effect. It made Williams the object of the first great Tractarian battle in the University, the contest for the Poetry Professorship: the first decisive and open trial of strength, and the first Tractarian defeat. The contest, even more than the result, distressed him greatly; and the course of things in the movement itself aggravated his distress. His general distrust of intellectual restlessness had now passed into the special and too well grounded fear that the movement, in some of its most prominent representatives, was going definitely in the direction of Rome. A new generation was rising into influence, to whom the old Church watchwords and maxims, the old Church habits of mind, the old Church convictions, had completely lost their force, and were become almost objects of dislike and scorn; and for this change Newman’s approval and countenance were freely and not very scrupulously quoted. Williams’s relation to him had long been a curious mixture of the most affectionate attachment and intimacy with growing distrust and sense of divergence. Newman was now giving more and more distinct warning that he was likely to go where Williams could not follow him, and the pain on both sides was growing. But things moved fast, and at length the strain broke.
The estrangement was inevitable; but both cherished the warmest feelings of affection, even though such a friendship had been broken. But Oxford became distasteful to Williams, and he soon afterwards left it for Bisley and Stinchcombe, the living of his brother-in-law, Sir G. Prevost. There he married (22d June 1842), and spent the remainder of his life devoting himself to the preparation of those devotional commentaries, which are still so well known. He suffered for the greatest part of his life from a distressing and disabling chronic asthma–from the time that he came back to Oxford as Fellow and Tutor–and he died in 1865. The old friends met once more shortly before Isaac Williams’s death; Newman came to see him, and at his departure Williams accompanied him to the station.
Isaac Williams wrote a great deal of poetry, first during his solitary curacy at Windrush, and afterwards at Oxford. It was in a lower and sadder key than the _Christian Year_, which no doubt first inspired it; it wanted the elasticity and freshness and variety of Keble’s verse, and it was often careless in structure and wanting in concentration. But it was the outpouring of a very beautiful mind, deeply impressed with the realities of failure in the Church and religion, as well as in human life, full of tenderness and pathetic sweetness, and seeking a vent for its feelings, and relief for its trouble, in calling up before itself the images of God’s goodness and kingdom of which nature and the world are full. His poetry is a witness to the depth and earnestness and genuine delicacy of what seemed hard and narrow in the Bisley School; there are passages in it which are not easily forgotten; but it was not strong enough to arrest the excitement which soon set in, and with its continual obscurity and its want of finish it never had the recognition really due to its excellence. Newman thought it too soft. It certainly wanted the fire and boldness and directness which he threw into his own verse when he wrote; but serious earnestness and severity of tone it certainly did not want.
FOOTNOTES:
[27] Mozley, _Reminiscences_, i. 18.
[28] I. Williams, _MS. Memoir_.
[29] I. Williams, _MS. Memoir_.
[30] The history of this famous Tract, No. 80, on _Reserve in communicating Religious Knowledge_, belongs to a later stage of the movement.
CHAPTER V
CHARLES MARRIOTT
Charles Marriott was a man who was drawn into the movement, almost in spite of himself, by the attraction of the character of the leaders, the greatness of its object, and the purity and nobleness of the motives which prompted it. He was naturally a man of metaphysical mind, given almost from a child to abstract and indeed abstruse thought.[31] He had been a student of S.T. Coleridge, whom the Oriel men disliked as a misty thinker. He used to discuss Coleridge with a man little known then, but who gained a high reputation on the Continent as a first-rate Greek scholar, and became afterwards Professor of Greek in the University of Sydney, Charles Badham. Marriott also appreciated Hampden as a philosopher, whom the Oriel men thoroughly distrusted as a theologian. He might easily under different conditions have become a divine of the type of F.D. Maurice. He was by disposition averse to anything like party, and the rough and sharp proceedings which party action sometimes seems to make natural. His temper was eminently sober, cautious and conciliatory in his way of looking at important questions. He was a man with many friends of different sorts and ways, and of boundless though undemonstrative sympathy. His original tendencies would have made him an eclectic, recognising the strength of position in opposing schools or theories, and welcoming all that was good and high in them. He was profoundly and devotedly religious, without show, without extravagance. His father, who died when he was only fourteen, had been a distinguished man in his time. He was a Christ Church man, and one of two in the first of the Oxford Honour lists in 1802, with E. Copleston, H. Phillpotts, and S.P. Rigaud for his examiners. He was afterwards tutor to the Earl of Dalkeith, and he became the friend of Walter Scott, who dedicated to him the Second Canto of _Marmion_; and having ready and graceful poetical talent, he contributed several ballads to the _Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border, The Feast of Spurs_, and _Archie Armstrong’s Aith_. He was a good preacher; his sympathies–of friendship, perhaps, rather than of definite opinion–were with men like Mr. John Bowdler and the Thorntons. While he lived he taught Charles Marriott himself. After his death, Charles, a studious boy, with ways of his own of learning, and though successful and sure in his work, very slow in the process of doing it, after a short and discouraging experiment at Rugby, went to read with a private tutor till he went to Oxford. He was first at Exeter, and then gained a scholarship at Balliol. He gained a Classical First Class and a Mathematical Second in the Michaelmas Term of 1832, and the following Easter he was elected Fellow at Oriel.
For a man of his power and attainments he was as a speaker, and in conversation, surprisingly awkward. He had a sturdy, penetrating, tenacious, but embarrassed intellect–embarrassed, at least, by the crowd and range of jostling thoughts, in its outward processes and manifestations, for he thoroughly trusted its inner workings, and was confident of the accuracy of the results, even when helplessly unable to justify them at the moment.[32] In matters of business he seemed at first sight utterly unpractical. In discussing with keen, rapid, and experienced men like the Provost, the value of leases, or some question of the management of College property, Marriott, who always took great interest in such inquiries, frequently maintained some position which to the quicker wits round him seemed a paradox or a mare’s nest. Yet it often happened that after a dispute, carried on with a brisk fire of not always respectful objections to Marriott’s view, and in which his only advantage was the patience with which he clumsily, yet surely, brought out the real point of the matter, overlooked by others, the debate ended in the recognition that he had been right. It was often a strange and almost distressing sight to see the difficulty under which he sometimes laboured of communicating his thoughts, as a speaker at a meeting, or as a teacher to his hearers, or even in the easiness of familiar talk. The comfort was that he was not really discouraged. He was wrestling with his own refractory faculty of exposition and speech; it may be, he was busy deeper down in the recesses and storehouses of his mind; but he was too much taken up with the effort to notice what people thought of it, or even if they smiled; and what he had to say was so genuine and veracious, as an expression of his meaning, so full of benevolence, charity, and generosity, and often so weighty and unexpected, that men felt it a shame to think much of the peculiarities of his long look of blank silence, and the odd, clumsy explanations which followed it. He was a man, under an uncouth exterior, of the noblest and most affectionate nature; most patient, indulgent, and hopeful to all in whom he took an interest, even when they sorely tried his kindness and his faith in them. Where he loved and trusted and admired, he was apt to rate very highly, sometimes too highly. His gratitude was boundless. He was one of those who deliberately gave up the prospect of domestic life, to which he was naturally drawn, for the sake of his cause. Capable of abstract thought beyond most men of his time, and never unwilling to share his thoughts with those at all disposed to venture with him into deep waters, he was always ready to converse or to discuss on much more ordinary ground. As an undergraduate and a young bachelor, he had attained, without seeking it, a position of almost unexampled authority in the junior University world that was hardly reached by any one for many years at least after him. He was hopeless as a speaker in the Union; but with all his halting and bungling speeches, that democratic and sometimes noisy assembly bore from him with kindly amusement and real respect what they would bear from no one else, and he had an influence in its sometimes turbulent debates which seems unaccountable. He was the _vir pietate gravis_. In a once popular squib, occasioned by one of the fiercest of these debates, this unique position is noticed and commemorated–
[Greek: Oud’ elathen Mariota, philaitaton Oreiaelon]
* * * * *
[Greek: Aelthe mega gronon, Masichois kai pas’ agapaetos, Kai smeilon, prosephae pantas keindois epeesin].[33]
His ways and his talk were such as to call forth not unfrequent mirth among those who most revered him. He would meet you and look you in the face without speaking a word. He was not without humour; but his jokes, carried off by a little laugh of his own, were apt to be recondite in their meaning and allusions. With his great power of sympathy, he yet did not easily divine other men’s lighter or subtler moods, and odd and sometimes even distressing mistakes were the consequence. His health was weak, and a chronic tenderness of throat and chest made him take precautions which sometimes seemed whimsical; and his well-known figure in a black cloak, with a black veil over his college cap, and a black comforter round his neck, which at one time in Oxford acquired his name, sometimes startled little boys and sleepy college porters when he came on them suddenly at night.
With more power than most men of standing alone, and of arranging his observations on life and the world in ways of his own, he had pre-eminently above all men round him, in the highest and noblest form, the spirit of a disciple. Like most human things, discipleship has its good and its evil, its strong and its poor and dangerous side; but it really has, what is much forgotten now, a good and a strong side. Both in philosophy and religion, the [Greek: mathaetaes] is a distinct character, and Charles Marriott was an example of it at its best. He had its manly and reasonable humility, its generous trustfulness, its self-forgetfulness; he had, too, the enthusiasm of having and recognising a great master and teacher, and doing what he wanted done; and he learned from the love of his master to love what he believed truth still more. The character of the disciple does not save a man from difficulties, from trouble and perplexity; but it tends to save him from idols of his own making. It is something, in the trials of life and faith, to have the consciousness of knowing or having known some one greater and better and wiser than oneself, of having felt the spell of his guidance and example. Marriott’s mind, quick to see what was real and strong, and at once reverent to it as soon as he saw it, came very much, as an undergraduate at Balliol, under the influence of a very able and brilliant tutor, Moberly, afterwards Headmaster of Winchester and Bishop of Salisbury; and to the last his deference and affection to his old tutor remained unimpaired. But he came under a still more potent charm when he moved to Oriel, and became the friend of Mr. Newman. Master and disciple were as unlike as any two men could be; they were united by their sympathy in the great crisis round them, by their absorbing devotion to the cause of true religion. Marriott brought to the movement, and especially to its chief, a great University character, and an unswerving and touching fidelity. He placed himself, his life, and all that he could do, at the service of the great effort to elevate and animate the Church; to the last he would gladly have done so under him whom he first acknowledged as his master. This was not to be; and he transferred his allegiance, as unreservedly, with equal loyalty and self-sacrifice, to his successor. But to the end, while his powers lasted, with all his great gifts and attainments, with every temptation to an independent position and self-chosen employment, he continued a disciple. He believed in men wiser than himself; he occupied himself with what they thought best for him to do.
This work was, for the most part, in what was done to raise the standard of knowledge of early Christian literature, and to make that knowledge accurate and scholarlike. He was, for a time, the Principal of the Theological College at Chichester, under Bishop Otter. He was also for a time Tutor at Oriel, and later, Vicar of St. Mary’s. He was long bent on setting on foot some kind of Hall for poor students; and he took over from Mr. Newman the buildings at Littlemore, which he turned into a place for printing religious works. But though he was connected more or less closely with numberless schemes of Christian work in Oxford and out of it, his special work was that of a theological student. Marriott had much to do with the Library of the Fathers, with correcting translations, collating manuscripts, editing texts.[34] Somehow, the most interesting portions hardly came to his share; and what he did in the way of original writing, little as it was, causes regret that so much of his time was spent on the drudgery of editing. Some sermons, a little volume of _Thoughts on Private Devotion_, and another on the _Epistle to the Romans_, are nearly all that he has left of his own. Novelty of manner or thought in them there is none, still less anything brilliant or sharp in observation or style; but there is an undefinable sense, in their calm, severe pages, of a deep and serious mind dwelling on deep and very serious things. It is impossible not to wish that a man who could so write and impress people might have had the leisure to write more.
