Evangelical Anglican Research Articles

Historians and the Church of England: Religion and Historical Scholarship, 1870-1920 by James Kirby

Reviewed by: Historians and the Church of England: Religion and Historical Scholarship, 1870-1920by James Kirby Martin Wellings Historians and the Church of England: Religion and Historical Scholarship, 1870-1920. By James Kirby. [ Oxford Historical Monographs.] (New York: Oxford University Press. 2016. Pp. xi, 257. $100.00; £60.00. ISBN 978-0-19-876815-9.) The central argument of James Kirby's elegant monograph on British historical scholarship between the mid-nineteenth century and the end of World War I is that many of the most influential and widely-read historians of the period were committed members of the Church of England, some lay and many ordained. [End Page 600]Kirby begins by establishing the importance and prestige of history in late-Victorian and Edwardian Britain, noting that a popular work like J. R. Green's Short History of the English People(1874) vastly outsold the novels of George Eliot and Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species. He explores the formation of the "Anglican historians"—E. A. Freeman, William Stubbs, J. S. Brewer, Nicholas Pocock, J. E. Thorold Rogers, J. R. Green, R. W. Dixon, Mandell Creighton—noting the influence of the worldview of the Oxford Movement, with its emphasis on the historical continuity of the Church. The opportunities for scholarship are then examined by investigating "the learned Church," with its well-endowed parishes, its tradition of intellectual activity among the cathedral clergy, and its near-monopoly of tenured posts at the universities of Oxford and Cambridge. Having set the scene, Kirby then investigates four themes in British history, showing how they were addressed by his Anglican scholars. He considers the Nation (and the role of the national Church), the Constitution (and the vexed question of the English Civil War), social and economic history from the Middle Ages to the industrial revolution, and the particularly neuralgic issue of the Reformation Settlement. Kirby's scholars were not necessarily in agreement on all of these topics. Dixon, Freeman, and Stubbs, for example, emphasised the continuity of the English Church across the Reformation, praising the Elizabethan Settlement as a triumph of authentic English (and Anglican) Catholicism. Brewer and Pocock, on the other hand, espoused a more thorough-going Anglo-Catholic view, owing something to the polemics of Hurrell Froude, and vigorously repudiating the English Reformers and all their works. As Freeman wrote to Green in May, 1869: "once a month (as some men get drunk), [Pocock] roasts a Reformer in the Sat. [urday] Rev. [iew]" (p.181). In his final chapter, Kirby turns to providence and teleology, showing that these historians eschewed the Positivist theories of H. T. Buckle ("an ignorant windbag," in Freeman's opinion—p. 191), and espoused a subtle and flexible teleology which allowed for an ultimately mysterious Providence drawing good out of the contingent choices of flawed but free human beings. Kirby persuasively connects this with a theological focus on the Incarnation, and with an ecclesiological emphasis on the Church as an extension of the Incarnation. An epilogue reflects on the gradual decline of the Anglican school of English historiography, blaming agricultural depression, the equalization of stipends and the expansion of other career opportunities for bright graduates for the demise of the "learned Church." James Kirby has written a well-researched and erudite study. One reservation: Kirby's heroes are almost all High Churchmen or Anglo-Catholics, with an occasional reference to Broad Churchmen. The Evangelicals are discounted, as are Nonconformists of all shades—the dismissive reference to the Countess of Huntingdon's Connexion, in which J. N. Figgis was raised, as "a Methodist sect" (p. 102) speaks volumes. Evangelical Anglicans and Nonconformists wrote and read history in this period, and more might be made of this constituency. And although it is gratifying for a reviewer to find his own work cited, it is disappointing when his name is consistently misprinted in the footnotes and the bibliography. [End Page 601] Martin Wellings Oxford Methodist Circuit Copyright © 2017 The Catholic University of America Press

The New Christian Zionism: Fresh Perspectives on Israel & the Land ed. by Gerald R. McDermott

