From the end of 1835, or the beginning of 1836, the world outside of Oxford began to be alive to the force and the rapid growth of this new and, to the world at large, not very intelligible movement. The ideas which had laid hold so powerfully on a number of leading minds in the University began to work with a spell, which seemed to many inexplicable, on others unconnected with them. This rapidity of expansion, viewed as a feature of a party, was noticed on all sides, by enemies no less than friends. In an article in the British Critic of April 1839, by Mr. Newman, on the State of Religious Parties, the fact is illustrated from contemporary notices.
There is at the present moment a reaction in the Church, and a growing reaction, towards the views which it has been the endeavours [of the Tract writers] and, as it seemed at the commencement, almost hopeless endeavours, to advocate. The fairness of the prospect at present is proved by the attack made on them by the public journals, and is confessed by the more candid and the more violent among their opponents. Thus the amiable Mr. Bickersteth speaks of it as having manifested itself "with the most rapid growth of the hot-bed of these evil days." The scoffing author of the Via Media says: "At this moment the Via is crowded with young enthusiasts who never presume to argue, except against the propriety of arguing at all." The candid Mr. Baden-Powell, who sees more of the difficulties of the controversy than the rest of their antagonists pot together, says that it is clear that "these views … have been extensively adopted, and are daily gaining ground among a considerable and influential portion of the members, as well as the ministers of the Established Church." The author of the Natural History of Enthusiasm says: "The spread of these doctrines is in fact having the effect of rendering all other distinctions obsolete. Soon there will be no middle ground left, and every man, especially every clergyman, will be compelled to make his choice between the two." … The Bishop of Chester speaks of the subject "daily assuming a more serious and alarming aspect": a gossiping writer of the moment describes these doctrines as having insinuated themselves not only into popular churches and fashionable chapels, and the columns of newspapers, but "into the House of Commons."
And the writer of the article goes on:—
Now, if there be any truth in these remarks, it is plainly idle and perverse to refer the change of opinions which is now going on to the acts of two or three individuals, as is sometimes done. Of course every event in human affairs has a beginning; and a beginning implies a when, and a where, and a by whom, and how. But except in these necessary circumstance, the phenomenon in question is in a manner quite independent of things visible and historical. It is not here or there; it has no progress, no causes, no fortunes: it is not a movement, it is a spirit, it is a spirit afloat, neither "in the secret chambers" nor "in the desert," but everywhere. It is within us, rising up in the heart where it was least expected, and working its way, though not in secret, yet so subtly and impalpably, as hardly to admit of precaution or encounter on any ordinary human rules of opposition. It is an adversary in the air, a something one and entire, a whole wherever it is, unapproachable and incapable of being grasped, as being the result of causes far deeper than political or other visible agencies, the spiritual awakening of spiritual wants.
Nothing can show more strikingly the truth of this representation than to refer to what may be called the theological history of the individuals who, whatever be their differences from each other on important or unimportant points, yet are associated together in the advocacy of the doctrines in question. Dr. Hook and Mr. Churton represent the High Church dignitaries of the last generation; Mr. Perceval, the Tory aristocracy; Mr. Keble is of the country clergy, and comes from valleys and woods, far removed both from notoriety and noise; Mr. Palmer and Mr. Todd are of Ireland; Dr. Pusey became what he is from among the Universities of Germany, and after a severe and tedious analysis of Arabic MSS. Mr. Dodsworth is said to have begun in the study of Prophecy; Mr. Newman to have been much indebted to the friendship of Archbishop Whately; Mr. Froude, if any one, gained his views from his own mind. Others have passed over from Calvinism and kindred religions.
Years afterwards, and in changed circumstances, the same writer has left the following record of what came before his experience in those years:—[67]
From beginnings so small (I said), from elements of thought so fortuitous, with prospects so unpromising, the Anglo-Catholic party suddenly became a power in the National Church, and an object of alarm to her rulers and friends. Its originators would have found it difficult to say what they aimed at of a practical kind: rather, they put forth views and principles, for their own sake, because they were true, as if they were obliged to say them; and, as they might be themselves surprised at their earnestness in uttering them, they had as great cause to be surprised at the success which attended their propagation. And, in fact, they could only say that those doctrines were in the air; that to assert was to prove, and that to explain was to persuade; and that the movement in which they were taking part was the birth of a crisis rather than of a place. In a very few years a school of opinion was formed, fixed in its principles, indefinite and progressive in their range; and it extended itself into every part of the country. If we inquire what the world thought of it, we have still more to raise our wonder; for, not to mention the excitement it caused in England, the movement and its party-names were known to the police of Italy and to the backwoods-men of America. And so it proceeded, getting stronger and stronger every year, till it came into collision with the Nation and that Church of the Nation, which it began by professing especially to serve.
FOOTNOTES:
[59] "I answered, the person whom we were opposing had committed himself in writing, and we ought to commit ourselves, too."—Apologia, p. 143.
[60] "I very much doubt between Oxford and Cambridge for my boy. Oxford, which I should otherwise prefer, on many accounts, has at present two-thirds of the steady-reading men, Rabbinists, i.e. Puseyites." But this was probably an exaggeration.—Whately's Life; letter of Oct. 1838, p. 163 (ed. 1875).
[61] "The sagacious and aspiring man of the world, the scrutiniser of the heart, the conspirator against its privileges and rights."—Prophetical Office of the Church, p. 132.
[62] Parochial Sermons, iv. 20. Feb. 1836.
[63] Vide J.B. Mozley, Letters, pp. 114, 115. "Confidence in me was lost, but I had already lost confidence in myself." This, to a friend like J.B. Mozley, seemed exaggeration. "Though admiring the letter [to the Vice Chancellor] I confess, for my own part, I think a general confession of humility was irrelevant to the present occasion, the question being simply on a point of theological interpretation. I have always had a prejudice against general confessions." Mozley plainly thought Newman's attitude too meek. He would have liked something more spirited and pugnacious.
[64] Romanism and Popular Protestantism, from 1834 to 1836, published March 1837; Justification, after Easter 1837, published March 1838; Canon of Scripture, published May 1838; Antichrist, published June 1838.
[65] Cf. Lyra Apostolica, No. 65:
Thou to wax fierce In the cause of the Lord!
* * * * *
Anger and zeal,
And the joy of the brave,
Who bade thee to feel,
Sin's slave?
[66] This weak side was portrayed with severity in a story published by Mr. Newman in 1848, after he left the English Church—Loss and Gain.
[67] Apologia, p. 156.
