NOTE A

Form of a Preacher's Licence

The following is a copy of a "licence" found among the papers of the late John Angell James:

CERTIFICATE FOR DISSENTING MINISTERS

to wit

Southampton, I do hereby certify, that at the General Quarter Sessions of the Peace of our Sovereign Lord the King, holden by adjournment at the Castle of Winchester, in and for the said county, on Monday the eighteenth day of July, in the forty-third year of the Reign of our Sovereign Lord George the Third and in the year of our Lord 1803,

JOHN JAMES

a Dissenting Teacher, did in open Court, between the Hours of Nine and Twelve of the Clock in the Forenoon, take and subscribe the Oaths of Allegiance, Supremacy, and Abjuration, and did also make and subscribe the Declaration against Transubstantiation, and against the Invocation and Adoration of the Virgin Mary, and the Sacrament of the Mass and all other Idolatry, and also did subscribe the Declaration mentioned in the Act passed in the nineteenth year of his present Majesty, George III.

Witness my hand this Eighteenth Day of July 1803.

PETER KERBY,
Clerk of the Peace.

CHAPTER X

ENGLISH CONGREGATIONALISM UNDER

GEORGE III. (1760-1820)

THE

GROWTH OF CONGREGATIONALISM-MEASURES TO STRENGTHEN ESTABLISHED CHURCH AGAINST THE INCREASE of Dissent-CONGREGATIONALISM AND THE METHODIST REVIVAL-THE EFFECT OF THE REVIVAL ON THE DOCTRINE AND POLITY OF CONGREGATIONAL CHURCHES AND THE CHARACTER OF THEIR MEMBERS-EXTEMPORANEOUS PREACHING-PRAYER-MEETINGS-LAY EVANGELISTS -THEOLOGICAL ACADEMIES-SUNDAY SCHOOLS-LONDON MISSIONARY SOCIETY-HOME MISSIONARY ORGANISATIONS-CONGREGATIONAL UNION.

IN

I

N 1772 the congregations in England belonging to the "Three Denominations numbered 1,092; fifty years later, towards the close of the long reign of George III., they numbered 1,583. In 1772 it is probable that there were about 380 Independent congregations; fifty years later there were 799. Within the same period the Baptists had increased from 390 to 532 congregations. The Presbyterians alone had fallen off. In 1772 they had probably about 320 congregations; fifty years later the number had sunk to 252. One-fourth of their congregations had become extinct, or had gone over to the Independents; and most of those that remained were very small. It has been estimated that of the Dissenters belonging to the "Three Denominations " towards the close of the reign of George III., the Presbyterians did not number more than one-twentieth.

The Independents had not only more than doubled the number of their congregations; the separate congregations were much larger. The Baptists had grown with almost equal rapidity.1

1 Bogue and Bennett, History of Dissenters, iv. 327–334.

In addition to the "Three Denominations" there were the new religious societies which had been created by the Evangelical Revival,-the Wesleyan Methodists, who in the early part of this century had already built their chapels in nearly every town in the kingdom, and in hundreds of villages; and the Calvinistic Methodists, as they were then called, consisting of congregations that had been formed by George Whitefield and through the exertions of Lady Huntingdon. These congregations were not very numerous, but the buildings in which they met were usually very large and very crowded. The preachers maintained the traditions of Whitefield's fervour and free popular eloquence.

The growth of these different forms of Dissent alarmed the supporters of the Established Church, and in 1811 the House of Lords obtained a return of the places of worship in towns containing 1,000 inhabitants and upwards. The returns were obtained through the bishops, and are probably very imperfect in their enumeration of the Dissenting meetinghouses, for the bishops' officers who collected the returns were likely to be ignorant of the obscurer meeting-houses; but they showed that in the towns containing at least 1,000 people there were 3,457 places of worship not connected with the Establishment, and only 2,547 churches. Other parliamentary returns had shown that half of the parochial incumbents were non-resident, and that nearly 4,000 of the benefices were worth less than £150 a year.3

To strengthen the Church against the growth of Dissent, the Government in 1809 proposed to vote £100,000 for increasing

