The National Churches of England, Ireland, and Scotland 1801-46


Book Description

In 1801, the United Kingdom was a semi-confessional State, and the national established Churches of England, Ireland and Scotland were vital to the constitution. They expressed the religious conscience of the State and served as guardians of the faith. Through their parish structures, they provided religious and moral instruction, and rituals for common living. This book explores the struggle to strengthen the influence of the national Churches in the first half of the nineteenth century. For many, the national Churches would help form the United Kingdom into a single Protestant nation-state, with shared beliefs, values and a sense of national mission. Between 1801 and 1825, the State invested heavily in the national Churches. But during the 1830s the growth of Catholic nationalism in Ireland and the emergence of liberalism in Britain thwarted the efforts to unify the nation around the established Churches. Within the national Churches themselves, moreover, voices began calling for independence from the State connection - leading to the Oxford Movement in England and the Disruption of the Church of Scotland.










Phantasms of the Living - Volume II.


Book Description

This book contains the second of two volumes of “Phantasms of the Living”, an 1886 work on the subject of spiritualism by leading members of the Society for Psychical Research Edmund Gurney (1847 – 1888), Frederic W. H. Myers (1843 – 1901), and Frank Podmore (1856 – 1910).Within it, the authors have documented more than 700 cases of ghost sightings which they believe are evidence of psychic ability. This volume contains an introduction by Myers as well as an outline of their analytical methods, while the rest is dedicated to telepathy, hallucinations, dreams, etc. “Phantasms of the Living” constitutes a pioneering study that provides a vivid insight into the Victorian fascination with the occult and the supernatural, not to be missed by those with an interest in the subject. Contents include: “Preliminary Remarks: Grounds of Caution”, “The Experimental Basis: Thought-Transference”, “The Transition From Experimental to Spontaneous Telepathy”, “General Criticism of the Evidence for Spontaneous Telepathy”, “Note on Witchcraft”, etc. Many vintage books such as this are becoming increasingly scarce and expensive. We are republishing this volume now in an affordable, modern, high-quality edition complete with the original text and artwork.




A Flight of Parsons


Book Description

Irish Anglican clergymen played an important role in the creation of a nineteenth-century "Greater Ireland," a term denoting a diasporic movement in which the Irish transformed into a global people, actively participating in British imperial expansion and colonial nation building. These essays address the formative influences and circumstances that informed the mental world and disposition of Irish Anglicans, particularly clergy who were graduates of Trinity College Dublin (TCD), an institution pivotal in the formation of attitudes among the Irish Anglican elite. TCD was the gathering point for Anglicans of different backgrounds, and as such acted as a great leveler and formative center where laity and aspirant clergy were educated together under a common curriculum. In common with the Irish as a whole, TCD graduate clergy exerted an influence on colonial life in the religious, cultural, intellectual, and political spheres out of all proportion to their numbers. Faced with its dismantling in the old world, adherents of the Church of Ireland availed of opportunities for its reconstruction in the new and in the process bequeathed an important legacy in the colonial church.