Edward Irving’s Antipodean Shadow.

Mark Hutchinson.¹

Southern Cross College

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The grave of William Henry Lumsdaine was hard to find. Despite a very efficient computerized cataloguing system in Sydney’s vast Rookwood cemetery, I blundered around the half-erased numbers and walked past it several times. A tree had grown up to obscure it, and over the graves of his son Paul and wife Jessie. Needless to say, no-one else was looking. It was a good metaphor for the church that Lumsdaine served, the church popularly known as the ‘Catholic Apostolic Church’. Its founder, Edward Irving, looms large as a critical (though not always appreciated) figure in the history of British Evangelicalism.² His impact on Australian religious history, however, has received remarkably little attention. Given the other lacunae in that field, perhaps reason for this is simply a matter of lack of human resources focused on the problem. If most of Australia’s leading historical religious figures lack adequate coverage, then why go chasing after a British figure whose floreat covered little more than a decade? Another reason is simple lack of interest. Irving’s clientele were drawn from that most unpopular of historical subjects, the rising British middle classes and the imperial elite. Both subjects seem somewhat passé in a period of historical equal opportunity and social history. Moreover, the type of work required to track intellectual influences of this kind can be irksome to busy academic historians.³ The most substantial vehicle for Irving’s memory was the Catholic Apostolic Church, an agency that even in its heyday measured in Britain little more than 300 congregations, and which faded gradually into invisibility in the seven decades following the death of the final Apostle (F V Woodhouse) in 1901. (Its tradition would continue in Germany, and in countries of Lutheran tradition in Europe.) It was Woodhouse who, in 1883, ‘by prophecy’ certified the ordination of Lumsdaine by evangelists Richard Thomas Roskilly and Alfred Wilkinson.

Irving, Woodhouse, Lumsdaine and the ‘time of silence’ after the death of the last apostle mark the four stages in what its members called ‘the Lord's restored apostolate’, or more simply ‘the Lord's work.’ The early period (really the pre-formation period) was that dominated by the personality of Edward Irving himself (1826-1834). The second period – after Irving had sadly declined through a combination of broken heart, poor health, overwork and the enervating impact of what Carlyle called Irving’s ‘miraculous rubbish’– is marked by the rise of the CAC itself under the leadership of Henry Drummond and (in particular) John Cardale, including the working out of its ecclesiology and the establishment of Apostles, Prophets and the mission of the Great Testimony (1833-1850). A third stage can be identified as the establishment of international churches and extension work through pastor/evangelists such as Alfred Wilkinson (1850-1896). Finally, after the death of the last apostle, Woodhouse, the ‘time of silence’ saw the churches shrink back into their family circles and undertake a concerted effort to influence society and mainline churches from within as they awaited the coming of Christ (1900-c1970). All of these stages interpenetrate, and depending on personal and other links, at any one time one could find people active in Catholic Apostolic Churches for any or all of the ruling themes originating in any of these periods. Likewise, as one would expect of a religious synthesis, different people were members of the CAC for different reasons.⁴

To 1834: The Shadow of Edward Irving.

Though this period technically closed with Irving's death in 1834, such was his charisma that those touched by him were often driven by its influence for the rest of their lives. Partly hidden by the wave of institutional fervour unleashed by the disruption of the Established Church of Scotland in 1843, those who heard 'the greatest preacher since the days of the Apostles' were motivated to cross boundaries and seek new spiritual resources in their ancient faith.⁵ Missionaries entering the rapidly expanding Protestant mission fields overseas, particularly the medical field (of which Scotland was oversupplied), were inevitably touched by Irving. The Anglo-Indian writer, William Wilson Hunter, for example, tells the story of ‘Mr Douglas’ (a figure thought to be modeled on James Williamson of the Baptist Mission in India) who ‘had held much communion with Edward Irving’ in Scotland before going out ‘to start doctoring’ in a missionary setting. Confronted by the spirituality of his setting and the incurability of many of the diseases he confronted, ‘for years I used the benediction of oil, and the beautiful order for anointing the sick in the liturgy of the Catholic Apostolic Church’.⁶ As with later missionaries (such as Mary Andrews of Sydney and China), the confrontation of European and non-European cultures challenged the spiritual resources of the older state churches and legitimized the new syntheses which Irving and others were proposing. The medical professionals who found themselves acting in another cultural space normally occupied by shamans were caused to question the adequacy of their world view. While, as with ‘Douglas’, the ‘spell of the apocalyptic eloquence [of] Edward Irving thrilled for a moment the university youth in the northern capital’, it eventually passed off and left the pragmatic Scotsman with ‘a great daily desire to do good for his people’.

