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‘Trying the Spirits’: The Case of the Gloucestershire Clergyman (1831)
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 25 March 2011
Extract
The political turmoil which characterised the decade from 1825 to 1835 is interestingly reflected in a religious crisis, as a result of which Established Church and traditional nonconformity alike were found by seceders to be spiritually wanting. Millenarian and charismatic movements are often, in part, an expression of social uncertainty. Any analysis of such movements as the Plymouth Brethren or the self-styled ‘Catholic Apostolic Church’ must take into account their social milieu which, at that time, included a great deal of political agitation - for causes like Roman Catholic Emancipation, parliamentary reform, currency reform and nascent socialism - as well as anxiety arising from the outbreak of cholera and social unrest, with several European revolutions in the background. It may not be entirely fortuitous that, when Edward Irving was expelled from his church in Regent Square in 1832, his congregation (not without some misgivings) met for a while in Robert Owen's socialist Rotunda in the Gray's Inn Road.
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References
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