If we were to judge of Hannah More's writings by their popularity, and the undoubted effects which they produced, or by the testimony which men of approved talents and discernment have borne to their value, we should place her in the very first rank of eighteenth century writers. 'Her style and manner are confessedly superior to those of any moral writer of the age.' She is 'one of the most illustrious females that ever was in the world. 'One of the most truly Evangelical divines of this whole age, perhaps almost of any age not apostolic.' Bishop Porteus actually recommended her writings both in a sermon and in a charge. A feeling of disappointment will probably be raised in most readers who turn from these extravagant eulogies to the works themselves. They are full of somewhat vapid truisms, and their style is too ornate for the present age. Like so many writers of her day, she wrote Johnsonese rather than English. She loved long words, and amplified where she should have compressed. However, it is an ungracious task to criticise one who did good work in her time. After all, the truest test of the merits of a writer who wrote with the single object that Hannah More did, is the effect she produced. Her writings were once readable and very influential. If the virtue now appears to have gone out of them, we may be thankful that it lasted so long as it was needed.
To conclude this long chapter. If any think that the picture here drawn of the leaders of the Evangelical Revival is too highly coloured, and that in this, as in all human efforts, frailties and mistakes might be discovered in abundance, the writer can only reply that he has not knowingly concealed any infirmities to which these good men were subject, though he frankly admits that he has touched upon them lightly and reluctantly. He feels that they were the salt of the earth in their day; that their disinterestedness, their moral courage in braving obloquy and unpopularity, their purity of life, the spirituality of their teaching, and the world of practical good they did among a neglected people, render them worthy of the deepest respect. It would have been an ungracious task ruthlessly to lay bare and to descant upon their weaknesses. That was done mercilessly by their contemporaries and those of the next generation. There is more need now to redress the balance by giving due weight to their many excellences.
It seems all the more necessary to bring out into full prominence their claims upon the admiration of posterity, because they have scarcely done justice to themselves in the writings they have left behind them. They were not, as they have been represented, a set of amiable and well-meaning but weak and illiterate fanatics. But their forte no doubt lay more in preaching and in practical work than in writing.
Again, the stream of theological thought has to a great extent drifted into a different current from that in which it ran in their day, and this change may have prevented many good men from sympathising with them as they deserved. The Evangelicals of the last century represented one side, but only one side, of our Church's teaching. With the spirituality and fervency of her liturgy and the 'Gospel' character of all her formularies, they were far more in harmony than the so-called 'orthodox' of their day. But they did not, to say the least of it, bring into prominence what are now called, and what would have been called in the seventeenth century, the 'Catholic' features of the English Church. They simply regarded her as one of many 'Protestant' communions. Distinctive Church principles, in the technical sense of the term, formed no part of their teaching. Daily services, frequent communions, the due observance of her Fasts and Festivals, all that is implied in the terms 'the æstheticism and symbolism of worship,' found no place in their course. The consequence was that while they formed a compact and influential body which still remained within the pale of the Church, they also revived very largely, though unintentionally, the Dissenting interest, which was at least in as drooping a condition as the Church of England before the Evangelical school arose. But every English Churchman has reason to be deeply grateful to them for what they did, however much he may be of opinion that their work required supplementing by others no less earnest, but of a different tone of thought.
FOOTNOTES:
[708] More true than the assertion which follows—'and Count Zinzendorf rocked the cradle.'
[709] He was, however, sometimes tempted to use unseemly language of the clergy. See extracts from his journals quoted in Warburton's Doctrine of Grace.
[710] 'Remarks on the Life and Character of John Wesley,' by Alexander Knox, printed at the close of Southey's Life of Wesley, vol. iii. p. 319.
[711] In the Minutes of Conference, 1747, 'What instance or ground is there in the New Testament for a "national" Church? We know none at all,' &c. 'The greatest blow,' he said, 'Christianity ever received was when Constantine the Great called himself a Christian and poured in a flood of riches, honour, and power upon the Christians, more especially upon the clergy.' 'If, as my Lady says, all outward establishments are Babel, so is this establishment. Let it stand for me. I neither set it up nor pull it down.... Let us build the city of God.'
[712] But he asserts the rights of the civil power in things indifferent, and reminds a correspondent that allegiance to a national Church in no way affects allegiance to Christ.—(Letter in answer to Toogood's Dissent Justified, 1752. Works, x. 503-6.)