Not surprisingly, then, public service and the helping professions became the natural abode of many of the Catholic Apostolics in Australia. When Edward Irving’s sister, Agnes, married Warrand Carlile in 1820, they were not only bringing together the families of Irving and his great friend Carlyle, but she made the Carlile / Carlyle families the carrier for Irving’s legacy. After her early death, her husband became a well known missionary to Jamaica, who would have been proud of his grandnephew, Wilson Carlile, who established the international Anglican evangelistic agency, the Church Army. One son (James Edward) became, like his famous uncle, a Presbyterian minister. Another (named Gavin, after Agnes’ father), became a church planter, academic and missions advocate, apart from (perhaps most importantly) editing Irving’s Collected Writings (1864) and his Prophetical Writings. Another branch of the family (Warrand’s first cousin, John Carlile of Houston) migrated to Australia in the turmoil of the Victorian Goldrushes. Unfortunately, John himself died at sea in October 1853 on the way to Melbourne, but his wife (Anne, née Williams) taught school and raised five children before remarrying the leading academic and surgeon Thomas Shearman Ralph in 1860. Her son, Edward, would (with Edward Irving’s son, Martin Howy Irving),⁷ long be the patriarch of Melbourne Catholic Apostolic circles, chief of the Seven Deacons of the Melbourne Church. A leading lawyer (from 1900 QC) who as Parliamentary Draftsman framed most of Victoria’s laws between 1879 and 1910, Edward was knighted for his services, and either member or chair of a plethora of prominent conservative and social service bodies (including the Melbourne Hospital, the Old Colonists Association and the Melbourne Athenaeum). One sister, Anne, married the chief Catholic Apostolic pastor in Melbourne (and later Sydney), Robert Appleton, while another married Andrew Robertson. Their daughter, Hildred, married one of Australia’s more distinguished academic medical doctors. Joseph Lexden Shellshear (who served gallantly with the Artillery in World War I on the Western Front leading to a DSO, before becoming Professor of Anatomy at the Universities of Hong Kong [1923-1936] and Sydney [1937-1948]) would later leave his name attached to the J L Shellshear Museum of Physical Anthropology and Comparative Anatomy at the University of Sydney.⁸ Another medical family, from Melbourne, would make significant contributions to in vitro fertilization in Australia.⁹ Many of the younger women in the families became educators or nurses. In 1914, for example, Edward Carlile’s second child, Isabella Maud, sailed with her medical doctor brother, Hildred Irving, to serve as a nurse with the 1st Australian General Hospital on the Western Front. In addition to M H Irving’s own impact on Melbourne’s educational scene through Wesley College, Hawthorn Grammar School and the University of Melbourne, at least five CAC women made outstanding contributions to education in Victoria: M H Irving’s daughters (Margaret and Lilian Irving) at Lauriston Girls School, John Kirkhope’s daughter Elizabeth Kilgour Kirkhope (who succeeded the Irving sisters as head of Lauriston), her sister Margaret Ellen Kirkhope at Invergowrie Homecraft Hostel, and Dorothy Tucker at the Clyde School (later amalgamated with Geelong Grammar). Between them, these five CAC headmistresses oversaw the preparation of a significant number of the daughters of Melbourne’s elite.

Numbers of Catholic Apostolics also found their way into government service of various types. Martin Howy Irving was a foundation member of the Victorian Public Service Board, though few were to rise as high as he. The NSW Lands Office was one place where church and work overlapped. It was there that William Henry Lumsdaine’s grandson, the CAC acolyte James, started working life, before transferring under the favour of his solicitor uncle (who later became an Anglican minister), Edward Alexander Lumsdaine, to the Crown Law office. There he was articled and, after war service with the 2/6 Armoured Regiment, returned to finish his law degree at the University of Sydney, going on to a long career as a lawyer for the Sydney Water Board and later as a barrister.¹⁰ Walter Shellshear, after training at the University of Glasgow, began as a draftsman in the NSW Railways, rising to become Deputy Engineer in Chief (1905-12) before returning to Britain as consulting and inspecting engineer in London (1912-21). The direct influence of the driving character of Irving reinforced the importance of education, and the influence of ideas. After Irving’s death, however, with the increasing ascendancy of bible prophecy over charismatic gifting, the tenor of the movement became less positive about the ability to win or change the world. For the Lumsdaines, there was no doubt about the love and respect they held for their grandfather, William Henry. There was also some feeling that his premillenial expectation about the soon return of Christ disadvantaged his sons by failing to prepare them for the longer term.¹¹ This however was an extreme result. As one might note with J L Shellshear, or Geoffrey and David Lumsdaine, or Harold Burnell Carter, CAC families were still capable of producing stellar figures. For a nation which rode upon the sheep’s back, indeed, the contribution of one of the Sydney church’s Deacons, Norman Carter, to the Veterinary School of the University of Sydney was lodged in a core Australian social icon. Carter would design the arms of the school and contribute portraits of its key members, and his son, H B Carter would receive the Order of Australia for his contribution to the history of wool science. Less directly, his brother’s son-in-law, Ian Clunies Ross, would become one of Australia’s best known research scientists.¹² In broader academe, his grandson, Brandon Carter, would coin the term ‘the anthropic principle’ in theoretical astronomy, around which would coalesce some of the most profound cosmological debates of the twentieth century.¹³

