At its emotional core is an ‘idea of community drawn [not from scripture but] from the works of Goethe, Schiller and other German romantics’.19 These sentiments resonate with contemporary commentators and comparisons with Matthew Arnold’s Culture and Anarchy (1869) can be clearly made. Indeed, the Arnoldian emphasis on the promulgation of ‘sweetness and light’, 20 the conferring of not merely moral and material improvement but an attempt to address the aesthetic condition of the masses, is prominent in Dawson’s message that there is no ‘object higher and nobler than that – to make Raphael common, to make Michelangelo intelligible’. This trope of ‘feeding the mind’ was prominent in Dawson’s rhetoric, in a later sermon given at the Church of the Saviour Dawson concluded that, when a man has his comfort, his health, his security, the mind and the spirit have needs of their own too, and those needs to be satisfied. This means that the city which really is a city must have parks as well as prisons, an art gallery as well as an asylum, books and libraries as well as baths and washhouses, schools as well as sewers. It must think of beauty and dignity no less than of order and of health.21 This was a creed of civic responsibility and a recognition of the equality of the citizens of Birmingham. The language of the speech clearly renders the city as the new corpus, a paternal and powerful organism with a duty to its inhabitants, not dissimilar to ‘a Church in which there was no bond, nor text, nor articles – a large Church, one of the greatest institutions yet established’.22 Dawson’s view is clearly that it is the highest and most noble duty of the Corporation to act as the nave or spiritual focus of this new church.23 Dawson was not alone in preaching the Civic Gospel and his influence was felt upon many dissenting preachers across Birmingham. Robert Dale, Congregationalist Minister of Carrs
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