NO. 90
The formation of a strong Romanising section in the Tractarian party was
obviously damaging to the party and dangerous to the Church. It was _pro
tanto_ a verification of the fundamental charge against the party, a
charge which on paper they had met successfully, but which acquired
double force when this paper defence was traversed by facts. And a great
blow was impending over the Church, if the zeal and ability which the
movement had called forth and animated were to be sucked away from the
Church, and not only lost to it, but educated into a special instrument
against it. But the divergence became clear only gradually, and the hope
that after all it was only temporary and would ultimately disappear was
long kept up by the tenacity with which Mr. Newman, in spite of
misgivings and disturbing thoughts, still recognised the gifts and
claims of the English Church. And on the other hand, the bulk of the
party, and its other Oxford leaders, Dr. Pusey, Mr. Keble, Mr. Isaac
Williams, Mr. Marriott, were quite unaffected by the disquieting
apprehensions which were beginning to beset Mr. Newman. With a humbling
consciousness of the practical shortcomings of the English Church, with
a ready disposition to be honest and just towards Rome, and even to
minimise our differences with it, they had not admitted for a moment any
doubt of the reality of the English Church. The class of arguments which
specially laid hold of Mr. Newman's mind did not tell upon them--the
peculiar aspect of early precedents, about which, moreover, a good deal
of criticism was possible; or the large and sweeping conception of a
vast, ever-growing, imperial Church, great enough to make flaws and
imperfections of no account, which appealed so strongly to his
statesmanlike imagination. Their content with the Church in which they
had been brought up, in which they had been taught religion, and in
which they had taken service, their deep and affectionate loyalty and
piety to it, in spite of all its faults, remained unimpaired; and
unimpaired, also, was their sense of vast masses of practical evil in
the Roman Church, evils from which they shrank both as Englishmen and as
Christians, and which seemed as incurable as they were undeniable.
Beyond the hope which they vaguely cherished that some day or other, by
some great act of Divine mercy, these evils might disappear, and the
whole Church become once more united, there was nothing to draw them
towards Rome; submission was out of the question, and they could only
see in its attitude in England the hostility of a jealous and
unscrupulous disturber of their Master's work. The movement still went
on, with its original purpose, and on its original lines, in spite of
the presence in it, and even the co-operation, of men who might one day
have other views, and serious and fatal differences with their old
friends.
The change of religion when it comes on a man gradually,--when it is not
welcomed from the first, but, on the contrary, long resisted, must
always be a mysterious and perplexing process, hard to realise and
follow by the person most deeply interested, veiled and clouded to
lookers-on, because naturally belonging to the deepest depths of the
human conscience, and inevitably, and without much fault on either side,
liable to be misinterpreted and misunderstood. And this process is all
the more tangled when it goes on, not in an individual mind, travelling
in its own way on its own path, little affected by others, and little
affecting them, but in a representative person, with the
responsibilities of a great cause upon him, bound by closest ties of
every kind to friends, colleagues, and disciples, thinking, feeling,
leading, pointing out the way for hundreds who love and depend on him.
Views and feelings vary from day to day, according to the events and
conditions of the day. How shall he speak, and how shall he be silent?
How shall he let doubts and difficulties appear, yet how shall he
suppress them?--doubts which may grow and become hopeless, but which, on
the other hand, may be solved and disappear. How shall he go on as if
nothing had happened, when all the foundations of the world seem to have
sunk from under him? Yet how shall he disclose the dreadful secret, when
he is not yet quite sure whether his mind will not still rally from its
terror and despair? He must in honesty, in kindness, give some warning,
yet how much? and how to prevent it being taken for more than it means?
There are counter-considerations, to which he cannot shut his eyes.
There are friends who will not believe his warnings. There are watchful
enemies who are on the look-out for proofs of disingenuousness and bad
faith. He could cut through his difficulties at once by making the
plunge in obedience to this or that plausible sign or train of
reasoning, but his conscience and good faith will not let him take
things so easily; and yet he knows that if he hangs on, he will be
accused by and by, perhaps speciously, of having been dishonest and
deceiving. So subtle, so shifting, so impalpable are the steps by which
a faith is disintegrated; so evanescent, and impossible to follow, the
shades by which one set of convictions pass into others wholly opposite;
for it is not knowledge and intellect alone which come into play, but
all the moral tastes and habits of the character, its likings and
dislikings, its weakness and its strength, its triumphs and its
vexations, its keenness and its insensibilities, which are in full
action, while the intellect alone seems to be busy with its problems. A
picture has been given us, belonging to this time, of the process, by a
great master of human nature, and a great sufferer under the process; it
is, perhaps, the greatest attempt ever made to describe it; but it is
not wholly successful. It tells us much, for it is written with touching
good faith, but the complete effect as an intelligible whole is wanting.
