The eighteenth-century Church of England did not reform its liturgy, creed or governance. But to dwell on formal structures, Sirota compellingly argues, misses the point. If we look instead at the voluntary sector, we find a vibrant Anglican renewal. The Church was characterised as much by ‘institutional fecundity’ as ‘constitutional inertia’. Churchmen, lay and clerical, proved energetic in creating societies to promote the nation's spiritual, moral and public good. The post-Revolution associational world was consecrated by Anglican zeal, and the Church secularised itself in a precise sense: it invested the saeculum with spiritual values, rendering itself ‘immanent’ within civil society. This revitalisation was partly pastoral: energetic catechising, the cult of frequent communion, local associations of diocesan clergy. But it was especially manifest in ‘an explosion of Anglican institution-building’: Societies for the Reformation of Manners, the SPCK, SPG, Bray Associates, Welsh Trust, Georgia Trust, Sons of the Clergy. The revival is epitomised by the annual parades of uniformed charity school children, a cadre of Anglican citizens in the making; and by the astonishing energy of Thomas Bray in bringing libraries to parishes. Regeneration was exported to the American colonies in a drive to entrench Anglicanism and evangelise slaves. The movement began before the Glorious Revolution, forged in the heat of stentorian rejection of James ii's popery: the Church ‘rose up against its governor while kneeling’. It was created too in the parish sodalities formed by Anthony Horneck and others. The momentary promise of constitutional reform in the Church manifestos of 1688 was shipwrecked by Convocation, so that churchmen turned elsewhere for new methods. The Anglican commitment to voluntarism was controversial. It produced ambivalence – exemplified in tensions within the Reformation of Manners movement over the inclusion of Dissenters – and at worst provoked an angry clerical backlash. The old suspicion of ‘conventicles’, of para-ecclesial sectarianism-within-the-gates, revived. Consequently, revival coexisted with embattled cries that the Church was ‘in danger’, and a sacerdotal ecclesiology of the Church as a ‘distinct society’ challenged the voluntarist movement. Sirota challenges recent alternative claims. He rejects the notion of an enduring ancien régime of confessional supremacy, unruffled by the Glorious Revolution and Toleration Act. Equally he denies a drastic rupture in which a reactionary and coercive Restoration Church is replaced by a reforming and discursive Revolution Church. He doubts the top-down model that has the Williamite court engendering the ‘moral revolution’. And he repudiates a ‘modern’ secularising revolution: religion was not privatised, the public realm was sacralised. This book is in some danger of recruiting old established phenomena on behalf of a new ‘revival’. Virulent antipopery, catechising, visiting the sick, fasting, pious preparation for communion, and bestselling devotional literature characterised the whole of the post-Reformation era. Did the revival give old Puritanism a novel Anglican face? Sirota has produced a deeply impressive study, richly researched, ambitious in coverage, and stylishly written. It is the best book for a long time on the post-Revolution Church.
No CrossRef data available.