CHAPTER XI
THE ROMAN QUESTION
The Hampden controversy had contributed to bring to the front a question, which from the first starting of the Tracts had made itself felt, but which now became a pressing one. If the Church of England claimed to be part of the Catholic Church, what was the answer of the Church of England to the claims and charges of the Church of Rome? What were the true distinctions between the doctrines of the two Churches on the great points on which they were supposed to be at issue? The vague outcry of Popery had of course been raised both against the general doctrine of the Church, enforced in the Tracts, and against special doctrines and modes of speaking, popularly identified with Romanism; and the answer had been an appeal to the authority of the most learned and authoritative of our writers. But, of course, to the general public this learning was new; and the cry went on with a dreary and stupid monotony. But the charges against Dr. Hampden led his defenders to adopt as their best weapon an aggressive policy. To the attack on his orthodoxy, the counter buffet was the charge against his chief opponents of secret or open Romanising. In its keenest and most popular form it was put forth in a mocking pamphlet written probably under Whately's inspiration by his most trusted confidant, Dr. Dickinson, in which, in the form of a "Pastoral Epistle from his Holiness the Pope to some Members of the University of Oxford," the Tract-writers are made to appear as the emissaries and secret tools of Rome, as in a jeu d'esprit of Whately's they are made to appear as the veiled prophets of infidelity.[68] It was clever, but not clever enough to stand, at least in Oxford, against Dr. Pusey's dignified and gravely earnest Remonstrance against its injustice and trifling. But the fire of all Dr. Hampden's friends had been drawn on the leaders of the movement. With them, and almost alone with them, the opposition to him was made a personal matter. As time went on, those who had been as hot as they against Dr. Hampden managed to get their part in the business forgotten. Old scores between Orthodox, Evangelicals, and Liberals were wiped out, and the Tractarians were left to bear alone the odium of the "persecution" of Dr. Hampden. It must be said that they showed no signs of caring for it.
But the Roman controversy was looming in earnest, and it was idle to expect to keep it long out of sight. The Tracts had set forth with startling vehemence the forgotten claims of the Church. One reason why this had been done was the belief, as stated in the first volume of them, "that nothing but these neglected doctrines, faithfully preached, will repress the extension of Popery, for which the ever-multiplying divisions of the religious world are too clearly preparing the way."[69] The question, What is the Church? was one which the conditions of the times would not permit men any longer to leave alone. It had become urgent to meet it clearly and decisively. "We could not move a step in comfort till this was done."[70] "The controversy with the Romanists," writes Mr. Newman in No. 71 of the Tracts, about the end of 1835, "has overtaken us 'like a summer's cloud.' We find ourselves in various parts of the country preparing for it, yet, when we look back, we cannot trace the steps by which we arrived at our present position. We do not recollect what our feelings were this time last year on the subject; what was the state of our apprehensions and anticipations. All we know is, that here we are, from long security ignorant why we are not Roman Catholics, and they on the other side are said to be spreading and strengthening on all sides of us, vaunting of their success, real or apparent, and taunting us with our inability to argue with them."
The attitude taken by Mr. Newman at this time, as regards the Roman Church, both in the Tracts and in his book on Romanism and Popular Protestantism, published in the early months of 1836, was a new one. He had started, as he tells us, with the common belief that the Pope was Antichrist, and that the case was so clear against the whole system, doctrinal and practical, of the Church of Rome, that it scarcely needed further examination. His feeling against Rome had been increased by the fierce struggle about Emancipation, and by the political conduct of the Roman Catholic party afterwards; and his growing dissatisfaction with the ordinary Protestantism had no visible effect in softening this feeling. Hurrell Froude's daring questions had made his friends feel that there might be more to be known about the subject than they yet knew; yet what the fellow-travellers saw of things abroad in their visit to the South in 1832 did not impress them favourably. "They are wretched Tridentines everywhere," was Froude's comment. But attention had been drawn to the subject, and its deep interest and importance and difficulty recognised. Men began to read with new eyes. Froude's keen and deep sense of shortcomings at home disposed him to claim equity and candour in judging of the alleged faults and corruptions of the Church abroad. It did more, it disposed him—naturally enough, but still unfairly, and certainly without adequate knowledge—to treat Roman shortcomings with an indulgence which he refused to English. Mr. Newman, knowing more, and more comprehensive in his view of things, and therefore more cautious and guarded than Froude, was much less ready to allow a favourable interpretation of the obvious allegations against Rome. But thought and reading, and the authority of our own leading divines, had brought him to the conviction that whatever was to be said against the modern Roman Church—and the charges against it were very heavy—it was still, amid serious corruption and error, a teacher to the nations of the Christian creed and hope; it had not forfeited, any more than the English Church, its title to be a part of that historic body which connects us with the Apostles of our Lord. It had a strong and consistent theory to oppose to its assailants; it had much more to say for itself than the popular traditions supposed. This was no new idea in Anglican divinity, however ill it might sort with the current language of Protestant controversy. But our old divines, more easily satisfied than we with the course of things at home under the protection of the Stuart kings, and stung to bitter recrimination by the insults and the unscrupulous political intrigues of Roman Catholic agents, had exhausted the language of vituperation against a great aggressive rival, which was threatening everything that they held dear. They had damaged their own character for fairness, and overlaid their substantial grounds of objection and complaint, by this unbalanced exaggeration. Mr. Newman, in his study of these matters, early saw both the need and the difficulty of discrimination in the Roman controversy. It had to be waged, not as of old, with penal legislation behind, but against adversaries who could now make themselves listened to, and before a public sufficiently robust in its Protestantism, to look with amused interest on a dialectical triumph of the Roman over the Anglican claims. Romanism, he thought, was fatal both to his recent hopes for the English Church, and to the honour and welfare of Christianity at large. But in opposing it, ground loosely taken of old must be carefully examined, and if untenable, abandoned. Arguments which proved too much, which availed against any Church at all, must be given up. Popular objections, arising from ignorance or misconception, must be reduced to their true limits or laid aside. The controversy was sure to be a real one, and nothing but what was real and would stand scrutiny was worth anything in it.
