Unitarians and the contradictions of liberal Protestantism in Victorian Britain: the Free Christian Union, 1867–70

Unitarians and the contradictions of liberalProtestantism in Victorian Britain: the Free ChristianUnion, 1867–70*hisr_518 486..505

Michael Ledger-LomasUniversity of Cambridge

AbstractRecent research on secularization in later Victorian Britain has emphasized the proliferation ofsubstitute religions as a compensation for the decline in the Church of England’s – and byextension Christianity’s – intellectual and ethical authority.This article complicates that pictureby drawing attention to a group of predominantly Unitarian liberal Protestants who attemptedto moderate the privatization of religious belief and the consequent decay of a theisticconsensus by creating a new kind of non-dogmatic church, the Free Christian Union (1867–70), which Protestants and theists of every disposition could join without sacrifice ofconscience. This article analyses the Union’s history, arguing that its rapid collapse bothillustrated the appeal and exposed the contradictions involved in the liberal Protestant attemptto reconcile fidelity to individual conscience with the agreement on theological principles thatan effective Christian church required.

Inquiring Victorians faced few dilemmas thornier than how to reconcile a deepconviction that religious institutions were vital to maintaining standards of personaland social morality with their conscientious inability to accept the doctrines of existingchurches. After mid century, the ‘moral revolt’ against orthodoxy, coupled with theimpact of inductive philosophy and continental biblical criticism, caused an increasingnumber of young men to avoid or abandon careers in the Church of England ratherthan subscribe to the thirty-nine articles or the Prayer Book.1 Those who did ‘stop’ inthe church were continually exhorted by those outside it to scrutinize their motives fordoing so.2 Yet while the perceived sinfulness of endorsing beliefs they no longer sharedundoubtedly drove many educated people from attendance at or office in the church,the erosion of its authority raised profound moral anxieties. Only unusually bullishagnostics claimed that personal and social morality would be left unscathed by thedecay of Christian churches and the theistic culture they supported.3 Even convinced

* For invaluable help and advice in producing this article the author would like to thank Jon Parry, TimLarsen, the other members of the CambridgeVictorian Studies Group, the staff of the Dr.Williams’s Library andthe two anonymous referees for Historical Research.

1 J. L.Altholz,‘The warfare of conscience with theology’, in The Mind andArt of Victorian England, ed. J.L.Altholz(Minneapolis, Minn., 1976), pp. 58–77; J. von Arx, ‘TheVictorian crisis of faith as a crisis of vocation’, in VictorianFaith in Crisis: Essays on Continuity and Change in 19th-Century Religious Belief, ed. R. J. Helmstadter and B.V.Lightman (Basingstoke, 1990), pp. 262–82; J. von Arx and F. M.Turner,‘Victorian ethics of belief: a reconsideration’,in Religion in Victorian Britain, iv: Interpretations, ed. G. Parsons (Manchester, 1988), pp. 298–317;A. G. L. Haig,‘Thechurch, the universities and learning in later Victorian Britain’, Historical Jour., xxix (1986), 187–201.

2 F. P. Cobbe, ‘The Church of England, and who should stop in it’, Theological Rev., v (1868), 482–508.3 J. Livingston, The Ethics of Belief: an Essay on the Victorian Religious Conscience (Tallahassee, Fla., 1974),

pp. 36–7;W. K. Clifford, ‘The influence upon morality of a decline in religious belief ’, in Lectures and Essays byWilliam Kingdon Clifford, ed. L. Stephen and F. Pollock (2 vols., 1879), i. 246–56.

© Institute of Historical Research 2009. DOI: 10.1111/j.1468-2281.2009.00518.x Historical Research, vol. 83, no. 221 (August 2010)Published by Blackwell Publishing Ltd., 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford, OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA.

freethinkers worried that only the sturdiest moral athletes could scale the lonelyheights of doubt without toppling into mean-spirited Epicureanism or, on the otherside, an infatuation with Roman Catholicism.4 Historians sensitive to these anxietieshave therefore emphasized that many later Victorian thinkers sought to construct newspiritual communities and world views to sustain their ethical purpose in the absenceof a church.5 These might be the churches of Comtean Positivism;6 the stoicism of thepublic moralists and the agnosticism of leading men of science, which their acolytesmade the basis of a new sect;7 or psychical researches, which held out the promiseof empirical proofs for a life after death that might otherwise vanish along withChristianity.8

The emphasis on substitute religions and quasi-churches rightly prompts historiansto argue that laterVictorian Britain experienced a ‘growing cacophony of inner belief ’,a proliferation of spiritual choices rather than a process of secularization bysubtraction.9 This article concentrates, though, on those who hoped that Christianlanguage and institutions might be sufficiently elastic to cope with scientific progressand speak in harmony with the modern conscience.Alongside the growing number ofthinkers to be found on Frank Turner’s ground, ‘between science and religion’, therewas also an important ‘liberal Christian’ or Protestant response to higher criticism andscientific naturalism, which sought to transform rather than to abandon Protestanttheology. Liberal Protestants responded to the trumpet call of the ‘New Reformation’or the still small voice of conscience just as eagerly as agnostics and secularists, but feltimpelled by it to press on with purifying rather than abandoning their Protestantconvictions.10

The efforts of liberal Protestants in both Europe and America were from theeighteen-sixties increasingly concentrated on closing the ‘breach between modernthought and ancient faith and worship’ through wide-ranging church reform.11 Whilethey benefited from the privatization of religious belief, they did not see howChristianity could survive without strong churches.A privatized, fissiparous faith wouldlead only to spiritual isolation and the waning of philanthropic activity.The imperative

4 J. von Arx, Progress and Pessimism: Religion, Politics, and History in later 19th Century Britain (1985), pp. 5–6;H. S. Jones, Intellect and Character inVictorian England: Mark Pattison and the Invention of the Don (Cambridge, 2007),pp. 126–8; G. Dawson, Darwin, Literature, and Victorian Respectability (Cambridge, 2007), ch. 5.

5 J. R. Moore, ‘Theodicy and society: the crisis of the intelligentsia’, in Helmstadter and Lightman, pp.153–86.

6 T. R. Wright, The Religion of Humanity: the Impact of Comtean Positivism on Victorian Britain (Cambridge,1986).

7 S. Collini, Public Moralists: Political Thought and Intellectual Life in Britain, 1850–1930 (Oxford, 1991); J.Turner,Without God,Without Creed: the Origins of Unbelief in America (1985), pp. 235–6; G. Levine, ‘Scientific discourse asan alternative to faith’, in Helmstadter and Lightman, pp. 225–61; Dawson, ch. 3; B.V. Lightman, ‘Huxley andscientific agnosticism: the strange history of a failed rhetorical strategy’, British Jour. for the Hist. of Science, xxv(2002), 271–89; B. V. Lightman, ‘Interpreting agnosticism as a nonconformist sect: T. H. Huxley’s “NewReformation”’, in Science and Dissent in England, 1688–1945, ed. P. Wood (Aldershot, 2004), pp. 197–214.

8 F. M.Turner, Between Science and Religion: the Reaction to Scientific Naturalism in late Victorian England (1974),chs. 2–4; J. Oppenheim, The Other World: Spiritualism and Psychical Research in England, 1850–1914 (Cambridge,1985); B. Schultz, Henry Sidgwick, Eye of the Universe: an Intellectual Biography (Cambridge, 2004), ch. 5.

9 J. Harris, Private Lives, Public Spirit: a Social History of Britain, 1870–1914 (Oxford, 1993), p. 171.10 The liberal Christian option is sketched in Turner, Between Science and Religion, p. ix; M. Francis, ‘Who still

has “sweetness and light” in studies of Victorian culture and politics?’, Historical Jour., xxxix (1996), 1076–96, atpp. 1088–9; T. Larsen, Crisis of Doubt: Honest Faith in Victorian England (Oxford, 2006).

11 H. W. Bellows, ‘The breach between modern thought and ancient faith and worship’, in Christianity andModern Thought (Boston, 1872), pp. 3–31; for the ideas in this paragraph, see J. Réville, Liberal Christianity: itsOrigin, Nature, and Mission (1903); B. M. G. Reardon, Liberal Protestantism (1968); and W. R. Hutchison, TheModernist Impulse in American Protestantism (Oxford, 1982).

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was therefore to reform national churches so that honest doubters couldconscientiously remain within them. They felt that the developing science of biblicalcriticism and the new history of religions had discredited the use of dogmatic tests forchurch membership, which merely succeeded in barring those who could otherwisehave united in cultivating a moral life on the pattern of Jesus of Nazareth. In pursuitof such an aim, the liberal Protestant Unions of France (1861) Germany (1863) andHolland (1870) campaigned against tests and for the empowerment of the educatedlaity. They were ultimately driven by the dream of a ‘church of the future’, whichwould reconcile the need for religious community with the duty to obey individualconscience.12 It would be something like the ‘Free Church’ of which the AmericanUnitarian Charles Eliot Norton dreamt in 1867, ‘to which all those who are . . . tryingto express their highest convictions in life, may come and be welcomed on equalterms, whether they call themselves Unitarians or Trinitarians, Christians orunbelievers’.13 There was also a steady traffic across the Channel and the Atlantic inplans for new kinds of national church.14

The Free Christian Union (1867–70) reveals much about the appeal of this liberalProtestant project in Britain but also the insuperable contradictions it involved.Treatedonly cursorily in existing historiography, it is the focus of this article.15 The Union wasfounded on 14 June 1867 at an open meeting for the friends of undogmatic religiousunion at University Hall in Gordon Square, a building at the centre of whatcontemporaries called ‘unorthodox London’.16 Its predominantly but not exclusivelyUnitarian founders, led by the eminent ministers James Martineau (1805–1900) andJohn James Tayler (1797–1869), intended it to pursue ‘the promotion of commonaction amongst those who rely in the religious improvement of human life on filialpiety and brotherly charity, with or without more particular agreement in . . . doctrinaltheology’. A committee was appointed to draw up its constitution, which was thenapproved at a second meeting in November 1867 before being circulated to potentialmembers.17 It was a classic document of liberal Protestantism. Previous attempts at thereligious association of Protestants across churches, such as the Evangelical Alliance,were openly or in practice restricted to orthodox evangelicals, but the Union’sconstitution framed a new church whose members were to have the comfort ofreligious belonging without embarrassing assent to exploded historical or metaphysical

12 For early uses of the term, see C. C. J. Bunsen, Die Verfassung der Kirche der Zukunft (Hamburg, 1845); F.W.Newman, Catholic Union: Essays towards a Church of the Future, as the Organization of Philanthropy (1854); A.Réville, ‘Dutch theology: its present and future state’, Theological Rev., i (1864), 255–93, at p. 293; Moore,‘Theodicy and society’, p. 176.

