Monthly Archives: September 2025

Wilson Carlile was an English priest and evangelist who founded the Church Army. He was also a prebendary of St. Paul’s Cathedral, London. Known as “The Chief” during his days of leading the Church Army, he inspired subsequent generations of evangelists.

Born in 1847 in Brixton, Carlile was the eldest child of a middle class family of twelve. Before he was three, his mother found him on tiptoe attempting to play the family piano. He persuaded his mother to help him learn some chords, and thereafter much of his time was spent on music.

Carlile suffered from a spinal weakness from birth that hampered his education. Nevertheless, he became fluent in French after being sent to school in France at 14. On his return from France, he joined his grandfather’s business firm, and by 18, owing to his grandfather’s failing health, Carlile came to be effectively in control of the firm. He was able to use his fluency in French to good advantage trading silk in France, and he learned German and Italian as well to enhance his business. By 1872, he was a successful young business man who had made well over 20,000 pounds (with a current buying power of nearly two million pounds). However, in 1873 an economic depression began that continued with a few breaks until 1896, bringing poverty and distress to working people and ruining many businessmen, including Carlile. He afterward suffered a physical breakdown and spent many weeks confined to his bed.

During one of these bouts of poor health, he began reading W. P. Mackay‘s Grace and Truth. Carlile would later write:

“I have seen the crucified and risen Lord as truly as if He had made Himself visible to my bodily sight. That is for me the conclusive evidence of His existence. He touched my heart, and old desires and hopes left it. In their place came the new thought that I might serve Him and His poor and suffering brethren.”

After recovering from his infirmity, he went to work in his father’s firm, but his real interest lay in religious work. He joined the Plymouth Brethren in London and worked among young people in the area. In 1875 he accompanied on the harmonium the singing of the huge crowds who gathered to hear the evangelistic preaching of the American evangelist Dwight L. Moody. After this, he accompanied Moody to Camberwell, where he chose and trained the choir for Moody’s South London mission. Working with Moody and with Ira Sankey, Moody’s music director, gave Carlile a solid understanding of the techniques of mass evangelism and the role that music could play in evangelistic missions.

Carlile was inspired by Moody’s example to become an evangelist. He joined the Church of England and decided to take holy orders, studying at the London School of Divinity and being ordained as a deacon in 1880. Following this, he was accepted as a curate at St. Mary Abbots, Kensington. Through his curacy, he wanted to reach people whom the Church was not reaching. As the Comtean positivist philosopher Charles Booth had observed, many working people in Britain regarded the churches as “resorts of the well-to-do” and believed they would find no welcome within. Carlile wanted this to change and worked to break down barriers to their church participation.

After his initial efforts to bring working class people into his congregation failed to work, Carlile decided to hold open air meeting to attract passersby. People began gathering in such large numbers that complaints ensued, and Carlile had to move his meetings to more appropriate places.

Carlile resigned his curacy to devote himself to ministering to the residents of slums. He founded the Church Army in 1882, four years after William and Catherine Booth founded the Salvation Army, inspired by their example of “an Army and not a Church,” in which “people could be banded together for purposes of evangelisation and soul-winning.” Carlile recruited and trained working class people to serve as evangelists. While he remained firmly in control of the Church Army, he wanted its work to remain firmly within the structures of the Church of England. No work was carried out in any parish without the approval of the incumbent (the local rector or vicar), nor in any prison or public institution unless the evangelists were invited by the chaplain.

Carlile met resistance in the early years but he persisted in trying to acquaint clerics and public officials in major cities with Church Army’s aims, ideas, and methods. In 1885, the Upper House of the Convocation of Canterbury passed a resolution of approval, and with increasing support from a few bishops, the Army gradually gained the respect of the church. By 1925, the Church Army grew to become the largest home mission society in the Church of England, and Carlile was appointed a Companion of Honour (CH) in the 1926 New Year Honours.

