Joseph Milner (1744–97), grammar school headmaster and lecturer at Holy Trinity Church, Hull, determined in the 1780s to write a new account of the Church's history.Footnote 1 More than 450 subscribers lent their support to Milner's stated aim to produce ‘An Ecclesiastical History on a new Plan’. The plan was to rescue the Church's past from what Milner saw as an increasingly cynical Protestant historiography, with its low view of medieval Christianity and eager ‘displays of Ecclesiastical wickedness’. Histories that dwelt on schism, heresy and corruption, Milner argued, were as like a true account of the Church as ‘an history of the highwaymen that have infected this country [were] an history of England’. Instead, Milner's account would focus on authentic Christianity in every age of the Church, celebrating those ‘men who have been real, not merely nominal Christians’.Footnote 2
The four volumes that resulted would remain the leading Evangelical church history for half a century.Footnote 3 Milner's History of the Church of Christ was translated into six languages, published over thirty times in Britain and ten times in the United States, and, according to one critic, as late as 1847 remained the primary source of church history for Anglicans.Footnote 4 Yet, for all Milner's popularity, scholarly accounts of the development of church history treat his History as insignificant, an out-of-place relic in the progression from early modern ‘confessional’ to nineteenth-century ‘critical’ historical methods. While several studies, most notably John Walsh's 1959 article in this Journal, as well as Darren Schmidt's 2009 doctoral dissertation, appreciate Milner's creative account of medieval Christianity, on the whole his History is treated as a pious, unscholarly apologetic.Footnote 5 But Milner's History merits reconsideration not only for its largely unnoticed departures from the conventions of Protestant ecclesiastical historiography, but also for what it reveals about the interplay between Evangelical and national identities in the early nineteenth century. The publication, reception and revisions of Milner's History illuminate a tension between earlier Evangelical concern with nominal, or ‘rational’ Protestantism, and the growing emphasis, both in Britain and in the United States, on defining both genuine religion and the nation itself as Protestant. Put another way, Milner shows that popular accounts of church history were implicated in the question of Protestant nationalism.
Milner's History of the Church of Christ
In Milner's first volume, published in 1794, he declared that he was producing the first proper Protestant church history. Protestant historians, most notably Johann Lorenz von Mosheim (1693–1755), devoted pages to religious controversies, civil matters and heresies, Milner complained, while offering ‘very scanty information of the progress of true religion’.Footnote 6 The famed martyrologist John Foxe (1516–87) was too anti-Catholic for Milner's tastes, and, although Milner appreciated the voluminous efforts of Matthias Flacius Illyricus (1520–75), he found the Magdeburg Centuriators tedious and at times unfair to the Catholic past.Footnote 7 While Milner did not mention Gottfried Arnold (1666–1714), his narrative implicitly challenged the Pietist historian's celebration of medieval heretics; more recent portrayals of the early and medieval Church by Edward Gibbon (1737–94) and David Hume (1711–76) were, in Milner's eyes, similarly tainted by deep prejudice against orthodox Christianity.Footnote 8 Between these Protestants and sceptics, who cynically disparaged medieval Christianity, and Catholic apologists, who blindly defended it, Milner presented himself as balanced and objective, reminding readers that when it came to history, ‘indiscriminate incredulity is as blind a thing as indiscriminate belief’.Footnote 9 In positioning himself as a moderate between modern scepticism and Catholic credulity, Milner revealed his Enlightenment sensibilities.Footnote 10
Rather than following other Protestant historians in excoriating the corruptions and superstitions of medieval Christianity, Milner focused his account on the enduring presence of true Christians, those converted by the Holy Spirit. Milner was optimistic that he could discern who had experienced conversion: as ‘real’ Christians throughout the centuries shared a ‘uniformity of faith, of inward experience, and of external practice’.Footnote 11 Milner's conversionist telling of church history required a particular kind of reading, wherein ‘the Scriptural Reader’ must ‘divest himself of all partial regards for sects and denominations, ages and countries’.Footnote 12 By attending solely to the fruits of conversion, the Evangelical reader would be convinced of the persistence of genuine Christianity throughout time, and realise that he too belonged to this ‘succession of pious men in all ages’.Footnote 13 Milner invited his readers to locate themselves in a lineage that stretched from the apostolic era through the Middle Ages and to the Protestant Reformation.
