When Oliver Cromwell sent his most trusted lieutenants into the provinces in 1655, the instructions he gave them were wide ranging and the task he set them was enormous. They were to oversee every aspect of local government, prevent conspiracies, remove negligent or scandalous ministers and promote godliness and virtue among the people. No wonder the major-generals felt daunted. John Thurloe, who as secretary-of-state handled their correspondence, soon found himself acting as a bureau for encouragement and advice. Once they were out on their own there was little to sustain the major-generals beyond their religious faith. This is not to say that their accounts of their doings should be taken wholly at face value, nor that baser motives were necessarily absent from their minds. It is hard to believe that any of the major-generals expected immediate material gain. But some at least may have been influenced by the search for power and the desire for revenge against their enemies in the civil war. Plainly, several of them still felt bitter hatred of cavaliers almost ten years after the war had ended. Such attitudes can be no more than glimpsed in letters designed to give a good impression of the major-generals’ performance. The motives that lay behind that performance must be assessed on the basis of what they wrote and the aspects of the CromweUian programme upon which they concentrated. The letters to Thurloe do much to explain why the major-generals worked so hard, riding the muddy lanes of England through a hard winter; they also illuminate the nature of their vision of a godly commonwealth.

For Lord Macaulay the defiance offered by the seven bishops to James II marked a turning-point in English history. It was the story of men who would not stand by as a ‘harsh and inexorable prince’ destroyed constitutional liberties, established a military despotism, and imposed Catholicism by force. The great whig historian was not much given to praise of the clergy in general or bishops in particular, but even he could not withhold his admiration from an archbishop of Canterbury ‘who was ready to wear fetters and lay his aged limbs on bare stones rather than betray the interests of the Protestant religion and set the prerogative above the laws.’ Macaulay’s account of the seven bishops is, however, closely bound up with his view of James II as one of the great villains of English history, and recent historians, while enjoying the rich texture of Macaulay’s prose, find it difficult to accept the version of classical whig historiography. In their work James appears as not so much a tyrant as a peculiarly maladroit politician, not so much an absolutist with wide-ranging ambitions as an obstinate man of narrow religious perspectives. His little army was quite incapable of imposing Catholicism by force on a fiercely protestant nation. James’s aim was as simple as it was injudicious: to achieve civil emancipation for the small minority of his catholic co-religionists by a process of political manoeuvre and manipulation. Now, if this re-interpretation be correct, it is time to extend the process into ecclesiastical history and look afresh at the motives and policies of the seven bishops. I would suggest that what emerges is something quite different from the traditional heroic version but nonetheless an instructive study in the clerical mind of the late seventeenth century.

Through the stormy and divided history of religion in seventeenth and early eighteenth-century England runs one constant and unvarying stream—hatred and fear of popery. That ‘gross and cruel superstition’ haunted the protestant imagination. The murderous paranoia of the popish plot was the last occasion on which catholic blood was spilled in the service of the national obsession, but the need to preserve ‘our Country from Papal Tyranny; our Laws, our Estates, our Liberties from Papal Invasion; our Lives from Papal Persecution; and our Souls from Papal Superstition . . .’ continued to exercise men of every shade of churchmanship, and of none. Throughout the early eighteenth century zealous churchmen sought to keep alive ‘the Spirit of Aversion to Popery whereby the Protestant Religion hath been chiefly supported among us’, and publications poured from the press reminding men of the barbarities of the papists, ancient and modern, the fires of Smithfield and the headman’s axe of Thorn. Catholicism was bloody, tyrannical, enslaving, and cant phrases rolled pat from tongue and pen—popery and arbitrary government, popery and wooden shoes. The tradition was universal, as integral a part of the nation’s self-awareness as beer and roast-beef, and equally above reason. There were, observed Daniel Defoe, ‘ten thousand stout fellows that would spend the last drop of their blood against Popery that do not know whether it be a man or a horse’.

‘Cas III Aristarque, Abbé de qualité, et d’unmérite distingué, il sollicite un Evêché, désirant de servir utilement l’Eglise. R. Il ne peut désirer l’Episcopat dans la vue d’être élevé à une si haute dignité, sans se rendre coupable d’ambition ou de présomption; il ne peut le désirer dans le dessein d’être honoré et respecté, ou de devenir riche sans se rendre coupable d’ambition ou d’avarice. Ajoutons que ce n’est point assez d’avoir une intention pure pour pouvoir désirer sans péché l’Episcopat; il faut avoir toutes les vertus que l’Apôtre demande dans un Evêque’.

‘It is possible that no breed of men and women can be so safely assessed as the nineteenth-century Protestant missionaries. No other breed, certainly, left more voluminous accounts of themselves to posterity.’ If the volume of documentation is a guarantee of safe assessment then Moorhouse’s bold assertion is particularly applicable to the subject of missionary motivation in Britain in die nineteenth century. Statements of motive, explicitly requested by directors of missionary societies, prayerfully considered and copiously detailed by candidates, and lovingly preserved by missionary-society archivists, might comprise the most voluminous extant documentation on religious motivation (Moorhouse’s boldness is infectious). Furthermore, this vast corpus of primary source material has been thoroughly ransacked by postgraduate students of history and sociology, so that the motives of English and Scottish missionaries for the whole of the nineteenth century have now been explored.

