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‘A Saint if ever there was One’: Henry Robert Reynolds (1825–96)
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 04 January 2016
Extract
A ‘saint if ever there was one, but who might have been a little more effective had there been in his nature some slight traces of the old Adam’. Thus William Hardy Harwood (1856—1924) reflecting on a past member of Sub Rosa, a long-established essay club for Congregational ministers in Greater London. Harwood could only have known this particular saint for four years and perhaps his recollection is best seen as a businesslike minister’s snapshot of an other-worldliness outside the normal run of Nonconformist experience. It betrays a degree of affectionate irritation. It is almost a dismissal. Free Churchmen don’t do saints.
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References
1 Peel, Albert, ‘The Sub Rosa’, Transactions of the Congregational Historical Society 12.3 (April 1934), 132–41, at 138.Google Scholar
2 The main source is Henry Robert Reynolds D.D.: His Life and Letters Edited by his Sisters, with Portraits (London, 1898); Reynolds and his brother, Sir John Russell Reynolds (1828–96), have entries in ODNB.
3 Sarah Fletcher Reynolds married John Bird Best (d. 1902), gentleman farmer of Dorset and Hertfordshire; Harriet Reynolds married John Savill Vaizey: the Vaizeys of Attwoods and Star Stile, Halstead, were an armigerous landowning family. County voters were those who were entitled to vote in county constituencies, by virtue of their property-holding qualifications (the so-called ‘forty-shilling freeholders’). Electoral reform from 1832 onwards, of course, changed the basis of the franchise.
4 Through the influence conferred by their newspaper, The Leeds Mercury, the Baines family shaped and dominated Leeds Liberalism, hence the term, ‘Bainesocracy’, to denote the peak of their influence, which lasted from the 1830s to the 1870s. Susanna Reynolds married Frederick Baines (1811—93).
5 The interaction of East Parade and the Bainesocracy is developed in Binfield, C., So Down to Prayers: Studies in English Nonconformity 1780–1920 (London, 1977), 54–100.Google Scholar
6 Life and Letters, 88–92.
7 Ibid. 208, 430.
8 [Hall, C. Newman], Newman Hall: An Autobiography (London, 1898), 302.Google Scholar
9 In 1883 and 1891: Peel, A., Letters to a Victorian Editor: Henry Allon, Editor of the British Quarterly Review (London, 1929), 339–40 Google Scholar; Life and Letters, 442.
10 This perhaps surprising link dates from Reynolds’s Romsey days: Broadlands, Palmerston’s estate, was nearby: Life and Letters, 6—8.
11 [With Whitehouse, O. C.], ‘Hosea’ and ‘Amos’, in Ellicott, C. J., ed., Old Testament Commentary for English Readers, 5 vols (London, 1882–4), 5: 411–34. 449–67 Google Scholar; The Pulpit Commentary: Introduction to the Gospel of St. John, with Exposition and Commentary (London, 1888)Google Scholar; John the Baptist (London, 1874)Google Scholar; Athanasius: His Life and Life-work (London, 1889)Google Scholar; Buddhism: A Comparison and a Contrast between Buddhism and Christianity (London, 1883).Google Scholar
12 ‘The Forgiveness and Absolution of Sins’, in Ecclesia: Church Problems considered in a Series of Essays (London, 1870), 243–312; ‘The Catholic Church’, in Ecclesia: A Second Series of Essays on Theological and Ecclesiastical Questions by Various Writers (London, 1871), 113–71.
13 Co-editor, British Quarterly Review, 1866–74; editor, Evangelical Magazine, 1877—82; The Leeds Hymn Book (1853); [with John Russell Reynolds], Yes and No, or Glimpses of the Great Conflict (London, 1860).
14 Life and Letters, 226–7, 290.
15 In Reynolds’s time numbers fluctuated without declining overall; the constant deficit of the 1880s did not amount to crisis; the ‘defections’, though painful to Reynolds, did not run counter to Cheshunt’s foundation.
16 Life and Letters, 144.
17 For Burch’s ministerial career, see W. H. Summers, History of the Congregational Churches in the Berks, South Oxon and South Bucks Association (Newbury, 1905), 253; for his subsequent career, see Who Was Who, 1897–1916 (London, 1920), s.n. ‘Burch, George James’.
18 Life and Letters, 546.
19 Evans, W. and Claridge, W., James Hirst Hollowell and the Movement for Civic Control in Education (Manchester, 1911), 11–12.Google Scholar
20 Peel, A. and Marriott, J. A. R., Robert Forman Horton (London, 1937), 205.Google Scholar
21 [Hall], Autobiography, 332.