One of Milner's key revisions was his insistence that Protestant historians ought not ‘be prejudiced against the real church, because she then wore a Roman garb’.Footnote 14 Milner set out to recover as many believers in ‘Roman garb’ as could be found, and, over the course of his first three volumes, was surprisingly successful.Footnote 15 He included hundreds of monks, bishops and priests, even praising the faith of popes Eugenius iii (1080–1153) and Celestine V (1215–96).Footnote 16 He defended at length many medieval clerics and theologians, including Gregory the Great (540–604), Boniface (675–754), Anselm of Canterbury (1033–1109) and Bernard of Clairvaux (1090–1153), who had been unfairly treated, he thought, by Flacius and Mosheim. Even while acknowledging that these men supported the papacy, Milner represented them as genuine believers, repristinated long quotations from their writings, and encouraged readers to imitate their piety.Footnote 17 At the same time, Milner was much less willing than either Mosheim or Arnold to celebrate medieval ‘proto-Protestants’ who were persecuted by the papacy.Footnote 18
Milner's defence of select medieval Catholics has been overlooked by scholars who portray him as typically Protestant: A. G. Dickens and John Tonkin asserted that Milner's History was representative of Evangelical anti-Catholicism, while S. J. Barnett wrongly concluded that Milner wrote a history of ‘proto-Protestants’ who had opposed the papacy.Footnote 19 To be sure, Milner maintained a typical Protestant understanding that genuine Christianity had declined between Augustine and Luther, agreed with Isaac Newton (1643–1727) that after the papacy of Gregory ii (715–31) the Church was inundated with false doctrine, and lamented the increase of ‘monastic darkness and superstition’ throughout the late medieval era.Footnote 20 Both conceptually and rhetorically Milner's History reflected a degree of eighteenth-century anti-Catholicism. However, his willingness to include and celebrate pro-papacy Christians not only disproves the notion that his History was limited to ‘proto-Protestants’ but also shows that his anti-Catholicism was mitigated by the desire to present an edifying account. As Darren Schmidt points out, then, in its inclusivity towards and elevation of medieval believers, the History diverged from Protestant tendencies to exclude Catholics from the lineage of true spirituality.Footnote 21
Because of Milner's explicitly Evangelical aims, his irenicism was lost on nineteenth-century critics, who dismissed the History as narrow-minded and partisan. The High Churchman H. J. Rose (1795–1838), for example, critiqued Milner's History in 1834 as ‘obviously a party book [that] therefore must do mischief’.Footnote 22 Likewise, Julius Charles Hare (1795–1855), who was given to Broad Church sympathies, accused Milner in 1847 of only including those who shared his Evangelical understanding of justification, confirming for the Calvinist party ‘that there never was a true Christian upon earth, except such as have made use of their shibboleth’.Footnote 23 These nineteenth-century criticisms continue to characterise the literature: Yngve Brilioth, Arthur Pollard and John Walsh each asserted that Milner only included those who agreed with his particular understanding of justification by faith alone.Footnote 24 By these lights, Milner perpetuated the tradition of Protestant confessional historiography, but with an Evangelical gloss.
These criticisms fail to attend to the full scope of Milner's inclusiveness. While Milner held justification by faith to be essential, he prioritised evidence of conversion above doctrinal precision. Even when a historical figure misunderstood justification by faith, the virtues of humility, charity and piety, which Milner repeatedly attributed to true believers, revealed their genuine faith.Footnote 25 Origen's (184–253) view of justification, for example, was ‘sullied and covered with rubbish’ but his conversion was evidenced by ‘the piety of his motives and the fervour of his zeal’.Footnote 26 Ephraim the Syrian (306–73) had ‘defective … views of Evangelical doctrine’ and did not understand justification at all, but his faith was to be admired.Footnote 27 ‘The precise and accurate nature of the doctrine’ was not understood even by Augustine of Hippo (354–430), but ‘doubtless it savingly flourished in his heart’.Footnote 28 Milner praised the ‘piety, humility, and charity’ of Fulgentius (468–533), even though the North African bishop misunderstood the word ‘justify’.Footnote 29 Robert Grosseteste (1175–1253) failed to embrace ‘the just nature of the Christian article of Justification’, but plainly trusted in Christ.Footnote 30 Thomas à Kempis (1380–1471) was badly wrong about justification, but ‘well versed in Christian experience’.Footnote 31 More examples could be given. In his eagerness to prove the endurance of true faith, Milner prioritised evidence of conversion above an articulation of justification by faith, and included many whose doctrine he considered flawed. While Schmidt and Walsh rightly noted Milner's relative charity toward medieval Catholics, his selection was more generous than even they acknowledge.Footnote 32
