THE AUTHORITIES AND THE MOVEMENT
While the movement was making itself felt as a moral force, without a
parallel in Oxford for more than two centuries, and was impressing
deeply and permanently some of the most promising men in the rising
generation in the University, what was the attitude of the University
authorities? What was the attitude of the Bishops?
At Oxford it was that of contemptuous indifference, passing into
helpless and passionate hostility. There is no sadder passage to be
found in the history of Oxford than the behaviour and policy of the
heads of this great Christian University towards the religious movement
which was stirring the interest, the hopes, the fears of Oxford. The
movement was, for its first years at least, a loyal and earnest effort
to serve the cause of the Church. Its objects were clear and reasonable;
it aimed at creating a sincere and intelligent zeal for the Church, and
at making the Church itself worthy of the great position which her
friends claimed for her. Its leaders were men well known in the
University, in the first rank in point of ability and character; men of
learning, who knew what they were talking about; men of religious and
pure, if also severe lives. They were not men merely of speculation and
criticism, but men ready to forego anything, to devote everything for
the practical work of elevating religious thought and life. All this did
not necessarily make their purposes and attempts wise and good; but it
did entitle them to respectful attention. If they spoke language new to
the popular mind or the "religious world," it was not new--at least it
ought not to have been new--to orthodox Churchmen, with opportunities of
study and acquainted with our best divinity. If their temper was eager
and enthusiastic, they alleged the presence of a great and perilous
crisis. Their appeal was mainly not to the general public, but to the
sober and the learned; to those to whom was entrusted the formation of
faith and character in the future clergy of the Church; to those who
were responsible for the discipline and moral tone of the first
University of Christendom, and who held their conspicuous position on
the understanding of that responsibility. It behoved the heads of the
University to be cautious, even to be suspicious; movements might be
hollow or dangerous things. But it behoved them also to become
acquainted with so striking a phenomenon as this; to judge it by what it
appealed to--the learning of English divines, the standard of a high and
generous moral rule; to recognise its aims at least, with equity and
sympathy, if some of its methods and arguments seemed questionable. The
men of the movement were not mere hostile innovators; they were fighting
for what the University and its chiefs held dear and sacred, the
privileges and safety of the Church. It was the natural part of the
heads of the University to act as moderators; at any rate, to have
shown, with whatever reserve, that they appreciated what they needed
time to judge of. But while on the one side there was burning and
devouring earnestness, and that power of conviction which doubles the
strength of the strong, there was on the other a serene ignoring of all
that was going on, worthy of a set of dignified French _abbés_ on the
eve of the Revolution. This sublime or imbecile security was
occasionally interrupted by bursts of irritation at some fresh piece of
Tractarian oddness or audacity, or at some strange story which made its
way from the gossip of common rooms to the society of the Heads of
Houses. And there was always ready a stick to beat the offenders;
everything could be called Popish. But for the most part they looked on,
with smiles, with jokes, sometimes with scolding.[74] Thus the men who
by their place ought to have been able to gauge and control the
movement, who might have been expected to meet half-way a serious
attempt to brace up the religious and moral tone of the place, so
incalculably important in days confessed to be anxious ones, simply set
their faces steadily to discountenance and discredit it. They were good
and respectable men, living comfortably in a certain state and ease.
