THE OXFORD MOVEMENT
TWELVE YEARS 1833-1845
R.W. CHURCH, M.A., D.C.L.
SOMETIME DEAN OF ST. PAUL'S AND FELLOW OF ORIEL COLLEGE, OXFORD
ADVERTISEMENT
The revision of these papers was a task to which the late Dean of St.
Paul's gave all the work he could during the last months of his life. At
the time of his death, fourteen of the papers had, so far as can be
judged, received the form in which he wished them to be published; and
these, of course, are printed here exactly as he left them. One more he
had all but prepared for publication; the last four were mainly in the
condition in which, six years ago, he had them privately put into type,
for the convenience of his own further work upon them, and for the
reading of two or three intimate friends. Those into whose care his work
has now come have tried, with the help of his pencilled notes, to bring
these four papers as nearly as they can into the form which they believe
he would have had them take. But it has seemed better to leave unaltered
a sentence here and there to which he might have given a more perfect
shape, rather than to run the risk of swerving from the thought which
was in his mind.
It is possible that the Dean would have made considerable changes in
the preface which is here printed; for only that which seems the first
draft of it has been found. But even thus it serves to show his wish and
purpose for the work he had in hand; and it has therefore been thought
best to publish it. Leave has been obtained to add here some fragments
from a letter which, three years ago, he wrote to Lord Acton about these
papers:
"If I ever publish them, I must say distinctly what I want to do, which
is, not to pretend to write a history of the movement, or to account for
it or adequately to judge it and put it in its due place in relation to
the religious and philosophical history of the time, but simply to
preserve a contemporary memorial of what seems to me to have been a true
and noble effort which passed before my eyes, a short scene of religious
earnestness and aspiration, with all that was in it of self-devotion,
affectionateness, and high and refined and varied character, displayed
under circumstances which are scarcely intelligible to men of the
present time; so enormous have been the changes in what was assumed and
acted upon, and thought practicable and reasonable, 'fifty years since.'
For their time and opportunities, the men of the movement, with all
their imperfect equipment and their mistakes, still seem to me the salt
of their generation.... I wish to leave behind me a record that one who
lived with them, and lived long beyond most of them, believed in the
reality of their goodness and height of character, and still looks back
with deepest reverence to those forgotten men as the companions to whose
teaching and example he owes an infinite debt, and not he only, but
religious society in England of all kinds."
_January_ 31st, 1891.
PREFACE
The following pages relate to that stage in the Church revival of this
century which is familiarly known as the Oxford Movement, or, to use its
nickname, the Tractarian Movement. Various side influences and
conditions affected it at its beginning and in its course; but the
impelling and governing force was, throughout the years with which these
pages are concerned, at Oxford. It was naturally and justly associated
with Oxford, from which it received some of its most marked
characteristics. Oxford men started it and guided it. At Oxford were
raised its first hopes, and Oxford was the scene of its first successes.
At Oxford were its deep disappointments, and its apparently fatal
defeat. And it won and lost, as a champion of English theology and
religion, a man of genius, whose name is among the illustrious names of
his age, a name which will always be connected with modern Oxford, and
is likely to be long remembered wherever the English language is
studied.
We are sometimes told that enough has been written about the Oxford
Movement, and that the world is rather tired of the subject. A good deal
has certainly been both said and written about it, and more is probably
still to come; and it is true that other interests, more immediate or
more attractive, have thrown into the background what is severed from us
by the interval of half a century. Still that movement had a good deal
to do with what is going on in everyday life among us now; and feelings
both of hostility to it, and of sympathy with it, are still lively and
keen among those to whom religion is a serious subject, and even among
some who are neutral in the questions which it raised, but who find in
it a study of thought and character. I myself doubt whether the interest
of it is so exhausted as is sometimes assumed. If it is, these pages
will soon find their appropriate resting-place. But I venture to present
them, because, though a good many judgments upon the movement have been
put forth, they have come mostly from those who have been more or less
avowedly opposed to it.[1] The men of most account among those who were
attracted by it and represented it have, with one illustrious exception,
passed away. A survivor of the generation which it stirred so deeply may
not have much that is new to tell about it. He may not be able to affect
much the judgment which will finally be accepted about it. But the fact
is not unimportant, that a number of able and earnest men, men who both
intellectually and morally would have been counted at the moment as part
of the promise of the coming time, were fascinated and absorbed by it.
