Joseph Milner's Evangelical Church History

Abstract

‘The Church History of Joseph Milner is one of those books which may perish with some revolution of the moral and religious character of the English race, but hardly otherwise.’ Sir James Stephen's prophecy reads alarmingly to-day when the book has vanished even from the dustiest and highest shelf of the rectory library. But it was of Milner's History that Cowper also wrote enthusiastically ‘the facts are incontestible, the grand observations upon them are all irrefragible, and the style, in my judgment, incomparably better than that of Robertson or Gibbon’. Translated into German, Swedish and Spanish, relayed to Grundtwigian pietist circles through the histories of Rasmus Sørensen, Milner was read as far north as Greenland and as far east as the Volga. His book was instrumental in converting half a dozen Members of Parliament. It was long considered—as Milner intended it to be—as the replacement of Mosheim's famous History, and as such it was prescribed reading in the educated Evangelical home and beyond. In 1847 Julius Hare regarded it as still ‘the main, if not the sole, source from which a large portion of our Church derive their notions of ecclesiastical history’. Ironically, it was from Milner's soundly Evangelical pages that young Newman got his first love of the Fathers. The History of the Church of Christ must thus be reckoned as a book of first importance in the religious history of early nineteenth-century England. Yet, save for a few pages in Abbey and Overton (still the most reliable survey of Evangelicalism, after eighty years) Milner's book is now unknown.

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