Lane Church (1854-1895), had seen Dawson preach in his youth and was similarly bent on transforming the Town Council into a guiding force of a Christian polity, whose Councillors were able to practically effect the mission Civic Gospel. For Dale, perhaps similarly to Matthew Arnold, the imperative for political involvement in the Civic Gospel was not simply humanitarian. He feared that there lurked a spectre of anarchy and a nascent desire for insurrection amongst the subterranean working class and that it was, therefore, the prerogative of the ‘prosperous people of a free nation’ to intervene in alleviating their hardships, lest ‘the political greatness and stability of their country [be] exposed to the most serious dangers’.24 In addition to Dale, H.W. Crosskey, Unitarian Minister of the Church of the Messiah, was pivotal in transferring such ideas to Birmingham’s most influential families and giving them a new social sense. Unitarianism, of course, was a religion of the minority in Birmingham but its impact on Victorian politics was certainly disproportionate to its size. Crosskey’s congregation included a triumvirate of Birmingham’s elite business families: the Chamberlains, the Nettlefolds and the Martineaus, whose prestige and wealth enabled them to dominate local political and social life. As Dale concludes, ‘the men that took part in the great and successful movement for reforming our administration... had learnt the principles on which they acted and caught the spirit by which they were inspired very largely in the Nonconformist churches of Birmingham’.25 Such men, so distinct to the unenlightened, corrupt and retrenched Town Councillors of the old ‘Economist’ days, would be capable of sweeping away streets in which it was not possible to live a healthy and decent life... of providing gardens and parks and a museum; that good water should be supplied without stint at the lowest possible prices; that the profits of the gas supply should relieve the pressure of the rates.26
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