The Oxford Movement
by
R.W. Church

Part 2 out of 6



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--

Οὐδ' ἔλαθεν Μαρίωτα, φιλαίτατον Ὠρειήλων

* * * * *

Ἦλθε μέγα γρώνων, Μασιχοῖς καὶ πᾶσ' ἀγαπητός,
Καὶ σμείλων, προσέφη πάντας κείνδοις ἐπέεσιν.[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 μαθητὴς 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.

[53] "Dr. Wilson was mightily pleased with my calling the traditionals
the 'Children of the Mist.' The title of 'Veiled Prophets' he thought
too severe" (1838), _Life_, ed. 1875, p. 167. Compare "Hints to
Transcendentalists for Working Infidel Designs through Tractarianism," a
_jeu d'esprit_ (1840), _ib._ p. 188. "As for the suspicion of secret


 


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