DR. HAMPDEN
The stage on which what is called the Oxford movement ran through its
course had a special character of its own, unlike the circumstances in
which other religious efforts had done their work. The scene of
Jansenism had been a great capital, a brilliant society, the precincts
of a court, the cells of a convent, the studies and libraries of the
doctors of the Sorbonne, the council chambers of the Vatican. The scene
of Methodism had been English villages and country towns, the moors of
Cornwall, and the collieries of Bristol, at length London fashionable
chapels. The scene of this new movement was as like as it could be in
our modern world to a Greek _polis_, or an Italian self-centred city of
the Middle Ages. Oxford stood by itself in its meadows by the rivers,
having its relations with all England, but, like its sister at
Cambridge, living a life of its own, unlike that of any other spot in
England, with its privileged powers, and exemptions from the general
law, with its special mode of government and police, its usages and
tastes and traditions, and even costume, which the rest of England
looked at from the outside, much interested but much puzzled, or knew
only by transient visits. And Oxford was as proud and jealous of its own
ways as Athens or Florence; and like them it had its quaint fashions of
polity; its democratic Convocation and its oligarchy; its social ranks;
its discipline, severe in theory and usually lax in fact; its
self-governed bodies and corporations within itself; its faculties and
colleges, like the guilds and "arts" of Florence; its internal rivalries
and discords; its "sets" and factions. Like these, too, it professed a
special recognition of the supremacy of religion; it claimed to be a
home of worship and religious training, _Dominus illuminatio mea_, a
claim too often falsified in the habit and tempers of life. It was a
small sphere, but it was a conspicuous one; for there was much strong
and energetic character, brought out by the aims and conditions of
University life; and though moving in a separate orbit, the influence of
the famous place over the outside England, though imperfectly
understood, was recognised and great. These conditions affected the
character of the movement, and of the conflicts which it caused. Oxford
claimed to be eminently the guardian of "true religion and sound
learning"; and therefore it was eminently the place where religion
should be recalled to its purity and strength, and also the place where
there ought to be the most vigilant jealousy against the perversions and
corruptions of religion, Oxford was a place where every one knew his
neighbour, and measured him, and was more or less friendly or repellent;
where the customs of life brought men together every day and all day, in
converse or discussion; and where every fresh statement or every new
step taken furnished endless material for speculation or debate, in
common rooms or in the afternoon walk. And for this reason, too,
feelings were apt to be more keen and intense and personal than in the
larger scenes of life; the man who was disliked or distrusted was so
close to his neighbours that he was more irritating than if he had been
obscured by a crowd; the man who attracted confidence and kindled
enthusiasm, whose voice was continually in men's ears, and whose private
conversation and life was something ever new in its sympathy and charm,
created in those about him not mere admiration, but passionate
friendship, or unreserved discipleship. And these feelings passed from
individuals into parties; the small factions of a limited area. Men
struck blows and loved and hated in those days in Oxford as they hardly
did on the wider stage of London politics or general religious
controversy.
The conflicts which for a time turned Oxford into a kind of image of
what Florence was in the days of Savonarola, with its nicknames,
Puseyites, and Neomaniacs, and High and Dry, counterparts to the
_Piagnoni_ and _Arrabbiati_, of the older strife, began around a student
of retired habits, interested more than was usual at Oxford in abstruse
philosophy, and the last person who might be expected to be the occasion
of great dissensions in the University. Dr. Hampden was a man who, with
no definite intentions of innovating on the received doctrines of the
Church--indeed, as his sermons showed, with a full acceptance of
them--had taken a very difficult subject for a course of Bampton
Lectures, without at all fathoming its depth and reach, and had got into
a serious scrape in consequence. Personally he was a man of serious but
cold religion, having little sympathy with others, and consequently not
able to attract any. His isolation during the whole of his career is
remarkable; he attached no one, as Whately or Arnold attached men. His
mind, which was a speculative one, was not one, in its own order, of the
first class. He had not the grasp nor the subtlety necessary for his
task. He had a certain power of statement, but little of co-ordination;
he seems not to have had the power of seeing when his ideas were really
irreconcilable, and he thought that simply by insisting on his
distinctly orthodox statements he not only balanced, but neutralised,
and did away with his distinctly unorthodox ones. He had read a good
deal of Aristotle and something of the Schoolmen, which probably no one
else in Oxford had done except Blanco White; and the temptation of
having read what no one else knows anything about sometimes leads men to
make an unprofitable use of their special knowledge, which they consider
their monopoly.
