Anglicans and the Atlantic World: High Churchmen, Evangelicals, and the Quebec Connection

RICHARD W. VAUDRY. Anglicans and the Atlantic World: High Churchmen, Evangelicals, and the Quebec Connection. McGill-Queen's Studies in the History of Religion. Montreal, Canada: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2003. Pp. xviii + 315, bibliography, index. $70.00. In the 1960s and 70s, before the stability of the Anglican world was seriously disturbed by the liturgical, sexual, and ordained ministerial ructions of the last thirty years, Anglican church history tended to be written from a narrowly national historical perspective. American Episcopalians may have had an interest in the history of the mother Church of England, but little in the doings of their fellow Anglicans just across the border in Canada. Furthermore, at a time when the theological and liturgical convergence of the ecumenical movement was near the top of the agenda of the churches, a consensual model, downplaying the role of church parties, also prevailed. Now that open warfare has erupted within the Anglican Communion, threatening its very survival, it is not surprising that historians should take a renewed interest in the history of the clash of churchmanships. In this notable study of the Anglican Church in Quebec between 1800-60, Richard Vaudry explores the vital trans-Atlantic links between Quebec and the United Church of England and Ireland. While not expressly seeking to hold up a mirror to the contemporary church, he reveals a world of theological debate and church politicking depressingly familiar to anyone concerned with the current life of the church. Vaudry is committed not only to exploring the links between the Canadian, English, and Irish churches, but also to maintaining a balance between the high-church and evangelical viewpoints. He explores the intellectual and social worlds of representative church people, including members of the Mountain dynasty (two of them bishops of Quebec) and their fellow high churchmen Jasper Hume Nicolls and Henry Roe, all oi them committed to the tradition of preTractarian high churchmanship and to holding at a distance the excesses of the ritualists. Vaudry traces the way, through the polarizing tendencies of the evangelical and Catholic revivals, they grew to be at loggerheads with evangelical co-religionists like Jonathan Sewell and Jeffrey Hale. Despite their common commitment to the Reformed identity of Anglicanism and to the role of the church in linking the interests of Canada and the mother country, the same disputes that divided the church in England-baptismal regeneration, relations with Nonconformity and Roman Catholicism, Tractarianism, differing understandings of justification and sanctification-just as surely inspired mistrust and conflict in Quebec. The tensions reached their climax in the dispute over the formation of a diocesan synod for Quebec in 1857-59. The evangelicals held that the episcopal veto in synod would be a denial of the reformed character of the Church of England, the high churchmen that episcopacy was fundamental to the very nature of Anglicanism. …

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