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The Call to Seriousness

其他書名	The Evangelical Impact on the Victorians
出版	Cape, 1976
主題	History / Europe / Great Britain / GeneralReligion / Christianity / AnglicanReligion / Christianity / Protestant
ISBN	02240116269780224011624
URL	http://books.google.com.hk/books?id=iX7ZAAAAMAAJ&hl=&source=gbs_api

註釋“Much of the piety, prudery, imperialistic sentiment, philanthropic endeavour and obsession with proper conduct that we think of as the distinctive characteristics of the Victorians can be traced back to the influence of the Evangelicals. This group of austere and high-minded puritans was the product of the religious revival in eighteenth-century England which had introduced the demanding new creed of ‘vital religion’. The distinguished civil servant Sir James Stephen epitomized their spirit by once smoking a cigar and finding it so delicious that he never smoked again. Many hooped that Victoria’s accession to the throne in 1837 might reverse the trend; but they were sadly disappointed, for surely there was no more serious exponent of the whole serious, high-minded age than its monarch.The impact of Evangelicalism during the first half of the nineteenth century was devastating. As one historian has put it, ‘Between 1780 and 1850 the English ceased to be one of the most aggressive, brutal, rowdy, outspoken, riotous, cruel and blood-thirsty nations in the world and became one of the most inhibited, polite, tender-minded, prudish and hypocritical.’ By the 1850s piety had become the fashion and dramatic conversions were all the rage. Over-zealous Evangelicals were a favourite subject of Victorian novelists. Thackeray satirized the activities of the Clapham Sect in The Newcomes and Anthony Trollope’s mother, Frances, wrote The Vicar of Wrexhill to show the terrible power of Evangelical influence. Dickens, through Mrs Pardiggle in Bleak House, and Wilkie Collins, through Miss Clack in The Moonstone, were boldly illustrating that philanthropy had become a cult.In this fascinating analysis of the effects of the Evangelical movement, Ian Bradley examines what made this call to seriousness so compelling to the Victorians, why their missionary zeal came to play so important a part in imperial policy, and how their crusade against vice came to transform the public’s morals so dramatically. He looks at the impact of the Evangelicals on the development of the professional middle classes in Britain and on the institutions of home and family. From a vast body of material, and with impeccable scholarship, he traces their methodical infiltration of the Anglican Church, weighing their influence not only on nineteenth-century England but on Britain today.”- Publisher