Rowan Strong

Edward Bouverie Pusey became directly involved with the Scottish Episcopal Church in the 1850s and 1860s as a consequence of two major issues. The first occurred as a result of the accusation of heresy and the subsequent trial of Bishop Alexander Penrose Forbes of Brechin from 1857 to 1860, over his teaching about the 'Real Objective Presence' of Christ in the Eucharist. The second was the prospective relinquishing of their indigenous Communion Office by the Scottish church in the early 1860s...

The Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts (SPG), founded in 1702, was the first and only British missionary society, until the advent of Evangelical mission societies in the 1790s. This article explores the annual anniversary sermons of the SPG from the society’s establishment until the 1790s. Throughout the eighteenth century, the SPG mission sermons constructed identities for the various colonial North American and, to a lesser extent, West Indian, populations that were the targets of SPG missions.

In 1847 Bishop George Selwyn was on one of his inland trips by Maori canoe, going down the Kaipara and waitara rivers in Northland. With characteristic Victorian obsession about avoiding idleness, he took with him a copy Henry Manning's The Unity of the Church published in 1842, reading it while his Maori helpers did the work of paddling. manning had sent the work to Selwyn out of his long-time concern for the spread of the Church of England into the British Empire. Selwyn was grateful, as he believed that the division of Christianity into competing denominations was a hindrance in commending his religion to the Maori. Selwyn was particularly grateful for this indication of esteem from the influential High Church Archdeacon of Chichester. He regarded Manning as having been instrumental in his vocation as the first Bishop of New Zealand. Manning and Selwyn had an intermittent correspondence during the 1840s, with manning sending the colonial bishop copies of his various archidiaconal charges, his university sermons, and dedicating the fourth volume of his published sermons to Selwyn as an exemplar of ushering in the kingdom of God by deeds, not mere words. The correspondence in turn enabled Selwyn to air his own views in support of the Anglican National Society for the Education of the Poor in the Principles of the Established Church in the contentious English national debate over education in that decade.

The British Empire was the British state at its most expansive and diverse, though it was far from being as collectivised as the metropolitan British state was becoming by the mid-nineteenth century. The Church of England had moved during the first half of the nineteenth century from a paradigm of partnership with the state with regard to its colonial extension to one of increasing autonomy. This paradigm shift had begun in the 1840s with the establishment of the Colonial Bishoprics Fund in 1841 and was increasingly well-entrenched in church circles by the succeeding decade. This chapter looks at the interface in the mid-nineteenth century between the Church and England and the imperial state of which it was still nominally the established church. it does so through the viewpoint of prominent Anglican preachers in England, both from Britain and the colonies. The sermons indicate a more critical distance between church and state in this period with respect to the British Empire, and an engagement with the empire by the Church of England that increasingly left the state out of the reckoning. The chapter focuses on the reasons behind this development, and the ways in which these leading Anglicans configured the empire as the nineteenth century drew closer to its period of high imperialism in British culture.

In 1493-94, Pope Alexander VI divided the globe between Spain and Portugal with reference to their conquest of the territories of the New World. In the eighteenth century, Anglicans divided the globe into the territory of Christ and the lands and peoples under the dominion of Satan...This essay examines the views of the afterlife propounded by the annual preachers of the anniversary sermons of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts (SPG) in the first twenty years following its foundation in 1701...