The Church in Victorian Scotland 1843-1874

Drummond, Andrew L; Bulloch, James

About the book

The urban masses were largely pagan except when Roman Catholic, and distaste for Calvinistic worship and doctrine was taking the landed and educated into the Scottish Episcopal Church. Sectarianism, secularism, social change, and advances in natural science and Biblical criticism created acute problems. Rival and apparently more vigorous Presbyterian Churches competed with the Church of Scotland, which now lost its responsibility for social welfare and education and was deprived of State support to cope with the new industrial areas. Yet its remaining contacts with the deprived classes and a more open-minded outlook enabled it to recover from the disaster of 1843.

This book is not written from a narrowly denominational standpoint, but deals with beliefs and standards in society at large, believing and unbelieving. Events and thought in this highly important period did much to shape the Scottish Church and nation in the twentieth century. Previously, the age has been uncritically seen as one when Scotland was Calvinistic in outlook, church-going, sabbatarian, strict in morals, and unquestioning in faith. The facts were not so, as the authors demonstrate in this pioneering study.

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