Congregationalism and the Evangelical Magazine

The Evangelical Magazine was founded in 1793 as a non‐denominational voice of evangelical culture, embracing Anglican Evangelicalism, Old Dissent, and New Dissent (Altholz, Religious Press in Britain, 45). In the preface to the first issue, the magazine situates itself in a world of advancing literacy in which “it will be a rare thing to find a beggar in the land who has not been taught to read” and in which “[t]housands read a Magazine, who have neither money to purchase, nor leisure to peruse, large volumes”. Yet, this progress is co‐opted by “a certain description of writers” who, “by monopolizing a work of this kind, have made more converts to their opinions, and done more mischief to the cause of religion, than all the folios of Socinus [i.e., Socinianism]”. To counter this influence, the Evangelical Magazine will convey “the collected knowledge and experience of various Ministers and Christians” in a form that is level “to every oneʼs capacity, and suited to every oneʼs time and circumstances”, as “elucidated” by the “fundamental doctrines of the Gospel” and by “the lives and experience of eminent Christians”—that is, “Experimental and Practical Theology”. On a more learned level, against the more “artful attacks of atheistical philosophers” and “infidel and illiberal critics”, the magazine will undertake “a manly and impartial Review of Religious Books” (“Preface” [January 1793], 1–2).

In its aspiration to represent a catholicity of evangelical aims and opinion based on experiential religion, the magazine was oriented to a broad movement for evangelical union that originated in the Great Awakening of the eighteenth century. In Scotland, the movement was forwarded in the first decade of the nineteenth century by the preaching and organizational efforts of the Haldane brothers, Robert (1764–1842) and James (1768–1851). Their organizing was associated with the rise of Scottish Congregationalism—the worship that the Ruskins favored in their first decades in London—and in their preaching, the Haldanes were partnered by English evangelicals, Charles Simeon (1759–1836) and Rowland Hill (1744–1833). Their itinerant preaching tours took in central Scotland, especially Perthshire, where John James Ruskinʼs sister, Jessie, eventually settled. Throughout central and northern Scotland, Robert funded the establishment of independent chapels or tabernacles, including the three‐thousand‐seat Leith Walk Tabernacle in Edinburgh—a large place of worship that, like Hillʼs Surrey Chapel in Blackfriars, London, and the Reverend Dr. Edward Andrewsʼs Beresford Chapel, which the Ruskins attended, was built to occupy a space between evangelicalism and the church establishment. Nonetheless, in Scotland, the Haldanesʼ evangelical fervor and criticism nettled the ministers of the Church of Scotland, whose pulpits the Haldanes and their associates often borrowed during their itinerant tours. Moreover, a social division prevailed between the populist movement and the more formally educated and conservative clergy of the established church, the kirk. (John James Ruskinʼs mother, Catherine, was the daughter of a minister of the Church of Scotland.) Robert Haldane, in particular, provoked conservatives early in his career by fomenting his advocacy of principles of the French Revolution. Eventually, the Haldanes splintered their movement owing to their conversion to Baptism, among other reasons, but this latter development appears only marginally connected to the Ruskinsʼ experience of Congregational worship in the suburbs south of London (Brownell, “Robert and James Haldane and the Quest for Evangelical Union”; Lovegrove, “Haldane, James Alexander [1768–1851]”; Lovegrove, “Haldane, Robert [1764–1842]”).

Despite the pull for unity, the Congregational wing of the early nineteenth century was firmly Calvinist in theology; and in keeping with that emphasis, the 1793 preface to volume one of the Evangelical Magazine proudly numbers among the “persons of evangelical principles in the kingdom” currently “three hundred thousand Calvinists” while perhaps nodding distantly to the Arminian Wesleyans among the “many others, savingly converted to God, who trust in the merits of Christ alone for salvation”. Still, the magazine pronounces itself “devoid of personality and acrimonious reflections on any sect of professing Christians” and commits to including both “Churchmen and Dissenters” among the team of “twenty‐four Ministers” who serve as editors and contributors. The editorial approach is to amass a “collected knowledge”, drawn not only from the ecumenical panel of editors but also from readers, whose “judicious pieces” are invited for submission, “especially well‐authenticated accounts of triumphant deaths, and remarkable providences” (“Preface” [January 1793], 1–3). Thus, whereas the Ruskins were not magazine readers by necessity—since they ranked comfortably among those with “money to purchase”, and “leisure to peruse, large volumes” denied to many among the magazineʼs target audience—John was exposed to an early Victorian model of crowdsourcing in print culture.

