The Evangelical Inheritance

Abstract

Evangelicals and Evangelicalism seem unable to remain for long either in or out of favor. The line of periodic assessments which began by moving upward from the tart jibes of Sydney Smith to James Stephen's measured rehabilitation, took a plunge with the Hammond's indignant assault, and has continued to trace lesser fluctuations for the past thirty years. E. M. Howse, in Saints in Politics, attacked the Hammonds for lack of balance and attempted a rehabilitation. In the process, however, he lost his own balance and fell over backwards. Now Ford K. Brown's Fathers of the Victorians implies that one can again disparage the Evangelicals. Their legacy to the century, Brown suggests, was a negative and stifling one.This matter of the legacy makes the question of interpretation and reinterpretation important. Historians of nineteenth-century England agree that Evangelicalism contributed much to the temper of the age. Yet there agreement ceases. Brown, for example, thinks that the legacy, never a rich one, was ill-spent by the likes of Charlotte Brönte's sour-souled Mr. Brocklehurst. Noel Annan, rather, finds it husbanded and flourishing in the sensitive conscience of Leslie Stephen. Both may be right. If so, merely further proof of the strength and complexity of the Evangelical inheritance; further indication, therefore, of the need for its careful examination.The legacy cannot be examined apart from its source: the Evangelical faith itself. Without an understanding of that faith, one cannot know that while Zachary Macaulay was an Evangelical, Granville Sharp was not; without that understanding the true difference between the Evangelical morality of Henry Thornton and the humanitarian morality of Henry Brougham will go undetected.