It turned and governed their lives, lifting them out of custom and
convention to efforts after something higher, something worthier of what
they were. It seemed worth while to exhibit the course of the movement
as it looked to these men--as it seemed to them viewed from the inside.
My excuse for adding to so much that has been already written is, that I
was familiar with many of the chief actors in the movement. And I do not
like that the remembrance of friends and associates, men of singular
purity of life and purpose, who raised the tone of living round them,
and by their example, if not by their ideas, recalled both Oxford and
the Church to a truer sense of their responsibilities, should, because
no one would take the trouble to put things on record, "pass away like a
dream."
The following pages were, for the most part, written, and put into
printed shape, in 1884 and 1885. Since they were written, books have
appeared, some of them important ones, going over most of the same
ground; while yet more volumes may be expected. We have had ingenious
theories of the genesis of the movement, and the filiation of its ideas.
Attempts have been made to alter the proportions of the scene and of the
several parts played upon it, and to reduce the common estimate of the
weight and influence of some of the most prominent personages. The
point of view of those who have thus written is not mine, and they tell
their story (with a full right so to do) as I tell mine. But I do not
purpose to compare and adjust our respective accounts--to attack theirs,
or to defend my own. I have not gone through their books to find
statements to except to, or to qualify. The task would be a tiresome and
unprofitable one. I understand their point of view, though I do not
accept it. I do not doubt their good faith, and I hope that they will
allow mine.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] It is hardly necessary to say that these and the following words
were written before Dr. Newman's death, and the publication of his
letters.
CONTENTS
CHAPTER I
THE CHURCH IN THE REFORM DAYS
CHAPTER II
THE BEGINNING OF THE MOVEMENT--JOHN KEBLE
CHAPTER III
RICHARD HURRELL FROUDE
CHAPTER IV
MR. NEWMAN'S EARLY FRIENDS--ISAAC WILLIAMS
CHAPTER V
CHARLES MARRIOTT
CHAPTER VI
THE OXFORD TRACTS
CHAPTER VII
THE TRACTARIANS
CHAPTER VIII
SUBSCRIPTION AT MATRICULATION AND ADMISSION OF DISSENTERS
CHAPTER IX
DR. HAMPDEN
CHAPTER X
GROWTH OF THE MOVEMENT, 1835-1840
CHAPTER XI
THE ROMAN QUESTION
CHAPTER XII
CHANGES
CHAPTER XIII
THE AUTHORITIES AND THE MOVEMENT
CHAPTER XIV
NO. 90
CHAPTER XV
AFTER NO. 90
CHAPTER XVI
THE THREE DEFEATS: ISAAC WILLIAMS, MACMULLEN, PUSEY
CHAPTER XVII
W.G. WARD
CHAPTER XVIII
THE IDEAL OF A CHRISTIAN CHURCH
CHAPTER XIX
THE CATASTROPHE
THE OXFORD MOVEMENT
CHAPTER I
THE CHURCH IN THE REFORM DAYS
What is called the Oxford or Tractarian movement began, without doubt,
in a vigorous effort for the immediate defence of the Church against
serious dangers, arising from the violent and threatening temper of the
days of the Reform Bill. It was one of several and widely differing
efforts. Viewed superficially it had its origin in the accident of an
urgent necessity.[2] The Church was really at the moment imperilled amid
the crude revolutionary projects of the Reform epoch;[3] and something
bolder and more effective than the ordinary apologies for the Church
was the call of the hour. The official leaders of the Church were almost
stunned and bewildered by the fierce outbreak of popular hostility. The
answers put forth on its behalf to the clamour for extensive and even
destructive change were the work of men surprised in a moment of
security. They scarcely recognised the difference between what was
indefensible and what must be fought for to the death; they mistook
subordinate or unimportant points for the key of their position: in
their compromises or in their resistance they wanted the guidance of
clear and adequate principles, and they were vacillating and
ineffective. But stronger and far-seeing minds perceived the need of a
broad and intelligible basis on which to maintain the cause of the
Church. For the air was full of new ideas; the temper of the time was
bold and enterprising. It was felt by men who looked forward, that to
hold their own they must have something more to show than custom or
alleged expediency--they must sound the depths of their own convictions,
and not be afraid to assert the claims of these convictions on men's
reason and imagination as well as on their associations and feelings.
