When the English gentleman and philanthropist Robert Nelson died in January 1715, he was considered one of the most charitable and devout men of his age. Among the manuscript notes, his friend Francis Lee scribbled for a biography of Nelson appeared the phrase "addicted to piety."

Indeed, as his many eulogists pointed out, hardly any religious or philanthropic endeavour had proceeded in those days without Nelson's concurrence. He had been an prodigiously popular devotional writer; a patron of churches, Anglican charity schools for the poor and parochial libraries for the impoverished provincial clergy; an advocate for the reformation of manners and the suppression of vice; an early and enduring member of the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge (founded in 1699) and the Society for Propagating the Gospel in Foreign Parts (founded in 1701); and a commissioner on Queen Anne's 1710 Commission for Building Fifty New Churches in and around London.

His will, with generous bequests to a host of worthy causes and institutions, was itself a testament to the explosion of new forms of social and religious engagement that had come to characterize English public life in the quarter-century since the Glorious Revolution of 1688-1689.

Robert Nelson's final work, An Address to Persons of Quality and Estate, edited and published posthumously by Francis Lee, appeared just months after his death. Nelson's Address, an exhaustive compendium of religious and philanthropic causes and projects, served as the veritable blueprint for the so-called "age of benevolence" that came to characterize eighteenth-century Britain. Directed to the charitable instincts of the titular "persons of quality and estate," the Address documented the myriad ways by which a prosperous and commercial nation might yet remain a good and godly one.

The Address catalogued the dozens of methods by which Britons of means and influence might use their fortunes to relieve both the spiritual and temporal wants of their fellow citizens: building churches and chapels of ease; dispensing Bibles, Books of Common Prayer and other works of piety and devotion; augmenting clerical livings; erecting charity schools and workhouses; endowing parochial libraries; and founding seminaries for the training of missionaries. He pressed for the reform of prisons, the relief of debtors and the redemption of captive Christians from the cells of the Inquisition or the bondage of the Turk. Nelson also advocated a new round of hospital foundations to exceed those of the Protestant Reformation: hospitals for the incurable; for the blind; for those stricken with gout, dropsy, consumption and palsy; even teaching hospitals and dispensaries. He proposed a house of charity to receive poor infants; one to reform penitent prostitutes; another to house new immigrants; and still another to receive Anglican converts from Roman Catholicism and Protestant Nonconformity.

Many of these projects, such as the charity schools and the workhouses, were already underway throughout the country during Nelson's lifetime. Not a few would be realized within a generation or two of his death: the Foundling Hospital for abandoned children in 1739; the London Lock Hospital for treatment of venereal disease in 1747; the Magdalen Hospital for reforming prostitutes in 1758; the great missionary organizations and Bible societies at the end of the century - these were the monuments of an age that considered itself superlatively munificent. By 1733, Nelson's acquaintance Jonathan Swift noted, "It is certain that the genius of the people of England is strongly turned to public charities."

Perhaps the most interesting aspect of Nelson's Address to Persons of Quality, and by extension the entire eighteenth-century age of benevolence that the Address both celebrated and inspired, was the subtle recession of both church and state from its social vision. Nelson was, of course, an exceedingly devout communicant of the Church of England - indeed, an erstwhile nonjuror who had long rejected the Revolution of 1688-1689 for its defiance of Anglican political theology. But the Address entrusted little of its philanthropic vision to either the British government or the traditional institutions of the Church of England.

Nelson's Address implored the wealthy to endow and maintain a host of new institutions for the relieving of spiritual and temporal want: schools, hospitals, libraries, workhouses, missionary societies, charitable corporations and voluntary associations. The premise of Nelson's Address was the empowerment of what we would refer to as "civil society" effectively to minister to itself. Nelson's addressees were being commissioned to undertake the amelioration of suffering, not by election or ordination or inheritance, but simply by their private accession to the public good. And the institutions designated to fulfil the imperatives of benevolence were not those consecrated by law or tradition, but simply those projects and enterprises answerable to the task at hand.

One wonders if the conservative Nelson fully comprehended the radical moral and institutional autonomy his work had invested in civil society.

Here, then, we can begin to understand the truly revolutionary character of Britain's eighteenth-century age of benevolence. In designating clubs, voluntary societies, trusts and projects as the preeminent instruments of charitable relief and religious renewal, Nelson and his colleagues were cultivating civil society as the privileged arena of moral action. What in the late-seventeenth century Restoration era was generally considered the noisome realm of raucous clubs, radical coffeehouses and illicit Nonconformist conventicles - deleterious to Church, Crown and civic order alike - was dramatically rehabilitated as the primary sphere of social engagement.