13 Letters of Charles Eliot Norton, with Biographical Comment, ed. S. Norton and M. A. Howe (2 vols., 1913), i.205–6.

14 R. Shannon, ‘John Robert Seeley and the idea of a national church: a study in historiography,churchmanship and politics’, in Ideas and Institutions of Victorian Britain: Essays in Honour of George Kitson Clark,ed. R. Robson (1967), pp. 236–67; P.T. Phillips, ‘The concept of a national church in late 19th century Englandand America’, Jour. Religious Hist., xiv (1986), 26–37; Liberal Religious Thought at the Beginning of the 20th Century:Addresses and Papers at the International Council of Unitarian and Other Liberal Religious Thinkers and Workers, held inLondon, May 1901, ed. W. Copeland Bowie (1901).

15 For cursory, not always very accurate notices, see, e.g., A. Stephenson, The Rise and Decline of EnglishModernism: the Hulsean Lectures 1979–80 (1984); C. Cashdollar, TheTransformation of Theology, 1830–90: Positivism andProtestant Thought in Britain and America (Princeton, N.J., 1989), pp. 316–18; C. Harvie, ‘Reform and expansion,1854–71’, in The History of the University of Oxford, vi: 19th-Century Oxford, pt. i, ed. M. Brock and M. C. Curthoys(Oxford, 1997), pp. 745–6; Schultz, Henry Sidgwick, pp. 143–4.

16 C. M. Davies, Unorthodox London (1873).17 London, Dr.Williams’s Library, Free Christian Union MSS. (hereafter F.C.U.), 24.132 (5), minute on history

of the Union.

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propositions.They would be united solely by what Jesus Christ defined in Matthew’sgospel as the essence of faith:‘the two great affections of love to God and love to Man’.The Union was to be Christian not in shrouding Jesus in a complex Christology butmerely in encouraging members to follow his moral example. It would campaign forthe lifting of dogmatic tests from the established and nonconformist churches, promoteundogmatic philanthropy and issue publications.18

The Union aroused considerable initial excitement. The Oxford philosopherThomas Hill Green (1836–82), who as ‘Mr. Grey’ inspired Mrs.Ward’s Robert Elsmereto plant his own liberal Protestant ‘New Brotherhood of Christ’ in the East End, hopedthat it might bring ‘religious men, who have broken with dogmatic Xty [Christianity]as dogmatic . . . to some mutual understanding, so as to have the chance ofreorganizing worship and religious beneficence when the present fabrics break up’.19

No such ‘mutual understanding’ proved possible for the Union however, its committeefinding it impossible to attract support or to devise an effective plan of action.With theunassuming W. S. Cookson as its president, the Union did little more than hold threeannual meetings for members, the second of which was preceded by a widely reportedecumenical service. Before Martineau moved the Union’s dissolution at a specialmeeting in December 1870, it had recruited no more than 100 members, mostlyUnitarians but including a sprinkling of mavericks from other churches.20

Having analysed the hopes behind the Union’s foundation, this article turnstherefore to explaining why they were impossible to realize.This had much to do withthe lingering aversion felt by most Protestants to co-operation with Unitarians,associated as they had been historically with a ‘Socinian’ hostility to the divinity ofChrist.21 Yet the Union also expressed in miniature deep contradictions in the liberalProtestant project. One of its basic assumptions was that it was both possible andurgently necessary to cut out Christianity’s kernel of theistic morality from its husk ofcontentious metaphysics.22 Yet where exactly should the knife’s edge bite? Anglicanbroad churchmen, with an existing institution at their back and a sense of pressingpractical duties to the nation, could often fudge or obfuscate this question – a coursethat the Union’s founders felt was rather dishonourable.Their analysis obliged them toset out what the very purest principles of communion for a national church mightlook like: to legislate for total religious freedom.Their efforts not only left churchmenunimpressed but antagonized the very freethinkers they had hoped to shepherd backinto the Christian fold.

For the Unitarian thinkers behind the Union, the increasingly overt alienation ofeducated people from clerical orthodoxy represented an opportunity as much as it dida crisis.As the preacher and moral philosopher James Martineau wrote in his preambleto the Union’s constitution, ‘progressive changes of thought and feeling’ had made

18 F.C.U., 24.132 (1), minute book (hereafter F.C.U. Minute Book), pp. 1–2, 12; F.C.U., 24.133 (8), draftscheme.

19 Mrs. Humphry Ward, Robert Elsmere, ed. R. Ashton (Oxford, 1987), p. 552; Cambridge, Trinity College(hereafter Trinity), Add. MS. c/94/18, T. H. Green to H. Sidgwick, 28 Dec. 1868.

20 F.C.U. Minute Book, pp. 105–7; F.C.U., 24.132 (17), members of the Free Christian Union, 25 June 1870.The most important of these were the Birmingham preacher George Dawson, the Baptist ministers HerbertNew and William Miall, the Congregationalists William Kirkus and Leigh Mann and the Anglicans CharlesKegan Paul and Henry Sidgwick, all of whom served at various times on the Union’s committee.

21 See F. Schulman, ‘Blasphemous and Wicked’: the Unitarian Struggle for Equality, 1813–44 (Oxford, 1997), forearly expression of this antagonism.

22 For this image, see E. Abbott, The Kernel and the Husk: Letters on Spiritual Christianity (1886).



‘concurrence in doctrinal opinion . . . more and more precarious’ but ‘spiritualaffinities grow and deepen’. The ‘real Religion of the Future is foreshadowed in therising sympathies of Society’ and could be expressed in a ‘pious union’ between allthose who believed in ‘Love to God and Love to Man . . . with or without moreparticular agreement in matters of doctrinal theology’.The shared faith of the Union’smembers would be purified ‘from superfluous and foreign admixtures, which set it atvariance with the present knowledge and conscience of mankind’. In his pamphlet TheNew Affinities of Faith (1869), Martineau recommended the Union in more dramaticterms: as a harbour for all those oppressed by the deadly struggle between scientificnaturalism and sacerdotalism; as an asylum for Anglican ministers who had lost faith inwhat they had to preach.23

The Union was therefore essentially an extension of Martineau’s idiosyncraticresponse to the epistemological and moral crisis he believed was facing Christianorthodoxy.24 Anglo-American Unitarianism had always been a vat in which attempts toreconcile Christianity with modern intellectual culture could be brewed up beforebeing sampled by mainstream Protestants.25 Thus Mauricean and broad churchAnglican thought presents numerous examples of borrowings from or at least parallelswith Unitarian theology, most notably the attempt to reorient Christianity from anemphasis on Jesus Christ’s atoning death to his exemplary human life.26 At the sametime, the determination of Unitarians to purify ‘liberal Christianity’ of metaphysicalcorruptions and their openness to higher criticism and such challenges to naturaltheology as phrenology had led many beyond a recognizably Christian faith.27

American Unitarians had often travelled into varieties of transcendentalism andintuitionalism, such as Theodore Parker’s crusading ‘Absolute Religion’.28 BritishUnitarians, whose faith was more closely allied to a necessarian and materialistphilosophy, were drawn instead to radical agnosticism. Martineau’s sister Harriet, thetranslator of Auguste Comte, is the classic example.29 Many pious Unitarians weredismayed by these developments, not least because they contributed to the reputationof their tradition as a forcing house for infidelity; they rushed to reaffirm commitmentto the literal truth of the New Testament and faith in a heaven-sent, miracle-workingMessiah.30

Martineau’s prestige, which extended beyond Unitarianism, derived from his abilityto pick a course between these extremes. Like his friend John James Tayler, the other

23 F.C.U., 24.133 (8), [J. Martineau], ‘Draft scheme of the Free Christian Union’; J. Martineau, The NewAffinities of Faith: a Plea for Free Christian Union (1869), p. 1.

24 R. K. Webb, ‘The faith of 19th-century Unitarians: a curious incident’, in Helmstadter and Lightman, pp.126–49; R.Waller, ‘James Martineau: the development of his religious thought’, in Truth, Liberty, Religion, ed. B.Smith (Oxford, 1986), pp. 225–64.

25 Hutchison, Modernist, ch. 1.26 D. G. Wigmore-Beddoes, Yesterday’s Radicals: a Study of the Affinity between Unitarianism and Broad Church

Anglicanism in the 19th Century (Cambridge, 1971); D.Young, F. D. Maurice and Unitarianism (Oxford, 1992).27 See, e.g., E. S. Schaffer, ‘Kubla Khan’ and the Fall of Jerusalem: the Mythological School in Biblical Criticism and

Secular Literature, 1770–1880 (Cambridge, 1975), ch. 1.28 See G. J. Dorrien, The Making of American Liberal Theology: Imagining Progressive Religion, 1805–1900

(Louisville, Ky., 2001), chs. 1 and 2; and D. Grodzins, American Heretic:Theodore Parker andTranscendentalism (ChapelHill, N.C., 2002).

