Tuesday 7 May 2013

Regency Snippets - Religion

"Popery was despised.

It was the last age in which a majority of educated men grew up without doubt.

The old church and non-conformists were at loggerheads. Scornful squires forbade tenants to hear Methodists and Weslyans.

Methodists united Britain in the face of revolutionary peril by convincing the more serious minded workders of the validity of Christian ethics, the great 18th century evangelists inoculated the poor against the Jacobin fever that was sweeping the Continent. Only where there was hunger and intolerable injustice did the virus triumph and then only for so long as the more extreme hardships remained unalleviated."

Arthur Bryant