To Frederic Rogers, Esq.,[188] Sept. 25, 1834.

‘… By the time you get this, it will be near a year since I have heard a word about you…. Of N[ewman] I heard as late as December 15, 1833: I have just referred to the rascal’s letter. But as to K[eble] and C[hristie] and you and the M[ozleys], I am in utter ignorance on which side the Styx you are all residing…. I have entirely left off animal food, which has cooled me without weakening me; and I have left off writing radicalism, which did myself harm, and no one else any good: for I see neither N[ewman] nor [Rose] will take any of it. Also, above all, I have left off thinking, which, on matured reflection, I am convinced is the great evil of human life…. If the sun was not so intensely hot as to make sitting in the open air intolerable (N.B., there is no shade here), I should take to drawing; but, somehow, there is not much to tempt one in that department. The lights and shades are here a third proportional to the lights and shades of an English summer day, and those on a moonlight night. Everything is one mass of brightness, except for the first and last half-hours of the day. The skies, too, are entirely deficient in that glow which one’s English imagination associates with heat; pale transparency, which one can hardly look at for its brilliance, stares at one on every side, and every part of the sky reflects so much light on every part of the landscape, that you may apply to day what Virgil says of night:

‘Rogers heard from Froude yesterday,’ runs a postscript of Newman to Keble on Nov. 10. ‘He says nothing about his health, but is evidently homesick and lonely.’ And two days after, Newman tenderly explains to Hurrell himself: ‘I am not surprised you should be so unjust to me, for I should be so to you under the same circumstances. You see we expected you here with the Bishop of Barbados till the middle of May, and therefore did not send letters. When we found him here without you, we instantly began to write; by accidents which we could not help (e.g., the box was a fortnight on the road to Dartington), it was August before it was off. However, you had news of Oxford up to the minute of its going…. Keble’s father has taken to his bed, and is so ill that Keble does not leave him.’

Meanwhile, Hurrell had pursued his grievance, attacking Mr. Keble with wistful humour, during October. ‘I wish I knew Horace’s receipt for giving the sound of a swan to mute fishes,[189] and I most certainly should administer you a dose. I know you must have a great deal on your hands, so I should be contented with extracting only two pages in as big a hand as an idle undergraduate’s theme: but I really do wish to hear something of you…. Concerning your worship’s self, I have been able to collect that you were in existence on or about the 12th of June last…. [Davison’s?] death was a great surprise to me, and I may almost say a shock, as I had always looked to him to do something great for us…. Do you know, I partly fear that you … are going to back out of the conspiracy and leave me and [Newman] to our fate? I mean to ally myself to him in a close league, and put as much mischief into his head as I can. He has sent me a great many of his pamphlets, etc., which I admire greatly for their ἦθος and execution; and I have written back to him, pointing out wherein I think him too conservative.’

The deceased colleague may well have been John Davison, who had died on the sixth day of May, 1834; but Hurrell would not have seen the announcement before July. Davison is commonly reckoned as one of the old school, the Oriel Noetics, or Liberals; but there is a contrary impression of him to be drawn from some charming pages in Mozley’s Reminiscences.[190] Newman twice names him with Rose as a steadfast encourager of the earliest Tracts.[191] There is no doubt that he sympathised with the Tractarians more than his indecisive habit would suffer him to testify by deed, and he was much beloved by them. Hurrell’s expectation of ‘something great’ from him would almost inevitably centre about the Scripture Commentary which he was known to be writing and rewriting, but his fastidious self-criticism got the better of that and him, after a most Oxonian fashion, as he directed his widow to burn all his manuscripts. Besides, he was fifty-seven, and naturally preferred an evening siesta on Troy Wall to any chances of war. Newman, looking back, wrote feelingly of him in April, 1842: ‘It is surely mysterious, considering what the world is, how it needs improvement, and, moreover, that this life is the appropriate time for action, or, what is emphatically called in Scripture, work, that they who seem gifted for the definite purpose of influencing and edifying their brethren, should be allowed to do so much less than might be expected…. Left to ourselves, we are apt to grudge that the powers of such a mind as [Mr. Davison’s] have not had full range in his age and country, and that a promise of such high benefits should, owing to circumstances beyond man’s control, have been but partially accomplished.’[192]