29 R. K.Webb, Harriet Martineau: a Radical Victorian (1960);V. A. Dodd, ‘Strauss’s English propagandists and thepolitics of Unitarianism, 1841–5’, Church Hist., l (1981), 415–35, at pp. 423–5.

30 For texts representative of this reaction, see, e.g., A. Norton, A Discourse on the Latest Form of Infidelity(Cambridge, Mass., 1839); The Evidences of the Genuineness of the Gospels (Cambridge, Mass., 1837–44); J. R. Beard,Scripture Vindicated against some Perversions of Rationalism (1849); S. Bache, Miracles, the Credentials of Christ: FiveLectures Delivered in the Church of the Messiah, Birmingham (1863).



prime mover of the Union, he began his professional life as a minister in northernEngland and as a professor at Manchester New College, eventually following itsrelocation from Manchester to Bloomsbury. Martineau’s eloquent sermons and hisarticles in the Westminster Review made him a prominent figure in the world of genteelfree thought.31 Yet although his and Tayler’s writings criticized supernatural andhistorical Christianity, they did not repudiate theistic faith itself. They had followedFriedrich Schleiermacher in arguing that theology must not legislate for the religiousconsciousness, but rather describe its origins in the soul and its development in humanhistory.32 They sought to overcome the tension between Christian belief and theconscience by suggesting that they were properly identical. Martineau’s and Tayler’sdeliberate revolt against Priestleyan Unitarianism’s mechanical and utilitarianunderstanding of human nature had led them to make the conscience of free-willedpersons central to their theology and ethical thought. They defined ethics as thestrenuous cultivation of a noble character and character in turn as an essentially theisticconcept, for the struggle to perfect our character brought us into direct contact witha divine being whose will was at once perfect and of ‘kindred nature’ with our own.33

While they agreed with intuitionists that conscience was therefore the only seat ofauthority in religion, this concession not only spared but rekindled devotion to Jesusof Nazareth. Theists could always venerate a man whose character showed him to bethe ‘highest conceivable form of human goodness’.34 Jesus may not have been the firstto realize the truths of a personal God, human duty and a future life, but his willingnessto die for them had made him ‘representative of a permanent reality’.35

German higher criticism, which unsettled the faith of so many British Protestants,was welcome to Martineau and Tayler because it made it easier to recover the historicallife of Jesus as a permanent moral ideal. Using its techniques, dubious sayings or actionsof Jesus could be dismissed as distortions inflicted on his memory by his short-sightedfollowers.36 The arguments of the Tübingen School critics that core Christian dogmasand the New Testament itself were the product of bitter conflict in the early churchcould equally be deployed in the service of a Christianity of conscience. Recognizingthe ‘diversified manifestation’ of Jesus in the minds of his followers should strengthenour faith in the marvellous power and fertility of his example.37 It allowed one to

31 See R. Ashton, 142 Strand: a Radical Address in Victorian London (2006) on this milieu.32 [J. J. Tayler], ‘Morell’s Philosophy of religion’, Prospective Rev., v (1849), 212–14; [J. J. Tayler],‘Church and

theology of Germany during the 19th century’, National Rev., xviii (1864), 191–230, at p. 226; J. J. Tayler,Christianity: What is it? And What has it Done? (1868), p. 17.

33 J. Martineau, Essays, Reviews and Addresses (4 vols., 1890–1), iii. 337–402; J. Martineau, ‘Distinctive types ofChristianity’, in his Studies in Christianity: a Series of Original Papers, now First Collected, or New, ed. W. R. Alger(1858), p. 5; J. J.Tayler, Christian Aspects of Faith and Duty (NewYork, 1851), p. 29; J. J.Tayler, Last Series of ChristianAspects of Faith and Duty (1877), sermons xiv, xvii; J. E. Carpenter, James Martineau,Theologian and Teacher: a Studyof his Life and Thought (1905), pp. 297–310; J. B. Schneewind, Sidgwick’s Ethics and Victorian Moral Philosophy(Oxford, 1977), pp. 245–7.

34 See, e.g., J. Martineau, ‘The watch-night lamps’, in Martineau, Essays, iv. 450–1; J. Martineau, ‘Looking up,and lifting up’, in his Endeavours after the Christian life (2 vols., 1843–7), ii; J. J. Tayler, ‘Christ the mediator’ and‘The distinctive and the permanent in Christianity’, in Tayler, Last Series.

35 J. J.Tayler, An Attempt to Ascertain the Character of the Fourth Gospel: Especially in its Relation to the Three First(1867), p. 72.

36 [J. Martineau], ‘New passages from Professor Newman’s creed’, Prospective Rev., ix (1853), 546–9; J.Martineau, ‘Early history of Messianic ideas’, Theological Rev., xvi (1863), 466–83; xviii (1864), 554–79.

37 [J. Martineau], ‘Strauss and Parker’, Westminster Rev., xlvii (1847), 136–74; and Studies of Christianity. [J. J.Tayler], ‘Ewald’s Life of Christ’, National Rev., i (1855), 92–123; [Tayler], ‘The mutual relation of history andreligion’, National Rev., iv (1857), 394–413; [Tayler], ‘Davidson’s Introduction to the New Testament’, Theological Rev.,v (1868), 373–401; [Tayler], Christianity, p. 19.



receive the doctrines of the incarnation or resurrection, the former of which earlierUnitarians had scornfully rejected, not as assertions of supernatural fact, but asimperfect but priceless metaphors for the development of a moral life lived in harmonywith God’s will and in hope of eternal life.38 The real threat to Christianity, arguedMartineau in 1864, was therefore not the criticism of the New Testament but theundermining of those ‘great primary truths of a personal God and of humanresponsibility and immortality’.39 Theistic morality was threatened not by critics whoshowed how awareness of its principles had gradually flowered in Jewish and Christianhistory, but by thinkers who severed its psychological roots by suggesting thatindividuals could not reach behind phenomena to achieve direct contact with God.

The drawing of the battle lines in this way caused a slow change in Martineau’s publicpersona from daring heresiarch to gallant, rather churchy opponent of all those whosought to sever the bond between God and conscience or to repudiate distinctivelyChristian ethics. In the early eighteen-fifties he had fallen out spectacularly not onlywith the editors of the Westminster Review but also with his sister Harriet, whom heaccused in print of ‘mesmeric atheism’.40 In articles produced thereafter for the NationalReview, he came down hard on the agnosticism of John Stuart Mill and Herbert Spencerand the pessimistic neo-Kantianism of Henry Longueville Mansel.41 By the early sixties,these preoccupations had brought Martineau and Tayler into sympathy with a range ofthinkers who shared their concern that the churches were not doing enough to mounta liberal defence of moral duty’s theistic foundations.42 They included churchmensuch as F. D. Maurice (1805–72), J. Llewelyn Davies (1826–1917), J. R. Seeley (1834–95),A. P. Stanley (1815–81) and J.W. Colenso (1814–83); academic liberals such as GoldwinSmith (1823–1910) and Henry Sidgwick (1836–1900); and theistic critics of Christianitywho also opposed scientific naturalism, such as Francis William Newman (1805–97) andFrances Power Cobbe (1822–1904), the British publicist for Theodore Parker and aprominent theorist of theistic ethics in her own right.

The connections forged between thinkers and writers in ‘unorthodox London’ werepersonal as well as intellectual. Cobbe attended services at Martineau’s Little PortlandStreet chapel; Martineau, whose sermons were devoured by broad churchmen, liked,along with other Unitarians, to hear Dean Stanley preach in Westminster abbey.43 SomeUnitarians had even embraced Trinitarian Christianity under Martineau’s teaching,such as his pupil the journalist Richard Holt Hutton (1826–97). If such crossings madea new kind of church seem feasible, so did the growing combativeness of many liberalchurchmen. The willingness of the clerical contributors to Essays and Reviews (1860)and Bishop Colenso to challenge existing constraints on free theological expressionexcited Unitarians, who felt that they were outcrops of a subterranean but widespreaddissatisfaction with orthodox teaching in the church.44 The Unitarian solicitor William

38 [J. Martineau], ‘Tracts for priests and people’, National Rev., xiii (1861), 443; Carpenter, pp. 367–8, 395–6;Tayler, Last Series, ch. 8; Tayler, Christianity, pp. 49, 55.

39 [J. Martineau], ‘The crisis of faith’, National Rev., xix (1864), 251–78.40 Ashton, Strand, pp. 145–6, 200–9.41 [J. Martineau], ‘Mansel’s Limits of religious thought’, National Rev., viii (1859), 209–27; [J. Martineau], ‘Comte’s

life and philosophy’, National Rev., vii (1858), 184–220; [J. Martineau],‘John Stuart Mill’, National Rev., ix (1859),474–508; [J. Martineau],‘Cerebral psychology: Bain’, National Rev., x (1860), 500–21; [J. Martineau], ‘Science,nescience, and faith’, National Rev., xv (1862), 394–419.

42 See generally B. V. Lightman, The Origins of Agnosticism: Victorian Unbelief and the Limits of Knowledge(Baltimore, Md., 1987); Cashdollar, pp. 82–4, ch. 4.

43 F. P. Cobbe, Life of Frances Power Cobbe, as Told by Herself, ed. B. Atkinson (1904), pp. 519–24; Carpenter, pp.485–86.

44 [J. J. Tayler], ‘Old creeds and new beliefs’, National Rev., xii (1861), 151–89.



