Lives in Cricket No 46 - George Raikes

64 The Curate of Portsea; Was Raikes A Muscular Christian? Divinity at Magdalen when Raikes was an undergraduate there and who almost certainly requested that Raikes should join him at Portsea (note 1) . On 31 May 1899, he was appointed a priest in the diocese of Winchester and continued to serve as curate at Portsea until 1903, his address being given as The Vicarage, Portsea. Lang, much respected but a little feared by his curates, was always destined for greater things and it was no surprise to those curates (who could grumble that he was too often absent preparing the way for his subsequent career) that he left Portsea in 1901 to become suffragan Bishop of Stepney and then became Archbishop, first of York and then of Canterbury (note 2) . Rev Bernard Robert Wilson MA took over Lang’s parish and presumably oversaw the continuing development of Raikes. Muscular Christianity (note 3) The term “Muscular Christianity” was coined by T.C.Sandars in 1857; it can be thought of as a: “vigorous, socially aware Christianity”. Norman Vance prefers the label “Christian Manliness”, taken from a popular pamphlet written by the Rev S.S.Pugh in 1867; it is less ‘catchy’ but Vance thinks that the older term over-stresses the muscular nature of the movement. “Christian Manliness” represented: “a strategy for commending Christian virtue by linking it with more interesting secular notions of moral and physical prowess.” Whichever name one prefers, the movement owed a debt to, and overlapped to a certain extent with, “Christian Socialism”, which concerned itself with the church and social reform without necessarily referring to the field of physical activity (note 4) . Two of the leading thinkers in the advancement of Christian Manliness were the Rev Charles Kingsley (1819-1875) and Thomas Hughes (1822-1896); they used the media of sermons and popular fiction to attempt to: “bring manliness in its various manifestations to church, and to keep it awake when it got there. Their novels can be seen as an extended demonstration of their own manly enthusiasms given dramatic shape and confidently … justified in the name of the living God who created the world and saw that it was good.” Kingsley elaborated: “Physical strength, courage and health are attractive, valuable and useful in themselves and in the eyes of God … The natural world was created for man to admire and to understand and to subdue through sustained intellectual and scientific enquiry which will also disclose the pattern of the moral universe underlying the natural world.” The arguments of Kingsley and Hughes gave permission for life to be enjoyed. But, while this brought the enjoyment of sport (but while observing a strict moral code (note 5) ) and even sex (within marriage of course) within the realms of correct behaviour, it also came with sizeable obligations. The Christian Man had that duty to work for the betterment of, not just himself (in a process that Kingsley termed ‘self-actualisation’) but also of all of society (note 6) and that also brought the need to engage with the works of Darwin et al. so as to more easily ‘understand’ the universe. Without these ‘duties’, Christian Manliness could never have become a movement of any practical significance, failing to serve society as a whole. Not to the