Their lives were mostly simple compared with the standard of the outer
world, though Fellows of Colleges thought them luxurious. But they were
blind and dull as tea-table gossips as to what was the meaning of the
movement, as to what might come of it, as to what use might be made of
it by wise and just and generous recognition, and, if need be, by wise
and just criticism and repression. There were points of danger in it;
but they could only see what _seemed_ to be dangerous, whether it was
so or not; and they multiplied these points of danger by all that was
good and hopeful in it. It perplexed and annoyed them; they had not
imagination nor moral elevation to take in what it aimed at; they were
content with the routine which they had inherited; and, so that men read
for honours and took first classes, it did not seem to them strange or a
profanation that a whole mixed crowd of undergraduates should be
expected to go on a certain Sunday in term, willing or unwilling, fit or
unlit, to the Sacrament, and be fined if they did not appear. Doubtless
we are all of us too prone to be content with the customary, and to be
prejudiced against the novel, nor is this condition of things without
advantage. But we must bear our condemnation if we stick to the
customary too long, and so miss our signal opportunities. In their
apathy, in their self-satisfied ignorance, in their dulness of
apprehension and forethought, the authorities of the University let pass
the great opportunity of their time. As it usually happens, when this
posture of lofty ignoring what is palpable and active, and the object of
everybody's thought, goes on too long, it is apt to turn into impatient
dislike and bitter antipathy. The Heads of Houses drifted insensibly
into this position. They had not taken the trouble to understand the
movement, to discriminate between its aspects, to put themselves frankly
into communication with its leading persons, to judge with the knowledge
and justice of scholars and clergymen of its designs and ways. They let
themselves be diverted from this, their proper though troublesome task,
by distrust, by the jealousies of their position, by the impossibility
of conceiving that anything so strange could really be true and sound.
And at length they found themselves going along with the outside current
of uninstructed and ignoble prejudice, in a settled and pronounced
dislike, which took for granted that all was wrong in the movement,
which admitted any ill-natured surmise and foolish misrepresentation,
and really allowed itself to acquiesce in the belief that men so well
known in Oxford, once so admired and honoured, had sunk down to
deliberate corrupters of the truth, and palterers with their own
intellects and consciences. It came in a few years to be understood on
both sides, that the authorities were in direct antagonism to the
movement; and though their efforts in opposition to it were feeble and
petty, it went on under the dead weight of official University
disapproval. It would have been a great thing for the English
Church--though it is hard to see how, things being as they were, it
could have come about--if the movement had gone on, at least with the
friendly interest, if not with the support, of the University rulers.
Instead of that, after the first two or three years there was one long
and bitter fight in Oxford, with the anger on one side created by the
belief of vague but growing dangers, and a sense of incapacity in
resisting them, and with deep resentment at injustice and stupidity on
the other.
The Bishops were farther from the immediate scene of the movement, and
besides, had other things to think of. Three or four of them might be
considered theologians--Archbishop Howley, Phillpotts of Exeter, Kaye of
Lincoln, Marsh of Peterborough. Two or three belonged to the Evangelical
school, Ryder of Lichfield, and the two Sumners at Winchester and
Chester. The most prominent among them, and next to the Bishop of Exeter
the ablest, alive to the real dangers of the Church, anxious to infuse
vigour into its work, and busy with plans for extending its influence,
was Blomfield, Bishop of London. But Blomfield was not at his best as a
divine, and, for a man of his unquestionable power, singularly unsure of
his own mind. He knew, in fact, that when the questions raised by the
Tracts came before him he was unqualified to deal with them; he was no
better furnished by thought or knowledge or habits to judge of them than
the average Bishop of the time, appointed, as was so often the case, for
political or personal reasons. At the first start of the movement, the
Bishops not unnaturally waited to see what would come of it. It was
indeed an effort in favour of the Church, but it was in irresponsible
hands, begun by men whose words were strong and vehement and of unusual
sound, and who, while they called on the clergy to rally round their
fathers the Bishops, did not shrink from wishing for the Bishops the
fortunes of the early days: "we could not wish them a more blessed
termination of their course than the spoiling of their goods and
martyrdom."[76] It may reasonably be supposed that such good wishes were
not to the taste of all of them. As the movement developed, besides that
it would seem to them extravagant and violent, they would be perplexed
by its doctrine. It took strong ground for the Church; but it did so in
the teeth of religious opinions and prejudices, which were popular and
intolerant. For a moment the Bishops were in a difficulty; on the one
hand, no one for generations had so exalted the office of a Bishop as
the Tractarians; no one had claimed for it so high and sacred an origin;
no one had urged with such practical earnestness the duty of Churchmen
