The Christian Monitors, The Church of England and the age of benevolence

摘要

This important book traces the eighteenth century 'age of benevolence' to the Anglican crisis of the 1680s. Sirota's thesis is that faced with the threat of the succession of James, and once he had succeeded with the threat of an oppressive Catholic monarchy, the Church of England saw its salvation in a renewed strengthening of its pastoral mission and charitable work. This in turn sparked an Anglican revival rooted in benevolence that endured for the next 50 years. It was this revival that produced the 'blue water' Anglicanism that spread it across the world. As Sirota acknowledges, the revival was intimately bound up with the Church's identity forged in the revolutionary events of 1688-9. Into this renewal Sirota sweeps up existing institutions such as the societies for the reformation of manners and the Corporation of the Sons of the Clergy as well as organisations like the SPCK and SPG which were founded more than a decade after the Revolution. A centrepiece of the revival, however, was that it injected the idea of benevolence into the mainstream of British society and by the end of the eighteenth century munificence had become synonymous with Britishness and with Anglicanism.