THE CHURCH
(_1838_)
A period and a movement certainly among the most remarkable in the
Christendom of the last three and a half centuries; probably more
remarkable than the movement associated with the name of Port
Royal, for that has passed away and left hardly a trace behind; but
this has left ineffaceable marks upon the English church and
nation.--GLADSTONE (1891).
It was the affinity of great natures for great issues that made Mr.
Gladstone from his earliest manhood onwards take and hold fast the
affairs of the churches for the objects of his most absorbing interest.
He was one and the same man, his genius was one. His persistent
incursions all through his long life into the multifarious doings, not
only of his own anglican communion, but of the Latin church of the west,
as well as of the motley Christendom of the east, puzzled and vexed
political whippers-in, wire-pullers, newspaper editors, leaders,
colleagues; they were the despair of party caucuses; and they made the
neutral man of the world smile, as eccentricities of genius and rather
singularly chosen recreations. All this was, in truth, of the very
essence of his character, the manifestation of its profound unity.
The quarrel upon church comprehension that had perplexed Elizabeth and
Burleigh, had distracted the councils of Charles I. and of Cromwell, had
bewildered William of Orange and Tillotson and Burnet, was once more
aglow with its old heat. The still mightier dispute, how wide or how
narrow is the common ground between the church of England and the church
of Rome, broke into fierce flame.
THE RELIGIOUS QUESTION
Then by and by these familiar contests of ancient tradition, thus
quickened in the eternal ebb and flow of human things into fresh
vitality, were followed by a revival, with new artillery and larger
strategy, of a standing war that is roughly described as the conflict
between reason and faith, between science and revelation. The
controversy of Laudian divines with puritans, of Hoadly with non-jurors,
of Hanoverian divines with deists and free-thinkers, all may seem now to
us narrow and dry when compared with such a drama, of so many
interesting characters, strange evolutions, and multiple and startling
climax, as gradually unfolded itself to Mr. Gladstone's ardent and
impassioned gaze.
His is not one of the cases, like Pascal, or Baxter, or Rutherford, or a
hundred others, where a man's theological history is to the world,
however it may seem to himself, the most important aspect of his career
or character. This is not the place for an exploration of Mr.
Gladstone's strictly theological history, nor is mine the hand by which
such exploration could be attempted. In the sphere of dogmatic faith,
apart from ecclesiastical politics and all the war of principles
connected with such politics, Mr. Gladstone, by the time when he was
thirty, had become a man of settled questions. Nor was he for his own
part, with a remarkable exception in respect of one particular doctrine
towards the end of his life, ever ready to re-open them. What is
extraordinary in the career of this far-shining and dominant character
of his age, is not a development of specific opinions on dogma, or
discipline, or ordinance, on article or sacrament, but the fact that
with a steadfast tread he marched along the high anglican road to the
summits of that liberalism which it was the original object of the new
anglicans to resist and overthrow.
The years from 1831 to 1840 Mr. Gladstone marked as an era of a
marvellous uprising of religious energy throughout the land; it saved
the church, he says. Not only in Oxford but in England he declares that
party spirit within the church had fallen to a low ebb. Coming
hurricanes were not foreseen. In Lord Liverpool's government patronage
was considered to have been respectably dispensed, and church reform
was never heard of.[81] This dreamless composure was rudely broken. The
repeal of the test and corporation Acts in 1828 first roused the church;
and her sons rubbed their eyes when they beheld parliament bringing
frankly to an end the odious monopoly of office under the crown, all
corporate office, all magistracy, in men willing to take the communion
at the altar of the privileged establishment. The next year a deadlier
blow fell after a more embittered fight--the admission of Roman
catholics to parliament and place. The Reform bill of 1832 followed.
Even when half spent, the forces that had been gathering for many years
in the direction of parliamentary reform, and had at last achieved more
than one immense result, rolled heavily forward against the church. The
opening of parliament and of close corporations was taken to involve an
opening to correspond in the grandest and closest of all corporations.