to recognise and maintain the unique authority of the Episcopate against
its despisers or oppressors. On the other hand, this was just the time
when the Evangelical party, after long disfavour, was beginning to gain
recognition, for the sake of its past earnestness and good works, with
men in power, and with ecclesiastical authorities of a different and
hitherto hostile school; and in the Tractarian movement the Evangelical
party saw from the first its natural enemy. The Bishops could not have
anything to do with the Tractarians without deeply offending the
Evangelicals. The result was that, for the present, the Bishops held
aloof. They let the movement run on by itself. Sharp sarcasms,
worldly-wise predictions, kind messages of approval, kind cautions,
passed from mouth to mouth, or in private correspondence from high
quarters, which showed that the movement was watched. But for some time
the authorities spoke neither good nor bad of it publicly. In his Charge
at the close of 1836, Bishop Phillpotts spoke in clear and unfaltering
language--language remarkable for its bold decision--of the necessity of
setting forth the true idea of the Church and the sacraments; but he was
silent about the call of the same kind which had come from Oxford. It
would have been well if the other Bishops later on, in their charges,
had followed his example. The Bishop of Oxford, in his Charge of 1838,
referred to the movement in balanced terms of praise and warning. The
first who condemned the movement was the Bishop of Chester, J. Bird
Sumner; in a later Charge he came to describe it as the work of Satan;
in 1838 he only denounced the "undermining of the foundations of our
Protestant Church by men who dwell within her walls," and the bad faith
of those "who sit in the Reformers' seat, and traduce the Reformation."
These were grave mistakes on the part of those who were responsible for
the government of the University and the Church. They treated as absurd,
mischievous, and at length traitorous, an effort, than which nothing
could be more sincere, to serve the Church, to place its claims on
adequate grounds, to elevate the standard of duty in its clergy, and in
all its members. To have missed the aim of the movement and to have been
occupied and irritated by obnoxious details and vulgar suspicions was a
blunder which gave the measure of those who made it, and led to great
evils. They alienated those who wished for nothing better than to help
them in their true work. Their "unkindness" was felt to be, in Bacon's
phrase,[77] _injuriae potentiorum_. But on the side of the party of the
movement there were mistakes also.
1. The rapidity with which the movement had grown, showing that some
deep need had long been obscurely felt, which the movement promised to
meet,[78] had been too great to be altogether wholesome. When we compare
what was commonly received before 1833, in teaching, in habits of life,
in the ordinary assumptions of history, in the ideas and modes of
worship, public and private--the almost sacramental conception of
preaching, the neglect of the common prayer of the Prayer Book, the
slight regard to the sacraments--with what the teaching of the Tracts
and their writers had impressed for good and all, five years later, on
numbers of earnest people, the change seems astonishing. The change was
a beneficial one and it was a permanent one. The minds which it
affected, it affected profoundly. Still it was but a short time, for
young minds especially, to have come to a decision on great and debated
questions. There was the possibility, the danger, of men having been
captivated and carried away by the excitement and interest of the time;
of not having looked all round and thought out the difficulties before
them; of having embraced opinions without sufficiently knowing their
grounds or counting the cost or considering the consequences. There was
the danger of precipitate judgment, of ill-balanced and disproportionate
views of what was true and all-important. There was an inevitable
feverishness in the way in which the movement was begun, in the way in
which it went on. Those affected by it were themselves surprised at the
swiftness of the pace. When a cause so great and so sacred seemed thus
to be flourishing, and carrying along with it men's assent and
sympathies, it was hardly wonderful that there should often be
exaggeration, impatience at resistance, scant consideration for the
slowness or the scruples or the alarms of others. Eager and sanguine men
talked as if their work was accomplished, when in truth it was but
beginning. No one gave more serious warnings against this and other
dangers than the leaders; and their warnings were needed.[79]
2. Another mistake, akin to the last, was the frequent forgetfulness of
the apostolic maxim, "All things are lawful for me, but all things are
not expedient." In what almost amounted to a revolution in many of the
religious ideas of the time, it was especially important to keep
distinct the great central truths, the restoration of which to their
proper place justified and made it necessary, and the many subordinate
points allied with them and naturally following from them, which yet
were not necessary to their establishment or acceptance. But it was on
these subordinate points that the interest of a certain number of
followers of the movement was fastened. Conclusions which they had a
perfect right to come to, practices innocent and edifying to themselves,
but of secondary account, began to be thrust forward into prominence,
whether or not these instances of self-will really helped the common
cause, whether or not they gave a handle to ill-nature and ill-will.
