The Dissenters. Vol. III

The final instalment of a three-part series, this is a rich, substantial and rigorously documented history. In weight and detail it surpasses existing studies of its subject, with appendices alone running to more than one hundred pages. Michael R. Watts tells the story of religious dissent in England and Wales—‘the descendants of men like Oliver Cromwell’—from the Victorian high noon to the ‘Liberal Landslide’ election of 1906, when the Nonconformist conscience registered a final, stunning victory in the British political arena. Throughout the book, Watts marries heft with nuance and detail, and, if the conclusions are undramatic, the overall impression is one of sustained quality and authority. The discussion of hell’s ‘dismissal’, for example, in the first part of the book, brings a familiar cast of characters to new life. Watts’s treatment of the gentle rebellions of F.D. Maurice, Samuel Cox and John Clifford, to name but three, brings a new level of sympathy and erudition to the theological crisis that he regards as the very solvent of dissenting energies. At the heart of this discussion, indeed of the book itself, is the paradox of a benign transition from a theology of terror and judgement which nevertheless proved fatal to Nonconformist energy and integrity. With palpable sympathy for the softeners and the liberalisers, and occasionally sharp distaste for hell’s defenders, Watts affirms the costs of a ‘larger’ yet ultimately anodyne gospel. The battle was personified by the Baptist titans, Charles Spurgeon and John Clifford. ‘Where Spurgeon was proud, conservative, rigid, dogmatic, and authoritarian’, Watts writes, ‘Clifford was humble, liberal, open-minded, and tolerant’. While one could ridicule evolution and boast of a certain immunity to new ideas, the other was a reader, ‘who placed a high value on learning’ (p. 66). But instead of the expected morality tale of how the future would belong to Clifford, we gradually learn that the future belonged to neither. As the Clifford generation began to blur the boundaries between the saved and the unsaved, the church and the world, Nonconformity began to suffer ‘the failure of success’. Such was the story of ‘the Institutional Church’ and the dissenting lurch into recreation and education, covered in the second part of the volume. The discussion of ‘the conscience of dissent’, in the third and final section of the book, captures a similar set of tensions—the power of indignation and the diminishing returns of ‘Nonconformist anger’; vigorous disagreement as to the meaning of ‘providence’. It is to Watts’s credit that he does not try to adjudicate upon such ultimately theological questions. This is especially apparent in one of the outstanding sections of the book, the discussion of ‘Imperialism and the Missionary Conscience’, in Chapter Eight, which shows how Christian missionaries came to be regarded as imperial oppressors in one context (China) and ‘liberators’ in several others: ‘the West Indies, throughout much of the Pacific and black Africa, and among the outcasts of India’ (p. 337). This book will delight specialists and it will serve any student of the nineteenth century with rich insights into the lost world of the free churches

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