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The traditional image of Charles Wesley is that of a loyal Anglican whose attachment to the parent Church of England led to his isolation within Methodism in his later years. There is a contradiction in this viewpoint as Charles Wesley, despite his protestations of Anglican loyalty, contributed a great deal to the establishment of an evangelical popular movement. The more that one examines the activities of Charles Wesley, the clearer it becomes that he was in fact a radical conservative, whose high Sacramental theology was combined with the promotion of new worship practices such as congregational hymn singing and the class meeting. This mix of different elements produced a Methodist movement that was a combination of High Church theology, strict discipline, and innovative forms of structure, devotion, and worship.

This chapter approaches the character and identity of the Oxford Movement from an assessment of how far it might be considered a ‘revival’. The need for reform-revival in the early 19th century Anglican Church was a topic much under discussion both at the time and continues being a subject of debate in recent historiography. The present study helps to define the distinctive character of the Movement and to clarify its position in respect to other parties within the Church of England. From this survey it becomes apparent that the Tractarians saw the ‘revival’ as emerging from an ethos wholly different from that which had so far been prevalent.

This chapter considers how far ethos determined the Tractarian stance towards the Reformers, the English Reformation, Church parties (Evangelical and High Church), and the Church of England itself. It also studies the Oxford Movement's historical analysis and predictions about how a defective ethos (Evangelical or High Church) leads toward rationalism, and later to infidelity. It ends with a study of the controversy about the arguments in favour or against remaining in the Church of England.

Charles Wesley was a complex man in terms of his denominational identity and this ambiguity is reflected in the Methodist movement that he helped to found. Some of the keys to understanding Charles Wesley and his relationship with Methodism, the wider Evangelical Revival, and the Church of England can be found in a childhood shaped by a difficult environment and parents whose own denominational identities were a rich mix of Puritan and High Church Anglican tempered by influences from other Christian traditions. These same ingredients proved to be of fundamental importance in the making of Methodism.

The partnership between church and state in the empire underwent a period of revitalization in the period between 1790 and 1830, after the loss of the thirteen North American colonies. This is evident in Anglican engagement with the Bengal mission by both High Church and Evangelical missions. This engagement witnessed a remarkable continuity with the public theological discourse about the British Empire that had been constructed in the North American context previously.

This chapter contains a brief biographical study of Samuel Francis Wood, the author of the two appendices included at the end of the book. Wood's life and personality offer revealing insights into the character of the Oxford Movement. He had absorbed its ideals in all the freshness of the pre-Tractarian spring; they became second nature to him, shaped his intellectual and moral outlook, and were to inspire and steer his life after he left Oxford. Indeed it may be affirmed without exaggeration that in Wood may be found the ethos of the Oxford Movement embodied in a person.

This chapter analyzes English High Churchmanship in the 18th century. Topics discussed include Latitudinarianism and its loss of cohesion and distinctiveness, Tory High Church influences, and Hutchinsonianism and religious revival. Historians have sometimes conveyed the impression that the Hutchinsonians were the only genuine High Churchmen left in the Church of England in the second half of the 18th century. This is mistaken. The country at large exhibited many different manifestations of a Church-conscious and Sacrament-conscious divinity that still needed to be brought together. Some were inheritances from the past, mature and declining. Others, like Hutchinsonianism, bore the stamp of revival. Provincial centres had their distinctive traditions.

In order to fully appreciate Samuel Horsley's position it is necessary to enquire first into what his High Churchmanship comprised, then to establish where he stood in relation to other church leaders who were sometimes bracketed with him, and how important these were in the composition of the later Georgian Church. His outlook embraced four distinctively High Church features. Firstly, he believed strongly in the divine origin of the ministerial commission and that episcopacy was the means chosen by the apostles for transmitting spiritual authority to the clergy down the ages to his own time. Second, his High Churchmanship was signalized by a leaning to the Catholic view of the Eucharist. Reverence for the older liturgies was consonant with a third characteristic of his High Church outlook: an emphasis upon the mysterious quality of the Christian religion. The fourth component of the bishop's opinions that placed him squarely in the High Church camp was the importance he assigned to tradition as a mentor of church doctrine and practice.

Despite its effectiveness for evangelical services, the theater‐like church did not become popular after its introduction in the 1830s; in fact, it was virtually ignored as evangelicals at mid‐century embraced High Church Gothic Revival architecture that was seemingly antithetical to their Low Church heritage. Investigating this paradox, this chapter asserts that the political turmoil aroused by the slavery issue led evangelicals to redirect their congregational activities away from revivalism and moral reform work (particularly abolitionism) and toward worship. Illustrating this trend is Ultraist abolitionist Lewis Tappan's indictment by the Broadway Tabernacle Church and the congregation's later efforts to foster cohesion among its politically disparate members by adopting worship as its primary mission. Such redirection of mission was one of several means of fostering cohesion or “Christian unity” among evangelical groups, the most visible of which was the widespread adoption of Gothic Revival architecture. Growing interest in liturgical formalism within the new churches also contributed to efforts to establish Christian unity in the context of political disruption.