Reviewed by: The New Christian Zionism: Fresh Perspectives on Israel & the Land ed. by Gerald R. McDermott Mark Mattes The New Christian Zionism: Fresh Perspectives on Israel & the Land. Edited by Gerald R. McDermott. Downers Grove: IVP Academic, 2016. 349 pp. With the exception of Lutherans influenced by Johann August Bengel (1687–1752) or by North American premillennialist Lutherans, such as Joseph Augustus Seiss (1823–1904) or Conrad Emil Lindberg (1852–1930), the role of Israel, both people and land, in [End Page 241] relation to God's overall economy of salvation, has not played a major role in Lutheran thinking. In contrast, traditional "Christian Zionism," enshrined in the Scofield Reference Bible, was advocated by many North American fundamentalists. In that view, although the return of Jews to their ancient homeland is a fulfillment of biblical prophecy, Israel and the church run on different tracks, with the church escaping God's wrath in the "Great Tribulation" but not Israel. Countering that view, traditional Lutheranism has tended to be "supercessionist," that is, that the church has supplanted Israel in God's economy of salvation. This book, edited by an Evangelical Anglican who for decades taught at Roanoke College and is now at Beeson Divinity School, takes a different track. The essayists here eschew dispensationalist premillennialism with its project of charting the end times. However, unlike the supercessionist position, they see Israel as having a crucial place in God's plan of salvation for the world (12). For these thinkers, God's promises made to the Jews are "irrevocable" (Rom. 11:2). This does not mean that the nation of Israel cannot be criticized. Instead, it indicates that the destiny of the church is intertwined with that of Israel since Jesus did not come to destroy the law but to fulfill it. Thereby the covenant with Israel "abides" (27). Agreeing with dispensationalists that the return of the Jews to Palestine is a fulfillment of prophecy, these writers see in the contemporary state of Israel a merely provisional and "proleptic" fulfillment of the promise of a whole new world (27). Decisive for these essayists is Romans 9–11, which they interpret Paul to say that the church has not supplanted the place of the Jewish people but that the Jews remain as God's "chosen people" (42). McDermott traces non-dispensationalist Zionism as a minority report in the ancient church but which came to fruition among Puritans, particularly Jonathan Edwards (64). Several scholars––Craig Blaising, Joel Willitts, Mark Kinzer, and David Rudolph––indicate that not all references to "the land" in the New Testament can be spiritualized, since they specify God's commitment to Israel's vocation which is rooted in the land promised to Abraham and his descendants. Mark Tooley narrates the history of attitudes about Israel among mainline Protestants, who early in the early twentieth century supported a nation [End Page 242] state of Israel but more recently (since the 1970s) have critiqued Israel since Israel is no longer seen as an underdog and the Palestinians are perceived as oppressed (217). Lutheran ethicist Robert Benne notes that Reinhold Niebuhr's support for a Jewish homeland was based not on biblical prophecy but instead on secular and liberal views. Benne himself goes further than Niebuhr and offers a theological justification for Christian support of Israel: God's covenant with Israel abides and that justifies Jews returning to "the land" (245). Robert Nicholson points out that in the 1967 war Israel pushed Jordan and Egypt "out of the original Mandate for Palestine, dislodging them from their own illegal occupation of Palestinian Arabs" (269). Shadi Khalloul, an Israeli Maronite Christian, highlights the benefits even for minorities of living in Israel. "When there are reports of Israeli killings of Palestinian civilians during war (which are rarely if ever intentional), thousands of Jewish people in Israel protest against the government. … but when a bus with Jews is blown up by Palestinian terrorists, Arabs often dance in the streets or name their children or parks after suicide bombers, and honor the murderers as martyrs" (295). Darrell Bock emphasizes that Gentile inclusion does not entail Jewish exclusion (311). Finally, Gerald McDermott notes that both Jews and Christians worship...

Aliens and strangers?: the struggle for coherence in the everyday lives of evangelicals

In this work of qualitative sociology, Anna Strhan offers an in-depth study of the everyday lives of members of a conservative evangelical Anglican church in London. ‘St John’s’ is a vibrant church, with a congregation of young and middle-aged members, one in which the life of the mind is important, and faith is both a comfort and a struggle – a way of questioning the order of things within society and for themselves. The congregants of St John’s see themselves as increasingly counter-cultural, moving against the grain of wider culture in London and in British society, yet they take pride in this, and see it as a central element of being Christian. This book reveals the processes through which the congregants of St John's learn to understand themselves as ‘aliens and strangers’ in the world, demonstrating the precariousness of their projects of staking out boundaries of moral distinctiveness. Through focusing on their interactions within and outside the church, Strhan shows how the everyday experiences of members of St John’s are simultaneously shaped by the secular norms of their workplaces and other city spaces and by the moral and temporal orientations of their faith that rub against these. Thus their self-identification as ‘aliens and strangers’ both articulates and constructs an ambition to be different from others around them in the city, rooted in a consciousness of the extent to which their hopes, concerns and longings are simultaneously shaped by their being in the world.