The resounding victory of the constitutional bill of 1832 was followed
by a drastic handling of the church in Ireland, and by a proposal to
divert a surplus of its property to purposes not ecclesiastical. A long
and peculiarly unedifying crisis ensued. Stanley and Graham, two of the
most eminent members of the reforming whig cabinet, on this proposal at
once resigned. The Grey ministry was thus split in 1834, and the Peel
ministry ejected in 1835, on the ground of the absolute inviolability of
the property of the Irish church. The tide of reaction set slowly in.
The shock in political party was in no long time followed by shock after
shock in the church. As has happened on more than one occasion in our
history, alarm for the church kindled the conservative temper in the
nation. Or to put it in another way, that spontaneous attachment to the
old order of things, with all its symbols, institutes, and deep
associations, which the radical reformers had both affronted and
ignored, made the church its rallying-point. The three years of tortuous
proceedings on the famous Appropriation clause--proceedings that
political philosophers declared to have disgraced this country in the
face of Europe, and that were certainly an ignominy and a scandal in a
party called reforming--were among the things that helped most to
prepare the way for the fall of the whigs and the conservative triumph
of 1841. Within ten years from the death of Canning the church
transfixed the attention of the politician. The Duke of Wellington was
hardly a wizard in political foresight, but he had often a good
soldier's eye for things that stood straight up in front of him. 'The
real question,' said the duke in 1838, 'that now divides the country and
which truly divides the House of Commons, is church or no church. People
talk of the war in Spain, and the Canada question. But all that is of
little moment. The real question is church or no church.'
CHANGED POSITION OF THE CHURCH
The position of the tory party as seen by its powerful recruit was, when
he entered public life, a state of hopeless defeat and discomfiture.
'But in my imagination,' wrote Mr. Gladstone, 'I cast over that party a
prophetic mantle and assigned to it a mission distinctly religious as
the champion in the state field of that divine truth which it was the
office of the Christian ministry to uphold in the church. Neither then
did I, nor now can I, see on what ground this inviolability could for a
moment be maintained, except the belief that the state had such a
mission.' He soon discovered how hard it is to adjust to the many angles
of an English political party the seamless mantle of ecclesiastical
predominance.
The changes in the political constitution in 1828, in 1829, and in 1832,
carried with them a deliberate recognition that the church was not the
nation; that it was not identical with the parliament who spoke for the
nation; that it had no longer a title to compose the governing order;
and--a more startling disclosure still to the minds of churchmen--that
laws affecting the church would henceforth be made by men of all
churches and creeds, or even men of none. This hateful circumstance it
was that inevitably began in multitudes of devout and earnest minds to
produce a revolution in their conception of a church, and a resurrection
in curiously altered forms of that old ideal of Milton's austere and
lofty school--the ideal of a purely spiritual association that should
leave each man's soul and conscience free from 'secular chains' and
'hireling wolves.'
CHANGED SOCIAL CONDITIONS
Strange social conditions were emerging on every side. The factory
system established itself on a startling scale. Huge aggregates of
population collected with little regard to antique divisions of diocese
and parish. Colonies over the sea extended in boundaries and numbers,
and churchmen were zealous that these infant societies should be blessed
by the same services, rites, ecclesiastical ordering and exhortation, as
were believed to elevate and sanctify the parent community at home. The
education of the people grew to be a formidable problem, the field of
angry battles and campaigns that never end. Trade, markets, wages,
hours, and all the gaunt and haggard economics of the labour question,
added to the statesman's load. Pauperism was appalling. In a word, the
need for social regeneration both material and moral was in the spirit
of the time. Here were the hopes, vague, blind, unmeasured, formless,
that had inspired the wild clamour for the bill, the whole bill, and
nothing but the bill. The whig patricians carried away the prizes of
great office, though the work had been done by men of a very different
stamp. It was the utilitarian radicals who laid the foundations of
social improvement in a reasoned creed. With admirable ability,
perseverance, unselfishness, and public spirit, Bentham and his
disciples had regenerated political opinion, and fought the battle
against debt, pauperism, class-privilege, class-monopoly, abusive
patronage, a monstrous criminal law, and all the host of sinister
interests.[82] As in every reforming age, men approached the work from
two sides. Evangelical religion divides with rationalism the glory of
more than one humanitarian struggle. Brougham, a more potent force than
we now realise, plunged with the energy of a Titan into a thousand
projects, all taking for granted that ignorance is the disease and
useful knowledge the universal healer, all of them secular, all dealing
with man from the outside, none touching imagination or the heart.