The creed and dogmas of the Christian Church are at least in their
broad features, not a speculation, but a fact. That not only the
Apostles' Creed, but the Nicene and Constantinopolitan Creeds, are
assumed as facts by the whole of anything that can be called the Church,
is as certain as the reception by the same body, and for the same time,
of the Scriptures. Not only the Creed, but, up to the sixteenth century,
the hierarchy, and not only Creed and hierarchy and Scriptures, but the
sacramental idea as expressed in the liturgies, are equally in the same
class of facts. Of course it is open to any one to question the genuine
origin of any of these great portions of the constitution of the Church;
but the Church is so committed to them that he cannot enter on his
destructive criticism without having to criticise, not one only, but all
these beliefs, and without soon having to face the question whether the
whole idea of the Church, as a real and divinely ordained society, with
a definite doctrine and belief, is not a delusion, and whether
Christianity, whatever it is, is addressed solely to each individual,
one by one, to make what he can of it. It need hardly be said that
within the limits of what the Church is committed to there is room for
very wide differences of opinion; it is also true that these limits
have, in different times of the Church, been illegitimately and
mischievously narrowed by prevailing opinions, and by documents and
formularies respecting it. But though we may claim not to be bound by
the Augsburg Confession, or by the Lambeth articles, or the Synod of
Dort, or the Bull _Unigenitus_, it does not follow that, if there is a
Church at all, there is no more binding authority in the theology of the
Nicene and Athanasian Creeds. And it is the province of the divine who
believes in a Church at all, and in its office to be the teacher and
witness of religious truth, to distinguish between the infinitely
varying degrees of authority with which professed representations of
portions of this truth are propounded for acceptance. It may be
difficult or impossible to agree on a theory of inspiration; but that
the Church doctrine of some kind of special inspiration of Scripture is
part of Christianity is, unless Christianity be a dream, certain. No one
can reasonably doubt, with history before him, that the answer of the
Christian Church was, the first time the question was asked, and has
continued to be through ages of controversy, _against_ Arianism,
_against_ Socinianism, _against_ Pelagianism, _against_ Zwinglianism. It
does not follow that the Church has settled everything, or that there
are not hundreds of questions which it is vain and presumptuous to
attempt to settle by any alleged authority.
Dr. Hampden was in fact unexceptionably, even rigidly orthodox in his
acceptance of Church doctrine and Church creeds. He had published a
volume of sermons containing, among other things, an able statement of
the Scriptural argument for the doctrine of the Trinity, and an equally
able defence of the Athanasian Creed. But he felt that there are
formularies which may be only the interpretations of doctrine and
inferences from Scripture of a particular time or set of men; and he
was desirous of putting into their proper place the authority of such
formularies. His object was to put an interval between them and the
Scriptures from which they professed to be derived, and to prevent them
from claiming the command over faith and conscience which was due only
to the authentic evidences of God's revelation. He wished to make room
for a deeper sense of the weight of Scripture. He proposed to himself
the same thing which was aimed at by the German divines, Arndt,
Calixtus, and Spener, when they rose up against the grinding oppression
which Lutheran dogmatism had raised on its _Symbolical Books_,[56] and
which had come to outdo the worst extravagances of scholasticism. This
seems to have been his object--a fair and legitimate one. But in arguing
against investing the Thirty-nine Articles with an authority which did
not belong to them, he unquestionably, without seeing what he was doing,
went much farther--where he never meant to go. In fact, he so stated his
argument that he took in with the Thirty-nine Articles every expression
of collective belief, every document, however venerable, which the
Church had sanctioned from the first. Strangely enough, without
observing it, he took in--what he meant to separate by a wide interval
from what he called dogma--the doctrine of the infallible authority and
sufficiency of Scripture. In denying the worth of the _consensus_ and
immemorial judgment of the Church, he cut from under him the claim to
that which he accepted as the source and witness of "divine facts." He
did not mean to do this, or to do many other things; but from want of
clearness of head, he certainly, in these writings which were complained
of, did it. He was, in temper and habit, too desirous to be "orthodox,"
as Whately feared, to accept in its consequences his own theory. The
theory which he put forward in his Bampton Lectures, and on which he
founded his plan of comprehension in his pamphlet on Dissent, left
nothing standing but the authority of the letter of Scripture. All
else--right or wrong as it might be--was "speculation," "human
inference," "dogma." With perfect consistency, he did not pretend to
take even the Creeds out of this category. But the truth was, he did not
consciously mean all that he said; and when keener and more powerful and
more theological minds pointed out with relentless accuracy what he _had
said_ he was profuse and overflowing with explanations, which showed how
little he had perceived the drift of his words. There is not the least
reason to doubt the sincerity of these explanations; but at the same
time they showed the unfitness of a man who had so to explain away his
own speculations to be the official guide and teacher of the clergy. The
criticisms on his language, and the objections to it, were made before
these explanations were given; and though he gave them, he was furious
with those who called for them, and he never for a moment admitted that
there was anything seriously wrong or mistaken in what he had said. To
those who pointed out the meaning and effect of his words and theories,
he replied by the assertion of his personal belief. If words mean
anything, he had said that neither Unitarians nor any one else could get
behind the bare letter, and what he called "facts," of Scripture, which
all equally accepted in good faith; and that therefore there was no
reason for excluding Unitarians as long as they accepted the "facts."
