IN the meantime, a series of events was taking place in another part of
England, which was to have a no less profound effect upon Manning's
history than the merciful removal of his wife. In the same year in which
he took up his Sussex curacy, the Tracts for the Times had begun to
appear at Oxford. The 'Oxford Movement', in fact, had started on its
course. The phrase is still familiar; but its meaning has become
somewhat obscured both by the lapse of time and the intrinsic ambiguity
of the subjects connected with it. Let us borrow for a moment the wings
of Historic Imagination, and, hovering lightly over the Oxford of the
thirties, take a rapid bird's-eye view.
For many generations the Church of England had slept the sleep of the
...comfortable. The sullen murmurings of dissent, the loud battle-cry of
Revolution, had hardly disturbed her slumbers. Portly divines subscribed
with a sigh or a smile to the Thirty-nine Articles, sank quietly into
easy living, rode gaily to hounds of a morning as gentlemen should, and,
as gentlemen should, carried their two bottles of an evening. To be in
the Church was in fact simply to pursue one of those professions which
Nature and Society had decided were proper to gentlemen and gentlemen
alone. The fervours of piety, the zeal of Apostolic charity, the
enthusiasm of self-renunciation--these things were all very well in
their way and in their place; but their place was certainly not the
Church of England. Gentlemen were neither fervid nor zealous, and above
all they were not enthusiastic. There were, it was true, occasionally to
be found within the Church some strait-laced parsons of the high Tory
school who looked back with regret to the days of Laud or talked of the
Apostolical Succession; and there were groups of square-toed
Evangelicals who were earnest over the Atonement, confessed to a
personal love of Jesus Christ, and seemed to have arranged the whole of
their lives, down to the minutest details of act and speech, with
reference to Eternity. But such extremes were the rare exceptions. The
great bulk of the clergy walked calmly along the smooth road of ordinary
duty. They kept an eye on the poor of the parish, and they conducted the
Sunday Services in a becoming manner; for the rest, they differed
neither outwardly nor inwardly from the great bulk of the laity, to whom
the Church was a useful organisation for the maintenance of Religion, as
by law established.
The awakening came at last, however, and it was a rude one. The liberal
principles of the French Revolution, checked at first in the terrors of
reaction, began to make their way into England. Rationalists lifted up
their heads; Bentham and the Mills propounded Utilitarianism; the Reform
Bill was passed; and there were rumours abroad of disestablishment. Even
Churchmen seemed to have caught the infection. Dr. Whately was so bold
as to assert that, in the interpretation of Scripture, different
opinions might be permitted upon matters of doubt; and, Dr. Arnold drew
up a disquieting scheme for allowing Dissenters into the Church, though
it is true that he did not go quite so far as to contemplate the
admission of Unitarians.
At this time, there was living in a country parish, a young clergyman of
the name of John Keble. He had gone to Oxford at the age of fifteen,
where, after a successful academic career, he had been made a Fellow of
Oriel. He had then returned to his father's parish and taken up the
duties of a curate. He had a thorough knowledge of the contents of the
Prayer-book, the ways of a Common Room, the conjugations of the Greek
Irregular Verbs, and the small jests of a country parsonage; and the
defects of his experience in other directions were replaced by a zeal
and a piety which were soon to prove themselves equal, and more than
equal, to whatever calls might be made upon them. The superabundance of
his piety overflowed into verse; and the holy simplicity of the
Christian Year carried his name into the remotest lodging-houses of
England.
As for his zeal, however, it needed another outlet. Looking forth upon
the doings of his fellow-men through his rectory windows in
Gloucestershire, Keble felt his whole soul shaken with loathing, anger,
and dread. Infidelity was stalking through the land; authority was
laughed at; the hideous doctrines of Democracy were being openly
preached. Worse still, if possible, the Church herself was ignorant and
lukewarm; she had forgotten the mysteries of the sacraments, she had
lost faith in the Apostolical Succession; she was no longer interested
in the Early Fathers; and she submitted herself to the control of a
secular legislature, the members of which were not even bound to profess
belief in the Atonement. In the face of such enormities what could Keble
do? He was ready to do anything, but he was a simple and an unambitious
man, and his wrath would in all probability have consumed itself
unappeased within him had he not chanced to come into contact, at the
critical moment, with a spirit more excitable and daring than his own.
