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‘Gold and the Gospel’: Systematic Beneficence in Mid-nineteenth-century England
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 21 March 2016
Extract
In 1864, Lord Shaftesbury spoke out against the complacency of those who congratulated themselves on the liberality of the nation. He looked back to the Irish famine, the Indian famine, the Crimean War. ‘The newspapers were loud in bepraising the munificence of the country in all those cases; but I confess I never saw any munificence.’ The first half of the nineteenth century had seen the formation of a multitude of philanthropic enterprises, Bible and Tract societies, missionary societies, which were both symptoms of and conducive to a revived state of religion. Yet, given Britain’s increasing prosperity, itself a focus for Protestant pride, the spirit of benevolence, if it had increased absolutely, seemed relatively to have declined. Too often, income increased, but donations remained the same. Moreover, as the Baptist William Brock put it:
The age is remarkable for its institutions. We have societies for everything … They are the grateful indications of the age’s benevolence. My fear is lest of the age’s selfishness they should now become the excuse.
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- Copyright © Ecclesiastical History Society 1987
References
1 Record, no 4334 (6 May 1864), p. 3; compare R. Spence, ‘The Jewish Law of Tithe, a Guide to Christian Liberality’, Gold and the Gospel (London, Dublin, and Edinburgh, 1853), p. 215.
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4 The obvious financial constraints of ecclesiastical voluntaryism naturally tended to exacerbate this identification.
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9 On the cover of the first number of the Society’s organ, the Benefactor, was the claim: ‘Gold and the Gospel cannot be in the hands of fewer than fifty thousand families; about 100, 000 of Mr. Arthur’s Lecture have been sown broadcast throughout the land; to about 30, 000 clergymen and ministers copies of Arthur’s Lecture and Dr. Candlish’s Analysis [of II Corinthians 8 and 9] have been presented.’
10 W. Arthur, The Successful Merchant: Sketches of the Life of Mr. Samuel Budgett late of Kingswood Hill (London, 1852), p. 27.
11Cather, Origin and Objects, p. 28. See also Binney, T., Money: a Popular Exposition in Rough Notes, with Remarks on Stewardship and Systematic Beneficence (London, 1865), p. 9 Google Scholar. For the focus on the business community, see also Christian Observer, 59 (1859), p. 492.
12 Cather, Origin and Objects, pp. 32–3.
13 The Scientific Gospeller and Benefactor (Sept. 1873), P. 25, cited in H. Lansdell, The Sacred Tenth, or Studies in Tithe-Giving, Ancient and Modem, 2 vols (London, 1906) 2, p. 4.
14 Church Magazine (London, Birmingham, and Liverpool, 1866), pp. 1–4.
15 Said at the first anniversary breakfast of the Society at the Freemasons’ Tavern (quoted in appendix to Cather, Origin and Objects, p. 59).
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17 See Chadwick, W. O., The Victorian Church, 2 vols, 3rd edn. (London, 1971) 1, pp. 214–17, 329.Google Scholar The Wesleyan Conference’s official sanction for the offertory did not come until 1889. The movement for systematic weekly storing was only partially concerned with the advocacy of the offertory per se as an immediate substitute for pew-rents. Nor was the focus of the proponents of systematic beneficence so much on the weekly offertory as a complete substitute for both public collections and the usual class and ticket money (in Nonconformist churches), as on its adoption as an additional—and highly efficient—means of gathering revenue. But the movement also had great importance for the development of the ethical life of individual Christians, providing discipline and structure to the individual’s pattern of private giving.
18 See Cooke, J., Sermon on the Misuse of Riches (Birmingham and London, 1831)Google Scholar, advertisement: ‘The author feels some apology necessary for the publication of a discourse, which, in the prosecution of its subject, has induced him to deviate from the appropriate ground of religious discussion, into a train of observations not usually heard from the pulpit’.