For some, the influence of Edward Irving took the form of doctrinal appropriation. In the Australian setting, Irving’s premillennialism was popularized through multiple paths – itinerant Brethren evangelists, British Keswick conventions and publications, British Israelite speakers, and the criss-crossing of family correspondence. W H Lumsdaine’s father (also William) had been born in India to a Border Scots East India Company Army officer. When his father died, he and his siblings (Louisa, Henry, Alexander, and John), were sent back to live and be educated in England, under an uncle, Edwin Sandys of Upper Harden (near Canterbury), who (through his wife falling heir to the Lumsdaine estates of Lumsdaine, Blanerne and Innergellie in Scotland) took the Lumsdaine name. Sandys-Lumsdaine was an Anglican minister of decidedly evangelical stamp, with his roots in the rural gentry who had given parliamentarians and Archbishops to the nation, and who saw himself as a footsoldier in the battles to keep the Anglican church true to Christ.¹⁴ Sandys’ uncle was rector of Islington, Edward Irving’s old London address, while another relative Selina married the Islington curate, Forster Simpson. Sandys was to remain a most potent influence in the lives of the children. Even when the boys were sent to Australia with their share of the inheritance to make their careers under the guidance of the newly appointed Bishop of Australia, William Grant Broughton (a friend of their father’s from India days),¹⁵ the name ‘Sandys’ would reoccur in baptismal names for generations, while the strong clerical and evangelical flavour of the Lumsdaine family no doubt drew its initial impulse from their upbringing in Kent. It was this fervent passion for Christ which William Lumsdaine then passed on to his son William Lumsdaine, a passion which, combined with the new premillenialism and other influences (see below), laid the basis for William Henry’s fervent acceptance of the Catholic Apostolic message present in his wife’s family, the Newtons of Branxton.

Formation and Expansion:

William Henry Lumsdaine’s marriage into the Newton family is telling, attested as it is by a rare piece of correspondence in which he asks William Marriott Newton for the hand of his daughter, Jessie. By 1881, he was already a ‘Deacon under the Lord’s restored Apostleship’, had prospered on the back of property passed on through his mother’s successful Hunt family connections, and so was ‘in a position to contemplate such a step, and that I sincerely believe your daughter’s temporal, and I think I may add, eternal interests, will in no way be endangered thereby.’¹⁶ The utility of his faith is thus made apparent. He was prospering (materially and spiritually) a state he conceived as God’s response to the prayer (as the CAC Shorter Office has it) that He would ‘grant unto us Thy blessing’¹⁷ in response to the biblical injunction to tithe, do good and ‘to distribute forget not’.¹⁸ His faith enabled him to maintain both the business side of his family’s interests (including that inherited via the Hunt family, that taught to him by his more sporadically successful father, William, and his own investments in city property and import/export business) and the spiritual side (as modeled by his clergyman father, and his earnest brother, Edwin, who would later turn away from his successful barrister’s practice to enter the Church of England ministry). He could be a lay priest, a sanctified businessman in the global mission of the spiritual, ecumenical Christian church awaiting the return of Christ and the Ascension of the Chosen. It was a self-image confirmed only two years later (1883) at his ordination as priest by Roskilly and Wilkinson, from which time he would be listed as senior pastor of the main CAC church in Redfern until the advent of Robert Appleton (c. 1900).¹⁹

It is this synthetic function of the Catholic Apostolic tradition which dominates its second and third stages – formation and expansion. The formation stage – during which the apostles are called, the world parceled up into areas of responsibility, and the Great Testimony promulgated leaves Australian largely untouched. Its influence is largely transmitted to the antipodes through migration, as members of the growing number of British churches find their way to Australia. It does, however, put Australia ‘on the map’ in Catholic Apostolic consciousness. The migration wave on which the churches were built was catalysed by the gold rushes, which made of Australia a new land of promise. Thus the Carlile family translocated to Melbourne in 1853, the year of the Victorian rush, followed shortly thereafter by H W De Mole (to Adelaide, 1853), Alfred Wilkinson (arrived in Melbourne 14 February 1853), M H Irving (Melbourne, 1856), T S Ralph (NZ 1854; to Melbourne 1859?), William Wilson (Melbourne 1860), and William Miller (New Zealand ?; Melbourne 1866). The first services (at least in Melbourne) seem to have begun in early 1853, with Wilkinson offering communion in a tent in the extensive temporary accommodation city built on the Domain between St Kilda Road and Prahran only thirteen days after his arrival. Services among this migrant population thus continued under canvas from 1853 to 1856, when the tent was blown down.

The major families (Irving, Carlile, Lumsdaine, De Mole, Wyndham) share much in common. They were in a sense the dispossessed seeking a place for reestablishment – John Carlile was a younger son of a cadet branch of the Paisley Carliles, pursuing a commercial career in London; Martin Irving was a brilliant scholar squeezed out of academic preferment by his father’s reputation and his continued allegiance to the CAC church then being roundly attacked in all the best circles in England.²⁰ Though they came earlier, the same could be said of the Lumsdaines and the Wyndhams. William Lumsdaine had left Edinburgh to make his fortune in India (a place where many of the CAC families had contacts), and only acceded to their Scottish estates on the death of another branch of the family without issue. The Wyndhams were a cadet branch of the Earls of Egremont and the politically important Lords Leconfield, an extended landed gentry cousinage which included their own family in Wiltshire and the Wyndhams of Felbrigg Hall, Norfolk. All of them came with considerable contacts, expectations as to the nature of the moral economy which underlaid their efforts, and a vision to ‘do better’. It is among these families – united by a strong (indeed almost patriarchal) sense of family history – that the basis for the CAC was established in both city and country. It was also among these families that CAC evangelists such as Alfred Wilkinson and Richard Roskilly were sent, by the Albury Apostolate, to work and build.