The same dangers and necessities acted differently on different minds;
but among those who were awakened by them to the presence of a great
crisis were the first movers in what came to be known as the Tractarian
movement. The stir around them, the perils which seemed to threaten,
were a call to them to examine afresh the meaning of their familiar
words and professions.
For the Church, as it had been in the quiet days of the eighteenth
century, was scarcely adapted to the needs of more stirring times. The
idea of clerical life had certainly sunk, both in fact and in the
popular estimate of it. The disproportion between the purposes for which
the Church with its ministry was founded and the actual tone of feeling
among those responsible for its service had become too great. Men were
afraid of principles; the one thing they most shrank from was the
suspicion of enthusiasm. Bishop Lavington wrote a book to hold up to
scorn the enthusiasm of Methodists and Papists; and what would have
seemed reasonable and natural in matters of religion and worship in the
age of Cranmer, in the age of Hooker, in the age of Andrewes, or in the
age of Ken, seemed extravagant in the age which reflected the spirit of
Tillotson and Secker, and even Porteus. The typical clergyman in English
pictures of the manners of the day, in the _Vicar of Wakefield,_ in Miss
Austen's novels, in Crabbe's _Parish Register,_ is represented, often
quite unsuspiciously, as a kindly and respectable person, but certainly
not alive to the greatness of his calling. He was often much, very much,
to the society round him. When communication was so difficult and
infrequent, he filled a place in the country life of England which no
one else could fill. He was often the patriarch of his parish, its
ruler, its doctor, its lawyer, its magistrate, as well as its teacher,
before whom vice trembled and rebellion dared not show itself. The idea
of the priest was not quite forgotten; but there was much--much even of
what was good and useful--to obscure it. The beauty of the English
Church in this time was its family life of purity and simplicity; its
blot was quiet worldliness. It has sometimes been the fashion in later
days of strife and disquiet to regret that unpretending estimate of
clerical duty and those easy-going days; as it has sometimes been the
fashion to regret the pomp and dignity with which well-born or scholarly
bishops, furnished with ample leisure and splendid revenues, presided in
unapproachable state over their clergy and held their own among the
great county families. Most things have a side for which something can
be said; and we may truthfully and thankfully recall that among the
clergy of those days there were not a few but many instances, not only
of gentle manners, and warm benevolence, and cultivated intelligence,
but of simple piety and holy life.[4] But the fortunes of the Church are
not safe in the hands of a clergy, of which a great part take their
obligations easily. It was slumbering and sleeping when the visitation
of days of change and trouble came upon it.
Against this state of things the Oxford movement was a determined
revolt; but, as has been said, it was not the only one, nor the first. A
profound discontent at the state of religion in England had taken
possession of many powerful and serious minds in the generation which
was rising into manhood at the close of the first quarter of the
century; and others besides the leaders of the movement were feeling
their way to firmer ground. Other writers of very different principles,
and with different objects, had become alive, among other things, to the
importance of true ideas about the Church, impatient at the ignorance
and shallowness of the current views of it, and alarmed at the dangers
which menaced it. Two Oxford teachers who commanded much attention by
their force and boldness--Dr. Whately and Dr. Arnold--had developed
their theories about the nature, constitution, and functions of the
Church. They were dissatisfied with the general stagnation of religious
opinion, on this as on other subjects. They agreed in resenting the
unintelligent shortsightedness which relegated such a matter to a third
or fourth rank in the scale of religious teaching. They agreed also in
seizing the spiritual aspect of the Church, and in raising the idea of
it above the level of the poor and worldly conceptions on the assumption
of which questions relating to it were popularly discussed. But in their
fundamental principles they were far apart. I assume, on the authority
of Cardinal Newman, what was widely believed in Oxford, and never
apparently denied, that the volume entitled _Letters of an
Episcopalian_,[5] 1826, was, in some sense at least, the work of Dr.
Whately. In it is sketched forth the conception of an organised body,
introduced into the world by Christ Himself, endowed with definite
spiritual powers and with no other, and, whether connected with the
State or not, having an independent existence and inalienable claims,
with its own objects and laws, with its own moral standard and spirit
and character. From this book Cardinal Newman tells us that he learnt
his theory of the Church, though it was, after all, but the theory
received from the first appearance of Christian history; and he records
also the deep impression which it made on others. Dr. Arnold's view was
a much simpler one. He divided the world into Christians and
non-Christians: Christians were all who professed to believe in Christ
as a Divine Person and to worship Him,[6] and the brotherhood, the
"Societas" of Christians, was all that was meant by "the Church" in the
New Testament. It mattered, of course, to the conscience of each
Christian what he had made up his mind to believe, but to no one else.