But Marriott never had any leisure. It has been said above that he placed himself at the service of those whom he counted his teachers. But the truth is that he was at every one’s service who wanted or who asked his help. He had a large, and what must have been often a burdensome, correspondence. With pupils or friends he was always ready for some extra bit of reading. To strangers he was always ready to show attention and hospitality, though Marriott’s parties were as quaint as himself. His breakfast parties in his own room were things to have seen–a crowd of undergraduates, finding their way with difficulty amid lanes and piles of books, amid a scarcity of chairs and room, and the host, perfectly unconscious of anything grotesque, sitting silent during the whole of the meal, but perfectly happy, at the head of the table. But there was no claimant on his purse or his interest who was too strange for his sympathy–raw freshmen, bores of every kind, broken-down tradesmen, old women, distressed foreigners, converted Jews, all the odd and helpless wanderers from beaten ways, were to be heard of at Marriott’s rooms; and all, more or less, had a share of his time and thoughts, and perhaps counsel. He was sensible of worry as he grew older; but he never relaxed his efforts to do what any one asked of him. There must be even now some still living who know what no one else knows, how much they owe, with no direct claim on him, to Charles Marriott’s inexhaustible patience and charity. The pains which he would take with even the most uncongenial and unpromising men, who somehow had come in his way, and seemed thrown on his charge, the patience with which he would bear and condone their follies and even worse, were not to be told, for, indeed, few knew what they were.
“He was always ready to be the friend of any one whose conduct gave proofs of high principle, however inferior to himself in knowledge or acquirements, and his friendship once gained was not easily lost. I believe there was nothing in his power which he was not ready to do for a friend who wanted his help. It is not easy to state instances of such kindness without revealing what for many reasons had better be left untold. But many such have come to my knowledge, and I believe there are many more known only to himself and to those who derived benefit from his disinterested friendship.”[35]
Marriott’s great contribution to the movement was his solid, simple goodness, his immovable hope, his confidence that things would come right. With much imaginativeness open to poetical grandeur and charm, and not without some power of giving expression to feeling, he was destitute of all that made so many others of his friends interesting as men. He was nothing, as a person to know and observe, to the genius of the two Mozleys, to the brilliant social charm of Frederic Faber, to the keen, refined intelligence of Mark Pattison, to the originality and clever eccentricity of William Palmer of Magdalen. And he was nothing as a man of practical power for organising and carrying out successful schemes: such power was not much found at Oxford in those days. But his faith in his cause, as the cause of goodness and truth, was proof against mockery or suspicion or disaster. When ominous signs disturbed other people he saw none. He had an almost perverse subtlety of mind which put a favourable interpretation on what seemed most formidable. As his master drew more and more out of sympathy with the English Church, Marriott, resolutely loyal to it and to him, refused to understand hints and indications which to others were but too plain. He vexed and even provoked Newman, in the last agonies of the struggle, by the optimism with which he clung to useless theories and impossible hopes. For that unquenchable hoping against hope, and hope unabated still when the catastrophe had come, the English Church at least owes him deep gratitude. Throughout those anxious years he never despaired of her.
All through his life he was a beacon and an incitement to those who wished to make a good use of their lives. In him all men could see, whatever their opinions and however little they liked him, the simplicity and the truth of a self-denying life of suffering–for he was never well–of zealous hard work, unstinted, unrecompensed; of unabated lofty hopes for the great interests of the Church and the University; of deep unpretending matter-of-course godliness and goodness–without “form or comeliness” to attract any but those who cared for them, for themselves alone. It is almost a sacred duty to those who remember one who cared nothing for his own name or fame to recall what is the truth–that no one did more to persuade those round him of the solid underground religious reality of the movement. Mr. Thomas Mozley, among other generous notices of men whom the world and their contemporaries have forgotten, has said what is not more than justice.[36] Speaking of the enthusiasm of the movement, and the spirit of its members, “There had never been seen at Oxford, indeed seldom anywhere, so large and noble a sacrifice of the most precious gifts and powers to a sacred cause,” he points out what each of the leaders gave to it: “Charles Marriott threw in his scholarship and something more, for he might have been a philosopher, and he had poetry in his veins, being the son of the well-known author of the ‘Devonshire Lane.’ No one sacrificed himself so entirely to the cause, giving to it all that he had and all that he was, as Charles Marriott. He did not gather large congregations; he did not write works of genius to spread his name over the land, and to all time; he had few of the pleasures or even of the comforts that spontaneously offer themselves in any field of enterprise. He laboured day and night in the search and defence of Divine Truth. His admirers were not the thousands, but the scholars who could really appreciate. I confess to have been a little ashamed of myself when Bishop Burgess asked me about Charles Marriott, as one of the most eminent scholars of the day. Through sheer ignorance I had failed in adequate appreciation.” In his later years he became a member of the new Hebdomadal Council at Oxford, and took considerable part in working the new constitution of the University. In an epidemic of smallpox at Oxford in 1854, he took his full share in looking after the sick, and caught the disorder; but he recovered. At length, in the midst of troublesome work and many anxieties, his life of toil was arrested by a severe paralytic seizure, 29th June 1855. He partially rallied, and survived for some time longer; but his labours were ended. He died at Bradfield, 25th September 1858. He was worn out by variety and pressure of unintermitted labour, which he would scarcely allow any change or holiday to relieve. Exhaustion made illness, when it came, fatal.
FOOTNOTES:
[31] “He told me,” writes a relative, “that questions about trade used to occupy him very early in life. He used to ponder how it could be right to sell things for more than they cost you.”
[32] “He had his own way of doing everything, and used most stoutly to protest that it was quite impossible that he should do it in any other.”–_MS. Memoir_ by his brother, John Marriott.
[33] _Uniomachia_, 1833.
[34] “This became the main task of his life us long as health was continued to him. All who knew him well will remember how laboriously he worked at it, and how, in one shape or another, it was always on hand. Either he was translating, or correcting the translation of others; or he was collating MSS., or correcting the press. This last work was carried on at all times and wherever he was–on a journey, after dinner–even in a boat, he would pull out a sheet and go to write upon it in haste to get it finished for the next post. The number of volumes in the Library of the Fathers which bear the signature C.M. attest his diligence.”–John Marriott’s Memoir of him (MS.)
[35] J.M., _MS. Memoir_.
[36] _Rem._ i. 447.
CHAPTER VI
THE OXFORD TRACTS
“On 14th July 1833,” we read in Cardinal Newman’s _Apologia_, “Mr. Keble preached the assize sermon in the University Pulpit. It was published under the title of _National Apostasy_. I have ever considered and kept the day as the start of the religious movement of 1833.”[37]
This memorable sermon was a strong expression of the belief common to a large body of Churchmen amid the triumphs of the Reform Bill, that the new governors of the country were preparing to invade the rights, and to alter the constitution, and even the public documents, of the Church. The suppression of ten Irish Bishoprics, in defiance of Church opinion, showed how ready the Government was to take liberties in a high-handed way with the old adjustments of the relations of Church and State. Churchmen had hitherto taken for granted that England was “a nation which had for centuries acknowledged, as an essential part of its theory of government, that, _as_ a Christian nation, she is also a part of Christ’s Church, and bound, in all her legislation and policy, by the fundamental laws of that Church.” When “a Government and people, so constituted, threw off the restraint which in many respects such a principle would impose upon them, nay, disavowed the principle itself,” this, to those whose ideas Mr. Keble represented, seemed nothing short of a “direct disavowal of the sovereignty of God. If it be true anywhere that such enactments are forced on the legislature by public opinion, is Apostasy too hard a word to describe the temper of such a nation?” The sermon was a call to face in earnest a changed state of things, full of immediate and pressing danger; to consider how it was to be met by Christians and Churchmen, and to watch motives and tempers. “Surely it will be no unworthy principle if any man is more circumspect in his behaviour, more watchful and fearful of himself, more earnest in his petitions for spiritual aid, from a dread of disparaging the holy name of the English Church in her hour of peril by his own personal fault and negligence. As to those who, either by station or temper, feel themselves more deeply interested, they cannot be too careful in reminding themselves that one chief danger in times of change and excitement arises from their tendency to engross the whole mind. Public concerns, ecclesiastical or civil, will prove indeed ruinous to those who permit them to occupy all their care and thought, neglecting or undervaluing ordinary duties, more especially those of a devotional kind. These cautions being duly observed, I do not see how any person can devote himself too entirely to the cause of the Apostolic Church in these realms. There may be, as far as he knows, but a very few to sympathise with him. He may have to wait long, and very likely pass out of this world, before he see any abatement in the triumph of disorder and irreligion. But, _if he be consistent_, he possesses to the utmost the personal consolations of a good Christian; and as a true Churchman, he has the encouragement which no other cause in the world can impart in the same degree: he is calmly, soberly, demonstrably _sure_ that, sooner or later, _his will be the winning side_, and that the victory will be complete, universal, eternal.”
But if Mr. Keble’s sermon was the first word of the movement, its first step was taken in a small meeting of friends, at Mr. Hugh James Rose’s parsonage at Hadleigh, in Suffolk, between the 25th and the 29th of the same July. At this little gathering, the ideas and anxieties which for some time past had filled the thoughts of a number of earnest Churchmen, and had brought them into communication with one another, came to a head, and issued in the determination to move. Mr. Rose, a man of high character and distinction in his day, who had recently started the _British Magazine_, as an organ of Church teaching and opinion, was the natural person to bring about such a meeting.[38] It was arranged that a few representative men, or as many as were able, should meet towards the end of July at Hadleigh Rectory. They were men in full agreement on the main questions, but with great differences in temperament and habits of thought. Mr. Rose was the person of most authority, and next to him, Mr. Palmer; and these, with Mr. A. Perceval, formed as it were the right wing of the little council. Their Oxford allies were the three Oriel men, Mr. Keble, Mr. Froude, and Mr. Newman, now fresh from his escape from death in a foreign land, and from the long solitary musings in his Mediterranean orange-boat, full of joyful vigour and ready for enterprise and work.[39] In the result, Mr. Keble and Mr. Newman were not present, but they were in active correspondence with the others.[40] From this meeting resulted the _Tracts for the Times_, and the agitation connected with them.
These friends were all devoted Churchmen, but, as has been said, each had his marked character, not only as a man but as a Churchman. The most important among them was as yet the least prominent. Two of them were men of learning, acquainted with the great world of London, and who, with all their zeal, had some of the caution which comes of such experience. At the time, the most conspicuous was Mr. Hugh James Rose.
Mr. Rose was a man whose name and whose influence, as his friends thought, have been overshadowed and overlooked in the popular view of the Church revival. It owed to him, they held, not only its first impulse, but all that was best and most hopeful in it; and when it lost him, it lost its wisest and ablest guide and inspirer. It is certainly true that when that revival began he was a much more distinguished and important person than any of the other persons interested in it. As far as could be seen at the time, he was the most accomplished divine and teacher in the English Church. He was a really learned man. He had the intellect and energy and literary skill to use his learning. He was a man of singularly elevated and religious character; he had something of the eye and temper of a statesman, and he had already a high position. He was profoundly loyal to the Church, and keenly interested in whatever affected its condition and its fortunes. As early as 1825 he had in some lectures at Cambridge called the attention of English Churchmen to the state of religious thought and speculation in Germany, and to the mischiefs likely to react on English theology from the rationalising temper and methods which had supplanted the old Lutheran teaching; and this had led to a sharp controversy with Mr. Pusey, as he was then, who thought that Mr. Rose[41] had both exaggerated the fact itself and had not adequately given the historical account of it. He had the prudence, but not the backwardness, of a man of large knowledge, and considerable experience of the world. More alive to difficulties and dangers than his younger associates, he showed his courage and his unselfish earnestness in his frank sympathy with them, daring and outspoken as they were, and in his willingness to share with them the risks of an undertaking of which no one knew better than he what were likely to be the difficulties. He certainly was a person who might be expected to have a chief part in directing anything with which he was connected. His countenance and his indirect influence were very important elements, both in the stirring of thought which led to the Hadleigh resolutions, and in giving its form to what was then decided upon. But his action in the movement was impeded by his failure in health, and cut short by his early death, January 1839. How he would have influenced the course of things if he had lived, it is not now easy to say. He must have been reckoned with as one of the chiefs. He would have been opposed to anything that really tended towards Rome. But there is no reason to think that he would have shrunk from any step only because it was bold. He had sympathy for courage and genius, and he had knowledge and authority which would have commanded respect for his judgment and opinion. But it is too much to say either that the movement could not have been without him, or that it was specially his design and plan, or that he alone could have given the impulse which led to it; though it seemed at one time as if he was to be its leader and chief. Certainly he was the most valuable and the most loyal of its early auxiliaries.
