Heaven on Earth

G.M. Young saw the mind of Victorian England as ‘employing the energy imparted by evangelical conviction to rid itself of the restraints which evangelicalism had laid on the senses and the intellect; on amusement, enjoyment, art; on curiosity, on criticism, on science’. In approaching the history of evangelicalism, Martin Spence is self-consciously revisionist, and his important, learned, wide-ranging, reflective book quietly and courageously shows how ill-informed that great scholar of Victorianism could sometimes be. Spence repudiates attempts to view nineteenth-century religion crudely in terms of ‘church parties’, emphasises the need for historians to take full account of theological ideas, and stresses ‘the need to re-appraise the whole character’ of the mid-nineteenth-century evangelical movement. ‘The central rationale for this book’, he writes, is that it ‘unlocks a significant element of the nineteenth-century theological mind’. With clever phrasing and wry humour, he topples not only Young, but frequently and courteously undermines the ill-informed generalisations of more recent historians. Like his evangelicals scrutinising the centuries to discover God’s plan for humankind, Spence pushes through thickets of detail in his quest for a better way of understanding the Victorians. Only in his insufficiently differentiated index does he fail fully to exploit his opportunities: who will labour through forty-eight undifferentiated references to ‘heaven’, or thirty-three to Thomas Rawson Birks

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