Church organisation was, according to circumstances, partly inevitable
or expedient, partly mischievous, but in no case of divine authority.
Teaching, ministering the word, was a thing of divine appointment, but
not so the mode of exercising it, either as to persons, forms, or
methods. Sacraments there were, signs and pledges of divine love and
help, in every action of life, in every sight of nature, and eminently
two most touching ones, recommended to Christians by the Redeemer
Himself; but except as a matter of mere order, one man might deal with
these as lawfully as another. Church history there was, fruitful in
interest, instruction, and warning; for it was the record of the long
struggle of the true idea of the Church against the false, and of the
fatal disappearance of the true before the forces of blindness and
wickedness.[7] Dr. Arnold's was a passionate attempt to place the true
idea in the light. Of the difficulties of his theory he made light
account. There was the vivid central truth which glowed through his soul
and quickened all his thoughts. He became its champion and militant
apostle. These doctrines, combined with his strong political liberalism,
made the Midlands hot for Dr. Arnold. But he liked the fighting, as he
thought, against the narrow and frightened orthodoxy round him. And he
was in the thick of this fighting when another set of ideas about the
Church--the ideas on which alone it seemed to a number of earnest and
anxious minds that the cause of the Church could be maintained--the
ideas which were the beginning of the Oxford movement, crossed his path.
It was the old orthodox tradition of the Church, with fresh life put
into it, which he flattered himself that he had so triumphantly
demolished. This intrusion of a despised rival to his own teaching about
the Church--teaching in which he believed with deep and fervent
conviction--profoundly irritated him; all the more that it came from men
who had been among his friends, and who, he thought, should have known
better.[8]
But neither Dr. Whately's nor Dr. Arnold's attempts to put the old
subject of the Church in a new light gained much hold on the public
mind. One was too abstract; the other too unhistorical and
revolutionary. Both in Oxford and in the country were men whose hearts
burned within them for something less speculative and vague, something
more reverent and less individual, more in sympathy with the inherited
spirit of the Church. It did not need much searching to find in the
facts and history of the Church ample evidence of principles distinct
and inspiring, which, however long latent, or overlaid by superficial
accretions, were as well fitted as they ever were to animate its
defenders in the struggle with the unfriendly opinion of the day. They
could not open their Prayer-Books, and think of what they read there,
without seeing that on the face of it the Church claimed to be something
very different from what it was assumed to be in the current
controversies of the time, very different from a mere institution of the
State, from a vague collection of Christian professions from one form
or denomination of religion among many, distinguished by larger
privileges and larger revenues. They could not help seeing that it
claimed an origin not short of the Apostles of Christ, and took for
granted that it was to speak and teach with their authority and that of
their Master. These were theological commonplaces; but now, the pressure
of events and of competing ideas made them to be felt as real and
momentous truths. Amid the confusions and inconsistencies of the
semi-political controversy on Church reform, and on the defects and
rights of the Church, which was going on in Parliament, in the press,
and in pamphlets, the deeper thoughts of those who were interested in
its fortunes were turned to what was intrinsic and characteristic in its
constitution: and while these thoughts in some instances only issued in
theory and argument, in others they led to practical resolves to act
upon them and enforce them.