Mr. Newman had always been impressed with the greatness of the Roman Church. Of old it had seemed to him great with the greatness of Antichrist. Now it seemed great with the strange weird greatness of a wonderful mixed system, commanding from its extent of sway and its imperial authority, complicated and mysterious in its organisation and influence, in its devotion and its superstitions, and surpassing every other form of religion both in its good and its evil.[71] What now presented itself to Mr. Newman's thoughts, instead of the old notion of a pure Church on one side, and a corrupt Church on the other, sharply opposed to one another, was the more reasonable supposition of two great portions of the divided Church, each with its realities of history and fact and character, each with its special claims and excellences, each with its special sins and corruptions, and neither realising in practice and fact all it professed to be on paper; each of which further, in the conflicts of past days, had deeply, almost unpardonably, wronged the other. The Church of England was in possession, with its own call and its immense work to do, and striving to do it. Whatever the Church of Rome was abroad, it was here an intruder and a disturber. That to his mind was the fact and the true position of things; and this ought to govern the character and course of controversy. The true line was not to denounce and abuse wholesale, not to attack with any argument, good or bad, not to deny or ignore what was solid in the Roman ground, and good and elevated in the Roman system, but admitting all that fairly ought to be admitted, to bring into prominence, not for mere polemical denunciation, but for grave and reasonable and judicial condemnation, all that was extravagant and arrogant in Roman assumptions, and all that was base, corrupt, and unchristian in the popular religion, which, with all its claims to infallibility and authority, Rome not only permitted but encouraged. For us to condemn Rome wholesale, as was ordinarily the fashion, even in respectable writers, was as wrong, as unfair, as unprofitable to the cause of truth and Christianity, as the Roman charges against us were felt by us to be ignorant and unjust. Rome professes like England to continue the constitution, doctrine, traditions, and spirit of the ancient and undivided Church: and so far as she does so—and she does so in a great degree—we can have no quarrel with her. But in a great degree also, she does this only in profession and as a theory: she claims the witness and suffrage of antiquity, but she interprets it at her own convenience and by her own authority. We cannot claim exemption from mistakes, from deviations from our own standard and principles, any more than Rome; but while she remains as she is, and makes the monstrous claims of infallibility and supremacy, there is nothing for English Churchmen but to resist her. Union is impossible. Submission is impossible. What we have to beware of for our own sake, as well as for our cause, are false arguments, unreal objections, ignorant allegations. There is enough on the very surface, in her audacious assertions and high-handed changes, for popular arguments against her, without having recourse to exaggeration and falsehood; she may be a very faulty Church, without being Babylon and Antichrist. And in the higher forms of argument, there is abundance in those provinces of ancient theology and ecclesiastical history and law, which Protestant controversialists have commonly surrendered and left open to their opponents, to supply a more telling weapon than any which these controversialists have used.
This line, though substantially involved in the theory of our most learned divines, from Andrewes to Wake, was new in its moderation and reasonable caution; in its abstention from insult and vague abuse, in its recognition of the primâ facie strength of much of the Roman case, in its fearless attempt, in defiance of the deepest prejudices, to face the facts and conditions of the question. Mr. Newman dared to know and to acknowledge much that our insular self-satisfaction did not know, and did not care to know, of real Christian life in the Church of Rome. He dared to admit that much that was popularly held to be Popish was ancient, Catholic, edifying; he dared to warn Churchmen that the loose unsifted imputations, so securely hazarded against Rome, were both discreditable and dangerous. All this, from one whose condemnation of Rome was decisive and severe, was novel. The attempt, both in its spirit and its ability, was not unworthy of being part of the general effort to raise the standard of thought and teaching in the English Church. It recalled men from slovenly prejudices to the study of the real facts of the living world. It narrowed the front of battle, but it strengthened it enormously. The volume on Romanism and Popular Protestantism is not an exhaustive survey of the controversy with Rome or of the theory of the Church. There are great portions of the subject, both theological and historical, which it did not fall within the scope of the book to touch. It was unsystematic and incomplete. But so far as its argument extended, it almost formed an epoch in this kind of controversial writing. It showed the command of a man of learning over all the technical points and minutiae of a question highly scholastical in its conceptions and its customary treatment, and it presented this question in its bearings and consequences on life and practice with the freedom and breadth of the most vigorous popular writing. The indictment against Rome was no vague or general one. It was one of those arguments which cut the ground from under a great established structure of reasonings and proofs. And its conclusions, clear and measured, but stern, were the more impressive, because they came from one who did not disguise his feeling that there was much in what was preserved in the Roman system to admire and to learn from.
The point which he chose for his assault was indeed the key of the Roman position—the doctrine of Infallibility. He was naturally led to this side of the question by the stress which the movement had laid on the idea of the Church as the witness and teacher of revealed truth: and the immediate challenge given by the critics or opponents of the movement was, how to distinguish this lofty idea of the Church, with its claim to authority, if it was at all substantial, from the imposing and consistent theory of Romanism. He urged against the Roman claim of Infallibility two leading objections. One was the way in which the assumed infallibility of the present Church was made to override and supersede, in fact, what in words was so ostentatiously put forward, the historical evidence of antiquity to doctrine, expressed by the phrase, the "consent of the Fathers." The other objection was the inherent contradiction of the notion of infallibility to the conditions of human reception of teaching and knowledge, and its practical uselessness as an assurance of truth, its partly delusive, partly mischievous, working. But he felt, as all deep minds must feel, that it is easier to overthrow the Roman theory of Church authority than to replace it by another, equally complete and commanding, and more unassailable. He was quite alive to the difficulties of the Anglican position; but he was a disciple in the school of Bishop Butler, and had learned as a first principle to recognise the limitations of human knowledge, and the unphilosophical folly of trying to round off into finished and pretentious schemes our fragmentary yet certain notices of our own condition and of God's dealings with it. He followed his teacher in insisting on the reality and importance of moral evidence as opposed to demonstrative proof; and he followed the great Anglican divines in asserting that there was a true authority, varying in its degrees, in the historic Church; that on the most fundamental points of religion this authority was trustworthy and supreme; that on many other questions it was clear and weighty, though it could not decide everything. This view of the "prophetical office of the Church" had the dialectical disadvantage of appearing to be a compromise, to many minds a fatal disadvantage. It got the name of the Via Media; a satisfactory one to practical men like Dr. Hook, to whom it recommended itself for use in popular teaching; but to others, in aftertimes, an ill-sounding phrase of dislike, which summed up the weakness of the Anglican case. Yet it only answered to the certain fact, that in the early and undivided Church there was such a thing as authority, and there was no such thing known as Infallibility. It was an appeal to the facts of history and human nature against the logical exigencies of a theory. Men must transcend the conditions of our experience if they want the certainty which the theory of Infallibility speaks of.