Addressing younger readers, “the children of religious parents”, the magazine offers to “allure” them “through pleasure, into the paths of true wisdom” by means of entertaining genres such as “Biography, Memoirs, Diaries, Authentic Anecdotes, Striking Providences, and the expressions of Dying Christians”. Add to these life‐writing genres the magazineʼs single feature of visual art, the engraved portraits that accompany the lead biographies in each issue, these attractions cannot fail to “arrest the mind” and “make a deep impression” on young persons, while the more exciting reading is tempered by sober instruction in “Ecclesiastical History, Jewish and Christian Antiquities, Sacred Criticism, Select Sentences, Short Poems, and Natural Philosophy”. Thus, on the one hand “charmed” with the testimony of “the illustrious virtues and rich experience of those very people whom the world has treated with contempt“ and on the other hand “impressed with admiration of the works of God”, young readers “will insensibly be led to examine the far superior displays of divine perfections, and the foundation of Christian hope and practice” (“Preface” [January 1793]).

In 1823, with the start of the new series of the magazine, the spirit of pan‐evangelical catholicity of opinion and mission was reaffirmed, but with the acknowledgment that the commitment had undergone strain over the first three decades of publication. A “Retrospect” published in the first issue of the new series admitted to the emergence of rival denominational publications on both the Anglican Evangelical and Congregational sides. In fact, the editorship of the Evangelical Magazine had itself become dominated by Congregationalists, just as that sect held increasing sway over the organization that the magazine prominently represented, the London Missionary Society (LMS) (“Retrospect of the Former Series of the Evangelical Magazine”, 1; Altholz, Religious Press in Britain, 46; Thorne, Congregational Missions and the Making of an Imperial Culture, 24).

Starting in 1813, the magazine expanded its title to the Evangelical Magazine and Missionary Chronicle, having already begun in previous issues to devote “a fifth of their pages to . . . religious information, under the title of The Missionary Chronicle; which includes the Proceedings of all Societies instituted for the spread of the gospel” but especially the activities of the LMS (“Preface” [12 December 1813], iii–iv). So prominent and detailed are the reports of LMS activity that the Ruskinsʼ (or at least Margaretʼs) regular reading of the Evangelical Magazine necessarily implies a strong interest in missionary work. Indeed, the enthusiasm surrounding foreign missions appears to account for a significant part of what tied the Ruskins to Congregationalism at this time, as documented by Ruskinʼs “a theme”, which is a transcript or summary of a meeting for soliciting support of missionary work. The Ruskinsʼ interest in missions can also be measured by the entire familyʼs eager reading of the journals and poetry of the Reverend Reginald Heber, Bishop of Calcutta. They were drawn to Heberʼs celebrity, just as they were impressed by the rising reputation of the Reverend Dr. Edward Andrews, who likewise encouraged the missionary cause.

The Ruskins were not uncharacteristic in being bound to Congregationalism by the excitement surrounding foreign missions. The spread of the gospel to foreign places was regarded as a key motivation driving the pan‐evangelical spirit that united Congregationalism with the broader Evangelical Revival. As the Anglican and Methodist‐leaning clergyman and missionary, Melville Horne (ca. 1761–1841), put the case for a unified British Protestant missionary enterprise: “I would not have him [the British missionary] indifferent to his own peculiarities, whether they respect the doctrines he receives as truth, or the points of ecclesiastical polity he considers most friendly to religion; but I would have him thoroughly sensible, that the success of his ministry rests not on points of separation, but on those wherein all godly men are united. . . . His object is to serve the Church Universal” (Letters on Missions [1794], quoted in Brownell, “Robert and James Haldane and the Quest for Evangelical Union”, 7).