At the end of the first quarter of the century, say about 1825-30, two
characteristic forms of Church of England Christianity were popularly
recognised. One inherited the traditions of a learned and sober
Anglicanism, claiming as the authorities for its theology the great line
of English divines from Hooker to Waterland, finding its patterns of
devotion in Bishop Wilson, Bishop Horne, and the "Whole Duty of Man,"
but not forgetful of Andrewes, Jeremy Taylor, and Ken,--preaching,
without passion or excitement, scholarlike, careful, wise, often
vigorously reasoned discourses on the capital points of faith and
morals, and exhibiting in its adherents, who were many and important,
all the varieties of a great and far-descended school, which claimed for
itself rightful possession of the ground which it held. There was
nothing effeminate about it, as there was nothing fanatical; there was
nothing extreme or foolish about it; it was a manly school, distrustful
of high-wrought feelings and professions, cultivating self-command and
shy of display, and setting up as its mark, in contrast to what seemed
to it sentimental weakness, a reasonable and serious idea of duty. The
divinity which it propounded, though it rested on learning, was rather
that of strong common sense than of the schools of erudition. Its better
members were highly cultivated, benevolent men, intolerant of
irregularities both of doctrine and life, whose lives were governed by
an unostentatious but solid and unfaltering piety, ready to burst forth
on occasion into fervid devotion. Its worse members were jobbers and
hunters after preferment, pluralists who built fortunes and endowed
families out of the Church, or country gentlemen in orders, who rode to
hounds and shot and danced and farmed, and often did worse things. Its
average was what naturally in England would be the average, in a state
of things in which great religious institutions have been for a long
time settled and unmolested--kindly, helpful, respectable, sociable
persons of good sense and character, workers rather in a fashion of
routine which no one thought of breaking, sometimes keeping up their
University learning, and apt to employ it in odd and not very profitable
inquiries; apt, too, to value themselves on their cheerfulness and quick
wit; but often dull and dogmatic and quarrelsome, often insufferably
pompous. The custom of daily service and even of fasting was kept up
more widely than is commonly supposed. The Eucharist, though sparingly
administered, and though it had been profaned by the operation of the
Test Acts, was approached by religious people with deep reverence. But
besides the better, and the worse, and the average members of this,
which called itself the Church party, there stood out a number of men of
active and original minds, who, starting from the traditions of the
party, were in advance of it in thought and knowledge, or in the desire
to carry principles into action. At the Universities learning was still
represented by distinguished names. At Oxford, Dr. Routh was still
living and at work, and Van Mildert was not forgotten. Bishop Lloyd, if
he had lived, would have played a considerable part; and a young man of
vast industry and great Oriental learning, Mr. Pusey, was coming on the
scene. Davison, in an age which had gone mad about the study of
prophecy, had taught a more intelligent and sober way of regarding it;
and Mr. John Miller's Bampton Lectures, now probably only remembered by
a striking sentence, quoted in a note to the _Christian Year,_[9] had
impressed his readers with a deeper sense of the uses of Scripture.
Cambridge, besides scholars like Bishop Kaye, and accomplished writers
like Mr. Le Bas and Mr. Lyall, could boast of Mr. Hugh James Rose, the
most eminent person of his generation as a divine. But the influence of
this learned theology was at the time not equal to its value. Sound
requires atmosphere; and there was as yet no atmosphere in the public
mind in which the voice of this theology could be heard. The person who
first gave body and force to Church theology, not to be mistaken or
ignored, was Dr. Hook. His massive and thorough Churchmanship was the
independent growth of his own thoughts and reading. Resolute, through
good report and evil report, rough but very generous, stern both against
Popery and Puritanism, he had become a power in the Midlands and the
North, and first Coventry, then Leeds, were the centres of a new
influence. He was the apostle of the Church to the great middle class.
These were the orthodox Churchmen, whom their rivals, and not their
rivals only,[10] denounced as dry, unspiritual, formal, unevangelical,
self-righteous; teachers of mere morality at their best, allies and
servants of the world at their worst. In the party which at this time
had come to be looked upon popularly as best entitled to be the
_religious_ party, whether they were admired as Evangelicals, or abused
as Calvinists, or laughed at as the Saints, were inheritors not of
Anglican traditions, but of those which had grown up among the zealous
clergymen and laymen who had sympathised with the great Methodist
revival, and whose theology and life had been profoundly affected by it.