"In the spring of 1839," we read in the _Apologia_, "my position in the
Anglican Church was at its height. I had a supreme confidence in my
controversial _status_, and I had a great and still growing success in
recommending it to others."[84] This, then, may be taken as the point
from which, in the writer's own estimate, the change is to be traced. He
refers for illustration of his state of mind to the remarkable article
on the "State of Religious Parties," in the April number of the _British
Critic_ for 1839, which he has since republished under the title of
"Prospects of the Anglican Church."[85] "I have looked over it now," he
writes in 1864, "for the first time since it was published; and have
been struck by it for this reason: it contains _the last words which I
ever spoke as an Anglican to Anglicans_.... It may now be read as my
parting address and valediction, made to my friends. I little knew it at
the time." He thus describes the position which he took in the article
referred to:--
Conscious as I was that my opinions in religious matters were not
gained, as the world said, from Roman sources, but were, on the
contrary, the birth of my own mind and of the circumstances in which I
had been placed, I had a scorn of the imputations which were heaped
upon me. It was true that I held a large, bold system of religion,
very unlike the Protestantism of the day, but it was the concentration
and adjustment of the statements of great Anglican authorities, and I
had as much right to do so as the Evangelical party had, and more
right than the Liberal, to hold their own respective doctrines. As I
spoke on occasion of Tract 90, I claimed, on behalf of the writer,
that he might hold in the Anglican Church a comprecation of the Saints
with Bramhall; and the Mass, all but Transubstantiation, with
Andrewes; or with Hooker that Transubstantiation itself is not a point
for Churches to part communion upon; or with Hammond that a General
Council, truly such, never did, never shall err in a matter of faith;
or with Bull that man lost inward grace by the Fall; or with Thorndike
that penance is a propitiation for post-baptismal sin; or with
Pearson that the all-powerful name of Jesus is no otherwise given than
in the Catholic Church. "Two can play at that game" was often in my
mouth, when men of Protestant sentiments appealed to the Articles,
Homilies, and Reformers, in the sense that if they had a right to
speak loud I had both the liberty and the means of giving them tit for
tat. I thought that the Anglican Church had been tyrannised over by a
Party, and I aimed at bringing into effect the promise contained in
the motto to the _Lyra_: "They shall know the difference now." I only
asked to be allowed to show them the difference.
I have said already (he goes on) that though the object of the
movement was to withstand the Liberalism of the day, I found and felt
that this could not be done by negatives. It was necessary for me to
have a positive Church theory erected on a definite basis. This took
me to the great Anglican divines; and then, of course, I found at once
that it was impossible to form any such theory without cutting across
the teaching of the Church of Rome. Thus came in the Roman
controversy. When I first turned myself to it I had neither doubt on
the subject, nor suspicion that doubt would ever come on me. It was in
this state of mind that I began to read up Bellarmine on the one hand,
and numberless Anglican writers on the other.[86]
And he quotes from the article the language which he used, to show the
necessity of providing some clear and strong basis for religious thought
in view of the impending conflict of principles, religious and
anti-religious, "Catholic and Rationalist," which to far-seeing men,
even at that comparatively early time, seemed inevitable:--
Then indeed will be the stern encounter, when two real and living
principles, simple, entire, and consistent, one in the Church, the
other out of it, at length rush upon each other, contending not for
names and words, a half view, but for elementary notions and
distinctive moral characters. Men will not keep standing in that very
attitude which you call sound Church-of-Englandism or orthodox
Protestantism. They will take one view or another, but it will be a
consistent one ... it will be real.... Is it sensible, sober,
judicious, to be so very angry with the writers of the day who point
to the fact, that our divines of the seventeenth century have occupied
a ground which is the true and intelligible mean between extremes?...
Would you rather have your sons and your daughters members of the
Church of England or of the Church of Rome?[87]
"The last words that I spoke as an Anglican to Anglicans,"--so he
describes this statement of his position and its reasons; so it seems to
him, as he looks back. And yet in the intimate and frank disclosures
which he makes, he has shown us much that indicates both that his
Anglicanism lasted much longer and that his Roman sympathies began to
stir much earlier. This only shows the enormous difficulties of
measuring accurately the steps of a transition state. The mind, in such
a strain of buffeting, is never in one stay. The old seems impregnable,
yet it has been undermined; the new is indignantly and honestly
repelled, and yet leaves behind it its never-to-be-forgotten and
unaccountable spell. The story, as he tells it, goes on, how, in the
full swing and confidence of his Anglicanism, and in the course of his
secure and fearless study of antiquity, appearance after appearance
presented itself, unexpected, threatening, obstinate, in the history of
the Early Church, by which this confidence was first shaken and then
utterly broken down in the summer of 1839. And he speaks as though all
had been over after two years from that summer: "From the end of 1841 I
was on my death-bed, as regards my membership with the Anglican Church,
though at the time I became aware of it only by degrees." In truth, it
was only the end which showed that it was a "death-bed." He had not yet
died to allegiance or "to hope, then or for some time afterwards." He
speaks in later years of the result, and reads what was then in the
light of what followed. But after all that had happened, and much, of
course, disturbing happened in 1841, he was a long way off from what
then could have been spoken of as "a death-bed." Deep and painful
misgivings may assail the sincerest faith; they are not fatal signs till
faith has finally given way.
What is true is, that the whole state of religion, and the whole aspect
of Christianity in the world, had come to seem to him portentously
strange and anomalous. No theory would take in and suit all the facts,
which the certainties of history and experience presented. Neither in
England, nor in Rome, and much less anywhere else, did the old, to which
all appealed, agree with the new; it might agree variously in this point
or in that, in others there were contrarieties which it was vain to
reconcile. Facts were against the English claim to be a Catholic
Church--how could Catholicity be shut up in one island? How could
England assert its continuity of doctrine? Facts were against the Roman
claim to be an infallible, and a perfect, and the whole Church--how
could that be perfect which was marked in the face of day with enormous
and undeniable corruptions? How could that be infallible which was
irreconcilable with ancient teaching? How could that be the whole
Church, which, to say nothing of the break-up in the West, ignored, as
if it had no existence, the ancient and uninterrupted Eastern Church?
Theory after theory came up, and was tried, and was found wanting. Each
had much to say for itself, its strong points, its superiority over its
rivals in dealing with the difficulties of the case, its plausibilities
and its imaginative attractions. But all had their tender spot, and
flinched when they were touched in earnest. In the confusions and sins
and divisions of the last fifteen centuries, profound disorganisation
had fastened on the Western Church. Christendom was not, could not be
pretended to be, what it had been in the fourth century; and whichever
way men looked the reasons were not hard to see. The first and
characteristic feeling of the movement, one which Mr. Newman had done so
much to deepen, was that of shame and humiliation at the disorder at
home, as well as in every part of the Church. It was not in Rome only,
or in England only; it was everywhere. What had been peculiar to
Anglicanism among all its rivals, was that it had emphatically and
without reserve confessed it.
With this view of the dislocation and the sins of the Church, he could
at once with perfect consistency recognise the shortcomings of the
English branch of the Church, and yet believe and maintain that it was
a true and living branch. The English fragment was not what it should
be, was indeed much that it should not be; the same could be said of the
Roman, though in different respects. This, as he himself reminds us, was
no new thing to his mind when the unsettlement of 1839 began. "At the
end of 1835, or the beginning of 1836, I had the whole state of the
question before me, on which, to my mind, the decision between the
Churches depended." It did not, he says, depend on the claims of the
Pope, as centre of unity; "it turned on the Faith of the Church"; "there
was a contrariety of _claims_ between the Roman and Anglican religions";
and up to 1839, with the full weight of Roman arguments recognised, with
the full consciousness of Anglican disadvantages, he yet spoke clearly
for Anglicanism. Even when misgivings became serious, the balance still
inclined without question the old way. He hardly spoke stronger in 1834
than he did in 1841, after No. 90.
And now (he writes in his Letter to the Bishop of Oxford[88]) having
said, I trust, as much as your Lordship requires on the subject of
Romanism, I will add a few words, to complete my explanation, in
acknowledgment of the inestimable privilege I feel in being a member
of that Church over which your Lordship, with others, presides.
Indeed, did I not feel it to be a privilege which I am able to seek
nowhere else on earth, why should I be at this moment writing to your
Lordship? What motive have I for an unreserved and joyful submission
to your authority, but the feeling that the Church in which your
Lordship rules is a divinely-ordained channel of supernatural grace to
the souls of her members? Why should I not prefer my own opinion, and
my own way of acting, to that of the Bishop's, except that I know full
well that in matters indifferent I should be acting lightly towards
the Spouse of Christ and the awful Presence which dwells in her, if I
hesitated a moment to put your Lordship's will before my own? I know
full well that your Lordship's kindness to me personally would be in
itself quite enough to win any but the most insensible heart, and, did
a clear matter of conscience occur in which I felt bound to act for
myself, my feelings towards your Lordship would be a most severe trial
to me, independently of the higher considerations to which I have
alluded; but I trust I have shown my dutifulness to you prior to the
influence of personal motives; and this I have done because I think
that to belong to the Catholic Church is the first of all privileges
here below, as involving in it heavenly privileges, and because I
consider the Church over which your Lordship presides to be the
Catholic Church in this country. Surely then I have no need to profess
in words, I will not say my attachment, but my deep reverence towards
the Mother of Saints, when I am showing it in action; yet that words
may not be altogether wanting, I beg to lay before your Lordship the
following extract from a defence of the English Church, which I wrote
against a Roman controversialist in the course of the last year.
"The Church is emphatically a living body, and there can be no greater
proof of a particular communion being part of the Church than the
appearance in it of a continued and abiding energy, nor a more
melancholy proof of its being a corpse than torpidity. We say an
energy continued and abiding, for accident will cause the activity of
a moment, and an external principle give the semblance of self-motion.
On the other hand, even a living body may for a while be asleep.
* * * * *
"It concerns, then, those who deny that we are the true Church because
we have not at present this special note, intercommunion with other
Christians, to show cause why the Roman Church in the tenth century
should be so accounted, with profligates, or rather the profligate
mothers of profligate sons for her supreme rulers. And still
notwithstanding life _is_ a note of the Church; she alone revives,
even if she declines; heretical and schismatical bodies cannot keep
life; they gradually became cold, stiff, and insensible.
* * * * *
"Now if there ever were a Church on whom the experiment has been
tried, whether it had life in it or not, the English is that one. For
three centuries it has endured all vicissitudes of fortune. It has
endured in trouble and prosperity, under seduction, and under
oppression. It has been practised upon by theorists, browbeaten by
sophists, intimidated by princes, betrayed by false sons, laid waste
by tyranny, corrupted by wealth, torn by schism, and persecuted by
fanaticism. Revolutions have come upon it sharply and suddenly, to and
fro, hot and cold, as if to try what it was made of.
It has been a sort of battlefield on which opposite principles have
been tried. No opinion, however extreme any way, but may be found, as
the Romanists are not slow to reproach us, among its Bishops and
Divines. Yet what has been its career upon the whole? Which way has it
been moving through 300 years? Where does it find itself at the end?
Lutherans have tended to Rationalism; Calvinists have become
Socinians; but what has it become? As far as its Formularies are
concerned, it may be said all along to have grown towards a more
perfect Catholicism than that with which it started at the time of its
estrangement; every act, every crisis which marks its course, has been
upward.
* * * * *
"What a note of the Church is the mere production of a man like
Butler, a pregnant fact much to be meditated on! and how strange it
is, if it be as it seems to be, that the real influence of his work is
only just now beginning! and who can prophesy in what it will end?
Thus our Divines grow with centuries, expanding after their death in
the minds of their readers into more and more exact Catholicism as
years roll on.
* * * * *
"Look across the Atlantic to the daughter Churches of England in the
States: 'Shall one that is barren bear a child in her old age?' yet
'the barren hath borne seven.' Schismatic branches put out their
leaves at once, in an expiring effort; our Church has waited three
centuries, and then blossoms like Aaron's rod, budding and blooming
and yielding fruit, while the rest are dry. And lastly, look at the
present position of the Church at home; there, too, we shall find a
note of the true City of God, the Holy Jerusalem. She is in warfare
with the world, as the Church Militant should be; she is rebuking the
world, she is hated, she is pillaged by the world.
* * * * *
"Much might be said on this subject. At all times, since Christianity
came into the world, an open contest has been going on between
religion and irreligion; and the true Church, of course, has ever been
on the religious side. This, then, is a sure test in every age _where_
the Christian should stand.... Now, applying this simple criterion to
the public Parties of this DAY, it is very plain that the English
Church is at present on God's side, and therefore, so far, God's
Church; we are sorry to be obliged to add that there is as little
doubt on which side English Romanism is.
* * * * *
"As for the English Church, surely she has notes enough, 'the signs of
an Apostle in all patience, and signs and wonders and mighty deeds.'
She has the note of possession, the note of freedom from party-titles;
the note of life, a tough life and a vigorous; she has ancient
descent, unbroken continuance, agreement in doctrine with the ancient
Church. Those of Bellarmine's Notes, which she certainly has not, are
intercommunion with Christendom, the glory of miracles, and the
prophetical light, but the question is, whether she has not enough of
Divinity about her to satisfy her sister Churches on their own
principles, that she is one body with them."
This may be sufficient to show my feelings towards my Church, as far
as Statements on paper can show them.
How earnestly, how sincerely he clung to the English Church, even after
he describes himself on his "death-bed," no one can doubt. The charm of
the _Apologia_ is the perfect candour with which he records fluctuations
which to many are inconceivable and unintelligible, the different and
sometimes opposite and irreconcilable states of mind through which he
passed, with no attempt to make one fit into another. It is clear, from
what he tells us, that his words in 1839 were not his _last_ words as an
Anglican to Anglicans. With whatever troubles of mind, he strove to be a
loyal and faithful Anglican long after that. He spoke as an Anglican. He
fought for Anglicanism. The theory, as he says, may have gone by the
board, in the intellectual storms raised by the histories of the
Monophysites and Donatists. "By these great words of the ancient
father--_Securus judicat orbis terrarum_"--the theory of the _Via Media_
was "absolutely pulverised." He was "sore," as he says in 1840, "about
the great Anglican divines, as if they had taken me in, and made me say
strong things against Rome, which facts did not justify."[89] Yes, he
felt, as other men do not feel, the weak points of even a strong
argument, the exaggerations and unfairness of controversialists on his
own side, the consciousness that you cannot have things in fact, or in
theory, or in reasoning, smoothly and exactly as it would be convenient,
and as you would like to have them. But his conclusion, on the whole,
was unshaken. There was enough, and amply enough, in the English Church
to bind him to its allegiance, to satisfy him of its truth and its life,
enough in the Roman to warn him away. In the confusions of Christendom,
in the strong and obstinate differences of schools and parties in the
English Church, he, living in days of inquiry and criticism, claimed to
take and recommend a theological position on many controverted
questions, which many might think a new one, and which might not be
exactly that occupied by any existing school or party.[90] "We are all,"
he writes to an intimate friend on 22d April 1842, a year after No. 90,
"much quieter and more resigned than we were, and are remarkably
desirous of building up a position, and proving that the English theory
is tenable, or rather the English state of things. If the Bishops would
leave us alone, the fever would subside."
He wanted, when all other parties were claiming room for their
speculations, to claim room for his own preference for ancient doctrine.
He wished to make out that no branch of the Church had authoritatively
committed itself to language which was hopelessly and fatally
irreconcilable with Christian truth. But he claimed nothing but what he
could maintain to be fairly within the authorised formularies of the
English Church. He courted inquiry, he courted argument. If his claim
seemed a new one, if his avowed leaning to ancient and Catholic views
seemed to make him more tolerant than had been customary, not to Roman
abuses, but to Roman authoritative language, it was part of the more
accurate and the more temperate and charitable thought of our day
compared with past times. It was part of the same change which has
brought Church opinions from the unmitigated Calvinism of the Lambeth
Articles to what the authorities of those days would have denounced,
without a doubt, as Arminianism. Hooker was gravely and seriously
accused to the Council for saying that a Papist could be saved, and had
some difficulty to clear himself; it was as natural then as it is
amazing now.[91]
But with this sincere loyalty to the English Church, as he believed it
to be, there was, no doubt, in the background the haunting and
disquieting misgiving that the attempt to connect more closely the
modern Church with the ancient, and this widened theology in a direction
which had been hitherto specially and jealously barred, was putting the
English Church on its trial. Would it bear it? Would it respond to the
call to rise to a higher and wider type of doctrine, to a higher
standard of life? Would it justify what Mr. Newman had placed in the
forefront among the notes of the true Church, the note of Sanctity?
Would the _Via Media_ make up for its incompleteness as a theory by
developing into reality and fruitfulness of actual results? Would the
Church bear to be told of its defaults? Would it allow to the
maintainers of Catholic and Anglican principles the liberty which
others claimed, and which by large and powerful bodies of opinion was
denied to Anglicans? Or would it turn out on trial, that the _Via Media_
was an idea without substance, a dialectical fiction, a mere theological
expedient for getting out of difficulties, unrecognised, and when put
forward, disowned? Would it turn out that the line of thought and
teaching which connected the modern with the ancient Church was but the
private and accidental opinion of Hooker and Andrewes and Bull and
Wilson, unauthorised in the English Church, uncongenial to its spirit,
if not contradictory to its formularies? It is only just to Mr. Newman
to say, that even after some of his friends were frightened, he long
continued to hope for the best; but undoubtedly, more and more, his
belief in the reality of the English Church was undergoing a very
severe, and as time went on, discouraging testing.
In this state of things he published the Tract No. 90. It was occasioned
by the common allegation, on the side of some of the advanced section of
the Tractarians, as well as on the side of their opponents, that the
Thirty-nine Articles were hopelessly irreconcilable with that Catholic
teaching which Mr. Newman had defended on the authority of our great
divines, but which both the parties above mentioned were ready to
identify with the teaching of the Roman Church. The Tract was intended,
by a rigorous examination of the language of the Articles, to traverse
this allegation. It sought to show that all that was clearly and
undoubtedly Catholic, this language left untouched:[92] that it was
doubtful whether even the formal definitions of the Council of Trent
were directly and intentionally contradicted; and that what were really
aimed at were the abuses and perversions of a great popular and
authorised system, tyrannical by the force of custom and the obstinate
refusal of any real reformation.
It is often urged (says the writer), and sometimes felt and granted,
that there are in the Articles propositions or terms inconsistent with
the Catholic faith; or, at least, if persons do not go so far as to
feel the objection as of force, they are perplexed how best to answer
it, or how most simply to explain the passages on which it is made to
rest. The following Tract is drawn up with the view of showing how
groundless the objection is, and further, of approximating towards the
argumentative answer to it, of which most men have an implicit
apprehension, though they may have nothing more. That there are real
difficulties to a Catholic Christian in the ecclesiastical position of
our Church at this day, no one can deny; but the statements of the
Articles are not in the number, and it may be right at the present
moment to insist upon this.
When met by the objection that the ideas of the framers of the Articles
were well known, and that it was notorious that they had meant to put an
insuperable barrier between the English Church and everything that
savoured of Rome, the writer replied that the actual English Church
received the Articles not from them but from a much later authority,
that we are bound by their words not by their private sentiments either
as theologians or ecclesiastical politicians, and that in fact they had
intended the Articles to comprehend a great body of their countrymen,
who would have been driven away by any extreme and anti-Catholic
declarations even against Rome. The temper of compromise is
characteristic of the English as contrasted with the foreign
Reformation. It is visible, not only in the Articles, but in the polity
of the English Church, which clung so obstinately to the continuity and
forms of the ancient hierarchical system, it is visible in the
sacramental offices of the Prayer Book, which left so much out to
satisfy the Protestants, and left so much in to satisfy the Catholics.
The Tract went in detail through the Articles which were commonly looked
upon as either anti-Catholic or anti-Roman. It went through them with a
dry logical way of interpretation, such as a professed theologian might
use, who was accustomed to all the niceties of language and the
distinctions of the science. It was the way in which they would be
likely to be examined and construed by a purely legal court. The effect
of it, doubtless, was like that produced on ordinary minds by the
refinements of a subtle advocate, or by the judicial interpretation of
an Act of Parliament which the judges do not like; and some of the
interpretations undoubtedly seemed far-fetched and artificial. Yet some
of those which were pointed to at the time as flagrant instances of
extravagant misinterpretation have now come to look different. Nothing
could exceed the scorn poured on the interpretation of the Twenty-second
Article, that it condemns the "_Roman_" doctrine of Purgatory, but not
_all_ doctrine of purgatory as a place of gradual purification beyond
death. But in our days a school very far removed from Mr. Newman's would
require and would claim to make the same distinction. And so with the
interpretation of the "Sacrifices of Masses" in the same article. It was
the fashion in 1841 to see in this the condemnation of all doctrine of a
sacrifice in the Eucharist; and when Mr. Newman confined the phrase to
the gross abuses connected with the Mass, this was treated as an affront
to common sense and honesty. Since then we have become better acquainted
with the language of the ancient liturgies--, and no instructed
theologian could now venture to treat Mr. Newman's distinction as idle.
There was in fact nothing new in his distinctions on these two points.
They had already been made in two of the preceding Tracts, the reprint
of Archbishop Ussher on Prayers for the Dead, and the Catena on the
Eucharistie Sacrifice; and in both cases the distinctions were supported
by a great mass of Anglican authority.[93]
But the Tract had sufficient novelty about it to account for most of
the excitement which it caused. Its dryness and negative curtness were
provoking. It was not a positive argument, it was not an appeal to
authorities; it was a paring down of language, alleged in certain
portions of the Articles to be somewhat loose, to its barest meaning;
and to those to whom that language had always seemed to speak with
fulness and decision, it seemed like sapping and undermining a cherished
bulwark. Then it seemed to ask for more liberty than the writer in his
position at that time needed; and the object of such an indefinite
claim, in order to remove, if possible, misunderstandings between two
long-alienated branches of the Western Church, was one to excite in many
minds profound horror and dismay. That it maintained without flinching
and as strongly as ever the position and the claim of the English Church
was nothing to the purpose; the admission, both that Rome, though
wrong, might not be as wrong as we thought her, and that the language of
the Articles, though unquestionably condemnatory of much, was not
condemnatory of as much as people thought, and might possibly be even
harmonised with Roman authoritative language, was looked upon as
incompatible with loyalty to the English Church.
The question which the Tract had opened, what the Articles meant and to
what men were bound by accepting them, was a most legitimate one for
discussion; and it was most natural also that any one should hesitate to
answer it as the Tract answered it. But it was distinctly a question for
discussion. It was not so easy for any of the parties in the Church to
give a clear and consistent answer, as that the matter ought at once to
have been carried out of the region of discussion. The Articles were the
Articles of a Church which had seen as great differences as those
between the Church of Edward VI and the Church of the Restoration. Take
them broadly as the condemnation--strong but loose in expression, as,
for instance, in the language on the "five, commonly called
Sacraments"--of a powerful and well-known antagonist system, and there
was no difficulty about them. But take them as scientific and accurate
and precise enunciations of a systematic theology, and difficulties
begin at once, with every one who does not hold the special and
well-marked doctrines of the age when the German and Swiss authorities
ruled supreme. The course of events from that day to this has shown
more than once, in surprising and even startling examples, how much
those who at the time least thought that they needed such strict
construing of the language of the Articles, and were fierce in
denouncing the "kind of interpretation" said to be claimed in No. 90,
have since found that they require a good deal more elasticity of
reading than even it asked for. The "whirligig of time" was thought to
have brought "its revenges," when Mr. Newman, who had called for the
exercise of authority against Dr. Hampden, found himself, five years
afterwards, under the ban of the same authority. The difference between
Mr. Newman's case and Dr. Hampden's, both as to the alleged offence and
the position of the men, was considerable. But the "whirligig of time"
brought about even stranger "revenges," when not only Mr. Gorham and Mr.
H.B. Wilson in their own defence, but the tribunals which had to decide
on their cases, carried the strictness of reading and the latitude of
interpretation, quite as far, to say the least, as anything in No. 90.
Unhappily Tract 90 was met at Oxford, not with argument, but with panic
and wrath.[94] There is always a sting in every charge, to which other
parts of it seem subordinate. No. 90 was charged of course with false
doctrine, with false history, and with false reasoning; but the emphatic
part of the charge, the short and easy method which dispensed from the
necessity of theological examination and argument, was that it was
dishonest and immoral. Professors of Divinity, and accomplished
scholars, such as there were in Oxford, might very well have considered
it an occasion to dispute both the general principle of the Tract, if it
was so dangerous, and the illustrations, in the abundance of which the
writer had so frankly thrown open his position to searching criticism.
It was a crisis in which much might have been usefully said, if there
had been any one to say it; much too, to make any one feel, if he was
competent to feel, that he had a good deal to think about in his own
position, and that it would be well to ascertain what was tenable and
what untenable in it. But it seemed as if the opportunity must not be
lost for striking a blow. The Tract was published on 27th February. On
the 8th of March four Senior Tutors, one of whom was Mr. H.B. Wilson, of
St. John's, and another Mr. Tait, of Balliol, addressed the Editor of
the Tract, charging No. 90 with suggesting and opening a way, by which
men might, at least in the case of Roman views, violate their solemn
engagements to their University. On the 15th of March, the Board of
Heads of Houses, refusing to wait for Mr. Newman's defence, which was
known to be coming, and which bears date 13th March, published their
judgment They declared that in No. 90 "modes of interpretation were
suggested, and have since been advocated in other publications
purporting to be written by members of the University, by which
subscription to the Articles might be reconciled with the adoption of
Roman Catholic error." And they announced their resolution, "That modes
of interpretation, such as are suggested in the said Tract, evading
rather than explaining the sense of the Thirty-nine Articles, and
reconciling subscription to them with the adoption of errors which they
are designed to counteract, defeat the object, and are inconsistent with
the due observance of the above-mentioned statutes."[95]
It was an ungenerous and stupid blunder, such as men make, when they
think or are told that "something must be done," and do not know what.
It gave the writer an opportunity, of which he took full advantage, of
showing his superiority in temper, in courtesy, and in reason, to those
who had not so much condemned as insulted him. He was immediately ready
with his personal expression of apology and regret, and also with his
reassertion in more developed argument of the principle of the Tract;
and this was followed up by further explanations in a letter to the
Bishop. And in spite of the invidious position in which the Board had
tried to place him, not merely as an unsound divine, but as a dishonest
man teaching others to palter with their engagements, the crisis drew
forth strong support and sympathy where they were not perhaps to be
expected. It rallied to him, at least for the time, some of the friends
who had begun to hold aloof. Mr. Palmer, of Worcester, Mr. Perceval, Dr.
Hook, with reserves according to each man's point of view, yet came
forward in his defence. The Board was made to feel that they had been
driven by violent and partisan instigations to commit themselves to a
very foolish as well as a very passionate and impotent step; that they
had by very questionable authority simply thrown an ill-sounding and
ill-mannered word at an argument on a very difficult question, to which
they themselves certainly were not prepared with a clear and
satisfactory answer; that they had made the double mistake of declaring
war against a formidable antagonist, and of beginning it by creating the
impression that they had treated him shabbily, and were really afraid to
come to close quarters with him. As the excitement of hasty counsels
subsided, the sense of this began to awake in some of them; they tried
to represent the off-hand and ambiguous words of the condemnation as not
meaning all that they had been taken to mean. But the seed of bitterness
had been sown. Very little light was thrown, in the strife of pamphlets
which ensued, on the main subject dealt with in No. 90, the authority
and interpretation of such formularies as our Articles. The easier and
more tempting and very fertile topic of debate was the honesty and good
faith of the various disputants. Of the four Tutors, only one, Mr. H.B.