But when it was pointed out that this reasoning reduced all belief in
the realities behind the bare letter to the level of personal and
private opinion, he answered by saying that he valued supremely the
Creeds and Articles, and by giving a statement of the great Christian
doctrines which he held, and which the Church taught. But he never
explained what their authority could be with any one but himself. There
might be interpretations and inferences from Scripture, by the hundred
or the thousand, but no one certain and authoritative one; none that
warranted an organised Church, much more a Catholic and Apostolic
Church, founded on the assumption of this interpretation being the one
true faith, the one truth of the Bible. The point was brought out
forcibly in a famous pamphlet written by Mr. Newman, though without his
name, called "Elucidations of Dr. Hampden's Theological Statements."
This pamphlet was a favourite object of attack on the part of Dr.
Hampden's supporters as a flagrant instance of unfairness and garbled
extracts. No one, they said, ever read the Bampton Lectures, but took
their estimate of the work from Mr. Newman's quotations. Extracts are
often open to the charge of unfairness, and always to suspicion. But in
this case there was no need of unfairness. Dr. Hampden's theory lay on
the very surface of his Hampton Lectures and pamphlet; and any unbiassed
judge may be challenged to read these works of his, and say whether the
extracts in the "Elucidations" do not adequately represent Dr. Hampden's
statements and arguments, and whether the comments on them are forced or
strained. They do not represent his explanations, for the explanations
had not been given; and when the explanations came, though they said
many things which showed that Dr. Hampden did not mean to be unorthodox
and unevangelical, but only anti-scholastic and anti-Roman, they did not
unsay a word which he had said. And what this was, what had been Dr.
Hampden's professed theological theory up to the time when the
University heard the news of his appointment, the "Elucidations"
represent as fairly as any adverse statement can represent the subject
of its attack.
In quieter times such an appointment might have passed with nothing more
than a paper controversy or protest, or more probably without more than
conversational criticism. But these wore not quiet and unsuspicious
times. There was reason for disquiet. It was fresh in men's minds what
language and speculation like that of the Bampton Lectures had come to
in the case of Whately's intimate friend, Blanco White. The
unquestionable hostility of Whately's school to the old ideas of the
Church had roused alarm and a strong spirit of resistance in Churchmen.
Each party was on the watch, and there certainly was something at stake
for both parties. Coupled with some recent events, and with the part
which Dr. Hampden had taken on the subscription question, the
appointment naturally seemed significant. Probably it was not so
significant as it seemed on the part at least of Lord Melbourne, who had
taken pains to find a fit man. Dr. Hampden was said to have been
recommended by Bishop Copleston, and not disallowed by Archbishop
Howley. In the University, up to this time, there had been no
authoritative protest against Dr. Hampden's writings. And there were not
many Liberals to choose from. In the appointment there is hardly
sufficient ground to blame Lord Melbourne. But the outcry against it at
Oxford, when it came, was so instantaneous, so strong, and so unusual,
that it might have warned Lord Melbourne that he had been led into a
mistake, out of which it would be wise to seek at least a way of escape.
Doubtless it was a strong measure for the University to protest as it
did; but it was also a strong measure, at least in those days, for a
Minister of the Crown to force so extremely unacceptable a Regius
Professor of Divinity on a great University. Dr. Hampden offered to
resign; and there would have been plenty of opportunities to compensate
him for his sacrifice of a post which could only be a painful one. But
the temper of both sides was up. The remonstrances from Oxford were
treated with something like contempt, and the affair was hurried through
till there was no retreating; and Dr. Hampden became Regius Professor.