Suspicion must always have attached to such a movement as this; but a
great deal of it was provoked by indiscreet defiance, which was rather
glad to provoke it.
3. Apart from these incidents--common wherever a number of men are
animated with zeal for an inspiring cause--there were what to us now
seem mistakes made in the conduct itself of the movement. Considering
the difficulties of the work, it is wonderful that there were not more;
and none of them were discreditable, none but what arose from the
limitation of human powers matched against confused and baffling
circumstances.
In the position claimed for the Church of England, confessedly unique
and anomalous in the history of Christendom, between Roman authority and
infallibility on one side, and Protestant freedom of private judgment on
the other, the question would at once arise as to the grounds of belief.
What, if any, are the foundations of conviction and certitude, apart
from personal inquiry, and examination of opposing arguments on
different sides of the case, and satisfactory logical conclusions? The
old antithesis between Faith and Reason, and the various problems
connected with it, could not but come to the front, and require to be
dealt with. It is a question which faces us from a hundred sides, and,
subtly and insensibly transforming itself, looks different from them
all. It was among the earliest attempted to be solved by the chief
intellectual leader of the movement, and it has occupied his mind to the
last.[80] However near the human mind seems to come to a solution, it
only, if so be, comes near; it never arrives. In the early days of the
movement it found prevailing the specious but shallow view that
everything in the search for truth was to be done by mere producible and
explicit argumentation; and yet it was obvious that of this two-thirds
of the world are absolutely incapable. Against this Mr. Newman and his
followers pressed, what was as manifestly certain in fact as it accorded
with any deep and comprehensive philosophy of the formation and growth
of human belief, that not arguments only, but the whole condition of the
mind to which they were addressed--and not the reasonings only which
could be stated, but those which went on darkly in the mind, and which
"there was not at the moment strength to bring forth," real and weighty
reasons which acted like the obscure rays of the spectrum, with their
proper force, yet eluding distinct observation--had their necessary and
inevitable and legitimate place in determining belief. All this was
perfectly true; but it is obvious how easily it might be taken hold of,
on very opposite sides, as a ground for saying that Tractarian or Church
views did not care about argument, or, indeed, rather preferred weak
arguments to strong ones in the practical work of life. It was ludicrous
to say it in a field of controversy, which, on the "Tractarian" side,
was absolutely bristling with argument, keen, subtle, deep, living
argument, and in which the victory in argument was certainly not always
with those who ventured to measure swords with Mr. Newman or Dr. Pusey.
Still, the scoff could be plausibly pointed at the "young enthusiasts
who crowded the Via Media, and who never presumed to argue, except
against the propriety of arguing at all." There was a good deal of
foolish sneering at reason; there was a good deal of silly bravado about
not caring whether the avowed grounds of opinions taken up were strong
or feeble. It was not merely the assent of a learner to his teacher, of
a mind without means of instruction to the belief which it has
inherited, or of one new to the ways and conditions of life to the
unproved assertions and opinions of one to whom experience had given an
open and sure eye. It was a positive carelessness, almost accounted
meritorious, to inquire and think, when their leaders called them to do
so. "The Gospel of Christ is not a matter of mere argument." It is not,
indeed, when it comes in its full reality, in half a hundred different
ways, known and unsearchable, felt and unfelt, moral and intellectual,
on the awakened and quickened soul. But the wildest fanatic can take the
same words into his mouth. Their true meaning was variously and
abundantly illustrated, especially in Mr. Newman's sermons. Still, the
adequate, the emphatic warning against their early abuse was hardly
pressed on the public opinion and sentiment of the party of the movement
with the force which really was requisite. To the end there were men who
took up their belief avowedly on insufficient and precarious grounds,
glorying in the venturesomeness of their faith and courage, and
justifying their temper of mind and their intellectual attitude by
alleging misinterpreted language of their wiser and deeper teachers. A
recoil from Whately's hard and barren dialectics, a sympathy with many
tender and refined natures which the movement had touched, made the
leaders patient with intellectual feebleness when it was joined with
real goodness and Christian temper; but this also sometimes made them
less impatient than they might well have been with that curious form of
conceit and affectation which veils itself under an intended and
supposed humility, a supposed distrust of self and its own powers.