23 See n. 11 above.
24 Orchard, S. C., Cheshunt College (Saffron Walden, 1968)Google Scholar, esp. 12–13.
25 The following paragraph is based on the entry placed annually in the Congregational Year Book [hereafter CYB], in this instance CYB, 1870, 333. In 1858 there were twenty-two students; twenty-nine in 1869; thirty-nine in 1878; thirty-three in 1893; the college was third in size of the eight English colleges in 1860.
26 Life and Letters, 281.
27 CYB, 1875, 382, 436.
28 A representative example is William Garrett Horder (1841–1922), notable hymnologist, whose departure from Wood Green to Bradford in 1893 was graced by Reynolds and who was to the fore in arranging a Cheshunt memorial for Reynolds: Life and Letters, 277, 335.
29 For John Robert Reynolds (1782–1862), see CYB, 1863, 256–60; Life and Letters, 2–8; Charles E. Surman, ‘Leaf Square Academy, Pendleton, 1811–1813’, Transactions of the Congregational Historical Society 13.2 (September 1938), 107—17, at 111.
30 Reynolds, H. R., Notes of the Christian Life: A Selection of Sermons (London, 1865).Google Scholar
31 ‘The Judgment of God’, in Notes, 386–411, at 400.
32 ‘The Teacher and the Taught’, in Notes, 311–33, at 322.
33 ‘The Two Lives’, in Notes, 1–23, at 16.
34 ‘About the Father’s Business’, in Notes, 185–206, at 200–1.
35 ‘The Two Lives’, 1; ‘Unity in Diversity’, in Notes, 44–66, at 47.
36 ‘John Oxenham’ [W.A. Dunkerley], The Hidden Years (London, 1925).
37 ‘About the Father’s Business’, 187.
38 Ibid. 188, 192. Was this sermon preached at East Parade? T. E. Plint (1823–61), stockbroker, art collector and Bainesocrat, was a deacon at East Parade; he owned Millais’s ‘Christ in the Carpenter’s Shop’ (1849–50); his purchase of Holman Hunt’s ‘Finding of Christ in the Temple’ (1859–60), the sensation of the season, contributed to his financial collapse: Macleod, Dianne Sachko, Art and the Victorian Middle Class: Money and the Making of Cultural Identity (Cambridge, 1996), 179–86, 460–1.Google Scholar
39 ‘About the Father’s Business’, 193, 199, 194, 195.
40 Ibid. 197.
41 ‘The Summons to Holy Work’, in Notes, 283–310, at 308.
42 ‘Faithfulness unto Death’, in Notes, 353–85, at 367–8. The ‘beloved brother’, whom the published sermon leaves unidentified, was Robert Dawson (1836—1906), whose missionary vocation, curtailed in Shanghai by illness, was reborn in the London City Mission. I am indebted to Revd Nigel Lemon for confirmation of this.
43 ‘About the Father’s Business’, 201.
44 ‘Delight in the Lord’, in Notes, 111–29, at 119.
45 ‘The Withered Hand’, in Notes, 207–24, at 208.
46 ‘The Teacher and the Taught’, 315–16.
47 ‘The Two Lives’, 3.
48 ‘The Teacher and the Taught’, 321.
49 Ecclesia: Second Series, ii.
50 ‘The Catholic Church’, ibid. 164.
51 Mansfield College, Oxford: Its Origin and Opening: October 14–16, 1889 (London, 1890), 81–93.
52 Ibid. 88, 90.
53 Ibid. 93
54 Life and Letters, 566.
55 Lilian Whitehouse, Owen Charles Whitehouse of Cheshunt College (Cambridge, 1916), 55.
56 For William John Fairchild Huxtable (1912–90) and Ernest Alexander Payne (1902–80), see ODNB.
57 Note taken of the conversation by C. Binfield, 20 March 1975. Reynolds had been a platform speaker at the first Free Church Congress, in November 1892. The story tends to confirm Butcher’s recollections during a visit to Cheshunt College, Cambridge, told to me, but not written down, in the early 1960s. For B.T. Butcher (b. 1877), missionary in Papua 1904—41, see Sibree, J., London Missionary Society: A Register of Missionaries, Deputations, etc. (London, 1923), 150Google Scholar; Goodall, N., A History of the London Missionary Society 1845–1948 (London, 1954), 420, 433, 518.Google Scholar