THE NEO-CATHOLIC REVIVAL, KNOWN AS THE ‘OXFORD MOVEMENT.’
[Sidenote: Character of the ‘Oxford Movement’]
The great Neo-Catholic Revival of the nineteenth century is so
intimately identified with Oxford that it came to be widely known as
the ‘Oxford Movement.’ It was less important than Methodism in its
purely moral aspect, since it was far less popular and practical,
leaving no such profound impression upon the religious life of the
nation. On the other hand, it exercised a more powerful influence on
Anglican theology, since it wore a more scholarlike garb, was more
attractive to cultivated and imaginative minds, allied itself with
the speculative and historical spirit of the age, and purported to be
essentially constructive or reconstructive. It had from the first a
centre, and solid base of operations, in the University, with branches
stretching far and wide, wherever zealous Churchmen were found. The
assaults of Methodism upon religious apathy in high places had been
more in the nature of guerilla warfare; those of ‘Tractarianism,’ as it
came to be called, assumed the character of a well-organised campaign.
[Sidenote: A reaction against the rising tide of Liberalism]
Whatever may have been the aims of its leaders, the Oxford Movement
was in truth a reaction, and its real origin must be sought in
political rather than in ecclesiastical causes. The question of
Catholic Emancipation, which had been stifled at the Union, was revived
in 1812 and fiercely debated for the next seventeen years. The measure
was equally opposed by the High and Low Church parties in the Church,
but carried in 1829 by a Tory Government in deference to political
exigencies. It was followed by the Reform Act, and in 1832 the reformed
Parliament assembled, with a large majority, not merely Erastian,
but hostile to the National Church. The vote of the bishops on the
Reform Bill had exposed them to popular obloquy; Lord Grey himself
had openly threatened them, and the press was full of attacks on
Episcopacy and the Establishment. Lord Grey’s Act for suppressing ten
Irish bishoprics was regarded as the first outburst of the gathering
storm; timid Churchmen trembled for the very existence of their Church,
and the Oxford Movement was set on foot with the deliberate purpose
of defending the Church and the Christianity of England against the
anti-Catholic aggressions of the dominant Liberalism.
[Sidenote: Oriel the centre of the Movement]
The University of Oxford was the natural centre for such a
reaction. The constitution of the University and colleges was
semi-ecclesiastical; the Heads were clerical dignitaries; nearly all
the fellows were bound to be in Holy Orders. Among the colleges,
Oriel then held the first rank, both as a place of education, and
as the home of a speculative and learned society among the fellows.
Copleston, its last Provost, had been a man of remarkable capacity, and
he was ably seconded by such colleagues as Davison and Whately. The
system of tuition at Oriel was the best in Oxford, and as it was the
first college to throw open its fellowships, it was able to attract
the ablest of the young graduates. It was known that Oriel fellows
were selected not merely on the evidence of the class-list, or by the
results of competitive examination, but also by a discriminating,
though arbitrary, estimate of their social qualities and probable
intellectual development. They were, therefore, a select body, somewhat
inclined to mutual admiration, producing little, but freely criticising
everything. The result was an Oriel school of thought, commonly known
as the _Noetics_, who applied an unsparing logic to received opinions,
especially those concerning religious faith, but whose strength lay
rather in drawing inferences and refuting fallacies than in examining
and settling the premisses from which their syllogisms were deduced.
Still, Oriel fostered a bright and independent intellectual life of its
own; the Oriel school was a standing protest against the prevailing
orthodoxy of mere conformity, and it became the congenial head-quarters
of the Oxford Movement.
[Sidenote: John Henry Newman]
Pusey and Keble were among the fellows of Oriel, when John Henry Newman
was elected to a fellowship in 1823, and later, in 1826, became tutor
in succession to Jelf. Newman’s early life at Oxford was a solitary
one. He did not seek friends, and in the Oriel common-room his shy
and retiring nature sometimes concealed his real power. As Wesley’s
sympathies were originally with High Church doctrines, so Newman’s
were originally with Evangelical doctrines; he was connected with the
Evangelical set at St. Edmund Hall; he was for a time secretary to
the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, and he actually helped
to start the ‘Record’ newspaper. In the early development of his ideas
he owed much to the robust intellect of Whately and the accurate
criticism of Hawkins, who succeeded Copleston as Provost in 1827. But
his reverence was reserved for Keble, whose ‘Christian Year’ appeared
in the same year and gave the first secret impulse to the Movement, of
which Newman became the head. In the following year, Pusey, then little
known to Newman, returned to Oxford as Professor of Hebrew and Canon of
Christchurch, unconsciously destined to give his own name to Newman’s
followers.
