Between 29 April 1689 and 24 March 1690 a number of Dissenting ministers in northern Lancashire conducted a series of meetings at which they examined the eighteen-year-old Richard Dugdale. A gardener by trade, Dugdale had been exhibiting what he and his family claimed were evidences of demonic possession. The Dissenting ministers involved were all convinced of the supernatural origins of Dugdale’s strange behaviour, and over the course of the year regularly prayed and fasted in an attempt to exorcise the young man. These meetings ended as abruptly as they began in March 1690, when the ministers claimed to have successfully exorcised him. Seven years after the final meeting a narative of these events was published by two of the Dissenting minsters involved, a step that provoked a hostile exchange of pamphlets. These pamphlets, commonly referred to as the Surey Demoniack pamphlets, form the basis of this article.

The Glorious Revolution encouraged Presbyterians to hope for comprehension within the Church of England. The failure of those hopes led them to co-operate more closely with their Congregational brethren. In London the earliest practical outcome of this increased co-operation was the Common Fund, which held its first meeting in June 1690. Controlled by managers drawn from both denominations, the Fund was established to offer financial help to poor ministers, congregations, and students who lived in the provinces. A scheme for uniting the two ministries, the Happy Union, set out in the ‘Heads of Agreement’, was adopted a year later on 6 April 1691, but within months this union had dissolved amidst bitter dissension. In less than four years all the schemes for co-operation between Presbyterians and Congregationals had collapsed in London. Nevertheless, co-operation between Presbyterians and Independents, and even the ideals of the Happy Union, continued in the provinces long after the failure in London. In part this was because the desire for a union between the two denominations was widely held throughout the country; indeed the earliest agreement was made by an Assembly of West Country ministers at Bristol in June 1690, nearly a year before the ‘Heads of Agreement’ were adopted in London. Moreover, in many localities following toleration, Presbyterians and Independents still came together in one meeting as a result of the earlier persecution and because of their loyalty to a particular minister. Where dissent was strong, such as in London and the major towns, separate congregations for Presbyterians and Congregational were likely; but where dissent was weaker, particularly in the countryside, congregations included members from both denominations. In these circumstances, members had to accept a minister who did not necessarily share their own denominational preferences. During the first two decades of the eighteenth century the majority of these joint congregations were to divide, as (in most cases) the smaller body of Congregational supporters withdrew to establish their own meetings. There had, however, been more than twenty years of co-operation in many areas in the period following the collapse of the Happy Union in London, and in a few cases such arrangements even continued until the early nineteenth century. There is evidence from at least two congregations, at Leicester and Chesterfield, of a formal agreement to settle the differences between the two denominations. The Happy Union and its failure in London has been the subject of a number of studies, but by contrast the continuing co-operation between Presbyterians and Independents in the provinces has received little detailed attention.

Following independence, Americans’ sense of the special status of their new nation drew succour not merely from their republican experiment but from the unique character of the nation’s religious life. Even before the Revolution Americans had witnessed an extraordinary proliferation of sects and churches, to a degree unparalleled in any single European state, as ethnic diversity increased and the mid-eighteenth-century revivals split churches and multiplied congregations. The Congregationalist establishment in New England and Anglican power in the middle and southern colonies uneasily confronted energetic dissenting minorities, including Scotch-Irish Presbyterians, English Baptists, and German Lutheran and Reformed groups. After 1776 it took some time to define a new relationship between church and state. Colonial habits of thought persisted and prompted schemes of multiple establishment or government support for religion in general. The Virginia Act for Establishing Religious Freedom in 1786 and, five years later, the First Amendment to the Federal Constitution did not succeed wholly in eliminating state authority from the sphere of religion; indeed, residual establishments persisted in Connecticut until 1818 and in Massachusetts until 1833. Yet an important shift was under way towards a ‘voluntary’ system of religious support, in which governmental authority in religion was replaced by increased authority for self-sustaining denominational bodies. After 1790 ecclesiastical institutions grew at an extraordinary pace, shaping the era labelled by historians the ‘Second Great Awakening’. As Jon Butler has reminded us, some 50,000 new churches were built in America between 1780 and 1860, sacralizing the landscape with steeples and graveyards and creating a heterogeneous presence that drew streams of European visitors curious to evaluate the effects of America’s unique experiment in ‘voluntarism’. By 1855 over four million of the country’s twenty-seven million people were members of one of over forty Protestant denominations, most of them recognizable by name as churches with an Old World ancestry but with features which made them distinctively American. Additionally, there were over one million Catholics.

