The Death of Christian Britain

— Men in Discourse and Narrative 1800–1950 —
of the children of the poor.’ 73 They were invariably portrayed as good boys:
‘While Robert Hood bore a good character outside his home, he also bore
a good character inside it. It was the testimony of his mother than he never
once said no.’ 74 Henry Drummond was described as a lad: ‘He was known
as “the man with a secret”, because he was so happy and good.’ 75 Struggle
through university and divinity school led on to issues of evangelical
conversion and continual rebirth. These become the dramas – the personal
melodramas – upon which the life-stories of the clergy hinged. For some
it was a process, beginning: ‘His conversion was not a sudden thing, but
a gradual growing into the light. Some conversions come like a flash of
lightening across a midnight sky, while others come like the sunrise. Robert
Hood’s conversion came like the sunrise. He had always been good, with
his face towards the sun-rising, and at last the blessed beams of the Sun of
Righteousness arose upon his soul.’ 76 There then followed the evangelical
themes of temptation, resistance and sustaining the state of grace: ‘When
he would be on his way to visit among the closes and alleys on a fine
summer evening, he would see hundreds of young people like himself
betaking themselves for a walk in the outskirts of the city. On such occasions
the devil would say to him, “Why can’t you go and have a walk
too?” But he always told the devil to get behind him, saying, “No; Christ’s
work is first.”’ 77 A leading minister in the Free Presbyterian Church,
Donald Macfarlane, wrote in his diary of three years of temptation from
atheism after he left divinity college, ‘a temptation from the evil one. It left
me as weak as a feather before the tempest. It was only gradually I got rid
of it.’ 78 Biographies and diaries were used in published form to give full
exposure to weakness and the self-remonstrance of the minister: ‘I have got
a most irritable temper. I have got a loose way of talking and of using slang
words, most unbecoming my profession.’ 79 In 1872–3, the British Messenger
provided an intense voyeuristic revelation of the Revd James Calder’s spiritual
struggles about ‘the state of my own soul’, starting in 1735 when he
reported that ‘a sullen gloom and unrelenting damp sit heavy on my soul’.
Thirty years later he was still in constant self-remonstration: ‘Oct. 19th
1762. Alas! I’ve offended the Lord and provoked Him to deny His usual
presence and countenance, by my shameful wasting an hour of precious
time before worship in an amusement innocent in itself, but unnecessary
and unseasonable, and therefore sinful and offensive at a time when I ought
to be employed to better purpose!’ He reported in 1763 that ‘I have not
trembled, and wept, and mourned in secret . . . as I ought to have done.’ 80
In this way the weakness of ‘holy men’ was most publicly paraded. The
spiritual turmoil of clergy, even of the most famous and revered, became
an obsession of popular religious magazines. They became an obsession
too of Victorian fiction. In Elizabeth Gaskell, Charles Dickens and
Anthony Trollope, crises of personal faith were inherent elements in the
religiosity of men; as Elizabeth Ermarth has said: ‘Doubt or even disbelief
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