[Sidenote: Origin of ‘Tracts for the Times’]
At this period Newman had no intention of heading the Oxford Movement,
still less of founding a new party in the Church. His Evangelical
principles were gradually falling away from him, and he was girding
himself up for a great struggle with Secularism as represented by a
Liberal Government, but the first steps in the Tractarian agitation
were not taken by him. In 1832 he travelled in Italy with his friend
and pupil, Richard Hurrell Froude; and it was from him that Newman
imbibed his veneration for the Virgin and the Saints, his antipathy to
the Reformation, and his respectful toleration of the Roman Catholic
Church. They went so far as to inquire upon what conditions they would
be allowed to communicate in that Church, but were repelled on hearing
that a subscription to the decisions of the Council of Trent would be
required. It was during Newman’s absence abroad, in July 1833, that
Keble preached his Assize Sermon on ‘National Apostasy,’ which may be
said to have struck the first note of the Movement, and in the same
year Peter Maurice sounded the alarm against ‘Popery in Oxford.’ A
series of ‘Tracts for the Times’ was projected at a conference, also
held during Newman’s absence, by a small body of his friends, but the
plan was matured at subsequent conferences in Oriel, where Newman was
present, and Keble warmly supported it in letters of advice to which
the utmost deference was paid. The proposed aim of these Tracts was
expository rather than controversial; they purported to enlighten the
prevailing ignorance on Church principles and Church history. They were
to appear anonymously, and each writer was to be responsible only for
his own production. The difficulty of maintaining this principle of
limited liability was foreseen from the first, and prudent friends of
the Movement were in favour of a judicious censorship, but Newman was
inflexible, and his will prevailed.
[Sidenote: Association formed]
The immediate outcome of these Oriel conferences was the formation of
an association designed to rally all friends of the Church against the
common enemy. This was the signal for which zealous Churchmen had been
waiting, and it met with an enthusiastic response in all parts of the
country. An address to the Archbishop of Canterbury was drawn up and
signed by eight thousand of the clergy, insisting upon the necessity
of restoring Church discipline, maintaining Church principles, and
resisting the growth of latitudinarianism. A large section of the
laity ranged themselves on the side of the revival. Meetings were held
throughout England, and the King himself volunteered a declaration
of his strong affection for the National Church, now roused from its
apathy, and prepared to defend itself vigorously, not merely as a true
branch of the Catholic Church, but as a co-ordinate power with the
State.
[Sidenote: Newman assumes the lead]
Newman had returned from Italy deeply imbued with the conviction that
he had a definite mission to fulfil. He was no less firmly assured of
the need for individual action at this juncture than impelled to it
by his own self-reliant nature. While others, therefore, were urging
combinations and committees as the best methods of working, Newman’s
strong individuality revolted from joint control, especially in the
form of a ‘Committee of Revision,’ and pressed him forward to strike
the first blow for himself. He took counsel with Froude alone, when,
in the autumn of 1833, he suddenly brought out the first of that
series of Tracts from which his party derived its familiar name of
Tractarians. In so doing he took his own colleagues by surprise, and
precipitated the crisis destined to result from the publication of
the Tracts. From that day forth he was the recognised leader of the
Tractarians. No one among them was equally fitted for that position.
Keble was too modest and studious by disposition, Pusey was not an
original pioneer of the movement, Froude was disqualified by delicate
health. Newman stepped naturally into the place. The influence which
he gained in his own college as a tutor, and in the University as a
preacher from the pulpit of St. Mary’s, had drawn round him a band of
followers; his sympathetic character won the confidence of young minds;
his confessions of speculative doubt added weight to his acceptance
of dogmatic authority. Yet the secret of his personal ascendency was
never fully revealed to himself, nor did he ever fully realise the
impression produced by his sermons. To him the Tractarian Movement was
‘no movement, but the spirit of the times.’ He felt himself, not the
leader of a new party, but a loyal son of the old Church; now awakened
from her lethargy. He claimed no allegiance and issued no commands. It
was through friends and disciples, as we learn from himself, that his
principles were spread, and, as in the case of Socrates, their reports
of his conversations were perhaps the main source of the spell which he
exercised over the University and the Church.
[Sidenote: Spread and objects of the movement. Publication of Tract XC.]
The adhesion of Pusey in 1835 was a great accession of strength to
the Tractarians. He had contributed a Tract to the series in December
1833, but he did not formally join the Movement until a year and a
half later. His learning, social connections, and official position
gave it a certain dignity and solidity in which it had been lacking.
