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.