This chapter argues that to see the divisions within English Protestantism in terms of ‘Church’ and ‘Dissent’ is simplistic. The boundaries between the two (and between different Dissenting denominations) were fuzzy. There were also deep divisions within the Church (between High and Low Church) and among Dissenters — above all between traditional Calvinist denominations on one hand (Presbyterians, Independents, and in some cases particular Baptists) and Quakers on the other. The chapter also considers the incidence of persecution under Charles II and the impact of the Toleration Act of 1689.

The drive to enlarge the toleration of Protestant Dissenters beyond the boundaries of the 1689 Act encountered little success in the late 1780s and the 1790s. The struggle was important chiefly for the impact that it made on the character of the contestants. To the Anglican side it imparted a deeper theological colouring. Because the challenge to the confessional state was spearheaded by Socinianism, a radically different doctrinal system to that of the Established Church, the question at issue quickly extended from how much freedom men should enjoy to the truth of what they believed. The attacks mounted by the more extreme Unitarians, not only upon the doctrine of the Trinity, but on the broad foundations of the Anglican type of Protestantism, rebounded in the Church of England in a retreat of some of its members from the loose accommodating liberalism of the 1760s and 1770s into a distinctive Prayer Book Anglicanism that enjoined subscription to the Articles, and trod the via media between arid Latitudinarianism and Methodist exuberance. This was the note struck by the British Critic in the 1790s. Though moderate and restrained, it was a step in the High Church direction.

Was the Church of England, between the Restoration and the Oxford movement, divided into parties? W. J. Conybeare, in a famous article of 1853, claimed that High and Low Church faded away, leaving a complacent worldliness. This chapter traces the emergence and track record of the identities ‘High Church’, ‘Latitudinarian’, and ‘Low Church’, shows their origin in polemic, traces their trajectories in political and religious conflict, and concludes that Conybeare’s reifications of identities were partly retrojections. Both the assertion and the denial of party labels were tactically motivated, but party identities nevertheless had both theological and parliamentary party-political purposes. The Broad Church cause that Conybeare sought to promote is revealed, and the seriousness of principled conflicts in earlier decades reasserted. The chapter centrally contends that since Conybeare’s account was inadequate, Norman Sykes’s model of the Hanoverian Church as consensual, unified, and moderate cannot now be sustained.

The event that prompted the evolution of Horsley's opinions and stimulated the growth of a High Church theology during the decade was the Trinitarian controversy with Priestley (1783–90). The return to stringency in the 1780s was signalled by the imparting of a new depth to the controversy, as the doctrine of the Trinity became the touchstone of the teaching authority of the Anglican Church and of its standing in the community. Priestley sounded the call to battle in a book entitled A History of the Corruptions of Christianity, published in 1782. In it he aimed on the one hand to rescue the Christian religion from the sneers of fashionable unbelief that he had encountered on his visit to Paris in 1774 and in Lord Shelburne's circle by showing that the objects of attack were not part of the true and original Christian faith, but were introduced into it in the early Christian centuries by admixture with a different culture.

This chapter discusses the development of nineteenth-century High Church Anglicanism during a period of major social, political, and religious change within, and outside of, the British state. Comfortable with Anglicanism as part of a ‘confessional state’, High Church clerics and laity successfully adjusted to an era of political reform and, as part of the Oxford Movement, the challenging presence of Tractarianism. Misunderstood by generations of historians as a movement in decline, Anglican High Churchmanship—which included emergent and independent churches in Scotland and the United States of America—played an active role in the development of Anglicanism during the nineteenth century.

The French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars shifted the balance of parties and groupings in the English Church. They worked in favour of those that assigned to Providence a major concern with the regeneration and protection of the civil community. The Evangelicals profited through their attachment to the idea of a righteous nation and a national faith, but failed to press home their advantage because their emphasis on individual conversions and personal righteousness divided English society between the sheep and the goats. It was the Old High Church, committed to an alliance or a more intimate union of Church and State that benefited most from the increased services of the clergy to the State called forth by the protracted hostilities. Its traditionalist wing was also better equipped than most theologians of the Age of Reason to handle the emotional releases of a nation at war.

This chapter examines how religious issues permeated preparations for the Exhibition. Most importantly, at the Mansion House banquet on 21 March 1850 Prince Albert unambiguously portrayed the Exhibition as an event to celebrate God's providence. The religious ethos of the Exhibition was further stressed at the opening ceremony on 1 May 1851 both by Albert and in the Archbishop of Canterbury's benediction. Although some High Churchmen and Catholics strongly objected to the Archbishop blessing a manifestly secular event, these interventions were widely seen as providing a religious sanction for the Exhibition. This chapter also draws attention to such publications as James Emerton's Moral and Religious Guide to the Great Exhibition and the competition with a £100 prize for an essay that supported the Exhibition from a religious perspective.