Recruits now offered themselves in abundance, and gifted young men
spent their days and nights in poring over materials for the Library of
the Fathers originated by Pusey, or in journeying from place to place,
in the spirit of the Methodist Revivalists, though in the pursuit of a
very different ideal. But the influence of Tractarianism over Oxford
thought must not be exaggerated. While it fascinated many subtle and
imaginative minds of a high order, and gathered into itself much of
the spiritual and even of the intellectual life of the University,
there were many robust intellects and earnest hearts which it not only
failed to reach but stirred into hostility. If it would be easy to draw
up an imposing list of eminent Oxford men who became Tractarians,
it would not be less easy to enumerate an equal number of equally
eminent men who consistently opposed Tractarianism, and predicted
that it must lead to Romanism. Nothing was further from the original
intentions and expectations of Newman himself. His object was to revive
the usages and doctrines of the primitive Church; to co-operate,
indeed, with the Church of Rome, so far as possible, but to keep aloof
from its pernicious corruptions; to establish the catholicity of the
Anglican Church, but, above all, to hold the _via media_ laid down
by its founders. His faith in Anglicanism was first disturbed in the
Long Vacation of 1839 by his supposed discovery of a decisive analogy
between the position of the Monophysite heretics and that of the
Anglican communion. Still, though he was gradually assimilating the
doctrines, he rebelled against the abuses and excesses, of the Roman
Church. Anglicanism as a distinctive creed had become untenable to him,
but he clung to a hope that its title might be lineally deduced from
the primitive Church, instead of being founded on a secession from the
Church of Rome. It was in this frame of mind that he published Tract
XC. in the year 1841, for the purpose of showing that the Articles of
the English Church were directed, not against the doctrines of the
Church of Rome as interpreted by the Council of Trent, but against
earlier heresies disavowed by that Council.
[Sidenote: Collapse of Tractarianism, and secession of Newman]
This Tract brought the Movement to a climax. It was received with a
storm of indignation throughout the country. The bishops delivered
charges against it, the great mass of Churchmen regarded it as an
attack on the Protestant Establishment, and a direct invitation to
Romanism. The Bishop of Oxford intervened, and the farther issue of
Tracts was stopped. Henceforth the real tendency of Tractarianism was
disclosed, and its promoters were hopelessly discredited. Newman found,
to his own great surprise, that his power was shattered. He retired,
during Lent 1840, to his parish at Littlemore, entrusting St. Mary’s
to a curate, in view of his possible resignation. His loyalty to the
English Church wavered more and more as he renewed his study of the
Arian controversy, and his misgivings were intensified by the hostile
attitude of the bishops, as well as by an incident which to a secular
mind would have appeared trivial—the institution of the Jerusalem
bishopric on a semi-Anglican and semi-Lutheran basis. His resignation
of St. Mary’s in the autumn of 1843, two years after the publication of
Tract XC., was due to an impulse of despondency on failing to dissuade
a young friend from conversion to Romanism. After preaching his last
sermon there he retired into lay-communion, giving up all idea of
acting upon others, and turning all his thoughts inwards. Two years
later, on October 8, 1845, his remaining difficulties being removed,
he was himself received into the Church of Rome, and finally left
Oxford early in the following year. Though his defection had long been
foreseen, it caused a profound shock throughout the English Church.
The first panic was succeeded by a reaction; some devoted adherents
followed him to Rome; others relapsed into lifeless conformity; and the
University soon resumed its wonted tranquillity.
[Sidenote: The ‘Hampden Controversy’]
The ‘Hampden Controversy,’ in 1836, may be regarded as an episode of
the Tractarian revival, already in full course of development. This
controversy arose out of Dr. Hampden’s Bampton Lectures on Scholastic
Philosophy, delivered in 1882, which, however, had attracted little
attention until he was appointed Regius Professor of Divinity four
years later. No sooner was this appointment known, than an anti-Hampden
Committee was formed, of which Pusey and Newman were members. The
Crown was actually petitioned to recall its nomination, but this
petition was coldly rejected by Lord Melbourne, and a vote of censure
on Dr. Hampden, proposed by the Hebdomadal Board, was defeated in
Convocation by the Proctors’ joint-veto—a very unusual, but perfectly
constitutional, exercise of the Proctorial authority. A war of
pamphlets ensued, and the vote of censure being reintroduced, after a
change of Proctors, was carried by an overwhelming majority. According
to the opinion of eminent counsel, the proceeding was illegal, as
transgressing the jurisdiction of the University under the Charter of
1636, but the sentence was never reversed, and Dr. Hampden remained
under the ban of the University, excluded from various privileges of
his office, until his elevation to the See of Hereford in 1847. The
opposition to him then broke out afresh, and the Dean of Hereford, in
a letter to Lord John Russell, held out a threat of resistance to the
Royal _congé d’élire_. The answer of Lord John Russell was such as
might be expected, but thirteen bishops supported the Dean’s protest
by a remonstrance, which Lord John Russell met by a peremptory refusal
to make the prerogative of the Crown dependent on the caprice of a
chance majority at one University, largely composed of persons who
had since joined the Church of Rome. Nevertheless, a final attempt was
made to negative the ‘confirmation’ of Dr. Hampden’s appointment at Bow
Church. An argument on this point in the Court of Queen’s Bench ended
in a dismissal of the case, owing to differences of opinion among the
judges, and on March 25, 1848, Dr. Hampden was duly consecrated Bishop.
