John, their first child, was a strong and independent character even from babyhood. On 21 June 1851, when he was 18 months old, his father John wrote to the little boy's grandmother Alice
he is a dear little fellow, most loving and affectionate but so determined and headstrong that we sometimes hardly know how to treat him. He has so much perseverance and energy that he will make either a very good or a very bad man [1]
In 1852 little Johnnie was impeding his mother as she wrote to John
I am writing whilst Johnnie is at my side telling me he wants to be naughty; you must excuse incoherency. [2]
We can see how much careful thought Alice and John gave to the best way of bringing up their children in a letter of Alice's in February 1854
Johnnie has been getting very crooked with Grandpapa this afternoon. The scene made me pray that we might be spared to bring up our dear children – harshness and hastiness would ruin Johnnie, whereas gentle loving correction seems to bring out all his tenderest affection. I have had occasion to put him to bed twice lately; when he comes to himself the dear little fellow has clung to me with more than his usual affection. Alfred is rather obstreperous; he has a prouder spirit than Johnnie. I fancy he will be more difficult to subdue yet he is a winning pleasant child [3]
They hoped fervently that their children would come to experience conversion, the experience that Fanny Dickens had described to the Revd James Griffin:
By degrees my eyes were opened, and I saw with shame and confusion my utter worthlessness in the sight of God, and that unless I came to Him through His dear Son, I could not be saved
They hoped and prayed that daily Bible reading, chapel attendance and careful teaching would help the children on their way. They often spoke of it to each other, as John wrote to Alice in August 1867 from Paris, when young John was 18
We went to a little prayer meeting at eight. There were several very earnest faithful addresses. Oh how I longed that it might be the turn of our dear John's conversion [4]
But young John was impervious to all their teaching. From her visit in October 1881 to young John and Evelyn in Kensington, Alice wrote to John in something like bewilderment
There is very much to be thankful for in this home – a growing mutual affection and, in the main, a wholesome training of the children. But I do feel the want of religion in the home; it is like the perpetual banishment of a cherished needed friend. And yet, strange to say, John seems to be more of a 'good' man than many a professing religious man. [5]
This was a conundrum that she and John had not expected. But it didn't affect their relationship with their remarkable son. In Bertram Hopkinson's memoir, he wrote of old John Dewhurst that his nonconformist principles were
the expression of a sturdy independence of character, and it taught an almost stern devotion to truth and duty. These were the qualities which Alice Hopkinson learnt from her father and passed on to her son. Of the narrowness which sometimes marred the nonconformist faith in those days there was none in her teaching. Thus it was, that though John Hopkinson in part rejected the form of her creed, he was able to keep its essence, and this slight divergence never affected the sympathy between him and his mother. To the end of his life it remained, a perpetual joy to both of them [6]
In the years after Alice's death in 1910 her children generally drifted away from Congregationalism but not necessarily from faith, her daughters especially remaining truly devout. Alfred was clearly the most torn in mind, leaving a legacy in his Will to the Rusholme Road Chapel Sunday School, disapproving heartily of infant baptism, but finding himself strongly drawn to the paintings of the Madonna he found in his holidays on the Continent. His niece Katharine Chorley wrote that he had "a rather troubled spirit" and, she suspected, "an unresolved philosophy of life." [7] Distinct social differences had opened up between chapel people and church-goers by the early 20th century, but she thought that the great draw of the Church of England among her family and neighbours was on aesthetic grounds and because of the "grave and noble dignity of the Book of Common Prayer". Her father's brothers and sisters had deserted one by one the Congregationalist chapels of their upbringing and she felt they were "drawn by the alluring beauty and majesty of the Litany" [8]
The second challenge to John and Alice's faith were the momentous 19th century developments in science and scholarship which brought immense difficulties to so many. Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species (1859) and the eruption into British scholarship of liberal German theology are the most famous examples of this.
Alfred could remember the shock of the liberal theology. He wrote in his memoirs of how in Puritan households like theirs the Bible was the literature that "absorbed most attention and was read most constantly" and was considered "literally and verbally inspired" and that
I can remember at the age of fifteen or sixteen feeling rather shocked by the remark of an older boy that what is recounted in the Bible before the Call of Abraham must be taken as really allegorical. [9]
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| Dr Alexander Maclaren (1826-1910) |
First of all, he had the physical outfit of an impressive speaker – an erect figure, a good action, a flashing eye, an expressive countenance, a carrying voice. The character lying back of the utterance was one of singular purity, depth, simplicity and humility.
We are not to look to Genesis for a scientific cosmogony, and are not to be disturbed by physicists' criticisms on it as such. Its purpose is quite another, and far more important; namely, to imprint deep and ineffaceable the conviction that the one God created all things …The work of the first four days is the preparation of the dwelling-place for the living creatures who are afterwards created to inhabit it. How far the details of these days' work coincide with the order as science has made it out, we are not careful to ask here ...On the sixth day the earth is replenished with living creatures. Then, last of all, comes man, the apex of creation. Obviously the purpose of the whole is to concentrate the light on man; and it is a matter of no importance whether the narrative is correct according to zoology, or not. What it says is that God made all the universe, that He prepared the earth for the delight of living creatures
His greatness as a preacher rested on his emphasis on evangelical certainties rather than on the reconciling of old theology with new theories. Nevertheless, the example of so great a preacher who was tolerant of higher criticism and who even entertained the possibility that the story of the fall was mythical could not have been without effect.
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