The Death of Christian Britain

Chapter three
The Salvation
Economy
THE PRIVATISATION OF FAITH
In 1844 Albert Bradwell, a small businessman in Sheffield, published his
Autobiography of a Converted Infidel. In this publication he described
weeks of nightly attendance at Methodist services and prayer meetings, and
the harrowing spiritual anguish resulting from his failure to experience
evangelical rebirth or salvation. Following one of many sermons which
failed to bring him to conversion, he recalled: ‘I went and knelt down
among the penitents, but could not obtain a blessing, for my mind was
opposed to the doctrines involved in the salvation economy’. After several
days and nights of physical and mental distress, a Wesleyan Methodist
preacher spotted Bradwell resisting the call for sinners in the congregation
to come forward; the preacher shouted at him across the crowded chapel:
‘Come out, man! and save your soul now.’ ‘So,’ Bradwell relates, ‘the poor
self-condemned sinner went to seek the face of God.’ Coming to the front
of the chapel, he knelt down:
I began to reflect on the economy of salvation, and concluded that
ecstacy, or feeling of any character, was not salvation, but only an
evidence of it; and so again I threw myself upon Christ, and said, ‘I
know my sins are forgiven,’ and that moment such a flood of joy
rushed in my heart, that every vein in my body tingled, and my tongue
found utterance, and shouted – ‘Glory! Glory! Glory be to God!’
My Lord has smiled upon me; I was indeed a sinner saved by grace,
and I lifted up my heart, and said, ‘ABBA, FATHER! MY LORD,
AND MY GOD.’ 1
This was a conversion, the point of salvation, or ‘my spiritual birthday’ as
Bradwell put it. From the beginning of the nineteenth century, the objective
of Christian evangelicalism was to lead every individual on earth to
this point.
35