ECCLESIASTICAL HISTORY 



the children were not catechized. This had been the case for a long 

 time.* If this was the state of things under the eye of the bishop, we 

 may conclude that they were as bad elsewhere. 



The recovery of ecclesiastical life dates from about the time that 

 Sir G. P. Tomline, bart., was bishop, 1820-7. Some of the old faults 

 of nepotism, which had been so common in the eighteenth century, were 

 not ended, but the evangelical movement had stirred both the clergy 

 and the laity, and the standard of clerical duty was being slowly raised. 

 A Surrey suburb of London, Clapham, had become the very fount 

 and heart of the evangelical party in the later eighteenth and earlier 

 nineteenth centuries. Mr. Thornton, Mr. Wilberforce and Mr. Zachary 

 Macaulay were all near neighbours there, with other less eminent men of 

 the same school." That so many leading laymen of the party lived 

 thereabouts was in part an accident. Undoubtedly their presence and 

 liberality had an effect upon church life and church buildings in the south 

 London suburbs and the neighbouring parts of the county. The suc- 

 ceeding bishop belonged to the school which they represented. Charles 

 Richard Sumner, bishop from 1 827 to 1 868, lived the life which the eccle- 

 siastical ruler is fortunately now expected as a matter of course to live ; but 

 his active care of the diocese was a new thing since the Revolution, almost, 

 one may be inclined to think, since before the Civil Wars. The first arch- 

 deacon of Surrey collated by him was Samuel Wilberforce, 1839-45. 

 The name alone calls up an ideal of clerical duty different from what 

 had prevailed. The successors of Sumner, Samuel Wilberforce, Edward 

 Harold Browne and Antony Wilson Thorold have shown how genius, 

 wisdom and a sense of duty in administration are not confined to one 

 school nor to one class of mind. Nor has the great succession ceased 

 in the living generation. 



Besides the vigorous revival of the Anglican Church in the nine- 

 teenth century two strong religious movements had their chief manifesta- 

 tion in Surrey. That Edward Irving, the Scotch Presbyterian, should 

 have founded the Irvingite or, as its followers call it, the Catholic and 

 Apostolic Church, was apparently the result of his meeting with Mr. 

 Henry Drummond of Albury. The two came together over the com- 

 mon interest of the translation of a book on the Second Advent by 

 Lacunza, a Spanish Jesuit, in 1826. Irving was constantly at Albury, 

 and the two friends formed the centre of a small circle of neighbours and 

 visitors who used to meet to discuss the prophecies of the Old Testament. 

 In 1829 the Morning Watch periodical was established and carried on by 

 the Albury circle chiefly. In 1832 the community came into existence. 

 Mr. Henry Drummond, a banker, a landowner, a beneficent landlord, an 

 active magistrate and later M.P. for West Surrey for thirteen years, was 

 one of the high priests of the movement. It was his liberality, as well 

 as early association, which made Albury one of the chief seats of the sect. 



' The vicar was not resident as early as 1725 {Willis^ Visltallon). 



» John Venn, the famous evangelical clergyman, a native of Clapham, was vicar from 1792 to 

 18 1 3, on the presentation of Mr. Samuel Thornton. 



45 