March-of-mind became to many almost as wearisome a cry as
wisdom-of-our-ancestors had been. According to some eager innovators,
dogma and ceremony were to go, the fabrics to be turned into mechanics'
institutes, the clergy to lecture on botany and statistics. The reaction
against this dusty dominion of secularity kindled new life in rival
schools. They insisted that if society is to be improved and
civilisation saved, it can only be through improvement in the character
of man, and character is moulded and inspired by more things than are
dreamed of by societies for useful knowledge. The building up of the
inward man in all his parts, faculties, and aspirations, was seen to be,
what in every age it is, the problem of problems. This thought turned
the eyes of many--of Mr. Gladstone first among them--to the church, and
stirred an endeavour to make out of the church what Coleridge describes
as the sustaining, correcting, befriending opposite of the world, the
compensating counterforce to the inherent and inevitable defects of the
state as a state. Such was the new movement of the time between 1835 and
1845.
'It is surprising,' said Proudhon, the trenchant genius of French
socialism in 1840 and onwards, 'how at the bottom of our politics we
always found theology.' It is true at any rate that the association of
political and social change with theological revolution was the most
remarkable of all the influences in the first twenty years of Mr.
Gladstone's public life. Then rose once more into active prominence the
supreme debate, often cutting deep into the labours of the modern
statesman, always near to the heart of the speculations of the
theologian, in many fields urgent in its interest alike to ecclesiastic,
historian, and philosopher, the inquiry: what is a church? This opened
the sluices and let out the floods. What is the church of England? To
ask that question was to ask a hundred others. Creeds, dogmas,
ordinances, hierarchy, parliamentary institution, judicial tribunals,
historical tradition, the prayer-book, the Bible--all these enormous
topics sacred and profane, with all their countless ramifications, were
rapidly swept into a tornado of such controversy as had not been seen in
England since the Revolution. Was the church a purely human creation,
changing with time and circumstance, like all the other creations of
the heart and brain and will of man? Were its bishops mere officers,
like high ministers of mundane state, or were they, in actual historic
truth as in supposed theological necessity, the direct lineal successors
of the first apostles, endowed from the beginning with the mystical
prerogatives on which the efficacy of all sacramental rites depended?
What were its relations to the councils of the first four centuries,
what to the councils of the fifteenth century and the sixteenth, what to
the Fathers? The Scottish presbyterians held the conception of a church
as strongly as anybody;[83] but England, broadly speaking, had never
been persuaded that there could be a church without bishops.
In the answers to this group of hard questions, terrible divisions that
had been long muffled and huddled away burst into view. The stupendous
quarrel of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries again broke out. To
the erastian lawyer the church was an institution erected on principles
of political expediency by act of parliament. To the school of Whately
and Arnold it was a corporation of divine origin, devised to strengthen
men in their struggle for goodness and holiness by the association and
mutual help of fellow-believers. To the evangelical it was hardly more
than a collection of congregations commended in the Bible for the
diffusion of the knowledge and right interpretation of the Scriptures,
the commemoration of gospel events, and the linking of gospel truths to
a well-ordered life. To the high anglican as to the Roman catholic, the
church was something very different from this; not a fabric reared by
man, nor in truth any mechanical fabric at all, but a mystically
appointed channel of salvation, an indispensable element in the relation
between the soul of man and its creator. To be a member of it was not to
join an external association, but to become an inward partaker in
ineffable and mysterious graces to which no other access lay open. Such
was the Church Catholic and Apostolic as set up from the beginning, and
of this immense mystery, of this saving agency, of this incommensurable
spiritual force, the established church of England was the local
presence and the organ.
