THE ABC’s OF HOLINESS
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The second half of the nineteenth century was not kind to Victorian evangelicals.
Darwin’s ideas, which first appeared in print in The Origin of Species in 1859, began to undermine the faith of some, just as German higher criticism of the Old Testament reached British shores in Essays and Reviews. Meanwhile, the Ritualists were busy unprotestantizing the Church of England, as men of “broad views” were insisting that sincerity — not truth — was the “one thing needful.” To make matters worse, relations between evangelical churchmen and dissenters reached new lows, and attacking (or defending) the establishment became a near-universal ecclesiastical obsession.
But in the 1870s, a renewal movement imported from America seemed to offer new spiritual life to embattled evangelicals. It promised full salvation and complete deliverance from all known sin — essentially a second conversion experience — and all one had to do was simply “let go and let God.” A series of popular meetings was held throughout England to promote this new vision of the Christian life, and the Keswick Convention was born.
Description
The second half of the nineteenth century was not kind to Victorian evangelicals.
Darwin’s ideas, which first appeared in print in The Origin of Species in 1859, began to undermine the faith of some, just as German higher criticism of the Old Testament reached British shores in Essays and Reviews. Meanwhile, the Ritualists were busy unprotestantizing the Church of England, as men of “broad views” were insisting that sincerity — not truth — was the “one thing needful.” To make matters worse, relations between evangelical churchmen and dissenters reached new lows, and attacking (or defending) the establishment became a near-universal ecclesiastical obsession.
But in the 1870s, a renewal movement imported from America seemed to offer new spiritual life to embattled evangelicals. It promised full salvation and complete deliverance from all known sin — essentially a second conversion experience — and all one had to do was simply “let go and let God.” A series of popular meetings was held throughout England to promote this new vision of the Christian life, and the Keswick Convention was born.
