The Death of Christian Britain

— Men in Discourse and Narrative 1800–1950 —
mid-1810s: ‘I was very much surprised at the unexpected cordiality of my
welcome, the people thronging about me, and requesting me to enter their
houses. I remember I could scarcely make my way to the bottom of a close
in the Saltmarket, I was so exceedingly thronged by the people.’ 61 Touring
preachers like Joseph Parker of the 1880s were mobbed nearly everywhere
they appeared. 62 Nineteenth-century clergy had the capacity for achieving
incredible popularity. Their photographs were widely circulated and in
some papers printed in full or even double-page formats, making them
quite literally ‘pin-ups’. 63 Even when not nationally famous, clergy were in
a key position of influence and responsibility in public piety. The minister
was frequently portrayed as the agency for the conversion of women. In
1866 the obituary of a Wesleyan Methodist woman acknowledged that ‘Her
conversion was the fruit of pastoral visitation,’ whilst clergymen’s published
diaries show their own primacy in women’s salvation: ‘Friday, Feb. 9. I
preached at Shapton; the power of God was amongst us. We held a prayer
meeting. There was one mourner, but she did not get into liberty . . . On
my way to Cawthorn, I called at Royston, and met with a woman mourning
under a sense of her sins. I prayed with her, and God heard prayer and
set her soul at liberty.’ 64
Clergy were unique and obvious exemplars of piety. However, a crucial
and very prominent element in the portrayal of clerical piety was that their
learning, status and bearing were critically mediated by two forms of
vulnerability: first, vulnerability as economic and social victims, and second,
vulnerability in piety.
The classic evangelical male biography started in the eighteenth century
with the establishment of the narrative of the clerical hero-victim of dissent:
notably the Methodist preacher in England and Wales, and the dissenting
presbyterian minister in Scotland. John Wesley was the most prominent
hero-victim in England, but the Scottish evidence is instructive. The clergy
of the Scottish Secession and Relief churches, formed in 1733 and 1756
respectively, became mythologically established as the successors to the
Covenanters of the seventeenth century who had resisted the Catholic and
episcopal intrusions of Charles II and James VII. 65 The Seceders established
a very thorough ‘victim culture’ from the 1730s, their puritan millenarianism
evident in the culture of the fast days – the day of ‘fast and
humiliation’ which preceded the day of communion for which manifestos
were issued decrying ‘the many other spiritual strokes we are lying under
– while there is no suitable viewing of the Lord’s hand in these strokes’. 66
The Seceders were the object of much criticism from the Church of
Scotland, having no doctors of divinity amongst their number; in response,
one Secession minister openly acknowledged: ‘their ministers have been too
poor to purchase the title and too illiterate to deserve it.’ 67 Victim culture
extended to members of the Church of Scotland where clergy had a whole
catalogue of complaints with patrons and heritors. They complained of
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