In the eighteenth century, both in the Dutch Republic and in the colonies of New England, collective repentance and social reconciliation with God were institutionalized in great common rituals. In both polities, Fast and Thanksgiving Days were proclaimed by civil authority, and these occasions brought people together into churches to hear ministers interpret their common situation. These rituals were the main way in which the New England colonies and the Dutch Republic expressed their unity as political communities. It was this aspect of these sermons that made them of interest to nineteenth-century American and Dutch historians. In the nineteenth-century Kingdom of the Netherlands, N. C. Kist, the first holder of the newly instituted chair of Church History at Leiden University, finished his career with his two-volume Neêrlands Bededagen en Biddagsbrieven, offering both an interpretation and an antiquarian overview of all the Fast Days proclaimed in the Netherlands. In the United States, William de Loss Love published his exquisite The Fast and Thanksgiving Days of New England in 1895, similarly offering both an antiquarian list of all Fast and Thanksgiving Days and an analysis. Kist was deeply involved with the nation-building project of the early nineteenth-century Kingdom of the Netherlands. De Loss Love, the first chaplain of the Connecticut Society of the Sons of the American Revolution, was as inspired by modern nationalism as Kist was. Both scholars interpreted the Fast-day ritual as an indication of the high moral purpose and commitment to the nation of their ancestors.

This essay focuses on repentance, with respect to one particular aspect of the work and witness of the Methodists as exemplified in the writings of their founders, John and Charles Wesley (1703–91 and 1707–88 respectively). A predominant motif of their preaching and hymn-writing came from the experience of working with condemned prisoners in Oxford and London gaols, an experience which became paradigmatic for the evangelical conversionist stance of the movement. The metaphors of imprisonment and freedom were realities arising from the physical conditions of the few, pressed upon a general population perceived to be languishing in spiritual stupor and captivity as the kairos of Gospel revelation called all those under sentence of death to repentance: This is the time, no more delay; This is the Lord’s appointed day’.

The place of repentance and retribution in children’s lives between 1740 and 1870 has not been viewed positively. E. P. Thompson famously claimed that ‘the child’ in Methodist Sunday schools and in pious homes, from about 1780, was subjected to ‘the worst kind of emotional bullying to confess his sins and come to a sense of salvation’. In the 1840s children in the mines allegedly reported that they had been taught at Sunday school that hell was a place full of fire and brimstone. Nor have such assertions been made only about working-class children. Lawrence Stone, James Walvin, Walter Houghton and others claimed that the young of the middle and upper classes were intimidated by stories such as Mrs Sherwood’s The Fairchild Family, and other Evangelical tracts threatening hell and retribution and urging immediate repentance. In 1995, Hugh Cunningham still followed Stone’s chronology in suggesting that the early nineteenth century was a period of ‘reaction’ in religious terms for children.

Ulster Presbyterians in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries formally dealt out retribution, repentance and reconciliation through church discipline administered by Kirk sessions and presbyteries. These institutional structures had given Presbyterians an organizational framework that enhanced their geographical concentration in the north-east of Ireland. Hitherto, historians of Presbyterianism in Ireland have taken the view, often based on evidence from the period before 1740, that discipline was effective, broad in its coverage, and hard yet fair in its judgements, claims made all the more remarkable as the north-east had the highest illegitimacy rates in Ireland during the period under consideration. It has been argued that though the system largely survived the eighteenth century, it collapsed at the turn of the nineteenth because of a loss of morale among Presbyterians after the failure of the 1798 rebellion in which many thousands of them had taken part.

The epidemic of bubonic plague that spread in Russia between 1770 and 1772, claiming about 100,000 lives, was perceived as a divine punishment by many ordinary Russians. In 1771, Moscow witnessed popular riots, which were partly caused by the unwillingness of ecclesiastical authorities to allow Muscovites to venerate the icon of the Mother of God placed above the St Barbara Gates in the Kremlin and which was believed to have miraculous powers against epidemic. In order to stop the spread of the infection, the Moscow authorities established sanitary cordons around the city. In such an atmosphere of social crisis the Old Believers, a conservative current of Russian religious dissent, articulated popular fears and proposed a solution to these. The Old Believer merchants had received permission from the government to set up quarantine hospitals and cemeteries on the borders of the city. This led to the emergence of two Old Believer centres in Moscow in the suburb of Lefortovo: Rogozhskoe, that belonged to the priestly Old Believers, and Preobrazhenskoe, belonging to a branch of the priestless Old Believers, the Theodosians (fedoseevtsy).