There were especially two weak points in this view of Anglicanism. Mr. Newman felt and admitted them, and of course they were forced on his attention by controversialists on both sides; by the Ultra Protestant school, whose modes of dealing with Scripture he had exposed with merciless logic and by the now eager Roman disputants, of whom Dr. Wiseman was the able and not over-scrupulous chief. The first of these points was that the authority of the undivided Church, which Anglicanism invoked, though it completely covered the great foundations of Christian doctrine, our faith as to the nature of God, did not cover with equal completeness other important points of controversy, such as those raised at the Reformation as to the Sacraments, and the justification of the sinner. The Anglican answer was that though the formal and conciliar authority was not the same in each case, the patristic literature of the time of the great councils, all that it took for granted and preserved as current belief and practice, all that resulted from the questions and debates of the time, formed a body of proof, which carried with it moral evidence only short of authoritative definition, and was so regarded in the Anglican formularies. These formularies implied the authority of the Church to speak; and what was defined on this authority was based on good evidence, though there were portions of its teaching which had even better. The other point was more serious. "Your theory," was the objection, "is nothing but a paper theory; it never was a reality; it never can be. There may be an ideal halting-place, there is neither a logical nor an actual one, between Romanism and the ordinary negations of Protestantism." The answer to the challenge then was, "Let us see if it cannot be realised. It has recognised foundations to build upon, and the impediments and interruptions which have hindered it are well known. Let us see if it will not turn out something more than a paper theory." That was the answer given at the time, abandoned ten years afterwards. But this at least may be said, that the longer experience of the last fifty years has shown that the Church of England has been working more and more on such a theory, and that the Church of England, whatever its faults may be, is certainly not a Church only on paper.
But on the principles laid down in this volume, the Roman controversy, in its varying forms, was carried on—for the time by Mr. Newman, permanently by the other leaders of the movement. In its main outlines, the view has become the accepted Anglican view. Many other most important matters have come into the debate. The publicly altered attitude of the Papacy has indefinitely widened the breach between England and Rome. But the fundamental idea of the relations and character of the two Churches remains the same as it was shadowed forth in 1836.
One very important volume on these questions ought not to be passed by without notice. This was the Treatise on the Church of Christ, 1838, by Mr. W. Palmer, who had already by his Origines of the English Ritual, 1832, done much to keep up that interest of Churchmen in the early devotional language of the Church, which had first been called forth by Bishop Lloyd's lectures on the Prayer Book. The Treatise on the Church was an honour to English theology and learning; in point of plan and structure we have few books like it.[72] It is comprehensive, methodical, well-compacted, and, from its own point of view, exhaustive. It is written with full knowledge of the state of the question at the time, both on the Anglican side and on the Roman. Its author evades no objection, and is aware of most. It is rigorous in form, and has no place for anything but substantial argument. It is a book which, as the Apologia tells us, commanded the respect of such an accomplished controversialist as Perrone; and, it may be added, of a theologian of an opposite school, Dr. Döllinger. It is also one on which the highest value has been set by Mr. Gladstone. It is remarkable that it did not exercise more influence on religious thought in Oxford at the critical time when it appeared. But it had defects, and the moment was against it. It was dry and formal—inevitably so, from the scientific plan deliberately adopted for it; it treated as problems of the theological schools, to be discussed by the rules of severe and passionless disputation, questions which were once more, after the interval of more than a century, beginning to touch hearts and consciences, and were felt to be fraught with the gravest practical issues. And Mr. Newman, in his mode of dealing with them, unsystematic, incomplete, unsatisfactory in many ways as it was, yet saw in them not abstract and scholastic inquiries, however important, but matters in which not only sound argument, but sympathy and quick intelligence of the conditions and working of the living minds around him, were needed to win their attention and interest. To persons accustomed to Mr. Newman's habit of mind and way of writing, his ease, his frankness, his candour, his impatience of conventionality, his piercing insight into the very centre of questions, his ever-ready recognition of nature and reality, his range of thought, his bright and clear and fearless style of argument, his undisplayed but never unfelt consciousness of the true awfulness of anything connected with religion, any stiff and heavy way of treating questions which he had treated would have seemed unattractive and unpersuasive. He had spoiled his friends for any mere technical handling, however skilful, of great and critical subjects. He himself pointed out in a review the unique merit and the real value of Mr. Palmer's book, pointing out also, significantly enough, where it fell short, both in substance and in manner. Observing that the "scientific" system of the English Church is not yet "sufficiently cleared and adjusted," and adding a variety of instances of this deficiency, he lets us see what he wanted done, where difficulties most pressed upon himself, and where Mr. Palmer had missed the real substance of such difficulties. Looking at it by the light of after-events, we can see the contradiction and reaction produced by Mr. Palmer's too optimist statements. Still, Mr. Newman's praise was sincere and discriminating. But Mr. Palmer's book, though never forgotten, scarcely became, what it at another time might well have become, an English text-book.
FOOTNOTES:
[68] Whately's Life, ed. 1875, pp. 187-190.
[69] Advertisement to vol. i. 1st Nov. 1834.
[70] Apologia, p. 139.
[71] Vide Lyra Apostolica, Nos. 170, 172:
How shall I name thee, Light of the wide West,
Or heinous error-seat?…
Oh, that thy creed were sound!
For thou dost soothe the heart, thou Church of Rome,
By thy unwearied watch and varied round
Of service, in thy Saviour's holy home.
And comp. No. 171, The Cruel Church.
[72] "The most important theological work which has lately appeared is Mr. Palmer's Treatise on the Church…. Whatever judgment may be formed of the conclusions to which he has come on the variety of points which he had to consider, we cannot contemplate without admiration, and (if it were right) without envy, the thorough treatment which his subject has received at his hands. It is indeed a work quite in character with the religious movement which has commenced in various parts of the Church, displaying a magnificence of design similar to that of the Bishop of London's plan of fifty new churches, and Dr. Pusey, of Oxford's, projected translation of the Fathers."—Brit. Crit.. July 1838. Short Notices.
CHAPTER XII
CHANGES
The first seven years of the movement, as it is said in the Apologia, had been years of prosperity. There had been mistakes; there had been opposition; there had been distrust and uneasiness. There was in some places a ban on the friends of Mr. Newman; men like Mr. James Mozley and Mr. Mark Pattison found their connexion with him a difficulty in the way of fellowships. But on the whole, things had gone smoothly, without any great breakdown, or any open collision with authority. But after 1840 another period was to begin of trouble and disaster. The seeds of this had been partially sown before in the days of quiet, and the time was come for their development. Differences in the party itself had been growing sharper; differences between the more cautious and the more fearless, between the more steady-going and the more subtle thinkers. The contrast between the familiar and customary, and the new—between the unknown or forgotten, and a mass of knowledge only recently realised—became more pronounced. Consequences of a practical kind, real or supposed; began to show themselves, and to press. And above all, a second generation, without the sobering experience of the first, was starting from where the first had reached to, and, in some instances, was rising up against their teachers' caution and patience. The usual dangers of all earnest and aggressive assertions of great principles appeared: contempt for everything in opinion and practice that was not advanced, men vying with each other in bold inferences, in the pleasure of "talking strong." With this grew fear and exasperation on the other side, misunderstandings, misgivings, strainings of mutual confidence, within. Dr. Hook alternated between violent bursts of irritation and disgust, and equally strong returns of sympathy, admiration, and gratitude; and he represented a large amount of feeling among Churchmen. It was but too clear that storms were at hand. They came perhaps quicker than they were anticipated.
