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The Mountain and the Flower: The Power and Potential of Nature in the World of Victorian Evangelicalism

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 January 2016

Mark Smith
Mark Smith*
Affiliation:
University of Oxford
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Extract

In the middle decades of the nineteenth century a new wind could be felt rustling in the branches of the Church of England. The transforming effect of the Oxford Movement on the High Church tradition is the most prominent example of this phenomenon but also well established in the literature are the transformations in contemporary Anglican Evangelicalism. David Bebbington in particular has stressed the impact of Romanticism as a cultural mood within the movement, tracing its effects in a heightened supernaturalism, a preoccupation with the Second Advent and with holiness which converged at Keswick, and also an emphasis on the discernment of spiritual significance in nature. But how did this emphasis play out in the lives of Evangelicals in the second half of the century and how might it have served their mission to society? This paper seeks to address the evangelical understanding of both the power and potential of nature through the example of one prominent Anglican clergyman, William Pennefather, and one little-known evangelical initiative, the Bible Flower Mission.

Type
Research Article
Information
Studies in Church History , Volume 46: God’s Bounty? The Churches and the Natural World , 2010 , pp. 307 - 318
Copyright
Copyright © Ecclesiastical History Society 2010

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References

1 Bebbington, D. W., Evangelicalism in Modem Britain: A History from the 1730s to the 1980s (London, 1989), 81–171 Google Scholar;The Keswick conventions, which began in 1875 in the romantic surroundings of the Lake District, brought together a theology of sanctification by faith with an emphasis on the imminence of the personal return of Christ; they were foundational for much mainstream evangelical spirituality in the succeeding decades. See also, in this volume, Andrew Atherstone,’Frances Ridley Havergal’s Theology of Nature’, 319–32.

2 For this context, see Acheson, Alan, A History of the Church of Ireland 1691—1996 (Blackrock, 1997)Google Scholar, pt 4, ch. 1; Stunt, Timothy C. F., From Awakening to Secession: Radical Evangelicals in Switzerland and Britain 1815—35 (Edinburgh, 2000)Google Scholar, ch. 7.

3 Smith, M. A., ‘William Pennefather’, in Larsen, T., ed., Biographical Dictionary of Evangelicals (Leicester, 2003), 514—16 Google Scholar; Bebbington, , Evangelicalism, 159—61 Google Scholar. For Pennefather, Lakeland and the Romantic poets, see Braithwaite, R., Life and Letters of Rev. William Pennefather (London, 1878), 12–13, 27, 400.Google Scholar

4 Braithwaite, Pennefather, 206.

5 Ibid., 31, 308, 399. For mountains as a site of communion with God, see also Pennefather, W., The Bridegroom King: A Meditation on Psalm XLV (London, n.d.), 16.Google Scholar

6 Braithwaite, Pennefather, 400, 440.

7 The doctrine of the restitution of all things was the notion that God, at the physical return of Christ, would restore the whole of his creation to its primitive perfection and that a restored earth would be the home of a redeemed humanity. See Spence, Martin, ‘The “Restitution of All Things” in Nineteenth-Century Evangelical Premillennialism’, in Clarke, Peter and Claydon, Tony, eds, The Church, the Afterlife and the Fate of the Soul, SCH 45 (Woodbridge, 2009), 349–59.Google Scholar

8 Braithwaite, Pennefather, 165.

9 Ibid. 131—32, 440. The concept of nature as promise among these Evangelicals stands in marked contrast to the emphasis on a lost Eden characteristic of some other Christian traditions.

10 Ibid. 277.

11 Ibid. 203.

12 The Flower Mission (London, 1874), 7.Google Scholar

13 For Hill’s similar involvement with the Kyrle Society, which aimed to bring beauty into the lives of the urban poor, see Boyd, N., Josephine Butler, Octavia Hill, Florence Nightingale (London, 1982), 113–17.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

14 Flower Mission, 14.

15 Ibid., 5–30. The idea that nature needed to be brought in to lighten the darkness of urban life was also characteristic of evangelical supporters of flower missions.

16 Ibid. 16.

17 Woman’s Work in the Great Harvest Field [hereafter Woman’s Work] 5 (1876), 80–81.

18 Murray, E., A Day at the Bible Flower Mission (London, n.d.), 4–13.Google Scholar

19 Report of the Bible Flower Mission East End Depot 1882 (London, 1882), 21 Google Scholar; Braithwaite, Pennefather, 530–34; First Report of the Flower Mission in Connection with the Manchester Evangelisation Committee March 1876–7 (Manchester, 1877)Google Scholar; Woman’s Work 4 (1875), 227–28.Google Scholar

20 Lowe, C. M. S., God’s Answers: A Narrative of Miss Macpherson’s Work (London, 1882), 2–10 Google Scholar; Birt, L. M., The Children’s Home-Finder (London, 1913), 122.Google Scholar

21 East End Depot 1882, 21–24.

22 Ashby, E., Wonderful Words of Life: A Manual for Flower Missions (London, c. 1882), 5.Google Scholar

23 Ibid. 5.

24 Ibid. 78.

25 East End Depot 1882, 21.

26 Murray, Flower Mission, 9.

27 Ibid. 6–7.

28 Ibid. 10.

29 Third Report of the Manchester Bible Flower Mission March 1878–9, (Manchester, 1879), 6.Google Scholar

30 East End Depot 1882, 9. For an earlier example, see the relationship between Margaret Hale and Nicholas and Bessy Higgins established by a gift of flowers in Gaskell, E., North and South (London, 1855), ch. 8.Google Scholar

31 Ashby, Wonderful Words, 7.

32 East End Depot 1882, 6, 20.

33 Murray, Bible Flower Mission, 9.

34 Woman’s Work 4 (1875), 141.

35 Woman’s Work 3 (1874), 158.

36 C. Pennefather,’Preface’, in Ashby, Wonderful Words (unpaginated).

37 Braithwaite, Pennefather, 202.