Hurrell’s playful use of the word ‘conspiracy’ to indicate the Movement, will be noted. It was habitual with him from the first. It irritated many excellent persons at the time; it irritated Dean Burgon fifty years later. In the chapter devoted to Mr. Rose, in Twelve Good Men, Dean Burgon administers to Hurrell an oblique rebuke. ‘Froude, a man of splendid abilities and real genius, but sadly wanting in judgment and of fatal indiscretion, rendered the good cause the greatest disservice in his power by speaking of the Hadleigh Conference in a letter to a friend as “the conspiracy”: which letter was soon afterward published.’ Yet the word was really employed, and it may have been even invented, a fortnight before the meeting at Hadleigh, by none other than Mr. William Palmer! ‘Now I hope you will be able to join in this little plan and conspiracy,’ he wrote to Mr. Perceval on July 10, 1833. A more recent, and an equally historic use of the word (not ironic in the least, this time), is Archbishop Tait’s, in condemning the publications of the Society of the Holy Cross:[193] ‘to counteract what I feel obliged to call a CONSPIRACY within our own body against the doctrine, the discipline and the practice of our Reformed Church.’

In this later Newman correspondence, as Miss Mozley the Editor of it remarks, ‘R. H. Froude appears more as critic than originator or author. His more intimate friends required his criticism, and rested on his judgment. In his own person, this faculty acted mainly as a check. He often speaks of trial and failure in his own attempts to bring out what was working in his mind; as, for instance: “I have tried to write a criticism on the Apollo [Belvedere], but cannot bring out my meaning, which is abstruse and metaphysico-poetical. I always get bombastic, and am forced to scratch out.” His critical faculty was too masterful to be practised upon himself, but when exercised for the benefit of friends to whom he looked up, he could give free license to a pungent pen, and yet leave the modern reader to understand how anxious those friends might well be to secure his comments, as long as they were attainable. Keble, in his own simple way, sends his papers to his old pupil to be overlooked by him; and Mr. Newman was more at ease with Froude’s imprimatur. Thus, he sends him draughts of papers; for example, “No. 2, Keble’s, No. 1, mine”; with the order: “criticise the whole very accurately in matter and style, and send it back by return of post.” Of course the state of Froude’s health made criticism more possible than authorship, but, also, different intellectual powers and functions are called into play.’[194]

It is certainly noticeable enough, in all the intercourse of these years, between Keble, Newman and Froude, how the ordinary business of the University is completely ignored. It is like necromancy to remember that men were really still hastily reading the Ethics by the fire, and emptying bottles, and, with their pipes, racing off to Shotover, through the white salve-like mud, for a constitutional. ‘The Tracts,’ says Mr. Mark Pattison sadly, ‘desolated Oxford life, and suspended, for an indefinite period, all science and humane letters, and the first strivings for intellectual freedom which had moved in the bosom of Oriel.’ Such æsthetic havoc was never caused in a city, unless under Savonarola, when all the wonted social graces went to the dust-bin, and works of art made acceptable fagots, and Christ was hailed, without legal precedent, King of Florence.

On November 18, 1834, Newman resumes, in reference to complaints from Hurrell, ‘suffering under intolerable delays incident to distant correspondence in those days’:

‘I am so angry with you, I cannot say! Have we not sent you a full box? That up to Sept. 29 you had not received it, is as hard for us to bear as for you. Why will you not have a little faith?… I suppose all this is for your good. You want a taming in various ways. It is to wean you from your over-interest in politics … so you see you are being taught to unlearn the world, the ecclesiastical as well as the worldly world. A strange thought came across me about you some six weeks ago, when I saw a letter from Tucker[195] of C. C. C., giving an account of his prospects in India. He is not at all an imaginative or enthusiastic man; but really, a religious spirit has sprung up among military men at our stations, and having no angel to direct them to Joppa, they have turned Evangelicals. The various sects there have a leaning towards the Church, and the men of colour are forming centres of operation. My thought was, if your health would not let you come home, you ought to be a Bishop in India….’

