Abstract
The conference held at Bradford in 1893 to form an Independent Labour Party was accompanied by a Labour Church service which some 5,000 people attended. It was organised by John Trevor, who in 1891 had left his Unitarian pulpit in Manchester and founded the first Labour Church. “God in the Labour Movement”, he explained “– working through it, as once he worked through Christianity, for the further salvation of the world – that was the simple conception that I had been seeking, and which at last came to me…” The fullest account of this movement created by Trevor has been given in H. M. Pelling's The Origins of the Labour Party, where it is sensibly cited as a stage in the “transfer of social energy from religion to politics.” The purpose of the present article is to dissent from certain judgments made by Mr. Pelling and to suggest, in some particulars, a different interpretation.
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