Hurrell Froude, one of Keble's pupils, was a clever young man to whom
had fallen a rather larger share of self-assurance and intolerance than
even clever young men usually possess. What was singular about him,
however, was not so much his temper as his tastes. The sort of ardour
which impels more normal youths to haunt Music Halls and fall in love
with actresses took the form, in Froude's case, of a romantic devotion
to the Deity and an intense interest in the state of his own soul. He
was obsessed by the ideals of saintliness, and convinced of the supreme
importance of not eating too much. He kept a diary in which he recorded
his delinquencies, and they were many. 'I cannot say much for myself
today,' he writes on September 29th, 1826 (he was twenty-three years
old). 'I did not read the Psalms and Second Lesson after breakfast,
which I had neglected to do before, though I had plenty of time on my
hands. Would have liked to be thought adventurous for a scramble I had
at the Devil's Bridge. Looked with greediness to see if there was a
goose on the table for dinner; and though what I ate was of the plainest
sort, and I took no variety, yet even this was partly the effect of
accident, and I certainly rather exceeded in quantity, as I was fuzzy
and sleepy after dinner.' 'I allowed myself to be disgusted, with--'s
pomposity,' he writes a little later, 'also smiled at an allusion in the
Lessons to abstemiousness in eating. I hope not from pride or vanity,
but mistrust; it certainly was unintentional.' And again, 'As to my
meals, I can say that I was always careful to see that no one else would
take a thing before I served myself; and I believe as to the kind of my
food, a bit of cold endings of a dab at breakfast, and a scrap of
mackerel at dinner, are the only things that diverged from the strict
rule of simplicity.' 'I am obliged to confess,' he notes, 'that in my
intercourse with the Supreme Being, I am be come more and more
sluggish.' And then he exclaims: 'Thine eye trieth my inward parts, and
knoweth my thoughts ... Oh that my ways were made so direct that I might
keep Thy statutes. I will walk in Thy Commandments when Thou hast set my
heart at liberty.'
Such were the preoccupations of this young man. Perhaps they would have
been different, if he had had a little less of what Newman describes as
his 'high severe idea of the intrinsic excellence of Virginity'; but it
is useless to speculate.
Naturally enough the fierce and burning zeal of Keble had a profound
effect upon his mind. The two became intimate friends, and Froude,
eagerly seizing upon the doctrines of the elder man, saw to it that they
had as full a measure of controversial notoriety as an Oxford common
room could afford. He plunged the metaphysical mysteries of the Holy
Catholic Church into the atmosphere of party politics. Surprised Doctors
of Divinity found themselves suddenly faced with strange questions which
had never entered their heads before. Was the Church of England, or was
it not, a part of the Church Catholic? If it was, were not the Reformers
of the sixteenth century renegades? Was not the participation of the
Body and Blood of Christ essential to the maintenance of Christian life
and hope in each individual? Were Timothy and Titus Bishops? Or were
they not? If they were, did it not follow that the power of
administering the Holy Eucharist was the attribute of a sacred order
founded by Christ Himself? Did not the Fathers refer to the tradition of
the Church as to something independent of the written word, and
sufficient to refute heresy, even alone? Was it not, therefore, God's
unwritten word? And did it not demand the same reverence from us as the
Scriptures, and for exactly the same reason--BECAUSE IT WAS HIS WORD?
The Doctors of Divinity were aghast at such questions, which seemed to
lead they hardly knew whither; and they found it difficult to think of
very apposite answers. But Hurrell Froude supplied the answers himself
readily enough. All Oxford, all England, should know the truth. The time
was out of joint, and he was only too delighted to have been born to set
it right.