The CAC synthesis of different liturgical and theological sources (Catholic mysticism, Eastern Orthodox liturgy and pneumatology, Celtic spirituality, Anglican establishmentarianism and conservatism, remnant conciliarist ecumenism, premillennial eschatology) meant that it could mean different things to different people. For the Wyndhams, it confirmed their moral rural idyll around the homesteads of Dalwood in the Hunter Valley, and Bukkulla Station near Inverell.²¹ The founder, George, for instance, berated what he considered to be the immoral basis for land acquisition in NSW, and was in favour of a ‘kind of patriarchal relation between the actual grower of produce, and the landlord, or owner of the soil.’²² His son John, who took over the Dalwood estate on his father’s death (having already managed it since 1857) was simply granted the status of local gentry, at his own death being referred to as ‘the Master of Dalwood’.²³ Here, and perhaps at Talgai in Queensland, in rural Victoria and around Perth, there were attempts to stay the dissolution of social authority through democratization and make time stand still. Their influence here was powerful, but local – George rejecting an offer to join the Legislative Council, John concentrating on his increasingly prestigious vines and vintages and local influence in press and farmers lobbies.

For others the CAC offered a commitment to the renewal of the tattered church which Carlyle, Irving and Coleridge (or indeed Maurice and Gladstone) bemoaned as the physical icon of a depleted European spirituality.²⁴ They are not hard to find, as Ruotsila points out in his study of CAC influence on conservative British politics. Some, like the Irish gold prospector who, shocked by the promulgation of the immaculate conception of Mary, found in Irving at least a transitory intellectual home for the unsatisfied urge to share in the immediacy, the humanity, of Jesus Christ.²⁵ It was the heresy for which Irving had technically been deposed from his Presbyterian ministry,²⁶ though only part of the theological corpus which was kept in circulation by CAC evangelists and, more definitively, by that member of the extended cousinage of both Thomas Carlyle and Edward Irving, the scholar Gavin Carlyle. Other parts of that corpus—Irving's premillennialism, his commitment to apostolic missions, his social conservationism—were kept alive by restorationist preachers (such as George Greenwell, who variously found a home among the Baptists, the CAC, or the churches of Christ, depending on where he found himself), by faith mission organisations often founded by Brethren activists such as H G Guinness, and by social elites in the military and the professions, which found Irving's bracing vision of a renewed and rechristianised Europe both compelling and convenient. In Australia, those who were directly influenced by Irving included populist reformers with a premillennial edge, such as John Dunmore Lang, and (as noted above) George Wyndham of Dalwood. Lang was a younger contemporary of Irving, and while no doubt the great preacher was a model of how a Chalmersite disciple could use the rules of respectability against the society which spawned it, there is no doubt that Irving's example had deeper consequences for him. Their politics would diverge, but Lang's Scots nationalism, his willingness to defy authority, his activism and millennial preaching,²⁷ all resonate with Irving's thought (particularly as seen through a young man's memories). His emphases on morally inspired, ordered rural communities (which, though rooted in different ground, he shared with Wyndham) drew on the premillennial urge to 'strengthen that which remains'. Whether the eclectic Lang would have pushed these tendencies further became academic after the twin intellectual tidal waves of the Disruption of the Established Church of Scotland, and Lang’s powerful encounter with American voluntarism in the early 1840s. What his case does show is a dissatisfaction with both the emptiness of the established churches, and the aridness of the scholastic spirituality of the reformed churches. The CAC provided a vehicle out of the former (while retaining its pretensions to ecumenicity and globality), and echoed the Tractarian and Puseyite response to the latter.²⁸ As with Thomas Carlyle, romanticism provided Catholic Apostolics with ‘an intellectually acceptable “restatement” of various Calvinist themes’, leaving many of their evangelical emphases in place, but reinterpreted by an ecumenist and liturgical framework.²⁹ Seen as a resistance movement to the disestablishment of the rural gentry, to the erasure of lowland Scots and fringe Celtic identities, and to secularization and democratization, the emergence of this premillennial but liturgical solution to contemporary ecclesial problems suddenly does not appear so unusual.³⁰ Because it was a church of elites, the later Pentecostal solution (through a democratization of the Spirit in the post disestablishment period) was not an option for the Catholic Apostolic Church. Indeed the second and third (or ecclesial) stages of the church rapidly locked up the charismatic manifestations of Irving’s day in liturgy, apostolic offices, and rituals of ‘sealing’. As will be noted, however, the turning of a lay, charismatic movement into a hierarchical clerical albeit voluntarist movement, had hidden dangers – for all that it drew on the energies of liturgical revival across Europe through this period.

By 1890, the end of the long economic boom which had begun with the gold rushes in Australia, there were at least ten congregations in Australia, and perhaps six or seven in New Zealand, to testify to the phases of foundation and expansion. In the cities, the practice of tithing saw the erection of the largest of the churches on Queensberry St., Carlton, in Melbourne;³¹ smaller churches in Redfern (Sydney), Launceston (Tasmania), Ballarat,³² Perth,³³ and in South Brisbane; and a number of halls. In the country, services tended to locate on the larger properties or in the houses owned by members (for instance, in the Wyndham houses at Branxton and Bukkulla, or the Wilkinson home at Pokolbin).³⁴ Between these, the diaconate and priesthood moved with considerable mobility, a result of which was the geographical extension of the supporting family groups. A member of the CAC since at least 1885, Kew businessman Henry William De Mole was sent to Brisbane in 1888 to take care of the church there. (The humidity and heat not agreeing with his health, he returned to Melbourne two years later, to reassume activity in the church there.) George Clark can be found listed as officiating for the CAC both at Talgai, near Toowoomba, Queensland, in the 1880s, and in and around Carlton and St Kilda, Melbourne, in the 1890s. The Tucker family originated in the congregation in Perth, but from 1894 were operating in the Carlton Church. Other ministers moved back and forth from the New Zealand churches, the Tasman acting as a single ecclesial area under an ‘archangel’. Of all these churches, Melbourne was clearly the most established and well distributed across its urban expanse. In the 1880s and 1890s alone, Sands’ Directory indicates 11 clergy operating in the metropolitan area (Robert Appleton, George Clark, Edward Wilton Eddis,³⁵ William Hinscliff, John Kirkhope, William Miller, William Patten, R G Suter, Edward Tucker, Percy Whitestone, and William Wilson), a greater number than all the other urban congregations combined. As such, it was most able to approximate the complex sacerdotal organization implemented by apostolic instruction from Albury. No doubt, the continuity and support provided by the Carliles and Irvings had much to do with the Church’s strength.