Towards the end of 1838, a proposal was brought forward, for which in its direct aspect much might plausibly be said, but which was in intention and indirectly a test question, meant to put the Tractarians in a difficulty, and to obtain the weight of authority in the University against them. It was proposed to raise a subscription, and to erect a monument in Oxford, to the martyrs of the Reformation, Cranmer, Ridley, and Latimer. Considering that the current and popular language dated the Church of England from the Reformation of the sixteenth century, and cited the Reformers as ultimate and paramount authorities on its doctrine, there was nothing unreasonable in such a proposal. Dr. Hook, strong Churchman as he was, "called to union on the principles of the English Reformation." But the criticism which had been set afloat by the movement had discovered and realised, what defenders of the English Church had hitherto felt it an act of piety to disbelieve, when put before them by Romanists like Lingard, and radicals like Cobbett. that the Reformers had been accomplices in many indefensible acts, and had been inconsistent and untrustworthy theologians. Providentially, it was felt, the force of old convictions and tradition and the historical events of the time had obliged them to respect the essentials of Catholic truth and polity and usage; we owed to them much that was beautiful and devotional in the Prayer Book; and their Articles, clear in all matters decided by the early theology, avoided foreign extremes in dealing with later controversies. But their own individual language was often far in advance of the public and official language of formularies, in the direction of the great Protestant authorities of Geneva and Zurich. There were still, even among the movement party, many who respected the Reformers for the work which they had attempted, and partly and imperfectly done, to be more wisely and soberly carried on by their successors of the seventeenth century. But the charges against their Calvinistic and even Zwinglian language were hard to parry; even to those who respected them for their connexion with our present order of things, their learning, their soundness, their authority appeared to be greatly exaggerated; and the reaction from excessive veneration made others dislike and depreciate them. This was the state of feeling when the Martyrs' Memorial was started. It was eagerly pressed with ingenious and persevering arguments by Mr. Golightly, the indefatigable and long-labouring opponent of all that savoured of Tractarianism. The appeal seemed so specious that at first many even of the party gave in their adhesion. Even Dr. Pusey was disposed to subscribe to it. But Mr. Newman, as was natural, held aloof; and his friends for the most part did the same. It was what was expected and intended. They were either to commit themselves to the Reformation as understood by the promoters of the Memorial; or they were to be marked as showing their disloyalty to it. The subscription was successful. The Memorial was set up, and stood, a derisive though unofficial sign of the judgment of the University against them.
But the "Memorial" made little difference to the progress of the movement. It was an indication of hostility in reserve, but this was all; it formed an ornament to the city, but failed as a religious and effective protest. Up to the spring of 1839, Anglicanism, placed on an intellectual basin by Mr. Newman, developed practically in different ways by Dr. Pusey and Dr. Hook, sanctioned in theory by divines who represented the old divinity of the English Church, like Bishop Phillpotts and Mr. H.J. Rose, could speak with confident and hopeful voice. It might well seem that it was on its way to win over the coming generations of the English clergy. It had on its side all that gives interest and power to a cause,—thought, force of character, unselfish earnestness; it had unity of idea and agreement in purpose, and was cemented by the bonds of warm affection and common sympathies. It had the promise of a nobler religion, as energetic and as spiritual as Puritanism and Wesleyanism, while it drew its inspiration, its canons of doctrine, its moral standards, from purer and more venerable sources;—from communion, not with individual teachers and partial traditions, but with the consenting teaching and authoritative documents of the continuous Catholic Church.
Anglicanism was agreed, up to this time—the summer of 1839—as to its general principles. Charges of an inclination to Roman views had been promptly and stoutly met; nor was there really anything but the ignorance or ill-feeling of the accusers to throw doubt on the sincerity of these disavowals. The deepest and strongest mind in the movement was satisfied; and his steadiness of conviction could be appealed to if his followers talked wildly and rashly. He had kept one unwavering path; he had not shrunk from facing with fearless honesty the real living array of reasons which the most serious Roman advocates could put forward. With a frankness new in controversy, he had not been afraid to state them with a force which few of his opponents could have put forth. With an eye ever open to that supreme Judge of all our controversies, who listens to them on His throne on high, he had with conscientious fairness admitted what he saw to be good and just on the side of his adversaries, conceded what in the confused wrangle of conflicting claims he judged ought to be conceded. But after all admissions and all concessions, the comparative strength of his own case appeared all the more undeniable. He had stripped it of its weaknesses, its incumbrances, its falsehoods; and it did not seem the weaker for being presented in its real aspect and on its real grounds. People felt that he had gone to the bottom of the question as no one had yet dared to do. He was yet staunch in his convictions; and they could feel secure.
But a change was at hand. In the course of 1839, the little cloud showed itself in the outlook of the future; the little rift opened, small and hardly perceptible, which was to widen into an impassable gulf. Anglicanism started with undoubted confidence in its own foundations and its own position, as much against Romanism as against the more recent forms of religion. In the consciousness of its strength, it could afford to make admissions and to refrain from tempting but unworthy arguments in controversy with Rome; indeed the necessity of such controversy had come upon it unexpectedly and by surprise. With English frankness, in its impatience of abuses and desire for improvement within, it had dwelt strongly on the faults and shortcomings of the English Church which it desired to remedy; but while allowing what was undeniably excellent in Rome, it had been equally outspoken and emphatic in condemnation of the evils of Rome. What is there to wonder at in such a position? It is the position of every honest reforming movement, at least in England. But Anglican self-reliance was unshaken, and Anglican hope waxed stronger as the years went on, and the impression made by Anglican teaching became wider and deeper. Outside attacks, outside persecution, could now do little harm; the time was past for that. What might have happened had things gone on as they began, it is idle to inquire. But at the moment when all seemed to promise fair, the one fatal influence, the presence of internal uncertainty and doubt, showed itself. The body of men who had so for acted together began to show a double aspect. While one portion of it continued on the old lines, holding the old ground, defending the old principles, and attempting to apply them for the improvement of the practical system of the English Church, another portion had asked the question, and were pursuing the anxious inquiry, whether the English Church was a true Church at all, a true portion of the one uninterrupted Catholic Church of the Redeemer. And the question had forced itself with importunate persistence on the leading mind of the movement. From this time the fate of Tractarianism, as a party, was decided.
In this overthrow of confidence, two sets of influences may be traced.