HARD QUESTIONS REVIVED
The noble restlessness of the profounder and more penetrating minds was
not satisfied, any more than Bossuet had been, to think of the church as
only an element in a scheme of individual salvation. They sought in it
the comprehensive solution of all the riddles of life and time. Newman
drew in powerful outline the sublime and sombre anarchy of human
history.
This is the enigma, this the solution in faith and spirit, in which Mr.
Gladstone lived and moved. In him it gave to the energies of life their
meaning, and to duty its foundation. While poetic voices and the oracles
of sages--Goethe, Scott, Wordsworth, Shelley, Byron, Coleridge--were
drawing men one way or another, or else were leaving the void turbid and
formless, he, in the midst of doubts, distractions, and fears, saw a
steadfast light where the Oxford men saw it; in that concrete
representation of the unseen Power that, as he believed, had made and
guides and rules the world, in that Church Catholic and Apostolic which
alone would have the force and the stoutness necessary to serve for a
breakwater against the deluge. Yet to understand Mr. Gladstone's case,
we have ever to remember that what is called the catholic revival was
not in England that which the catholic counter-revolution had been on
the continent of Europe, primarily a political movement. Its workings
were inward, in the sphere of the mind, in thought and faith, in
idealised associations of historic grandeur.[84]
II
HIS RELIGIOUS GROWTH
The reader has already been told how at Rome and in Naples in 1832, Mr.
Gladstone was suddenly arrested by the new idea of a church,
interweaving with the whole of human life a pervading and equalised
spirit of religion. Long years after, in an unfinished fragment, he
began to trace the golden thread of his religious growth:--
My environment in my childhood was strictly evangelical. My dear
and noble mother was a woman of warm piety but broken health, and I
was not directly instructed by her. But I was brought up to believe
that Doyly and Mant's Bible (then a standard book of the colour
ruling in the church) was heretical, and that every unitarian (I
suppose also every heathen) must, as matter of course, be lost
forever. This deplorable servitude of mind oppressed me in a
greater or less degree for a number of years. As late as in the
year (I think) 1836, one of my brothers married a beautiful and in
every way charming person, who had been brought up in a family of
the unitarian profession, yet under a mother very sincerely
religious. I went through much mental difficulty and distress at
the time, as there had been no express renunciation [by her] of the
ancestral creed, and I absurdly busied myself with devising this or
that religious test as what if accepted might suffice.[85]
So, as will be seen, the first access of churchlike ideas to my
mind by no means sufficed to expel my inherited and bigoted
misconception, though in the event they did it as I hope
effectively. But I long retained in my recollection an observation
made to me in (I think) the year 1829, by Mrs. Benjamin Gaskell of
Thornes, near Wakefield, a seed which was destined long to remain
in my mind without germinating. I fell into religious conversation
with this excellent woman, the mother of my Eton friend Milnes
Gaskell, himself the husband of an unitarian. She said to me,
Surely we cannot entertain a doubt as to the future condition of
any person truly united to Christ by faith and love, whatever may
be the faults of his opinions. Here she supplied me with the key to
the whole question. At this hour I feel grateful to her
accordingly, for the scope of her remark is very wide; and it is
now my rule to remember her in prayer before the altar.
There was nothing at Eton to subvert this frame of mind; for
nothing was taught us either for it or against it. But in the
spring and summer of 1828, I set to work on Hooker's
_Ecclesiastical Polity_, and read it straight through. Intercourse
with my elder sister Anne had increased my mental interest in
religion, and she, though generally of evangelical sentiments, had
an opinion that the standard divines of the English church were of
great value. Hooker's exposition of the case of the church of
England came to me as a mere abstraction; but I think that I found
the doctrine of Baptismal Regeneration, theretofore abhorred,
impossible to reject, and the way was thus opened for further
changes.
In like manner at Oxford, I do not doubt that in 1830 and 1831 the
study of Bishop Butler laid the ground for new modes of thought in
religion, but his teaching in the sermons on our moral nature was
not integrated, so to speak, until several years later by larger
perusal of the works of Saint Augustine. I may, however, say that I
was not of a mind ill disposed to submit to authority.
