In 1833 Thomas Arnold, the reforming head of Rugby School, later professor of history at Oxford, said: 'The Church, as it now stands, no human power can save.' His concern was understandable. The country was becoming industrialised. It was a painful process. There was a fear of something like the French revolution being repeated here. Ancient landmarks were becoming obliterated. Darwin, Marx and Freud were waiting their turn to demonstrate other ways of thinking than the traditional one. The Church could see itself becoming marooned as an ebbing tide of belief manifested itself in the words of a notable poem by Thomas Arnold's son Matthew.
An extraordinary thing happened. By an agency beyond the wit of man, the Christian Gospel embarked on an era of energetic expansion. An industrialised country, the first to be in that category, became wealthy and powerful. Victorian England undoubtedly threw its weight about. It failed in many ways to be an entirely admirable society but it espoused in its own way the Christian faith and empire and with a bit of help from the Royal Navy projected its power and its culture to the wide world.
We are now conscious of the weaknesses and injustices of the colonial pattern over which Her Britannic Majesty presided and we are drifting further and further away from the potent mixture of Christianity, Stoicism and empire that was once the unquestioned background of English people's lives.
But, in days of decline, resilience – not to mention the grace of God – displayed itself. We demonstrated that it was possible for a society in some sense to retain its grip on the message of Christ and to win new adherents to the Christian community. We need the same resilience and the same grace of God today.
There is an interesting sidelight to the tumultuous story of the early Church in the book of Acts. Every so often the writer pauses and says something like, 'Oh, by the way, while this was going on, new converts were quietly being added to the Church.' See for example Acts 2.47, 6.7 and 9.31. As the hymn-writer William Cowper reminds us, 'God moves in a mysterious way, his wonders to perform.' It's worth taking a look at that hymn. We should not under-estimate the God of the Scriptures.
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