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Irvingism1 as an Analogue of the Oxford Movement

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 July 2009

Pierce Butler
Affiliation:
University of Chicago

Extract

The Irvingite sect, or, as it names itself, “The Catholic Apostolic Church,” can be traced back to a meeting called by Henry Drummond, an eminent banker of London, at the beginning of Advent in 1826. Drummond was then a loyal member of the Church of England and had no suspicion that his invitation to twenty “students of prophecy” for eight days of conference at his suburban estate was to lead to the establishment of a new dissenting body with himself as one of its chief ministers. Yet from this informal beginning there germinated an international church, which, in its authoritarianism, sacerdotalism, sacramentalism, and ritualism, ran in close parallel with the Catholic development within Anglicanism.

Type
Articles
Copyright
Copyright © American Society of Church History 1937

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References

2 The reporter says, “The room used to ring with it.”

3 On this point it is interesting that Miller, the Anglican, on one occasion accuses the Irvingite prelates of an “economy of truth” and a subtle evasiveness; on another he states with horror that certain clergy of the Established Church were secretly members of the sectarian order. One is reminded in both points of Walter Walsh's Secret History of the Oxford Movement, which brings exactly the same charges against the school of which Miller himself is so typically representative.

4 Frequently the Catholic personifies “Holy Mother Church.”

5 Men of a similar type will find this no difficult feat.

6 In these the heart of an economic interpreter of history may be glad and rejoice greatly.

7 Reprinted by Miller, , Irvingism, I, 347436.Google Scholar