The Oxford Movement, properly so called, began in the year 1833,
but it had no direct effect upon me. I did not see the Tracts, and
to this hour I have read but few of them. Indeed, my first
impressions and emotions in connection with it were those of
indignation at what I thought the rash intemperate censures
pronounced by Mr. Hurrell Froude upon the reformers. My chief tie
with Oxford was the close friendship I had formed in 1830 with
Walter Hamilton.[86] His character, always loving and loved, had,
not very greatly later, become deeply devout. But I do not think he
at this time sympathised with Newman and his friends; and he had
the good sense, in conjunction with Mr. Denison, afterwards bishop,
to oppose the censure upon Dr. Hampden, to which I foolishly and
ignorantly gave in, without, however, being an active or important
participator.
But the blow struck by the prayer-book in 1832 set my mind in
motion, and that motion was never arrested. I found food for the
new ideas and tendencies in various quarters, not least in the
religious writings of Alexander Knox, all of which I perused.
Moreover, I had an inclination to ecclesiastical conformity, and
obedience as such, which led me to concur with some zeal in the
plans of Bishop Blomfield. In the course of two or three years,
Manning turned from a strongly evangelical attitude to one as
strongly anglican, and about the same time converted his
acquaintance with me into a close friendship. In the same manner
James Hope, whom I had known but slightly at Eton or Oxford, made a
carefully considered change of the same kind; which also became the
occasion of a fast friendship. Both these intimacies led me
forward; Hope especially had influence over me, more than I think
any other person at any period of my life.[87]
When I was preparing in 1837-8 _The State in its Relations with the
Church_, he took a warm interest in the work, which, during my
absence on the continent, he corrected for the press. His attitude
towards the work, however, included a desire that its propositions
should be carried further. The temper of the times among young
educated men was working in the same direction. I had no low
churchmen among my near friends, except Walter Farquhar. Anstice, a
great loss, died very early in his beautiful married life. While I
was busy about my book, Hope made known to me Palmer's work on the
Church, which had just appeared. I read it with care and great
interest. It took hold upon me; and gave me at once the clear,
definite, and strong conception of the church which, through all
the storm and strain of a most critical period, has proved for me
entirely adequate to every emergency, and saved me from all
vacillation. I did not, however, love the extreme rigour of the
book in its treatment of non-episcopal communions. It was not very
long after this, I think in 1842, that I reduced into form my
convictions of the large and important range of subjects which
recent controversy had brought into prominence. I conceive that in
the main Palmer completed for me the work which inspection of the
prayer-book had begun.
Before referring further to my 'redaction' of opinions, I desire to
say that at this moment I am as closely an adherent to the
doctrines of grace generally, and to the general sense of Saint
Augustine, as at the date from which this narrative set out. I hope
that my mind has dropped nothing affirmative. But I hope also that
there has been dropped from it all the damnatory part of the
opinions taught by the evangelical school; not only as regards the
Roman catholic religion, but also as to heretics and heathens;
nonconformists and presbyterians I think that I always let off
pretty easily....
III
INFLUENCE OF FRIENDS AND BOOKS
The Tractarian movement is by this time one of the most familiar
chapters in our history, and it has had singular good fortune in being
told by three masters of the most winning, graphic, and melodious
English prose of the century to which the tale belongs.[88] Whether we
call it by the ill name of Oxford counter-reformation or the friendlier
name of catholic revival, it remains a striking landmark in the varied
motions of English religious thought and feeling for the three-quarters
of a century since the still unfinished journey first began. In its
early stages, the movement was exclusively theological. Philanthropic
reform still remained with the evangelical school that so powerfully
helped to sweep away the slave trade, cleansed the prisons, and aided in
humanising the criminal law. It was they who 'helped to form a
conscience, if not a heart, in the callous bosom of English politics,'
while the very foremost of the Oxford divines was scouting the fine talk
about black men, because they 'concentrated in themselves all the
whiggery, dissent, cant, and abomination that had been ranged on their
side.'[89] Nor can we forget that Shaftesbury, the leader in that
beneficent crusade of human mercy and national wisdom which ended in the
deliverance of women and children in mines and factories, was also a
leader of the evangelical party.