What Newman did not confess to his friend was that he had dreamed of their fates as one: he, too, would be a Bishop in India. To his sister Jemima he had written from Tunbridge Wells on October 2: ‘I have been much struck with a most sensible account of the state of India just received here from Mr. Tucker, in almost every word of which (it is full of practical and doctrinal matters), I agree. Though he is a Calvinist, I do believe our differences would, in India, almost be a matter of a few words. He gives a most exciting account of his field of labour, without intending it. At this moment, could I choose, and have all circumstances and providences at my disposal, I would go as an independent Bishop to his part of India, and found a Church there. This, you will say, is an ambitious flight. I am sure some one ought to be sent as Bishop; but the State, the State! we are crippled. I can fancy the day coming when India might be a refuge, if our game was up here.’ Froude agreed. He says elsewhere: ‘The present Church system is an incubus upon the country. It spreads its arms in all directions, claiming the whole surface of the earth for its own, and refusing a place to any subsidiary system to spring upon. Would that the waters would throw up some Acheloides, where some new Bishop might erect a See beyond the blighting influence of our upas trees.[196] Yet I suppose that before he could step in, an Act of Parliament would put its paw upon the κρησφύγετον, and include it within the limits of some adjacent diocese. I admire [Mozley’s?] hit about our being united to the State as Israel was to Egypt.’

To return to the letter sent to Barbados on November 18. Around this half-quaint suggestion of young mitred revolutionaries in unhampered Sees, Newman’s love and genius break forth together.

‘It quite amused[197] me for awhile, and made me think how many posts there are in His Kingdom, how many offices, who says to one “Do this, and he doeth it,” etc. It is quite impossible that some way or other you are not destined to be the instrument of God’s purposes. Though I saw the earth cleave and you fall in, or Heaven open, and a chariot appear, I should say just the same. God has ten thousand posts of service. You might be of use in the central elemental fire; you might be of use in the depths of the sea.’

To the editor of the Letters and Correspondence to 1845 we owe, again, this enriching footnote:

‘In Vol. ii. of the Parochial Sermons (Ascension Day, p. 214) there is a passage which throws light on this ardent confident strain, prompted as it is evidently by the failure of hope in his friend’s recovery for service in this present scene. “Moreover, this departure of Christ and coming of the Holy Ghost leads our minds with great comfort to the thought of many lower dispensations of Providence towards us…. This is a thought which is particularly soothing as regards the loss of friends, or of especially gifted men who seem, in their day, the earthly support of the Church…. Doubtless, ‘it is expedient’ they should be taken away; otherwise some great mercy will not come to us. They are taken away, perchance, to other duties in God’s service equally ministrative to the salvation of the elect as earthly service. Christ went to intercede with the Father: we do not know, we may not boldly speculate, yet it may be that Saints departed intercede, unknown to us, for the victory of the Truth upon earth … they are taken away for some purpose surely; their gifts are not lost to us; their soaring minds, the fire of their contemplations, the sanctity of their desires, the vigour of their faith, the sweetness and gentleness of their affections, were not given without an object.”’

A long letter to Newman, on Nov. 23, opens: ‘Do you know, I am hungry and thirsty to hear about you, and whether your health stands, in the midst of your occupations? My father tells me your Sermons are talked of in all directions…. I have entirely left off meat; my dinner is toast, and a basin of very weak chicken broth. Breakfast is my chief meal, and consists of a vast joram[198] of milk and arrow-root. It is an odd thing, [as] milk never used to agree with me, but I find that by putting a good lot of cinnamon into it, I can digest any quantity. I find I must not take exercise so as to put me out of breath, as that increases my cough, yet the more I take the stronger I get; so that I am in a dilemma, which I shall cut by borrowing one of the Bishop’s horses instead of walking. I am perforce as idle as possible, my chief occupation being to keep thoughts out of my head. In this respect I find my friend Sanctus Thomas[199] of infinite use. Dawdling over translations, and picking facts out of allusions just keep one going for the time, without supplying any materials to brood over. If you see Keble, congratulate him on the Yank edition of The Christian Year,[200] which has gone on Oakeley’s[201] plan of putting the fine passages in italics. It is amusing to see the selection which he[202] has made…. As to sentiment, I am heartily tired of this place and climate. I am sure it has been too hot for me, particularly during August, September, and October, the hurricane months. I fancy, too, if there was something more to interest one, I should have been benefited by it. Niggerland is a poor substitute for the limen Apostolorum! However, I do verily believe that if I had stayed in England I should have had a confirmed disease on my lungs by this time…. I have not written a verse since I have been out here, and could not, for the life of me…. If I had the necessary books here, I should like much to get together materials for the Lives of Bishops Andrewes, Cosin, and Overall. They might be made into a nice first volume for a series of Lives of Apostolical Divines of the Church of England: a genus which seems to me to have come into existence about the beginning of James I., and to have become extinct with the Nonjurors…. I wish I could say, as John of Salisbury of Saint Thomas: “Domino Cantuarensi, quoad literaturam et mores, plurimum profuit exilium illud.” But somehow I think I have become even more uncharitable and churlish than I was!’

