Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Preface
- 1 Into battle
- 2 The defensive years
- 3 Through the Waste Land
- 4 Continuing nadir
- 5 The turning tide
- 6 Towards the conversion of many
- 7 Flood-tide of Evangelism
- 8 Anatomy of Evangelicalism
- 9 The Fundamentalist issue
- 10 The hard facts of Evangelicals and unity
- 11 The Honest to God debate
- 12 Liturgical debates
- 13 Charismatic differences
- 14 Keele – a watershed
- 15 Evangelical identity – a problem
- Notes
- Index
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Preface
- 1 Into battle
- 2 The defensive years
- 3 Through the Waste Land
- 4 Continuing nadir
- 5 The turning tide
- 6 Towards the conversion of many
- 7 Flood-tide of Evangelism
- 8 Anatomy of Evangelicalism
- 9 The Fundamentalist issue
- 10 The hard facts of Evangelicals and unity
- 11 The Honest to God debate
- 12 Liturgical debates
- 13 Charismatic differences
- 14 Keele – a watershed
- 15 Evangelical identity – a problem
- Notes
- Index
Summary
The eighteenth-century Evangelical Revival had run its course, the French Revolution, threatening Britain, had come and gone and England had settled down to enduring a succession of ludicrous nineteenth-century monarchs. By 1811, George III had been pronounced permanently insane, his son George IV was noted for his dissipation, his extravagance and his heartless treatment of his wife, Caroline of Brunswick, from whom he separated after a year, and in 1830 he was succeeded by William IV of the same disastrous royal house. ‘Silly Billy’, as he was called, had ten illegitimate children by an Irish actress before he married a German princess.
By way of sharp contrast, it was in these thirty dark years, when the throne was shamed, that Evangelicalism reached a high pitch, a fact recorded with great candour by the famous High- Churchman and Tractarian, Edward Bouverie Pusey:
The great doctrines which alone make ‘repentance towards God and faith toward our Lord Jesus Christ’ seriously possible were its constant theme. The world to come, with its boundless issues of life and death, the infinite value of the one Atonement, the regenerating, purifying, guiding action of God the Holy Spirit in respect of the Christian soul, were preached to our grandfathers with a force and earnestness which are beyond controversy.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- From Controversy to Co-ExistenceEvangelicals in the Church of England 1914–1980, pp. 1 - 16Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1985