1. One, which came from above, from the highest leading authority in the movement, was the unsettlement of Mr. Newman's mind. He has told the story, the story as he believed of his enfranchisement and deliverance; and he has told the story, though the story of a deliverance, with so keen a feeling of its pathetic and tragic character,—as it is indeed the most tragic story of a conversion to peace and hope on record,—that it will never cease to be read where the English language is spoken. Up to the summer of 1839, his view of the English position had satisfied him—satisfied him, that is, as a tenable one in the anomalies of existing Christendom. All seemed clear and hopeful, and the one thing to be thought of was to raise the English Church to the height of its own standard. But in the autumn of that year (1839), as he has told us, a change took place. In the summer of 1839, he had set himself to study the history of the Monophysite controversy. "I have no reason," he writes, "to suppose that the thought of Rome came across my mind at all…. It was during this course of reading that for the first time a doubt came across me of the tenableness of Anglicanism. I had seen the shadow of a hand on the wall. He who has seen a ghost cannot be as if he had never seen it. The heavens had opened and closed again." To less imaginative and slower minds this seems an overwrought description of a phenomenon, which must present itself sometime or other to all who search the foundations of conviction; and by itself he was for the time proof against its force. "The thought for the moment had been, The Church of Rome will be found right after all; and then it had vanished. My old convictions remained as before." But another blow came, and then another. An article by Dr. Wiseman on the Donatists greatly disturbed him. The words of St. Augustine about the Donatists, securus judicat orbis terrarum, rang continually in his ears, like words out of the sky. He found the threatenings of the Monophysite controversy renewed in the Arian: "the ghost had come a second time." It was a "most uncomfortable article," he writes in his letters; "the first real hit from Romanism which has happened to me"; it gave him, as he says, "a stomach-ache." But he still held his ground, and returned his answer to the attack in an article in the British Critic, on the "Catholicity of the English Church." He did not mean to take the attack for more than it was worth, an able bit of ex parte statement. But it told on him, as nothing had yet told on him. What it did, was to "open a vista which was closed before, and of which he could not see the end"; "we are not at the bottom of things," was the sting it left behind From this time, the hope and exultation with which, in spite of checks and misgivings, he had watched the movement, gave way to uneasiness and distress. A new struggle was beginning, a long struggle with himself, a long struggle between rival claims which would not be denied, each equally imperious, and involving fatal consequences if by mistake the wrong one was admitted. And it was not only the effect of these thoughts on his own mind which filled him with grief and trouble. He always thought much for others; and now there was the misery of perhaps unsettling others—others who had trusted him with their very souls—others, to whom it was impossible to explain the conflicts which were passing in his own mind. It was so bitter to unsettle their hope and confidence. All through this time, more trying than his own difficulties, were the perplexities and sorrows which he foresaw for those whom he loved. Very illogical and inconsecutive, doubtless; if only he had had the hard heart of a proselytiser, he would have seen that it was his duty to undermine and shatter their old convictions. But he cared more for the tempers and beliefs in which he was at one with his Anglican friends, than for those in which they could not follow him. But the struggle came on gradually. What he feared at first was not the triumph of Rome, but the break-up of the English Church; the apparent probability of a great schism in it. "I fear I see more clearly that we are working up to a schism in the English Church, that is, a split between Peculiars and Apostolicals … I never can be surprised at individuals going off to Rome, but that is not my chief fear, but a schism; that is, those two parties, which have hitherto got on together as they could, from the times of Puritanism downwards, gathering up into clear, tangible, and direct forces, and colliding. Our Church is not at one with itself, there is no denying it." That was at first the disaster before him. His thought for himself began to turn, not to Rome, but to a new life without office and authority, but still within the English Church. "You see, if things come to the worst, I should turn brother of charity in London." And he began to prepare for a move from Oxford, from St. Mary's, from his fellowship. He bought land at Littlemore, and began to plant. He asks his brother-in-law for plans for building what he calls a μονή. He looks forward to its becoming a sort of Monastic school, but still connected with the University.
In Mr. Newman's view of the debate between England and Rome, he had all along dwelt on two broad features, Apostolicity and Catholicity, likeness to the Apostolic teaching, and likeness to the uninterrupted unity and extent of the undivided Church; and of those two features he found the first signally wanting in Rome, and the second signally wanting in England. When he began to distrust his own reasonings, still the disturbing and repelling element in Rome was the alleged defect of Apostolicity, the contrast between primitive and Roman religion; while the attractive one was the apparent widely extended Catholicity in all lands, East and West, continents and isles, of the world-wide spiritual empire of the Pope. It is these two great points which may be traced in their action on his mind at this crisis. The contrast between early and Roman doctrine and practice, in a variety of ways, some of them most grave and important, was long a great difficulty in the way of attempting to identify the Roman Church, absolutely and exclusively, with the Primitive Church. The study of antiquity indisposed him, indeed, more and more to the existing system of the English Church; its claims to model itself on the purity and simplicity of the Early Church seemed to him, in the light of its documents, and still more of the facts of history and life, more and more questionable. But modern Rome was just as distant from the Early Church though it preserved many ancient features, lost or unvalued by England. Still, Rome was not the same thing as the Early Church; and Mr. Newman ultimately sought a way out of his difficulty—and indeed there was no other—in the famous doctrine of Development. But when the difficulty about Apostolicity was thus provided for, then the force of the great vision of the Catholic Church came upon him, unchecked and irresistible. That was a thing present, visible, undeniable as a fact of nature; that was a thing at once old and new; it belonged as truly, as manifestly, to the recent and modern world of democracy and science, as it did to the Middle Ages and the Fathers, to the world of Gregory and Innocent, to the world of Athanasius and Augustine. The majesty, the vastness of an imperial polity, outlasting all states and kingdoms, all social changes and political revolutions, answered at once to the promises of the prophecies, and to the antecedent idea of the universal kingdom of God. Before this great idea, embodied in concrete form, and not a paper doctrine, partial scandals and abuses seemed to sink into insignificance. Objections seemed petty and ignoble; the pretence of rival systems impertinent and absurd. He resented almost with impatience anything in the way of theory or explanation which seemed to him narrow, technical, dialectical. He would look at nothing but what had on it the mark of greatness and largeness which befitted the awful subject, and was worthy of arresting the eye and attention of an ecclesiastical statesman, alive to mighty interests, compared to which even the most serious human affairs were dwarfed and obscured. But all this was gradual in coming. His recognition of the claims of the English Church, faulty and imperfect as he thought it, did not give way suddenly and at once. It survived the rude shock of 1839, From first to almost the last she was owned as his "mother"—owned in passionate accents of disappointment and despair as a Church which knew not how to use its gifts; yet still, even though life seemed failing her, and her power of teaching and ruling seemed paralysed, his mother; and as long as there seemed to him a prospect of restoration to health, it was his duty to stay by her.[73] This was his first attitude for three or four years after 1839. He could not speak of her with the enthusiasm and triumph of the first years of the movement. When he fought her battles, it was with the sense that her imperfections made his task the harder. Still he clung to the belief that she held a higher standard than she had yet acted up to, and discouraged and perplexed he yet maintained her cause. But now two things happened. The Roman claims, as was natural when always before him, seemed to him more and more indisputable. And in England his interpretation of Anglican theology seemed to be more and more contradicted, disavowed, condemned, by all that spoke with any authority in the Church. The University was not an ecclesiastical body, yet it had practically much weight in matters of theology; it informally, but effectually, declared against him. The Bishops, one by one, of course only spoke as individuals; but they were the official spokesmen of the Church, and their consent, though not the act of a Synod, was weighty—they too had declared against him. And finally that vague but powerful voice of public opinion, which claims to represent at once the cool judgment of the unbiassed, and the passion of the zealous—it too declared against him. Could he claim to understand the mind of the Church better than its own organs?