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23 Brown, H. S., ‘Lucre and Filthy Lucre’, Manliness and other Sermons (London, 1889 edn.), p. 157 Google Scholar; Baptist Magazine, 44 (1856), p. 755. For the consumer’s role in beating down prices, ‘by the intention of putting what is saved into a missionary-box’, see Record no 3016, 18 Feb. 1856, p. 2.
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34 Ross, The Lord’s Portion, p. 8 5; Thomas Farmer (brother-in-law of Samuel Budgett’s son James; treasurer of the Evangelical Alliance 1850–1) was said to have begun life by giving a tenth; when he began to prosper, he gave two tenths, three tenths, four tenths and five tenths, until eventually he continued in business only to be able to give it all away, for a similar injunction by James Budgett, see J. Telford, The Life of fames Harrison Rigg (London, 1889), p. 110.
35 [Morgan], ‘The Scripture Rule’, Gold and the Gospel, p. 157; Ross, The Lord’s Portion, pp. 21, 111; Bate, Christian Giving, p. 36;Tweedie, Man and his Money, preface (v) for the example of John Thornton and his son Henry, for emphasis of the dual potency of this argument, see ‘The Christian Steward’, Gold and the Gospel, pp. 390–1; Arthur, The Duty of Giving Away, p. 36: ‘One reason why many tradesmen fail is that they do not … with sufficient frequency ascertain precisely where they are’. Such system seemed all the more pertinent at a time of widely publicized fluctuations in fortune.
36 Spence in Gold and the Gospel, p. 257; compare J. F. Stearns,‘Men of Business: their intellectual culture’, The Man of Business (Edinburgh, 1864), p. 169.
37 Owen, D., English Philanthropy (Harvard, 1964), pp. 215–19 Google Scholar; C. L Mowat, The Charity Organisation Society (London, 1961). Such an approach could also claim to escape the potentially patronizing preoccupation of charitable organizations with transforming working-class habits. For discussion of the Manchester and Salford District Provident Society asan organization of this sort, which is compared to the Charity Organisation Society, see A. J. Kidd, ‘Charity Organization and the Unemployed in Manchester, c. 1870–1914’, Social History, 9 (1984), pp. 45–66.
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40 It has been argued that profit-sharing was only introduced as a defensive strategy by employers with a bad history of labour relations. Whilst this may in some cases have been true, the argument is inapplicable to the employers cited here. For the debate, see R. A. Church, ‘Profit-sharing and Labour Relations in England in the Nineteenth Century’, International Review of Social History, 16 (Assen, 1971), pp. 2–16, esp. pp. 3–5, 10; R B. Perks, ‘Real Profit-sharing: William Thompson and Sons of Huddersfield’, Business History, 24, no 2 (July 1982), pp. 156–74; S. Pollard, R. Turner, ‘Profit-sharing and Autocracy. The Case of J. T. and J. Taylor, of Badey, Woollen Manufacturers 1892–1966’, Business History, 18, no 1 (Jan. 1976), pp. 4–34, esp. p. 11, on the fact that the quest for the workers’ moral and material improvement had long preceded the introduction of the profit-sharing scheme.
41 Freedley, , Money, p. 207 Google Scholar; H. Dunckley, The Charter of Nations, or Free Trade and its Results (London, 1854), p. 23: the workers at Messrs Elkington’s electroplate factory formed themselves into societies for mutual help, and from these made considerable grants to charit able institutions.
42 [Withington, ], Temporal Prosperity, pp. 100–1 Google Scholar;Ross, The Lord’s Portion, p. 118.
43 Spence in Gold and the Gospel, p. 263.
44 For detailed discussion of this, and of the particular issues raised in this paper, see Garnett, E. J., ‘Aspects of the Relationship between Protestant Ethics and Economic Activity in mid-Victorian England’ (Oxford D.Phil, thesis, 1986).Google Scholar
45 Record, no 4334 (6 May 1864), p. 3.