Shaen (1821–87), who worshipped at Little Portland Street, assisted the hereticalColenso in his 1863–6 battle to retain possession of his see, while other Unitarianscontributed to his legal costs.45 Later publications by Mauriceans such as Seeley andLlewelyn Davies were less contentious, but furthered this impression by stressing thatthe church’s priority must be to encourage a shared moral life rather than to police anarrow doctrinal conformity.46

It spoke for the contrariness of Unitarians that this striking convergence filledMartineau and his friends with gloom.The papers and journals they influenced carriedlengthy dissections of just why it was that their creed, which was so well suited to thetime, failed to win open adherents and was even shedding them. It was no consolationthat many churchmen shared their theological biases when this merely allowedUnitarians to ‘glide into the establishment’ with the ‘sophistical plea’ that its ministersshared their views. Did their addiction to politics put people off? Or was their austerestyle of worship, savouring as it did of the ‘lecture hall’, failing to compete with thechurch’s rich liturgy? Perhaps earnest Christians were repelled by their reputation forforming purse-proud coteries,‘blandly eager to communicate views’ and animated onlyby a ‘hatred of unreal phraseology’?47 In any event, Unitarians apparently still spokewith ‘tainted lips’, the relish of earlier generations for fiercely, even blasphemouslydenying orthodox Christology dogging their ecumenical descendants.48 Martineau’sego was thus bruised when in 1866 he was passed over for a professorship at UniversityCollege London in favour of Croom Robertson – a disciple of Mill whose purelymaterialist theories of human psychology were evidently more acceptable to the Senatethan Martineau’s Unitarianism.49

Such snubs strengthened Martineau and his friends in a conviction that theirproposed defence of ethical theism would only be heard if they succeeded in allayingthe religious public’s entrenched distaste for the Unitarian sect.They encouraged theirown congregations to feel part of the ‘living church’ and to celebrate the truths thatthey shared with other Christians, rather than aggressively parading sectarian dogmas.They should concentrate on what connected them horizontally with other BritishProtestants and vertically with pious Christians in previous ages.50 They pioneered anew eclecticism in Unitarian worship, popularizing Gothic architecture and hymnals,donning gowns and instituting rites of passage.51 This new appropriation of ‘CatholicChristianity’ might ultimately prepare Unitarians for reincorporation into a visible

45 P.W. Clayden, Samuel Sharpe: Egyptologist and Translator of the Bible (1883), pp. 236–9; William Shaen: a BriefSketch, ed. M. J. Shaen (1912), p. 53; J. Drummond and C. Upton, The Life and Letters of James Martineau (2 vols.,1902), ii. 26–9; G. Parsons, ‘Friendship and theology: Unitarians and Bishop Colenso, 1862–5’, Trans. UnitarianHistorical Soc., xxii (2000), 97–110.

46 See, e.g., J. Llewelyn Davies, The Gospel in Modern Life: Sermons on Some of the Difficulties of the Day: witha Preface on a Recent Phase of Deism (1869), chs. 1, 3; J. R. Seeley, ‘The church as a teacher of morality’, in Essayson Church Policy, ed. W. L. Clay (1868), pp. 247–91.

47 ‘Causes of the decline in Unitarianism’, Inquirer, 10 Oct. 1853, p. 635; ‘Unitarian and domestic missions’,Inquirer, 2 June 1853, pp. 337–8; ‘Address to our readers’, Inquirer, 7 Jan. 1865, p. 1; ‘Church organisation’, Inquirer,25 Feb. 1865, pp. 13–14; ‘Our cultus’, Inquirer, 3 Feb. 1865, pp. 63–4.

48 [C. Beard], ‘Foreword’, Theological Rev., i (1864), 17–18.49 C. Beard, ‘University College and Mr Martineau’, Theological Rev., iv (1867), 120; Clayden, pp. 244–5;

Drummond and Upton, i. 410–13.50 J. Martineau, ‘The Unitarian position: a letter to the Rev. S. F. Macdonald’, in his Essays, ii. 371–80; J.

Martineau, ‘The living church through changing creeds’, Theological Rev., iii (1866), 296–306.51 Letters Embracing the Life of John James Tayler, ed. J. H.Thom (2 vols., 1872), ii. 258, 287; L. Smith, ‘Unitarians

and the Gothic revival: church building, 1837–99’, Trans. Unitarian Historical Soc., xvii (1980), 81–7; H. Davies,Worship and Theology in England: from Watts and Wesley to Martineau, 1690–1900 (3 vols. in 1, Cambridge, 1996), ii.264–84.



national establishment.52 For that to happen, though, the establishment must abandonits commitment to ‘stupid uniformity’ and the iniquitous Restoration settlement,which was framed to exclude conscientious Protestants. Yet there seemed littleimmediate prospect of arresting the national church’s weakening hold over the‘national mind . . . this people’s noblest thoughts and purest aspiration’.53 Liberalclergymen appeared to be more preoccupied with evading punishment for views thatcontradicted the creeds and articles than in mounting a principled challenge toconformity. Their reticence was understandable, but Martineau thought it lookedhypocritical to a people that had retained a puritan reverence for honest speech.54

Moreover, liberals appeared to be losing internal battles with high churchmen, whoseinsolent contempt for science and taste for Ritualist flummery were creating in theeducated public a disgust with Christianity itself, rather as Ultramontanism had doneon the continent.55

The establishment of a ‘Catholic Christian Church’ required an independentorganization that could work for the establishment’s truly comprehensivereconstruction. It could not be an explicitly Unitarian body. Not only would thatperpetuate sectarian distrust, but Martineau and Tayler wished to distance themselvesfrom the current British and Foreign Unitarian Association (B.F.U.A., 1824), whosetheological stodginess and spirit of vulgar proselytism they disliked.56 It was a numberof heated debates at the B.F.U.A. about the need to reaffirm commitment to dogmaticpropositions that led the ‘new school’ to plot the establishment of the ‘Free Christian’Union. Its title aptly summed up its objective: to outflank Unitarian conservatives; toflush disgruntled churchmen into an honest stand against the principle of conformity;and to coax free inquirers back into a Christian organization.57 Welcoming theirproceedings from Boston, Charles Eliot Norton wrote that it would be the ‘glory ofUnitarianism’ to serve as the ‘last step of the ascending series by which men reachedthe platform of the Church Universal’.58

The architects of the Church Universal realized they would get nowhere without the‘prominent action’ of a sizeable fraction of the Church of England.59 As the journalismof Charles Maurice Davies, a member of the Union, memorably revealed, midVictorian London was a tangled bank teeming with tiny sects, whose minute size wasin inverse proportion to the scrupulosity of their members.60 The Free ChristianUnion’s ecclesiological principle of love to God and love for man would supposedlyallow it to gobble up this mass of sectarian larvae. Its committee canvassed everyonefrom the Positivist priest Richard Congreve to John Tyndall, the Carlylean prophet ofscientific materialism; from the historian W. E. H. Lecky to Edward Miall, evangelical

52 J. J.Tayler, A Retrospect of the Religious Life of England: or, the Church, Puritanism, and Free Inquiry (1845), pp.6, 223–7.

53 [J. Martineau], ‘The battle of the churches’, Westminster Rev., lviv (1851), 441–96.54 [Tayler], ‘Old creeds’, pp. 178–89.55 J. J.Tayler, A Catholic Christian Church the Want of our Time (1867), p. 39; Martineau, ‘Introduction’, pp. 6–7;

C. Beard, ‘The separation of church and state’, Theological Rev., viii (1871), 77–8.56 A. Ruston, ‘Locked in combat: James Martineau and the Unitarian Association’, Trans. Unitarian Historical

Soc., xxii (2002), 371–83; C. G. Bolam and others, The English Presbyterians: from Elizabethan Puritanism to ModernUnitarianism (1968), pp. 266–8.

57 ‘British and Foreign Unitarian Association’, Inquirer, 10 June 1865, p. 365; Letter, Inquirer, 16 Sept. 1865, p.591; F.C.U., 24.136 (5–6), memoranda on origins.

58 Norton and Howe, p. 296.59 F.C.U., 24.133 (17), J. J. Tayler to W. S. Cookson, 7 Aug. 1867.60 Davies, Unorthodox London; C. M. Davies, Heterodox London, or, Phases of FreeThought in the Metropolis (1874).



editor of the hectoring Nonconformist.61 Yet if it was not to be just another quirky sect,but the seed of a genuinely national and catholic institution, then it would have towork to convert the Church of England to its principles.As the historic establishment,with a presence in every parish and a privileged relationship with the universities, thechurch would rob any other religious pretender to national status of oxygen.Althoughit proved impossible to win over any significant number of Anglicans, the attempt todo so dominated the Union’s short life.

