England Clergymen Research Articles

When Novels Were Books

When Novels Were Books

Anglican Clergy Responses to Jewish Migration in late Nineteenth-Century London

When, yearly, on Good Friday, Church of England clergymen prayed:‘Have mercy upon all Jews, Turks, Infidels and Hereticks, and take from them all ignorance, hardness of heart and contempt of thy Word: and so fetch them home blessed Lord, to thy flock, that they may be saved among the remnant of the Israelites’, 99.9 per cent of them in the late nineteenth century had little expectation of encountering a Jew, Turk or Infidel. This paper seeks to explore how the few Church of England clergy in London who in the 1890s did have a significant presence of Jews in their parishes responded as ministers of the established Church, with a charge to be responsible for the spiritual well-being of all the inhabitants of their parishes, including the call to save the Jews ‘among the remnant of the Israelites’.

Distinctive Call, Distinctive Profile: The Psychological Type Profile of Church of England Full-time Hospital Chaplains

This paper employs psychological type theory in order to illuminate the personality characteristics of Church of England clergy engaged in ministry as full-time hospital chaplains. Data provided by 101 chaplains (who completed the Francis Psychological Type Scales) are compared with the general profile of Church of England clergy published in an earlier study. The key findings are that, compared with Church of England clergymen in general, those engaged in full-time hospital chaplaincy are more likely to prefer introversion (71% compared with 57%), to prefer feeling (84% compared with 54%), and to prefer judging (82% compared with 68%). This finding is particularly poignant in light of the way in which, compared with Church of England clergymen in general, men in the United Kingdom population are less likely to prefer feeling (35%) or judging (55%). The implications of these findings are discussed for the development of healthcare chaplaincy.

Clerical responses to the Jacobite rebellion in 1715

Abstract This article examines sermons published by Church of England clergymen and dissenters during the Jacobite rebellion of 1715. It shows that while some clergymen supported Jacobitism, most were determined to create a broad-based opposition to the Stuart Pretender. To achieve this, the clergy carefully selected themes and arguments to ensure that all English Protestants – radical dissenters, low churchmen and high churchmen – could join the campaign against the Pretender. Above all, clergymen used the language of anti-popery and preached the duty of Christian obedience to the king. In the immediate aftermath of the rebellion, however, this consensus began to break down, and divisions between high and low churchmen re-opened.

Cultural Fictions

Cultural Fictions Elizabeth Segel Douglas, Ann . The Feminization of Americn Culture. New York: Alfred A Knopf, 1977; Avon, 1978. Baym, Nina . Woman's Fiction: A Guide to Novels by and about Women in America, 1820-1870. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1978. The enormously popular fiction written by and for women in the nineteenth century has generally been dismissed as sentimental hack-work by literary historians, its authors branded by Hawthorne as "a d—d mob of scribbling women." That this large body of novels was neither monolithic nor static and that it well repays closer attention is convincingly demonstrated in these impressive studies by Ann Douglas and Nina Baym. The two scholars, however, approach the literature from different perspectives and bring to it strikingly different attitudes. Douglas's The Feminization of American Culture laments the loss in the nineteenth century of Calvinist certainty and dominance because "Until roughly 1820, this theological tradition was a chief, perhaps the chief, vehicle of intellectual and cultural activity in American life" (5).* The growing anti-intellectualism, materialism, and hypocrisy of the country she attributes to a coalition of genteel ladies and New England clergymen, both of whom were suffering from a loss of formal status and consequent powerlessness. Douglas suggests that the doctrine of "influence," with which these two groups sought to achieve power indirectly, and the formula fiction for women that propagated this doctrine, were the start of modern mass consumer culture, vacuous, nostalgic, and exploitative. Appended to her argument in the concluding section of the book are chapters on Margaret Fuller and Herman Melville, who tried to substitute for the old Calvinism a "fully humanistic, historically minded romanticism" and failed. My major reservation about Douglas's book formed as I read the title and the articulation of the book's thesis in the introductory chapter, and nothing in the rest of the book allayed my doubts on this point: Douglas deplores the deterioration of American intellectual life in the nineteenth century and the transformation of New England theology from Calvinism to a more liberal, nurturing, less authoritarian (but also less rigorous) theology, and she labels this decline "feminization." Leaving aside the possibility that one may see the theological component of this shift as progressive, rather than the reverse (Douglas admits that Calvinism was "repressive, authoritarian, dogmatic, patriarchal to an extreme" [12]), to use the term "feminization" in so pejorative a manner is to compound the injury that Victorian stereotyping instituted. It also undercuts her careful acknowledgment that women were losers in the whole process and that the forces bringing about the cultural deterioration were complex. Perhaps the title was chosen to take advantage of current interest in women's history. At any rate, late in the book Douglas refers to her study as "the story of Victorian sentimentalism in American" (309), and one wishes she had used a similar phrase for the book's title. The author's fundamental impatience with the female and clerical figures she treats comes through frequently, however, often in diction. "The pattern of defeat within victory which characterized the feminine takeover of America's schools. . ." (89); "Whatever their ambiguities of motivation, both [women and clergymen] believed they had a genuine redemptive mission in the society: to propagate the potentially matriarchal virtues of nurture, generosity, and acceptance. . . It is hardly altogether their fault that their efforts intensified sentimental rather than matriarchal values" (10, italics mine)—the latter a strikingly grudging admission. In viewing the women novelists as purveyors of an oppressive ideology, Douglas does not give enough weight to the spur of economic desperation. She does note in passing that the majority of the women turned to writing because they had dependents—small children, bankrupt fathers, ill husbands—and no other way of earning sufficient money, but she does not allow that this need dictated the type of novels they wrote. As R. Gordon Kelly has pointed out: "Where speed and sheer volume of material become essential, some degree of standardized form becomes a functional necessity." The particular standardized form, or formula, adopted will be one which "embodies the values, expectations, assumptions, hero types, and needs of a social group. . . ." (Mother Was a Lady. Westport: Greenwood...