Sierra leone was the first success story of the modern missionary movement. The years from 1787 to 1830 saw it pass first from a green if not very fertile land supporting subsistence farmers and riverine slaving factories to Utopia in a disaster area; then transformed again as free blacks from Nova Scotia and Jamaica, full of evangelical religion and American republicanism carried out a Clapham-inspired scheme in ways the men of Clapham did not always like; and again as this population was overwhelmed by new uprooted peoples from all over west Africa, brought in from the slaveships before they had ever seen the transatlantic plantations. The new population responded, sometimes with enthusiasm and rarely with prolonged resistance, to missionary preaching; and, with those same missionaries appointed to superintend their temporal as well as their spiritual welfare, adopted the norms and characteristics of their Nova Scotian and Maroon predecessors. Contemporary British sources do not suggest that at the time Sierra Leone was regarded as a huge success; people in England tended to think of the appalling loss of missionary life in the white man’s grave, and the enormous expense of the Sierra Leone mission; besides, they heard stories which suggested that the serpent still dwelt in their west African garden. Nonetheless, here was the first part of Africa, one of the very few parts anywhere in the world, where there was a mass movement towards the Christian faith, where a whole non-Christian people became Christian.

More than a decade ago, Max Warren suggested that the nature of protestant missionary expansion in the last quarter of the nineteenth century presented ‘some of the most perplexing features in the history of the modern missionary movement’; but the extensive ‘painstaking research’ which he called for into the metropolitan roots of that movement has hardly yet been forthcoming. Historians have more usually preferred to direct their attention to the impact of western missions outside Europe, and to consider their contribution to the modernisation of the non-European world. This growing body of published research unquestionably aids the would-be historian of metropolitan motives, but—for reasons requiring too much space for elucidation here—also makes his own work the more necessary if the expansive forces within western society are to be clearly understood and placed in perspective.

Dr Henry Cooke, the Athanasius of Irish presbyterianism, who might fairly be described as the archetypal Ulster unionist political parson, is an obvious subject for a study in religious motivation. Emerging in the 1820s as a vigorous champion of trinitarian orthodoxy, he led a relentless campaign against Arianism in the Belfast Institution, the college in which at that time the majority of Irish presbyterian ordinands were educated, and in his church, until the Arians had withdrawn from the synod of Ulster and, ultimately, the link had been broken between his church and the college. During the campaign he made clear his opposition, not only to theological liberalism, but also to the political radicalism which had characterised the outlook of many Ulster presbyterians in the eighteenth century.

Autobiography and statistics appear at first sight to be incompatible sources in any study of religious motivation. The former rarely hint at the sociological factors governing religious commitment. The latter are difficult to interpret in terms of individual conviction. Yet the evangelical revival produced an abundance of both. John Wesley in the Arminian Magazine set a fashion which was followed by evangelicals of every brand who published spiritual autobiographies to edify the faithful. Wesleyan methodism also kept careful membership statistics on which scholars like A. D. Gilbert can base a sociological explanation of the rise and fall of denominational religion. Placed side by side the inward and outward evidence gave the impression that statistical success, in terms of ever increasing membership, depended on intense individual conviction in preacher and convert. The Liverpool minutes of 1820 are but the Wesleyan example of a general pattern. Nevertheless this recipe did not guarantee success. It would seem that the challenge to the individual conscience needed to be combined with a strong appeal to a sense of group or class solidarity for any lasting impression to be made. Unfortunately the places where evangelical religion was successful do not always coincide with available autobiographical sources.

In August 1858 an American minister described the current revival in that country as a ‘Fourth Great Awakening’ to be likened to pentecost, the sixteenth-century reformation and the eighteenth-century awakening in colonial America. His historical judgment was weak, but his euphoria typified the mood of American evangelicals after a year of mass conversions. Particularly through denominational ‘protracted meetings’ and inter-denominational or ‘union’ prayer meetings, all the protestant churches throughout the country shared in the excitement. Even many of the more cautious episcopalians, Unitarians and universalists showed sympathy for a wave of revivals which seemed remarkably well-ordered and free of the ‘enthusiasm’ and ‘human machinery’ of earlier ‘ingatherings’. By the end of annus mirabilis each of the evangelical denominations could report huge accessions: of the largest bodies, the presbyterians (old and new schools) added almost thirty thousand members by examination, the major baptist churches baptised almost one hundred thousand new members, while the two main branches of methodism reported a staggering net increase of nearly one hundred and eighty thousand, a growth of sixteen per cent over the previous year. What had moved Americans to flock to revival meetings and ‘get religion‘ in these numbers?

The title of this paper was inspired by a piece of ecclesiastical doggerel published in the Hensal-Cum-Heck Church Monthly for November 1895:

They may call me a Papist, and laugh at my creed,
‘Tis the Faith that will save in the hour of need;
Let them talk, let them laugh, but when death is at hand
The priest is the only true friend in the land.

