Quakers
Authors: Kennedy Thomas C. 
Published: May 2017

Unitarianism and Presbyterian Dissent had a complex relationship in the nineteenth century. Neither English Unitarians nor their Presbyterian cousins grew much if at all in the nineteenth century, but elsewhere in the United Kingdom the picture was different. While Unitarians failed to prosper, Presbyterian Dissenting numbers held up in Wales and Ireland and increased in Scotland thanks to the Disruption of the Church of Scotland. Unitarians were never sure whether they would benefit from demarcating themselves from Presbyterians as a denomination. Though they formed the British and Foreign Unitarian Association, its critics preferred to style themselves ‘English Presbyterians’ and Presbyterian identities could be just as confused. In later nineteenth-century Scotland and Ireland, splinter Presbyterian churches eventually came together; in England, it took time before Presbyterians disentangled themselves from Scots to call themselves the Presbyterian Church of England. While Unitarians were tepid about foreign missions, preferring to seek allies in other confessions and religions rather than converts, Presbyterians eagerly spread their church structures in India and China and also felt called to convert Jews. Missions offered Presbyterian women a route to ministry which might otherwise have been denied them. Unitarians liked to think that what was distinctive in their theology was championship of a purified Bible, even though other Christians attacked them as a heterodox bunch of sceptics. Yet their openness to the German higher criticism of the New Testament caused them problems. Some Unitarians exposed to it, such as James Martineau, drifted into reverent scepticism about the historical Jesus, but they were checkmated by inveterate conservatives such as Robert Spears. Presbyterians saw their adherence to the Westminster Confession as a preservative against such disputes, yet the Confession was increasingly interpreted in ways that left latitude for higher criticism. Unitarians started the nineteenth century as radical subversives of a Trinitarian and Tory establishment and were also political leaders of Dissent. They forfeited that leadership over time, but also developed a sophisticated, interventionist attitude to the state, with leaders such as H.W. Crosskey and Joseph Chamberlain championing municipal socialism, while William Shaen and others were staunch defenders of women’s rights and advocates of female emancipation. Their covenanting roots meant that many Presbyterians were at best ‘quasi-Dissenters’, who were slower to embrace religious voluntaryism than many other evangelical Dissenters. Both Unitarians and Presbyterians anguished about how to reconcile industrial, urban capital with the gospel. Wealthy Unitarians from William Roscoe to Henry Tate invested heavily in art galleries and mechanics institutes for the people but were disappointed by the results. By the later nineteenth century they turned to more direct forms of social reform, such as domestic missions and temperance. Scottish Presbyterians also realized the importance of remoulding the urban fabric, with James Begg urging the need to tackle poor housing. Yet neither these initiatives nor the countervailing embrace of revivalism banished fears that Presbyterians were losing their grip on urban Britain. Only in Ireland, where Home Rule partially united the Protestant community in fears for its survival, did divisions of space and class seem a less pressing concern.