Perhaps even more surprising was Milner's subversion of Protestant exceptionalism – the notion that the spiritual and social goods of Christianity grew out of Protestant principles, while all that was misguided or false was due to Romanist corruption. Milner not only celebrated the faith of many medieval Catholics, but also insisted that some had been better Christians than the Protestants of his own day.Footnote 33 Perhaps eighteenth-century Englishmen had shed superstitious beliefs and rituals, but their overconfidence in reason, their arrogance and their ‘mercantile taste’ were as absurd as any medieval practice.Footnote 34 Against the grain of Protestant historiography, Milner placed the Catholic past in judgement over the Protestant present. He argued, for instance, that the so-called ‘dark ages’ surpassed Protestant Britain in zeal for missions.Footnote 35 In contrast to Mosheim, Gibbon and Hume, Milner admired medieval Britain, insisting that Bede's history evidenced ‘a real spirit of godliness’ in the land.Footnote 36 Milner even pointed out that Britain owed a spiritual debt to the medieval Church, and defended the reputations of Gregory the Great and Anselm, favourite targets of British Protestant historians.Footnote 37
A key function of Milner's portrayal of Catholic figures, then, was to add historical weight to his critique of a nominally Protestant Britain. While ‘superstition, to a certain degree, may co exist with the spirit of the Gospel’, Milner argued, the rationalism of the philosophes was incompatible with godliness.Footnote 38 He underscored the point by caricaturing rationalists as Roman Catholics, suggesting that Gibbon, Hume and Voltaire functioned as Protestant popes whose every word was uncritically accepted.Footnote 39 Those who narrated the story of Christian history as inimical to human progress – here, Gibbon was in mind – set up ‘the eighteenth century as a pope to judge the foregoing seventeen’.Footnote 40
Likewise, he criticised Mosheim for failing ‘to shew any candour toward the ancients’ and for assuming ‘all excellencies to be confined to these later ages’.Footnote 41 Milner claimed that modern sceptics were essentially Romish, while underneath the ‘Roman garb’ of the medieval saint one might find a real Christian. Ironically, it was the overly critical reader who was in danger of being popish, not the reader who appreciated medieval piety. Milner's account of the pre-Reformation tradition, then, distanced genuine Christian spirituality from Protestant rationality, while at the same time subverting the historical tradition that undergirded Protestant exceptionalism.
Milner's reception
On the whole, Evangelicals received Milner's work enthusiastically. The Christian Observer commended Milner's History in 1803 for its salubrious effect on the reader, for whom ‘faith is invigorated and hope enlivened by the triumph of Evangelical truth over the splendid system of pagan idolatry’.Footnote 42 In particular, the reviewer appreciated Milner's assault on the rationalists, praising his refutation of ‘the artful and insidious misrepresentations of Hume and Gibbon’.Footnote 43 Evangelical readers were delighted to discover that genuine Christians existed in every era: ‘My mind was repeatedly arrested’, one reviewer wrote in 1812, by the ‘lives of many illustrious characters, not only in the earliest but subsequent ages of Christianity’.Footnote 44 Milner had set out to edify, and for many readers he succeeded. ‘Milner's History … will be read with delight by every Bible Christian’, an 1827 article promised, and ‘the pious reader will always rise from this book animated and strengthened for “the race set before him”’.Footnote 45 Edward Bickersteth (1786–1850) advised his readers in 1829 that Milner's was not only ‘the best history’, but also ‘eminently pious and useful’.Footnote 46
