The Death of Christian Britain

— The Salvation Economy —
family home, inquiry into the ‘religious condition’ of each of the occupants,
and, if possible, reading of Scripture, handing over of tracts, recruitment of
adults and children to appropriate religious organisations or mission
churches, accompanied by prayer and sometimes the singing of hymns or
psalms. This work was ‘scientifically’ organised, with both professional missionaries
and volunteer visitors assigned streets and houses, and a duty to
compile notebooks of visits and progress with individual families. One
woman, Miss M.S.S. Herdman, established a small organisation specialising
in the evangelisation of soldiers which in 1878 became the Soldier’s Bible
(later Scripture) Union. Much of her own work was at Aldershot, where
‘visiting in married quarters is similar to ordinary district visiting. In a general
way commonplace and disheartening, occasionally a gleam of sunshine
and hope breaks the clouds.’ Here are samples of her visiting notes:
No. 4 we found to be a dirty hovel. Private —, minus his tunic, was
nursing a squalling child, while another lay asleep in a basket cradle.
His wife came in from the public-house secreting a bottle of gin under
her shawl. Drink was here the bane of happiness.
Visited No. 1, E lines. – Corporal —, a steady, well-educated,
Christian man. His wife tidy, clean, respectable, the room a model of
neatness, quite a pleasure to hold a little service in. 38
Refusal of entry must have been common though it was rarely openly
reported in evangelical publications. In 1871 a minister reported how he
knocked at a seventy-five-year-old woman’s door asking if he might read
the Scriptures and pray in her house. With ‘a scowling look, a muttered
curse, and a closed door,’ he was rebuffed ‘as every minister must have had
in indiscriminate visiting’. 39 But what is most astounding to the modern
reader is how readily entry to the home was gained, despite the apparent
gulf in attitudes between visiting evangelist and the occupier. The Anglican
parish missionary in Islington in the 1890s held quite profound and personal
conversations with householders, and was able to make notes – like that
concerning Mr Duncan at 34 Pickering Street: ‘really an infidel and ridicules
many of the truths of the Bible such as the Fall of Adam and Eve and the
Resurrection of Christ and called it “a beautiful hallucination”.’ 40 This
was intrusive work, and it is remarkable to the early twenty-first-century
eye the extent to which evangelical visitors were admitted to the homes of
the poor and the working classes.
Evangelism, and especially the aggressive system, had a profound impact
on its practitioners as well. David Stow, founder of infant schools, noted
the impact upon Chalmers’ lay elders at the Tron Church in Glasgow in
1815–19:
Till Dr. Chalmers came to Glasgow, parochial Christian influence was
a mere name – it was not systematic, it was not understood – there
47