Corporate Holiness: Pulpit Preaching and the Church of England Missionary Societies, 1760–1870 by Bob Tennant (review)

Reviewed by: Corporate Holiness: Pulpit Preaching and the Church of England Missionary Societies, 1760–1870 by Bob Tennant Laura M. Stevens Bob Tennant, Corporate Holiness: Pulpit Preaching and the Church of England Missionary Societies, 1760–1870 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013). Pp. xii + 342. $105.00. This review is also a tribute, for Bob Tennant died on January 6, 2014, his sixty-fifth birthday, just two weeks after his book was published. Tennant’s posthumous scholarly reputation—especially in regard to his work on Anglican sermons, missionary societies, and the eighteenth-century bishop and philosopher Joseph Butler—will exceed the reputation he enjoyed during his lifetime, because most of his publications either came out in the years just preceding his death or are now in press. Tennant’s career followed a nonstandard path: he earned his doctorate in English literature from the University of London in 1970 and taught at the University of Sussex (where he had received his BA) until 1978; then, for more than two decades, he worked in London as a senior manager in adult education while being active in the labor and trade union movement. It was not until 2001 that he took up full-time scholarly research, first as Honorary Research Fellow at the University of Glasgow and then at the University of Durham. During these thirteen years, which included a term as Visiting Scholar at Baylor University, he was remarkably prolific, publishing two books, Conscience, Consciousness and Ethics in Joseph Butler’s Philosophy and Ministry (2011) and Corporate Holiness, along with several articles including two chapters in The Oxford Handbook of the British Sermon 1689–1901 (2012), a project for which he was a consultant editor. Corporate Holiness is a study of what Tennant calls “the operational ethos” of the Church of England’s three missionary societies in existence between the mid-eighteenth and late nineteenth centuries: The Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge (SPCK), founded in 1698; the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts (SPG), an incorporated society chartered in 1702; and the Church Missionary Society (CMS), founded in 1799. The first two organizations shared founders, many members, and general sensibilities, with distinct but mutually [End Page 303] supporting purviews emerging from a wave of Anglican pastoral and reformist engagement spanning the turn of the eighteenth century. The SPCK’s projects included funding charity schools throughout Britain, providing chaplains for the East India Company, distributing religious literature at home and abroad, and supporting missions to India, many of which were staffed by Danish and German Lutherans. The SPG’s primary tasks were to supply ministers to colonial populations where the Church of England was not the established church, to assist with the conversion of African slaves, and to bring the gospel to indigenous heathen populations near colonial settlements. The CMS was one of several organizations launched by the Clapham Sect, an evangelical Anglican group best known for its abolitionist activism and its moral reform projects. Being “the prototype in a broad-front intervention in society by the Evangelicals” (95), with a stated mission overlapping those of the SPG and SPCK, the CMS occasioned some controversy and competition within the Church of England. The book’s title speaks to a core challenge faced by all three societies: the Church of England “had no obvious mandate beyond the nation,” and thus had a “corresponding constitutional need to justify missionary activity . . . to an extent unapproached by those of the Roman Catholic and Dissenting Churches” (284). The Anglican societies thus faced the task of crafting from scratch an extroverted missiology, with accompanying governing structures and methodologies. Tennant drew the phrase “corporate holiness” from Bishop of Gloucester William Warburton’s conception “of corporate holiness as an expression of national spirituality and practice, grounded on prophesy and the mutually reinforcing platforms of Church and State,” but even more so from Butler’s “projection of the personally ethical into the corporate” (287). This was not a static concept, for the societies’ identities, understandings of their missions, and structures altered over the 110 years covered by this book, while differences both subtle and glaring developed among the three organizations “about the Church’s role in relation to detached...