Milner's History proliferated through a denominationally diverse network of Evangelical publishers, patrons and reviewers, who believed that the same historical line traced by Milner continued through their own evangelistic efforts. Before the first US edition was printed in 1809, Milner had been translated into Dutch and German; Evangelicals printed his account in Swedish, Italian, French and Spanish as well. In 1805 the Moravian Peter Mortimer (1750–1828) reported that his German translation, annually printed for three years, was read throughout ‘Switzerland, Prussia, Livonia, Denmark, and Sweden’, and as far off as Greenland and Russia.Footnote 47 The History went onto the mission field with Bishop Reginald Heber (1783–1826), who planned to translate excerpts of Milner into Cingalese.Footnote 48 In the United States, colleges and seminaries used Milner as a textbook, while American religious periodicals repristinated his accounts of early Christian martyrs such as Polycarp and Perpetua.Footnote 49
In spite of scholarly criticisms – most notably the articles by S. R. Maitland (1792–1866), which exposed Milner's factual errors and censured his reliance on secondary sources – the History enjoyed a remarkably long run of popularity.Footnote 50 One High Churchman complained in 1847 that it remained the main ‘source from which a large portion of our Church derive their notions of ecclesiastical history’.Footnote 51 Evangelical publishers in London, Edinburgh and Philadelphia continued to reprint Milner's History every few years through the 1840s and 1850s. As late as 1850 the scholarly review Bibliotheca Sacra, while noting the History’s weaknesses, still recommended it ‘for practical and popular use’.Footnote 52 Such longevity illustrates that Milner's History encapsulated and propagated Evangelical spirituality. As James Stephen (1789–1859) declared in 1849, it was ‘one of those books which may perish with some revolution of the moral and religious character of the English race, but hardly otherwise’.Footnote 53
However, not all Evangelicals were comfortable with Milner's account. Some, including Hannah More (1745–1833), found his theological interpretations tendentious.Footnote 54 Evangelicals were most likely to be bothered by the History’s implications regarding their own ecclesiastical sympathies. The Anglican Evangelical Thomas Haweis (1734–1820), a leading figure in the Countess of Huntingdon's Connexion, disliked Milner's criticism of medieval schismatics, and, in 1800, published a rival history intended to please Evangelicals of all denominations.Footnote 55 Dissenters in Britain and Evangelicals in the United States disapproved of Milner's defence of church establishment, and denominational belonging often accurately predicted a reviewer's assessment of the History.Footnote 56 Especially troublesome to Protestant readers was Milner's inclusion of medieval Catholics. The Christian Disciple and Theological Review, an influential Unitarian publication, lambasted Milner for his praise of medieval ‘hermits, and monks’ and his portrayal of the ‘dark ages’ as virtuous.Footnote 57 Some Evangelicals were also troubled: in his 1843 review, the dissenting minister John Cockin (1783–1861) criticised the history for being too ‘tender and indulgent towards … the bishops of Rome’. Readers, he advised, should be skeptical of Milner's overly generous portrait of medieval Christians.Footnote 58
The criticisms levelled by Cockin reflect a growing discomfort among some Evangelicals with Milner's departure from Protestant historiographical norms, particularly the ways in which his celebration of select medieval Catholics undermined Protestant exceptionalism. This is most evident in the ways that Milner's History was revised, particularly in the editions printed by the Religious Tract Society (RTS), the American Sunday School Union (ASSU) and the London publisher Robert Seeley. These three adaptations merit attention because they emerged from leading Evangelical publishers, and, in contrast to other nineteenth-century editions, evidence a deliberate revision of Milner's account.
The Religious Tract Society's adaptation
As Roger Martin documents, the printing of Milner's History by the RTS in 1826 only took place after a divisive controversy.Footnote 59 The RTS was determined to avoid theological partisanship in its publications;Footnote 60 when George Stokes (1789–1847), a wealthy Anglican layman and RTS trustee, offered to fund a printing of Milner's History as part of the society's new initiative to reprint theological works for middle-class readers, many Nonconformist members protested.Footnote 61 Milner's defence of the establishment and castigation of dissenting groups bothered some members of the Society, but also troubling was the charity that Milner had shown to medieval Christianity. Milner's History, these Evangelicals charged, included ‘details which would not be unworthy of the credulity of a Roman Catholic historian’, even praising ‘canonised saints of the Romish calendar’.Footnote 62 After months of debate, the Society decided to print a revision of the History without Milner's name and with all offensive portions removed.
