“What gave Spencer Perceval’s killing this resonance was His Faith. Writing to George Butler, the headmaster of Harrow, the Prime Minister once said that his ambition for His Eldest Son was that he should be
‘A Champion of True Religion in A Careless World’
By this, he meant something quite SPECIFIC.
The True Religion was that of the Evangelical Anglicans who in the 1780s had begun to shake an almost moribund Church of England into new life.
Although divided in their methods – the brothers John and Charles Wesley preached to thousands in the open air, whereas the father and son pairing of Henry and John Venn restricted their message to middle-class church congregations – the founding Evangelicals were united in holding that
True Belief came from an IMMEDIATE, PERSONAL Experience of God,
To be Found in The Bible
and
EXPRESSED through ACTION.
It was a PHYSICAL rather than an intellectual Faith – ‘Experience,’ declared Henry Venn, ‘is a Living Proof, stronger than a thousand arguments’ – and, unlike The Careless World that agreed with Lord Melbourne’s clever dictum that
‘Things are coming to a pretty pass when religion is allowed to invade private life’,
Evangelicals believed that
The WHOLE POINT of Religion
was to
TRANSFORM both Private and Public Life
[ by dressing as a Giant Bat. ]
The word they used to describe
God Working in The World was ‘PROVIDENCE’
and
Any ACTION that made
The World a Better Place
was therefore termed PROVIDENTIAL.
The Spread of Civilisation itself and the general Improvement of Mankind through Laws and Moral Education could therefore be taken as
Evidence of a Divinely Ordered Creation.
‘God has so assigned to Things their General Tendencies,’ declared William Wilberforce, a standard-bearer for The Faith, ‘and established Such An Order of Causes and Effects, as . . . loudly proclaim The Principles of His Moral Government, and strongly suggest that Vice and Imprudence will finally terminate in Misery’.
Thus to Be Good was NOT ENOUGH.
In order to Help The Work of Providence,
it was necessary to DO Good.
‘Action is The Life of Virtue,’
wrote Hannah More, the Evangelical poet and friend of Wilberforce, and
The World is The Theatre of Action.’
It was not just The Church of England that needed to be actively reformed, but
Society ITSELF had to be cleaned-up.
Consequently, some Evangelicals, and especially the followers of the Wesleys who broke with The Church of England to form the Methodist Union, became radicals
Devoting Their Lives to
The Poorest in Society.