Another coadjutor, whose part at the time also seemed rather that of a chief, was Mr. William Palmer, of Worcester College. He had been educated at Trinity College, Dublin, but he had transferred his home to Oxford, both in the University and the city. He was a man of exact and scholastic mind, well equipped at all points in controversial theology, strong in clear theories and precise definitions, familiar with objections current in the schools and with the answers to them, and well versed in all the questions, arguments, and authorities belonging to the great debate with Rome. He had definite and well-arranged ideas about the nature and office of the Church; and, from his study of the Roman controversy, he had at command the distinctions necessary to discriminate between things which popular views confused, and to protect the doctrines characteristic of the Church from being identified with Romanism. Especially he had given great attention to the public devotional language and forms of the Church, and had produced by far the best book in the English language on the history and significance of the offices of the English Church–the _Origines Liturgicae_, published at the University Press in 1832. It was a book to give a man authority with divines and scholars; and among those with whom at this time he acted no one had so compact and defensible a theory, even if it was somewhat rigid and technical, of the peculiar constitution of the English Church as Mr. Palmer. With the deepest belief in this theory, he saw great dangers threatening, partly from general ignorance and looseness of thought, partly from antagonistic ideas and principles only too distinct and too popular; and he threw all his learning and zeal on the side of those who, like himself, were alive to those dangers, and were prepared for a great effort to counteract them.
The little company which met at Hadleigh Rectory, from 25th to 29th July 1833, met–as other knots of men have often met, to discuss a question or a policy, or to found an association, or a league, or a newspaper–to lay down the outlines of some practical scheme of work; but with little foresight of the venture they were making, or of the momentous issues which depended on their meeting. Later on, when controversy began, it became a favourite rhetorical device to call it by the ugly name of a “conspiracy.” Certainly Froude called it so, and Mr. Palmer; and Mr. Perceval wrote a narrative to answer the charge. It was a “conspiracy,” as any other meeting would be of men with an object which other men dislike.
Of the Oriel men, only Froude went to Hadleigh. Keble and Newman were both absent, but in close correspondence with the others. Their plans had not taken any definite shape; but they were ready for any sacrifice and service, and they were filled with wrath against the insolence of those who thought that the Church was given over into their hands, and against the apathy and cowardice of those who let her enemies have their way. Yet with much impatience and many stern determinations in their hearts, they were all of them men to be swayed by the judgment and experience of their friends.
The state of mind under which the four friends met at the Hadleigh conference has been very distinctly and deliberately recorded by all of them. Churchmen in our days hardly realise what the face of things then looked like to men who, if they felt deeply, were no mere fanatics or alarmists, but sober and sagacious observers, not affected by mere cries, but seeing dearly beneath the surface of things their certain and powerful tendencies. “We felt ourselves,” writes Mr. Palmer some years afterwards,[42] “assailed by enemies from without and foes within. Our Prelates insulted and threatened by Ministers of State. In Ireland ten bishoprics suppressed. We were advised to feel thankful that a more sweeping measure had not been adopted. What was to come next?… Was the same principle of concession to popular clamour … to be exemplified in the dismemberment of the English Church?… We were overwhelmed with pamphlets on Church reform. Lord Henley, brother-in-law of Sir Robert Peel, Dr. Burton, and others of name and influence led the way. Dr. Arnold of Rugby ventured to propose that all sects should be united by Act of Parliament with the Church of England. Reports, apparently well founded, were prevalent that some of the Prelates were favourable to alterations in the Liturgy. Pamphlets were in wide circulation recommending the abolition of the Creeds (at least in public worship), especially urging the expulsion of the Athanasian Creed; the removal of all mention of the Blessed Trinity; of the doctrine of baptismal regeneration; of the practice of absolution. We knew not to what quarter to look for support. A Prelacy threatened and apparently intimidated; a Government making its power subservient to agitators, who avowedly sought the destruction of the Church … And, worst of all, _no principle in the public mind to which we could appeal_; an utter ignorance of all rational grounds of attachment to the Church; an oblivion of its spiritual character, as an institution not of man but of God; the grossest Erastianism most widely prevalent, especially amongst all classes of politicians. There was in all this enough to appal the stoutest heart; and those who can recall the feeling of those days will at once remember the deep depression into which the Church had fallen, and the gloomy forebodings universally prevalent.”
“Before the spirit and temper of those who met at the conference is condemned as extravagant,” writes Mr. Perceval in 1842,[43] “let the reader call to mind what was then actually the condition as well as the prospect of the Church and nation: an agrarian and civic insurrection against the bishops and clergy, and all who desired to adhere to the existing institutions of the country; the populace goaded on, openly by the speeches, covertly (as was fully believed at the time) by the paid emissaries of the ministers of the Crown; the chief of those ministers in his place in Parliament bidding the bishops ‘set their house in order’; the mob taking him at his word, and burning to the ground the palace of the Bishop of Bristol, with the public buildings of the city, while they shouted the Premier’s name in triumph on the ruins.” The pressing imminence of the danger is taken for granted by the calmest and most cautious of the party, Mr. Rose, in a letter of February 1833. “That something is requisite, is certain. The only thing is, that whatever is done ought to be _quickly_ done, for the danger is immediate, and _I should have little fear if I thought that we could stand for ten or fifteen years as we are_.”[44] In the _Apologia_ Cardinal Newman recalls what was before him in those days. “The Whigs had come into power; Lord Grey had told the bishops to ‘set their house in order,’ and some of the prelates had been insulted and threatened in the streets of London. The vital question was. How were we to keep the Church from being Liberalised? There was so much apathy on the subject in some quarters, such imbecile alarm in others; the true principles of Churchmanship seemed so radically decayed, and there was such distraction in the councils of the clergy. The Bishop of London of the day, an active and open-hearted man, had been for years engaged in diluting the high orthodoxy of the Church by the introduction of the Evangelical body into places of influence and trust. He had deeply offended men who agreed with myself by an off-hand saying (as it was reported) to the effect that belief in the apostolical succession had gone out with the Non-jurors. ‘_We can count you_,’ he said to some of the gravest and most venerated persons of the old school…. I felt affection for my own Church, but not tenderness: I felt dismay at her prospects, anger and scorn at her do-nothing perplexity. I thought that if Liberalism once got a footing within her, it was sure of victory in the event. I saw that Reformation principles were powerless to rescue her. As to leaving her, the thought never crossed my imagination: still I ever kept before me that there was something greater than the Established Church, and that that was the Church Catholic and Apostolic, set up from the beginning, of which she was but the local presence and organ. She was nothing unless she was this. She must be dealt with strongly or she would be lost. There was need of a second Reformation.”
“If _I thought that we could stand ten or fifteen years as we are_, I should have little fear,” said Mr. Rose. He felt that, if only he could secure a respite, he had the means and the hope of opening the eyes of Churchmen. They were secure and idle from long prosperity, and now they were scared and perplexed by the suddenness of an attack for which they were wholly unprepared. But he had confidence in his own convictions. He had around him ability and zeal, in which he had the best reason to trust. He might hope, if he had time, to turn the tide. But this time to stand to arms was just what he had not. The danger, he felt, was upon him. He could not wait. So he acquiesced in an agitation which so cautious and steady a man would otherwise hardly have chosen. “That _something must be done_ is certain. The only thing is, that whatever is done ought to be _quickly_ done.” Nothing can show more forcibly the imminence and pressure of the crisis than words like these, not merely from Froude and his friends, but from such a man as Mr. Hugh James Rose.
“Something must be done,” but what? This was not so easy to say. It was obvious that men must act in concert, and must write; but beyond these general points, questions and difficulties arose. The first idea that suggested itself at Hadleigh was a form of association, which would have been something like the _English Church Union_ or the _Church Defence Association_ of our days. It probably was Mr. Palmer’s idea; and for some time the attempt to carry it into effect was followed up at Oxford. Plans of “Association” were drawn up and rejected. The endeavour brought out differences of opinion–differences as to the rightness or the policy of specific mention of doctrines; differences as to the union of Church and State, on the importance of maintaining which, as long as possible, Mr. Newman sided with Mr. Palmer against Mr. Keble’s more uncompromising view. A “_third_ formulary” was at length adopted. “Events,” it said, “have occurred within the last few years calculated to inspire the true members and friends of the Church with the deepest uneasiness.” It went on to notice that political changes had thrown power into the hands of the professed enemies of the Church as an establishment; but it was not merely as an establishment that it was in most serious danger. “Every one,” it says, “who has become acquainted with the literature of the day, must have observed the sedulous attempts made in various quarters to reconcile members of the Church to alterations in its doctrines and discipline. Projects of change, which include the annihilation of our Creeds and the removal of doctrinal statements incidentally contained in our worship, have been boldly and assiduously put forth. Our services have been subjected to licentious criticism, with the view of superseding some of them and of entirely remodelling others. The very elementary principles of our ritual and discipline have been rudely questioned; our apostolical polity has been ridiculed and denied.” The condition of the times made these things more than ordinarily alarming, and the pressing danger was urged as a reason for the formation, by members of the Church in various parts of the kingdom, of an association on a few broad principles of union for the defence of the Church. “They feel strongly,” said the authors of the paper, “that no fear of the appearance of forwardness should dissuade them from a design, which seems to be demanded of them by their affection towards that spiritual community to which they owe their hopes of the world to come; and by a sense of duty to that God and Saviour who is its Founder and Defender.” But the plan of an Association, or of separate Associations, which was circulated in the autumn of 1833, came to nothing. “Jealousy was entertained of it in high quarters.” Froude objected to any association less wide than the Church itself. Newman had a horror of committees and meetings and great people in London. And thus, in spite of Mr. Palmer’s efforts, favoured by a certain number of influential and dignified friends, the Association would not work. But the stir about it was not without result. Mr. Palmer travelled about the country with the view of bringing the state of things before the clergy. In place of the Association, an Address to the Archbishop of Canterbury was resolved upon. It was drawn up by Mr. Palmer, who undertook the business of circulating it. In spite of great difficulties and trouble of the alarm of friends like Mr. Rose, who was afraid that it would cause schism in the Church; of the general timidity of the dignified clergy; of the distrust and the crotchets of others; of the coldness of the bishops and the opposition of some of them–it was presented with the signatures of some 7000 clergy to the Archbishop in February 1834. It bore the names, among others, of Dr. Christopher Wordsworth, Master of Trinity; Dr. Gilbert, of Brasenose College; Dr. Faussett, and Mr. Keble. And this was not all. A Lay Address followed. There were difficulties about the first form proposed, which was thought to say too much about the doctrine and discipline of the Church; and it was laid aside for one with more vague expressions about the “consecration of the State,” and the practical benefits of the Established Church. In this form it was signed by 230,000 heads of families, and presented to the Archbishop in the following May. “From these two events,” writes Mr. Perceval in 1842, “we may date the commencement of the turn of the tide, which had threatened to overwhelm our Church and our religion.”[45] There can, at any rate, be little doubt that as regards the external position of the Church in the country, this agitation was a success. It rallied the courage of Churchmen, and showed that they were stronger and more resolute than their enemies thought. The revolutionary temper of the times had thrown all Churchmen on the Conservative side; and these addresses were partly helped by political Conservatism, and also reacted in its favour.
Some of the Hadleigh friends would probably have been content to go on in this course, raising and keeping alive a strong feeling in favour of things as they were, creating a general sympathy with the Church, and confidence in the peculiar excellency of its wise and sober institutions, sedulously but cautiously endeavouring to correct popular mistakes about them, and to diffuse a sounder knowledge and a sounder tone of religious feeling. This is what Mr. H.J. Rose would have wished, only he felt that he could not insure the “ten or fifteen years” which he wanted to work this gradual change. Both he and Mr. Palmer would have made London, to use a military term, their base of operations. The Oriel men, on the other hand, thought that “Universities are the natural centres of intellectual movements”; they were for working more spontaneously in the freedom of independent study; they had little faith in organisation; “living movements,” they said, “do not come of committees.” But at Hadleigh it was settled that there was writing to be done, in some way or other; and on this, divergence of opinion soon showed itself, both as to the matter and the tone of what was to be written.
