‘Our Brethren of the North’: The Scottish Episcopal Church and the Oxford Movement

Abstract

Studies of the Oxford or Tractarian Movement in Britain have almost exclusively focused on the Church of England. The impact of the Catholic revival within Scotland has been accorded little attention. This neglect partly reflects the small size of the Episcopal Church in Scotland. Yet the subject deserves fuller consideration precisely because the minority Scottish Episcopal Church was, by the nineteenth century, more uniformly High Church in its theology and outlook than the Church of England, a fact which predisposed it to be peculiarly receptive to Tractarianism, which in turn exacerbated its relations with the dominant Presbyterian Kirk. The few serious studies of the question, however, have been coloured by an uncritical assumption that the movement's impact on the Episcopal Church was altogether positive and benign. The differences between the Tractarians and nonjuring episcopalians of the north have been overlooked or understated. While according due weight to the affinities and continuities between the two traditions, this article will question the standard Anglo-Catholic historiography and reveal the tensions within the Episcopal Church sharpened by the often negative influence of the Catholic revival when transported north of the border.