The Disappearance of Hell from Revival Hymns

Josef L. Altholz: The Warfare of Conscience with Theology

Footnote 15 of the author's "The Warfare of Conscience with Theology" in The Mind and Art of Victorian England, which the University of Minnesota Press published in 1976. It has been included in the Victorian Web with the kind permission of the author, who of course retains copyright.
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A student of hymnology has pointed out that references to hell in revival hymns had almost disappeared by the 1870s; and the Congregationalist divine R. W. Dale said in 1874 that eternal punishment had been relegated to "the house of beliefs which we have not rejected, but which we are willing to forget." G. Kitson Clark, An Expanding Society: Britain 1830-1900 (Cambridge, 1967), p. 104; H. G. Wood, Belief and Unbelief since 1850 (Cambridge, 1955), p. 32.

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Last modified 15 August 2001