Carlile married Flora Vickers in 1870, with whom he had five sons. In his later years he shared a house with his sister, Mary-Louise Carlile, who despite ill health was herself heavily involved in the work of the Church Army, starting to train women in 1888 and setting up the first rescue shelter for women in 1892. She was head of the Church Army Sisters for fifty years.

Carlile died on September 26 in 1942. His ashes are interred in St. Paul’s Cathedral at the foot of his memorial.

The Collect (Of a Missionary or Evangelist)

Almighty and everlasting God, you called your servant Wilson Carlile to preach the Gospel to the people of England: Raise up in this and every land evangelists and heralds of your kingdom, that your Church may proclaim the unsearchable riches of our Savior Jesus Christ; who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever.  Amen.

A devoted scholar, hard-working and accurate, and a master of fifteen languages, Lancelot Andrewes was renowned for his learning and for his preaching, and was a seminal influence on the development of a distinctive reformed Catholic theology in the Church of England. Born in the parish of All Hallows, Barking, Andrewes was educated at Merchant Taylors’ School and Pembroke Hall, Cambridge, where he was elected Fellow in 1576 and Catechist in 1580. In 1589 he became Vicar of St Giles, Cripplegate, and Master of Pembroke Hall. His incumbency at Cripplegate was attached to a prebend at St Paul’s Cathedral, where his remarkable preaching abilities first attracted notice. In 1601 he became Dean of Westminster. Under James the First (reigned 1603-1625), who held Andrewes in high esteem, he was made Bishop of Chichester in 1605, of Ely in 1609, and of Winchester in 1619.

A distinguished biblical scholar proficient in both Hebrew and Greek, in 1604 Andrewes attended the Hampton Court Conference and was appointed one of the translators of the Authorized (King James) Version of the Bible. He was largely responsible for the translation of the Pentateuch (the Books of Moses) and the historical Books (including the Chronicles and Kings). Andrewes was involved in vigorous correspondence with Roman Catholic controversialists and critics of the Church of England, including Cardinal Bellarmine, and in this correspondence he gave a robust defense of the catholicity of the Church of England.

Andrewes died at Winchester House, Southwark, in 1626, on either the twenty-fifth or the twenty-sixth of September (the uncertainty of the date accounts for the variance among Anglican Churches in the date of his commemoration). He was buried in the parish church which later became Southwark Cathedral.

Andrewes was one of the principal influences in the formation of a distinctly reformed catholic English theology, which in reaction to the rigidity of the puritanism of his time, he insisted should be moderate in tone and catholic in content and perspective. Convinced that true theology must be built on sound learning, he cultivated the friendship of such divines as Richard Hooker and George Herbert, as well as of scholars from abroad, including the French Reformed scholar and philologist Isaac Casaubon and the pastor-theologian Pierre du Moulin. His aversion to Calvinism (despite the friendships with French Reformed divines) probably explains his absence from the Church of England’s delegation to the Synod of Dort in 1618. Andrewes held a high doctrine of the Eucharist, emphasizing that in the sacrament we receive the true Body and Blood of Christ, and he consistently used sacrificial language of the rite. (Somewhat ironically, given his aversion to contemporary “Calvinism,” his sacramental theology is very close to that of Calvin himself, what is sometimes referred to as “Patristic Reformed.” Drawn from the teachings of the Articles of Religion and of the Book of Common Prayer, the was the sacramental theology of the eucharist among the Caroline Divines and later High Churchmen for the next two centuries and beyond.) He desired the Church of England to express its liturgy in ordered ceremonial and in his own chapel used the mixed chalice (wine and water), a silver ciborium, an incense censer, and altar-lights (candles). In keeping with the rubrics of the Book of Common Prayer (1604), he celebrated the Holy Communion at the north end of the Holy Table.

In his lifetime Andrewes’ fame rested particularly on his preaching. He regularly preached at court on the greater Church festivals, being the favorite preacher of King James. His “Ninety-Six Sermons”, first published in 1629, remain a classic of Anglican homiletical works. The sermons are characterized by sophisticated verbal conceits, a minute (and to modern sensibilities overworked) analysis of the text, and constant Greek and Latin quotations. The noted Orthodox theologian Vladimir Lossky has written perceptively of the deeply patristic character of Andrewe’s theology in these sermons.