Another difficult matter, not altogether successfully managed--at least
from the original point of view of the movement, and of those who saw in
it a great effort for the good of the English Church--was the treatment
of the Roman controversy. The general line which the leaders proposed to
take was the one which was worthy of Christian and truth-loving
teachers. They took a new departure; and it was not less just than it
was brave, when, recognising to the full the overwhelming reasons why
"we should not be Romanists," they refused to take up the popular and
easy method of regarding the Roman Church as apostate and antichristian;
and declined to commit themselves to the vulgar and indiscriminate abuse
of it which was the discreditable legacy of the old days of controversy.
They did what all the world was loudly professing to do, they looked
facts in the face; they found, as any one would find who looked for
himself into the realities of the Roman Church, that though the bad was
often as bad as could be, there was still, and there had been all
along, goodness of the highest type, excellence both of system and of
personal life which it was monstrous to deny, and which we might well
admire and envy. To ignore all this was to fail in the first duty, not
merely of Christians, but of honest men; and we at home were not so
blameless that we could safely take this lofty tone of contemptuous
superiority. If Rome would only leave us alone, there would be
estrangement, lamentable enough among Christians, but there need be no
bitterness. But Rome would not leave us alone. The moment that there
were signs of awakening energy in England, that moment was chosen by its
agents, for now it could be done safely, to assail and thwart the
English Church. Doubtless they were within their rights, but this made
controversy inevitable, and for controversy the leaders of the movement
prepared themselves. It was an obstacle which they seemed hardly to have
expected, but which the nature of things placed in their way. But the
old style of controversy was impossible; impossible because it was so
coarse, impossible because it was so hollow.
If the argument (says the writer of Tract 71, in words which are
applicable to every controversy) is radically unreal, or (what may be
called) rhetorical or sophistical, it may serve the purpose of
encouraging those who are really convinced, though scarcely without
doing mischief to them, but certainly it will offend and alienate the
more acute and sensible; while those who are in doubt, and who desire
some real and substantial ground for their faith, will not bear to be
put off with such shadows. The arguments (he continues) which we use
must be such as are likely to convince serious and earnest minds, which
are really seeking for the truth, not amusing themselves with
intellectual combats, or desiring to support an existing opinion anyhow.
However popular these latter methods may be, of however long standing,
however easy both to find and to use, they are a scandal; and while they
lower our religious standard from the first, they are sure of hurting
our cause in the end.
And on this principle the line of argument in _The Prophetical Office of
the Church_ was taken by Mr. Newman. It was certainly no make-believe,
or unreal argument. It was a forcible and original way of putting part
of the case against Rome. It was part of the case, a very important
part; but it was not the whole case, and it ought to have been evident
from the first that in this controversy we could not afford to do
without the whole case. The argument from the claim of infallibility
said nothing of what are equally real parts of the case--the practical
working of the Roman Church, its system of government, the part which it
and its rulers have played in the history of the world. Rome has not
such a clean record of history, it has not such a clean account of what
is done and permitted in its dominions under an authority supposed to be
irresistible, that it can claim to be the one pure and perfect Church,
entitled to judge and correct and govern all other Churches. And if the
claim is made, there is no help for it, we must not shrink from the task
of giving the answer.[81] And, as experience has shown, the more that
rigid good faith is kept to in giving the answer, the more that
strictness and severity of even understatement are observed, the more
convincing will be the result that the Roman Church cannot be that which
it is alleged to be in its necessary theory and ideal.