The Tractarian movement, as all know, opened, among other sources, in
antagonism to utilitarian liberalism. Yet J. S. Mill, the oracle of
rationalistic liberalism in Oxford and other places in the following
generation, had always much to say for the Tractarians. He used to tell
us that the Oxford theologians had done for England something like what
Guizot, Villemain, Michelet, Cousin had done a little earlier for
France; they had opened, broadened, deepened the issues and meanings of
European history; they had reminded us that history is European; that it
is quite unintelligible if treated as merely local. He would say,
moreover, that thought should recognise thought and mind always welcome
mind; and the Oxford men had at least brought argument, learning, and
even philosophy of a sort, to break up the narrow and frigid conventions
of reigning system in church and college, in pulpits and professorial
chairs. They had made the church ashamed of the evil of her ways, they
had determined that spirit of improvement from within 'which, if this
sect-ridden country is ever really to be taught, must proceed _pari
passu_ with assault from without.'[90]
One of the ablest of the Oxford writers talking of the non-jurors,
remarks how very few of the movements that are attended with a certain
romance, and thus bias us for a time in their favour, will stand full
examination; they so often reveal some gross offence against common
sense.[91] Want of common sense is not the particular impression left by
the Tractarians, after we have put aside the plausible dialectic and
winning periods of the leader, and proceed to look at the effect, not on
their general honesty but on their intellectual integrity, of their most
peculiar situation and the methods which they believed that situation to
impose. Nobody will be so presumptuous or uncharitable as to deny that
among the divines of the Oxford movement were men as pure in soul, as
fervid lovers of truth, as this world ever possessed. On the other hand
it would be nothing short of a miracle in human nature, if all that
dreadful tangle of economies and reserves, so largely practised and for
a long time so insidiously defended, did not familiarise a vein of
subtlety, a tendency to play fast and loose with words, a perilous
disposition to regard the non-natural sense of language as if it were
just as good as the natural, a willingness to be satisfied with a bare
and rigid logical consistency of expression, without respect to the
interpretation that was sure to be put upon that expression by the
hearer and the reader. The strain of their position in all these
respects made Newman and his allies no exemplary school. Their example
has been, perhaps rightly, held to account for something that was often
under the evil name of sophistry suspected and disliked in Mr. Gladstone
himself, in his speeches, his writings, and even in his public acts.
MISCHIEVOUS EFFECTS OF OXFORD ENTANGLEMENTS
It is true that to the impartial eye Newman is no worse than teachers in
antagonistic sects; he is, for instance, no subtler than Maurice. The
theologian who strove so hard in the name of anglican unity to develop
all the catholic elements and hide out of sight all the calvinistic, was
not driven to any hardier exploits of verbal legerdemain, than the
theologian who strove against all reason and clear thinking to devise
common formulæ that should embrace both catholic and calvinistic
explanations together, or indeed anything else that anybody might choose
to bring to the transfusing alchemy of his rather smoky crucible. Nor
was the third, and at that moment the strongest, of the church parties
at Oxford and in the country, well able to fling stones at the other
two. What better right, it was asked, had low churchmen to shut their
eyes to the language of rubrics, creeds, and offices, than the high
churchmen had to twist the language of the articles?
The confusion was grave and it was unfathomable. Newman fought a skilful
and persistent fight against liberalism, as being nothing else than the
egregious doctrine that there is no positive truth in religion, and that
one creed is as good as another. Dr. Arnold, on the other hand,
denounced Newmanism as idolatry; declared that if you let in the little
finger of tradition, you would soon have in the whole monster, horns and
tail and all; and even complained of the English divines in general,
with the noble exceptions of Butler and Hooker, that he found in them a
want of believing or disbelieving anything because it was true or false,
as if that were a question that never occurred to them.[92] The plain
man, who was but a poor master either of theology or of the history of
the church of England, but who loved the prayer-book and hated
confession, convents, priest-craft, and mariolatry, was wrought to
madness by a clergyman who should describe himself, as did R. H. Froude,
as a catholic without the popery, and a church of England man without
the protestantism. The plain man knew that he was not himself clever
enough to form any distinct idea of what such talk meant. But then his
helplessness only deepened his conviction that the more distinct his
idea might become, the more intense would his aversion be, both to the
thing meant and to the surpliced conjurer who, as he bitterly supposed,
was by sophistic tricks trying hard to take him in.