Mr. Palmer has recorded how various efforts were made to neutralise the
effect of the appointment. But the Heads of Houses, though angry, were
cautious. They evaded the responsibility of stating Dr. Hampden's
unsound positions; but to mark their distrust, brought in a proposal to
deprive him of his vote in the choice of Select Preachers till the
University should otherwise determine. It was defeated in Convocation by
the veto of the two Proctors (March 1836), who exercised their right
with the full approval of Dr. Hampden's friends, and the indignation of
the large majority of the University. But it was not unfairly used: it
could have only a suspending effect, of which no one had a right to
complain; and when new Proctors came into office, the proposal was
introduced again, and carried (May 1836) by 474 to 94. The Liberal
minority had increased since the vote on subscription, and Dr. Hampden
went on with his work as if nothing had happened. The attempt was twice
made to rescind the vote: first, after the outcry about the Ninetieth
Tract and the contest about the Poetry Professorship, by a simple
repeal, which was rejected by 334 to 219 (June 1842); and next,
indirectly by a statute enlarging the Professor's powers over Divinity
degrees, which was also rejected by 341 to 21 (May 1844). From first to
last, these things and others were the unfortunate incidents of an
unfortunate appointment.
The "persecution of Dr. Hampden" has been an unfailing subject of
reproach to the party of the Oxford movement, since the days when the
_Edinburgh Review_ held them up to public scorn and hatred in an article
of strange violence. They certainly had their full share in the
opposition to him, and in the measures by which that opposition was
carried out. But it would be the greatest mistake to suppose that in
this matter they stood alone. All in the University at this time, except
a small minority, were of one mind, Heads of Houses and country parsons,
Evangelicals and High Churchmen--all who felt that the grounds of a
definite belief were seriously threatened by Dr. Hampden's speculations.
All were angry at the appointment; all were agreed that something ought
to be done to hinder the mischief of it. In this matter Mr. Newman and
his friends were absolutely at one with everybody round them, with those
who were soon to be their implacable opponents. Whatever deeper view
they might have of the evil which had been done by the appointment, and
however much graver and more permanent their objections to it, they were
responsible only as the whole University was responsible for what was
done against Dr. Hampden. It was convenient afterwards to single them
out, and to throw this responsibility and the odium of it on them alone;
and when they came under the popular ban, it was forgotten that Dr.
Gilbert, the Principal of Brasenose, Dr. Symons, the Warden of Wadham,
Dr. Faussett, afterwards the denouncer of Dr. Pusey, Mr. Vaughan Thomas,
and Mr. Hill of St. Edmund Hall, were quite as forward at the time as
Dr. Pusey and Mr. Newman in protesting against Dr. Hampden, and in the
steps to make their protest effective. Mr. Palmer, in his
_Narrative_,[57] anxious to dissociate himself from the movement under
Mr. Newman's influence, has perhaps underrated the part taken by Mr.
Newman and Dr. Pusey; for they, any rate, did most of the argumentative
work. But as far as personal action goes, it is true, as he says, that
the "movement against Dr. Hampden was not guided by the Tract writers."
"The condemnation of Dr. Hampden, then, was not carried by the Tract
writers; it was carried by the _independent_ body of the University. The
fact is that, had those writers taken any leading part, the measure
would have been a failure, for the number of their friends at that time
was a _very small proportion_ to the University at large, and there was
a general feeling of distrust in the soundness of their views."
We are a long way from those days in time, and still more in habits and
sentiment; and a manifold and varied experience has taught most of us
some lessons against impatience and violent measures. But if we put
ourselves back equitably into the ways of thinking prevalent then, the
excitement about Dr. Hampden will not seem so unreasonable or so
unjustifiable as it is sometimes assumed to be. The University
legislation, indeed, to which it led was poor and petty, doing small and
annoying things, because the University rulers dared not commit
themselves to definite charges. But, in the first place, the provocation
was great on the part of the Government in putting into the chief
theological chair an unwelcome man who could only save his orthodoxy by
making his speculations mean next to nothing--whose _primâ facie_
unguarded and startling statements were resolved into truisms put in a
grand and obscure form. And in the next place, it was assumed in those
days to be the most natural and obvious thing in the world to condemn
unsound doctrine, and to exclude unsound teachers. The principle was
accepted as indisputable, however slack might have been in recent times
the application of it. That it was accepted, not on one side only, but
on all, was soon to be shown by the subsequent course of events. No one
suffered more severely and more persistently from its application than
the Tractarians; no one was more ready to apply it to them than Dr.