This stunning moral valorisation of civil society at the turn of the eighteenth century legitimated what we might consider a new kind of public life - indeed, a new kind of publicness, that was largely incomprehensible within the prevailing political languages of the preceding century: republicanism and absolutism. The former confined virtu to public service in government and war, while the latter reduced public morality to obedience to consecrated authorities. By contrast, the age of benevolence invested citizenship with a mandate for social activism - one that was not limited to service within extant structures of civic life, but permitted the creation and promotion of new institutions within an increasingly open public sphere. This was a moral entrepreneurialism.

Given the obligations of initiative, improvisation and self-promotion that such a vision of social life necessarily entailed, it is perhaps not surprising that moral reformers and philanthropists in this period routinely deployed the language of commercial organization in vindication of their designs. Reformers spoke of their work as "pious enterprise." Like commercial endeavours, social engagement required the pooling of both risk and resources. "This trade," preached one Nottinghamshire clergyman in 1698, "is not to be driven but by a joint-stock." The previous year, a London clergyman argued that forming voluntary associations for moral and religious renewal was "no other thing than what is constantly done without offense in cases of secular concernment." Robert Nelson himself wondered why Christians should not be allowed to "meet and consult together, to improve one another in Christian knowledge ... when the same liberty is taken for the improvement of trade."

Commercial organization provided reformers with a framework for promoting voluntary association that was at once already widely acknowledged as conducive to the public good and substantially free of the negative connotations still attached to clubs and conventicles. Moreover, such language further affirmed the legitimacy of the popular (as opposed to governmental) initiative that increasingly characterized the work of philanthropic outreach in this period. Daniel Defoe did not distinguish between charitable and commercial enterprise when in 1697 he proclaimed his era "an age of projects."

In the twenty-first century, we are inclined to situate questions of social provision and relief on the political and ideological fault line between government and voluntary associations, between state and civil society. Interestingly, this was not a significant site of conflict for much of the eighteenth century - although in the second part of Thomas Paine's The Rights of Man published in 1792, one can begin to discern the adumbration of the social state.

In the early part of the century, however, it was the established Church of England - or, rather, elements within the Church - that eyed warily the moral valorisation of civil society. While many Anglican churchmen - bishops and clergy no less than the laity - most enthusiastically embraced voluntary associations and other new social forms for the purposes of religious renewal and philanthropic engagement, others of their brethren dissented volubly.

The post-Revolutionary Anglican High-Church movement evinced a pronounced scepticism - often, an outright hostility - toward the nascent culture of moral entrepreneurialism. Its stalwarts treated such activism as corrosive of the integrity of parish life. They considered religious voluntarism and lay initiative the hallmark of the Protestant sect, incompatible with a true Church. Most worrisome however was what they saw as the transfer of pastoral obligation away from the Church of England and its clergy toward the proliferating, unregulated projects and enterprises of civil society.

Accordingly, Anglican high churchmanship in the post-Revolutionary era was characterized by a determined effort to refurbish the traditional instruments of ecclesiastical discipline and engagement - the convocation, the ecclesiastical courts, the rural deaneries - to perform the pastoral functions usurped by voluntary associations. In this rearguard action, they were spectacularly unsuccessful. The Church of England could not arrest the democratization of pastoral power. The eighteenth-century age of benevolence would be one of lay activism rather than reconstructed clerical authority.

The debate over social provision has, of course, migrated away from questions of ecclesiology, and remains firmly situated on the frontier between state and civil society. That the new millennium has seen a fresh round of religious calls for the moral re-valorisation of civil society - for instance, by the Protestant evangelicals behind George W. Bush's "faith-based organizations" or the Anglo-Catholic Red Tories of the "big society" - goes some length toward confirming the dormancy of the struggles between church and civil society that characterized early eighteenth century Britain. Indeed, the imbrication of religious organizations within civil society is simply a fact in modern liberal democratic polities.

And yet, there have lately been faint signs of the old debate stirring. Pope Francis has repeatedly warned against the Catholic Church becoming little more than a "compassionate NGO," a non-governmental organization indistinguishable in function from the myriad relief agencies that inhabit our global civil society. This was precisely the question that haunted Britain's eighteenth-century "age of benevolence": how do religious bodies, taking their place amidst the panoply of domestic and international humanitarian organizations, maintain any particular claim to embody the sacred?

Surely this is a question for believers; but it is, at the same time, a question for all scholars and thinkers attempting to comprehend processes of secularization and the place of religion in modernity. Does the sacred remain a meaningful analytic category when sacred and secular are subsumed in a common philanthropy?

Interestingly, it was the English evangelical Hannah More who grasped this problem most clearly at the end of the eighteenth century. Surveying in 1791 the works of a century of unprecedented munificence throughout Britain, she wondered whether "to consider benevolence as a substitute for Christianity, [rather] than as evidence of it."

Brent Sirota is assistant professor of history at North Carolina State University. Parts of this article were excerpted from his new book, The Christian Monitors: The Church of England and the Age of Benevolence, 1680-1730.