But, after all, something more was needed than even the excitement of
Froude combined with the conviction of Keble to ruffle seriously the
vast calm waters of Christian thought; and it so happened that that
thing was not wanting: it was the genius of John Henry Newman. If Newman
had never lived, or if his father, when the gig came round on the fatal
morning, still undecided between the two Universities, had chanced to
turn the horse's head in the direction of Cambridge, who can doubt that
the Oxford Movement would have flickered out its little flame unobserved
in the Common Room of Oriel? And how different, too, would have been the
fate of Newman himself! He was a child of the Romantic Revival, a
creature of emotion and of memory, a dreamer whose secret spirit dwelt
apart in delectable mountains, an artist whose subtle senses caught,
like a shower in the sunshine, the impalpable rainbow of the immaterial
world. In other times, under other skies, his days would have been more
fortunate. He might have helped to weave the garland of Meleager, or to
mix the lapis lazuli of Fra Angelico, or to chase the delicate truth in
the shade of an Athenian palaestra, or his hands might have fashioned
those ethereal faces that smile in the niches of Chartres. Even in his
own age he might, at Cambridge, whose cloisters have ever been
consecrated to poetry and common sense, have followed quietly in Gray's
footsteps and brought into flower those seeds of inspiration which now
lie embedded amid the faded devotion of the Lyra Apostolica.
At Oxford, he was doomed. He could not withstand the last enchantment of
the Middle Age. It was in vain that he plunged into the pages of Gibbon
or communed for long hours with Beethoven over his beloved violin. The
air was thick with clerical sanctity, heavy with the odours of tradition
and the soft warmth of spiritual authority; his friendship with Hurrell
Froude did the rest. All that was weakest in him hurried him onward, and
all that was strongest in him too. His curious and vaulting imagination
began to construct vast philosophical fabrics out of the writings of
ancient monks, and to dally with visions of angelic visitations and the
efficacy of the oil of St Walburga; his emotional nature became absorbed
in the partisan passions of a University clique; and his subtle
intellect concerned itself more and more exclusively with the
dialectical splitting of dogmatical hairs. His future course was marked
out for him all too clearly; and yet by a singular chance the true
nature of the man was to emerge triumphant in the end. If Newman had
died at the age of sixty, today he would have been already forgotten,
save by a few ecclesiastical historians; but he lived to write his
Apologia, and to reach immortality, neither as a thinker nor as a
theologian, but as an artist who has embalmed the poignant history of an
intensely human spirit in the magical spices of words.
When Froude succeeded in impregnating Newman with the ideas of Keble,
the Oxford Movement began. The original and remarkable characteristic of
these three men was that they took the Christian Religion au pied de la
lettre. This had not been done in England for centuries. When they
declared every Sunday that they believed in the Holy Catholic Church,
they meant it. When they repeated the Athanasian Creed, they meant it.
Even, when they subscribed to the Thirty-nine Articles, they meant it-or
at least they thought they did. Now such a state of mind was
dangerous--more dangerous indeed--than they at first realised. They had
started with the innocent assumption that the Christian Religion was
contained in the doctrines of the Church of England; but, the more they
examined this matter, the more difficult and dubious it became. The
Church of England bore everywhere upon it the signs of human
imperfection; it was the outcome of revolution and of compromise, of the
exigencies of politicians and the caprices of princes, of the prejudices
of theologians and the necessities of the State. How had it happened
that this piece of patchwork had become the receptacle for the august
and infinite mysteries of the Christian Faith? This was the problem with
which Newman and his friends found themselves confronted. Other men
might, and apparently did, see nothing very strange in such a situation;
but other men saw in Christianity itself scarcely more than a convenient
and respectable appendage to existence, by which a sound system of
morals was inculcated, and through which one might hope to attain to
everlasting bliss.