Other portents were at the same time beginning to disturb the world. The
finds and the theories of geologists made men uncomfortable, and brought
down sharp anathemas. Wider speculations on cosmic and creative law came
soon after, and found their way into popular reading.[93] In prose
literature, in subtler forms than the verse of Shelley, new dissolving
elements appeared that were destined to go far. Schleiermacher, between
1820 and 1830, opened the sluices of the theological deep, whether to
deluge or to irrigate. In 1830 an alarming note was sounded in the
publication by a learned clergyman of a history of the Jews. We have
seen (p. 56) how Mr. Gladstone was horrified by it. Milman's book was
the beginning of a new rationalism within the fold. A line of thought
was opened that seemed to make the history of religious ideas more
interesting than their truth. The special claims of an accepted creed
were shaken by disclosing an unmistakeable family likeness to creeds
abhorred. A belief was deemed to be accounted for and its sanctity
dissolved, by referring it historically to human origins, and showing it
to be only one branch of a genealogical trunk. Historic explanation
became a graver peril than direct attack.
IV
NEW IDEAS AND TENDENCIES
The first skirmish in a dire conflict that is not even now over or near
its end happened in 1836. Lord Melbourne recommended for the chair of
divinity at Oxford Dr. Hampden, a divine whose clumsy handling of nice
themes had brought him, much against his intention, under suspicion of
unsound doctrine, and who was destined eleven years later to find
himself the centre of a still louder uproar. Evangelicals and
Tractarians flew to arms, and the two hosts who were soon to draw their
swords upon one another, now for the first time, if not the last,
swarmed forth together side by side against the heretic. What was rather
an affront than a penalty was inflicted upon Hampden by a majority of
some five to one of the masters of arts of the university, and in accord
with that majority, as he has just told us, though he did not actually
vote, was Mr. Gladstone. Twenty years after, when he had risen to be a
shining light in the world's firmament, he wrote to Hampden to express
regret for the injustice of which in this instance 'the forward
precipitancy of youth' had made him guilty.[94] The case of Hampden gave
a sharp actuality to the question of the relations of church and crown.
The particular quarrel was of secondary importance, but it brought home
to the high churchmen what might be expected in weightier matters than
the affair of Dr. Hampden from whig ministers, and confirmed the
horrible apprehension that whig ministers might possibly have to fill
all the regius chairs and all the sees for a whole generation to come.
Not less important than the theology of the Oxford divines in its
influence on Mr. Gladstone's line of thought upon things ecclesiastical
was the speculation of Coleridge on the teaching and polity of a
national church. His fertile book on _Church and State_ was given to the
world in 1830, four years before his death, and this and the ideas
proceeding from it were the mainspring, if not of the theology of the
movement, at least of Mr. Gladstone's first marked contribution to the
stirring controversies of the time. He has described the profound effect
upon his mind of another book, the _Treatise on the Church of Christ_,
by William Palmer of Worcester College (1838), and to the end of his
life it held its place in his mind among the most masterly performances
of the day in the twin hemispheres of theology and church polity.[95]
Newman applauded the book for its magnificence of design, and
undoubtedly it covers much ground, including a stiff rejection of
Locke's theory of toleration, and the assertion of the strong doctrine
that the Christian prince has a right by temporal penalties to protect
the church from the gathering together of the froward and the
insurrection of wicked doers. It has at least the merit, so far from
universal in the polemics of that day, of clear language, definite
propositions, and formal arguments capable of being met by a downright
yes or no.[96] The question, however, that has often slumbered yet never
dies, of the right relations between the Christian prince or state and
the Christian church, was rapidly passing away from logicians of the
cloister.