Researching Lived Islam as an Evangelical Anglican Minister

The article examines the impact of the researcher’s own faith tradition on research done with those of a different faith tradition. It questions the extent to which personal identity and individual convictions impact upon the approach taken to fieldwork. Two specific questions examined are how truthful about intentions and how forthright regarding personal views a researcher should be when engaged in fieldwork. In the third main section, the question of how the experience of fieldwork might impact a researcher’s personal beliefs is discussed.

America's Pastor: Billy Graham and the Shaping of a Nation

America's Pastor: Billy Graham and Shaping of Nation. By Grant Wacker. (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2014, Pp. 413. $27.95); Godly Ambition: John Stott and Evangelical Movement. By Alister Chapman. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012, Pp. xi, 222. $58 hardback; $24.95 paper.)Some prominent figures are particularly fortunate in their biographers. This is certainly case with world renowned Protestant leader and with British evangelical Anglican whom Time magazine listed in 2005 as one of globe's hundred most important people. Wacker of Duke University Divinity School perused thousands of documents at Billy Graham Center Archives at Wheaton College, Illinois, in researching global revivalist. Chapman of Westmont College, Santa Barbara, had full access to John Stott's papers. Both of these well written accounts are highly sympathetic towards their subjects, though Walker in particular reveals several major flaws.Both biographers note that Graham and Stott were good friends. Stott in fact faced fierce attacks from more liberal and influential clergy within his own Church of England for supporting Graham's massive London crusade in 1954. Both men stressed infallibility of Bible. Both were influential in International Congress of World Evangelization, held in Lausanne in 1974, body formed in response to liberal ecumenicism of World Council of Churches.Yet biographies reveal how different two men were. Stott was very much part of British establishment, his father prominent Harley Street doctor. He was educated at Rugby and Cambridge, where he graduated with honors, and from 1945 to 1970 usually led London's All Souls Church. Graham came from moderately prosperous farm family in North Carolina, received his bachelor's degree from small evangelical college, never attended seminary, and held pastorate for just over year. Stott saw himself primarily as an educator, in Chapman's words, a learned yet popular theologian who could bridge gap between academy and pew (44). Graham was an unabashed revivalist, ignoring such matters as sacraments and biblical criticism to press unrelentingly for the decision that would determine one's fate for eternity.Certain facts about Stott are particularly fascinating. Influenced by Anglican evangelical Eric Nash, world-denying separatist who believed in imminent coming of Christ, Stott had born-again experience at age sixteen. …

Do different psychological types look for different things in sermons? A research note

A sample of 76 Evangelical Anglican churchgoers completed the Francis Psychological Type Scales and rated the importance that they attribute to a sermon speaking to their imagination. The data demonstrated that sermons speaking to the imagination were rated more highly by intuitive types, feeling types, and perceiving types than by sensing types, thinking types, and judging types. Different psychological types look for different things in sermons.

E.M. Forster, the Clapham Sect, and the Secular Public Sphere

Critics have characterized E.M. Forster as an advocate of what Jürgen Habermas calls the “secular public sphere.” Yet Forster was critical of liberalism’s insistence that religious experiences should be translated into the language of secular rationality. The discussion of the Clapham Sect in “Henry Thornton” (1939) suggests that eighteenth-century evangelical Anglicanism set in motion a historical trajectory that led secular modern intellectuals to retreat into their own privacy, a position exemplified by Forster’s contemporaries in the Bloomsbury Group. One can thus look back to A Passage to India (1924) and understand how the novel’s spiritual themes articulate a politically relevant alternative both to Clapham’s rationalized religiosity and Bloomsbury’s secular insularity. Forster depicts the Hindu religious festival of Gokul Ashtami as promising an alternative form of social cohesion that resists translation into secular, rational language.