For the writers of real force, the men of genius, were the three Oriel men, with less experience, at that time, with less extensive learning, than Mr. Rose and Mr. Palmer. But they were bolder and keener spirits; they pierced more deeply into the real condition and prospects of the times; they were not disposed to smooth over and excuse what they thought hollow and untrue, to put up with decorous compromises and half-measures, to be patient towards apathy, negligence, or insolence. They certainly had more in them of the temper of warfare. We know from their own avowals that a great anger possessed them, that they were indignant at the sacred idea of the Church being lost and smothered by selfishness and stupidity; they were animated by the spirit which makes men lose patience with abuses and their apologists, and gives them no peace till they speak out. Mr. Newman felt that, though associations and addresses might be very well, what the Church and the clergy and the country wanted was plain speaking; and that plain speaking could not be got by any papers put forth as joint manifestoes, or with the revision and sanction of “safe” and “judicious” advisers. It was necessary to write, and to write as each man felt: and he determined that each man should write and speak for himself, though working in concert and sympathy with others towards the supreme end–the cause and interests of the Church.
And thus were born the _Tracts for the Times._[46] For a time Mr. Palmer’s line and Mr. Newman’s line ran on side by side; but Mr. Palmer’s plan had soon done all that it could do, important as that was; it gradually faded out of sight, and the attention of all who cared for, or who feared or who hated the movement, was concentrated on the “Oxford Tracts.” They were the watchword and the symbol of an enterprise which all soon felt to be a remarkable one–remarkable, if in nothing else, in the form in which it was started. Great changes and movements have been begun in various ways; in secret and underground communications, in daring acts of self-devotion or violence, in the organisation of an institution, in the persistent display of a particular temper and set of habits, especially in the form of a stirring and enthralling eloquence, in popular preaching, in fierce appeals to the passions. But though tracts had become in later times familiar instruments of religious action, they had, from the fashion of using them, become united in the minds of many with rather disparaging associations. The pertinacity of good ladies who pressed them on chance strangers, and who extolled their efficacy as if it was that of a quack medicine, had lowered the general respect for them. The last thing that could have been thought of was a great religions revolution set in motion by tracts and leaflets, and taking its character and name from them.
But the ring of these early Tracts was something very different from anything of the kind yet known in England. They were clear, brief, stern appeals to conscience and reason, sparing of words, utterly without rhetoric, intense in purpose. They were like the short, sharp, rapid utterances of men in pain and danger and pressing emergency. The first one gave the keynote of the series. Mr. Newman “had out of his own head begun the Tracts”: he wrote the opening one in a mood which he has himself described. He was in the “exultation of health restored and home regained”: he felt, he says, an “exuberant and joyous energy which he never had before or since”; “his health and strength had come back to him with such a rebound” that some of his friends did not know him. “I had the consciousness that I was employed in that work which I had been dreaming about, and which I felt to be so momentous and inspiring. I had a supreme confidence in our cause; we were upholding that primitive Christianity which was delivered for all time by the early teachers of the Church, and which was registered and attested in the Anglican formularies and by the Anglican divines. That ancient religion had well-nigh faded out of the land through the political changes of the last 150 years, and it must be restored. It would be, in fact, a second Reformation–a better Reformation, for it would return, not to the sixteenth century, but to the seventeenth. No time was to be lost, for the Whigs had come to do their worst, and the rescue might come too late. Bishoprics were already in course of suppression; Church property was in course of confiscation; sees would be soon receiving unsuitable occupants. We knew enough to begin preaching, and there was no one else to preach. I felt,” he goes on,[47] with a characteristic recollection of his own experience when he started on his voyage with Froude in the _Hermes_, “as on a vessel, which first gets under weigh, and then clears out the deck, and stores away luggage and live stock into their proper receptacles.” The first three Tracts bear the date of 9th September 1833. They were the first public utterance of the movement. The opening words of this famous series deserve to be recalled. They are new to most of the present generation.
TO MY BRETHREN IN THE SACRED MINISTRY, THE PRESBYTERS AND DEACONS OF THE CHURCH OF CHRIST IN ENGLAND, ORDAINED THEREUNTO BY THE HOLY GHOST AND THE IMPOSITION OF HANDS.
FELLOW-LABOURERS,–I am but one of yourselves–Presbyter; and therefore I conceal my name, lest I should take too much on myself by speaking in my own person. Yet speak I must; for the times are very evil, yet no one speaks against them.
Is not this so? Do not we “look one upon another,” yet perform nothing? Do we not all confess the peril into which the Church is come, yet sit still each in his own retirement, as if mountains and seas cut off brother from brother? Therefore suffer me, while I try to draw you forth from those pleasant retreats, which it has been our blessedness hitherto to enjoy, to contemplate the condition and prospects of our Holy Mother in a practical way; so that one and all may unlearn that idle habit, which has grown upon us, of owning the state of things to be bad, yet doing nothing to remedy it.
Consider a moment. Is it fair, is it dutiful, to suffer our bishops to stand the brunt of the battle without doing our part to support them? Upon them comes “the care of all the Churches.” This cannot be helped; indeed it is their glory. Not one of us would wish in the least to deprive them of the duties, the toils, the responsibilities of their high office. And, black event as it would be for the country, yet (as far as they are concerned) we could not wish them a more blessed termination of their course than the spoiling of their goods and martyrdom.
To them then we willingly and affectionately relinquish their high privileges and honours; we encroach not upon the rights of the SUCCESSORS OF THE APOSTLES; we touch not their sword and crozier. Yet surely we may be their shield-bearers in the battle without offence; and by our voice and deeds be to them what Luke and Timothy were to St. Paul.
Now then let me come at once to the subject which leads me to address you. Should the Government and the Country so far forget their God as to cast off the Church, to deprive it of its temporal honours and substance, _on what_ will you rest the claim of respect and attention which you make upon your flocks? Hitherto you have been upheld by your birth, your education, your wealth, your connexions; should these secular advantages cease, on what must Christ’s Ministers depend? Is not this a serious practical question? We know how miserable is the state of religious bodies not supported by the State. Look at the Dissenters on all sides of you, and you will see at once that their Ministers, depending simply upon the people, become the _creatures_ of the people. Are you content that this should be your case? Alas! can a greater evil befall Christians, than for their teachers to be guided by them, instead of guiding? How can we “hold fast the form of sound words,” and “keep that which is committed to our trust,” if our influence is to depend simply on our popularity? Is it not our very office to _oppose_ the world? Can we then allow ourselves to _court_ it? to preach smooth things and prophesy deceits? to make the way of life easy to the rich and indolent, and to bribe the humbler classes by excitements and strong intoxicating doctrine? Surely it must not be so;–and the question recurs, _on what_ are we to rest our authority when the State deserts us?
Christ has not left His Church without claim of its own upon the attention of men. Surely not. Hard Master He cannot be, to bid us oppose the world, yet give us no credentials for so doing. There are some who rest their divine mission on their own unsupported assertion; others, who rest it upon their popularity; others, on their success; and others, who rest it upon their temporal distinctions. This last case has, perhaps, been too much our own; I fear we have neglected the real ground on which our authority is built–OUR APOSTOLICAL DESCENT.
We have been born, not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God. The Lord Jesus Christ gave His Spirit to His Apostles; they in turn laid their hands on those who should succeed them; and these again on others; and so the sacred gift has been handed down to our present bishops, who have appointed us as their assistants, and in some sense representatives.
Now every one of us believes this. I know that some will at first deny they do; still they do believe it. Only, it is not sufficiently, practically impressed on their minds.
They _do_ believe it; for it _is_ the doctrine of the Ordination Service, which they have recognised as truth in the most solemn season of their lives. In order, then, not to prove, but to remind and impress, I entreat your attention to the words used when you were made ministers of Christ’s Church.
The office of Deacon was thus committed to you: “Take thou authority to execute the office of a Deacon in the Church of God committed unto thee: In the name, etc.”
And the Priesthood thus:
“Receive the Holy Ghost, for the office and work of a Priest, in the Church of God, now committed unto thee by the imposition of our hands. Whose sins thou dost forgive, they are forgiven; and whose sins thou dost retain, they are retained. And be thou a faithful dispenser of the Word of God, and of His Holy Sacraments: In the name, etc.”
These, I say, were words spoken to us, and received by us, when we were brought nearer to God than at any other time of our lives. I know the grace of ordination is contained in the laying on of hands, not in any form of words;–yet in our own case (as has ever been usual in the Church) words of blessing have accompanied the act. Thus we have confessed before God our belief that the bishop who ordained us gave us the Holy Ghost, gave us the power to bind and to loose, to administer the Sacraments, and to preach. Now _how_ is he able to give these great gifts? _Whence_ is his right? Are these words idle (which would be taking God’s name in vain), or do they express merely a wish (which surely is very far below their meaning), or do they not rather indicate that the speaker is conveying a gift? Surely they can mean nothing short of this. But whence, I ask, his right to do so? Has he any right, except as having received the power from those who consecrated him to be a bishop? He could not give what he had never received. It is plain then that he but _transmits_; and that the Christian Ministry is a _succession_. And if we trace back the power of ordination from hand to hand, of course we shall come to the Apostles at last. We know we do, as a plain historical fact; and therefore all we, who have been ordained clergy, in the very form of our ordination acknowledged the doctrine of the APOSTOLICAL SUCCESSION.
And for the same reason, we must necessarily consider none to be _really_ ordained who have not _thus_ been ordained. For if ordination is a divine ordinance, it must be necessary; and if it is not a divine ordinance, how dare we use it? Therefore all who use it, all of _us_, must consider it necessary. As well might we pretend the Sacraments are not necessary to salvation, while we make use of the offices in the Liturgy; for when God appoints means of grace, they are _the_ means.
I do not see how any one can escape from this plain view of the subject, except (as I have already hinted) by declaring that the words do not mean all that they say. But only reflect what a most unseemly time for random words is that in which ministers are set apart for their office. Do we not adopt a Liturgy _in order to_ hinder inconsiderate idle language, and shall we, in the most sacred of all services, write down, subscribe, and use again and again forms of speech which have not been weighed, and cannot be taken strictly?
Therefore, my dear brethren, act up to your professions. Let it not be said that you have neglected a gift; for if you have the Spirit of the Apostles on you, surely this _is_ a great gift. “Stir up the gift of God which is in you.” Make much of it. Show your value of it. Keep it before your minds as an honourable badge, far higher than that secular respectability, or cultivation, or polish, or learning, or rank, which gives you a hearing with the many. Tell _them_ of your gift. The times will soon drive you to do this, if you mean to be still anything. But wait not for the times. Do not be compelled, by the world’s forsaking you, to recur as if unwillingly to the high source of your authority. Speak out now, before you are forced, both as glorying in your privilege and to insure your rightful honour from your people. A notion has gone abroad that they can take away your power. They think they have given and can take it away. They think it lies in the Church property, and they know that they have politically the power to confiscate that property. They have been deluded into a notion that present palpable usefulness, producible results, acceptableness to your flocks, that these and such like are the tests of your divine commission. Enlighten them in this matter. Exalt our Holy Fathers the bishops, as the representatives of the Apostles, and the Angels of the Churches; and magnify your office, as being ordained by them to take part in their Ministry.
But, if you will not adopt my view of the subject, which I offer to you, not doubtingly, yet (I hope) respectfully, at all events, CHOOSE YOUR SIDE. To remain neuter much longer will be itself to take a part. _Choose_ your side; since side you shortly must, with one or other party, even though you do nothing. Fear to be of those whose line is decided for them by chance circumstances, and who may perchance find themselves with the enemies of Christ, while they think but to remove themselves from worldly politics. Such abstinence is impossible in troublous times. HE THAT IS NOT WITH ME IS AGAINST ME, AND HE THAT GATHERETH NOT WITH ME SCATTERETH ABROAD.