To Newman and Keble it was otherwise. They saw a transcendent
manifestation of Divine power flowing down elaborate and immense through
the ages; a consecrated priesthood, stretching back, through the mystic
symbol of the laying on of hands, to the very Godhead; a whole universe
of spiritual beings brought into communion with the Eternal by means of
wafers; a great mass of metaphysical doctrines, at once incomprehensible
and of incalculable import, laid down with infinite certitude; they saw
the supernatural everywhere and at all times, a living force, floating
invisible in angels, inspiring saints, and investing with miraculous
properties the commonest material things. No wonder that they found such
a spectacle hard to bring into line with the institution which had been
evolved from the divorce of Henry VIII, the intrigues of Elizabethan
parliaments, and the Revolution of 1688. They did, no doubt, soon
satisfy themselves that they had succeeded in this apparently hopeless
task; but, the conclusions which they came to in order to do so were
decidedly startling.
The Church of England, they declared, was indeed the one true Church,
but she had been under an eclipse since the Reformation; in fact, since
she had begun to exist. She had, it is true, escaped the corruptions of
Rome; but she had become enslaved by the secular power, and degraded by
the false doctrines of Protestantism. The Christian Religion was still
preserved intact by the English priesthood, but it was preserved, as it
were, unconsciously--a priceless deposit, handed down blindly from
generation to generation, and subsisting less by the will of man than
through the ordinance of God as expressed in the mysterious virtue of
the Sacraments. Christianity, in short, had become entangled in a series
of unfortunate circumstances from which it was the plain duty of Newman
and his friends to rescue it forthwith. What was curious was that this
task had been reserved, in so marked a manner, for them. Some of the
divines of the seventeenth century had, perhaps, been vouchsafed
glimpses of the truth; but they were glimpses and nothing more. No, the
waters of the true Faith had dived underground at the Reformation, and
they were waiting for the wand of Newman to strike the rock before they
should burst forth once more into the light of day. The whole matter, no
doubt, was Providential--what other explanation could there be?
The first step, it was clear, was to purge the Church of her shames and
her errors. The Reformers must be exposed; the yoke of the secular power
must be thrown off; dogma must be reinstated in its old pre-eminence;
and Christians must be reminded of what they had apparently
forgotten--the presence of the supernatural in daily life. 'It would be
a gain to this country,' Keble observed, 'were it vastly more
superstitious, more bigoted, more gloomy, more fierce in its religion,
than at present it shows itself to be.' 'The only good I know of
Cranmer,' said Hurrell Froude, 'was that he burned well.' Newman
preached, and soon the new views began to spread. Among the earliest of
the converts was Dr Pusey, a man of wealth and learning, a professor, a
canon of Christ Church, who had, it was rumoured, been to Germany. Then
the Tracts for the Times were started under Newman's editorship, and the
Movement was launched upon the world.
The Tracts were written 'with the hope of rousing members of our Church
to comprehend her alarming position ... as a man might give notice of a
fire or inundation, to startle all who heard him'. They may be said to
have succeeded in their objective, for the sensation which they caused
among clergymen throughout the country was extreme. They dealt with a
great variety of questions, but the underlying intention of all of them
was to attack the accepted doctrines and practices of the Church of
England. Dr. Pusey wrote learnedly on Baptismal Regeneration; he also
wrote on Fasting. His treatment of the latter subject met with
considerable disapproval, which surprised the Doctor. 'I was not
prepared,' he said, 'for people questioning, even in the abstract, the
duty of fasting; I thought serious-minded persons at least supposed they
practised fasting in some way or other. I assumed the duty to be
acknowledged and thought it only undervalued.' We live and learn, even
though we have been to Germany.
Other tracts discussed the Holy Catholic Church, the Clergy, and the
Liturgy. One treated of the question 'whether a clergyman of the Church
of England be now bound to have morning and evening prayers daily in his
parish church?' Another pointed out the 'Indications of a superintending
Providence in the preservation of the Prayer-book and in the changes
which it has undergone'. Another consisted of a collection of 'Advent
Sermons on Antichrist'. Keble wrote a long and elaborate tract 'On the
Mysticism attributed to the Early Fathers of the Church', in which he
expressed his opinions upon a large number of curious matters.