The search initially produced some results. Although Stanley turned down aninvitation to serve as a vice-president, his friend Goldwin Smith, the former regiusprofessor of history at Oxford, did chair the June 1868 conference of members.Smith’s record of opposition to university tests and his vindication of rational theismagainst Mansel made him a natural choice for the Union, but he was soon to departfor the United States.62 The Revd. Charles Kegan Paul (1828–1902) and his friendHenry Sidgwick proved to be much more energetic recruits, although modernbiographers largely pass over this episode in their lives. Paul had begun his clericalcareer as a Mauricean Christian Socialist, but was increasingly drawn to full-blownPositivism. By the time he joined the Union’s committee in November 1867 he wasan open, acerbic critic of Anglican theology but was still in orders.63 Sidgwick’sparticipation followed lengthy misgivings about the historical foundations of Chris-tianity, which culminated in his 1869 decision to resign his fellowship at TrinityCollege, Cambridge rather than take orders. Yet his rebellion against orthodoxChristianity was sustained more by the ‘emotional Theism’ of Francis Newman thanby Comte’s Positivism. He could not conquer an anxiety that man’s ethical purposewould dwindle when cut off from some larger framework of theistic conviction.64 Inthis mood, the Union’s interlinked credo of love to God and for man convincedhim to conquer his ‘fastidiousness’ about working with dissenters and become itsvice-president.65

Yet if Sidgwick and Paul did take part, other prominent liberals in the church – Seeley,Thomas Hughes (1822–96), Benjamin Jowett (1817–93),W. H. Fremantle (1831–1916)and Charles Voysey (1828–1912) – returned evasive or sceptical replies to the Union’sovertures.66 There were pressing reasons why ordained clergymen such as Jowettshould not join in: under the Act of Uniformity, they faced legal sanctions for publicparticipation in the worship of a dissenting sect. They might also face less formal butequally significant social penalties. Sidgwick’s brother Arthur initially hesitated aboutjoining because he was worried about losing his mastership at Rugby School, while Paullost £200 in pupils’ fees when parents saw newspaper reports of a sermon he had

61 F.C.U., 24.132 (18a), ‘List of people to whom circulars have been sent from the Free Christian Union’.62 F.C.U., 24.133 (6), Smith to Clayden, 19 Nov. 1867; F.C.U., 24.133 (7), ‘Notes of the conference June 1868’;

G. Smith, Rational Religion, and the Rationalistic Objections of the Bampton Lectures for 1858 (Oxford, 1861).63 C. K. Paul, Memories (1899), pp. 157–65, 219–22, 264–5; C. K. P., ‘The influence of the Church of England’,

Theological Rev., ii (1866), 286–7; C. K. P.,‘The influence of the Church of England on theology’, Theological Rev.,ii (1865), 522–43; F.C.U., 24.133.48, C. Kegan Paul to Enfield [the Union’s secretary].

64 A. Sidgwick and E. M. Sidgwick, Henry Sidgwick: a Memoir (1906), pp. 74–82, 94, 120–2, 145–467; [H.Sidgwick], ‘Ecce Homo’, Westminster Rev., xxx (1866), 58–88; on his lingering theism, see J. B. Schneewind,‘Sidgwick and the Cambridge moralists’, in Essays on Henry Sidgwick, ed. B. Schultz (Cambridge, 2002), pp. 80,93–122; Schultz, Henry Sidgwick, ch. 5, p. 685; Turner, Between Science and Religion, ch. 2.

65 F.C.U., 24.133.36, Sidgwick quoted in C. K. Paul to E. Enfield, 9 Nov. 1867.66 Trinity, Add. MS. c/94,T. H. Green to H. Sidgwick; F.C.U., 23.133 (73), C.Voysey to Enfield, 16 Jan. 1868;

F.C.U., 24.133 (123),T. Hughes to Enfield, 19 June 1868; F.C.U., 24.133 (42),W. H. Fremantle to Enfield, 2 July1867. Anglicans who did join included Sidgwick’s brother Arthur, his friend J. S. Phillpotts, Charles MauriceDavies and the biblical critic T. K. Cheyne.



preached for the Union.67 Furthermore, although figures like Jowett were perhaps asradical as Martineau in their critique of Christian orthodoxy, they had no wish tocompromise their position within the church. The deeper their passion for adjustingChristian faith to modern culture, the stronger was their attachment to the establishmentas the right vehicle to effect that transformation. Sidgwick warned the committee ofthe paradox that the Union’s commitment to transcend sectarianism would strikechurchmen as the ‘announcement of a new sect, even though it be an unsectarian sect’.68

The more concrete the Union’s proposals – the committee pondered setting up a‘Central Church’ served by ministers of different denominations on a shift system andoffered financial help to new liberal Christian congregations – the more repellent theywere to churchmen who had no wish to trek into the useless obscurity of exile.Theirswas an ‘old method’, Jowett told Sidgwick, which ‘should be left to the old parties’.69

Jowett’s and Stanley’s quarrel with the Union project was essentially strategic.Other liberal Anglicans, notably those influenced by Maurice, were divided bytheological principle.Although similarly concerned that quarrels over doctrinal minutiaewere distracting Christians from more important tasks, they blanched at the Union’ssuggestion that religious communion and the pious service of humanity could be totallydetached from dogmatic agreement. They felt that the Union’s antipathy to theologyverged on positivist rationalism. Maurice, Seeley, Llewelyn Davies or Hughes put strictconformity second to living a Christian life, not because they thought theologicaldogmas unimportant but rather because they exalted one by which all others lookedrelatively unimportant: God’s incarnation in Jesus Christ and through Christ in humanhistory and the natural world.70 For Maurice and many in the subsequent generation ofProtestant modernists in Britain and the United States, liberal Christianity often meantreading historic creedal language in a way that evoked the centrality of the incarnationand its social consequences, rather than an attempt to abolish creeds altogether.71 It wastherefore dangerous to concentrate on the task of demolishing theological systems ratherthan on the positive task of realizing the truths they evoked.As Seeley admonished theUnion’s committee, ‘to reduce dogma to the utmost is only to make Christianityinsignificant unless there is a corresponding . . . development of Christian morality’.72

Advanced Unitarians pitied the limpet-like attachment of Mauriceans toincarnational dogma, which they regarded as a late, albeit poetic incrustation on themoral core of Christianity. The Union’s promoters interpreted demands that theirconstitution should invoke the incarnate authority of Christ as tantamount toforgetting the cardinal distinction between the permanent basis of Christiancommunion and transient additions to it.73 An attempt by Henry Solly (1813–1903),a Unitarian but also a deeply Mauricean Christian Socialist, to include an

67 F.C.U., 24.133 (77), C. K. Paul to Enfield, 4 Feb. 1868; Cambridge University Library (hereafter C.U.L.),Add. MS. 7348/11/75, C. K. Paul to J. M. Ludlow.

68 F.C.U., 23.133 (148), H. Sidgwick to E. Enfield, 18 Nov. 1868.69 Sidgwick and Sidgwick, Memoir, p. 191.70 See J. Llewelyn Davies, ‘Preface’, in his Sermons on the Manifestation of the Son of God: with a Preface Addressed

to Laymen, on the Present Position of the Clergy of the Church of England (1864); Llewelyn Davies, Gospel, ch. 8.71 [R. H. Hutton], ‘Religion and theology’, Spectator, 16 Nov. 1867, pp. 1281–3; J. N. Morris, F. D. Maurice and

the Crisis of Christian Authority (Oxford, 2005), pp. 112–17; P.T. Phillips, A Kingdom on Earth:Anglo-American SocialChristianity, 1880–1940 (University Park, Pa., 1996), pp. 4–5; Hutchison, Modernist Impulse, ch. 4.

72 Trinity,Add. MS. c/93/124/2, J. R. Seeley to E. Enfield, 21 March 1867; D. Bell, ‘Unity and difference: JohnRobert Seeley and the political theology of international relations’, Rev. International Stud., xxxi (2005), 568–72usefully stresses that Seeley’s faith blended intense moralism with a distaste for theological wrangling.

73 See the debate in Inter Amicos: Letters between James Martineau and William Knight 1869–72 (1901), pp. 4–6,22–32.



acknowledgment of Christ’s divine authority in the Union’s constitution was easilydefeated.74 Mauriceans regarded this attitude as condescending. Richard Holt Hutton’sSpectator, which had become a recognized organ for liberal Trinitarianism, lacerated theUnion’s muddled thinking. If the incarnation was set aside as a speculative dogma, whynot follow the positivists in dismissing belief in God on similar grounds?75 If practicalhumanitarianism rather than fussing over dogma was its justifiable priority, why notabandon the ‘curiously futile’ attempts to draw up a vapid creed and concentrateon mobilizing opinion ‘to cleanse St Giles, and house properly its wretchedhordes . . . call[ing] themselves, if they please, a Union of Practical Christians’?76 Thiswas a telling point at a time when philanthropic energy was the litmus test for religiousorganizations. With a pricey yearly subscription of a guinea, the Union faced thecharge that it was just a talking shop for wealthy rationalists, not a real church.77

These charges distressed the Union’s founders, who were keen to show that theirprincipled silence about Christ had nothing in common with Comte’s atheisticreligiosity.78 They set great store on developing distinctively Christian forms ofreligious worship. The Comtists united in the worship of humanity, but the membersof the Free Christian Union would pray together like Christ and to God.79 In June1869, they put on an anniversary service in the Freemasons’ Hall, which turned out tobe the most widely noticed of all its events, attracting a crowd of well-heeledworshippers. It featured sermons by Paul and the French Protestant Athanase Coquerelfils (1820–75), prayers read by Martineau and the Baptist minister William Miall andhymns by Wesley and from the Latin breviary.80

This service was the nearest that the Union came to showing how an undogmaticchurch could have worked in practice. Martineau and Paul designed it to allowindividuals with the prickliest of consciences to pray together, using the riches of theChristian devotional tradition. As Paul wrote in an essay around this time, the ‘certainself-abandonment’ that communal worship necessarily entailed must never involveforcing assent to ‘propositions hard to understand, about whose moral bearing orhistorical accuracy there may be grave doubts’.81 The anniversary service sought tomeet these criteria with the sort of potpourri offered by Martineau in his own chapel:devotional petals without dogmatic thorns. Addresses to God, the ‘Father of our LordJesus Christ’ and Christ as the ‘Son of God’ who gave ‘access by one spirit to theFather’ and effected the ‘redemption of the world’ mingled with prayers for the queenand parliament.82 The service ironically raised the very concerns about hypocrisy it was

74 ‘Free Christian Union’, Inquirer, 29 Nov. 1867, p. 755; letters from Thomas Foster Barham and Henry Solly,Inquirer, 20 July 1868, pp. 478–9.

75 [R. H. Hutton], ‘Dogma’, Spectator, 21 Dec. 1867, p. 1447; on the Spectator at this time, see ‘Introduction’,in A Victorian Spectator: the Uncollected Writings of R. H. Hutton, ed. R. H.Tener and M.Woodfield (Bristol, 1989),pp. 9–10.