[Sidenote: Proceedings against Pusey and Ward]
On the other hand, while Newman was in retirement at Littlemore, Pusey
was suspended from preaching in the University pulpit for two years, on
a report from a board appointed to examine a sermon delivered by him
at Christ Church, in which he was alleged to have affirmed the Real
Presence in a sense inconsistent with the doctrines of the Church. Soon
afterwards, Dr. Hampden, as Regius Professor of Divinity, inhibited
from his B.D. degree a candidate who had declined to be examined by
him on Tradition and Transubstantiation. The right of examination was
challenged by the candidate, but upheld by the Delegates of Appeals,
to whom the question was referred. On November 20, 1844, Mr. Ward,
a fellow of Balliol, was summoned before the Vice-Chancellor, and
questioned respecting the authorship of a book entitled ‘The Ideal of
a Christian Church.’ A war of pamphlets ensued, but in the end, on
February 13, 1845, a proposition was submitted to Convocation, densely
crowded with non-residents, condemning Ward’s doctrines as inconsistent
with the Articles, with his subscription thereto, and with his own good
faith in subscribing. This resolution was carried by a large majority,
and a further resolution, for the degradation of Ward, was carried by
a smaller majority. A third resolution, condemning Tract XC., had been
appended, but was negatived by the joint veto of the Proctors. It had
actually been intended to subjoin to the first resolution a declaration
annexing a new sense to subscription, and thus creating a new test, but
this addition was ultimately withdrawn in deference to a legal opinion,
which also denied the validity of Ward’s deprivation.
[Sidenote: Effect of the ‘Oxford Movement’]
With these proceedings the academical history of the Tractarian
Movement may properly be closed, though many distinguished members of
the University joined the Church of Rome at a later period, especially
after the celebrated judgment in the ‘Gorham Case,’ establishing
liberty of opinion on Baptismal Regeneration. For several years after
Newman’s conversion, the progress of the Neo-Catholic Revival was
arrested, and when it took a new departure under the name of Ritualism,
it ceased to draw its inspiration from the University of Oxford.
Nevertheless, the work of Newman and his fellows left its mark on
the University as well as on the English Church. The effect of his
speculative teaching was infinitely weakened by his own conversion to
Rome, but the effect of his practical teaching could not be dissipated.
In the widespread restoration of churches, in the improvement of
church-services, and in the greater energy of religious life within the
Anglican communion, we may still recognise the influence for good which
emanated from the Oriel common-room.
[Sidenote: Controversy on the Endowment of the Greek Professorship.
Defeat of Mr. Gladstone in 1865]
Thirty years after his own suspension, Dr. Pusey, now regarded as a
champion of orthodoxy, came forward with certain other Doctors of
Divinity, to bring a charge of heresy against Mr. Jowett, of Balliol,
the Regius Professor of Greek, who had contributed to the volume called
‘Essays and Reviews.’ A suit was instituted in the Chancellor’s Court,
and on February 6, 1863, a judgment was delivered by Mr. Mountague
Bernard, as assessor. This judgment disallowed the defendant’s protest
against the jurisdiction of the Court in spiritual matters, or over
a Regius Professor; but, in effect, arrested the proceedings without
deciding the case on its merits. A somewhat undignified controversy
followed, and greatly disturbed the peace of the University, on
the question of increasing the very meagre endowment of the Greek
Professorship—a measure which Dr. Pusey opposed on the sole ground
that it would strengthen the position of the existing Professor. The
partisanship engendered by the long struggle on this question divided
the senior members of the University into hostile camps, and often
determined their votes on matters which had no connection with the
subject. At last, on February 18, 1865, a compromise was effected, by
accepting the offer of Christchurch to endow the Professorship. The
University, in truth, was heartily sick of the controversy, and even
the High Church residents were unwilling to please the non-resident
clergy by perpetuating an apparent injustice which damaged their own
credit with the abler students. In the following summer, Mr. Gladstone,
who had been elected Member of Parliament for the University in 1847,
and whose seat had been contested at every subsequent election, was
defeated by Mr. Gathorne Hardy. This event established the supremacy of
the Conservative party in the constituency, and, though a contest took
place in 1878, the result was never doubtful, and the fierce passions
incident to constant trials of political strength have sensibly died
away. Thus, two fruitful sources of academical discord were removed
within a few months of each other. The last twenty-one years have
witnessed many warm discussions and close divisions in the University
legislature, but they have been mainly on academical issues, and have
seldom been embittered by the _odium theologicum_. Since 1865, a tacit
_concordat_ has prevailed between the two great schools of thought in
Oxford, and a philosophical toleration of opinion has superseded the
intolerant dogmatism, not confined to one party in the Church, which
had its origin in the Neo-Catholic Revival.