Even more fundamentally, the commitment to missionary labor was, as Susan Thorne argues, key to coalescing a middle‐class identity within Congregationalism. In the late eighteenth century, Thorne explains, “missions [both home and foreign] were a distinctively middle‐class alternative to gentry modes of authority, a means of controlling the lower orders at home as well as abroad that was in direct opposition to traditional or gentry forms of rule”. “This is not to say”, she goes on, “that the missionary language of opposition was antiauthoritarian, much less antinational” (Thorne, Congregational Missions and the Making of an Imperial Culture, 39, 43). The latter caveat applies especially to the Ruskins, whose middle‐class, evangelical identity had no stake in radical Dissent, and whose loyalties probably adhered more to a national Protestant and anti‐Roman Catholic sense of mission than a sectarian Dissenter spirit. There appears no mention of the Ruskins attending the Protestant Dissenting Meeting House, as a Congregational chapel was called in their neighborhood of Camberwell in the second half of the 1820s. That congregation was led by the Reverend William Orme (1787–1830), who had parted ways with his first mentor, Robert Haldane, in their Perth years, when Haldane was known both as “one of Scotlandʼs leading advocates of foreign missionary expansion” and as a fervent supporter of the French Revolution. Was Ormeʼs respectability insufficient to dispel an air of working‐class Dissent surrounding a "Protestant Meeting House"? The Ruskins drove a longer distance to attend “Dr. Andrewsʼs Chapel” as the Beresford Street Chapel was identified in the Evangelical Magazine (Gordon and Pimlott, “Orme, William [1787–1830]”; Thorne, Congregational Missions and the Making of an Imperial Culture, 44 [on Haldane], 58–59 [on the increased working‐class presence in Congregationalism in the wake of the Evangelical Revival]; and see “a theme”: Discussion).

Foreign missions and middle‐class identity were interdependent in Congregationalism in part because the London Missionary Society centered church activity on fundraising for the missions. The first Congregational foreign missions (sent to the South Seas) were funded by a few wealthy patrons, as tended to be the case in other churches, and relied for success on the will of God. Fervent but ill‐equipped and uninformed, these first missions fell apart; and consequently, the LMS reorganized fundraising on a broader basis, soliciting contributions both large and small, metropolitan and provincial, but most substantially from the urban middle class (Thorne, Congregational Missions and the Making of an Imperial Culture, 59–62). The fundraising and network of related activities were reported in detail in the Missionary Chronicle section of the Evangelical Magazine. The published tables of contributions to the LMS, along with reports of activities in the local and regional auxiliary LMS societies, were calculated, as Sujit Sivasundaram argues, to inspire readers with a collective experience of evangelical zeal. The lists were observantly detailed, even listing contributors of used copies of the magazine to be sent to missionaries abroad, who duly reported back with their gratitude to receive reports from the parent and auxiliary organizations, not to mention their relief for fresh reading to palliate the tedium of their missions. Readers, in turn, felt they played a part in a worldwide evangelistic effort, regardless of their level of donation (Sivasundaram, “The Periodical as Barometer”, 43–48).

This extensive outreach reported in the Evangelical Magazine and Missionary Chronicle was characteristic of the LMSʼs broader effort in print culture including and beyond the journal. As Anna Johnston describes its aim, the LMS constructed “a reading audience through its canny manipulation of textual and media technologies, a readership that would unite religious Britons in a common cause despite differences of class, region, gender, and age” (“British Missionary Publishing”, 30).

For Ruskin as a young writer, the magazine appears to have served as a model of print in a variety of ways. Each month, the magazine featured a section of poetry, albeit almost exclusively pious in subject matter. While some of Ruskinʼs poems share sacred themes and genres with the religious verse in the magazine, he appears to have mined the pages mainly as a resource on which to model his small verse anthologies in his Red Books. For example, his verse anthology titles, “Poetry”, resemble the header used for the magazineʼs monthly collections (see, e.g., MS I Poetry Anthology). Ruskinʼs custom of presenting his father with an annual New Yearʼs ode also was likely influenced by a similar feature in each January issue of the magazine.