While Mr. Palmer was working at the Association and the Address, Mr. Newman with his friends was sending forth the Tracts, one after another, in rapid succession, through the autumn and winter of 1833. They were short papers, in many cases mere short notes, on the great questions which had suddenly sprung into such interest, and were felt to be full of momentous consequence,–the true and essential nature of the Christian Church, its relation to the primitive ages, its authority and its polity and government, the current objections to its claims in England, to its doctrines and its services, the length of the prayers, the Burial Service, the proposed alterations in the Liturgy, the neglect of discipline, the sins and corruptions of each branch of Christendom. The same topics were enforced and illustrated again and again as the series went on; and then there came extracts from English divines, like Bishop Beveridge, Bishop Wilson, and Bishop Cosin, and under the title “Records of the Church,” translations from the early Fathers, Ignatius, Justin, Irenaeus, and others. Mr. Palmer contributed to one of these papers, and later on Mr. Perceval wrote two or three; but for the most part these early Tracts were written by Mr. Newman, though Mr. Keble and one or two others also helped. Afterwards, other writers joined in the series. They were at first not only published with a notice that any one might republish them with any alterations he pleased, but they were distributed by zealous coadjutors, ready to take any trouble in the cause. Mr. Mozley has described how he rode about Northamptonshire, from parsonage to parsonage, with bundles of the Tracts. The _Apologia_ records the same story. “I called upon clergy,” says the writer, “in various parts of the country, whether I was acquainted with them or not, and I attended at the houses of friends where several of them were from time to time assembled…. I did not care whether my visits were made to High Church or Low Church: I wished to make a strong pull in union with all who were opposed to the principles of Liberalism, whoever they might be.” He adds that he does not think that much came of these visits, or of letters written with the same purpose, “except that they advertised the fact that a rally in favour of the Church was commencing.”
The early Tracts were intended to startle the world, and they succeeded in doing so. Their very form, as short earnest leaflets, was perplexing; for they came, not from the class of religionists who usually deal in such productions, but from distinguished University scholars, picked men of a picked college; and from men, too, who as a school were the representatives of soberness and self-control in religious feeling and language, and whose usual style of writing was specially marked by its severe avoidance of excitement and novelty; the school from which had lately come the _Christian Year_, with its memorable motto “_In quietness and confidence shall be your strength_.” Their matter was equally unusual. Undoubtedly they “brought strange things to the ears” of their generation. To Churchmen now these “strange things” are such familiar commonplaces, that it is hard to realise how they should have made so much stir. But they were novelties, partly audacious, partly unintelligible, then. The strong and peremptory language of the Tracts, their absence of qualifications or explanations, frightened friends like Mr. Palmer, who, so far, had no ground to quarrel with their doctrine, and he wished them to be discontinued. The story went that one of the bishops, on reading one of the Tracts on the Apostolical Succession, could not make up his mind whether he held the doctrine or not. They fell on a time of profound and inexcusable ignorance on the subjects they discussed, and they did not spare it. The cry of Romanism was inevitable, and was soon raised, though there was absolutely nothing in them but had the indisputable sanction of the Prayer Book, and of the most authoritative Anglican divines. There was no Romanism in them, nor anything that showed a tendency to it. But custom, and the prevalence of other systems and ways, and the interest of later speculations, and the slackening of professional reading and scholarship in the Church, had made their readers forget some of the most obvious facts in Church history, and the most certain Church principles; and men were at sea as to what they knew or believed on the points on which the Tracts challenged them. The scare was not creditable; it was like the Italian scare about cholera with its quarantines and fumigations; but it was natural. The theological knowledge and learning were wanting which would have been familiar with the broad line of difference between what is Catholic and what is specially Roman. There were many whose teaching was impugned, for it was really Calvinist or Zwinglian, and not Anglican. There were hopeful and ambitious theological Liberals, who recognised in that appeal to Anglicanism the most effective counter-stroke to their own schemes and theories. There were many whom the movement forced to think, who did not want such addition to their responsibilities. It cannot be thought surprising that the new Tracts were received with surprise, dismay, ridicule, and indignation. But they also at once called forth a response of eager sympathy from numbers to whom they brought unhoped-for relief and light in a day of gloom, of rebuke and blasphemy. Mr. Keble, in the preface to his famous assize sermon, had hazarded the belief that there were “hundreds, nay, thousands of Christians, and that there soon will be tens of thousands, unaffectedly anxious to be rightly guided” in regard to subjects that concern the Church. The belief was soon justified.
When the first forty-six Tracts were collected into a volume towards the end of 1834, the following “advertisement” explaining their nature and objects was prefixed to it. It is a contemporary and authoritative account of what was the mind of the leaders of the movement; and it has a significance beyond the occasion which prompted it.
The following-Tracts were published with the object of contributing-something towards the practical revival of doctrines, which, although held by the great divines of our Church, at present have become obsolete with the majority of her members, and are withdrawn from public view even by the more learned and orthodox few who still adhere to them. The Apostolic succession, the Holy Catholic Church, were principles of action in the minds of our predecessors of the seventeenth century; but, in proportion as the maintenance of the Church has been secured by law, her ministers have been under the temptation of leaning on an arm of flesh instead of her own divinely-provided discipline, a temptation increased by political events and arrangements which need not here be more than alluded to. A lamentable increase of sectarianism has followed; being occasioned (in addition to other more obvious causes), first, by the cold aspect which the new Church doctrines have presented to the religious sensibilities of the mind, next to their meagreness in suggesting motives to restrain it from seeking out a more influential discipline. Doubtless obedience to the law of the land, and the careful maintenance of “decency and order” (the topics in usage among us), are plain duties of the Gospel, and a reasonable ground for keeping in communion with the Established Church; yet, if Providence has graciously provided for our weakness more interesting and constraining motives, it is a sin thanklessly to neglect them; just as it would be a mistake to rest the duties of temperance or justice on the mere law of natural religion, when they are mercifully sanctioned in the Gospel by the more winning authority of our Saviour Christ. Experience has shown the inefficacy of the mere injunctions of Church order, however scripturally enforced, in restraining from schism the awakened and anxious sinner; who goes to a dissenting preacher “because” (as he expresses it) “he gets good from him”: and though he does not stand excused in God’s sight for yielding to the temptation, surely the ministers of the Church are not blameless if, by keeping back the more gracious and consoling truths provided for the little ones of Christ, they indirectly lead him into it. Had he been taught as a child, that the Sacraments, not preaching, are the sources of Divine Grace; that the Apostolical ministry had a virtue in it which went out over the whole Church, when sought by the prayer of faith; that fellowship with it was a gift and privilege, as well as a duty, we could not have had so many wanderers from our fold, nor so many cold hearts within it.
This instance may suggest many others of the superior _influence_ of an apostolical over a mere secular method of teaching. The awakened mind knows its wants, but cannot provide for them; and in its hunger will feed upon ashes, if it cannot obtain the pure milk of the word. Methodism and Popery are in different ways the refuge of those whom the Church stints of the gifts of grace; they are the foster-mothers of abandoned children. The neglect of the daily service, the desecration of festivals, the Eucharist scantily administered, insubordination permitted in all ranks of the Church, orders and offices imperfectly developed, the want of societies for particular religious objects, and the like deficiencies, lead the feverish mind, desirous of a vent to its feelings, and a stricter rule of life, to the smaller religious communities, to prayer and Bible meetings, and ill-advised institutions and societies, on the one hand, on the other, to the solemn and captivating services by which Popery gains its proselytes. Moreover, the multitude of men cannot teach or guide themselves; and an injunction given them to depend on their private judgment, cruel in itself, is doubly hurtful, as throwing them on such teachers as speak daringly and promise largely, and not only aid but supersede individual exertion.
These remarks may serve as a clue, for those who care to pursue it, to the views which have led to the publication of the following Tracts. The Church of Christ was intended to cope with human nature in all its forms, and surely the gifts vouchsafed it are adequate for that gracious purpose. There are zealous sons and servants of her English branch, who see with sorrow that she is defrauded of her full usefulness by particular theories and principles of the present age, which interfere with the execution of one portion of her commission; and while they consider that the revival of this portion of truth is especially adapted to break up existing parties in the Church, and to form instead a bond of union among all who love the Lord Jesus Christ in sincerity, they believe that nothing but these neglected doctrines, faithfully preached, will repress that extension of Popery, for which the ever multiplying divisions of the religious world are too clearly preparing the way.
Another publication ought to be noticed, a result of the Hadleigh meeting, which exhibited the leading ideas of the conference, and especially of the more “conservative” members of it. This was a little work in question and answer, called the “Churchman’s Manual,” drawn up in part some time before the meeting by Mr. Perceval, and submitted to the revision of Mr. Rose and Mr. Palmer. It was intended to be a supplement to the “Church Catechism,” as to the nature and claims of the Church and its Ministers. It is a terse, clear, careful, and, as was inevitable, rather dry summary of the Anglican theory, and of the position which the English Church holds to the Roman Church, and to the Dissenters. It was further revised at the conference, and “some important suggestions were made by Froude”; and then Mr. Perceval, who had great hopes from the publication, and spared himself no pains to make it perfect, submitted it for revision and advice to a number of representative Churchmen. The Scotch Bishops whom he consulted were warm in approval, especially the venerable and saintly Bishop Jolly; as were also a number of men of weight and authority in England: Judge Allan Park, Joshua Watson, Mr. Sikes of Guilsborough, Mr. Churton of Crayke, Mr. H.H. Norris, Dr. Wordsworth, and Dr. Routh. It was then laid before the Archbishop for correction, or, if desirable, suppression; and for his sanction if approved. The answer was what might have been expected, that there was no objection to it, but that official sanction must be declined on general grounds. After all this Mr. Perceval not unnaturally claimed for it special importance. It was really, he observed, the “first Tract,” systematically put forth, and its preparation “apparently gave rise” to the series; and it was the only one which received the approval of all immediately concerned in the movement. “The care bestowed on it,” he says, “probably exceeds that which any theological publication in the English communion received for a long time;” and further, it shows “that the foundation of the movement with which Mr. Rose was connected, was laid with all the care and circumspection that reason could well suggest.” It appears to have had a circulation, but there is no reason to think that it had any considerable influence, one way or other, on opinion in the Church. When it was referred to in after-years by Mr. Perceval in his own vindication, it was almost forgotten. More interesting, if not more important, Tracts had thrown it into the shade.
FOOTNOTES:
[37] _Apol._ p. 100.
[38] Palmer, _Narrative_, 1843 (republished 1883), pp. 5, 18.
[39] Palmer (1883), pp. 40, 43, “June 1833, when he joined us at Oxford.”
[40] See Palmer’s account (1883), pp. 45-47, and (1843), pp. 6,7.
[41] “Mr. Rose … was the one commanding figure and very lovable man, that the frightened and discomfited Church people were now rallying round. Few people have left so distinct an impression of themselves as this gentleman. For many years after, when he was no more, and Newman had left Rose’s standpoint far behind, he could never speak of him or think of him without renewed tenderness” (Mr. T. Mozley, _Reminiscences_, i. 308).
In November 1838, shortly before Mr. Rose’s death, Mr. Newman had dedicated a volume of sermons to him–“who, when hearts were failing, bade us stir up the gift that was in us, and betake ourselves to our true mother” (_Parochial Sermons_, vol. iv.)
[42] _Narrative of Events connected with the publication of Tracts for the Times_, by W. Palmer (published 1843, republished 1883), pp. 96-100 (abridged).
[43] _Collection of Papers connected with the Theological Movement of_ 1833, by A.P. Perceval (1842), p. 25.
[44] Palmer’s _Narrative_ (1833), p. 101
[45] _Collection of Papers_, p. 12.
[46] “That portentous birth of time, the _Tracts for the Times._”–Mozley, _Remin_, i. 311.
[47] Froude, _Remains_, i. 265.