Then at length a change came; and it was marked outwardly by a curious retractation of his severe language about Rome, published in a paper called the Conservative Journal, in January 1843; and more distinctly, by his resignation of St. Mary's in September 1843, a step contemplated for some time, and by his announcement that he was preparing to resign his fellowship. From this time he felt that he could no longer hold office, or be a champion of the English Church; from this time, it was only a matter of waiting, waiting to make quite certain that he was right and was under no delusion, when he should leave her for the Roman Communion. And to his intimate friends, to his sisters, he gave notice that this was now impending. To the world outside, all that was known was that he was much unsettled and distressed by difficulties.
It may be asked why this change was not at this time communicated, not to a few intimates, but to the world? Why did he not at this time hoist his quarantine flag and warn every one that he was dangerous to come near? So keen a mind must, it was said, have by this time foreseen how things would end; he ought to have given earlier notice. His answer was that he was sincerely desirous of avoiding, as far as possible, what might prejudice the Church in which he had ministered, even at the moment of leaving her. He saw his own way becoming clearer and clearer; but he saw it for himself alone. He was not one of those who forced the convictions of others; he was not one of those who think it a great thing to be followed in a serious change by a crowd of disciples. Whatever might be at the end, it was now an agonising wrench to part from the English body, to part from the numbers of friends whose loyalty was immovable, to part from numbers who had trusted and learned from him. Of course, if he was in the right way, he could wish them nothing better than that they should follow him. But they were in God's hands; it was not his business to unsettle them; it was not his business to ensnare and coerce their faith. And so he tried for this time to steer his course alone. He wished to avoid observation. He was silent on all that went on round him, exciting as some of the incidents were. He would not he hurried; he would give himself full time; he would do what he could to make sure that he was not acting under the influence of a delusion.
The final result of all this was long in coming; there was, we know, a bitter agony of five years, a prolonged and obstinate and cruel struggle between the deepest affections and ever-growing convictions. But this struggle, as has been said, did not begin with the conviction in which it ended. It began and long continued with the belief that though England was wrong, Rome was not right; that though the Roman argument seemed more and more unanswerable, there were insuperable difficulties of certain fact which made the Roman conclusion incredible; that there was so much good and truth in England, with all its defects and faults, which was unaccountable and unintelligible on the Roman hypothesis; that the real upshot was that the whole state of things in Christendom was abnormal; that to English Churchmen the English Church had immediate and direct claims which nothing but the most irresistible counter-claims could overcome or neutralise—the claims of a shipwrecked body cut off from country and home, yet as a shipwrecked body still organised, and with much saved from the wreck, and not to be deserted, as long as it held together, in an uncertain attempt to rejoin its lost unity. Resignation, retirement, silence, lay communion, the hope of ultimate, though perhaps long-deferred reunion—these were his first thoughts. Misgivings could not be helped, would not be denied, but need not be paraded, were to be kept at arm's-length as long as possible. This is the picture presented in the autobiography of these painful and dreary years; and there is every evidence that it is a faithful one. It is conceivable, though not very probable, that such a course might go on indefinitely. It is conceivable that under different circumstances he might, like other perplexed and doubting seekers after truth, have worked round through doubt and perplexity to his first conviction. But the actual result, as it came, was natural enough; and it was accelerated by provocation, by opponents without, and by the pressure of advanced and impatient followers and disciples in the party itself.
2. This last was the second of the two influences spoken of above. It worked from below, as the first worked from above.
Discussions and agitations, such as accompanied the movement, however much under the control of the moral and intellectual ascendancy of the leaders, could not of course be guaranteed from escaping from that control. And as the time went on, men joined the movement who had but qualified sympathy with that passionate love and zeal for the actual English Church, that acquaintance with its historical theology, and that temper of discipline, sobriety, and self-distrust, which marked its first representatives. These younger disciples shared in the growing excitement of the society round them. They were attracted by visible height of character, and brilliant intellectual power. They were alive to vast and original prospects, opening a new world which should be a contrast to the worn-out interest of the old. Some of these were men of wide and abstruse learning; quaint and eccentric scholars both in habit and look, students of the ancient type, who even fifty years ago seemed out of date to their generation. Some were men of considerable force of mind, destined afterwards to leave a mark on their age as thinkers and writers. To the former class belonged Charles Seager, and John Brande Morris, of Exeter College, both learned Orientalists, steeped in recondite knowledge of all kinds; men who had worked their way to knowledge through hardship and grinding labour, and not to be outdone in Germany itself for devouring love of learning and a scholar's plainness of life. In the other class may be mentioned Frederic Faber, J.D. Dalgairns, and W.G. Ward, men who have all since risen to eminence in their different spheres. Faber was a man with a high gift of imagination, remarkable powers of assimilating knowledge, and a great richness and novelty and elegance of thought, which with much melody of voice made him ultimately a very attractive preacher. If the promise of his powers has not been adequately fulfilled, it is partly to be traced to a want of severity of taste and self-restraint, but his name will live in some of his hymns, and in some very beautiful portions of his devotional writings. Dalgairns's mind was of a different order. "That man has an eye for theology," was the remark of a competent judge on some early paper of Dalgairns's which came before him. He had something of the Frenchman about him. There was in him, in his Oxford days, a bright and frank briskness, a mixture of modesty and arch daring, which gave him an almost boyish appearance; but beneath this boyish appearance there was a subtle and powerful intellect, alive to the problems of religious philosophy, and impatient of any but the most thorough solutions of them; while, on the other hand, the religious affections were part of his nature, and mind and will and heart yielded an unreserved and absolute obedience to the leading and guidance of faith. In his later days, with his mind at ease, Father Dalgairns threw himself into the great battle with unbelief; and few men have commanded more the respect of opponents not much given to think well of the arguments for religion, by the freshness and the solidity of his reasoning. At this time, enthusiastic in temper, and acute and exacting as a thinker, he found the Church movement just, as it were, on the turn of the wave. He was attracted to it at first by its reaction against what was unreal and shallow, by its affinities with what was deep in idea and earnest in life; then, and finally, he was repelled from it, by its want of completeness, by its English acquiescence in compromise, by its hesitations and clinging to insular associations and sympathies, which had little interest for him.