The Time of Silence

There is no reason, given its social position and wherewithal, why the Catholic Apostolic Church needed to nearly disappear off the Australian religious map as it did. The twentieth century saw many groups build constituencies and survive in a pluralizing atmosphere (the Christadelphians, the Jehovah’s Witnesses, the Brethren, the Seventh Day Adventists, among others). That it did so was largely due to its internal culture. Emerging as it did within the British Victorian elite, the theology of the church implicitly accepted the demands of respectability by weaving a post-biblical defence into its core tenet, the restoration of apostolicity. Unlike later Pentecostalism, which tended to be ahistorical and so attempted to leap back to the restoration of an unmediated New Testament Church,³⁶ the Catholic Apostolic Church accepted the history and traditions of the mainline churches, and so linked its declaration of the ‘latter rain’ to a definite historical announcement of the soon coming of Christ. Christ would return, declared the apostles, before the last apostle died. The authority of the apostolate, which was also woven throughout the liturgy, was based on prophecy.³⁷ When the last apostle died in 1901, the ramifications for the church were therefore significant.

The first was, how were they to explain the seeming disappointment of prophetic expectation? For some, the fact that Christ had not returned emptied the prophetic office of the church of meaning, and therefore undermined the credibility of all that had been done in the name of the apostles. Across nearly a century of space, family tradition had it that the founding CAC minister in Melbourne, William Wilson, left the church over the linking of the apostolate to the return of Christ, and other dated declarations of the return of Christ.³⁸ The feisty son of H W De Mole, William (who reportedly preferred the religion of Darwin and Dewey to that of Irving) had left the CAC around 1889, but clearly was not over the impact of its intensity, of ‘old Ralph roaring his prophecies or Suter pouring out his bilious spleen.’³⁹ He was incensed in 1901 (then working as an engineer on the Kalgoorlie Goldfields) to receive a circular from George Clark referring to arrangements after the death of the last apostle, and addressing him as if he were still a member. Joining the church, he replied, was the one great false step of his life – and he now saw in ‘the death of the last of your Apostles only the inexorable hand of time’, which would result in the church fading ‘away into the obscurity out of which they arose’.⁴⁰ His private ruminations in his letters to his wife were less restrained again. De Mole’s defection points out the problems facing the church. The cultural reception of biblical authority, on which in turn prophetic authority was based, though under attack even in Irving’s day, had progressed rapidly since the foundation of the church, and the younger generation did not accept it without question. The modern faith in science and rationality (seen, for example, in the movement in editorial control at the Sydney Morning Herald from the pious John Fairfax, to the intellectual John West, to the modernizing Andrew Garran, to his son the liberal Robert Garran) was increasingly triumphant in Australian public culture, and it had little truck with prophets or apostles. The failure of the latter shredded for many the already fragmenting authority of the former. As W F De Mole’s contemporary George Bernard Shaw noted, if Joan of Arc had returned in his own day,

…she would be sent, first to a convent school in which she would be mildly taught to connect inspiration and conscience with St Catherine and St Michael exactly as she was in the fifteenth century, and then finished up with a very energetic training in the gospel of Saints Louis Pasteur and Paul Bert, who would tell her (possibly in visions but more probably in pamphlets) not to be a superstitious little fool, and to empty out St Catherine and the rest of the Catholic hagiology as an obsolete iconography of exploded myths.⁴¹

