The Pragmatic Pulpit: Politics and Changes in Preaching Styles in the Church of England, 1660-1760

• Published in: A journal of church and state Vol. 56; no. 3; pp. 454 - 485
• Main Author: Levis, R. Barry
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Oxford Oxford University Press 01.07.2014
• Subjects: British history, 1688-1714; Charity; Christianity; Churches; Clergy; Clerics; England; Evangelicalism; Faith; French Revolution; History; Influence; Methods; Morality; Preachers; Preaching; Pulpits; Religion and politics; Religious history; Sin; Spiritual love; England
• ISSN: 0021-969X; 2040-4867
• DOI: 10.1093/jcs/css107

Victorian evangelicals and Tractarians shared a negative assessment of the eighteenth-century church. E. B. Pusey, for instance, saw the deficiencies of his contemporary church stretching back to the previous century. Pusey, as well as the other Tractarians, maintained that the eighteenth-century church had "suffered deeply, both in lukewarnmess of life and degeneracy of faith, until the horrors of the French Revolution awoke us as out of a death-sleep." In another context, he noted with disdain that "the eighteenth century was comparatively a stagnant period of the Church,--in England, owing to the violent revolution, whereby so many of her best members, the Non-juring Clergy, were ejected, and that, at one time, the State set itself to corrupt and degrade her, and her writers looked for strength in foreign alliances;--abroad, through the development of the principles of the ultra-reformation, and the influence of degraded England and corrupted France. Here, Levis explains the differences between the church of the later Stuarts and the one that emerged with the coming of the Hanoverians.