In 1826 the RTS published the three-volume revision, edited by Stokes himself. In keeping with his charge to remove Anglican bias, Stokes redacted much of Milner's commentary, his charge that the Donatists and Novatians were dissenters, his extensive defence of ecclesiastical establishment, and his argument that genuine Christianity did not begin to decline upon Constantine's conversion.Footnote 63 Milner had defended early monasticism as a well-intended, even pious, enterprise; Stokes removed this entirely.Footnote 64 To ensure that middle-class Evangelicals not take offence, Stokes also excised potentially troubling historical details, including Milner's mention that the Donatists practiced re-baptism, and his inclusion of early Christian references to infant baptism.Footnote 65
Stokes went out of his way to revise Milner on virtually every point that challenged Protestant ideals. Where Milner had encouraged charitable readings of the Church Fathers, for example, Stokes inserted a warning: ‘the student of the writings of the Fathers should also keep his attention continually directed to the word of God’ to discern how the Fathers corrupted scriptural teaching.Footnote 66 Stokes consistently lessened or deleted Milner's praise for those in the Church hierarchy, especially his ‘too favourable opinion of Gregory’.Footnote 67 While Milner had praised the ‘unaffected humility of [Gregory's] whole life’, Stokes removed this approbation, instead criticising the sixth-century bishop for his ‘inclination for spiritual dominion’.Footnote 68 Stokes represented Boniface and Pope Eugenius iii in less favourable lights than had Milner, and castigated Anselm and Bernard for promoting the papacy while removing Milner's apology for their support.Footnote 69 Meanwhile, typical proto-Protestants, such as Arnold of Brescia (1090–1155), fared better. Milner argued that opposing the papacy was not grounds for inclusion as a real believer, and, given Arnold's flaws, refused to celebrate him. Stokes, in contrast, included Arnold without any criticism or censure.Footnote 70 In both selection and interpretation, Stokes more closely associated true Christianity with opposition to the papacy.
As it became more defensively Protestant, Stokes's version also grew more nationalistic. The editor deleted all Milner's unfavourable comparisons between modern Britain and the Catholic past, including his celebration of medieval missionary work.Footnote 71 The two accounts diverged on pre-Reformation Britain, with Stokes contradicting Milner by arguing that Bede's history presented ‘not … a very pleasing picture of the state of religion in our country’.Footnote 72 While Milner acknowledged Britain's spiritual debt to Gregory the Great, Stokes presented a Britain subjected to the yoke of Rome.Footnote 73 Milner wrote that Anselm's advocacy on behalf of the Church hierarchy had made Protestant historians, particularly Foxe, far too critical of the eleventh-century archbishop;Footnote 74 Stokes replaced this apologetic with the very words of Foxe that Milner considered unfair.Footnote 75 Stokes's account presented Britain's Catholic past as tyrannical and spiritually bankrupt, while removing any criticism of the Protestant present.
By the time that was finished, Milner's History fitted more comfortably into the tradition of anti-Catholic historiography, a change that reflects the religious and political climate of the 1820s. During debates over Catholic Emancipation, when, Linda Colley has shown, the relationship between British identity and Protestantism was particularly contested, to suggest that Britain owed medieval Rome a spiritual debt was beyond the pale.Footnote 76 Promoting a relatively sympathetic history of the Catholic past ran the risk of dividing the Society's Evangelical members; that very year the British and Foreign Bible Society split over the Apocrypha controversy, a fate avoided by the RTS because its members were more uniformly antagonistic toward Roman Catholicism.Footnote 77 Stokes successfully responded to this anti-Catholic mood: an early review in The Congregational Magazine rejoiced that ‘the passages which, in the original, excited in our minds no small degree of disgust, have been expunged’. At long last, the reviewer concluded, Evangelicals may ‘make themselves acquainted with the earlier part of ecclesiastical history’.Footnote 78 And so they did, as, according to the RTS, Stokes’ edition sold very well, such that in 1842 the Society reprinted it in tract form.Footnote 79 Stokes's retelling of Milner's story, in other words, satisfied an Evangelical readership that was increasingly characterised by anti-Catholicism.Footnote 80
The American Sunday School Union's adaptation
Six years after the RTS revision, the American Sunday School Union printed an adaptation of Milner's History. Like the RTS in Britain, the ASSU was an inter-denominational organisation determined to Christianise the nation through an expansive publication programme.Footnote 81 And, like its British counterpart, the ASSU aspired to print only ‘those plain and simple gospel truths, which are peculiar to NO sect, but of vital importance to ALL’.Footnote 82 As the leading Evangelical church history, Milner's account was an ideal candidate for adaptation. The publication committee shortened Milner, supplemented it with details from Mosheim's history, and printed the result as Letters on ecclesiastical history from the fictional Mrs Lyman to her children – a genre that tapped into cultural ideals of maternal religious instruction while also rendering Milner accessible to a young audience.Footnote 83
Because the Letters intended to provide models of piety for its young readers, some of Milner's sympathetic portrait of pre-Reformation Christianity was retained. The faith of young men such as Origen and Ephraim the Syrian was celebrated, as were examples of godly motherhood, such as Monica, mother of Augustine of Hippo.Footnote 84 Figures in the Church hierarchy were not necessarily excluded from the account. ‘Even a retired youth in America, in the nineteenth century’, Mrs Lyman wrote, ‘can find something in the life of a good bishop [Gregory the Great], who lived more than twelve hundred years ago.’ Similarly, Boniface, Anselm and Bernard were praised, but without any mention of their support for the papacy.Footnote 85 Even though these figures were included, their Catholic characteristics were redacted. Milner's coterie of medieval believers, in the ASSU Letters, no longer wore a ‘Roman garb’.