76 [H. F.], ‘The Free Christian Union’, Spectator, 7 Dec. 1867, pp. 1380–1.77 F.C.U., 24.133 (71), Charles Beard to Edward Enfield, ‘A universal church, with an annual guinea at the

door! What a paradox!’.78 ‘A Member of the Church of England’, Spectator, 28 Dec. 1867, p. 1484.79 F.C.U., 24.133 (148), H. Sidgwick to J. Martineau, 18 Nov. 1868;Trinity,Add. MS. c/93/124 (3), Martineau,

‘Notes [in answer]’; Trinity, Add. MS. c/94/117/1, J. Martineau to H. Sidgwick, 6 Feb. 1869.80 J. E. Ritchie, The Religious Life of London (1870), pp. 279–88; ‘The anniversary of the Free Christian Union’,

Inquirer, 5 June 1869, pp. 361–2.81 C. K. Paul, ‘On the use of creeds in worship’, Theological Rev., viii (1871), 238–40; see A. O. J. Cockshut, The

Unbelievers: English Agnostic Thought 1840–90 (1964), p. 70, for contemporary debate about the ethics of worship.82 F.C.U., 24.136 (3), ‘Form of prayer to be used at the religious service in connection with the Free Christian

Union, to be held at the Freemasons’ Hall on Tuesday Evening, June 1st, 1869’.



intended to alleviate, with even sympathetic observers feeling that no ‘third alternative’could genuinely unite the majority of Protestants who prayed to Jesus Christ with theminority of Unitarians and freethinkers who merely prayed like Him.83

The suspicion that the Union’s eclecticism disguised a desire to dilute Christianfaith into nothingness explains why most nonconformists equally kept their distance,even though they were not inhibited by the same legal and social barriers as the clergyfaced, or by the Anglican distaste for sectarianism. The young Congregationalistswho formed evangelical nonconformity’s intellectual avant-garde had begun to echoMaurice’s fulminations against confusing human statements of orthodoxy with thedeeper realities recognized by all Christians.84 Yet they continued to think that theirdifferences with Unitarians over the divinity of Jesus Christ were insurmountable, sothat any ‘comprehension’ that resulted from ignoring them would be a hollow thing.To most nonconformists, true faith flourished in a context not of comprehension butof competition, in which members of visible churches were united by frank agreementon key theological principles. They viewed the incarnation and the regeneration ofhumanity through Jesus Christ’s death as the ‘bony fulcrum’ without which communalfaith could only be a ‘molluscous nonentity’.The Union’s attempt to sketch a churchindependent of these realities could only weaken faith in them.85 It left a legacy ofsuspicion. Congregationalists who invoked the ‘church of the future’ now firmlydistinguished its evangelical character from Martineau’s weightless ‘spiritual Utopia’,while those who did float schemes of undogmatic comprehension faced charges thatthey were useful idiots for Unitarianism.86 Even liberal Congregationalists remainedconvinced that the solution to the ethical difficulties of belief must lie not in wideningthe national church but in a renewed campaign against the establishment principle,which would remove worldly inducements to hypocritical conformity.To Martineau’schagrin, the slogans of ‘“Liberation” men’ drowned out the Union’s attempts to starta more temperate conversation on the future of the state church.87

It was testament to the difficulty of framing a position to which all British Protestantscould subscribe that Coquerel’s presence at the 1869 service was easily its most successfulfeature.The Union had always sought European partners, wishing as they did to presenttheir humble band as part of a vaster conflict against the ‘arrogant pretensions of thepriesthood’ and ‘materialistic atheism’.88 AlthoughTayler’s death in 1869 interrupted thecourtship of such luminaries as the French historian of religions Albert Réville andDaniel Schenkel, a leader of the German Protestantenverein,Coquerel was a useful catch.89

An ally of Réville and an admirer of Anglo-American Unitarianism, Coquerel wasembroiled in a struggle against doctrinal tests in the Reformed Church that lookedanalogous to the Union’s attempt to build a new national church. His sermon before theUnion argued that Jesus Christ’s injunction to live ethically before God was the ‘Onething needful’. If the moulting intellectual cladding around this imperative was stripped

83 ‘Free Christianity’, Pall Mall Gazette, 2 June 1869, p. 5; C.U.L., Add. MS. 6258 (E), 59, A. de Morgan to S.Taylor; S. E. de Morgan, Memoir of Augustus de Morgan: with Selections from his Letters (1882), pp. 365–6.

84 See M. Hopkins, Nonconformity’s Romantic Generation: Evangelical and Liberal Theologies in Victorian England(Carlisle, 2004).

85 ‘Comprehension – say ye not, a confederacy’, English Independent, 20 June 1867, pp. 813–14.86 [D. W. Simon], ‘Comprehension’, British Quarterly Rev., lxvii (1878), 153–73; H. Allon, The Church of the

Future (1881), p. 21.87 Martineau to W. Knight, 25 July 1870 (in Inter amicos, p. 33).88 Thom, ii. 324–5.89 Proceedings of the First Anniversary June 1869, with the Report of the Committee (1869), pp. 9–10; for appreciation

of the Protestantenverein, see [C. Beard], ‘Ecclesiastical chronicle’, Theological Rev., ii (1866), 232–5.



away, it could be an endlessly progressive force in modern society.90 This was Martineau’slanguage, but it was easier to applaud a preacher of ‘noble Huguenot ancestry’, who hadno British sectarian axe to grind. Meanwhile Coquerel exploited his trip to drum upfunds for the congregation he had founded in Montmartre.91

While the Union failed to determine principles of communion for the church ofthe future, it helped to vent the swelling dissatisfaction of some ordained membersof the Church of England with subscription, which resulted in the 1870 ClericalDisabilities Act and the 1871 Universities Tests Act.Tayler was fascinated by the way inwhich Essays and Reviews had galvanized debate about the future of dogmaticconformity in the church and wanted the Union to publish a sequel, ‘Essays designedto promote a closer union among all religious persons by the exercise of free thoughtand a catholic spirit’.92 The names of Green, Jowett, H. B. Wilson and Mark Pattisonwere floated as possible contributors. Williams and Norgate, one of whose partnersbelonged to the Union and which issued the Union’s circulars and Martineau’s andCoquerel’s pamphlets, would have published it.93 Although this scheme came tonothing, the Union did end up sponsoring some of the most powerful protests againstthe hypocrisy of clerical subscription. It published Sidgwick’s The Ethics of Conformityand Subscription (1869) and subsidized publication of a pamphlet by Sedley Taylor(1834–1920), a clerical fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge who had just surrenderedhis fellowship in protest against subscription.94 It also entered into talks with Taylor’sfriend W. G. Clark (1821–78), who had similarly resigned his Trinity clerical fellowshipand was seeking assistance in publishing an indictment of subscription.95

Unfortunately, these works were negative contributions to Anglican casuistry,reflecting the ‘half lawyer like habit of mind’ supposedly characteristic of the Churchof England.96 Indeed, the Union declined to subsidize Clark’s pamphlet because itsproposed reforms, such as striking out a few portions of the liturgy, were too ad hocto constitute a blueprint for the ‘Church of the Future’.97 Sidgwick’s was in some waysmore troubling. Rather than proposing a clear line of action for conscientious doubtersin the church, he suggested that they would always be faced with potentiallyirreconcilable duties. The clergyman who wished to advertise his disagreement withthe liturgy had, for instance, to weigh the shock caused to his parishioners and theprospect of surrendering a highly useful position against the harm he was doing to hisconscience. Martineau confessed that Sidgwick had ‘shaken’ his belief in the viability ofa national church.98

90 See A. Coquerel, The One Thing Needful: a Sermon Preached at the First Anniversary of the Free Christian Union,1st June, 1869 (1869); J. Devèze, Athanase Coquerel: sa vie et ses oeuvres (Paris, 1884); A. Coquerel, ‘Christianity andprogress’, in his Four Sermons in English (1872), pp. 27–48.

91 F.C.U., 24.135 (21–7, 42–3, 50–1), correspondence.92 Trinity, Add. MS. c/95/136/1, Tayler to Sidgwick, 23 Dec. 1868; Trinity, Add. MS. c/94/18, Green to

Sidgwick.93 F.C.U., 24.134 (64), S. Williams to Enfield, 15 Dec. 1870.94 Trinity, Add. MS. c/94/67, Jowett to Sidgwick, 25 Jan. 1869; on Ethics of Conformity, see Schultz, Henry

Sidgwick, pp. 132–3.95 F.C.U., 24.135 (12), S. Taylor to Enfield, 18 Dec. 1869; S. Taylor, The System of Clerical Subscription in the

Church of England: its Unjustifiable Character and its Injurious Results Examined (1869); W. G. Clark, The PresentDangers of the Church of England (1869); C.U.L., Add. MS. 6258 (E), 61, Clark to Taylor, 14 Jan. 1870.

96 Trinity, Add. MS. c/94/119, Martineau to Sidgwick, 27 Dec. 1869; F.C.U., 24.135 (14), Martineau toEnfield.

97 F.C.U., 24.134 (20–6), correspondence; Clark, Present Dangers, pp. 12–14.98 H. Sidgwick, The Ethics of Conformity and Subscription (1869);Trinity,Add. MS. c/94/120, J. Martineau to H.

Sidgwick, 18 March 1870.



