The View from Murney Tower: Salem Bland, the Late-Victorian Controversies, and the Search for a New Christianity (review)

Reviewed by: The View from Murney Tower: Salem Bland, the Late-Victorian Controversies, and the Search for a New Christianity David B. Marshall The View from Murney Tower: Salem Bland, the Late-Victorian Controversies, and the Search for a New Christianity. Vol. 1. Richard Allen. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2008. Pp. 496, $80.00 Richard Allen’s biography is a meticulous reconstruction of the life and ministry of one of the leading exponents of the social gospel in Canadian Methodism. Salem Bland was born in 1859, and by the late 1890s was one of the most controversial preachers, powerful orators, and influential clergymen in Canada. He penned a radical statement of the social gospel and reconstruction of Canadian society in The New Christianity (1920), which featured a critique of capitalism and advocacy of a labour church. He died in 1950, twenty-five years after helping shepherd the Methodist Church into the United Church of Canada. This volume, however, ends half-way through his life, just as he is departing Ontario to take up a position at Wesley College in Winnipeg in 1903. Allen begins his account in Kingston in 1889, with Salem Bland, a solitary figure, hobbling up the stairs of Kingston’s Murney Tower. For Allen, this tower with its panoramic vista serves as a metaphor for [End Page 786] Bland’s perspective on the religious controversies of the late-Victorian age. Allen suggests that Bland had an epiphany on this occasion, as he recognized that doubt and open-mindedness were necessary for a clearer appreciation of Christianity. Certainty regarding God and the religious questions of the day was limiting because it robbed God of an essential mysteriousness and cut off the possibility of deeper understanding. Engaging with new and sometimes troubling knowledge, Bland realized, was the bedrock for an enduring and vibrant Christian faith. In this biography, Bland emerges as a figure constantly in the storm of the intellectual and religious turmoil of the late-Victorian age. By close analysis of Bland’s extensive and thoughtful reading and his interaction with the leading theologians of the day, Allen clearly delineates the intellectual underpinnings of Bland’s practical Christianity in late-Victorian idealism. This biography adds significantly to the substantial literature on the intellectual history of religion in late-nineteenth-century Canada. In this book Allen answers a question that was left open in his classic 1973 book, The Social Passion: Religion and Social Reform in Canada, 1914–28, where the story of the social gospel is taken up midstream with only a cursory explanation of its roots and early development. Through Salem Bland’s ministry and pastoral work in the late 1880s and 1890s, Allen demonstrates how the social gospel emerged in late-Victorian Canada. Bland’s activities in the small industrial centres of Cornwall and Smiths Falls are most illuminating. Both communities experienced the stresses of industrialization while falling behind larger, thriving urban centres, such as Montreal and Toronto. As Bland observed worsening industrial conditions, he became bolder in his ministry. Factory workers, he thought, were being cruelly thrust into the position of being the ‘helpless instruments’ of their masters and an industrial machine that devoured their skills. In the public ownership movement, Bland saw another way to follow Jesus. The Smiths Falls Electric Power Company, for example, would bring in a new era of co-operation and brotherhood. Similarly, Bland was encouraged by the Grand Trunk Railway strike of 1899. He preached that strike activity was legitimized in scripture. In the labour movement, Bland saw the emergence of a new Christianity that would reject bourgeois spirituality, which ignored social problems and injustices, in favour of an ‘earthly biblical materialism’ (261). According to Allen, Bland regarded the crusade for public ownership and the labour movement as sacred causes. In an important revision, Allen makes it clear that Bland was clearly articulating a social gospel position by the [End Page 787] late 1890s, well before he moved to Winnipeg, a crucible of progressive thinking and often considered the catalyst for the development of Bland’s social gospel. Like many other historians, Allen rejects the notion of a ‘procrustean’ divide between evangelicalism, liberal theology, modern thought, and the...

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