When James Brooke became rajah of Sarawak in 1841, his enterprise – the acquiring of territorial sovereign rule by a private British citizen– was regarded with doubt and hesitation in official circles in London, and all three white rajahs were always very sensitive about their status. But when James Brooke visited England in 1847-8 there was no doubt about his personal standing as a romantic figure. Moreover, he added to the strength of the British presence in south-east Asia, which was needed to discourage Dutch assertiveness, and so he was lionised, and knighted, and among other things given an honorary doctorate by the university of Oxford. While he was there, about £500 was collected by members of the university, who considered that a mission to Borneo ‘ought to go forth under the superintendence of a Bishop from the very first’. This was sound doctrinal theory, but unlikely to be put into practice then or indeed since. But the idea was there, and the money was funded, and the church in Borneo did not have to wait as long as many places for episcopal ministrations, or for an episcopate of its own. Plans for a mission to Sarawak had already been made, and the first two missionaries sailed with their families at the end of 1847, and landed in Sarawak on 29 June 1848.

Nonconformists had an attitude of veneration for Gladstone. They admired his political skills; they were grateful for the legislative benefits he had brought them like the abolition of compulsory church rates and the opening of higher degrees at the ancient universities; and they were roused by his displays of oratorical power. Yet their respect for Gladstone went far beyond what was due to the able leader of a political party. There was amongst nonconformists by 1890 what a correspondent of The Times called a ‘fascination, amounting to fetishism, of the great name and personality of Mr Gladstone.’ This was not primarily a result of sympathy in political policy, despite a general concurrence of nonconformists with Gladstone in the principles of peace, retrenchment and reform. In many other areas of policy there was disagreement. The overriding aim of political dissent, the aim of religious equality, was not shared by Gladstone; he was usually absent from parliamentary debates on the contagious diseases acts against which nonconformist feeling was high; and as temperance political pressure gathered momentum among nonconformists in the later years of his life, Gladstone stood aside. Nonconformists were always more wholeheartedly behind Gladstone in opposition, when he was denouncing the wrongs of conservative administrations, than behind Gladstone in office, when he was ignoring the wishes of nonconformist electors. Yet, despite policy differences, from at least 1868 until Gladstone’s death thirty years later nonconformists as a whole were enthusiastic Gladstonians, supporters of the man. The explanation lies in the fact that undergirding the political relationship was a religious affinity. At a meeting of ten leading nonconformist ministers in 1889, according to the diary of the baptist John Clifford, when the prospects of the liberal party were under discussion, ‘the conversation turned chiefly on the religious fibre of the prospective leaders. Suppose Gladstone gone, what have we to look to? The outlook was thought to be very unpromising.’ It was the ‘religious fibre’ of Gladstone that brought him esteem. It was primarily religion that bound the nonconformists in personal loyalty to Gladstone.

These words are a useful reminder that contemporaries were surprised at the easy passage of the enabling act, and that its success therefore requires explanation. The ‘rightness of the cause’ has tended to obscure the fact that right causes often fail. Moreover subsequent criticisms of the act, and particularly the disappointment of the life and liberty movement with what followed, have tended to minimise the significance of the changes it made. Nevertheless the charisma of William Temple and Dick Sheppard seems to have led even the critics to attribute the act’s success to the life and liberty movement; viscount Wolmer’s church self-government association has been relegated to the sidelines; and the verdict of bishop Bell (who in 1919 was Davidson’s chaplain) that ‘Its achievement was due to Randall Davidson more than to any other single person’ has been forgotten. In this paper I shall argue that the political success of the enabling act requires a political explanation, that parliamentary tactics in both the house of commons and the house of lords are therefore of prime importance, and that the significance of the success is enhanced by a fact which has never been discussed before - the initial opposition of the government of the day.

The government of Ireland act (1920) did not fall, like Athene, fully fledged from the head of Zeus, so its historical development has to be considered if the presbyterian attitude to it is to be understood.

Presbyterians in Ireland had been second-class citizens up to 1780, and from then until the act of disestablishment in 1870 a tolerated church. This was a vital factor when they were called upon to face the issue of home rule in 1886. A second was that they were a minority, the majority of whose members lived in Ulster, whose community interests with Britain had been accentuated by industrialisation. They owed little or nothing to an irish parliament or Dublin so far as relief from legal disabilities and their standard of living were concerned. A third factor was the ‘vote tory manifesto’ of ‘catholic nationalism’ in 1885 which ended liberalism as a party in Ulster politics leaving presbyterianism without a political party of its own liberal ethos. Politically, presbyterians had now no option but to choose between the toryism of the former ascendancy and an aggressive catholic nationalism which at times resorted to force and violence against the union with Britain on which their standard of living and economic welfare depended.

The exposition delivered at the synod of Barmen on Wednesday, 30 May 1934, by Pfarrer Hans Asmussen gives us the exact purpose and intention of the committee which had drawn up the six articles of the theological declaration. It is made quite clear that the fundamental concern of the declaration is divine revelation. In the several articles of the declaration the uniqueness of the revelation in Christ is asserted and the uniqueness of the church as the body which is entrusted with the proclamation of that revelation is equally carefully emphasised. The church is alone in her responsibility and any attempt by the world to usurp that responsibility must be rejected. These great claims for the church are made because the church is more than a sociological entity, and the church must ever remain that which she truly is. Positions of responsibility within the church should be exercised with humility, for thus only can church order correspond to the inner essence of the church. The limits which separate the church and the state must be strictly observed and neither the church nor the state should presume to exercise authority in that which does not belong to it. And finally, the freedom of the Holy Spirit must be known, and the guidance of the Holy Spirit must be felt in the church. These statements are the culmination of a series of events in which the German evangelical church had been seriously disturbed by the national socialist policy of Gleichschaltung. Together with this there had been an attempt in various parts of the church to modify its doctrinal position and in that way to admit elements of racial nationalism. Finally, there had been since the collapse of Germany at the end of the great war a formidable amount of political theology which discovered manifestations of God’s will and purpose otherwise than in the revelation of Jesus Christ. It is these three aspects of the life of the church which created a crisis which brought about the first confessing synod of the German evangelical church at Barmen on 29 to 31 May 1934.

The German church struggle in the nineteen thirties inevitably involved christians in Germany in a reconsideration of their attitudes towards politics, but its significance was not confined to Germany. The fate of Martin Niemöller, in particular, was a matter of lively concern in Britain. Conway contends that ‘the English-speaking public was all the more disposed to give every credit to the “Bekennende Kirche” because all the books published in English before the war were wholeheartedly on their side.’ English-speaking authors, he adds, unanimously, if one-sidedly, saw the struggle as one of church versus state, good versus evil, and confessing church versus nazi storm-troopers. A brief study of the activities of one of the writers mentioned by Conway, Mrs Dorothy Buxton, reveals that the ‘English-speaking public’ was not quite as unanimous in its interpretation of church and politics in Germany as the contemporary literary works might suggest.