This communication summarises the findings of an enquiry into the origins of English Sabbatarianism at the turn of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Two aspects of this movement have seemed to merit fresh investigation: the sources of English Sabbatarian notions and the circumstances in which the Sabbath became a major controversial issue in the Church of England, dividing the puritan Nonconformists from the representatives of authority.

Sabbatarianism, for the purpose of this discussion, is defined as something more than a certain ethical and social attitude to the use of Sunday: it implies the doctrinal assertion that the fourth commandment is not an obsolete ceremonial law of the Jews but a perpetual, moral law, binding on Christians; in other words, that the Christian observance of Sunday has its basis not in ecclesiastical tradition but in the decalogue.

The architects of the Restoration Church Settlement were, it is alleged, those divines whose loyalty and High Church opinions had driven them into long and bitter exile with their sovereign. Considerable attention has been focused upon these men by recent research. A number of the younger divines, however, did not go into exile, but laboured diligently in the cause of king and Church throughout the period of the Commonwealth. Their influence upon the eventual settlement of ecclesiastical affairs, if settlement it may be called, was considerable and merits further attention from historians. Among those who remained in this country throughout this period was Peter Gunning, whose consistent loyalty to the crown and devotion to the Church of England was rewarded after the king’s restoration by his appointment successively to the sees of Chichester and of Ely.

The publication of Lux Mundi in 1889 has long been regarded as an important moment in the development of Anglican thought. Equally familiar is the distress which the new turn gave to H. P. Liddon, who could only regard the effort made by the Lux Mundi group to set the Catholic faith in its right relation to modern knowledge as capitulation to the snares of liberalism, and as ultimately fatal to the close coherence of Christian truth. The book represented a new grafting upon the stock of the English Catholic party, and no satisfactory explanation has ever been offered of the reasons why such a theology was produced within the post-Tractarian circle at Oxford. The new outlook involved a wholesale change from the deductive theology of the Tractarians with its imperatives against the world and all those things which liberalism accepted in the world, to an inductive theology which appealed to men for Christ by showing how the best and truest things led up to Him and found fulfilment in Him. At the same time religion appeared now as an interpretation of the world as well as of the Church, and the intense conservatism of Pusey and Keble was replaced by the radicalism of Scott Holland and Gore. The question is first why these new attitudes grew up amongst men who more than any others were conditioned against them by intense religious training, and, secondly, a question regarded by Prestige as inexplicable, how it came about that Liddon was so shocked by a publication which embodied tendencies which had been notorious for twenty years and of which, in a letter to Scott Holland in 1884, he had seemed quite clearly aware.

Nowadays when ‘Executive Officers’ and ‘Councils for Evangelical Strategy’ plan a ‘Younger Church’ one of the things they worry about most is the training of an indigenous clergy. In the nineteenth century men were not so self-conscious about missions. You took the Gospel to the heathen. You relied upon clergy coming from ‘home.’ Even where there was a small population of white colonists, they did not often expect to have to produce their own clergymen. Of the fifty or sixty Anglican clergymen who served in South Africa between the second British occupation of the Cape and the appointment of the first bishop (1806-1848), only one was born in the colony—and he was a white man.