'According to men's usual way of talking,' he wrote, 'it would be called
an accidental circumstance that there were five loaves, not more nor
less, in the store of Our Lord and His disciples wherewith to provide
the miraculous feast. But the ancient interpreters treat it as designed
and providential, in this surely not erring: and their conjecture is
that it represents the sacrifice of the whole world of sense, and
especially of the Old Dispensation, which, being outward and visible,
might be called the dispensation of the senses, to the FATHER of our
LORD JESUS CHRIST, to be a pledge and means of communion with Him
according to the terms of the new or evangelical law.
They arrived at this idea by considering the number five, the number of
the senses, as the mystical opponent of the visible and sensible
universe--ta aistheta, as distinguished from ta noita. Origen lays down
the rule in express terms. '"The number five,"' he says, '"frequently,
nay almost always, is taken for the five senses."' In another passage,
Keble deals with an even more recondite question. He quotes the teaching
of St. Barnabas that 'Abraham, who first gave men circumcision, did
thereby perform a spiritual and typical action, looking forward to the
Son'. St. Barnabas's argument is as follows: Abraham circumcised of his
house men to the number of 318. Why 318? Observe first the 18, then the
300. Of the two letters which stand for 18, 10 is represented by 1, 8 by
H. 'Thou hast here,' says St. Barnabas, 'the word of Jesus.' As for the
300, 'the Cross is represented by Tau, and the letter Tau represents
that number'.
Unfortunately, however, St. Barnabas's premise was of doubtful validity,
as the Rev. Mr. Maitland pointed out, in a pamphlet impugning the
conclusions of the Tract. 'The simple fact is,' he wrote, 'that when
Abraham pursued Chedorlaomer "he armed his trained servants, BORN IN HIS
OWN HOUSE, three hundred and eighteen". When, more than thirteen
(according to the common chronology, fifteen) years after, he
circumcised "all the men of his house, BORN IN THE HOUSE, AND BOUGHT
WITH MONEY OF THE STRANGER", and, in fact, every male who was as much as
eight days old, we are not told what the number amounted to. Shall we
suppose (just for the sake of the interpretation) that Abraham's family
had so dwindled in the interval as that now all the males of his
household, trained men, slaves, and children, equalled only and exactly
the number of his warriors fifteen years before?'
The question seems difficult to answer, but Keble had, as a matter of
fact, forestalled the argument in the following passage, which had
apparently escaped the notice of the Rev. Mr. Maitland:
'Now whether the facts were really so or not (if it were, it was surely
by special providence), that Abraham's household at the time of the
circumcision was exactly the same number as before; still the argument
of St. Barnabas will stand. As thus: circumcision had from the
beginning, a reference to our SAVIOUR, as in other respects, so in this;
that the mystical number, which is the cipher of Jesus crucified, was
the number of the first circumcised household in the strength of which
Abraham prevailed against the powers of the world. So St. Clement of
Alexandria, as cited by Fell.'
And Keble supports his contention through ten pages of close print, with
references to Aristeas, St. Augustine, St. Jerome, and Dr. Whitby.
Writings of this kind could not fail in their effect. Pious youths in
Oxford were carried away by them, and began to flock around the standard
of Newman. Newman himself became a party chief--encouraging, organising,
persuading. His long black figure, swiftly passing through the streets,
was pointed at with awe; crowds flocked to his sermons; his words were
repeated from mouth to mouth; 'Credo in Newmannum' became a common
catchword. Jokes were made about the Church of England, and practices,
unknown for centuries, began to be revived. Young men fasted and did
penance, recited the hours of the Roman Breviary, and confessed their
sins to Dr. Pusey. Nor was the movement confined to Oxford; it spread in
widening circles through the parishes of England; the dormant devotion
of the country was suddenly aroused. The new strange notion of taking
Christianity literally was delightful to earnest minds; but it was also
alarming. Really to mean every word you said, when you repeated the
Athanasian Creed! How wonderful! And what enticing and mysterious vistas
burst upon the view! But then, those vistas, where were they leading?
Supposing--oh heavens!--supposing after all they were to lead to--!