One of the most remarkable features in the history of British Quakerism is its ability rapidly to change its theological orientation — changing in succession from an outward looking mass movement, to an inward-looking sect, to an evangelical ecumenically-minded denomination, to a theologically liberal association of like-minded individuals. This paper considers the third of these transitions, the move from sectarianism to evangelicalism. This period of transition provides a useful case study of how the beliefs of a pan-denominational movement (in this case evangelicalism) interact with the existing beliefs of a sect (in this case the corpus of traditional Quaker beliefs known as Quietism). In this case study, particular attention will be focused on Joseph John Gurney (1788-1847), the individual most closely associated with the rise of evangelicalism within British Quakerism.

About thirty years ago, Dr John Walsh observed that ‘the comparative history of the many evangelical or pietistic revivals of the nineteenth century remains to be written” and on this particular front we can hardly claim today to have made very much progress. Any such study could well start with the French-speaking Swiss awakening or réveil, in the second decade of the century, which was soon to have a considerable impact on both French-speaking Protestants in general and, a little later, on British Evangelicals. Reacting against the conservative rationalism of the establishment many of the réveillés turned to a more romantic and experimental form of pietism which was liable to bring them into conflict with the ecclesiastical authorities and sometimes caused them to hive off into secession. The young men whose aims and ideals led to these divisions had nevertheless some genuinely ecumenical aspirations and a real concern for some visible expression of the Church’s unity. The movement in French-speaking Switzerland is therefore a good field of enquiry in which the tensions between strivings for unity and separatist diversification can be explored.

Leonard Bacon, minister of the First Congregational Church at New Haven, preaching before the Foreign Evangelical Society in New York in May 1845, found in the Atlantic Ocean a vivid image of an underlying unity which he perceived in the divided evangelical churches that surrounded it. Separated though they were, still influences upon them operated like ‘the tide raised from the bosom of the vast Atlantic when the moon hangs over it in her height, [which] swells into every estuary, and every bay and sound, and every quiet cove and sheltered haven, and is felt far inland where mighty streams rise in their channels and pause upon their journey to the sea’. The choice of metaphor betrayed an aspiration that the North Atlantic itself should become an evangelical lake. Such hopes, Bacon appreciated, would be worse than fruitless if they were driven by a model of Christianity as ‘one and indivisible’. No, the model should be the American, not the French Republic, e pluribus unum, unity in diversity.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the subject of Anglican identity in the period from about 1800 to about 1870. This is a complex topic, and it will be possible here only to highlight a few themes. It will be suggested that the understanding of who was and who was not a ‘real’ Anglican underwent several important shifts during the period, until by the 1870s the definition had become increasingly narrow and exclusive. The result was not unity, but an atmosphere of increasingly narrow sectarianism, which had the effect of repelling those who were on the fringes of Anglican allegiance, and thus narrowing the base of lay support for the Church of England in the country at large.

In May 1832, as emissaries from the Birmingham Political Union sought to gain support for the Reform Bill in Staffordshire, the editor of the pro-Reform Birmingham Journal, W. G. Lewis, exhorted ‘Our cause is a holy cause, — it is the cause of religion, - it is the cause of humanity, — it is the cause of the Bible.’ This is but one of many declarations by radical Christian figures of the intrinsic connection they saw between religion and politics. They not only confirmed that it was right for Christians to be involved in the political sphere, but asserted that the teachings of Scripture demanded fundamental changes to the socio-political order and the principles upon which it was founded.

In August 1841 George Spencer, great-grandson of the third Duke of Marlborough and second Bishop of Madras, entertained two house guests in his residence at Kotagherry. Both were seeking admission into the Anglican ministry. One was an Indian, a former Roman Catholic priest who had begun to question the catholicity of the Roman communion, had joined himself for a while to the American Congregational mission in Madura, but had eventually reached the conclusion, in Spencer’s words, that ‘evangelical doctrine joined to Apostolic Government were only to be met with in indissoluble conjunction with the Church of England’. Bishop Spencer, while keen to employ the Indian as a catechist, felt it premature, ‘in a matter of such importance’, to receive him as a presbyter, even though the validity of his orders was unquestionable. The Indian is not named in the records, and it would appear that he never became an Anglican priest.

