A HISTORY OF BUCKINGHAMSHIRE 



several of the clergy of this county : Cole tells us of Barton Burton, 

 curate of Ravenstone, that he had a ' strong Methodistical turn ' which 

 had ' near shattered a weak understanding ' ' ; Thomas Scott, afterwards 

 curate of the same place and later of Olney, whose commentaries on 

 Holy Scripture were largely read even by Church people about fifty 

 years ago, was one of the same school. The most famous Methodist of 

 this county, however, was John Newton, curate of Olney from 1764 to 

 1779 : two new galleries had to be built in the parish church to 

 accommodate those who flocked to hear his preaching. Newton's own 

 account of the reflections which led him to seek episcopal ordination 

 shows that he had no idea whatever of any intrinsic superiority of the 

 Church over the sects, or of the necessity of apostolic succession : he 

 only became and remained a churchman, 2 like many others of his time, 

 because the holding of a benefice within the establishment secured to 

 him a larger influence. The effects of such an attitude, maintained by 

 many popular preachers, remained in the Church long after the main 

 body of the Methodists had separated from her, and the strength of the 

 movement had spent itself. The same party within the Church, while 

 rightly insisting on the necessity of personal religion, tended to dis- 

 courage reverence for its external forms and for the ordinary means of 

 grace in an age which already valued them little enough. It is 

 probable that to this period, the close of the eighteenth and beginning 

 of the nineteenth centuries, we owe the loss of many ancient Church 

 customs and relics of mediaeval devotion which had survived even the 

 ravages of the Commonwealth. Many of the churches lapsed again 

 into a condition not unlike that described in the visitation of 1637. In 

 Aylesbury Church before 1848 there was scarcely a wall or pillar which 

 had not gone out of the perpendicular. 3 At the time when Lipscomb 

 wrote his History of Buckinghamshire the sky was visible through the 

 roof of the chapel at Tattenhoe * ; and the church at Stowe was a 

 ' small mean structure,' with a decayed vicarage in which no one had 

 lived for nearly a century. 5 The same want of reverence which did not 

 care to keep the churches in repair caused them sometimes to be put to 

 strange uses. Aylesbury Church was turned into a powder magazine at 



i Add. MS. 5839, f. 165. 



3 Memoirs of John Newton, prefixed to his works, ed. Rev. R. Cecil, pp. 37, 40. It is only fair to 

 add that his mother was a dissenter, that he never had any Church teaching, and that the refusal of the 

 Archbishop of York to ordain him was his lack of a university education, not any matter of principle. 

 The Bishop of Lincoln accepted him through the influence of a friend. But it is clear from his own 

 words that he would quite as readily have taken charge of a dissenting congregation, if he had finally 

 failed to obtain a church, and only preferred the establishment because of its practical advantage. It 

 is interesting, however, to notice that one of the first instruments of his conversion, after a career of 

 wild adventure and utter disregard of religion, was a book which had been the fruit of the Church revival 

 under Queen Anne Dean Stanhope's edition of the Imitation of Christ. 



3 Gibbs, History of Aylesbury, 74. 



4 Lipscomb, History of Buckinghamshire, iii. 489. 



6 Ibid. iii. 1(39. The disused chapel of Quarrendon was allowed to fall to pieces during the first 

 half of the nineteenth century : it was quite complete in 1818. On the other hand, orders were given 

 in 1791 for the repair of the four churches belonging to the archdeaconry of St. Albans, and had evi- 

 dently been carried out by 1804, when Winslow and Grandborough were in good order, and Aston Abbots 

 and Little Horwood only needed slight repairs (MS. Records of the Archdeaconry of St. Albans). 



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