form of expression. Such forms were essentially a matter of style, and style mattered.

On his way to one of the early meetings of the church service society, Story met Charteris on the street, who asked what were their aims. He replied, ‘To restore the ring in marriage, the cross in baptism, and the denial of the cup to the laity’. Charteris fled in horror.

Before discussing the renaissance of public worship in the church of Scotland it is necessary to look at the background. The lineage of reformed worship can be traced from Diebold Schwarz’s translation of the Hagenau Missal into German in 1524 through Bucer and Calvin, both of whom desired weekly communion, to the Scottish Book of Common Order (1564). When the civil authorities forbade weekly communion, Bucer and Calvin did not prepare an order of service for Sunday morning, but rubricated the order for communion as to how it should end when there was no celebration of the supper: that is, the eucharist was the norm for public worship.

Let us start from the propositions that we need a new model of late nineteenth-century English nonconformist history, and that one might be found by making some use of the idea of ‘renaissance’, especially if one uses ‘renaissance’ to point to the emergence at a particular time of humanist attitudes. This new model needs to be both less anglican and less nonconformist than its predecessors. The anglican model of nineteenth-century nonconformity is obsessed with anglicanism, and the nonconformist model is equally obsessed with the behaviour of an earlier, largely unrelated evangelical protestantism in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Both, in other words, are affected by shallow ideas of historical continuity. The individual nineteenth-century anglican often thought of nonconformity as the shadow cast by anglicanism; individual nonconformists believed that seventeenth-century independency had founded English political freedom, or that eighteenth-century non-anglicans had saved evangelical protestant truth from total disappearance. These were myths, however.

There is a theological renaissance today’, proclaimed the American theologian Daniel Day Williams in 1952. ‘The rebirth of theology means a renewal of the effort to discover the foundations of the Christian life’. He maintained that following the publication of Karl Barth’s commentary on Romans in 1918 ‘there has been a deepening consciousness that there is a radical settlement to be made between Christianity and the thought and values of the modern world’. Williams’ assertion is better read as an indication of the mood of ‘pessimistic optimism’ manifested by many American theologians in the post world war two era than as an accurate description of the development of American theology from 1918. Moreover one man’s ‘renaissance’ is another man’s ‘reaction’, and there is something distinctly bizarre in the use of the former term in connection with a thinker like Karl Barth who devoted the most productive period of his life to total opposition to those intellectual assumptions which were characteristic of the sixteenth-century renaissance and were further developed in the European enlightenment. Nevertheless the historian of religion would be the last to deny the importance of investigating the factual basis of mythical beliefs, especially when they were as widely held as those put forward by Williams.

Storrington in Sussex, at the beginning of this century, was described as ‘a quiet, peaceful village.’ Although in the intervening period its population has more than doubled, it is still known as a village and has retained much of that agreeable character. In 1909 it suddenly became the centre of an ecclesiastical cause célèbre that attracted international attention. Anyone who was in Storrington on 21 July in that year could have witnessed an extraordinary funeral.

It was the burial of a Roman catholic priest. The mourners, who numbered about forty, assembled in the garden of the house in the middle of the village where the priest had died and walked from there in silence to a grave that had been prepared in the anglican or parish churchyard. There was no requiem or formal funeral service, but prayers were said and an address was given by an unrobed priest who was in fact a Frenchman, though that might not have been evident since he was fluent in English. He said that he spoke in the name of many French, Italian and German friends, for father George Tyrrell, whose funeral it was, had become well-known in those countries and in others too. He was one of the most conspicuous representatives of what is known to historians as the modernist movement in the Roman catholic church and of what may be described as an abortive renaissance.

It was clear to the German people who lived through the Nazi seizure of power that they were witnessing a process of profound political and social change. It seemed natural to those who were active Christians to ask what was the spiritual nature of this change? Did it offer hope of Christian renaissance and renewal? In retrospect it seems obvious that it did not and even surprising that Christians should have entertained hopes that it might. But, at the time, this was not at all obvious to millions of German protestants. The very volume of their publications centred on the year 1933 is eloquent testimony to the urgent need they felt to understand, explain and interpret what was going on around them. This paper is about the questions they asked and the reasons why the answers were not clear to them.