It was ironic that the Union should have published Sidgwick’s pamphlet.The Unionwas meant to scoop up all those who believed that compromise and evasion could nolonger bridge the ugly ditch between personal belief and public professions of faith.This was Sidgwick’s personal position: he had after all resigned his fellowship.Yet thetenor of his pamphlet was that no simple principle could serve as the foundation of analternative church. A church was necessarily about compromise and its existence mustalways be a matter of trying to perpetuate its role in the moral education of the peoplewhile doing the minimal possible harm to the personal honesty of its ministers. Broadchurchmen who, unlike Sidgwick, saw no obstacle to serving in the church wouldincreasingly favour this kind of argument, putting utilitarian considerations abovenarrow matters of principle, loosening rather than slicing through the Gordian knot.They stressed that liberal clergymen were entitled to spiritualize or to keep silent onthe objectionable doctrines of the church to which they belonged in the interests ofexploiting its very considerable intellectual and institutional resources for the good ofthe nation.99

Divided on so much else, high churchmen, evangelicals and agnostic rebels againstChristianity were united in condemning the dishonesty of this gambit.Yet pragmaticreform of the existing national church at least commanded wider assent as a means ofmodernizing British Protestantism than the visionary pursuit of a church of the future.Churchmen such as Hughes, Fremantle, Seeley and his friend Edwin Abbott (1838–1926) may have steered clear of the Union but they threw themselves into suchpragmatic reforming bodies as the Church Reform Association (1870) or theChurchman’s Union (1898), which aimed to make the national church a more efficientservant of national religion and morality by, for instance, giving the laity a greater sayin its governance.100 Illustrative of this tactic’s appeal was that it drew in Martineau.Other Unitarians concluded from the Union’s failure that the game of courting churchpeople was not worth the candle; they returned to building up sectarian Unitarianorganizations. Never a very fiery dissenter, Martineau rather absorbed the lesson thatthe national church of the future could not be designed from scratch but must evolvefrom the slow, organic ‘expansion of the Church of England’. His declining years werefilled with schemes to repeal the Act of Uniformity, federate dissenting with Anglicancongregations and nationalize places of worship.101 He renounced any hope thatavowed non-Christians such as his friend Francis Newman could find a place in sucha church. ‘What is to unite a nation’, he confessed in 1886, must ‘take up the actualforms of visible social religion’.102

The debates over the Union had in truth shown that it was just as difficult to createa church that the important if nebulous community of non-Christian theists could joinas it was to incorporate members of existing Christian churches.103 By the time of theUnion’s foundation, theists had a crusading publisher in Thomas Scott of Ramsgateand were soon to acquire their own church, headed by the renegade priest Charles

99 Livingston, Ethics, pp. 11–12, 38–42.100 von Arx, Progress and Pessimism, pp. 20–4; Stephenson, English Modernism, pp. 26–7; Cashdollar, ch. 10; A.

Kadish, Apostle Arnold: the Life and Death of Arnold Toynbee, 1852–83 (Durham, N.C., 1986), ch. 4.101 J. Martineau, ‘The expansion of the Church of England’, Contemporary Rev., l (1886), 6–26; J. Martineau,

‘The national church as a federal union’, Contemporary Rev., li (1887), 408–33.102 Drummond and Upton, ii. 125, 108.103 See, e.g., Basis of a New Reformation (Ramsgate, 1868); F. P. Cobbe, Broken Lights: an Enquiry into the Present

Condition and Future Prospects of Religious Faith (1864); and F.W. Newman, The Religious Weakness of Protestantism(Ramsgate, 1866).



Voysey. They were often involved in campaigns against prostitution, drink, vivisectionand cruelty to native peoples. Subscribing as they did to various forms of intuitionistmorality, they believed that all people were immortal persons, with the right to exercisefree will and the duty to rescue themselves and others from the suffering or inflictionof pain.104 The determination of theists to attack what they regarded as the immoralsuperstitions of Christianity often aligned them with crusading secularists and men ofscience under the banner of the ‘New Reformation’.There was nonetheless scope fortheir co-operation in the Union, given Martineau’s close friendships with Cobbeand Newman and their shared anxiety about the threat of materialism.105 Could theUnion’s insistence on the utmost intellectual liberty consistent with love to God andlove of man encompass even those who had rejected the Christian name?

The Union’s founding meetings of June and November 1867 had agonized overthis very question. Martineau’s original motion to establish the Union stated theirbelief that ‘religion’ was independent of history or dogma. Others present hadsuccessfully pressed for a clearer statement that they meant the ‘Christian religion’.Martineau temporized, arguing that he would not ‘shut the door in [the] face’ ofnon-Christians, but stressing that they should feel happy to support the‘commandments of Christ’ that underpinned their union: love to God and love forman.106 This did not satisfy the theists present or those who represented their interests.At the November meeting, William Shaen and the radical preacher Moncure DanielConway (1832–1907) proposed a motion to rename the Union and revise itsconstitution, so that it could admit ‘all persons . . . whether Christian or not, who areprepared to accept the common bond of Love to God, and Love to Man’. Conwayprotested that Carlyle, Mill, Cobbe or Newman, and therefore ‘much of the brain andheart of the religious world’, would be left outside a Christian organization. NeitherParker nor a ‘devout Parsee’ would have been able to preach at their proposed services.Though the motion was lost, Shaen continued to protest against the ‘deplorable andinconsistent restriction’ the Union had imposed on itself.107

Although Cobbe did join the Union, other theists went public with criticisms of achurch that might be Christian but could for that reason not be truly free.108 Newman,who had long yearned for ‘catholic union’ between all theists, argued in his Thoughts ona Free and Liberal Christianity (1868) that the Union was guilty of the very dogmatism itcondemned in others. Its constant invocation of Christ would repel all those who hadsincerely rejected his authority, not to mention Jews, Hindus or Muslims.True believersin free religion would feel no happier entering an avowedly Christian body thanProtestants would on entering a ‘Jesuitical Union’.109 Newman and his admirerswished instead to create a ‘Free Religious Union’ in emulation of the ‘Free ReligiousAssociation’ that dissident Unitarians had just founded in the United States.110 Free

104 See F. W. Newman, Theism: Doctrinal and Practical: or, Didactic Religious Utterances (1858); Shaen, pp. 33–5,65–6; F. P. Cobbe, ‘The new creed and the old, in their secular results’, Theological Rev., iv (1867), 1–21, 241–58;S. Peacock, The Theological and Ethical Writings of Frances Power Cobbe (Lampeter, 2002).

105 For these fears, see, e.g., F. P. Cobbe, ‘Darwinism in morals’, Theological Rev., viii (1871), 167–92; and F.W.Newman, The Two Theisms (1874); Peacock.

106 ‘Free Christian Union’, Inquirer, 22 June 1867, pp. 401–3.107 F.C.U. Minute Book, p. 18; ‘Free Christian Union’, Inquirer, 29 Nov. 1867, pp. 753–5; F.C.U., 24.133 (72),

W. Shaen to E. Enfield.108 F.C.U. 24.133 (143), Cobbe to Enfield.109 F. W. Newman, Thoughts on a Free and Comprehensive Christianity (1868), pp. 6, 9–12.110 F.C.U., 24.133.87, T. Scott to E. Enfield. On the Association, see O. B. Frothingham, Recollections and

Impressions, 1822–90 (New York, 1891), pp. 120–3; D. Robinson, The Unitarians and the Universalists (1985), pp. 6,92, 107–8; ‘Pure theism in America’, Inquirer, 20 June 1868, pp. 389–90.



religion, its leading lights informed British readers,must be a fraternity, not a ‘democraticautocracy’ subject to Christ. It must be universal, not limited to the few who recognizedthe Christian name; it would be realized not in a church but in the ‘coming Republicof the world’ and its motto was America’s, E Pluribus Unum.111

If America kindled exciting visions of democracy among all religious people, thenthe progress of the Brahmo-Somaj movement in India hinted at the existence of a‘wider Theistic Catholic Church’, which insistence on a Christian label necessarilyexcluded.112 Admirers of its leader Keshub Chunder Sen (Keshab Chandra Sen,1838–84), who toured England in 1870, saw him as an oriental champion of the same‘absolute religion’ preached by Parker. Sen was teaching his adherents that the greattruths of human equality and individual responsibility to God testified against caste andgender inequalities in Indian society.113Yet none of the Christian organizations that Senmet on his visit genuinely shared his position. To remedy this gap, Shaen convened ameeting in July 1870 to found a ‘theistic society’, which was pointedly free from theUnion’s exclusivity. Founded to maintain a ‘Belief in the Fatherhood of God and theBrotherhood of Man’, this abortive society was so attentive to scruples of consciencethat its committee could not even decide on what to call themselves. Sen, guest ofhonour at its founding meeting, prematurely congratulated them on founding the‘future Church of the world’.114

The Union and its theistic critics could not therefore agree whether fidelity toindividual conscience obliged one to smash or to work within historic expressions oftheistic spirituality. Did new wine always burst old bottles? Although overly sanguineabout the possibility of a totally undogmatic communion in the Union’s case,Martineau saw the absurdity of legislating for a church that would be completelylacking in historical reference points. He rightly predicted the collapse of Shaen’stheistic society, on the grounds that it vainly attempted to bring together people whowere united only by their inability to compromise one iota of their own views.115 Inanswering Newman’s pamphlet, he had forcefully criticized the notion that religiousliberty must involve a rigorous process of abstraction or subtraction. AlthoughChristianity was neither more nor less than a set of theistic moral principles, it did notfollow that those principles could be usefully extracted from the poetry that previousages had developed to express them. Reformers who picked a fight with Christiantraditions risked ‘interrupt[ing] the Past in its creation of the Future’, deprivingthemselves of the most powerful language that they and others had inherited todescribe their religious convictions.116

Martineau’s critics felt that his deep respect for ‘continuity’ had caused him to strikea false balance between the past and the future. Conway, the American preacher ofSouth Place chapel, was a particularly sharp critic of his genteel rationalism. Under hisministry, which had begun in 1863, South Place had resumed its transition from aUnitarian chapel to a centre of progressive religion, understood as a heightened stateof ethical and aesthetic awareness. Sermons and intercessory prayer gave way to music

111 F. E. Abbot, Thoughts for the Times (Ramsgate, 1872), pp. 6–11.112 Shaen, pp. 55–6.113 [F. P. Cobbe], ‘The Brahmo Samaj’, Fraser’s Magazine, lxxiv (1866), 191–211; S. D. Collet, ‘Indian theism and

its relation to Christianity’, Contemporary Rev., xiii (1870), 230–45; Keshub Chunder Sen’s English Visit, ed. S. D.Collet (1871); T. Masuzawa, The Invention of World Religions (2005), pp. 287–8.