Andrewes was also a deeply devout man, and one of his most admired works is his Preces Privatae (“Private Devotions”), a collection of devotions, mainly in Greek, drawn from the Scriptures and from ancient liturgies, compiled for his personal use. The Preces were translated in partial versions from 1630 onwards, and the first comprehensive edition was published in 1675. The Preces illustrate Andrewes’ piety and throw light on the sources of his theology.

Andrewes was respected by many as the model of a bishop at a time when the episcopate was held in low esteem. His student, John Hacket, later Bishop of Lichfield, wrote of him:

“Indeed he was the most Apostolical and Primitive-like Divine, in my Opinion, that wore a Rochet in his Age; of a most venerable Gravity, and yet most sweet in all Commerce; the most Devout that I ever saw, when he appeared before God; of such a Growth in all kind of Learning that very able Clerks were of a low Stature to him.”

prepared in part from The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church
and Lesser Feasts and Fasts (1980)

The Collect (Of a Teacher of the Faith)

Almighty God, you gave your servant Lancelot Andrewes special gifts of grace to understand and teach the truth revealed in Christ Jesus: Grant that by this teaching we may know you, the one true God, and Jesus Christ whom you have sent; who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.

The Collect (Lesser Feasts and Fasts, 1980)

Lord and Father, our King and God, by your grace the Church was enriched by the great learning and eloquent preaching of your servant Lancelot Andrewes, but even more by his example of biblical and liturgical prayer: Conform our lives, like his, to the image of Christ, that our hearts may love you, our minds serve you, and our lips proclaim the greatness of your mercy; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.

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A number of Andrewes’ sermons and some other of his writings are published online at Project Canterbury.

John Coleridge Patteson was born in London in 1827 of a Devonshire family. He attended Balliol College, Oxford, where he took his degree in 1849. After travel in Europe and a study of languages, at which he was adept, he became a Fellow of Merton College in 1852 and was ordained the following year.

While serving as a curate of Alphington, Devonshire, near his family home, he responded to Bishop George Augustus Selwyn’s call in 1855 for helpers in New Zealand. For five years, he toured the islands on the Southern Cross, visiting the indigenous peoples and teaching them the Christian faith. He administered the Melanesian Mission’s summer school at Kohimarama, Auckland, and founded St. Barnabas College on Norfolk Island to serve as a school for native Melanesian youths, training them as Christian workers and missionaries. Patteson never tried to make the Melanesians British but thought he was equipping them for the contemporary world. “East and west could not be made to think after the same fashion,” he wrote, “nor could Melanesians and Englishmen; the Church of Christ has room for both.” Employing his facility of languages, he learned to speak some twenty-three of the languages of the Melanesian people, having learned the Maori language as well. Patteson’s most brilliant native scholar, Edward Wogala, later wrote that “He did not live apart, he was always friends with us and did not despise in the least a single one of us.”

On February 24, 1861, at Auckland, he was consecrated Bishop of Melanesia. His diocese was vast, encompassing islands scattered across over nearly two thousand miles of ocean. His missionary endeavors were made more difficult by the abuses that the native people suffered at the hands of blackbirders, who captured Melanesian youths, transporting them elsewhere as slave laborers. (These slave traders would sometimes impersonate missionaries in order to kidnap the youth.) The Melanesians were usually reassured by Patteson’s gentle and quiet manner, but not always.