It was the second or third generation of those whose religious ideas had
been formed and governed by the influence of teachers like Hervey,
Romaine, Cecil, Venn, Fletcher, Newton, and Thomas Scott. The fathers of
the Evangelical school were men of naturally strong and vigorous
understandings, robust and rugged, and sometimes eccentric, but quite
able to cope with the controversialists, like Bishop Tomline, who
attacked them. These High Church controversialists were too half-hearted
and too shallow, and understood their own principles too imperfectly, to
be a match for antagonists who were in deadly earnest, and put them to
shame by their zeal and courage. But Newton and Romaine and the Milners
were too limited and narrow in their compass of ideas to found a
powerful theology. They undoubtedly often quickened conscience. But
their system was a one-sided and unnatural one, indeed in the hands of
some of its expounders threatening morality and soundness of
character.[11] It had none of the sweep which carried the justification
doctrines of Luther, or the systematic predestinarianism of Calvin, or
the "platform of discipline" of John Knox and the Puritans. It had to
deal with a society which laid stress on what was "reasonable," or
"polite," or "ingenious," or "genteel," and unconsciously it had come to
have respect to these requirements. The one thing by which its preachers
carried disciples with them was their undoubted and serious piety, and
their brave, though often fantastic and inconsistent, protest against
the world. They won consideration and belief by the mild persecution
which this protest brought on them--by being proscribed as enthusiasts
by comfortable dignitaries, and mocked as "Methodists" and "Saints" by
wits and worldlings. But the austere spirit of Newton and Thomas Scott
had, between 1820 and 1830, given way a good deal to the influence of
increasing popularity. The profession of Evangelical religion had been
made more than respectable by the adhesion of men of position and
weight. Preached in the pulpits of fashionable chapels, this religion
proved to be no more exacting than its "High and Dry" rival. It gave a
gentle stimulus to tempers which required to be excited by novelty. It
recommended itself by gifts of flowing words or high-pitched rhetoric to
those who expected _some_ demands to be made on them, so that these
demands were not too strict. Yet Evangelical religion had not been
unfruitful, especially in public results. It had led Howard and
Elizabeth Fry to assail the brutalities of the prisons. It had led
Clarkson and Wilberforce to overthrow the slave trade, and ultimately
slavery itself. It had created great Missionary Societies. It had given
motive and impetus to countless philanthropic schemes. What it failed in
was the education and development of character; and this was the result
of the increasing meagreness of its writing and preaching. There were
still Evangelical preachers of force and eloquence--Robert Hall, Edward
Irving, Chalmers, Jay of Bath--but they were not Churchmen. The circle
of themes dwelt on by this school in the Church was a contracted one,
and no one had found the way of enlarging it. It shrank, in its fear of
mere moralising, in its horror of the idea of merit or of the value of
good works, from coming into contact with the manifold realities of the
spirit of man: it never seemed to get beyond the "first beginnings" of
Christian teaching, the call to repent, the assurance of forgiveness: it
had nothing to say to the long and varied process of building up the new
life of truth and goodness: it was nervously afraid of departing from
the consecrated phrases of its school, and in the perpetual iteration of
them it lost hold of the meaning they may once have had. It too often
found its guarantee for faithfulness in jealous suspicions, and in
fierce bigotries, and at length it presented all the characteristics of
an exhausted teaching and a spent enthusiasm. Claiming to be exclusively
spiritual, fervent, unworldly, the sole announcer of the free grace of
God amid self-righteousness and sin, it had come, in fact, to be on very
easy terms with the world. Yet it kept its hold on numbers of
spiritually-minded persons, for in truth there seemed to be nothing
better for those who saw in the affections the main field of religion.
But even of these good men, the monotonous language sounded to all but
themselves inconceivably hollow and wearisome; and in the hands of the
average teachers of the school, the idea of religion was becoming poor
and thin and unreal.
But besides these two great parties, each of them claiming to represent
the authentic and unchanging mind of the Church, there were independent
thinkers who took their place with neither and criticised both. Paley
had still his disciples at Cambridge, or if not disciples, yet
representatives of his masculine but not very profound and reverent way
of thinking; and a critical school, represented by names afterwards
famous, Connop Thirlwall and Julius Hare, strongly influenced by German
speculation, both in theology and history, began to attract attention.