Hampden with his friends; no one approved and encouraged its vigorous
enforcement against them more than Dr. Whately. The idle distinction set
up, that they were not merely unsound but dishonest, was a mere insolent
pretext to save trouble in argument, and to heighten the charge against
them; no one could seriously doubt that they wrote in good faith as much
as Dr. Whately or Dr. Faussett. But unless acts like Dr. Pusey's
suspension, and the long proscription that went on for years after it,
were mere instances of vindictive retaliation, the reproach of
persecution must be shared by all parties then, and by none more than by
the party which in general terms most denounced it. Those who think the
Hampden agitation unique in its injustice ought to ask themselves what
their party would have done if at any time between 1836 and 1843 Mr.
Newman had been placed in Dr. Hampden's seat.
People in our days mean by religious persecution what happens when the
same sort of repressive policy is applied to a religious party as is
applied to vaccination recusants, or to the "Peculiar People." All
religious persecution, from the days of Socrates, has taken a legal
form, and justified itself on legal grounds. It is the action of
authority, or of strong social judgments backed by authority, against a
set of opinions, or the expression of them in word or act--usually
innovating opinions, but not by any means necessarily such. The
disciples of M. Monod, the "Momiers" of Geneva, were persecuted by the
Liberals of Geneva, not because they broke away from the creed of
Calvin, but because they adhered to it. The word is not properly applied
to the incidental effects in the way of disadvantage, resulting from
some broad constitutional settlement--from the government of the Church
being Episcopal and not Presbyterian, or its creed Nicene and not
Arian--any more than it is persecution for a nation to change its
government, or for a legitimist to have to live under a republic, or for
a Christian to have to live in an infidel state, though persecution may
follow from these conditions. But the _privilegium_ passed against Dr.
Hampden was an act of persecution, though a mild one compared with what
afterwards fell on his opponents with his full sanction. Persecution is
the natural impulse, in those who think a certain thing right and
important or worth guarding, to disable those who, thinking it wrong,
are trying to discredit and upset it, and to substitute something
different. It implies a state of war, and the resort to the most
available weapons to inflict damage on those who are regarded as
rebellious and dangerous. These weapons were formidable enough once:
they are not without force still. But in its mildest form--personal
disqualification or proscription--it is a disturbance which only war
justifies. It may, of course, make itself odious by its modes of
proceeding, by meanness and shabbiness and violence, by underhand and
ignoble methods of misrepresentation and slander, or by cruelty and
plain injustice; and then the odium of these things fairly falls upon
it. But it is very hard to draw the line between conscientious
repression, feeling itself bound to do what is possible to prevent
mischief, and what those who are opposed, if they are the weaker party,
of course call persecution.
If persecution implies a state of war in which one side is stronger, and
the other weaker, it is hardly a paradox to say that (1) no one has a
right to complain of persecution as such, apart from odious
accompaniments, any more than of superior numbers or hard blows in
battle; and (2) that every one has a right to take advantage and make
the most of being persecuted, by appeals to sympathy and the principle
of doing as you would be done by. No one likes to be accused of
persecution, and few people like to give up the claim to use it, if
necessary. But no one can help observing in the course of events the
strange way in which, in almost all cases, the "wheel comes full
circle." Δράσαντι παθεῖν--_Chi la fa, l' aspetti_,[58] are some of the
expressions of Greek awe and Italian shrewdness representing the
experience of the world on this subject; on a large scale and a small.
Protestants and Catholics, Churchmen and Nonconformists, have all in
their turn made full proof of what seems like a law of action and
reaction. Except in cases beyond debate, cases where no justification is
possible, the note of failure is upon this mode of repression.
Providence, by the visible Nemesis which it seems always to bring round,
by the regularity with which it has enforced the rule that infliction
and suffering are bound together and in time duly change places, seems
certainly and clearly to have declared against it. It may be that no
innovating party has a right to complain of persecution; but the
question is not for them. It is for those who have the power, and who
are tempted to think that they have the call, to persecute. It is for
them to consider whether it is right, or wise, or useful for their
cause; whether it is agreeable to what seems the leading of Providence
to have recourse to it.
FOOTNOTES:
[56] See Pusey's _Theology of Germany_ (1828), p. 18 _sqq_.
[57] _Narrative_ pp. 29, 30, ed. 1841; p 131. ed. 1883.
[58] Δράσαντι παθεῖν, Τριγέρων μῦθος τάδε φωνεῖ. Aesch. _Choeph_. 310.
Italian proverb, in _Landucci, Diario Fiorentino_, 1513, p. 343.