But this task was never adequately undertaken. It was one of no easy
execution.[82] Other things, apparently more immediately pressing,
intervened. There was no question for the present of perfect and
unfeigned confidence in the English Church, with whatever regrets for
its shortcomings, and desires for its improvement But to the outside
world it seemed as if there were a reluctance to face seriously the
whole of the Roman controversy; a disposition to be indulgent to Roman
defects, and unfairly hard on English faults. How mischievously this
told in the course of opinion outside and inside of the movement; how it
was misinterpreted and misrepresented; how these misinterpretations and
misrepresentations, with the bitterness and injustice which they
engendered, helped to realise themselves, was seen but too clearly at a
later stage.
4. Lastly, looking back on the publications, regarded as characteristic
of the party, it is difficult not to feel that some of them gave an
unfortunate and unnecessary turn to things.
The book which made most stir and caused the greatest outcry was
Froude's _Remains_. It was undoubtedly a bold experiment; but it was not
merely boldness. Except that it might be perverted into an excuse by the
shallow and thoughtless for merely "strong talk," it may fairly be said
that it was right and wise to let the world know the full measure and
depth of conviction which gave birth to the movement; and Froude's
_Remains_ did that in an unsuspiciously genuine way that nothing else
could have done. And, besides, it was worth while for its own sake to
exhibit with fearless honesty such a character, so high, so true, so
refined, so heroic. So again, Dr. Pusey's Tract on Baptism was a bold
book, and one which brought heavy imputations and misconstructions on
the party. In the teaching of his long life, Dr. Pusey has abundantly
dispelled the charges of harshness and over-severity which were urged,
not always very scrupulously, against the doctrine of the Tract on
Post-baptismal Sin. But it was written to redress the balance against
the fatally easy doctrines then in fashion; it was like the Portroyalist
protest against the fashionable Jesuits; it was one-sided, and
sometimes, in his earnestness, unguarded; and it wanted as yet the
complement of encouragement, consolation, and tenderness which his
future teaching was to supply so amply. But it was a blow struck, not
before it was necessary, by a strong hand; and it may safely be said
that it settled the place of the sacrament of baptism in the living
system of the English Church, which the negations and vagueness of the
Evangelical party had gravely endangered. But two other essays appeared
in the Tracts, most innocent in themselves, which ten or twenty years
later would have been judged simply on their merits, but which at the
time became potent weapons against Tractarianism. They were the
productions of two poets--of two of the most beautiful and religious
minds of their time; but in that stage of the movement it is hardly too
much to say that they were out of place. The cause of the movement
needed clear explanations; definite statements of doctrines which were
popularly misunderstood; plain, convincing reasoning on the issues which
were raised by it; a careful laying out of the ground on which English
theology was to be strengthened and enriched. Such were Mr. Newman's
_Lectures on Justification_, a work which made its lasting mark on
English theological thought; Mr. Keble's masterly exposition of the
meaning of Tradition; and not least, the important collections which
were documentary and historical evidence of the character of English
theology, the so-called laborious _Catenas_. These were the real tasks
of the hour, and they needed all that labour and industry could give.
But the first of these inopportune Tracts was an elaborate essay, by Mr.
Keble, on the "Mysticism of the Fathers in the use and interpretation of
Scripture." It was hardly what the practical needs of the time required,
and it took away men's thoughts from them; the prospect was hopeless
that in that state of men's minds it should be understood, except by a
very few; it merely helped to add another charge, the vague but
mischievous charge of mysticism, to the list of accusations against the
Tracts. The other, to the astonishment of every one, was like the
explosion of a mine. That it should be criticised and objected to was
natural; but the extraordinary irritation caused by it could hardly have
been anticipated. Written in the most devout and reverent spirit by one
of the gentlest and most refined of scholars, and full of deep
Scriptural knowledge, it furnished for some years the material for the
most savage attacks and the bitterest sneers to the opponents of the
movement. It was called "On Reserve in communicating Religious
Knowledge"; and it was a protest against the coarseness and shallowness
which threw the most sacred words about at random in loud and
declamatory appeals, and which especially dragged in the awful mystery
of the Atonement, under the crudest and most vulgar conception of it, as
a ready topic of excitement in otherwise commonplace and helpless
preaching. The word "Reserve" was enough. It meant that the
Tract-writers avowed the principle of keeping back part of the counsel
of God. It meant, further, that the real spirit of the party was
disclosed; its love of secret and crooked methods, its indifference to
knowledge, its disingenuous professions, its deliberate concealments,
its holding doctrines and its pursuit of aims which it dared not avow,
its _disciplina arcani_, its conspiracies, its Jesuitical spirit. All
this kind of abuse was flung plentifully on the party as the controversy
became warm; and it mainly justified itself by the Tract on "Reserve."