It is not the only ritualist concept of priestly vocation; in a somewhat earlier tract on confession priests are described as ‘the spiritual police of Almighty God; they must hunt out, track, pursue, and arraign sinners, as the police pursue and apprehend thieves and rascals’. Although both concepts are to be found elsewhere in ritualist literature, and both would have been accepted by many ritualist priests as not being mutually exclusive, it would seem that the concept of the priest as ‘friend’ was the dominant one.

That Gladstone was religious is obvious enough, and to state it does not get us very far, but this remains as far as most historians get. The aim of this paper is to show by exposition the religious motivation behind two of the greatest Gladstonian and Victorian outbursts—the clutch of writings on the Vatican council published in 1874–5 and the pamphlet and articles on the ‘Bulgarian Horrors’ in 1876. These two expostulations, though they occurred within twenty two months of each other, are usually treated by historians as quite unrelated. Moreover, although attention has been paid to their proximate causes, they have not been placed in the complex and long-drawn out process of Gladstone’s religious development. I hope to show that both groups of pamphlets, though written in passion spurred by proximate causes, reflected long standing and interrelated intellectual, theological and political interests, an understanding of which illuminates both Gladstone and his age. If this paper ranges from idealism to cabinet diplomacy, this reflects the range of influences on Gladstone who consistently and deliberately tried to place himself at the cross-roads of Victorian culture, society, religion and politics.

Otto Dibelius is missing in our interpretations of Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s development in the sense that though well-known, the Berlin general superintendent has been little thought of in this role. Eberhard Bethge in his life of Bonhoeffer and in the collected writings gives enough evidence of their social and ecclesiastical connections throughout Bonhoeffer’s career to provoke enquiry. That Bethge and others have not pursued the enquiry is due in part to the fluctuations of Dibelius’s reputation, especially in the tradition of the Berlin theologians who were young around 1930. Bonhoeffer’s life was written in the shadows of the last period of Dibelius’s life, when he was a prince of the restored evangelical church, the ‘NATO-bishop’ taking a different line in the cold war from many who were finding their prophet in Bonhoerfer.

The young Karl Barth is not an easy man to assess. It is not just that he covered a major theological revulsion by violent polemics, nor even that in the second world war he became a cult figure with hard-pressed protestants everywhere, overwhelmed by the need to save their churches from the destructive compromises of the church leaders, and subsequently, more briefly, a cult figure with a new theological establishment. More recently the young Karl Barth has been the victim of disputes over the uses to which Barthianism can be put. In the German student revolt the need to unify thought and action in politics and theology exposed a generation gap; a burning concern to many theological students, it embarrassed many of their teachers. At the Kirchliche Hochschule in Berlin, a bastion of Barthianism, Friedrich-Wilhelm Marquardt, a pupil of Hellmut Gollwitzer, sought to bridge the gap by showing that from beginning to end the core of Barth’s theology was a socialist commitment. (The first paragraph of this book reads starkly, ‘Karl Barth was Socialist’.) The perspective first opened by the student movement was confirmed by Marquardt’s editorial work on Barth’s Safenwil remains, and especially on forty three socialist speeches. Marquardt worked out his view systematically in a Habilitationschrift which was rejected at the Kirchliche Hochschule as unwissenschaftlich. Gollwitzer made a public scene, got the book published, and took the whole argument further in a long essay of his own. The clinching evidence (if diat is what it really is) of the speeches is not available under the terms on which Karl Barth’s unpublished remains are being edited until the volume in which they are to be incorporated is published. Yet most of the voluminous material ever likely to be available for the young Barth is now in print, and it is worth examining in its own right, as distinct from being expounded in the light of the Church Dogmatics with Marquardt.

‘Ecumenicalism is assumed to be the will of God, and is less discussed than eulogized.... In belittling old conflicts and veiling new, the ecumenical movement obscures past and present alike’. This assertion from the introduction to Robert Currie’s study of division and reunion in methodism constitutes a challenge to historians of the modern church which cannot be ignored. The significance of the ecumenical movement is acknowledged by both its protagonists and its critics, but the issue raised here is essentially one of integrity, primarily on the part of ecumenical advocates, but also indirectly on the part of those who study the movement historically. As such it is directly related to questions of religious motivation, whether treated theologically or sociologically.

During the period of their emergence and growth, sects are generally discussed in terms of opprobrium, perhaps because most of those who have written about them have been people not only of other theological persuasions, but often people with vested professional interests in sustaining their own theology against that of others, or, occasionally, they have been men of decidedly rationalistic temper, eager to condemn all religion by reference to what they take to be the latest and most patent religious outrage to common sense. By the time a sect becomes a historical phenomenon it is likely that those still interested in it will discuss it with a measure of detached objectivity: for contemporary sects, only sociologists are likely to espouse the same canons of ethical neutrality and objectivity that are, perhaps so much more easily, endorsed by historians in their treatment of things past.