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The Oxford Tractarians represented the link between the old-fashioned high churchmen of the 18th century and the later Victorian ritualists. The Cambridge Ecclesiologists undoubtedly brought a new perspective to Anglican Church architecture and liturgy, but it was one which took a considerable degree of time to implement, to such an extent that some churches were largely untouched by it. Nevertheless, when the changes did finally succeed in transforming the liturgical life of the Church of England in a very radical, though at the same time rather reactionary, manner, they themselves became the accepted Anglican norm for another century, to such an extent that recent attempts to modify them have been condemned as an attack on a historical legacy. This chapter puts the liturgical changes of the 19th century into perspective, reassesses the speed with which they were carried out, and challenges some of the assumptions that have been made.

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.

The churchmen and aristocrats who dominated the German scene in medieval times knew how to struggle among themselves for control of the available resources, and how to exploit them to the best advantage. At the same time, there existed a strongly pious tendency providing material support for innumerable monastic establishments. Various motives can be adduced: dynastic prestige and local pride; family connection with certain bishoprics and monastic orders; personal religious commitment and a perceived need for a family mausoleum; networks of kinship, friendship, and prayer confraternity; adverse crises or notable victories in need of commemoration; and so on. But the overriding conviction appears to have arisen from a firm belief in the overwhelming power of prayer. The almost uncontrollably violent tendency of the aristocracy was therefore tempered by a piety which then acted as an economic and social quantity to be reckoned with.

People with a logical turn of mind say that the history of the world can be summarised in a sentence. A précis of mediaval historian Richard William Southern's work made in that spirit would identify two characteristics, one housed inside the other, and both quite apart from the question of its quality as a work of art. The first is his sympathy for a particular kind of medieval churchman, a kind who combined deep thought about faith with practical action. This characteristic fits inside another, touching Southern's historical vision as a whole. Its genesis is traceable to those few seconds in his teens when he ‘quarrelled’ with his father about the Renaissance. The intuition that moved him to do so became a historical fides quaerens intellectum. Reflection on Southern's life work leaves us with an example of the service an historian can perform for his contemporary world, as a truer self-perception seeps into the common consciousness by way of a lifetime of teaching and writing, spreading out through the world (all Southern's books were translated into one or more foreign language).

This chapter discusses the life of Robert Matthews, who was born in 1788 to a Scots immigrant family in the farming village of Cambridge, Washington County, New York. It notes that the few associations they sustained with others came mainly with their fellow immigrants in the surrounding New York and Vermont country towns who clung to their uncompromising Scots Calvinism, nursing ancient ecclesiastical grudges unknown to the rest of the world. The chapter reports that in 1835, an enterprising Manhattan journalist disclosed that Robert Matthews had his own conversations with supernatural spirits and impressed his friends with feats of clairvoyance. It notes, however, that the source is highly suspect and that no such report appears in the Coila church records. It is just possible that the visions did appear and that the worried Coila churchmen suppressed the fact.

Samuel Horseley was born on 15 September 1733. Like the place of his birth, his career presented arresting contrasts. Though he would emerge at the close of the century as the leading High Churchman on the bench, professing a theology that was unfashionable in the England of his age, his background was by no means detached from the central experiences of the national life. His father, the Revd John Horsley, who was lecturer in the parish of St. Martin, had been educated for the Nonconformist ministry at Edinburgh University, whence he graduated on 14 February 1723. His mother Anne, died before her son was 3 years of age.

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.

This chapter examines the relation between Northumbrian and Irish churches during the period between 635 and 735. It suggests that the journeys of churchmen between Ireland and Northumbria were in some ways inextricably linked with those of their lay counterparts and that the development of major ecclesiastical establishments during the seventh and early eighth centuries added a new dimension to trans-Irish Sea contact. The chapter also explains why the trans-Irish Sea contact did not cease in 664 when formal links between Lindisfarne on the one hand, and Iona and the Columban churches in Ireland, on the other, were terminated.

This chapter discusses the system of governance and the pattern of politics in Wales during the Restoration. A powerful majority of Welsh royalists and churchmen were returned to Parliament in 1661, and joined by those who had served in Cromwellian times in order to preserve some kind of constituted authority and public order. The fate of Charles I had been the cause of much bad blood during the restoration. Charles II ensured that all those who assisted in the murder of the late king were delivered over to public justice. Politics and practice were the preserve of rich men and although there were little enthusiasm for politics among Welsh after 1689, talented men continued to reach positions of political eminence during the reigns of William and Anne. The constitution and the system of parliamentary representation enabled the leading families to rule almost as feudal barons over the rest of society.

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.