How bad was the Eighteenth Century?

We’ve come across two hymns written at least two hundred and fifty years ago. Both call us to look at ourselves in the light of history and both speak to our day in calling for national repentance.

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When Abram full of sacred awe

Elizabeth Scott (1708-1776) penned ‘When Abram Full of Sacred Awe’ in the middle of the Eighteenth Century. It was published in 1769.

Actually, the Lord had already changed his name to Abraham by the time he was pleading for Sodom (in Gen 18:19-33), but Miss Scott thought it best to fit her thoughts in to Common Metre, or four lines with syllables thus: 8.6.8.6. (We sing this to the tune ‘Cheshire’.) So she begins:

1. When Abra’m full of sacred awe, before Jehovah stood,
and with a humble, fervent prayer, for guilty Sodom sued;

Her second verse describes the wonderful result of his prayer:

2. With what success, what wondrous grace, was his petition crowned!
The Lord would spare, if in the place ten righteous men be found.

Of what was Britain ‘guilty’?

The man of God did not dare go below the Hebrew number for a congregation, but even then, he pitched his request too high. As Elizabeth Scott goes on:

3. And could a single holy soul so rich a boon obtain?
Great God, and shall thy remnant cry and plead with thee in vain?

No-one could be found in Sodom except righteous Lot, his wife and his weird daughters. Not even their husbands believed Lot’s warning of impending destruction (Gen 19:1-19). But why did she move on immediately to citing God’s remnant in her own day? And what does Miss Scott mean in the next verse by this:

4. Britain, all guilty as she is, her several saints confess,
And now their fervent prayers ascend; and can those prayers be lost?

See gracious God before thy throne

Our other eighteenth-century hymn was published in 1760 and written by Miss Scott’s contemporary Anne Steele, (1717-1778). It is also in CM (we use the tune ‘Burford’) and begins with six verses making a case for repentance and reformation. Here are the first four:

1. See gracious God, before Thy throne, Thy mourning people bend;
‘Tis on Thy grace in Christ alone, Our failing hopes depend.
2. Tremendous judgments from Thy hand, Thy dreadful power display;
Yet mercy spares this guilty land, And still we live to pray.
3. Great God! and why is Britain spared? Ungrateful as we are;
O make thy awful warnings heard, While mercy cries, Forbear!
4. What numerous crimes increasing rise, Through this apostate isle!
What land as favoured of the skies, And yet what land so vile!

Seventeenth Century upheavals

So what was going on in their day to inspire these two ladies to speak of Britain’s guilt? Was not the Eighteenth Century, Georgian Britain, prospering and growing with an expanding empire? Did not Britannia rule the waves?

The previous century had seen great upheaval. The throne of England and Wales became united with that of Scotland in 1603 under James VI/I, him of King James Bible fame. He was Protestant and targeted by the conspirators of the Gunpowder Plot in 1605. King James died in 1625. His son, Charles I, became arrogant and thought he was above parliament. That led to a dreadful civil war and to the king’s execution in 1649.

The Commonwealth lasted until 1660. Parliament restored the monarchy in the shape of Charles II. But his son James II was adjudged a Roman Catholic activist and was deposed in 1688.

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The Glorious Revolution

Parliament brought James’s Protestant daughter Mary and her husband, William of Orange, over from the Netherlands in 1689, and enthroned them as joint rulers. Christians, that is virtually everyone of the time, gave thanks to God for this bloodless ‘Glorious Revolution’.

After that tumultuous Seventeenth Century, William and Mary’s daughter Queen Anne reigned from 1702 to 1714. Climate change had brought about the ‘Little Ice Age’ by now. The low point was the Great Frost of 1709, when the ground froze to a depth of three feet during a terrible period of starvation and death from January to April. The Great Frost was followed by a severe economic depression. The Guardian explains how the cold left the economy in ruins: ‘Per capita gross domestic product dropped by 23%, and did not fully recover for another 10 years, all from a single terrible winter.’

Anne was succeeded by her son George I, the first of the Hanoverians, in 1714. Now hymn writer Isaac Watts would give thanks in his hymn ‘To thee most holy and most high’ for deliverance from popery and for the ‘happy accession’ of King George.

Drunkenness and depravity

The optimism was not to last. The economy recovered, but the people fell into sin. Thirty-seven years later, in 1751, now under George II, William Hogarth engraved the illustrations ‘Beer Street’ and ‘Gin Lane’, castigating the drunkenness and depravity of London.