A second, more practical issue was that all authority depended on the Apostles: only they could appoint Bishops (Coadjutors) and Priests. The instructions for the ordination of an Angel, for instance, read: ‘The Angel elect and the two Angels supporting him shall take their seats in front of the Priests stalls, before the service commences. The Apostle and the ministers with him shall go to the access to the sanctuary; and the Apostle shall begin the service as follows…’⁴² The death of the last Apostle without provision for replacement saw throughout the twentieth century the gradual ageing and death without replacement first of the Angels, and then of the priests, thus choking off the ability to supply communion – the liturgy surrounding which was one of the CAC’s aesthetic attractions for liturgical revivalists. Indeed, the CAC had enjoyed some strength among the artistic community, due to the connections between liturgical revival and such romantic medievalists as seen in the arts and crafts movement and the Pre-Raphaelite brotherhood.⁴³ One CAC priest (later the Angel) in Melbourne (John Kirkhope) was originally a disciple of William Morris who moved to Melbourne to work for an interior design company;⁴⁴ a deacon (John Carter) was a design painter, while in Sydney the CAC church became the focus for artists such as Myra Felton and Norman Carter (John’s grandson). From the collections left to the Mitchell Library, Florence Hindmarsh Wilkinson, Alfred Wilkinson’s daughter in law, was also quite a hand. While not as extravagantly decorated as the CAC Mansfield Square church in Edinburgh, design was important in their buildings as it was in their liturgy (as may be noted by the Kelmscott-like capitals which decorate the printed CAC Liturgy, by the fact that the Melbourne Church is now used by the liturgical Romanian Orthodox Church, and by the craft and design elements in the Redfern Church). Growing up in Gladesville, the Lumsdaine family would have been familiar with the Le Gay Brereton family at Osgathorpe. Indeed, Ida Le Gay Brereton was to marry into Mary Ann Lumsdaine’s family, the Hunts – and their artistic circle (including Henry Lawson and Henry Kendall), while Rose Florence Paterson (A.B. ‘Banjo’ Paterson’s sister) married W H Lumsdaine’s brother, Edwin Sandys Lumsdaine.⁴⁵ Myra Felton bought a slice of William Henry Lumsdaine’s property on the suitably named Goodhope Street, Paddington, and the two would be life long friends, next door neighbours and co-religionists (a fact that William Henry’s oldest son would never forget – he was named ‘Myro Montclair Lumsdaine’ after the artist).⁴⁶ Norman Carter by contrast came from the Melbourne church to the Sydney church, having trained in stained glass out of the Melbourne National Gallery School. His windows now grace such prominent places as St Andrew’s Cathedral and the University of Sydney, while his paintings hang in Sydney and Canberra. Along with others, he worked with David Annand on the Australian Pavilion at the New York World’s Fair in 1939, the design for which was considered a triumph. For Carter and Felton, no doubt, the CAC provided an aesthetic refuge from a commercializing society. The arts and crafts movement was swamped by mass production and consumerism after World War II, while for a long time pre-Raphaelite painting was not considered ‘authentic’ art, because of its appeal to the medieval in a modern society defined by its banishing of medieval ideals.⁴⁷ The CAC found itself in the same cultural niche – unable to appeal to its 19th century liturgical revivalist strengths, unwilling to adapt to the new democratized religious setting.

As a result, the church folded up and folded in. In 1946, congregants were told to attend mainstream churches for communion. Scattered over large distances as they were in Australia, this had been a normal enough process – but now it was due to the lack of priests. In the 1960s and 1970s, the churches were handed over to other bodies: the Melbourne Church was handed over to the University of Melbourne (and then to the Romanian Orthodox Church); the Sydney Church to the Anglican Diocese of Sydney (now ‘Te Wairua Tapu’, or the Church of the Holy Spirit, the base for the Anglican Maori chaplaincy in Sydney); and after a short time as St Thomas’ Anglican Church (1962-1972) and the first White Russian congregation in Brisbane, the CAC church at 16 Manning Street, South Brisbane, is now a commercial property. In 1960, the last CAC Angel died; in 1971, the last CAC Priest. The last Pastoral Instruction (no. 696) was published in September 1972 for the Feast of All Angels. Deacons continued for some time to hold meetings for catechization and the litany, often in homes. After they and the underdeacons failed, the litany was read in family circles. Given the explanation that the church had entered the ‘time of silence’ awaiting the return of Christ, however, such groups are non-expressive and so virtually invisible to the larger society. Continuing CAC churches in the Netherlands, Scandinavia and other parts of Europe provide some means of connecting Australian family members to a living tradition, but not to the extent where resurgence may be expected in Australia. As at the beginning, so at the end: they await the return of Christ.

Assessing the Influence of the Catholic Apostolic Church in Australia

Despite its relatively small size, the CAC may be argued to have influenced Australian society in a number of ways. The most substantial would be through its reinforcement of a conservative political ethic. This was so both through its direct influence in Australia, and through the filtered influence of Australia’s long-running political dialogue with the United Kingdom. As Ruotsila notes, CAC political theory gained disproportionate influence through its elite clientele, and its position in the formation of the modern conservative party in British politics.⁴⁸ The ‘Great[er] Testimony’ of the CAC was deliberately aimed at the heads of government and the powerful, and he notes that among those influenced by it were many non-members, such as Lord Melbourne, Lord Liverpool, F. D. Maurice, John Henry Newman and the young W. E. Gladstone. More importantly, the marriage of Algernon George, sixth Duke of Northumberland, to the daughter of CAC Apostle Henry Drummond, essentially brought some of the most powerful politicians of the time within earshot of the CAC message. While Algernon was too inward to make much of an impact, ‘far more active and outspoken in public, were his son and heir and three of his grandsons--Henry George, the seventh duke (1846-1918), Henry Algernon George, Earl Percy (1871-1909), Alan Ian, the eighth duke (1880-1930) and Lord Eustace Percy, later Baron Percy of Newcastle (1887-1958).’ In a fascinating paper, Ruotsila traces the influence of Catholic Apostolic pre-millennialism on British conservative thought, as it sought to build refuges for Christian Britain which could influence the direction of public life:

The public doctrine of the Percys, just as the underlying CAC doctrine--and the doctrine of Die-Hard Conservatism--was predicated on the assumption that humanity was degenerating, not developing, that social reforms not only did not amount to anything lasting or worthwhile, but that in many cases they were noxious and even blasphemous. By the same token, both the Percys and the CAC —and the Die-Hards as a whole— stood for 'strengthening the things that remained' of what they regarded as an immutable, divinely set social, political and institutional order, under siege from a liberalism most broadly, spiritually no less than materially, understood.⁴⁹

This influence was reinforced by the other arc of Irving and Drummond’s influence: a premillennial precommitment to seeing the reemergence of the State of Israel as a fulfillment of Biblical prophecy.⁵⁰ While largely worked out through the influence of J N Darby and his successors, it must be remembered that the architects of the particular hermeneutic were Irving and Drummond. Longer term, the combination of the inner, immediate influence of the CAC on British conservatism, and the outer referencing of seemingly objective texts with objective events, has proven to be a particularly powerful force in world politics.