Bishop Patteson spent the middle months of 1871 at Mota, where he had had the joy of baptizing 298 of the people and seeing one island at least become Christian. From Mota he sailed to the Solomon Islands, and thence to the Santa Cruz islands, where he arrived on the island of Nakapu on September 20, 1871 and befriended the chief, exchanging names with him. Later that day, Patteson was clubbed to death while sleeping on shore by Teadule, the uncle of a kidnapped youth, one of five who had been taken in a raid by slavers and carried off to Fiji. Four of Patteson’s companions, who were just offshore in a boat, were fired upon by men on the shore who mistook them for slaver traders. The chief of the island pursued the murderer, who fled to the island of Santa Cruz, where the islanders killed him. The women of Nakapu, who knew and loved Patteson, were horrified by his murder, and one of the women, Liufai, together with her friends washed and prepared him for burial. The men of Nakapu made five wounds on Patteson’s body and placed a palm leaf with five fronds knotted on his breast to show that one life had been taken for five of theirs, and then Liufai wrapped it in a mat (which is still kept in the Anglican cathedral in the Solomon Islands) and placed the body in a canoe to take it to their cemetery. However, Patteson’s companions retrieved the body from the Nakapu islanders and buried him at sea.

In all five of Patteson’s companions, in the boat and from the ship, were wounded in the attack, two of them dying of their wounds. Joe Atkin, an English-born priest who was Patteson’s close friend and was expected to succeed him in the episcopate, and Solomon Taroaniara, a native of San Cristoval whom Patteson intended to ordain once they returned to Norfolk Island and who would have been the first Solomon Islander to be ordained to Christian ministry, both died of tetanus from the arrow wounds they received. John Ngongono, the third of the four companions in the boat, recovered from his wounds and later became the first missionary to Meralava Island. Joe Wate and Charles Sapi, both of whom were wounded when they left the ship and took a boat ashore to retrieve the bishop’s body, survived to later become the first natives of the islands of Mala and of Gela, respectively, to be ordained.

The death of Bishop Patteson and his companions at the hands of Melanesian islanders, whom Patteson had sought to protect from slave-traders, aroused the British government to take serious measures to prevent piratical manhunting in the South Seas. Bishop Selwyn later reconciled the natives of Melanesia to the memory of one who came to help and not to hurt, and the martyrdom of Patteson and his companions was the seed that produced the strong and vigorous Church which flourishes in Melanesia today.

A memorial to Bishop Patteson was erected in the chapel at Merton College, Oxford. He is also memorialized in the Martyr’s Pulpit of Exeter Cathedral. But Patteson’s greatest and most enduring memorial is the Church in Melanesia. In 1960 in a Melanesian newspaper a woman of Meralava wrote: “Every year we remember this day [September 20] because he died for the Melanesian people, as our Lord Jesus Christ died for the sins of the whole world. John Patteson put down his life for his friends of Melanesia.”

from Lesser Feasts and Fasts (1980), with additions

The Collect (Of a Missionary or Evangelist)

Almighty and everlasting God, you called your servants John Coleridge Patteson and his companions to preach the Gospel to the people of Melanesia: Raise up in this and every land evangelists and heralds of your kingdom, that your Church may proclaim the unsearchable riches of our Savior Jesus Christ; who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever.  Amen.

The Collect (Lesser Feasts and Fasts, 1980)

Almighty God, you called your faithful servant John Coleridge Patteson and his companions to be witnesses and martyrs in the islands of Melanesia, and by their labors and sufferings raised up a people for your own possession: Pour out your Holy Spirit upon your Church in every land, that by the service and sacrifice of many, your holy Name may be glorified and your kingdom enlarged; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.

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The Anglican Church of Melanesia is a member of the Anglican Communion and of the Global South Fellowship of Anglican Churches. The website of the Anglican Communion has a page on the Anglican Church of Melanesia. See also the Wikipedia page for information on this Global South Anglican Church. The BCP website of the Society of Archbishop Justus has information on both the Church and its Prayer Book.

A Sermon by Canon Dr. Charles Elliot Fox on the Occasion of the Centenary of the Consecration of Bishop John Coleridge Patteson (February 24, 1961) is published online at the Project Canterbury website.

