Journal

of free thinkers as a result of scientific scepticism and more rigorous
historical scholarship of the Bible. But the main controversy followed by the
Brontës was that triggered by the Oxford Movement, led by Edward Pusey
and John Henry Newman (before he moved to Roman Catholicism). They
challenged the moderates in the Anglican Church—those known as the Broad
Church, who were prepared to accommodate to changing views. The Broad
Church leaders were people like Dr Thomas Arnold (of Rugby School) and
F.D. Maurice whom Charlotte and her sister Anne admired immensely. The
Broad Church was opposed to extremes: opposed to the conservatism of
the Anglo-Catholic Oxford Movement that wanted a return to the secure
source of authority in Church tradition, and to the conservatism of the less
moderate evangelicals and the dissenter sects who insisted on a literal belief in
every word of the Bible. Charlotte and her siblings made good use of both
these extremes in their writings. In her juvenilia there are savage satirical
portraits of Methodism, repeated in Emily Brontë’s portrait of Joseph, the
Calvinist servant in Wuthering Heights; and at the other extreme are the lighthearted
satirical portraits of the clerics in the opening chapter (called
“Levitical”) of Charlotte’s novel Shirley – where even her future husband, the
curate Arthur Bell Nicholls, comes in for criticism for his sympathy for the
rituals of Tractarianism, the High-Anglican Oxford Movement.
Charlotte Brontë’s stance in relation to these issues and to F.D. Maurice in
particular, gives us some solid evidence for her mature religious position. I say
mature because her position was not stable: Charlotte journeyed (as we will see)
from early fears that extreme Calvinism might be true, towards universalism—
the belief that hell is purgative and therefore only temporary and that ultimately
all free moral creatures will share in the grace of salvation. She refused to
believe that the condemnation of sinners to everlasting torment was compatible
with Christ’s teaching. This is why, soon after Jane Eyre was published in 1847, a
reviewer in the High Church Guardian (1 Dec. 1847) deplored Helen Burns’s
heretical belief that the human spirit would rise ‘through gradations of glory’.
Helen is sure that God would ‘never destroy what he created’ (ch. 9). Brontë
wrote to her old teacher Margaret Wooler on 14 February 1850, saying
confidently, ‘I am sorry the Clergy do not like the doctrine of Universal
Salvation; I think it a great pity for their sakes, but surely they are not so
unreasonable as to expect me to deny or suppress what I believe the truth!’ 4
I think this strong sense of personal faith is the key to Charlotte’s religious
stance. Certainly this was encouraged by her upbringing and by her clerical
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