With its readership in mind, the Letters also simplified Milner's narrative, instructing children in the morals to be learned from the past.Footnote 86 How should nineteenth-century American children imitate early Christian martyrs? ‘Sometimes the young suffer a kind of persecution from their gay companions’, Mrs. Lyman ventured, ‘being the subjects of satirical remarks, and undeserved ridicule. Now this same spirit would teach you to meet this ridicule with a calm and equal temper.’Footnote 87 Similar applications appeared throughout the Letters, with Mrs Lyman translating history into lessons appropriate for her readers. For example, Gregory the Great's care for the poor offered Mrs Lyman the opportunity to exhort her sons to fair business practices and honest bargaining in ‘their intercourse with one another’.Footnote 88 In the ASSU edition, the saints of the Christian past functioned as instructors in nineteenth-century Protestant social and ethical norms.
Much like the RTS revision, the ASSU Letters distanced authentic Christianity from Catholic trappings. While Milner had praised the genuine, if superstitious, piety of the past, the Letters disparaged medieval faith. Mrs Lyman ridiculed the doctrine of eucharistic ‘real presence’, which was obviously ‘at variance with common sense’.Footnote 89 Milner's admissions that men who had supported the papacy or misunderstood justification by faith were yet genuine believers all disappeared in the ASSU adaptation. When medieval developments were discussed, they were explicitly connected to the decline of the ‘true spirit of Christianity’.Footnote 90 The ASSU revision, in its moralising and de-Catholicising approach, sought to disarm the past of its potential to confuse young Protestants.
Even more than Stokes's revision, the ASSU Letters took on a patriotic tone. Mrs Lyman repeatedly compared the Christian past unfavourably to nineteenth-century American democracy, freedom of religion and disestablishment. For example, the fourth-century Arian controversy, she wrote, ‘ought to make us grateful that the government of our country has no control over its religion. You, my dear sons, will, I hope, grow up with an abhorrence of any plan or principle which shall lead to a connexion between the Church and the government of the country’.Footnote 91 Milner had used stories of persecution to criticise the apathy and luxury of his own context; Mrs. Lyman, in contrast, described horrific martyrdoms in order to inspire thanks ‘for our happy government, and that freedom of thought and expression, which is enjoyed by the most obscure member of our republic’.Footnote 92 In contrast to Milner's narrative, in this history the Protestant present was vastly superior to the Christian past.
The ASSU revision emerged during the first wave of anti-Catholic publishing that, in the 1830s, proliferated in response to increasing Catholic immigration.Footnote 93 As Jon Gjerde demonstrates, antebellum Protestants saw Catholics as a threat not only to true religion, but also to democracy and society as a whole.Footnote 94 This fear is explicit in the ASSU Letters, with Mrs Lyman warning her children that ‘[Catholicism] may yet prevail to a great extent in the United States, unless the people are enlightened by an early acquaintance with the word of God’.Footnote 95 If the young reader did not devote herself to Protestantism, the nation might fall back into the dark ages. The function of this anti-Catholic print culture, Candy Gunther Brown explains, was to unite Protestant denominations against a common enemy while constructing an imagined community of Evangelical readers.Footnote 96 The ASSU's reconstruction of Milner's History embodied this purpose, mobilising children to defend the Protestant nation against the threat of the Catholic past, and, along the way, reversing Milner's direction of critique in order to demonstrate the superiority of Protestant religion.