And at Cambridge was growing, slowly and out of sight, a mind and an
influence which were to be at once the counterpart and the rival of the
Oxford movement, its ally for a short moment, and then its earnest and
often bitter enemy. In spite of the dominant teaching identified with
the name of Mr. Simeon, Frederic Maurice, with John Sterling and other
members of the Apostles' Club, was feeling for something truer and
nobler than the conventionalities of the religious world.[12] In Oxford,
mostly in a different way, more dry, more dialectical, and, perhaps it
may be said, more sober, definite, and ambitious of clearness, the same
spirit was at work. There was a certain drift towards Dissent among the
warmer spirits. Under the leading of Whately, questions were asked about
what was supposed to be beyond dispute with both Churchmen and
Evangelicals. Current phrases, the keynotes of many a sermon, were
fearlessly taken to pieces. Men were challenged to examine the meaning
of their words. They were cautioned or ridiculed as the case might be,
on the score of "confusion of thought" and "inaccuracy of mind"; they
were convicted of great logical sins, _ignoratio elenchi,_ or
_undistributed middle terms;_ and bold theories began to make their
appearance about religious principles and teaching, which did not easily
accommodate themselves to popular conceptions. In very different ways
and degrees, Davison, Copleston, Whately, Hawkins, Milman, and not
least, a brilliant naturalised Spaniard who sowed the seeds of doubt
around him, Blanco White, had broken through a number of accepted
opinions, and had presented some startling ideas to men who had thought
that all religious questions lay between the orthodoxy of Lambeth and
the orthodoxy of Clapham and Islington. And thus the foundation was
laid, at least, at Oxford of what was then called the Liberal School of
Theology. Its theories and paradoxes, then commonly associated with the
"_Noetic_" character of one college, Oriel, were thought startling and
venturesome when discussed in steady-going common-rooms and country
parsonages; but they were still cautious and old-fashioned compared
with what was to come after them. The distance is indeed great between
those early disturbers of lecture-rooms and University pulpits, and
their successors.
While this was going on within the Church, there was a great movement of
thought going on in the country. It was the time when Bentham's
utilitarianism had at length made its way into prominence and
importance. It had gained a hold on a number of powerful minds in
society and political life. It was threatening to become the dominant
and popular philosophy. It began, in some ways beneficially, to affect
and even control legislation. It made desperate attempts to take
possession of the whole province of morals. It forced those who saw
through its mischief, who hated and feared it, to seek a reason, and a
solid and strong one, for the faith which was in them as to the reality
of conscience and the mysterious distinction between right and wrong.
And it entered into a close alliance with science, which was beginning
to assert its claims, since then risen so high, to a new and undefined
supremacy, not only in the general concerns of the world, but specially
in education. It was the day of Holland House. It was the time when a
Society of which Lord Brougham was the soul, and which comprised a great
number of important political and important scientific names, was
definitely formed for the _Diffusion of Useful Knowledge_. Their labours
are hardly remembered now in the great changes for which they paved the
way; but the Society was the means of getting written and of publishing
at a cheap rate a number of original and excellent books on science,
biography, and history. It was the time of the _Library of Useful
Knowledge,_ and its companion, the _Library of Entertaining Knowledge;_
of the _Penny Magazine,_ and its Church rival, the _Saturday Magazine,_
of the _Penny Cyclopaedia,_ and _Lardner's Cabinet Cyclopaedia,_ and
_Murray's Family Library_: popular series, which contained much of the
work of the ablest men of the day, and which, though for the most part
superseded now, were full of interest then. Another creation of this
epoch, and an unmistakable indication of its tendencies, was the British
Association for the Advancement of Science, which met for the first time
at Oxford in June 1832, not without a good deal of jealousy and
misgiving, partly unreasonable, partly not unfounded, among men in whose
hearts the cause and fortunes of religion were supreme.
Thus the time was ripe for great collisions of principles and aims; for
the decomposition of elements which had been hitherto united; for
sifting them out of their old combinations, and regrouping them
according to their more natural affinities. It was a time for the
formation and development of unexpected novelties in teaching and
practical effort. There was a great historic Church party, imperfectly
conscious of its position and responsibilities;[13] there was an active
but declining pietistic school, resting on a feeble intellectual basis
and narrow and meagre interpretations of Scripture, and strong only in
its circle of philanthropic work; there was, confronting both, a rising
body of inquisitive and, in some ways, menacing thought. To men deeply
interested in religion, the ground seemed confused and treacherous.
There was room, and there was a call, for new effort; but to find the
resources for it, it seemed necessary to cut down deep below the level
of what even good men accepted as the adequate expression of
Christianity, and its fit application to the conditions of the
nineteenth century. It came to pass that there were men who had the
heart to make this attempt. As was said at starting, the actual movement
began in the conviction that a great and sudden danger to the Church was
at hand, and that an unusual effort must be made to meet it. But if the
occasion was in a measure accidental, there was nothing haphazard or
tentative in the line chosen to encounter the danger. From the first it
was deliberately and distinctly taken. The choice of it was the result
of convictions which had been forming before the occasion came which
called on them. The religious ideas which governed the minds of those
who led the movement had been traced, in outline at least, firmly and
without faltering.