John Wesley was preaching on sin and redemption up and down the land from 1727 until weeks before his death in March 1791.

Nine years after Hogarth’s satires, as Miss Steele was printing her hymn and George III was acceding to the throne, in 1760, ‘Harris’s List of Covent Garden Ladies’ was first published. It was a blatant directory of London prostitutes. The ‘List’ was in print, constantly updated, until 1794.

It was estimated that 6,000 – 7,000 mainly working-class women were earning a living from prostitution at the time in London alone. Another estimate is 50,000, which seems improbable out of a population of just 650,000. 6-7,000 is surely bad enough. John Wesley preached at least one sermon against prostitution, in the Covent Garden area of Seven Dials, in January 1763.

Elizabeth Scott and Anne Steele speak to our day

Crime and venereal disease were rampant in the time when Wesley preached. Elizabeth Scott’s lines lead us to conclude homosexuality was also part of the sorry picture:

5. Are not thy righteous dear to thee
Now, as in ancient times?
Or does this guilty land
exceed Gomorrah in its crimes?

Anne Steele seems to have agreed, even if words change their meaning over time:

5. How changed, alas, are truths divine,
For error, guilt and shame!
Impious numbers, bold in sin,
Disgrace the Christian name!
6. Regardless of thy smile or frown,
Their pleasures they require;
And sink with gay indifference down,
To everlasting fire.

There was indeed an effeminate homosexual sub-culture of ‘Molly Houses’ existing at the time. It is sobering, if the expression does not fall too awkwardly in a discussion of the eighteenth century, to recognise our own times in the world about which Miss Scott and Miss Steele wrote.

Not only was theirs a prophetic voice in their own time, but they speak to ours today.

Suppression of vice

When Miss Scott and Miss Steele were writing their hymns, Messrs Hogarth and Wesley were just about the sum of the century’s reformers. It is true that William Wilberforce was born in 1759 but neither lady would live to see him elected to Parliament in 1780.

Nevertheless, the MP, together with Bishop Beilby Porteus, successfully petitioned King George III for a Royal Proclamation in June 1787 to suppress vice and honour the Lord’s Day.

John Wesley wrote to Wilberforce to encourage him in his fight to end slavery in the last letter he wrote, days before his death.

A ‘new thing’ in our land, in our day

As the writer of Ecclesiastes puts it:
Eccl 1:9 The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be; and that which is done is that which shall be done: and there is no new thing under the sun.

However, there is one ‘new thing’ in our day which our hymn writers would not recognise. It may well be that politicians of their time were involved in the sins of their day. But they were not advancing them as good things. Hogarth’s paintings shocked because the viewers, politicians among them, recognised he had a valid point.

Today, the entire British establishment is promoting the sins of homosexuality, transgenderism and abortion both at home and abroad, even to young children in ‘relationships and sex education’. The State actively promoting evil, spitting in the face of God, has only ever been done once in history, in Sodom and Gomorrah, in the Days of Lot.

And that did not end well:
Gen 19:24 Then the LORD rained upon Sodom and upon Gomorrah brimstone and fire from the LORD out of heaven;

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The hymn writers’ prayers

The hymns ‘When Abram full of sacred awe’ and ‘See gracious God’ both end with prayers. There are also today those in our land who bear the name of Jesus. God dwells within us. Our Constitution yet owns the name above every name. We have a great spiritual heritage in the Lord Jesus. This land was founded upon the word of God. We can follow the writer of the epistle:

Heb 4:16 Let us therefore come boldly unto the throne of grace, that we may obtain mercy, and find grace to help in time of need.

Therefore we can in confidence pray Miss Scott’s concluding verse and prayer:

6. Still there are those who bear thy name, here yet is thine abode;
Long has thy presence blessed our land; forsake us not, O God!

Anne Steele’s last two verses go further. They call for repentance and for our rulers to seek the face of the King of kings. Her words have additional force when she prophetically speaks of ‘insulting’ invaders. Even then, she writes that we can be fearless, but only if our elite have drawn the nation close to God:

7. O turn us, turn us, mighty Lord, By thy resistless grace;
Then shall our hearts obey thy word, And humbly seek thy face;
8. Then, should insulting foes invade, We shall not sink in fear;
Secure of never-failing aid, If God, our God, is near.

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