Robert B. Seeley's adaptation
In 1834 Robert B. Seeley (1798–1886), London author and publisher, revised Milner's History for his ‘Christian Family's Library’ series. The History included an Evangelical defence of the establishment, and Seeley, as an Evangelical churchman, was eager to promote this cause during a time of increasing Evangelical secessions from the Church of England.Footnote 97 As he edited, however, Seeley concluded that he must ‘change the form of the history’ to better account for the Church's fall into papal apostasy.Footnote 98 Seeley retained much of Milner's language, his relatively charitable account of monasticism, and his defence of Gregory the Great.Footnote 99 However, he dissented from Milner's project of tracing the true Church beyond the sixth century. ‘Instead … of following our author in his search after the scattered fragments of the true church’, Seeley explained, ‘we shall here break off the narrative, resuming it under the more natural form of a HISTORY OF THE PAPACY.’Footnote 100
It was twelve years before Seeley printed the next volume. He had wrestled with how to revise Milner's account of medieval Christianity, given its neglect of the ‘total and … fatal’ fall of the Church. Seeley decided that he could not simply make changes to Milner's narrative, as ‘an individual, here and there, cannot be called “the Church of Christ”’. His account would not, ‘with Milner, devote much attention to isolated individuals of the Romish communion’ but rather would only celebrate those whom Rome had persecuted.Footnote 101 Milner's favourite medievals did not fare well in Seeley's retelling, which referenced Boniface, Eugenius iii and Celestine V without mention of their piety.Footnote 102 Bernard of Clairvaux ‘was an earnest and self-denying servant of the apostate church’, Seeley wrote. ‘Whether he belonged to Christ's true church, is a question on which we shall offer no opinion.’ Seeley celebrated the sects persecuted by Bernard, while bitterly noting that ‘this celebrated monk proved himself a most useful servant of the Papacy’.Footnote 103 Anselm's name never appeared at all. In Seeley's narrative, only proto-Protestants and medieval dissenters were included as faithful believers. A project that began as an adaptation of Milner's History ended up a thorough rebuttal of his account of medieval Christianity, and a return to the Protestant historical norms exemplified by Mosheim and Arnold.
Seeley's departures from Milner are explained in part by shifting ecclesial context. In 1845 Seeley was less concerned with Evangelical secessions from the Church of England than with Roman Catholic advances within it.Footnote 104 Eager to disarm the Tractarians of their historical argumentation, Seeley's History was an extended case against the historiography produced by William Palmer (1803–85) and John Henry Newman (1801–90). Seeley's account also embodies the post-1830 shift in British Evangelicalism, when, according to David Bebbington, the combination of premillennial historicism and increased Irish immigration produced a more militant anti-Catholicism within the movement.Footnote 105 While Milner had been eager to showcase the perpetuity of Christ's faithful through the Middle Ages, Seeley was driven to demonstrate the fulfilment of biblical prophecy in the Church's fall into apostasy. How Evangelicals received this revision is difficult to ascertain, as the publications that reviewed other editions of Milner did not review Seeley's. His first volume was successful enough to merit a second printing in 1844; his second volume emerged in the year when the Maynooth controversy re-energised anti-Catholic sentiment.Footnote 106 In this context, a work that eviscerated the Catholic past and cast church history in apocalyptic terms must have resonated with not a few Evangelical readers.
Other nineteenth-century adaptations of Milner contrast with and illuminate the revisionary approach of the RTS, ASSU and Seeley. Two early American editions, an 1816 abridgement by the Presbyterian minister Jesse Townsend (1766–1838) and an 1817 adaptation for Sunday Schools by the teacher Rebecca Eaton, closely followed Milner's interpretations of Anselm, Bernard and other medieval Christians.Footnote 107 Likewise, an 1836 abridgement by the Scottish Reformed bookseller Thomas Nelson (1780–1861) did not modify any of Milner's conclusions.Footnote 108 The edition ‘revised and corrected’ in 1847 by the Anglican Thomas Grantham (1795–1864) modified Milner on the errors pointed out by Maitland, particularly in his account of the Waldensians. Grantham retained Milner's overall narrative, however, promising that ‘the admirers of Milner will find nothing to regret, and the lovers of accuracy not a little to commend’.Footnote 109 The faithfulness of these editors, and the ongoing printing of Milner's original account through the 1830s and 1840s, clarifies that not all nineteenth-century Evangelicals were ill-disposed to Milner's approach. However, in every instance where Milner's interpretations were significantly edited, the account became more critical of the Catholic past. And, as certain constituencies within the Evangelical milieu grew more virulently anti-Catholic, organisations committed to pan-Evangelical cooperation were unwilling to reproduce Milner's narrative wholesale. The ASSU and RTS editors recognised that Milner's History must be modified before it could contribute to their inter-denominational mission.
