The Death of Christian Britain

— The Death of Christian Britain —
enthusiastic ignorance’. 26 Agricultural change, rural industrialism and
radical politics came together in the 1790s to make the ‘ecclesiastical
republics’ 27 of the dissenting congregation akin to the Jacobinical, and effectively
stalled the home mission. So in the midst of war, the foreign mission
won priority, and from 1795 British foreign missionary societies were
founded upon the identification of an urgent and achievable Christian evangelisation
of the country’s maturing empire.
The home mission as a coherent idea did not really re-emerge until the
end of war in the 1810s when a parallel discourse on the ‘heathen’ industrial
city started to take shape. The most influential figure was the Revd
Dr Thomas Chalmers (1780–1847), who in 1843 led the secession from the
Church of Scotland to found the Free Church. Chalmers experienced what
many clergy of his generation did. When he moved as minister from rural
Fife to the Tron parish in central Glasgow in 1815, it was an immense
shock. He struggled with the practicalities of being a minister in a town
parish, finding that a visitation of every family – as was customary in rural
areas – was near impossible in a slum area of some 11,000 people. Large
numbers had no church connection, and he started to conceive the need
for a variety to Christian agencies. ‘The preaching of Christianity’ he said
in 1816,
should be turned to meet the every style of conception and the every
variety of taste or prejudice which can be found in all the quarters
of society. The proudest of her recorded distinctions is that she is the
religion of the poor – that she can light up the hope of immortality
in their humble habitations . . . – that on the strength of her great and
elevating principles a man in rags may become rich in faith. ... Ay,
my brethren, such a religion as this should be made to find its way
into every cottage and to circulate throughout all the lanes and avenues
of a crowded population . . . 28
Chalmers started to organise day and Sunday schools in his parish on what
was then a new and rigid principle: that they should be open to only children
of the parish. Indeed, he went a step further in personally going with
an elder to recruit twenty-eight children from a single lane, and appointed
a day-school teacher for them. The ‘principle of locality’ was taking shape
in Chalmers’ designs. He told his congregation how the work of the urban
church was now beyond the individual minister:
It is not easy for me to describe my general feeling in reference to
the population with which I have more immediately to do. I feel as
if it were a mighty and impenetrable mass, truly beyond the strength
of one individual arm, and before which, after a few furtive and
unavailing exertions, nothing remains but to sit down in the idleness
of despair. It is a number, it is a magnitude, it as an endless succession
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