Conversion from Indian to Puritan

AT the ideological level, New England Puritan society in the seventeenth century renewed itself, not through birth as had been true for most of humanity in its earlier existence, but through rebirth experienced as religious conversion. Membership in the community of living saints was determined through an analysis of the preparation of one's soul for salvation, and not by kinship, territorial, or class relationships. What the convert experienced as an emotional transition in the construction of his or her identity was simultaneously a passage from one sphere of traditional social relationships perceived as sinful, into a new sphere perceived as saintly. Some New England clergymen, notably John Eliot of Roxbury, and Thomas Mayhew, Jr. of Martha's Vineyard, took seriously the responsibility which many Puritans felt to impart the means of salvation to the Indians they encountered in the New World. In their hands, conversion became the instrument for the total reconstitution of Indian cultures. Al-

The Origins of Civil Millennialism in America: New England Clergymen, War with France, and the Revolution

N i o doubts clouded the Reverend Samuel Sherwood's assessment of the impending war between Great Britain and the American colonies. "God Almighty, with all the powers of heaven, are on our side," he declared to his Connecticut audience early in I776. "Great numbers of angels, no doubt, are encamping round our coast, for our defence and protection. Michael stands ready, with all the artillery of heaven, to encounter the dragon, and to vanquish this black host." With a confidence almost prophetic, Sherwood announced the coming defeat of the "antichristian tyranny" which the British government represented; because the king's chief ministers had sipped the golden cup of fornication with "the old mother of harlots," they faced the imminent doom reserved for the wicked, persecuting tyrants of the earth. In building the climax of his address, which translated the conflict into a struggle of cosmic significance, Sherwood predicted that the British attack on America was one "of the last efforts, and dying struggles of the man of sin." From this apocalyptic point of view America's victory would initiate Christ's millennial kingdom.1 Sherwood was by no means the only American minister whose millennial hopes were fired by the Revolutionary struggle. The cosmic interpretation of the conflict-God's elect versus antichrist-appeared as a significant pattern in the intricate tapestry of ideas used by New England clergymen to explain the war's purpose. Moreover, by the time American vic. tory seemed assured, the rhetoric of New England sermons was brimming with euphoric images of America's role in hastening the kingdom. The prospects for this blessed age had not seemed so bright since the founding

Social and Cultural Characteristics of a Selected Sample of New England Clergymen

among the denominations in terms of their members' general socio-economic status, educational attainment, income, and occupational characteristics.' In large measure, then, these studies have been restricted to the general population of churchgoers. There are only sketchy and limited data available as to the distributions of these socio-cultural characteristics among the members of the clergy.

Charles Wardell Stiles

I became acquainted with Dr. C. W. Stiles when, as a graduate student at the School of Hygiene and Public Health of The Johns Hopkins University, I had the privilege of attending the meetings of the Helminthological Society of Washington. This little group of serious thinkers would alternate monthly meetings between Baltimore and Washington. Doctor Stiles usually came early to the Baltimore meetings and would spend much time talking to Doctor Cort's students. Some of the Washington meetings would be held in Doctor Stiles' laboratory, and others would be of a social nature at his home. Being an articulate speaker and charming conversationalist, Stiles left the listener with many impressions and memories on occasions of every sort, whether they were Helmsoc meetings, social gatherings, or laboratory visits. After my student days, I learned of Doctor Stiles' retirement and failing health. Thinking that the important scientific episodes and the other interesting events of his life should be recorded while first-hand material was still available, I asked Doctor Stiles for permission to write a biographical article, and for assistance in the task. The rough, unfinished draft of an autobiographical sketch, begun some years before and intended for his grandchildren, furnished me with much personal material, especially on the earlier part of his life. This was supplemented by considerable correspondence and by biographical data already published. The biographical article1 was published after Doctor Stiles' death, which occurred on January 24, 1941. Son and grandson of stern New England clergymen, Charles Stiles' boyhood training was a bit austere even for the 1870's.