2 These returns of the archbishops and bishops of the number of churches and chapels of the Church of England in every parish of 1,000 persons and upwards, also of the number of other places of worship not of the Establishment, vary, as given in different places, in an unaccountable way. As given in (a) Parl. Papers, 1812 (256); (b) Annual Register, 1811, liii. 268, appendix; (c) Bennett, History of Dissenters, 261-262; they appear as follows:—

3 Livings of value under £150 per ann., 3,996. Parl. Papers, 1810 (272).

Resident Incumbents, 4,421. Non-resident, 5,840. Parl. Papers, 1812 (255).

the revenues of Queen Anne's Bounty, which was created to augment small livings. These votes were made annually till they amounted to £1,100,000. They did not, however, always pass without criticism. In the session of 1810, when the Bill came before the House of Lords, and was supported by Lord Harrowby, on the score of the poverty of the clergy and the increasing numbers of Dissenters, Earl Stanhope said that Dissenters would continue to increase while they found that the advocates of the Establishment supposed that the best means of maintaining it was to apply for public money. He went on to say-

"Whether you vote six millions or sixty millions, whether you build churches or no churches, whether you calumniate Dissenters or otherwise, the number of communicants of the Established Church will decrease, and that of Dissenters increase, so long as the Church of England is made the engine of State policy, and its prelates are translated and preferred, not for their religious merits, but for their support to the minister of the day." 4

But to relieve the clergy was not enough; the Dissenters were building new chapels in all parts of the kingdom, and it was necessary for the Church to keep pace with them. With this end in view an Act was passed in 1818, creating a Church Building Commission; and it was determined to supply the Commissioners with funds to carry out their work. There were precedents of a kind for such a course. After the Great Fire, a rate had been levied by Parliament for restoring and rebuilding the London churches that had been injured or destroyed, and a tax on coals brought into the city was appropriated to the rebuilding of St. Paul's. A grant had also been made by Parliament for the erection of new churches in the reign of Queen Anne. That effort, indeed, had been a failure: only eleven new churches had been built instead of fifty. But the Government decided that the time had come to make a fresh attempt, and the Chancellor of the Exchequer brought in a Bill to appropriate £1,000,000 to that purpose. In the House of Lords, Lord Liverpool, who introduced the Bill, said that its object was "to remove Dissent," and urged that it was the duty of Parliament to enable the Church to counterbalance the activity of the Dissenters.5 Lord Holland, although he • Parl. Debates (Hansard: F. S.), xvii. 709, 751-770. 5 Ibid., xviii. 710, 713.

did not oppose the measure, took objection to the grounds on which it had been advocated. The Bill, he said, had been defended as a measure for placing Churchmen and Dissenters on an equal footing. What it actually did was to say to the Dissenters," You, gentlemen, who pay for yourselves, who pay for your own chapels and your own clergy, in addition to paying tithes to ours, shall also contribute to the creation of those churches in which you have no interest whatever." The Bill, however, passed; the million was voted-in fact, more than the million, for the duty on materials was remitted, making a large addition to the nominal grant.'

II

The rapid increase in the number of Congregationalists during the reign of George III. was due, in part, to the same causes that had contributed to their strength under the two preceding reigns. The Presbyterian ministers continued to drift farther and farther away from the Calvinistic creed. They passed from Arianism to Unitarianism, and their congregations died out; many of their people became Independents. But the principal cause of the new and expansive vigour of the Congregational Churches was the great Evangelical Revival. Whitefield had begun field-preaching in 1739; Wesley had instituted lay-preachers in 1741; and when George III. came to the throne, England was passing through a great religious revolution.

For some years the great majority of the Congregationalists regarded the new movement with deep distrust. The following passage, though written in the first few years of the nineteenth century, represents contemporary opinion:

Scarcely could two classes of good people be more different than the evangelical Dissenters and the Methodists. The former were a disciplined army of veteran warriors, long inured to service, and to whom every part of service was familiar; the latter were soldiers of the revolution, not so expert, but full of enthusiasm, and eager for the battle. The difference was displeasing to the Methodists, who charged the Dissenters with coldness and deadness, many

6 Parl. Debates (Hansard: F. S.), xxxviii. 716–717.

7 Ibid., xxxviii. 709-721. See also ibid., xxxvii. 1115-1131. In 1837 these remissions had amounted to £170,561; from 1837 to 1845, to £165,778. Parl. Papers (1838), 325; (1845), 322.