114 Proceedings of the General Meeting of the Theistic Society held at the Freemasons’ Hall, London on Wednesday, 20July 1870 (1870); Collet, Sen’s English Visit, p. 461.

115 Drummond and Upton, ii. 2–3.116 Martineau, ‘New affinities of faith’, pp. 520–1; see Thom, ii. 313, for very similar remarks.



and discourses on Voltaire.117 Although respectful of Martineau’s critical powers andinitially interested in the Union, Conway was soon lampooning it as a ‘Society ofScholars for the Contrivance of Means to Hold on to the Symbols of Christianity’.Instead of Martineau’s Burkean emphasis on what living believers owed to the dead,Conway had a Hegelian vision of the way in which the human spirit first evolved butthen sloughed off successive mythologies. Christianity had served its turn as one suchmythology but had now perished: Conway wrote that there was nothing to be gainedin keeping alive the ‘worship of a dead Jew’. This was meant to be shocking, but notirreligious language: Conway thought that progressive spirituality actually required it.HisVirginian upbringing among God-fearing slave-owners left him keenly sensitive tothe misuse of Christian imagery to rivet the chains of inequality. He warned reticentliberal Protestants that their ‘word worship’ would ‘prop up the throne of superstition’,strengthening those who exploited the people’s piety to keep them in subjection.118

In 1870 Charles Kegan Paul took to verse to lament the end of the Union’s dream to‘bind in one / The scattered family of God / And to bring in one broad path to run/ The separate paths the churches trod’. Just four years later Paul finally abandoned hisorders, began a successful publishing career and embraced Positivism. Before his death,another throw of the religious dice saw him convert to Roman Catholicism.119 Thevery eccentricity of this religious trajectory is representative of the kind of Victorianintellectual who swam into but then through the net cast by organizations like the FreeChristian Union. The logic of its foundation had been that every devout conscienceshared principles that lay beyond the reach of both meddling priests and materializingscientists.The ‘floods of doubt’, orated Martineau in welcoming Keshub Chunder Sento England, would sweep away the ‘wrecks of tradition’, but leave ‘beneath the foot theEternal Rock’.120 Given their trust in these intuitive truths, liberal Protestants musttransform churches that demanded any further dogmatic commitment, so that theybecame true rallying points for all who wished to resist secularizing forces. Martineauand his Unitarian admirers were anxious to build a church that could unite all thosewho wished to defend ‘our native faith in the intuitions of thought and conscience’against those who dismissed them as a by-product of evolution, the ‘hatched andfully-fledged form of the protoplasmic egg’.121

The Union’s life demonstrated particularly well then the contradictions of liberalProtestantism, which promised to allow the maximum possible divergence of religiousbelief while assimilating it into something recognizable as a church. It proved to be animpossible project, because the kind of fudge possible within an existing church wasblatantly obvious in one designed from scratch.The strenuous charity to conscientiousscruple of the thinkers attracted to the Union always courted absurdity. Conway thus

117 On South Place under Conway, see M. D. Conway, Centenary History of the South Place Society (1894);Davies, Unorthodox London, ch. 2; I. D. MacKillop, The British Ethical Societies (Cambridge, 1986), pp. 47–57.

118 M. D. Conway, The Earthward Pilgrimage (1870), chs. 4, 7; M. D. Conway, Christianity (1876), pp. 112, 117–20;M. D. Conway, Autobiography: Memories and Experiences of Moncure Daniel Conway (2 vols., 1904), ii. 13; J.A. Good,‘Introduction’, in The Ohio Hegelians (3 vols., Bristol, 2005), i, pp. xx–xxi.

119 C. K. Paul, ‘On the dissolution of the “Free Christian Union”’, in On the Way Side:Verses and Translations(1899), p. 69; on his later career, see L. Howsam, Kegan Paul, a Victorian Imprint: Publishers, Books, and CulturalHistory (1998).

120 Collet, Sen’s English Visit, pp. 19–20.121 J. Martineau, ‘The place of mind in nature and intuition in man’, in Christianity and Modern Thought, p.

182–3; for similar warnings, see J. R. Moore, The Post-Darwinian Controversies: a Study of the Protestant Struggle toCome to Terms with Darwin in Great Britain and America, 1870–1900 (Cambridge, 1979), ch. 12.



criticized the Union on the grounds that a Christian body could not be truly free, buthe also popped up at Shaen’s theistic society to denounce the illiberalism of excludingpeople who did not believe in God. For Conway, even the desire to worship a God hadcome to seem like an obstacle to a truly religious attitude, the first duty of which mustbe to both understand the world and to improve it.122

Martineau and his sympathizers within Unitarianism experienced the Union’scollapse as a personal failure. Although he retained the respect of liberals within theChurch and unaffiliated theistic thinkers, they did not want to join forces with him andhis vision of the future was soon consigned to the past. Martineau would beincreasingly dismayed by both the recrudescence of apparently uncritical forms ofChristian faith, such as Anglo-Catholicism, and by the popularity of Idealistphilosophy as a means of rescuing the moral kernel of Christianity for the modern age.He felt that the ‘Hegelian formulas’ of Jowett, Green and Edward Caird would destroythe ‘conception and consecration of Personality’ that was the basis of all sound theism.123

The Union had extolled libertarian association as the only means of keeping theisticreligion alive, but the distinctiveness of this position was becoming ever harder tomaintain as the Protestant celebration of religious liberty blurred into avowedlyreligious attacks on theism. In a climate in which the Fortnightly Review could spell‘God’ with a small ‘g’ and Herbert Spencer the ‘unknowable’ with a capital ‘U’, laterattempts to combine intellectual latitude with spiritual unity experienced even greaterdifficulties in deciding whether they were forestalling or advancing secularization.124

Conway’s short-lived Congress of Liberal Thinkers (1878) typified this confusion:disowned not only by Martineau but even by its own vice-president T. H. Huxley asa mere ‘Propaganda of negations’, crusading freethinkers would have nothing to dowith it either.125

The story of the Union demonstrates that in the last analysis even avowedly radicalProtestants like the Unitarians still prized the idea of a church as a means of managingthe escalating breakdown in theological orthodoxy. As distrusted outsiders to thenational church and as members of a high-minded but outnumbered sect, Martineauand his friends feared that the tacit pluralization of belief going on all around themmight just encourage either dishonest conformity or the formation of a scattered andhence ineffectual band of free inquirers. Yet their attempt to create a church thatwelcomed everyone who professed to revere Jesus while excluding no one ran upagainst the enduring distrust of Unitarians as well as the stubborn Anglican convictionthat the existing church was the best vehicle for managing religious change.126 Itsfailure suggests the difficulty of legislating for Protestant freedom, a goal that is bestdefined through what it is not. As the Union’s detractors suggested, it was morepromising to try to foster unity not through theological debates that restated the splitsthey sought to transcend, but by concentrating on simple philanthropic goals. Mary

122 M. D. Conway, ‘Theism, atheism, and the problem of evil’, Theological Rev., ix (1872), 207–20.123 See dismissive remarks in W. Knight, Retrospects (1904), pp. 122, 135; Drummond and Upton, ii. 226; Inter

amicos, p. 2; and Martineau,‘The relation between ethics and religion’, in Essays, iv. 305, 312. P. Hinchliff, BenjaminJowett and the Christian Religion (Oxford, 1987), chs. 7, 9 discusses Idealism’s Christian preoccupations.

124 Conway, Autobiography, p. 46.125 Conway, Autobiography, p. 354; L. Huxley, Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley (2 vols., 1900), ii. 265–6;

A. Desmond, Huxley: from Devil’s Disciple to Evolution’s High Priest (1998), p. 500. For similar tensions in thedevelopment of the American Free Religious Association, see Robinson, Unitarians, pp. 113–15; F. E. Abbot,Scientific Theism (1885);Turner, Without God, p. 241;W. Creighton Peden, The Philosopher of Free Religion: FrancisEllingwood Abbot, 1836–1903 (New York, 1992).

126 See, e.g., H. R. Haweis, The Broad Church: or, What is Coming (1891).



Ward (1851–1920) discovered this when in the eighteen-nineties she tried to bringbroad churchmen together with the next generation of liberal Unitarians to found aHall of Liberal Theology on the very premises in which the Free Christian Union hadbeen founded. The Hall, which turned Robert Elsmere’s New Brotherhood of Christfrom fiction into fact, foundered when its inmates turned out to be more interested inslumming than in lectures on the Pentateuch.127 As a bromide for fears aboutsecularization, as a potent metaphor for social reform or for the activity of a literaryclerisy, the idea of an intensely moral but utterly undogmatic church had a promisingfuture.128 Yet the Union’s demise had shown that what worked as metaphor made apoor guide to reality.129

127 C. H. Herford, Philip Henry Wicksteed: his Life and Work (1931), pp. 95–100.128 Phillips, A Kingdom on Earth, pp. 182–3; Bell, p. 569.129 See now E. Kaye, ‘Heirs of Richard Baxter? The Society of Free Catholics, 1914–28’, Jour. Eccles. Hist., lviii

(2007), 256–72, for a later but equally marginal society that thought along similar lines as the Union.



Documents

Unitarians and the contradictions of liberal Protestantism in Victorian Britain: the Free Christian Union, 1867–70