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Gladstone was brought up as an Evangelical, but soon diverged from his earlier position by adopting the doctrine of baptismal regeneration and accepting a high view of the visible church. Although he continued to value religious experience, during the 1830s he sided with Orthodox High Churchmen in abandoning claims about the possibility of firm assurance of salvation. He did not, however, follow Newman in seeing human merit as a ground of justification. In 1838 he published The State in its Relations with the Church in order to vindicate the principle of establishment, revealing in the revised edition of 1841 a remarkable affinity with contemporary German political philosophy. His Church Principles considered in their Results (1840) argued the claims of the Church of England on the basis of his communitarian social premises, but he acknowledged the authenticity of faith outside its bounds.

Within the culture of British Protestantism in which John Henry Newman wrote An Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine (1845), the development of doctrine was not a live option in historiography, although this was to change over the subsequent eighty years of the Essay’s reception. Across the spectrum of Evangelicals, liberals, High Churchmen, the Essay’s first reviewers united in a chorus of criticism. At the end of the nineteenth century, although Newman’s Essay was still criticized, it was acknowledged to have anticipated developmentalism in the study of history and science. By the early twentieth century, Newman had contributed to making development an accepted opinion among British Protestants. Although many Modernist liberals agreed with High Churchmen that the Essay itself held a minimal view of doctrinal change, the former relished and the latter feared the implications of the theory for development in theology.

Exploration of Bishop Horsley's part in the renovation of the Church at the national level establishes his claim to be regarded as a reformer, but one of a moderate and uneven kind. Like earlier High Churchmen in the Laudian mould, he was chiefly interested in reforms that buttressed the temporal pillars of the Church and rescued the clergy from the condescension of laymen. He was less sensitive to the grievances of the laity against the clergy, and stood in with the archbishop of Canterbury and most other bishops against the Younger Pitt's schemes for commutation of tithes. Horsley was never complacent about the state of the Church of England. When the French Revolution and the English Republicans arose to challenge the values for which it stood, he developed a concern to refurbish its image in the sight of respectable Englishmen. The remedies that he favoured were piecemeal. He had no vision of an overall reform to be achieved by redistributing revenues, but thought that Parliament should strengthen every bishop to insist on the proper performance of duty in his diocese.

Chapter 2 examines the theme of primitive Christianity on the voyage to Georgia. On the Simmonds, Wesley and his fellow missionaries resumed the ascetical and devotional practices characteristic of the Oxford Methodists, including the adoption of religious resolutions, vegetarianism, fasting, and apostolic poverty. Wesley spent considerable time investigating the Eucharistic theology and practice of the High Churchman John Johnson and the extreme sect of Usager Nonjurors. Alongside this, he examined the baptismal doctrine and practice of the primitive church and Church of England, particularly through the work of William Wall, which was influential amongst High Churchmen. Wesley engaged in this intensive study with the aim of restoring the ecclesiology of the primitive church in Georgia as advocated by the Usager Nonjurors. At sea he began to implement his clerical practices, which emphasized the centrality of the sacraments in worship inspired by the example of the early church and Nonjurors.

While many religious writers praised Paxton's innovative design, often likening it to a temple or the modern equivalent of a medieval cathedral, High Churchmen and Roman Catholics abhorred the design, comparing it most unfavourably to the neo‐Gothic style then in vogue for ecclesiastical and public buildings. Certain exhibits also proved controversial, none more so than Pugin's contributions to the Medieval Court, which were often seen as importing Catholic devices into the very heart of the Exhibition. This chapter centres on the religious controversies surrounding the Crystal Palace and its contents in order to show that it was a highly contested space and that protagonists across the religious spectrum endowed it with different spiritual meanings.