Long had the ‘still small voice’ been spoke in vain,
But God now thunders in an awful strain!
Commercial woes brought down our nation’s pride,
Our harvest fail’d, and yet we God defy’d:
But now the ‘voice’ cries loud to all the Land,
The ‘Rod’ is felt, Oh! may we see the Hand.
’Tis God who speaks – ’Tis He who ’points the blow,
’Tis God who’s laid the pride of Britain low!

In these lines, written in November 1817, a lady member of a Newcastle-upon-Tyne Nonconformist congregation unambiguously attributed the death of Princess Charlotte to specific divine intervention. This conviction reflected that of her minister, James Pringle, in a recent sermon preached on an Old Testament text widely expounded at that time, the chastening rod (or voice) of God in Micah 6: 9. Such a perception of adverse national events as divine retribution for sin, comparable to prophetic interpretations of the history of Old Testament Israel, was a noticeable strand in early nineteenth-century British evangelical discourse.

In the spring of 1802, the Roman catacombs of Priscilla were the scene of excavations in search of Christian antiquities and martyrs’ bodies. Excavations of this kind had been going on in Rome since the late sixteenth century, though they had been temporarily interrupted during the occupation by French revolutionary troops in the last years of the eighteenth century. On 25 May, the fossores, or diggers, who worked under the authority of a religious dignitary, the Custodian of the Relics, hit on an elaborate tomb. The profuse symbols on the slab were (erroneously) believed to indicate martyrdom: arrows, an anchor and a lash for the instruments of torture, a luxuriant palm for the martyr’s eventual triumph and reward in heaven. From the garbled inscription ‘LUMENA PAX TECUM FI’, the name of Filumena, or Philomena, could be deduced.

On 2 March 1865, the Revd Carl Sylvius Völkner, a Church Missionary Society (CMS) missionary, was hanged from a willow tree close to his own church and mission station at Opotiki in the Bay of Plenty, New Zealand. John Hobbs, who had arrived as a Methodist missionary in New Zealand in 1823, reported on ‘the very barbarous Murder of one of the best Missionaries in New Zealand’ and noted that Völkner’s death marked ‘a New Era in the history of this country’. Völkner was the first European missionary of any denonomination to be killed in New Zealand since missionary work began in 1814.

At the end of the eighteenth century the ‘bloody code’ was still in full force in England and Wales. There were some two hundred offences which carried the death penalty, ranging from murder to stealing goods worth five shillings from a shop. In the 1780s several hundred men, women and children were sentenced to death each year, and though rather over half were reprieved, there were still about two hundred executions. In London, condemned prisoners were confined in Newgate prison in the City, and until 1783 they were transported two miles to be hanged at Tyburn on the western outskirts of the metropolis. There were usually large crowds lining the streets, and particularly notorious criminals might expect up to thirty thousand spectators at their death. A clergyman would travel in the cart with the prisoners, his main purpose being to ensure that they died repentant, and, it was hoped, with better prospects in the next world than in the present one.

Of all the dark legends which have arisen out of the British experience of the First World War, perhaps none is more compelling than the fate of more than three hundred British, Dominion and Colonial soldiers who were tried and executed for military offences during the course of the conflict. Controversial at the time, these executions were the subject of much debate and official scrutiny in the inter-war period and, even today, the subject continues to have a bitter and painful resonance. Led by the Shot at Dawn Campaign, pressure for the rehabilitation of these men continues and the case for a millennium pardon was marked in June 2001 by the opening of an emotive memorial to them at the National Memorial Arboretum near Lichfield. However, this paper is not concerned with the justice of the proceedings which led to the deaths of these men. Whether due legal process was followed or whether those executed were suffering from shell shock are difficult and probably unanswerable questions which I will leave to legal and to military historians. Instead of investigating the circumstances of the condemned, this paper turns the spotlight onto the circumstances and attitudes of men whose presence at military executions was as inevitable as that of the prisoner or the firing squad; namely, the commissioned chaplains of the British army.

Scattered through the history of the Christian Church are seminal moments that have shaped the future course of Christianity whether for good or ill. When later historians of Christianity will write about the twentieth century, I anticipate that they will refer to the role of the Churches in Nazi Germany and apartheid South Africa as paradigmatic both in terms of success and failure. They might also refer to the role of the Christian Church in the transition to democracy in both countries in similar terms. In what follows I will offer some reflections on the South African side of the story, briefly tracing the response and role of what I have termed the ‘Ecumenical Church’ in South Africa to African resistance, democratic transition and national reconciliation.