Another person, who was at this time even more prominent in the advanced portion of the movement party, and whose action had more decisive influence on its course, was Mr. W.G. Ward, Fellow of Balliol. Mr. Ward, who was first at Christ Church, had distinguished himself greatly at the Oxford Union as a vigorous speaker, at first on the Tory side; he came afterwards under the influence of Arthur Stanley, then fresh from Rugby, and naturally learned to admire Dr. Arnold; but Dr. Arnold's religious doctrines did not satisfy him; the movement, with its boldness and originality of idea and ethical character, had laid strong hold on him, and he passed into one of the most thoroughgoing adherents of Mr. Newman. There was something to smile at in his person, and in some of his ways—his unbusiness-like habits, his joyousness of manner, his racy stories; but few more powerful intellects passed through Oxford in his time, and he has justified his University reputation by his distinction since, both as a Roman Catholic theologian and professor, and as a profound metaphysical thinker, the equal antagonist on their own ground of J. Stuart Mill and Herbert Spencer. But his intellect at that time was as remarkable for its defects as for its powers. He used to divide his friends, and thinking people in general, into those who had facts and did not know what to do with them, and those who had in perfection the logical faculties, but wanted the facts to reason upon. He belonged himself to the latter class. He had, not unnaturally, boundless confidence in his argumentative powers; they were subtle, piercing, nimble, never at a loss, and they included a power of exposition which, if it was not always succinct and lively, was always weighty and impressive. Premises in his hands were not long in bringing forth their conclusions; and if abstractions always corresponded exactly to their concrete embodiments, and ideals were fulfilled in realities, no one could point out more perspicuously and decisively the practical judgments on them which reason must sanction. But that knowledge of things and of men which mere power of reasoning will not give was not one of his special endowments. The study of facts, often in their complicated and perplexing reality, was not to his taste. He was apt to accept them on what he considered adequate authority, and his argumentation, formidable as it always was, recalled, even when most unanswerable at the moment, the application of pure mathematics without allowance for the actual forces, often difficult to ascertain except by experiment, which would have to be taken account of in practice.
The tendency of this section of able men was unquestionably Romewards, almost from the beginning of their connexion with the movement. Both the theory and the actual system of Rome, so far as they understood it, had attractions for them which nothing else had. But with whatever perplexity and perhaps impatience, Mr. Newman's power held them back. He kept before their minds continually those difficulties of fact which stood in the way of their absolute and peremptory conclusions, and of which they were not much inclined to take account. He insisted on those features, neither few nor unimportant nor hard to see, which proved the continuity of the English Church with the Church Universal. Sharing their sense of anomaly in the Anglican theory and position, he pointed out with his own force and insight that anomaly was not in England only, but everywhere. There was much to regret, there was much to improve, there were many unwelcome and dangerous truths, invidiosi veri, to be told and defended at any cost. But patience, as well as honesty and courage, was a Christian virtue; and they who had received their Christianity at the hands of the English Church had duties towards it from which neither dissatisfaction nor the idea of something better could absolve them. Spartam nactus es, hanc exorna is the motto for every one whose lot is cast in any portion of Christ's Church. And as long as he could speak with this conviction, the strongest of them could not break away from his restraint. It was when the tremendous question took shape, Is the English Church a true Church, a real part of the Church Catholic?—when the question became to his mind more and more doubtful, at length desperate—that they, of course, became more difficult to satisfy, more confident in their own allegations, more unchecked in their sympathies, and, in consequence, in their dislikes. And in the continued effort—for it did continue—to make them pause and wait and hope, they reacted on him; they asked him questions which he found it hard to answer; they pressed him with inferences which he might put by, but of which he felt the sting; they forced on him all the indications, of which every day brought its contribution, that the actual living system of the English Church was against what he had taught to be Catholic, that its energetic temper and spirit condemned and rejected him. What was it that private men were staunch and undismayed? What was it that month by month all over England hearts and minds were attracted to his side, felt the spell of his teaching, gave him their confidence? Suspicion and disapprobation, which had only too much to ground itself upon, had taken possession of the high places of the Church. Authority in all its shapes had pronounced as decisively as his opponents could wish; as decisively as they too could wish, who desired no longer a barrier between themselves and Rome.
Thus a great and momentous change had come over the movement, over its action and prospects. It had started in a heroic effort to save the English Church. The claims, the blessings, the divinity of the English Church, as a true branch of Catholic Christendom, had been assumed as the foundation of all that was felt and said and attempted. The English Church was the one object to which English Christians were called upon to turn their thoughts. Its spirit animated the Christian Year, and the teaching of those whom the Christian Year represented. Its interests were what called forth the zeal and the indignation recorded in Froude's Remains. No one seriously thought of Rome, except as a hopelessly corrupt system, though it had some good and Catholic things, which it was Christian and honest to recognise. The movement of 1833 started out of the Anti-Roman feelings of the Emancipation time. It was Anti-Roman as much as it was Anti-Sectarian and Anti-Erastian. It was to avert the danger of people becoming Romanists from ignorance of Church principles. This was all changed in one important section of the party. The fundamental conceptions and assumptions were reversed. It was not the Roman Church, but the English Church, which was put on its trial; it was not the Roman Church, but the English, which was to be, if possible, apologised for, perhaps borne with for a time, but which was to be regarded as deeply fallen, holding an untenable position, and incomparably, unpardonably, below both the standard and the practical system of the Roman Church. From this point of view the object of the movement was no longer to elevate and improve an independent English Church, but to approximate it as far as possible to what was assumed to be undeniable—the perfect Catholicity of Rome. More almost than ideas and assumptions, the tone of feeling changed. It had been, towards the English Church, affectionate, enthusiastic, reverential, hopeful. It became contemptuous, critical, intolerant, hostile with the hostility not merely of alienation but disgust This was not of course the work of a moment, but it was of very rapid growth. "How I hate these Anglicans!" was the expression of one of the younger men of this section, an intemperate and insolent specimen of it. It did not represent the tone or the language of the leader to whom the advanced section deferred, vexed as he often was with the course of his own thoughts, and irritated and impatient at the course of things without. But it expressed but too truly the difference between 1833 and 1840.
FOOTNOTES:
[73] See Sermons on Subjects of the Day, 1843.