The Tract was in many ways a beautiful and suggestive essay, full of
deep and original thoughts, though composed in that spirit of the
recluse which was characteristic of the writer, and which is in strong
contrast with the energetic temper of to-day.[83] But it could well have
been spared at the moment, and it certainly offered itself to an
unfortunate use. The suspiciousness which so innocently it helped to
awaken and confirm was never again allayed.
FOOTNOTES:
[74] Fifty years ago there was much greater contrast than now between
old and young. There was more outward respect for the authorities, and
among the younger men, graduates and undergraduates, more inward
amusement at foibles and eccentricities. There still lingered the
survivals of a more old-fashioned type of University life and character,
which, quite apart from the movements of religious opinion, provoked
those νεανιεύματα ἰδιωτῶν εἰς τοὐς ἄρχοντας,[75] _impertinences of
irresponsible juniors towards superiors_, which Wordsworth, speaking of
a yet earlier time, remembered at Cambridge--
"In serious mood, but oftener, I confess,
With playful zest of fancy, did we note
(How could we less?) the manners and the ways
Of those who lived distinguished by the badge
Of good or ill report; or those with whom
By frame of Academic discipline
We were perforce connected, men whose sway
And known authority of office served
To set our minds on edge, and did no more.
Nor wanted we rich pastime of this kind,
Found everywhere, but chiefly in the ring
Of the grave Elders, men unsecured, grotesque
In character, tricked out like aged trees
Which through the lapse of their infirmity
Give ready place to any random seed
That chooses to be reared upon their trunks."
_Prelude_, bk. iii.
[75] Plat. _R.P._ iii. 390.
[76] _Tracts for the Times_, No. 1, 9th September 1833.
[77] _An Advertisement touching the Controversies of the Church of
England:_ printed in the _Resuscitatio_, p. 138 (ed. 1671).
[78] See Mr. Newman's article, "The State of Religious Parties," in the
_British Critic_, April 1839, reprinted in his _Essays Historical and
Critical_, 1871, Vol. 1., essay vi.
[79] "It would not be at all surprising, though, in spite of the
earnestness of the principal advocates of the views in question, for
which every one seems to give them credit, there should be among their
followers much that is enthusiastic, extravagant, or excessive. All
these aberrations will be and are imputed to the doctrines from which
they proceed; nor unnaturally, but hardly fairly, for aberrations there
must be, whatever the doctrine is, while the human heart is sensitive,
capricious, and wayward.... There will ever be a number of persons
professing the opinions of a movement party, who talk loudly and
strangely, do odd and fierce things, display themselves unnecessarily,
and disgust other people; there will ever be those who are too young to
be wise, too generous to be cautious, too warm to be sober, or too
intellectual to be humble; of whom human sagacity cannot determine, only
the event, and perhaps not even that, whether they feel what they
say, or how far; whether they are to be encouraged or
discountenanced."--_British Critic_, April 1839, "State of Religious
Parties," p. 405.
[80] Cardinal Newman, _Grammar of Assent_.
[81] The argument from history is sketched fairly, but only sketched in
_The Prophetic Office_, Lect. xiv.
[82] In the Roman controversy it is sometimes hard to be just without
appearing to mean more than is said; for the obligation of justice
sometimes forces one who wishes to be a fair judge to be apparently an
apologist or advocate. Yet the supreme duty in religious controversy is
justice. But for the very reason that these controversialists wished to
be just to Rome, they were bound to be just against her. They meant to
be so; but events passed quickly, and leisure never came for a work
which involved a serious appeal to history.
[83] _Vide_ a striking review in the _British Critic_, April 1839,
partly correcting and guarding the view given in the Tract.