Growing out of the High Church teachings and practices in the Church of England but arguing (often in disagreement with many High Church Anglicans) for a ressourcement of aspects of the theology and practice of the pre-Reformation Church, the Oxford Movement found its acknowledged leader in Edward Bouverie Pusey. Born near Oxford, August 22, 1800, Pusey was educated at Christ Church College in that city’s University and was elected a Fellow of Oriel College in 1823. Not long afterwards he studied in Göttingen and Berlin, where he became acquainted with many leading German biblical scholars. During the next years he devoted himself t the study of Hebrew, Arabic, and other Semitic languages both at Oxford and in Germany. In 1828 he was ordained deacon and priest and was also appointed Regius Professor of Hebrew and Canon of Christ Church, offices he held for the rest of his life. At the end of 1833 he joined John Keble and John Henry Newman in producing the Tracts for the Times, which gave the Oxford Movement its popular name of Tractarianism.

His most influential activity, however, was his preaching—catholic in content, evangelical in his zeal for souls. He drew on the Greek Fathers and the Christian mystical tradition, and his sermons, while stressing the heinousness of sin and the nothingness of the world, rise to contemplative rapture in their emphasis on the indwelling of Christ, salvation as participation in God, and the blessedness of heaven. But to many of his more influential contemporaries these teachings seemed dangerously innovative. A sermon preached before the University in 1843 on “The Holy Eucharist, a Comfort to the Penitent” was condemned by the vice-chancellor and six doctors of divinity as teaching error, and Pusey was suspended from his university pulpit for two years, a judgment he bore patiently. However, the condemnation secured a wider publicity for the sermon in printed form and drew attention to the doctrine of the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist, which Pusey defended with devotion. In another university sermon, preached in 1846 on “The Entire Absolution of the Penitent”, he claimed for the Church of England the power of the keys and the reality of priestly absolution. The sermon encouraged the revival of private confession in modern Anglicanism. (It should be noted that the reality of priestly absolution had never been denied in Anglicanism, as evidenced by the writings of such churchmen as Jeremy Taylor and John Henry Hobart, and in the Prayer Book itself.)

The death of his wife in 1839 left an indelible mark on Pusey, and from that time he practiced many austerities. His foundation of St. Saviour’s, Leeds, in memory of his wife and daughter, created a model Tractarian slum parish. In 1845 he assisted in the foundation of the first Anglican sisterhood, and throughout his life he continued to encourage the establishment of Anglican religious foundations, giving generously from his own substantial private income.

When in 1841 Newman withdrew from the Tractarians, leadership of the movement largely devolved on Pusey. As the principal champion of the nascent Anglo-Catholic movement he had frequently to defend its doctrines. When Newman was received into the Church of Rome in 1845, Pusey’s adherence to the Church of England kept many from following, and he defended them in their teachings and practices. (Several of the more “advanced” Tractarians would follow Newman into the Roman Church.)

Pusey died on September 16, 1882, at Ascot Priory in Berkshire, the convent of the sisterhood he had helped found. His body was brought back to Christ Church, Oxford, and buried in the nave. Pusey House, a house of studies founded after his death, perpetuates his name at the University he served throughout his life. His own erudition and integrity gave stability to the Oxford Movement that eventually spread throughout the Anglican Churches, and won many to Anglo-Catholic principles.

from Lesser Feasts and Fasts (1980) with amendments
and additions from The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church

The Collect (Of a Teacher of the Faith)

Almighty God, you gave your servant Edward Bouverie Pusey special gifts of grace to understand and teach the truth revealed in Christ Jesus: Grant that by this teaching we may know you, the one true God, and Jesus Christ whom you have sent; who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.

The Collect (Lesser Feasts and Fasts, 1980)

Grant, O God, that in all time of our testing we may know your presence and obey your will; that, following the example of your servant Edward Bouverie Pusey, we may with integrity and courage accomplish what you give us to do, and endure what you give us to bear; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.

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The image of Edward Bouverie Pusey is (c) Christ Church, University of Oxford, supplied by The Public Catalogue Foundation.