The Church Missionary Society and Architecture in the Mission Field: Evangelical Anglican Perspectives on Church Building Abroad, c. 1850-1900

The Gothic Revival occupies a central place in the architectural development of the Church of England in the nineteenth century, both at home and abroad. Within the expanding British colonial world, in particular, the neo-Gothic church became a centrally important expression of both faith and identity throughout the second half of the nineteenth century. From a symbolic and communicative perspective, the style represented not only a visual link to Britain, but also the fundamental expression of the Church of England as an institution and of the culture of Englishness. As such, it carried with it a wide range of cultural implications that suited the needs of settler communities wishing to re-established their identity abroad. Expansion during this period, however, was not only limited to the growth of settler communities but was also reflected in growing Anglican missions to the non-Christian peoples of annexed territories. The two primary organs of the Church of England in the field, the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel (SPG) and the Church Missionary Society (CMS), actively employed the revived medieval style throughout the Empire as missions were solidified through infrastructure development. As a popular style with direct connotations to the Christian faith, revived medieval design became increasingly popular with Anglican missionaries abroad in the period between the early 1840s and the end of the century. Not only did its origins in ecclesiastical buildings make it attractive, but it was also stylistically distinctive, and set apart as a sacred style from both secular and ‘heathen’ structures.

Anglican Evangelical Theology, c. 1820–1850: The Case of Edward Bickersteth

The period between the 1780s and the 1830s is widely acknowledged to be a formative one for Anglican Evangelical identity. It was the age of Simeon, Wilberforce, and the Clapham Sect, a time when polite culture became imbued with moral seriousness, and when pious causes came to the centre of the political stage. Yet while it is equally well known that the late 1820s witnessed a significant change in mood and direction, prompted by the passing of an earlier generation of leaders, missionary failure and theological fragmentation, the Anglican Evangelical movement in the second quarter of the nineteenth century has received comparatively little attention. Evangelicals appear frequently in work on the Oxford Movement and Broad Church, but often only as two‐dimensional reactionaries ripe for the protagonists to trample. Edward Bickersteth (1786–1850) is therefore a particularly interesting figure, having risen to prominence in the 1810s and 1820s but in the 1830s and 1840s becoming one of the movement's acknowledged leaders. By showing how the coming man of the earlier period negotiated rockier territory later on, this article seeks to explore not just the changes but also the striking continuities in Evangelical thought. For even if, as Grayson Carter has argued in an excellent recent study, the ecclesiastical changes of the 1820s and 1830s forced Anglican Evangelicals, like others, to reconsider their place in the Church of England, Bickersteth was among the most prominent of the majority who, while unhappy with developments in politics and theology, remained loyal to their Church.

George Reginald Balleine: Historian of Anglican Evangelicalism

AbstractA History of the Evangelical Party in the Church of England(1908) by G.R. Balleine (1873–1966) is the classic narrative history of the Anglican evangelical movement, still enduringly popular more than a century after its publication. It has long outlived its author but is usually read without reference to him. This paper examines Balleine's approach to historical research and demonstrates how his personal theological priorities shaped hisHistory. In particular, it highlights his concerns in his parish ministry in Bermondsey, south London, for innovative evangelism, political activism and loyal Anglican churchmanship; his disinterest in doctrinal definitions and his abhorrence of ecclesiastical controversy. The paper argues that Balleine's lively account of Anglican evangelicalism's past in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was also an apologia and mandate for the future direction of the movement as it entered the twentieth century. It concludes by pointing to the sharp irony that while theHistoryhas gained a reputation for impeccable evangelical credentials, the historian was on a divergent trajectory away from his evangelical roots.

The metropolis and evangelical life: coherence and fragmentation in the ‘lost city of London’

This article examines the interplay of different processes of cultural and subjective fragmentation experienced by conservative evangelical Anglicans, based on an ethnographic study of a congregation in central London. The author focuses on the evangelistic speaking practices of members of this church to explore how individuals negotiate contradictory norms of interaction as they move through different city spaces, and considers their response to tensions created by the demands of their workplace and their religious lives. Drawing on Georg Simmel's ‘The Metropolis and Mental Life’, the author argues that their faith provides a sense of coherence and unity that responds to experiences of cultural fragmentation characteristic of everyday life in the city, while simultaneously leading to a specific consciousness of moral fragmentation that is inherent to conservative evangelicalism.