CHAPTER VII
THE TRACTARIANS
Thus had been started–hurriedly perhaps, yet not without counting the cost–a great enterprise, which had for its object to rouse the Church from its lethargy, and to strengthen and purify religion, by making it deeper and more real; and they who had put their hands to the plough were not to look back any more. It was not a popular appeal; it addressed itself not to the many but to the few; it sought to inspire and to teach the teachers. There was no thought as yet of acting on the middle classes, or on the ignorance and wretchedness of the great towns, though Newman had laid down that the Church must rest on the people, and Froude looked forward to colleges of unmarried priests as the true way to evangelise the crowds. There was no display about this attempt, no eloquence, nothing attractive in the way of original speculation or sentimental interest. It was suspicious, perhaps too suspicious, of the excitement and want of soberness, almost inevitable in strong appeals to the masses of mankind. It brought no new doctrine, but professed to go back to what was obvious and old-fashioned and commonplace. It taught people to think less of preaching than of what in an age of excitement were invidiously called forms–of the sacraments and services of the Church. It discouraged, even to the verge of an intended dryness, all that was showy, all that in thought or expression or manner it condemned under the name of “flash.” It laid stress on the exercise of an inner and unseen self-discipline, and the cultivation of the less interesting virtues of industry, humility, self-distrust, and obedience. If from its writers proceeded works which had impressed people–a volume like the _Christian Year_, poems original in their force and their tenderness, like some of those in the _Lyra Apostolica_, sermons which arrested the hearers by their keenness and pathetic undertone–the force of all this was not the result of literary ambition and effort, but the reflexion, unconscious, unsought, of thought and feeling that could not otherwise express itself, and that was thrown into moulds shaped by habitual refinement and cultivated taste. It was from the first a movement from which, as much by instinct and temper as by deliberate intention, self-seeking in all its forms was excluded. Those whom it influenced looked not for great things for themselves, nor thought of making a mark in the world.
The first year after the Hadleigh meeting (1834) passed uneventfully. The various addresses in which Mr. Palmer was interested, the election and installation of the Duke of Wellington as Chancellor, the enthusiasm and hopes called forth by the occasion, were public and prominent matters. The Tracts were steadily swelling in number; the busy distribution of them had ceased, and they had begun to excite interest and give rise to questions. Mr. Palmer, who had never liked the Tracts, became more uneasy; yet he did not altogether refuse to contribute to them. Others gave their help, among them Mr. Perceval, Froude, the two Kebles, and Mr. Newman’s friend, a layman, Mr. J. Bowden; some of the younger scholars furnished translations from the Fathers; but the bulk and most forcible of the Tracts were still the work of Mr. Newman. But the Tracts were not the most powerful instruments in drawing sympathy to the movement. None but those who remember them can adequately estimate the effect of Mr. Newman’s four o’clock sermons at St. Mary’s.[48] The world knows them, has heard a great deal about them, has passed its various judgments on them. But it hardly realises that without those sermons the movement might never have gone on, certainly would never have been what it was. Even people who heard them continually, and felt them to be different from any other sermons, hardly estimated their real power, or knew at the time the influence which the sermons were having upon them. Plain, direct, unornamented, clothed in English that was only pure and lucid, free from any faults of taste, strong in their flexibility and perfect command both of language and thought, they were the expression of a piercing and large insight into character and conscience and motives, of a sympathy at once most tender and most stern with the tempted and the wavering, of an absolute and burning faith in God and His counsels, in His love, in His judgments, in the awful glory of His generosity and His magnificence. They made men think of the things which the preacher spoke of, and not of the sermon or the preacher. Since 1828 this preaching had been going on at St. Mary’s, growing in purpose and directness as the years went on, though it could hardly be more intense than in some of its earliest examples. While men were reading and talking about the Tracts, they were hearing the sermons; and in the sermons they heard the living meaning, and reason, and bearing of the Tracts, their ethical affinities, their moral standard. The sermons created a moral atmosphere, in which men judged the questions in debate. It was no dry theological correctness and completeness which were sought for. No love of privilege, no formal hierarchical claims, urged on the writers. What they thought in danger, what they aspired to revive and save, was the very life of religion, the truth and substance of all that makes it the hope of human society.
But indeed, by this time, out of the little company of friends which a common danger and a common loyalty to the Church had brought together, one Mr. Newman, had drawn ahead, and was now in the front. Unsought for, as the _Apologia_ makes so clear–unsought for, as the contemporary letters of observing friends attest–unsought for, as the whole tenor of his life has proved–the position of leader in a great crisis came to him, because it must come. He was not unconscious that, as he had felt in his sickness in Sicily, he “had a work to do.” But there was shyness and self-distrust in his nature as well as energy; and it was the force of genius, and a lofty character, and the statesman’s eye, taking in and judging accurately the whole of a complicated scene, which conferred the gifts, and imposed inevitably and without dispute the obligations and responsibilities of leadership. Dr. Pusey of course was a friend of great account, but he was as yet in the background, a venerated and rather awful person, from his position not mixing in the easy intercourse of common-room life, but to be consulted on emergencies. Round Mr. Newman gathered, with a curious mixture of freedom, devotion, and awe–for, with unlimited power of sympathy, he was exacting and even austere in his friendships–the best men of his college, either Fellows–R. Wilberforce, Thomas Mozley, Frederic Rogers, J.F. Christie; or old pupils–Henry Wilberforce, R.F. Wilson, William Froude, Robert Williams, S.F. Wood, James Bliss, James Mozley; and in addition some outsiders–Woodgate of St. John’s, Isaac Williams and Copeland, of his old College, Trinity. These, members of his intimate circle, were bound to him not merely by enthusiastic admiration and confidence, but by a tenderness of affection, a mixture of the gratitude and reliance of discipleship with the warm love of friendship, of which one has to go back far for examples, and which has had nothing like it in our days at Oxford. And Newman was making his mark as a writer. The _Arians_, though an imperfect book, was one which, for originality and subtlety of thought, was something very unlike the usual theological writing of the day. There was no doubt of his power, and his mind was brimming over with ideas on the great questions which were rising into view. It was clear to all who know him that he could speak on them as no one else could.
Towards the end of 1834, and in the course of 1835, an event happened which had a great and decisive influence on the character and fortunes of the movement. This was the accession to it of Dr. Pusey. He had looked favourably on it from the first, partly from his friendship with Mr. Newman, partly from the workings of his own mind. But he had nothing to do with the starting of it, except that he early contributed an elaborate paper on “Fasting.” The Oxford branch of the movement, as distinguished from that which Mr. Palmer represented, consisted up to 1834 almost exclusively of junior men, personal friends of Mr. Newman, and most of them Oriel men. Mr. Newman’s deep convictions, his fiery enthusiasm, had given the Tracts their first stamp and impress, and had sent them flying over the country among the clergy on his own responsibility. They answered their purpose. They led to widespread and sometimes deep searchings of heart; to some they seemed to speak forth what had been long dormant within them, what their minds had unconsciously and vaguely thought and longed for; to some they seemed a challenge pregnant with danger. But still they were but an outburst of individual feeling and zeal, which, if nothing more came of its fragmentary displays, might blaze and come to nothing. There was nothing yet which spoke outwardly of the consistency and weight of a serious attempt to influence opinion and to produce a practical and lasting effect on the generation which was passing. Cardinal Newman, in the _Apologia_, has attributed to Dr. Pusey’s unreserved adhesion to the cause which the Tracts represented a great change in regard to the weight and completeness of what was written and done. “Dr. Pusey,” he writes, “gave us at once a position and a name. Without him we should have had no chance, especially at the early date of 1834, of making any serious resistance to the liberal aggression. But Dr. Pusey was a Professor and Canon of Christ Church; he had a vast influence in consequence of his deep religious seriousness, the munificence of his charities, his Professorship, his family connexions, and his easy relations with the University authorities. He was to the movement all that Mr. Rose might have been, with that indispensable addition, which was wanting to Mr. Rose, the intimate friendship and the familiar daily society of the persons who had commenced it. And he had that special claim on their attachment which lies in the living presence of a faithful and loyal affectionateness. There was henceforth a man who could be the head and centre of the zealous people in every part of the country who were adopting the new opinions; and not only so, but there was one who furnished the movement with a front to the world, and gained for it a recognition from other parties in the University.”[49]
This is not too much to say of the effect of Dr. Pusey’s adhesion. It gave the movement a second head, in close sympathy with its original leader, but in many ways very different from him. Dr. Pusey became, as it were, its official chief in the eyes of the world. He became also, in a remarkable degree, a guarantee for its stability and steadiness: a guarantee that its chiefs knew what they were about, and meant nothing but what was for the benefit of the English Church. “He was,” we read in the _Apologia_, “a man of large designs; he had a hopeful, sanguine mind; he had no fear of others; he was haunted by no intellectual perplexities…. If confidence in his position is (as it is) a first essential in the leader of a party, Dr. Pusey had it.” An inflexible patience, a serene composure, a meek, resolute self-possession, was the habit of his mind, and never deserted him in the most trying days. He never for an instant, as the paragraph witnesses, wavered or doubted about the position of the English Church.
He was eminently, as his friend justly observes, “a man of large designs.” It is doubtless true, as the _Apologia_ goes on to say, that it was due to the place which he now took in the movement that great changes were made in the form and character of the Tracts. To Dr. Pusey’s mind, accustomed to large and exhaustive theological reading, they wanted fulness, completeness, the importance given by careful arrangement and abundant knowledge. It was not for nothing that he had passed an apprenticeship among the divines of Germany, and been the friend and correspondent of Tholuck, Schleiermacher, Ewald, and Sack. He knew the meaning of real learning. In controversy it was his sledge-hammer and battle-mace, and he had the strong and sinewy hand to use it with effect. He observed that when attention had been roused to the ancient doctrines of the Church by the startling and peremptory language of the earlier Tracts, fairness and justice demanded that these doctrines should be fully and carefully explained and defended against misrepresentation and mistake. Forgetfulness and ignorance had thrown these doctrines so completely into the shade that, identified as they were with the best English divinity, they now wore the air of amazing novelties; and it was only due to honest inquirers to satisfy them with solid and adequate proof. “Dr. Pusey’s influence was felt at once. He saw that there ought to be more sobriety, more gravity, more careful pains, more sense of responsibility in the Tracts and in the whole movement.” At the end of 1835 Dr. Pusey gave an example of what he meant. In place of the “short and incomplete papers,” such as the earlier Tracts had been, Nos. 67, 68, and 69 formed the three parts of a closely-printed pamphlet of more than 300 pages.[50] It was a treatise on Baptism, perhaps the most elaborate that has yet appeared in the English language. “It is to be regarded,” says the advertisement to the second volume of the Tracts, “not as an inquiry into a single or isolated doctrine, but as a delineation and serious examination of a modern system of theology, of extensive popularity and great speciousness, in its elementary and characteristic principles.” The Tract on Baptism was like the advance of a battery of heavy artillery on a field where the battle has been hitherto carried on by skirmishing and musketry. It altered the look of things and the condition of the fighting. After No. 67 the earlier form of the Tracts appeared no more. Except two or three reprints from writers like Bishop Wilson, the Tracts from No. 70 to No. 90 were either grave and carefully worked out essays on some question arising out of the discussions of the time, or else those ponderous _catenae_ of patristic or Anglican divinity, by which the historical continuity and Church authority of various points of doctrine were established.
Dr. Pusey was indeed a man of “large designs.” The vision rose before him of a revived and instructed Church, earnest in purpose and strict in life, and of a great Christian University roused and quickened to a sense of its powers and responsibilities. He thought of the enormous advantages offered by its magnificent foundations for serious study and the production of works for which time and deep learning and continuous labour were essential. Such works, in the hands of single-minded students, living lives of simplicity and hard toil, had in the case of the Portroyalists, the Oratorians, and above all, the Benedictines of St. Maur, splendidly redeemed the Church of France, in otherwise evil days, from the reproach of idleness and self-indulgence. He found under his hand men who had in them something of the making of students; and he hoped to see college fellowships filled more and more by such men, and the life of a college fellow more and more recognised as that of a man to whom learning, and especially sacred learning, was his call and sufficient object, as pastoral or educational work might be the call of others. Where fellowships were not to be had, he encouraged such men to stay up in Oxford; he took them into his own house; later, he tried a kind of hall to receive them. And by way of beginning at once, and giving them something to do, he planned on a large scale a series of translations and also editions of the Fathers. It was announced, with an elaborate prospectus, in 1836, under the title, in conformity with the usage of the time, which had _Libraries of Useful Knowledge, etc._, of a _Library of Fathers of the Holy Catholic Church anterior to the Division of the East and West_, under the editorship of Dr. Pusey, Mr. Keble, and Mr. Newman. It was dedicated to the Archbishop of Canterbury, and had a considerable number of Bishops among its subscribers. Down to a very late date, the _Library of the Fathers_, in which Charles Marriott came to take a leading part, was a matter of much concern to Dr. Pusey. And to bring men together, and to interest them in theological subjects, he had evening meetings at his own house, where papers were read and discussed. “Some persons,” writes a gossiping chronicler of the time,[51] “thought that these meetings were liable to the statute, _De conventiculis illicitis reprimendis_.” Some important papers were the result of these meetings; but the meetings themselves were irresistibly sleepy, and in time they were discontinued. But indefatigable and powerful in all these beginnings Dr. Pusey stirred men to activity and saw great ground of hope. He was prepared for opposition, but he had boundless reliance on his friends and his cause. His forecast of the future, of great days in store for the Church of England, was, not unreasonably, one of great promise. Ten years might work wonders. The last fear that occurred to him was that within ten years a hopeless rift, not of affection but of conviction, would have run through that company of friends, and parted irrevocably their course and work in life.