Nova Scotia and Quebec were the only two overseas Anglican bishoprics in 1800, besides the eleven in the USA. By 1900 there were ninety-three overseas Anglican bishops, as well as the seventy-two in the home and missionary dioceses of the USA Church. Rapidly expanding colonial and missionary work was an essential element in the life of all nineteenth-century British Churches. Each by 1900 supported denominational and interdenominational missionary societies and encouraged local congregational missionary activities. Here and in fostering emigration to colonies, each British Church willingly took its part in fulfilling British imperial ideals.

When Christian missionaries returned to Japan in 1859, after having been excluded from that country for over two centuries, they hoped that there might be some possibility of making contact with descendants of Japan’s original evangelized communities, and locating some folk memory of the so-called ‘Christian Century’, which had ended with the expulsion of European priests in 1614, and the persecution of native Christians. None of the newly arrived missionaries, however, had been prepared for the discovery of active secret communities who had maintained the Christian faith as an underground church for seven generations. Yet this was the revelation experienced by Father Bernard Petitjean of the French Société des Missions Étrangères in the porch of the newly consecrated church at Õura in Nagasaki, on 17 March 1865:

One of the foremost advocates of union between the Anglican and Presbyterian Churches at the beginning of this century was James Cooper, Regius Professor of Ecclesiastical History in the University of Glasgow from 1898 to 1922. Cooper was the best-known representative within the Church of Scotland of the Scoto-Catholic or high-church movement which was expressed in the formation of the Scottish Church Society in 1892. One of the ‘special objects’ of the Society was the ‘furtherance of Catholic unity in every way consistent with true loyalty to the Church of Scotland’. The realization of catholic unity led high churchmen to seek what Cooper termed a ‘United Church for the British Empire’ which would include the union of the Church of Scotland and the Church of England. This new unity would require a reconciliation of differences and the elimination of diversities: on the one hand an acceptance of bishops by the Scottish Presbyterians; on the other an acceptance of the validity of Presbyterian orders by Episcopalians and Anglicans.

‘Uniformity’, declared Sir John Nicholl, one of the greatest of Anglican ecclesiastical lawyers, ‘is one of the leading and distinguishing principles of the Church of England - nothing is left to the discretion and fancy of the individual.’ At the Reformation the English Church was distinguished not by the decisions of councils, confessional statements, or the writings of particular leaders, but by one uniform liturgy. This liturgy, ‘containing nothing contrary to the Word of God, or to sound Doctrine’ and consonant with the practice of the early Church, was intended to ‘preserve Peace and Unity in the Church’ and to edify the people. It was also opposed to the ‘great diversity in saying and singing in Churches within this Realm’ and, abolishing the liturgical uses of Salisbury, Hereford, Bangor, York, and Lincoln, it established that ‘now from henceforth all the whole Realm shall have but one Use’. This principle of liturgical uniformity was enshrined in the several Acts of Uniformity from that of the second year of King Edward VI to that of the fourteenth year of Charles II, amended, but not abolished, in the reign of Queen Victoria. It was a principle conveyed to the churches in the colonies so that, even if they revised or abandoned the Book of Common Prayer in use in England, as the Americans did in 1789, what was substituted was called ‘The Book of Common Prayer and declared to be ‘the Liturgy of this Church’ to be ‘received as such by all members of the same’. The principle of uniformity was modified during the Anglican Communion’s missionary expansion. The Lambeth Conference of 1920 considered that liturgical uniformity throughout the Churches of the Anglican Communion was not a necessity, but the 1930 Conference held that the Book of Common Prayer, as authorized in the several Churches of the Communion, was the place where faith and order were set forth, and so implied a degree of uniformity maintained by the use of a single book.

For the Seventh-day Adventist Church, whose doctrines are rooted in eschatological and apocalyptic theology, ecumenism is problematic. While the Church sees itself as one heir of the historic tradition of Christianity and so welcomes recognition as part of the mainstream, it also claims to be the organization through which God proclaims a special message to the modern age. Put simply, sometimes Seventh-day Adventists are happy to be part of the universal Church and at other times they claim to be members of the only true Church. Obviously, the latter, exclusivist attitude is in contradiction to the ethos of the ecumenical movement.

YMCA is a household acronym. Throughout the world people are sure that they know what it means. In 1926 two well-connected Labour politicians, the Wedgwood Benns, were in Moscow. There the head of the Bureau for Cultural Relations with Foreigners, Olga Kamenev, who was also well-connected, since she was Trotsky’s sister, told them about one of the Russian capital’s most serious problems: the street children. These youngsters, homeless since the civil war, slept under bridges and robbed railway trains: