AFTER NO. 90
The proceedings about No. 90 were a declaration of war on the part of
the Oxford authorities against the Tractarian party. The suspicions,
alarms, antipathies, jealousies, which had long been smouldering among
those in power, had at last taken shape in a definite act. And it was a
turning-point in the history of the movement. After this it never was
exactly what it had been hitherto. It had been so far a movement within
the English Church, for its elevation and reform indeed, but at every
step invoking its authority with deep respect, acknowledging allegiance
to its rulers in unqualified and even excessive terms, and aiming
loyally to make it in reality all that it was in its devotional language
and its classical literature. But after what passed about No. 90 a
change came. The party came under an official ban and stigma. The common
consequences of harsh treatment on the tendencies and thought of a
party, which considers itself unjustly proscribed, showed themselves
more and more. Its mind was divided; its temper was exasperated; while
the attitude of the governing authorities hardened more into determined
hostility. From the time of the censure, and especially after the events
connected with it,--the contest for the Poetry Professorship and the
renewed Hampden question,--it may be said that the characteristic
tempers of the Corcyrean sedition were reproduced on a small scale in
Oxford.[97] The scare of Popery, not without foundation--the reaction
against it, also not without foundation--had thrown the wisest off their
balance; and what of those who were not wise? In the heat of those days
there were few Tractarians who did not think Dr. Wynter, Dr. Faussett,
and Dr. Symons heretics in theology and persecutors in temper, despisers
of Christian devotion and self-denial. There were few of the party of
the Heads who did not think every Tractarian a dishonest and perjured
traitor, equivocating about his most solemn engagements, the ignorant
slave of childish superstitions which he was conspiring to bring back.
It was the day of the violent on both sides: the courtesies of life were
forgotten; men were afraid of being weak in their censures, their
dislike, and their opposition; old friendships were broken up, and men
believed the worst of those whom a few years back they had loved and
honoured.
It is not agreeable to recall these long extinct animosities, but they
are part of the history of that time, and affected the course in which
things ran. And it is easy to blame, it is hard to do justice to, the
various persons and parties who contributed to the events of that
strange and confused time. All was new, and unusual, and without
precedent in Oxford; a powerful and enthusiastic school reviving old
doctrines in a way to make them seem novelties, and creating a wild
panic from a quarter where it was the least expected; the terror of this
panic acting on authorities not in the least prepared for such a trial
of their sagacity, patience, and skill, driving them to unexampled
severity, and to a desperate effort to expel the disturbing
innovators--among them some of the first men in Oxford in character and
ability--from their places in the University.[98] In order to do justice
on each side at this distance of time, we are bound to make
allowance--both for the alarm and the mistaken violence of the
authorities, and for the disaffection, the irritation, the strange
methods which grew up in the worried and suspected party--for the
difficulties which beset both sides in the conflict, and the
counter-influences which drew them hither and thither. But the facts are
as they are; and even then a calmer temper was possible to those who
willed it; and in the heat of the strife there were men among the
authorities, as well as in the unpopular party, who kept their balance,
while others lost it.
Undoubtedly the publication of No. 90 was the occasion of the aggravated
form which dissension took, and not unnaturally. Yet it was anything but
what it was taken to mean by the authorities, an intentional move in
favour of Rome. It was intended to reconcile a large and growing class
of minds, penetrated and disgusted with the ignorance and injustice of
much of the current controversial assumptions against Rome, to a larger
and more defensible view of the position of the English Church. And this
was done by calling attention to that which was not now for the first
time observed--to the loose and unguarded mode of speaking visible in
the later controversial Articles, and to the contrast between them and
the technical and precise theology of the first five Articles. The
Articles need not mean all which they were supposed popularly to mean
against what was Catholic in Roman doctrine. This was urged in simple
good faith; it was but the necessary assumption of all who held with the
Catholic theology, which the Tractarians all along maintained that they
had a right to teach; it left plenty of ground of difference with
unreformed and usurping Rome. And we know that the storm which No. 90
raised took the writer by surprise. He did not expect that he should
give such deep offence. But if he thought of the effect on one set of
minds, he forgot the probable effect on another; and he forgot, or
under-estimated, the effect not only of the things said, but of the way
in which they were said.[99] No. 90 was a surprise, in the state of
ordinary theological knowledge at the time. It was a strong thing to say
that the Articles left a great deal of formal Roman language untouched;
but to work this out in dry, bald, technical logic, on the face of it,
narrow in scope, often merely ingenious, was even a greater
stumbling-block. It was, undoubtedly, a great miscalculation, such as
men of keen and far-reaching genius sometimes make. They mistake the
strength and set of the tide; they imagine that minds round them are
going as fast as their own. We can see, looking back, that such an
interpretation of the Articles, with the view then taken of them in
Oxford as the theological text-book, and in the condition of men's
minds, could not but be a great shock.
And what seemed to give a sinister significance to No. 90 was that, as
has been said, a strong current was beginning to set in the direction of
Rome. It was not yet of the nature, nor of the force, which was
imagined. The authorities suspected it where it was not. They accepted
any contemptible bit of gossip collected by ignorance or ill-nature as a
proof of it. The constitutional frankness of Englishmen in finding fault
with what is their own--disgust at pompous glorification--scepticism as
to our insular claims against all the rest of Christendom to be exactly
right, to be alone, "pure and apostolic"; real increase and enlargement
of knowledge, theological and historical; criticism on portions of our
Reformation history; admiration for characters in mediaeval times;
eagerness, over-generous it might be, to admit and repair wrong to an
opponent unjustly accused; all were set down together with other more
unequivocal signs as "leanings to Rome." It was clear that there was a
current setting towards Rome; but it was as clear that there was a much
stronger current in the party as a whole, setting in the opposite
direction. To those who chose to see and to distinguish, the love, the
passionate loyalty of the bulk of the Tractarians to the English Church
was as evident and unquestionable as any public fact could be. At this
time there was no reason to call in question the strong assurances
given by the writer of No. 90 himself of his yet unshaken faith in the
English Church. But all these important features of the
movement--witnessing, indeed, to deep searchings of heart, but to a
genuine desire to serve the English Church--were overlooked in the one
overwhelming fear which had taken possession of the authorities.
Alarming symptoms of a disposition to acknowledge and even exaggerate
the claims and the attractions of the Roman system were indeed apparent.
No doubt there were reasons for disquiet and anxiety. But the test of
manliness and wisdom, in the face of such reasons, is how men measure
their proportion, and how they meet the danger.
The Heads saw a real danger before them; but they met it in a wrong and
unworthy way. They committed two great errors. In the first place, like
the Jesuits in their quarrel with Portroyal and the Jansenists, they
entirely failed to recognise the moral elevation and religious purpose
of the men whom they opposed. There was that before them which it was to
their deep discredit that they did not see. The movement, whatever else
it was, or whatever else it became, was in its first stages a movement
for deeper religion, for a more real and earnest self-discipline, for a
loftier morality, for more genuine self-devotion to a serious life, than
had ever been seen in Oxford. It was an honest attempt to raise Oxford
life, which by all evidence needed raising, to something more laborious
and something more religious, to something more worthy of the great
Christian foundations of Oxford than the rivalry of colleges and of the
schools, the mere literary atmosphere of the tutor's lecture-room, and
the easy and gentlemanly and somewhat idle fellowship of the
common-rooms. It was the effort of men who had all the love of
scholarship, and the feeling for it of the Oxford of their day, to add
to this the habits of Christian students and the pursuit of Christian
learning. If all this was dangerous and uncongenial to Oxford, so much
the worse for Oxford, with its great opportunities and great
professions--_Dominus illuminatio mea_. But certainly this mark of moral
purpose and moral force was so plain in the movement that the rulers of
Oxford had no right to mistake it. When the names come back to our minds
of those who led and most represented the Tractarians, it must be a
matter of surprise to any man who has not almost parted with the idea of
Christian goodness, that this feature of the movement could escape or
fail to impress those who had known well all their lives long what these
leaders were. But amid the clamour and the tell-tale gossip, and, it
must be admitted, the folly round them, they missed it. Perhaps they
were bewildered. But they must have the blame, the heavy blame, which
belongs to all those who, when good is before them, do not recognise it
according to its due measure.[100]
In the next place, the authorities attacked and condemned the
Tractarian teaching at once violently and ignorantly, and in them
ignorance of the ground on which the battle was fought was hardly
pardonable. Doubtless the Tractarian language was in many respects novel
and strange. But Oxford was not only a city of libraries, it was the
home of what was especially accounted Church theology; and the
Tractarian teaching, in its foundation and main outlines, had little but
what ought to have been perfectly familiar to any one who chose to take
the trouble to study the great Church of England writers. To one who,
like Dr. Routh of Magdalen, had gone below the surface, and was
acquainted with the questions debated by those divines, there was
nothing startling in what so alarmed his brethren, whether he agreed
with it or not; and to him the indiscriminate charge of Popery meant
nothing. But Dr. Routh stood alone among his brother Heads in his
knowledge of what English theology was. To most of them it was an
unexplored and misty region; some of the ablest, under the influence of
Dr. Whately's vigorous and scornful discipline, had learned to slight
it. But there it was. Whether it was read or not, its great names were
pronounced with honour, and quoted on occasion. From Hooker to Van
Mildert, there was an unbroken thread of common principles giving
continuity to a line of Church teachers. The Puritan line of doctrine,
though it could claim much sanction among the divines of the
Reformation--the Latitudinarian idea, though it had the countenance of
famous names and powerful intellects--never could aspire to the special
title of Church theology. And the teaching which had that name, both in
praise, and often in dispraise, as technical, scholastic, unspiritual,
transcendental, nay, even Popish, countenanced the Tractarians. They
were sneered at for their ponderous _Catenae_ of authorities; but on the
ground on which this debate raged, the appeal was a pertinent and solid
one. Yet to High Church Oxford and its rulers, all this was strange
doctrine. Proof and quotation might lie before their eyes, but their
minds still ran in one groove, and they could not realise what they saw.
The words meant no harm in the venerable folio; they meant perilous
heresy in the modern Tract. When the authorities had to judge of the
questions raised by the movement, they were unprovided with the adequate
knowledge; and this was knowledge which they ought to have possessed for
its own sake, as doctors of the Theological Faculty of the University.
And it was not only for their want of learning, manifest all through the
controversy, that they were to blame. Their most telling charge against
the Tractarians, which was embodied in the censure of No. 90, was the
charge of dishonesty. The charge is a very handy one against opponents,
and it may rest on good grounds; but those who think right to make it
ought, both as a matter of policy and as a matter of conscience, to be
quite assured of their own position. The Articles are a public, common
document. It is the differing interpretations of a common document which
create political and religious parties; and only shallowness and
prejudice will impute to an opponent dishonesty without strong and clear
reason. Mr. Newman's interpretation in No. 90,--new, not in claiming for
the Articles a Catholic meaning, but in _limiting_, though it does not
deny, their anti-Roman scope, was fairly open to criticism. It might be
taken as a challenge, and as a challenge might have to be met. But it
would have been both fair and wise in the Heads, before proceeding to
unusual extremities, to have shown that they had fully considered their
own theological doctrines in relation to the Church formularies. They
all had obvious difficulties, and in some cases formidable ones. The
majority of them were what would have been called in older controversial
days frank Arminians, shutting their eyes by force of custom to the look
of some of the Articles, which, if of Lutheran origin, had been claimed
from the first by Calvinists. The Evangelicals had long confessed
difficulties, at least, in the Baptismal Service and the Visitation
Office; while the men most loud in denunciation of dishonesty were the
divines of Whately's school, who had been undermining the authority of
all creeds and articles, and had never been tired of proclaiming their
dislike of that solemn Athanasian Creed to which Prayer Book and
Articles alike bound them. Men with these difficulties daily before them
had no right to ignore them. Doubtless they all had their explanations
which they _bona fide_ believed in. But what was there that excluded Mr.
Newman from the claim to _bona fides_? He had attacked no foundation of
Christianity; he had denied or doubted no article of the Creed. He gave
his explanations, certainly not more far-fetched than those of some of
his judges. In a Church divided by many conflicting views, and therefore
bound to all possible tolerance, he had adopted one view which certainly
was unpopular and perhaps was dangerous. He might be confuted, he might
be accused, or, if so be, convicted of error, perhaps of heresy. But
nothing of this kind was attempted. The incompatibility of his view, not
merely with the Articles, but with morality in signing what all, of
whatever party, had signed, was asserted in a censure, which evaded the
responsibility of specifying the point which it condemned. The alarm of
treachery and conspiracy is one of the most maddening of human impulses.
The Heads of Houses, instead of moderating and sobering it, with the
authority of instructed and sagacious rulers, blew it into a flame. And
they acted in such a hurry that all sense of proportion and dignity was
lost. They peremptorily refused to wait even a few days, as the writer
requested, and as was due to his character, for explanation. They dared
not risk an appeal to the University at large. They dared not abide the
effect of discussion on the blow which they were urged to strike. They
chose, that they might strike without delay, the inexpressibly childish
step of sticking up at the Schools' gates, and at College butteries,
without trial, or conviction, or sentence, a notice declaring that
certain modes of signing the Articles suggested in a certain Tract were
dishonest. It was, they said, to protect undergraduates; as if
undergraduates would be affected by a vague assertion on a difficult
subject, about which nothing was more certain than that those who issued
the notice were not agreed among themselves.
The men who acted thus were good and conscientious men, who thought
themselves in the presence of a great danger. It is only fair to
remember this. But it is also impossible to be fair to the party of the
movement without remembering this deplorable failure in consistency, in
justice, in temper, in charity, on the part of those in power in the
University. The drift towards Rome had not yet become an unmanageable
rush; and though there were cases in which nothing could have stopped
its course, there is no reason to doubt that generous and equitable
dealing, a more considerate reasonableness, a larger and more
comprehensive judgment of facts, and a more patient waiting for strong
first impressions to justify and verify themselves, would have averted
much mischief. There was much that was to be regretted from this time
forward in the temper and spirit of the movement party. But that which
nourished and strengthened impatience, exaggeration of language and
views, scorn of things as they were, intolerance of everything
moderate, both in men and in words, was the consciousness with which
every man got up in the morning and passed the day, of the bitter
hostility of those foremost in place in Oxford--of their incompetence to
judge fairly--of their incapacity to apprehend what was high and earnest
in those whom they condemned--of the impossibility of getting them to
imagine that Tractarians could be anything but fools or traitors--of
their hopeless blindness to any fact or any teaching to which they were
not accustomed. If the authorities could only have stopped to consider
whether after all they were not dealing with real thought and real wish
to do right, they might after all have disliked the movement, but they
would have seen that which would have kept them from violence. They
would not listen, they would not inquire, they would not consider. Could
such ignorance, could such wrong possibly be without mischievous
influence on those who were the victims of it, much more on friends and
disciples who knew and loved them? The Tractarians had been preaching
that the Church of England, with all its Protestant feeling and all its
Protestant acts and history, was yet, as it professed to be, part and
parcel of the great historic Catholic Church, which had framed the
Creeds, which had continued the Sacraments, which had preached and
taught out of the Bible, which had given us our immemorial prayers. They
had spared no pains to make out this great commonplace from history and
theology: nor had they spared pains, while insisting on this dominant
feature in the English Church, to draw strongly and broadly the lines
which distinguished it from Rome. Was it wonderful, when all guarding
and explanatory limitations were contemptuously tossed aside by
"all-daring ignorance," and all was lumped together in the
indiscriminate charge of "Romanising," that there should have been some
to take the authorities at their word? Was it wonderful when men were
told that the Church of England was no place for them, that they were
breaking their vows and violating solemn engagements by acting as its
ministers, and that in order to preserve the respect of honest men they
should leave it--that the question of change, far off as it had once
seemed, came within "measurable distance"? The generation to which they
belonged had been brought up with strong exhortations to be real, and to
hate shams; and now the question was forced on them whether it was not a
sham for the English Church to call itself Catholic; whether a body of
teaching which was denounced by its authorities, however it might look
on paper and be defended by learning, could be more than a plausible
literary hypothesis in contrast to the great working system of which the
head was Rome. When we consider the singular and anomalous position on
any theory, including the Roman, of the English Church; with what great
differences its various features and elements have been prominent at
different times; how largely its history has been marked by
contradictory facts and appearances; and how hard it is for any one to
keep all, according to their real importance, simultaneously in view;
when we remember also what are the temptations of human nature in great
collisions of religious belief, the excitement and passion of the time,
the mixed character of all religious zeal, the natural inevitable anger
which accompanies it when resisted, the fervour which welcomes
self-sacrifice for the truth; and when we think of all this kept aglow
by the continuous provocation of unfair and harsh dealing from persons
who were scarcely entitled to be severe judges; the wonder is, human
nature being what it is, not that so many went, but that so many stayed.
FOOTNOTES:
[97] Τόλμα ἀλόγιστος ἀνδρία φιλέταιρος ἐνομίσθη ... τὸ δὲ σῶφρον τοῦ
ἀνάνδρου πρόσχημα, καὶ τὸ πρὸς ἄπαν ξυνετὸν ἐπὶ πᾶν ἀργόν τὸ δὲ
ὲμπλήκτως ὀξὐ ἀνδρὸς μοίρᾳ προσετέθη ... καὶ ὁ μὲν χαλεπαίνων πιστὸς
ἀεί, ὁ δὲ ἀντιλέγων αὐτῷ ὕποπτος.--Thuc. iii. 82. "Reckless daring was
held to be loyal courage; moderation was the disguise of unmanly
weakness; to know everything was to do nothing; frantic energy was the
true character of a man; the lover of violence was always trusted, and
his opponent suspected."--Jowett's translation.
[98] One of the strangest features in the conflict was the entire
misconception shown of what Mr. Newman was--the blindness to his real
character and objects--the imputation to him not merely of grave faults,
but of small and mean ones. His critics could not rise above the poorest
measure of his intellect and motives. One of the ablest of them, who had
once been his friend, in a farewell letter of kindly remonstrance,
specifies certain Roman errors, which he hopes that Mr. Newman will not
fall into--adoring images and worshipping saints--as if the pleasure and
privilege of worshipping images and saints were to Mr. Newman the
inducement to join Rome and break the ties of a lifetime. And so of his
moral qualities. A prominent Evangelical leader, Dr. Close of
Cheltenham, afterwards Dean of Carlisle, at a complimentary dinner, in
which he himself gloried in the "foul, personal abuse to which he had
been subjected in his zeal for truth," proceeded to give his judgment on
Mr. Newman: "When I first read No. 90, I did not then know the author;
but I said then, and I repeat here, _not with any personal reference to
the author_, that I should be sorry to trust the author of that Tract
with my purse,"--Report of Speech in _Cheltenham Examiner_, 1st March
1843.
[99] οὐ γὰρ ἀπόχρη τὸ ἔχειν ἄ δεῖ λέγειν, ἀλλ' ἀνάγκη καὶ ταῦτο ὠς δεῖ
είπεῖν.--Arist. _Rhet._ iii. I.
[100] Dr. Richards, the Rector of Exeter, seems to have stood apart from
his brother heads.--Cf. _Letters of the Rev. J.B. Mozley_, p. 113.