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 '[1] ; 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 [4] ; 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
- ↑ Add. MS. 5839, f. 165.
- ↑ 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.
- ↑ Gibbs, History of Aylesbury, 74.
- ↑ Lipscomb,History of Buckinghamshire, iii. 489.
- ↑ 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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