FOOTNOTES:
[48] The subjoined extracts record the impression made by Mr. Newman’s preaching on contemporaries well qualified to judge, and standing respectively in very different relations to the movement. This is the judgment of a very close observer, and very independent critic, James Mozley. In an article in the _Christian Remembrancer_, January 1846 (p. 169), after speaking of the obvious reasons of Mr. Newman’s influence, he proceeds:–
We inquire further, and we find that this influence has been of a peculiarly ethical and inward kind; that it has touched the deepest part of our minds, and that the great work on which it has been founded is a practical, religious one–his Sermons. We speak not from our own fixed impression, however deeply felt, but from what we have heard and observed everywhere, from the natural, incidental, unconscious remarks dropped from persons’ mouths, and evidently showing what they thought and felt. For ourselves, we must say, one of Mr. Newman’s sermons is to us a marvellous production. It has perfect power, and perfect nature; but the latter it is which makes it so great. A sermon of Mr. Newman’s enters into all our feelings, ideas, modes of viewing things. He wonderfully realises a state of mind, enters into a difficulty, a temptation, a disappointment, a grief; he goes into the different turns and incidental, unconscious symptoms of a case, with notions which come into the head and go out again, and are forgotten, till some chance recalls them…. To take the first instance that happens to occur to us … we have often been struck by the keen way in which he enters into a regular tradesman’s vice–avarice, fortune-getting, amassing capital, and so on. This is not a temper to which we can imagine Mr. Newman ever having felt in his own mind even the temptation; but he understands it, and the temptation to it, as perfectly as any merchant could. No man of business could express it more naturally, more pungently, more _ex animo_…. So with the view that worldly men take of religion, in a certain sense, he quite enters into it, and the world’s point of view: he sees, with a regular worldly man’s eye, religion vanishing into nothing, and becoming an unreality, while the visible system of life and facts, politics and society, gets more and more solid and grows upon him. The whole influence of the world on the imagination; the weight of example; the force of repetition; the way in which maxims, rules, sentiments, by being simply sounded in the ear from day to day, seem to prove themselves, and make themselves believed by being often heard,–every part of the easy, natural, passive process by which a man becomes a man of the world is entered into, as if the preacher were going to justify or excuse him, rather than condemn him. Nay, he enters deeply into what even scepticism has to say for itself; he puts himself into the infidel’s state of mind, in which the world, as a great fact, seems to give the lie to all religions, converting them into phenomena which counterbalance and negative each other, and he goes down into that lowest abyss and bottom of things, at which the intellect undercuts spiritual truth altogether. He enters into the ordinary common states of mind just in the same way. He is most consoling, most sympathetic. He sets before persons their own feelings with such truth of detail, such natural expressive touches, that they seem not to be ordinary states of mind which everybody has, but very peculiar ones; for he and the reader seem to be the only two persons in the world that have them in common. Here is the point. Persons look into Mr. Newman’s sermons and see their own thoughts in them. This is, after all, what as much as anything gives a book hold upon minds…. Wonderful pathetic power, that can so intimately, so subtilely and kindly, deal with the soul!–and wonderful soul that can be so dealt with.
Compare with this the judgment pronounced by one of quite a different school, the late Principal Shairp:–
Both Dr. Pusey and Mr. Keble at that time were quite second in importance to Mr. Newman. The centre from which his power went forth was the pulpit of St. Mary’s, with those wonderful afternoon sermons. Sunday after Sunday, year by year, they went on, each continuing and deepening the impression produced by the last. As the hour interfered with the dinner-hour of the Colleges, most men preferred a warm dinner without Newman’s sermon to a cold one with it; so the audience was not crowded–the large church little more than half filled. The service was very simple, no pomp, no ritualism; for it was characteristic of the leading men of the movement that they left these things to the weaker brethren. Their thoughts, at all events, were set on great questions which touched the heart of unseen things. About the service, the most remarkable thing was the beauty, the silver intonation of Mr. Newman’s voice as he read the lessons…. When he began to preach, a stranger was not likely to be much struck. Here was no vehemence, no declamation, no show of elaborated argument, so that one who came prepared to hear “a great intellectual effort” was almost sure to go away disappointed. Indeed, we believe that if he had preached one of his St. Mary’s sermons before a Scotch town congregation, they would have thought the preacher a “silly body”…. Those who never heard him might fancy that his sermons would generally be about apostolical succession, or rights of the Church, or against Dissenters. Nothing of the kind. You might hear him preach for weeks without an allusion to these things. What there was of High Church teaching was implied rather than enforced. The local, the temporary, and the modern were ennobled by the presence of the Catholic truth belonging to all ages that pervaded the whole. His power showed itself chiefly in the new and unlooked-for way in which he touched into life old truths, moral or spiritual, which all Christians acknowledge, but most have ceased to feel–when he spoke of “unreal words,” of the “individuality of the soul,” of the “invisible world,” of a “particular Providence,” or again, of the “ventures of faith,” “warfare the condition of victory,” “the Cross of Christ the measure of the world,” “the Church a Home for the lonely.” As he spoke, how the old truth became new; how it came home with a meaning never felt before! He laid his finger how gently, yet how powerfully, on some inner place in the hearer’s heart, and told him things about himself he had never known till then. Subtlest truths, which it would have taken philosophers pages of circumlocution and big words to state, were dropt out by the way in a sentence or two of the most transparent Saxon. What delicacy of style, yet what strength! how simple, yet how suggestive! how homely, yet how refined! how penetrating, yet how tender-hearted! If now and then there was a forlorn undertone which at the time seemed inexplicable, you might be perplexed at the drift of what he said, but you felt all the more drawn to the speaker. … After hearing these sermons you might come away still not believing the tenets peculiar to the High Church system; but you would be harder than most men, if you did not feel more than ever ashamed of coarseness, selfishness, worldliness, if you did not feel the things of faith brought closer to the soul.–_John Keble,_ by J. C. Shairp, Professor of Humanity, St. Andrews (1866), pp. 12-17.
I venture to add the judgment of another contemporary, on the effect of this preaching, from the _Reminiscences_ of Sir F. Doyle, p. 145:–
That great man’s extraordinary genius drew all those within his sphere, like a magnet, to attach themselves to him and his doctrines. Nay, before he became a Romanist, what we may call his mesmeric influence acted not only on his Tractarian adherents, but even in some degree on outsiders like myself. Whenever I was at Oxford, I used to go regularly on Sunday afternoons to listen to his sermon at St. Mary’s, and I have never heard such preaching since. I do not know whether it is a mere fancy of mine, or whether those who know him better will accept and endorse my belief, that one element of his wonderful power showed itself after this fashion. He always began as if he had determined to set forth his idea of the truth in the plainest and simplest language–language, as men say, “intelligible to the meanest understanding.” But his ardent zeal and fine poetical imagination were not thus to be controlled. As I hung upon his words, it seemed to me as if I could trace behind his will, and pressing, so to speak, against it, a rush of thoughts, of feelings which he kept struggling to hold back, but in the end they were generally too strong for him, and poured themselves out in a torrent of eloquence all the more impetuous from having been so long repressed. The effect of these outbursts was irresistible, and carried his hearers beyond themselves at once. Even when his efforts of self-restraint were more successful, those very efforts gave a life and colour to his style which riveted the attention of all within the reach of his voice. Mr. Justin McCarthy, in his _History of Our Own Times_, says of him: “In all the arts that make a great preacher or orator, Cardinal Newman was deficient. His manner was constrained and ungraceful, and even awkward; his voice was thin and weak, his bearing was not at first impressive in any way–a gaunt emaciated figure, a sharp eagle face, and a cold meditative eye, rather repelled than attracted those who saw him for the first time.” I do not think Mr. McCarthy’s phrases very happily chosen to convey his meaning. Surely a gaunt emaciated frame and a sharp eagle face are the very characteristics which we should picture to ourselves as belonging to Peter the Hermit, or Scott’s Ephraim Macbriar in _Old Mortality_. However unimpressive the look of an eagle may be in Mr. McCarthy’s opinion, I do not agree with him about Dr. Newman.
When I knew him at Oxford, these somewhat disparaging remarks would not have been applicable. His manner, it is true, may have been self-repressed, constrained it was not. His bearing was neither awkward nor ungraceful; it was simply quiet and calm, because under strict control; but beneath that calmness, intense feeling, I think, was obvious to those who had any instinct of sympathy with him. But if Mr. McCarthy’s acquaintance with him only began when he took office in an Irish Catholic university, I can quite understand that (flexibility not being one of his special gifts) he may have failed now and again to bring himself into perfect harmony with an Irish audience. He was probably too much of a typical Englishman for his place; nevertheless Mr. McCarthy, though he does not seem to have admired him in the pulpit, is fully sensible of his intellectual powers and general eminence.
Dr. Pusey, who used every now and then to take Newman’s duties at St. Mary’s, was to me a much less interesting person. [A learned man, no doubt, but dull and tedious as a preacher.] Certainly, in spite of the name Puseyism having been given to the Oxford attempt at a new Catholic departure, he was not the Columbus of that voyage of discovery undertaken to find a safer haven for the Church of England. I may, however, be more or less unjust to him, as I owe him a sort of grudge. His discourses were not only less attractive than those of Dr. Newman, but always much longer, and the result of this was that the learned Canon of Christ Church generally made me late for dinner at my College, a calamity never inflicted on his All Souls’ hearers by the terser and swifter fellow of Oriel whom he was replacing.
[49] _Apologia_, p 136.
[50] It swelled in the second edition to 400 pages [in spite of the fact that in that edition the historical range of the treatise was greatly reduced].
[51] _Recollections of Oxford_, by G.V. Cox, p. 278.
CHAPTER VIII
SUBSCRIPTION AT MATRICULATION AND ADMISSION OF DISSENTERS
“Depend upon it,” an earnest High Churchman of the Joshua Watson type had said to one of Mr. Newman’s friends, who was a link between the old Churchmanship and the new–“depend upon it, the day will come when those great doctrines” connected with the Church, “now buried, will be brought out to the light of the day, and then the effect will be quite fearful.”[52] With the publication of the _Tracts for the Times_, and the excitement caused by them, the day had come.