Note to page 167.
'_Hawarden, Chester, November 9, 1856._--MY LORD BISHOP,--Your
lordship will probably be surprised at receiving a letter from me,
as a stranger. The simple purpose of it is to discharge a debt of
the smallest possible importance to you, yet due I think from me,
by expressing the regret with which I now look back on my
concurrence in a vote of the University of Oxford in the year 1836,
condemnatory of some of your lordship's publications. I did not
take actual part in the vote; but upon reference to a journal kept
at the time, I find that my absence was owing to an accident.
'For a good many years past I have found myself ill able to master
books of an abstract character, and I am far from pretending to be
competent at this time to form a judgment on the merits of any
propositions then at issue. I have learned, indeed, that many
things which, in the forward precipitancy of my youth, I should
have condemned, are either in reality sound, or lie within the just
limits of such discussion as especially befits an University. But
that which (after a delay, due, I think, to the cares and pressing
occupations of political life) brought back to my mind the
injustice of which I had unconsciously been guilty in 1836, was my
being called upon, as a member of the Council of King's College in
London, to concur in a measure similar in principle with respect to
Mr. Maurice; that is to say, in a condemnation couched in general
terms which did not really declare the point of imputed guilt, and
against which perfect innocence could have no defence. I resisted
to the best of my power, though ineffectually, the grievous wrong
done to Mr. Maurice, and urged that the charges should be made
distinct, that all the best means of investigation should be
brought to bear on them, ample opportunity given for defence, and a
reference then made, if needful, to the Bishop in his proper
capacity. But the majority of laymen in the Council were
inexorable. It was only, as I have said, after mature reflection
that I came to perceive the bearing of the case on that of 1836,
and to find that by my resistance I had condemned myself. I then
lamented very sincerely that I had not on that occasion, now so
remote, felt and acted in a different manner.
'I beg your lordship to accept this expression of my cordial
regret, and to allow me to subscribe myself, very respectfully,
your obedient and humble servant, W. E. GLADSTONE.'[97]
FOOTNOTES:
[81] Newman, _Essays_. ii. p. 428.
[82] See Sir Leslie Stephen's _English Utilitarians_, ii. p. 42.
[83] 'Nowhere that I know of,' the Duke of Argyll once wrote in friendly
remonstrance with Mr. Gladstone, 'is the doctrine of a separate society
being of divine foundation, so dogmatically expressed as in the Scotch
Confession; the 39 articles are less definite on the subject.'
[84] On this, see Fairbairn's _Catholicism, Roman and Anglican_, pp.
114-5.
[85] A little sheaf of curious letters on this family episode survives.
[86] Afterwards Bishop of Salisbury.
[87] Marrying Walter Scott's granddaughter (1847) he was named
Hope-Scott after 1853.
[88] The _Apologia_ of its leader; Froude, _Short Studies_, vol. iv.;
and Dean Church's _Oxford Movement_, 1833-45, a truly fascinating
book--called by Mr. Gladstone a great and noble book. 'It has all the
delicacy,' he says, 'the insight into the human mind, heart, and
character, which were Newman's great endowment; but there is a pervading
sense of soundness about it which Newman, great as he was, never
inspired.'
[89] See Dr. Fairbairn's _Catholicism, Roman and Anglican_, p. 292.
Pusey speaks of our 'paying twenty millions for a theory about slavery'
(Liddon, _Life of Pusey_, iii. p. 172).
[90] _Dissertations_, i. p. 444.
[91] J. B. Mozley's _Letters_, p. 234.
[92] Stanley's _Life of Arnold_, ii. p. 56 _n_.
[93] The _Vestiges of Creation_ appeared in 1844.
[94] The letter will be found at the end of the chapter.
[95] See his article in the _Nineteenth Century_ for August, 1894, where
he calls Palmer's book the most powerful and least assailable defence of
the position of the anglican church from the sixteenth century
downwards.
[96] See Church, _Oxford Movement_, pp. 214-6.
[97] This letter is printed in the _Life of Hampden_ (1876), p. 199.