This contested publication history underscores the revisionary strain in Milner's account and the cultural, indeed political, significance of this revision. By eschewing a strict doctrinal formulation of genuine Christianity, and relativising his own age in relation to the Catholic past, Milner produced a history that departed from prior Protestant norms. While Milner remained thoroughly Protestant in his theology, his Evangelical aims led him to identify with notable medieval Christians and to critique the shortcomings of the Protestant present. In contrast to the literature on Milner, he included many whom he considered mistaken about justification by faith. Gregory the Great's missionary zeal, Bernard's devotion and Anselm's theological writing were each reminiscent of Evangelical piety, and Milner presented them as genuine Christians who ‘wore a Roman garb’, at the same time Catholic and Evangelical.Footnote 110 Milner's History, then, shows late eighteenth-century Evangelical concerns, particularly the fear of Protestant rationalism, undermining typical Protestant accounts of the Christian past. In his generosity toward medieval Christians, Milner anticipated later favourable histories, such as H. H. Milman's History of Latin Christianity (1854–5) or Philip Schaff's History of the Christian Church (1858–90). That these were more original, critical and influential works than Milner's should not obscure his irenicism.
Some of Milner's editors, however, were far less comfortable coupling Evangelical faith with the errors of Rome, and the ASSU, RTS and Seeley editions either castigated the Catholicism of figures such as Bernard or Anselm or avoided mentioning it altogether. These revisions reflect a growing concern among some Evangelicals that a too-generous account of the medieval Church might confuse the reader, or, worse, lead her to Rome. In the United States, this fear not only shaped Sunday School literature but also seminary education: in the 1820s Andover Seminary's faculty reserved the study of church history for seminarians’ final year, as only then might they safely explore ‘the labyrinth of opinions and controversies found in the history of the church’.Footnote 111 This caution is all the more noteworthy in light of the seminary's reliance on Milner as a textbook.Footnote 112
To be fair, losing readers to Rome was not an unfounded fear. In 1816 a young Evangelical named John Henry Newman picked up Milner's account and was captivated by his portrayal of the early Church: ‘I read Joseph Milner's Church History, and was nothing short of enamoured of the long extracts from St. Augustine, St. Ambrose, and the other Fathers which I found there.’Footnote 113 Even after Newman's conversion to Roman Catholicism, he praised the Evangelical History for giving him an ‘imaginative devotion’ to the Church Fathers, which ‘saved him from the danger’ of a cold or latitudinarian faith.Footnote 114 Milner sought to redeem the Catholic past from the cynicism of Mosheim, Hume and Gibbon, but, in Newman's case, he succeeded too well. Milner's History may have, as Walsh notes, converted a number of Ministers of Parliament to the Evangelical faith, but it also started a young Evangelical down the road to Rome.Footnote 115 The RTS, ASSU and Seeley, in contrast, were determined to ensure that their readers would remain thoroughly Protestant.
Not only the soul of the individual reader but also the soul of the nation was at stake. Writing in the 1780s and ’90s, Milner constructed his narrative to contrast real Christianity with nominal Protestantism; in the 1820s and ’30s, the RTS, ASSU and Seeley were less concerned with scepticism than with Rome. Particularly in a moment when the religious identities of both Britain and the United States were politically contested, the Christian past presented a problem for Evangelicals. As Susan Griffin has argued, it was precisely because of their shared history that Catholics appeared to nineteenth-century Protestants as ‘at once familiar and unfamiliar, homely and foreign’.Footnote 116 Church history had the power to undermine or heighten antipathy to Catholicism. That Milner's most revisionary interpretations were reversed by two organisations committed to national evangelisation shows the extent to which Milner destabilised a historical narrative that was increasingly useful in a context of contested Protestant nationhood. The RTS, ASSU and Seeley portrayed pre-Reformation Christianity as proto-Protestant, producing historical accounts that served the project of imagining Britain and the United States as Protestant communities. Nineteenth-century religious nationalism, in other words, blunted the subversive edge of Evangelical historiography, and Milner's account was made to align with conventional Protestant representations of the Christian past.
