The Victorian Church of England

The Church of England entered the nineteenth century as a comfortable establishment and left it a contested one. Three parties argued for its soul. Evangelicals who had inherited the awakening's fervour and its campaigns against slavery and squalor, high churchmen who rediscovered the church's catholic inheritance, and broad churchmen who wanted room for the new biblical criticism and the new geology. The quarrels went to law: the Gorham case of 1850 over what baptism does, the storm over the essayists of 1860 who applied critical methods to Scripture, ritual prosecutions that put clergymen in prison over vestments and candles. Underneath the controversies the church rebuilt itself, in thousands of new buildings and slum parishes at home and in a mission network abroad that by 1867 had produced enough overseas bishops that a first Lambeth Conference had to be called to hold them together.