Arecent scholar has written of ‘the widespread belief, by no means the monopoly of high Anglicans only, that it was to Glastonbury, first of all places in these islands of ours, that the Christian faith first came, and that Glastonbury is therefore the fountain and headspring of Christianity in England, and indeed in the whole of the British Isles’.

Small attention has generally been paid to the activities of Roger Boyle, Lord Broghill, during his year in Scotland from September 1655 to September 1656. In particular, his negotiations with the Protester and Resolutioner ministers have not been supposed any more or less successful than those, for example, of Lillburne or Monck, but merely another stage in the Cromwellian government's ineffectual urgings towards a settlement of the dispute in the Church.

Students of the Evangelical Revival may have noted the grateful reference made by George Whitefield to a minister in Gloucester, Thomas Cole, who encouraged him in his youth when he began preaching, and have wished that we knew more of this ‘most venerable dissenting minister’. A few months after Cole's death in 1742, Whitefield tells how he was brought up to ridicule Cole ‘and (with shame I write it) used, when a boy, to run into his meeting-house, and cry, Old Cole! old Cole! old Cole! Being asked once by one of his congregation, what business I would be of? I said, “a minister, but I would take care never to tell stories in the pulpit, like the old Cole”. About twelve years afterwards the old man heard me preach in one of the churches at Gloucester; and on my telling some story to illustrate the subject I was upon, having been informed what I had before said, made this remark to one of his elders, “I find that young Whitefield can now tell stories, as well as old Cole”. Being affected much with my preaching, he was as it were become young again, and used to say, when coming to and returning from Barn, “These are days of the Son of Man indeed!” nay, he was so animated, and so humbled, that he used to subscribe himself my Curate, and went about preaching after me, from place to place’.

In October 1826, an impassioned letter appeared in The Times, written by an outraged correspondent whose house had been entered unceremoniously by two offensive females who demanded first a donation towards the construction of a missionary training college and then a justification of his refusal to subscribe. He fulminated against the triumphalism of voluntary religious societies: ‘It seems “to grow by what it feeds on”’ The first half of the nineteenth century in Britain was certainly an age of ‘evangelical aggression’, and probably the modern missionary movement was making an impression on British society far deeper than it made on such countries as India and Africa, to which missionaries were sent. Missionary enthusiasm appears to have increased lay giving for home missions as well as foreign missions; it probably stimulated interest in home missions and increased the number of candidates for the ministry; it almost certainly provided a fillip to theological education; it reinforced the already existing tendency to express piety in activity rather than quiescence; it helped to bury fatalistic and deterministic theological systems; it appears to have appealed, like the later temperance movement, to all classes of society; and (perhaps related to the last claim) it declared war on denominational bigotry.

The 1880s witnessed a remarkable upsurge in public concern over the question of child welfare. Not only were two important Acts of Parliament passed providing children, for the first time, with effective safeguards against neglect, cruelty and exploitation, but the final year of the decade saw the establishment of the highly influential National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children. Whilst much has been written of these developments, the part played by cardinal Henry Edward Manning in forming public opinion and in helping to secure the successful passage of legislation has, by and large, gone unacknowledged. It was in 1885—some twenty years after his elevation to the see of Westminster—that he took up the burning question of child protection, a fact which adds weight to Ausubel's assertion that ‘his last years were in many respects the most fruitful of his life, especially in his attempts to apply Christianity to social problems’.