Practising the Space Between: Embodying Belief as an Evangelical Anglican Student

This article explores the formation of British evangelical university students as believers. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted with a conservative evangelical Anglican congregation in London, I describe how students in this church come to embody a highly cognitive, word-based mode of belief through particular material practices. As they learn to identify themselves as believers, practices of reflexivity and accountability enable them to develop a sense of narrative coherence in their lives that allows them to negotiate tensions that arise from their participation in church and from broader social structures. I demonstrate that propositional belief—in contexts where it becomes an identity marker—is bound up with relational practices of belief, so that distinctions between ‘belief in’ and ‘belief that’ are necessarily blurred in the lives of young evangelicals.

‘True churchmen’? Anglican Evangelicals and history, c.1770–1850

In the first half of the nineteenth century the relationship between the Church of England and the state shifted dramatically. This influenced, and was in turn influenced by, heated debates about Anglican history in general and about the Reformation in particular. Some of the bitterest debates revolved around differing understandings of the Church’s foundational literature – the Articles, Homilies and Prayer Book – and what they stood for. These debates drove scholarly understanding of the Reformation, but they also sharpened developing party boundaries. This article examines how these supposedly unchanging texts were reinterpreted as first Evangelicals and ‘Orthodox’ churchmen then Tractarians too sought to demonstrate that they, and not their adversaries, were the ‘true churchmen’.

The “Morpeth Mind” and Australian Politics 1927–1934

The publication of the Morpeth Review between 1927 and 1934 was a milestone in the evolution of an authentic public sphere for Australian political intellectuals. The Review covered several areas of political and philosophical concern, ranging ideologically from Christian socialism and idealist liberalism, through market economics, to reactionary anti‐Bolshevism, within the editorial context of a strongly idealist liberalism inspired by the Oxford liberals of the early twentieth century, and both evangelical and sacramentalist Anglican Protestantism. Ernest H. Burgmann and Roy Lee used the magazine to develop a unique form of Anglican social and political activism and other members of an identifiable group of radical clergy also contributed. A.p. Elkin's writings on Indigenous politics are of particular interest as they can be viewed simultaneously as a turning toward the novel idea of Aboriginal citizenship, and at the same time as a restatement of Darwinist biological determinism and racialism, both lit by genuine compassion and affection for Aboriginal Australians.

God's empire: religion and colonialism in the British World, c.1801-1908

Part I. God's Empire: 1. Colonialism, colonization and Greater Britain 2. Protestant nation to Christian Empire, 1801-1908 Part II. Colonial Missions: Introduction: colonial mission 3. Anglicans 4. Catholics 5. Evangelical Anglicans 6. Nonconformists 7. Presbyterians Part III. Colonial Clergy: 8. Clergy 9. St Augustine's College, Canterbury 10. Missionary College of All Hallows, Drumcondra (Dublin) Part IV. Promised Lands: Introduction: emigrants and colonists 11. Christian colonization and its critics 12. Colonies Conclusion.

Henry Ryder and the Bath CMS: Evangelical and High Church Controversy in the Later Hanoverian Church

The early nineteenth century saw a turn in Anglican Evangelicalism towards respectability and regularity. The same period paradoxically saw renewed controversy with some High Churchmen while others were more inclined to cooperate with the Evangelical movement. A case study of the early episcopal career of Henry Ryder illuminates this phenomenon, showing that while there were important divisions in doctrine between Evangelicals and High Churchmen, Evangelical innovations in practice proved more radical and controversial and provoked a divided response among their High Church brethren.

The Keele Congress of 1967: A Paradigm Shift in Anglican Evangelical Attitudes

AbstractThe National Evangelical Anglican Congress which took place at Keele University in April 1967 is widely acknowledged as a major watershed for the evangelical movement in the Church of England. This paper offers a fresh analysis of the event, based on detailed archival research. It argues that there was a decisive attitudinal shift at the congress, driven especially by the younger generation – from piety to policy, conservatism to radicalism, homogeneity to diversity, and exclusivism to ecumenism. It shows how in these four areas the Keele Congress established a new agenda for Anglican evangelicalism, a legacy which still continues today.

