126 - The Call to Seriousness: The Evangelical Impact on the Victorians

The Call to Seriousness:
The Evangelical Impact on the Victorians
By Ian Bradley
New York, Macmillan, 1976. 224 pp. $12.95.

This is not so much a study of theology and worship as of life-style, a sphere in which evangelicalism shaped "the piety, the prudery, the imperialistic sentiments, the philanthropic endeavor, and the obsession with proper conduct which we think of as the distinctive characteristics of the Victorians" (p. 18). The author traces this influence from the

127 - The Call to Seriousness: The Evangelical Impact on the Victorians

French Revolution to about 1860, when he feels that evangelicalism passed into a more bigoted phase dominated by premillennialism and biblical literalism. In the previous half century, he contends, evangelicalism changed the prevailing habits and attitudes of the entire population. Even those who broke with evangelical theology, the Newmans, George Eliot, Samuel Butler, Leslie Stephen, still often bore the unmistakable mark of the evangelical ethos, that driving sense of duty.

The portrayal of evangelical moral theology and casuistry is largely based on a selection of the more popular manuals of ethics, such as those by Thomas Gisborne, William Roberts, and Hannah More. Evangelicalism was more characteristic of the laity than of ministers, and of laywomen than laymen. Among walks of life favored by evangelicals, politics was made, by men like Wilberforce and Shaftesbury, a different calling from what it had been with Pitt or Fox. Similarly the civil service and the armed forces, particularly the colonial services, acquired a new discipline and integrity. In business, evangelical bankers and merchants were noted for sober, reliable, conscientious practice. Professions like law and medicine, again, were subdued to evangelical discipline.

The evangelicals are credited with a major contribution to British imperialism. They opposed mere conquest, or mere commercial exploitation, but urged a civilizing responsibility along with the missionary concern, which made them into reluctant advocates of empire. Charles Grant in India and Thomas Buxton in Africa illustrate this contribution.

In somewhat analogous fashion Bradley gives such evangelicals as Shaftesbury credit for preparing the Welfare State, if unintentionally, by urging benevolent state intervention in economic life on behalf of the helpless victims of the industrial system. Most evangelicals were politically conservative, even at times repressive. Their interest in the poor was genuine if paternalistic, and they knew the poor as individual people in the slums, factories, prisons, and madhouses as did no other comparable group. In treating these matters Bradley is more subtle and discriminating than some recent muckrakers, who reduce evangelical attitudes to mere class politics and hypocrisy.

Evangelical women, meanwhile, supplied an enormous amount of volunteer service, visiting the poor, teaching in Sunday schools and ragged schools, serving as Bible women, deaconesses, and district visitors. The most frequent avenue of evangelical penetration of families in the middle and upper classes was through wives, daughters, and nurses. And by the end of the century the bulk of foreign missionaries were women.

Evangelical home life, with its daily family prayers and strict Sabbath observance, its regulations on recreations, the deathbed morality, produced generally a high sense of responsibility. Often repressive, sometimes sadistic, it also often expressed deep affection and mutual respect.

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Bradley is an agreeable writer; his history is enjoyable reading. Its virtues are remarkable for a scholar of twenty-five, since it is more of a balanced survey of many dimensions than an exploitation of new research. Good use is made of Victorian novelists and essayists. One only wishes there were more of it, that Bradley had included nonconformist evangelicalism, for example, or explored further the interplay and relations of evangelicalism and utilitarianism. American readers will frequently be stimulated to comparisons and contrasts.

James Hastings Nichols
Princeton Theological Seminary
Princeton, New Jersey