Wilson, published an explanation of their part in the matter; it was a
clumsy, ill-written and laboured pamphlet, which hardly gave promise of
the intellectual vigour subsequently displayed by Mr. Wilson, when he
appeared, not as the defender, but the assailant of received opinions.
The more distinguished of the combatants were Mr. Ward and Mr. R. Lowe.
Mr. Ward, with his usual dialectical skill, not only defended the Tract,
but pushed its argument yet further, in claiming tolerance for doctrines
alleged to be Roman. Mr. Lowe, not troubling himself either with
theological history or the relation of other parties in the Church to
the formularies, threw his strength into the popular and plausible topic
of dishonesty, and into a bitter and unqualified invective against the
bad faith and immorality manifested in the teaching of which No. 90 was
the outcome. Dr. Faussett, as was to be expected, threw himself into the
fray with his accustomed zest and violence, and caused some amusement at
Oxford, first by exposing himself to the merciless wit of a reviewer in
the _British Critic_, and then by the fright into which he was thrown by
a rumour that his reelection to his professorship would be endangered by
Tractarian votes.[96] But the storm, at Oxford at least, seemed to die
out. The difficulty which at one moment threatened of a strike among
some of the college Tutors passed; and things went back to their
ordinary course. But an epoch and a new point of departure had come into
the movement. Things after No. 90 were never the same as to language and
hopes and prospects as they had been before; it was the date from which
a new set of conditions in men's thoughts and attitude had to be
reckoned. Each side felt that a certain liberty had been claimed and
had been peremptorily denied. And this was more than confirmed by the
public language of the greater part of the Bishops. The charges against
the Tractarian party of Romanising, and of flagrant dishonesty, long
urged by irresponsible opponents, were now formally adopted by the
University authorities, and specially directed against the foremost man
of the party. From that time the fate of the party at Oxford was
determined. It must break up. Sooner or later, there must be a secession
more or less discrediting and disabling those who remained. And so the
break-up came, and yet, so well grounded and so congenial to the English
Church were the leading principles of the movement, that not even that
disastrous and apparently hopeless wreck prevented them from again
asserting their claim and becoming once more active and powerful. The
_Via Media_, whether or not logically consistent, was a thing of genuine
English growth, and was at least a working theory.
FOOTNOTES:
[84] _Apologia_, p. 180.
[85] _Essays Critical and Historical_, 1871.
[86] _Apologia_, pp. 181, 182. Comp. _Letter to Jelf_, p. 18.
[87] _British Critic_, April 1839, pp. 419-426. Condensed in the
_Apologia_, pp. 192-194.
[88] _Letter to the Bishop of Oxford_ (29th March 1841), pp. 33-40.
Comp. _Letter to Jelf_, pp. 7, 8.
[89] _Apologia_, pp. 212, 221.
[90] _Letter to Jelf_ [especially p. 19].
[91] _Walton's Life_, i. 59 (Oxford: 1845).
[92] No. 90, p. 24.
[93] The following letter of Mr. James Mozley (8th March 1841) gives the
first impression of the Tract:--"A new Tract has come out this week, and
is beginning to make a sensation. It is on the Articles, and shows that
they bear a highly Catholic meaning; and that many doctrines, of which
the Romanist are corruptions, may be held consistently with them. This
is no more than what we know as a matter of history, for the Articles
were expressly worded to bring in Roman Catholics. But people are
astonished and confused at the idea now, as if it were quite new. And
they have been so accustomed for a long time to look at the Articles as
on a par with the Creed, that they think, I suppose, that if they
subscribe to them they are bound to hold whatever doctrines (not
positively stated in them) are merely not condemned. So if they will
have a Tractarian sense, they are thereby all Tractarians.... It is, of
course, highly complimentary to the whole set of us to be so very much
surprised that we should think what we held to be consistent with the
Articles which we have subscribed." See also a clever Whateleian
pamphlet, "The Controversy between Tract No. 90 and the Oxford Tutors."
(How and Parsons, 1841.)
[94] See J.B. Mozley's _Letters_, 13th March 1841.
[95] _Scil._, those cited in the preamble to this resolution.
[96] J.B. Mozley's _Letters_, 13th July 1841.