From 1754 to 1759 Henry Venn was curate of the village of Clapham, and four times a week he rode into London to lecture at St. Antholin's, St. Alban's, Wood Street, and St. Swithin's, London Stone. On going to Clapham he had written to Wesley for advice, and two years later he had been present at the Methodist Conference at Bristol, but up to this time his views were not quite settled. In the autumn of 1757 Lady Huntington invited him to undertake a preaching tour with Whitefield in the western counties, but at the end she was not satisfied with the doctrine that he taught. "O friend," she wrote, "we can make no atonement to a violated law; we have no inward holiness of our own: the Lord Jesus Christ is the Lord our Righteousness. Cling not to such beggarly elements, mere cobwebs of Pharisaic pride, but look to Him who hath wrought out a perfect righteousness for His people." This letter seems to have made him seriously think out his position, and, after further intercourse with Whitefield, he obtained a firm grasp of the doctrines of Redemption. When Walker of Truro visited him a few months later, he described him as "a London clergyman, till of late a sort of dependent on John Wesley, but now brought to believe for himself. He is a man very desirable in his temper, humble and teachable." But his chief work was not done in London. In 1759 he was called to Huddersfield...
Modern writers have rather misunderstood his position: he certainly was not "the first evangelist of the modern slum," nor was Huddersfield then "a huge, dark, manufacturing town." The Gazetteer still ranked it with the villages: though the parish included a large country district and several outlying hamlets, the population was only four thousand. Venn's work resembled Grimshaw's in many ways. Much of his time was spent on horseback, hunting out obscure parishioners in lonely farms and cottages. He drew the same enormous congregations, so that often the church could not hold the people, and the sermon had to be preached in the open air. He took the same care to make the services real. He would begin with a short exhortation reminding the careless that they were standing in the presence of God: a few words of explanation accompanied the Psalms and Lessons: and when the time for the sermon came, he had the same gift of moving thousands to repentance and tears. But his best work was done outside his pulpit. "He was one of the most eminent examples," wrote Sir James Stephen, "of one of the most uncommon of human excellencies, the possession of perfect and uninterrupted mental health." His common sense was sensible and sanctified in the highest degree, and shepherds and weavers, saints and sinners flocked to his study for advice. But behind all the good advice that he gave about farms or quarrels or marriages, there was always the deep desire to win the soul for God. "I wish you had known your grandfather," wrote Simeon long afterwards - to one of Venn's grandsons; "the only end for which he lived was to make all men see the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ." But after eleven years the work broke him down. A hacking cough and spitting of blood made it impossible to preach, and his friends procured for him (1771) the little agricultural parish of Yelling, where the lighter work enabled him to recover his strength, and to labour on for twenty-six years more.
Meanwhile he had made his influence felt in every part of England by his pen, for his Complete Duty of Man became one of the most popular devotional books of the day. More than a century before, on the eve of the Restoration, there had appeared a treatise on The Whole Duty of Man. Its author's name was never known, but it sprang at once into a semi-official position. It was chained in churches for the people to read. It was made the basis of instruction in the charity schools. It was accepted as the recognized statement of sound and sober Church teaching. If we want to grasp the type of Churchmanship which prevailed in the eighteenth century, we can see it in all its strength and weakness in this rather unattractive little volume. It was written at the height of the reaction against the Puritan theology, and its author tries to reduce religion to its most prosaic elements. Everything emotional, everything speculative, all passionate yearnings after holiness and communion with the Unseen are relentlessly excluded as delusions. Every sensible person, we are told, ought to take care of his soul, for it is the most durable part of him, but to do so he must "act by the same rules of common reason, whereby he proceeds in his worldly business." He must go to church, pay his tithes, keep the fasts, avoid drunkenness, and seek to do his duty as a neighbour, a master, and a son. Whitefield may be pardoned his exaggeration when he said that its author knew no more about Christianity than Mohammed. The Evangelicals were always pointing out the deficiencies of this book. Venn did something better; he provided a substitute. The Complete Duty of Man is just as practical as The Whole Duty. In his parish work he had learnt most of the average Churchman's difficulties. He deals with the duties of husband and wife, parents and children, masters and servants, neighbours and friends, the use of money, the sins of the flesh, the details of everyday life, but he deals with them in a very different spirit. "Christ the Law-Giver will always speak in vain, without Christ the Saviour is first known. All treatises to promote holiness must be deplorably defective, unless the Cross of Christ be laid as the foundation, constantly kept in view, and every duty enforced as having relation to the Redeemer." - "Duty first" is the message of the earlier book; "Christ the beginning and the end of all" is the message of the later; and by their fruits the two systems must be judged. No one would deny that the older school trained many upright men, the school in which Nelson learnt his great Trafalgar signal, but morally, spiritually England was perishing, and no man could find the remedy, until the Evangelical teaching swept through the land, revealing how sin could be conquered and duty consistently done.
Extract from "A History of the Evangelical Party in the Church of England" (G.R.Balleine)