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preceding century had needed to overcome, we have not altered the fact that he viewed evangelical

history as a successionist.

iii. The argument for discontinuity rests upon an unjustified fixation upon Anglicanism as

though it summed up the whole of English Protestantism.

There is no disguising the fact that the Puritan evangelical heritage had been largely eradicated

from within the Church of England after the Act of Uniformity of 1662. The Puritan heritage and the

Nonconformist tradition which thereafter perpetuated it could not easily distance itself from a perceived

connection with the execution of King Charles in 1649 and this, even though Puritan forces had been of

two minds about the king at that time.

It is now accepted that Puritan theologizing in the Church of

England had ended with John Edwards (1637-1716) of St. John's College, Cambridge.

Anglican clergy

of such an outlook were all but non-existent by 1730 and there were plainly no colleges training Anglican

clergy to embrace these viewpoints.

But with this admitted, it is far from necessary to conclude that this influence had no living

exponents within England. Reformed theologians of the preceding century were still weighty authorities

in the various Nonconformist academies on which Presbyterian and Independent congregations depended

for the education of their ministers.

One such Nonconformist minister, Philip Pugh, of Cardiganshire,

Wales owned a copy of the Body of Divinity of the late Archbishop James Ussher (d.1658); he apparently

obtained the work in 1724 and loaned it to the young Anglican evangelical Daniel Rowlands in 1740.

We may also fairly typify as successionist the ecclesiastical history of Isaac Milner, History of the Church of

Christ, (London, 1827). But it did not extend forward beyond the age of Luther. In fairness, we must admit that
John Stoughton, the 19

century Nonconformist historian ,viewed these events differently. Rather like such 18

century Nonconformists as Isaac Watts who watched the Awakening from a polite distance, Stoughton took note of
the "manifest defects" of the 18

century evangelicals. See John Stoughton, History of Religion in England from

the Long Parliament to 1850. Second edition. (London, Hodder), Vol. VII, p. 112.

The stigma attached to the Puritan heritage in the 18

century is helpfully described in Raphael Samuel, "The

Discovery of Puritanism, 1820-1914: A Preliminary Sketch" in Jane Garnett and Colin Matthew, editors, Revival
and Religion Since 1700: Essays for John Walsh, (London, The Hambledon Press, 1993).

s.v. "Edwards, John" in the J.D. Douglas, ed. New International Dictionary of the Christian Church, (Grand

Rapids, Zondervan, 1974).

There is a candid discussion of this period in Bebbington, p. 36.

The 18

century academies are helpfully described in Gordon Rupp's Religion in England 1688-1791, (Oxford,

1984), pp. 172-79 and the older work of H. McLachlan, English Education Under The Test Act. (Manchester,
University Press, 1931).

Eifion Evans, Daniel Rowland and the Great Awakening in Wales, (Edinburgh, Banner, 1985). p. 38. This Body

of Divinity was in all likelihood Ussher's Principles of the Christian Religion (1564), identified among the
publications of the late Archbishop by the biographer R.Buick Knox in his James Ussher, Archbishop of Armagh,,
(Cardiff, University of Wales Press, 1967). p. 195. See also, A. Skevington Wood, The Inextinguishable Blaze,
(London, Paternoster, 1960), p.46.