The movement had its spring in the consciences and character of its
leaders. To these men religion really meant the most awful and most
seriously personal thing on earth. It had not only a theological basis;
it had still more deeply a moral one. What that basis was is shown in a
variety of indications of ethical temper and habits, before the
movement, in those who afterwards directed it. The _Christian Year_ was
published in 1827, and tells us distinctly by what kind of standard Mr.
Keble moulded his judgment and aims. What Mr. Keble's influence and
teaching did, in training an apt pupil to deep and severe views of truth
and duty, is to be seen in the records of purpose and self-discipline,
often so painful, but always so lofty and sincere, of Mr. Hurrell
Froude's journal. But these indications are most forcibly given in Mr.
Newman's earliest preaching. As tutor at Oriel, Mr. Newman had made what
efforts he could, sometimes disturbing to the authorities, to raise the
standard of conduct and feeling among his pupils. When he became a
parish priest, his preaching took a singularly practical and
plain-spoken character. The first sermon of the series, a typical
sermon, "Holiness necessary for future Blessedness," a sermon which has
made many readers grave when they laid it down, was written in 1826,
before he came to St. Mary's; and as he began he continued. No sermons,
except those which his great opposite, Dr. Arnold, was preaching at
Rugby, had appealed to conscience with such directness and force. A
passionate and sustained earnestness after a high moral rule, seriously
realised in conduct, is the dominant character of these sermons. They
showed the strong reaction against slackness of fibre in the religious
life; against the poverty, softness; restlessness, worldliness, the
blunted and impaired sense of truth, which reigned with little check in
the recognised fashions of professing Christianity; the want of depth
both of thought and feeling; the strange blindness to the real
sternness, nay the austerity, of the New Testament. Out of this ground
the movement grew. Even more than a theological reform, it was a protest
against the loose unreality of ordinary religious morality. In the first
stage of the movement, moral earnestness and enthusiasm gave its impulse
to theological interest and zeal.
FOOTNOTES:
[2] The suppression of the Irish bishoprics. Palmer, _Narrative_ (1883),
pp. 44, 101. Maurice, _Life_, i. 180.
[3] "The Church, as it now stands, no human power can save" (Arnold to
Tyler, June 1832. _Life,_ i. 326). "Nothing, as it seems to me, can save
the Church but an union with the Dissenters; now they are leagued with
the antichristian party, and no merely internal reforms will satisfy
them" (Arnold to Whately, January 1833, i. 348). He afterwards thought
this exaggerated (_Life,_ i. 336). "The Church has been for one hundred
years without any government, and in such a stormy season it will not go
on much longer without a rudder" (Whately to Bp. Copleston, July 1832.
_Life_, i, 167). "If such an arrangement of the Executive Government is
completed, it will be a difficult, but great and glorious feat for your
Lordship's ministry to preserve the establishment from utter overthrow"
(Whately to Lord Grey, May 1832. _Life_, i. 156). It is remarkable that
Dean Stanley should have been satisfied with ascribing to the movement
an "origin _entirely political_" and should have seen a proof of this
"thoroughly political origin" in Newman's observing the date of Mr.
Keble's sermon "National Apostasy" as the birthday of the movement,
_Edin. Rev._ April 1880, pp. 309, 310.
[4] Readers of Wordsworth will remember the account of Mr. R. Walker
(Notes to the "River Duddon").
[5] Compare _Life of Whately_ (ed. 1866), i. 52, 68.
[6] Arnold to W. Smith, _Life_, i. 356-358; ii. 32.
[7] _Life_, i. 225 _sqq_.
[8] "I am vexed to find how much hopeless bigotry lingers in minds, οἶς
ἥκιστα ἕχρη" (Arnold to Whately, Sept. 1832. _Life,_ i. 331; ii. 3-7).
[9] St. Bartholomew's Day
[10] "The mere barren orthodoxy which, from all that I can hear, is
characteristic of Oxford." Maurice in 1829 (_Life,_ i. 103). In 1832 he
speaks of his "high endeavours to rouse Oxford from its lethargy having
so signally failed" (i. 143).
[11] Abbey and Overton, _English Church in the Eighteenth Century,_ ii.
180, 204.
[12] _V._ Maurice, _Life,_ i. 108-111; Trench's _Letters;_ Carlyle's
_Sterling_.
[13] "In what concerns the Established Church, the House of Commons
seems to feel no other principle than that of vulgar policy. The old
High Church race is worn out." Alex. Knox (June 1816), i. 54.