Their unflinching and severe proclamation of Church principles and Church doctrines coincided with a state of feeling and opinion in the country, in which two very different tendencies might be observed. They fell on the public mind just when one of these tendencies would help them, and the other be fiercely hostile. On the one hand, the issue of the political controversy with the Roman Catholics, their triumph all along the line, and the now scarcely disguised contempt shown by their political representatives for the pledges and explanations on which their relief was supposed to have been conceded, had left the public mind sore, angry, and suspicious. Orthodox and Evangelicals were alike alarmed and indignant; and the Evangelicals, always doctrinally jealous of Popery, and of anything “unsound” in that direction, had been roused to increased irritation by the proceedings of the Reformation Society, which had made it its business to hold meetings and discussions all over the country, where fervid and sometimes eloquent and able Irishmen, like Mr. E. Tottenham, afterwards of Laura Chapel, Bath, had argued and declaimed, with Roman text-books in hand, on such questions as the Right of Private Judgment, the Rule of Faith, and the articles of the Tridentine Creed–not always with the effect which they intended on those who heard them, with whom their arguments, and those which they elicited from their opponents, sometimes left behind uncomfortable misgivings, and questions even more serious than the controversy itself. On the other hand, in quarters quite unconnected with the recognised religious schools, interest had been independently and strongly awakened in the minds of theologians and philosophical thinkers, in regard to the idea, history, and relations to society of the Christian Church. In Ireland, a recluse, who was the centre of a small knot of earnest friends, a man of deep piety and great freedom and originality of mind, Mr. Alexander Knox, had been led, partly, it may be, by his intimacy with John Wesley, to think out for himself the character and true constitution of the Church, and the nature of the doctrines which it was commissioned to teach. In England, another recluse, of splendid genius and wayward humour, had dealt in his own way, with far-reaching insight, with vast reading, and often with impressive eloquence, with the same subject; and his profound sympathy and faith had been shared and reflected by a great poet. What Coleridge and Wordsworth had put in the forefront of their speculations and poetry, as the object of their profoundest interest, and of their highest hopes for mankind, might, of course, fail to appear in the same light to others; but it could not fail, in those days at least, to attract attention, as a matter of grave and well-founded importance. Coleridge’s theories of the Church were his own, and were very wide of theories recognised by any of those who had to deal practically with the question, and who were influenced, in one way or another, by the traditional doctrines of theologians. But Coleridge had lifted the subject to a very high level. He had taken the simple but all-important step of viewing the Church in its spiritual character as first and foremost and above all things essentially a religious society of divine institution, not dependent on the creation or will of man, or on the privileges and honours which man might think fit to assign to it; and he had undoubtedly familiarised the minds of many with this way of regarding it, however imperfect, or cloudy, or unpractical they might find the development of his ideas, and his deductions from them. And in Oxford the questions which had stirred the friends at Hadleigh had stirred others also, and had waked up various responses. Whately’s acute mind had not missed these questions, and had given original if insufficient answers to them. Blanco White knew only too well their bearing and importance, and had laboured, not without success, to leave behind him his own impress on the way in which they should be dealt with. Dr. Hampden, the man in Oxford best acquainted with Aristotle’s works and with the scholastic philosophy, had thrown Christian doctrines into a philosophical calculus which seemed to leave them little better than the inventions of men. On the other hand, a brilliant scholar, whose after-career was strangely full of great successes and deplorable disasters, William Sewell of Exeter College, had opened, in a way new to Oxford, the wealth and magnificence of Plato; and his thoughts had been dazzled by seeming to find in the truths and facts of the Christian Church the counterpart and realisation of the grandest of Plato’s imaginations. The subjects treated with such dogmatic severity and such impetuous earnestness in the Tracts were, in one shape or another, in all men’s minds, when these Tracts broke on the University and English society with their peremptory call to men “to take their side.”
There was just a moment of surprise and uncertainty–uncertainty as to what the Tracts meant; whether they were to be a new weapon against the enemies of the Church, or were simply extravagant and preposterous novelties–just a certain perplexity and hesitation at their conflicting aspects; on the one hand, the known and high character of the writers, their evident determination and confidence in their cause, the attraction of their religious warmth and unselfishness and nobleness, the dim consciousness that much that they said was undeniable; and on the other hand, the apparent wildness and recklessness of their words: and then public opinion began steadily to take its “ply,” and to be agreed in condemning them. It soon went farther, and became vehement in reprobating them as scandalous and dangerous publications. They incensed the Evangelicals by their alleged Romanism, and their unsound views about justification, good works, and the sacraments; they angered the “two-bottle orthodox” by their asceticism–the steady men, by their audacity and strong words–the liberals, by their dogmatic severity; their seriously practical bearing was early disclosed in a tract on “Fasting.” But while they repelled strongly, they attracted strongly; they touched many consciences, they won many hearts, they opened new thoughts and hopes to many minds. One of the mischiefs of the Tracts, and of those sermons at St. Mary’s which were the commentaries on them, was that so many people seemed to like them and to be struck by them. The gathering storm muttered and growled for some time at a distance, and men seemed to be taking time to make up their minds; but it began to lour from early days, till after various threatenings it broke in a furious article in the _Edinburgh_, by Dr. Arnold, on the “Oxford Malignants”; and the Tract-writers and their friends became, what they long continued to be, the most unpopular and suspected body of men in the Church, whom everybody was at liberty to insult, both as dishonest and absurd, of whom nothing was too cruel to say, nothing too ridiculous to believe. It is only equitable to take into account the unprepared state of the public mind, the surprise and novelty of even the commonest things when put in a new light, the prejudices which the Tract-writers were thought wantonly to offend and defy, their militant and uncompromising attitude, where principles were at stake. But considering what these men were known to be in character and life, what was the emergency and what were the pressing motives which called for action, and what is thought of them now that their course is run, it is strange indeed to remember who they were, to whom the courtesies of controversy were denied, not only by the vulgar herd of pamphleteers, but by men of ability and position, some of whom had been their familiar friends. Of course a nickname was soon found for them: the word “Tractarian” was invented, and Archbishop Whately thought it worth while, but not successfully, to improve it into “Tractites.” Archbishop Whately, always ingenious, appears to have suspected that the real but concealed object of the movement was to propagate a secret infidelity; they were “Children of the Mist,” or “Veiled Prophets”;[53] and he seriously suggested to a friend who was writing against it,–“this rapidly spreading pestilence,”–to parallel it, in its characteristics and modes of working, with Indian Thuggee.[54]
But these things were of gradual growth. Towards the end of 1834 a question appeared in Oxford interesting to numbers besides Mr. Newman and his friends, which was to lead to momentous consequences. The old, crude ideas of change in the Church had come to appear, even to their advocates, for the present impracticable, and there was no more talk for a long time of schemes which had been in favour two years before. The ground was changed, and a point was now brought forward on the Liberal side, for which a good deal might be plausibly said. This was the requirement of subscription to the Thirty-nine Articles from young men at matriculation; and a strong pamphlet advocating its abolition, with the express purpose of admitting Dissenters, was published by Dr. Hampden, the Bampton Lecturer of two years before.
Oxford had always been one of the great schools of the Church. Its traditions, its tone, its customs, its rules, all expressed or presumed the closest attachment to that way of religion which was specially identified with the Church, in its doctrinal and historical aspect. Oxford was emphatically definite, dogmatic, orthodox, compared even with Cambridge, which had largely favoured the Evangelical school, and had leanings to Liberalism. Oxford, unlike Cambridge, gave notice of its attitude by requiring every one who matriculated to subscribe the Thirty-nine Articles: the theory of its Tutorial system, of its lectures and examinations, implied what of late years in the better colleges, though certainly not everywhere, had been realised in fact–a considerable amount of religious and theological teaching. And whatever might have been said originally of the lay character of the University, the colleges, which had become coextensive with the University, were for the most part, in the intention of their founders, meant to educate and support theological students on their foundations for the service of the Church. It became in time the fashion to call them lay institutions: legally they may have been so, but judged by their statutes, they were nearly all of them as ecclesiastical as the Chapter of a Cathedral. And Oxford was the fulcrum from which the theological revival hoped to move the Church. It was therefore a shock and a challenge of no light kind, when not merely the proposal was made to abolish the matriculation subscription with the express object of attracting Dissenters, and to get Parliament to force the change on the University if the University resisted, but the proposal itself was vindicated and enforced in a pamphlet by Dr. Hampden by a definite and precise theory which stopped not short of the position that all creeds and formularies–everything which represented the authority of the teaching Church–however incidentally and temporarily useful, were in their own nature the inventions of a mistaken and corrupt philosophy, and invasions of Christian liberty. This was cutting deep with a vengeance, though the author of the theory seemed alone unable to see it. It went to the root of the whole mutter; and if Dr. Hampden was right, there was neither Church nor doctrine worth contending for, except as men contend about the Newtonian or the undulatory theory of light.
No one ought now to affect, as some people used to affect at the time, that the question was of secondary importance, and turned mainly on the special fitness of the Thirty-nine Articles to be offered for the proof of a young man’s belief. It was a much more critical question. It was really, however disguised, the question, asked then for the first time, and since finally decided, whether Oxford was to continue to be a school of the Church of England; and it also involved the wider question, what part belief in definite religion should have in higher education. It is speciously said that you have no right to forestall a young man’s inquiries and convictions by imposing on him in his early years opinions which to him become prejudices. And if the world consisted simply of individuals, entirely insulated and self-sufficing; if men could be taught anything whatever, without presuming what is believed by those who teach them; and if the attempt to exclude religious prejudice did not necessarily, by the mere force of the attempt, involve the creation of anti-religious prejudice, these reasoners, who try in vain to get out of the conditions which hem them in, might have more to say for themselves. To the men who had made such an effort to restore a living confidence in the Church, the demand implied giving up all that they had done and all that they hoped for. It was not the time for yielding even a clumsy proof of the religious character of the University. And the beginning of a long and doubtful war was inevitable.
A war of pamphlets ensued. By the one side the distinction was strongly insisted on between mere instruction and education, the distinctly religious character of the University education was not perhaps overstated in its theory, but portrayed in stronger colours than was everywhere the fact; and assertions were made, which sound strange in their boldness now, of the independent and constitutional right to self-government in the great University corporations. By the other side, the ordinary arguments were used, about the injustice and mischief of exclusion, and the hurtfulness of tests, especially such tests as the Articles applied to young and ignorant men. Two pamphlets had more than a passing interest: one, by a then unknown writer who signed himself _Rusticus_, and whose name was Mr. F.D. Maurice, defended subscription on the ground that the Articles were signed, not as tests and confessions of faith, but as “conditions of thought,” the expressly stated conditions, such as there must be in all teaching, under which the learners are willing to learn and the teacher to teach: and he developed his view at great length, with great wealth of original thought and illustration and much eloquence, but with that fatal want of clearness which, as so often afterwards, came from his struggles to embrace in one large view what appeared opposite aspects of a difficult subject. The other was the pamphlet, already referred to, by Dr. Hampden: and of which the importance arose, not from its conclusions, but from its reasons. Its ground was the distinction which he had argued out at great length in his Bampton Lectures–the distinction between the “Divine facts” of revelation, and all human interpretations of them and inferences from them. “Divine facts,” he maintained, were of course binding on all Christians, and in matter of fact were accepted by all who called themselves Christians, including Unitarians. Human interpretations and inferences–and all Church formularies were such–were binding on no one but those who had reason to think them true; and therefore least of all on undergraduates who could not have examined them. The distinction, when first put forward, seemed to mean much; at a later time it was explained to mean very little. But at present its value as a ground of argument against the old system of the University was thought much of by its author and his friends. A warning note was at once given that its significance was perceived and appreciated. Mr. Newman, in acknowledging a presentation copy, added words which foreshadowed much that was to follow. “While I respect,” he wrote, “the tone of piety which the pamphlet displays, I dare not trust myself to put on paper my feelings about the principles contained in it; _tending, as they do, in my opinion, to make ship-wreck of Christian faith_. I also lament that, by its appearance, the first step has been taken towards interrupting that peace and mutual good understanding which has prevailed so long in this place, and which, if once seriously disturbed, will be succeeded by discussions the more intractable, because justified in the minds of those who resist innovation by a feeling of imperative duty.” “Since that time,” he goes on in the _Apologia_, where he quotes this letter, “Phaeton has got into the chariot of the sun.”[55] But they were early days then; and when the Heads of Houses, who the year before had joined with the great body of the University in a declaration against the threatened legislation, were persuaded to propose to the Oxford Convocation the abolition of subscription at matriculation in May 1835, this proposal was rejected by a majority of five to one.
This large majority was a genuine expression of the sense of the University. It was not specially a “Tractarian” success, though most of the arguments which contributed to it came from men who more or less sympathised with the effort to make a vigorous fight for the Church and its teaching; and it showed that they who had made the effort had touched springs of thought and feeling, and awakened new hopes and interest in those around them, in Oxford, and in the country. But graver events were at hand. Towards the end of the year (1835), Dr. Burton, the Regius Professor of Divinity, suddenly died, still a young man. And Lord Melbourne was induced to appoint as his successor, and as the head of the theological teaching of the University, the writer who had just a second time seemed to lay the axe to the root of all theology; who had just reasserted that he looked upon creeds, and all the documents which embodied the traditional doctrine and collective thought of the Church, as invested by ignorance and prejudice with an authority which was without foundation, and which was misleading and mischievous.
FOOTNOTES:
[52] The conversation between Mr. Sikes of Guilsborough and Mr. Copeland is given in full in Dr. Pusey’s _Letter to the Archbishop of Canterbury_ (1842), pp. 32-34.