Steven S.Maugham, Mighty England Do Good: Culture, Faith, Empire, and World in the Foreign Missions of the Church of England, 1850-1915. Grand Rapids, Michigan; Cambridge, U.K.: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2014. 511 pp.

Abstract

Steven S. Maugham, England Good: Culture, Faith, Empire, and World in the Foreign of the Church of 1850-1915. Grand Rapids, Michigan; Cambridge, U.K.: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2014. 511 pp. England is a recent addition to the series Studies in the History of Christian Missions published by Eerdmans. tide refers to a speech made by Jacob Wainwright, one of the faithful Africans who transported the salt-encrusted and sun-dried body of David Livingstone from the interior of Africa to where it was solemnly buried in Westminster Abbey on 18 April 1874. Speaking on the missionary circuit in Wainwright described the long journey of Livingstone's remains, culminating his story with a powerful missionary message in which he compared the nations of the world to a train being drawn to heaven by a powerful engine, with the Bible supplying its time table. England, he said, was the engine driving this train. Wainwright concluded his presentation by shouting out, Mighty England Good. His audience responded to this appeal and its challenge with rapturous applause. England provides a meticulously researched and very well written history and analysis of the impact of the attempt to Do Good for God, the church, the nation, and the world that inspired and propelled the missionary enterprise of the Church of England in the Victorian and Edwardian eras. Chapter 1, entitled The Foreign of the Church of England: Reconceptualizing Anglicanism in Imperial Culture, 1850-1915, begins by raising some important matters related to the historiography of English society and missions in the 19th century that Maugham insists have not been given sufficient attention by historians. Among these neglected matters is the fact that in studies of an age when the largest voluntary organizations and charitable societies in England were mission agencies, not only secular historians but also historians of religion have largely ignored the history, impact, and ideology of foreign missions on English society and its churches in historical studies of the Victorian and Edwardian eras. Another neglected matter concerns the fact that historical studies of the mission movement, with only a few recent exceptions, continue to emphasize male agency and accomplishments, ignoring the role of women in the movement. Foreign mission was totally dependent on women for organizing grassroots support, for fundraising, and for providing the largest number of recruits for the mission field in the form both of missionary wives and of single female missionaries, with the result that the roles of women and the opportunities open to women were expanded to the point of transforming both church and society. Despite this fact, historians of the women's movement generally overlook the opportunities that the foreign mission movement opened up for English women. Similarly, in spite of the fact that the 19th-century expansion of the English missionary movement coincided with the greatest period of expansion of the British Empire, the role of mission leaders and of missionaries as both agents and critics of Empire has been largely ignored by secular historians of Empire and, until recently, by historians of religion. Maugham concludes the chapter by identifying some tensions in 19thcentury church and society in England that provide the context for his goal of producing an integrated account of the relationships among culture, faith, empire, and the world during that era. These tensions include the religious divide in English society among members of the established Church of nonconformists, and Roman Catholics; within the Church of England among evangelicals, broad and high churchmen, and Anglo-Catholics; the tensions produced by the rapid expansion of the British Empire and the reciprocal effect of both metropolitan and peripheral influences on one another; and finally the tensions caused as developments in the mission movement and society as whole challenged traditional views of the role of women in relation to the roles of men, and of lay persons and voluntary organizations in relation to the authority of clergy, and especially of bishops. …