Such an influence was much tempered in Australia. As Sir George Stephen found when he came from his work on slavery reform in Britain, the colonies took democracy to a height unheard of in the old world. The old Whigs of the period of the French Revolution – who resisted the idea that reform was to be equated with democracy – found the social sources of their synthesis missing in Australia. Those who, like Ian Clunies-Ross’s father, could be described as 'religious, widely read, pipe-smoking, bearded ... blending social egalitarianism with political conservatism' often found Australia hard going.⁵¹ The descent of the ‘time of silence’ on the Church effectively concentrated its attention on liturgy and the decline of all things towards the Second Coming, creating what one former member has called a very ‘tribal’ and mystical base of people very sure of their election, which at the same time was self-exiled from the public sphere. For people such as Clunies-Ross, his wife’s connections not only did not impede his public success, but positively reinforced them through personal connections, a commitment to a conservative political engagement, and a global ecumenism which easily slid into liberal Christianity (at least once the premillenialism was rationalized out of personal belief). For Godfrey George Howy Irving and his son, Ronald, the professional pursuit of what among their CAC families had originated in the gentry’s commitment to the Volunteer movement,⁵² took them to the very top of the Australian military tree. G G H Irving ended his career as a Major General, and deputy Quartermaster General; while Ronald finished his career as a Brigadier General (having served on Blamey’s command staff) and as Secretary of the Australian Vice-Chancellor’s Committee. In the battle to conserve the values of British society, they were to be found in the vanguard.

In terms of religion, the tendency has been to dismiss the CAC contribution – a tendency that begins with Carlyle and Irving’s record-leaving friends, who saw his decline and death as a result of his commitment to the new church, and continues with the attacks of the church as a new form of heresy (and, in fact, a threat to the hegemony of a particular type of respectable British religion). With regard to the phenomenon of twentieth century religion, the rise of popular, global Pentecostalism, the tendency is likewise to dismiss any real linkage between the two. Greg Mast, by contrast, has pointed out the liturgical impact of the CAC. Their complex liturgy

…which drew on sources eastern and western, was used by the Mercersburg theologians of the German Reformed Church in America, and this, in turn, was used by the Church Service Society of the Church of Scotland in its Euchologion, first published in 1867. It was also to have an influence, even if slight, on the nineteenth-century Dutch Reformed liturgy in America.⁵³

Irving’s premillennial impact has been sufficiently explored elsewhere. The Church as a continuing embodiment of that theology has been less well explored – but as noted with the case of George Greenwell (above), and as studies of leading Australian Christians, such as Thomas Playford and Frederick Miller, indicate, Irving’s theological impact was wider than simply among his London setting. Migration spread his premillennialism to places where the CAC church had no formal presence, but where perhaps groups of people who joined other traditions gathered. Certainly, even before the death of the last apostle, many Catholic Apostolics (comforted by the emphasis on ecumenical churchmanship in the liturgy) were in the practice of holding dual memberships. Their own identity and practice was unmistakably, if quietly, Catholic Apostolic, while their attendance for communion or baptism could be Anglican, Catholic or Orthodox.⁵⁴ As a sponsor and vector for premillennial teaching (an essential part of early Pentecostalism, Anglican evangelicalism, and such movements as the Churches of Christ and the Brethren), and restorationism in Australia, the CAC, therefore, clearly needs more exploration.

When it comes to direct influence on modern Australian Pentecostalism, Barry Chant’s careful summary expresses the state of play with regard to Joseph Marshall, leader of the ‘sounders’ in Portland, Victoria, where the first evidence of tongues speaking was noted in 1870: ‘It is possible that Marshall had learned about glossolalia from the Irvingite movement in England, but I can find no evidence to this effect nor any suggestion that he was affiliated with the Church of Scotland, Irving’s original denomination.’ ⁵⁵ At this remove, it is unlikely that the search for such genetic links will be successful, short of a broadly based exercise which unearths family memory, genealogy and local knowledge on a prosopographical basis, such as that achieved in Brian Dickey’s Australian Dictionary of Evangelical Biography. The level of interest in Australian Pentecostalism, unfortunately, does not suggest that such a project will be forthcoming. What has not been explored in the Australian context are the biographical links between, for instance, the British CAC and migrants to Australia who joined such intermediary institutions such as John Alexander Dowie’s Christian Catholic Apostolic Church in Zion. There are identifiable – if vague - links between this body and the CAC, though only time will tell if there is sufficient literary and oral material left to unearth the premillennial-healing culture of late nineteenth century Melbourne in sufficient depth.⁵⁶ There are also close linguistic parallels – emerging from their common literature – between the CAC, Dowie, and the early publications of Australian Pentecostalism (such as Sara Jane Lancaster’s Good News). The emphases on ‘the latter rain’, the place of ‘apostolic Christianity’, on ecumenism, and on the humanity of Christ, all suggest intellectual links. Liturgical links could well be through the common hymns transported by the Scots around the world, in particular those of Horatio Bonar, which were directly impacted by Irving. Whether the links extended to shared communities of practice – even at one remove and mediated by the fluid world of independent chapels, end time, healing, temperance and British Israel preachers, and Keswick conventions which typified the end of the nineteenth century – is difficult to establish. When Alfred Wilkinson spoke at the Athenaeum in Melbourne as follows, how many were there who shared his world view, but ended up in different movements?

