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Chapter Two examines Tennyson’s dramatic monologue “St. Simeon Stylites” from several angles. The first section, “Victorian End Times,” places St. Simeon’s desire for rapture in the context of Victorian evangelicalism and millenarianism. Pearsall demonstrates the ways in which the theological arguments concerning rapture propounded by the evangelist Edward Irving (a controversial figure who deeply interested Tennyson’s fellow Cambridge Apostles, including Arthur Henry Hallam and Richard Chenevix Trench) influenced Tennyson’s portrayal of St. Simeon. The second section, “The Rapture of St. Simeon’s Stylites,” engages in a detailed reading of Tennyson’s monologue, examining the ingenious discursive strategies employed by St. Simeon as he labors to perform his own rapture. The chapter’s final section, “Simeon’s Afterlife: The Message of the Butterfly,” parallels Tennyson’s St. Simeon with contemporary environmental activist Julia Butterfly Hill, probing the similarities in their strategies for attaining communal as well as personal transformation.

The late 1820s and early 1830s were marked by controversy and fragmentation in English Evangelicalism. Out of this period emerged a small number of sterner groups who were seized by millennial expectation and a desire to return to pure, radical ‘apostolic’ practices. These groups were restless, and their pessimism tore a number of prominent Evangelicals, lay and clerical, away from the mother Church of England into new religious bodies. In this climate of anxiety, millennial speculation became the subject of intense study by well-educated clergymen like Edward Bickersteth and MPs like Henry Drummond. For the most part, this millennial fervour was contained within the Established Church. Yet there were latent tendencies within the prophetic movement, which coalesced around Drummond and Edward Irving, that could easily carry its devotees into outright secession. Drummond's ecclesiology was curious and eclectic, combining a strictly hierarchical view of social order, high Toryism, a determined Protestantism, a High Church view of the liturgy, and a belief in the pre-millennial advent of Christ.

This chapter focuses on the responses of established Churches to unfortunate events, like the failure of the New Reformation in Ireland, constitutional changes, and the voluntary onslaught. It starts with an explanation of the political struggles faced by the established Churches. Efforts to defend the established Churches in the new political environment made them increasingly politicized with parliamentary parties, royal commissions, voluntary societies, and other groups. Since then, prophetical movements were established, sharing a vision of the established Churches of Christ's continuing sovereignty over the world. The chapter also describes the connection between the prophetical movements within the established Churches to the careers of individuals such as Edward Irving.

This chapter explores the early career and conversion to Southcottianism of James Elishama Smith – a key figure in the relation between millenarianism and social radicalism in the 1830s. Smith originally trained as a Church of Scotland minister. In 1828, he was convinced that the millennium was imminent by the preaching of Edward Irving – a member of the Albury Group of evangelicals, and a founder of the Catholic Apostolic Church. Smith adopted Irving’s pessimistic millennial beliefs for a period, before opting to join Wroe’s ‘Christian Israelite’ community at Ashton-under-Lyne in 1830. This chapter traces Smith’s shifting pre-1830 millennial beliefs in detail, as he exchanged a belief in the millennium based solely on scriptural interpretation for one based largely on revelations to modern prophets. It identifies Smith’s intellectual inheritance from Irving, and shows how his views on human action and divine agency altered with his conversion to the Southcottian tradition.

This chapter deals with Hannah More's last years, a period of bereavement, increasing frailty, and reactionary politics. In response to the post-1815 radical publications, she published Cheap Repository Tracts suited to the Present Times. Her Moral Sketches acquired mild notoriety because of its francophobic attack on British visitors to France. The Queen Caroline affair and Catholic emancipation reinforced her Toryism. She joined the Ultra Constitutional Association. She was suspicious of some of he new trends in Evangelicalism and came to distrust the millenarian preacher Edward Irving. Forced to leave Barley Wood because of the depredations of her servants, she died at Clifton in 1833.

The Catholic Apostolic Church was one of the lesser-known Scots influences on the Second German Empire, which was founded by Thomas Carlyle's friend Edward Irving. Carlyle identified himself so much with ‘history as biography’ that he has been dropped from ‘scientific’ lines of enquiry. The leitmotifs of ‘Signs of the Times’ were derived from Schiller: belief-systems as the alternative to mechanistic, fragmented unbelief; hence the stressing of the apocalyptic alternative. Carlyle, far from being the dark philosopher of ‘the work ethic’, really anticipates the vitalising options of Pat Kane's Play Ethic. Carlyle's world, carnivalesque as well as didactic, not only retained its relevance, but also advanced it: not primarily in book form, but dictionary-wise in brief lives and sayings and apothegms.