A history of England

by Charles Oman

The Factory Acts.

Meanwhile many other characteristic features of modern English social life were rapidly developing themselves. We have mentioned the misery of the operative classes in the great towns in an earlier chapter. The first efforts to amend their condition date from the years 1832-52. Philanthropists, of whom Lord Shaftesbury was the best known, strove unceasingly to put an end to the worst horrors of the new industrial system. In 1833 acts were passed to prevent mill-owners from working children in their factories for more than half-time. In 1844 Sir Robert Peel put women under the same protection, prohibited lads under eighteen from being given more than twelve hours' labour, and appointed inspectors to go round the factories and see that the law was carried out. The Mines Act of 1842 prohibited women and children from working underground, and a second Mines Act of 1850 put all subterranean labour under government inspection. This benevolent legislation was mainly due to the Tories, for the Liberals, wedded to the principles of strict political economy, were loth to interfere between employer and workman, and generally urged that matters ought to be allowed to right themselves by the laws of supply and demand.

Trades Unions.

A not less effective means of protection for the operative classes was devised by the workmen themselves. Trades Unions became possible after the laws prohibiting combination of labourers had been repealed in 1824, though governments, both Whig and Tory, still looked upon them with much suspicion and disapproval, and occasionally suppressed them under the plea that they were secret societies for coercing free labour. Strikes, then as now, were often accompanied with violence and rioting, and it had not yet been realized that they might often be justified. But in spite of the frowns of those in authority, the Unions were continually growing in number and in power all through the middle of the century, though they had not yet assumed the inquisitorial and dictatorial tone which they have adopted in our own day, and were still defensive rather than offensive in their character.

The state of the Church.

While social England was thus assuming its modern shape, the chief factors of the spiritual and intellectual life of the present day were also coming into being. To the period 1832-52 belongs the rise of both of the movements which have stirred the minds of men during the last fifty years. In the early years of the century the condition of the Church of England was very unsatisfactory. The only body within its pale who displayed any zeal or true spiritual life were the Evangelicals, the heirs of the men who had been stirred by the preaching of the contemporaries of Wesley. [63] But they were not a very numerous body, for their general acceptance of the harshest doctrines of Calvinism repelled the majority; moreover, they were destitute of organization, for they worked to increase the religious fervour of the individual soul, not to reform the Church. Yet the Church needed reforming; its higher ranks were still filled by "Greek-play bishops" and promoted royal chaplains; the bulk of the parish clergy, though genial honest men, were neither learned, zealous, nor spiritual-minded, differing often only by the colour of their coats from the squires with whom they associated. The worst part of the situation was that the new masses of the population in the great towns were slipping out of religious habits altogether, owing to the want of missionary zeal among their pastors, and the deplorable dearth of religious endowment in the new centres of life.

The "Broad- Church" movement.

The reaction against the deadness of the national Church took shape in two new forms. The first was the "Broad-Church" movement, started by men who wished to broaden and popularize the Church by bringing its teaching into accordance with the latest discoveries in science and in history, and by giving it a basis on philosophy rather than on dogma. The first great name in this school was Archbishop Whately (1787-1863); he and his contemporaries laid more stress on logic and philosophy than did the younger generation of Broad Churchmen, who devoted themselves more to reconciling science and religion, and to bringing to bear on the history of Christianity new historical and scientific lights. They only agreed in setting dogma aside, advocating the widest freedom of opinion, and preaching the application of the spirit of Christianity to the everyday acts and duties of life.

The Tractarian movement.

Very different were the views and aims of the other party in the Church which arose in the years between 1830 and 1840. The new High-Church school thought that the deadness of spiritual life in their day came from a neglect of dogma and a want of appreciation of the unity and historical continuity of the Church of England. Most men then held that the national Church only dated from the Reformation, and that the Bible was the only basis of its doctrines. Against these views the leaders of the new school—the Oxford movement as it was called, because its three leaders, John Henry Newman, John Keble, and Edward Pusey, were all resident Fellows of Oxford colleges—entered an emphatic protest. They said that the Church of 1835 was the Church of Anselm and Augustine, and that those who wished to make it the Church of Henry VIII. and to cut it off from its place in the unity of Christendom, were guilty of national apostacy. They taught that it was still bound to hold all the dogmas and usages which could be traced back to the days of the early Fathers. Most especially they laid stress on two doctrines of which little had been heard since the days of the Stuarts—the Real Presence in the Sacrament, and the sacrificial priesthood of the clergy. Newman started a series of "Tracts for the Times," to which his friends and followers contributed; they urged that submission to authority in matters doctrinal, and a return to the ritual and practice of the early Church could alone revivify English spiritual life. Unfortunately, it was impossible to find any universally received authority to which to appeal, since Low Churchmen and Broad Churchmen alike denied the first postulates of the Tractarian creed, and fell back on the Thirty-nine Articles and the practice of the last two centuries as the only standard of faith and ceremony that they would recognize. They added that those who yearned after mediaeval doctrine and ritual were mere disguised Romanists, and would find what they wanted in Popery alone.