Long since the Church was warned that ‘in the last days perilous times should come’, and now all things indicate that the final struggle between good and evil- God and Satan - Christ and Antichrist - fast approaches... It would be strange beyond expression if, amid the accumulated signs of the end now manifest, no message from God were to come to His people. Before the flood, He sent Noah to warn men of the approaching destruction, and to prepare the Ark of refuge to all who would flee to it. At the close of the Jewish Dispensation He sent the greatest of all the Prophets, John, to prepare the way of the Lord, and to proclaim the judgments then impending over an apostate people. And now at this eleventh our of this day of salvation, the Lord has again called and sent forth His Apostles into His vineyard to awake the Church to consciousness of her high calling, to warn her of the fearful dangers which beset her, and to seal those who may be accounted worthy to escape the terrible judgments which are coming upon the earth. And, amid the uncertainty and fear which abound, thousands, gathered from all parts of the Church, are, through their ministry, abiding in the unity of the faith once delivered to the saints, filled with the hope of, watching and waiting for, their Lord's glorious appearing.⁵⁷

For the CAC, the sign was the restored Apostolate, determined by prophecy. For Pentecostals, it was the restored prophecy which determined apostolicity. The very least that can be said is that – as with the ‘pentecostal tinderbox’ metaphor suggested by Donald Dayton for fin-de-siecle America—the CAC provided continuity for Holy Spirit language, global (ie, ecumenical and transdenominational) consciousness, and premillennial expectation. Class and ecclesiology separated the two movements – the fact that society and Church diverged from the CAC dream, however, does not negate the necessity for exploring the melting pot which made up the colonial setting on the eve of Australian Federation. It may in fact be that there was more flow between these two premillennial voluntarist movements than at first meets the eye.⁵⁸

Conclusion:

There is a tree grown over the grave of William Henry Lumsdaine, just as there is much history grown over the contribution of the Catholic Apostolic Church. The traditional interpretation has been to interpret the CAC as an interesting side show, a diversion in the main stream of Christian history. There is a change in the wind, however. It is too early perhaps to speak of revisionist history, but it is certain that much of the heat of argument arising from disestablishment and the redefinition of Orthodoxy has gone out of the argument, and we are beginning to see the value of diversity which the CAC held to be true long before the mainstream. Readers who are no longer frightened by the antinomian ghosts of the English Civil War, no longer motivated by the old party fears, are more likely to take the CAC on its own terms, and to try to understand it in its context. This literature is beginning to emerge (for example, in David Dorries’ book, Edward Irving’s Incarnational Theology, Fairfax, VA: Xulon Press, 2002.) Before new movements begin to simply graft Irving and the CAC onto their family trees, however, it is important to understand the movement as it actually was (and is). This article has attempted to unpack some of the little known history of the movement as it impacted on Australia, and to reflect on the continuities, as well as the discontinuities, which have been the ‘stock in trade’.

Like all such ‘renewal’ movements, the CAC picked up on the cultural energies available at the time and deployed them in ways which formed a new and culturally appropriate synthesis. It asked significant questions of the Church of its time. As the order for Evening Prayer intoned in ways which no realistic Christian could deny:

… we have all broken the vows made in our baptism; we have all disregarded the unity of the Church; and, distracted by diverse winds of doctrine and divided into many sects, we are incapable, except we repent, of receiving the full blessing of God, or attaining to the perfect stature of Christ. Moreover, we have not held fast the hope of the coming and kingdom of our Lord; neither have we purified ourselves as He is pure. We have grieved and well-nigh quenched the Holy Ghost, the earnest of our inheritance; we have preferred the institutions of man to those of God: and they who should have been the salt of the earth are themselves become corrupt.

The fact that the CAC itself, in attempting to solve these shortfallings of the Church, to become another sect, divided by its own doctrines, quenching the Holy Spirit by locking it up in institutional forms, is only too apparent. Nevertheless, even Thomas Carlyle had to admit that his friend Irving, died not in victory, but in invincibility:

His was the freest, brotherliest, bravest human soul mine ever came in contact with….s The Spirit of the Time, which could not enlist him as its soldier, must needs, in all ways, fight against him as its enemy: it has done its part, and he has done his. One of the noblest natures; a man of antique heroic nature, in questionable modern garniture, which he could not wear! ⁵⁹

Much the same could be said of the Church that Carlyle was determined to hate. When the times changed, it preferred to die than to change what it essentially was. In this light, it was inevitably a creature of its time. But if the CAC has gone down in history, so have its opponents, the princes and Kings of yore. But while they moulder, the CAC’s questions remain in circulation, and are echoed by continuing renewal movements which ask the same questions: how can a mere man be faithful to almighty God? How can the Church be one? How can we live so as not to grieve and quench the Holy Ghost in the necessary institutionalization of what we conceive to be the work of God? How it asked those questions and attempted to live out the Testimony has yet to be fully explored in terms of its historical presence in Australia. Once it is, it may well be that the CAC still will hold surprises for those who have dismissed the influence of those who pose the question.

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