Frances Ridley Havergal (1836-79)

Frances Ridley Havergal (1836-79) Krista Lysack (bio) If literary critics have only recently begun to recall that France Ridley Havergal was "among the best known and most popular religious poets of her day" (Armstrong and Bristow 581), there are some communities for whom such a reminder is unnecessary. Since her own day, Havergal's compositions have been in continuous print in Protestant hymn books on both sides of the Atlantic, where hymns like "Take my Life," "Like a River Glorious," "Who is on the Lord's Side," and "I Gave my Life for Thee" have never gone out of style. Her music and lyrics have even found a home in the digital age in NetHymnal, a web-based archive of sacred song that includes Havergal's compositions along with those of a number of other nineteenth-century hymnodists. Havergals's almost 850 pages of verse and seventy-five or so hymns (Huttar 307) can seem quaint, or even alienating, to many other audiences today, as this work is often premised on submission to God in gestures that verge on self-abnegation. Havergal's evangelical fervour, however, was not incompatible with her role in public life. Havergal maintained daily involvements in the religious print marketplace through which her poems and hymns circulated and re-circulated, and she kept up a prodigious correspondence with a multitude of adoring fans. Indeed, her "ministry of song," as she termed her writing and publishing practices, made her into a saleable commodity, both in her own lifetime and perhaps even more afterwards, when dozens of posthumous biographies vied to sell the story of this devout hymn-writer and poetess. Havergal's significance for contemporary readers, then, is that she offers a model of religious duty that is not incommensurate with fame. As such, her life and work reminds us of intersections often neglected in Victorian studies, ones that existed between celebrity, print culture, and religious discourse. Havergal's life began in what might well be considered ideal family circumstances for the formation of a gifted and saintly spinster. The youngest of six children, she was born on 14 December 1836 at Astley, Worcestershire, to Jane Head Havergal and the Rev. William Henry Havergal, an evangelical Anglican clergyman. Following her mother's death, Havergal, then thirteen, began attending school but returned home following an attack of erysipelas only a couple of years later.1 This episode touched off the beginning of a lifetime of ill health for Havergal and was preceded by a period of acute psychological unrest, or what Havergal would identify as the onset of her spiritual conversion, in 1850 (Memorials 31). In part influenced by a former schoolmistress whom Havergal adored, her conversion marked a turn away from the precociousness and religious indifference of her childhood toward an adolescence of self-renunciation: a transformation that, as Leighton and Reynolds aptly observe, recalls that of Christina Rossetti at a similarly impressionable age (415). [End Page 17] The intensity of Havergal's self-denial was matched by her determination to develop her emerging poetical and musical talents. Havergal showed promise as a poet and hymn-writer as a teenager, by which time she was writing melodies and "poems, enigmas, and charades" (Memorials 46), entering contests under the name "Sabrina" or "Zoide," and then giving her prize money to the Church Missionary Society. These early attempts were followed by publishing success as a young adult. In 1860, her first hymn was accepted by Good Words (53), the first of many to appear in evangelical magazines. This was followed by The Ministry of Song (1869), her debut collection of poems. However, Havergal was careful to qualify this achievement. A poem from this volume, also entitled "The Ministry of Song," sums up her conception of poetry as one among many forms of religious service to which God calls certain individuals: In God's great field of labour All work is not the same;He hath a service for each one Who loves His holy name.All you to whom the secrets Of all sweet sounds are known,Rise up! for He hath called you To a mission of your own.And, rightly to fulfil it, His grace can...

A Zealous Evangelical Missionary. Mary Ann Greaves in Europe 1814–1824

Mary Ann Greaves (1779–1846), a zealous unmarried evangelical Anglican, travelled and then lived in Europe as an unofficial representative of the British and Foreign Bible Society. Her unpublished travel journal covering the years 1814–1815 shows both her missionary zeal to bring all Christians to true religion and her keen secular interest in the Grand Tour's works of art. In 1815, settled in Lausanne in the Canton de Vaud, she continued her determined work of reforming the reformed until banished from the Canton in 1822 as subversive; she then moved to near Geneva. As a single woman, Greaves faced (and usually ignored) the constrictions of what was appropriate for women imposed by both secular and evangelical convention. Her journal reveals how much her own determined and confident character differed from the ideal and illuminates both her partial success and her ultimate disappointment in her missionary work among the Calvinists of Switzerland.