‘When I come home, I mean to rat-and-be-married: i.e., if I can hook in anyone to be such a fool. The great difference between a wife and a friend is that a wife cannot cut one, and a friend can. It is a bad thing περισσὰ φρονεῖν, so I shall certainly rat.[203] I see that … [Henry Wilberforce][204] has … Old [Ryder’s] apostacy I knew of before. [Isaac][205] cannot hold out long, if he is not fallen already. So why should you and I be wiser than our neighbours?[206] Some months ago, before I had repented of my radicalism, I was devising a scheme for you, which was knocked on the head by my finding from The British Magazine that you were ordained by the Bishop of Oxford.[207] For my part, I would rather have had my orders from a Scotch Bishop, and I thought of suggesting the same to you. The stream is purer, and, besides, it would have left one free from some embarrassing engagements.[208] By the by, all I know about any of you is through The British Magazine…. I am very thirsty for more authentic information. Not that I would have you write to me after the receipt of this letter, though; for by that time I shall most likely be on my way back. I shall start as early as I can in April, and I really begin now to think that I shall come back cured. At least people tell me that since the weather has become cooler I have altered for the better in appearance rapidly, and certainly I have in strength…. For the last three weeks, I have had a horse, which I have been cool enough to smug from the Bishop’s stables in his absence;[209] and this, I think, has been of use to me.’

The letter to Newman, as usual, goes deeper, and touches sadly on more intimate matters.

‘… There was a passage in a letter I have just received from my father that made me feel so infinitely dismal, that I must write to you about it. He says you have written to him to learn something about me, and to ask what to do with my money. It really made me feel as if I was dead, and you were sweeping up my remains; and, by the by, if I was dead, why should I be cut off from the privilege of helping on the Good Cause? I don’t know what money I left: little enough I suspect; but, whatever it was, I am superstitious enough to think that any good it could do “in honorem Dei et sacrosanctæ Matris Ecclesiæ,” would have done something too “in salutem animæ meæ.”

‘… My father’s letter was a dismal one altogether. He tells me Isaac[210] is far from well, and Sir George and Lady Prevost obliged to leave England. Also that my poor sister [Phillis] has just sailed for Madeira to escape the winter, for fear of an affection just like mine…. Also that Mr. Keble[211] is supposed to be on his death-bed. About you personally I hear nothing. As for myself, it really seems as if I was going to have a respite. I have still some symptoms which make me fear it may turn out moonshine, e.g., great irritability of pulse, and shortness of wind in walking up hill. But everyone says, and I cannot help observing, that my looks are greatly altered for the better…. Sometimes I seem to myself very ridiculous to give way to such doleful thoughts, considering how very little there is apparently the matter with me; and if it was not for the effect consumption had taken on my … family, I should be ashamed of myself. But the pertinacity of my trifling ailment has sometimes seemed to me like a warning that fate had put its hand on me for the next [world].

‘When I get your letter, I expect a rowing for my Roman Catholic sentiments. Really, I hate the Reformation and the Reformers more and more,[212] and have almost made up my mind that the Rationalist spirit they set afloat is the ψευδοπροφήτης of the Revelations. I have a theory about the Beast and Woman too, which conflicts with yours; but which I will not inflict on you now. I have written nothing for a long time, and only read in a desultory, lounging way; but really, it is not out of idleness, for I find that the less I do the better I am, and so on principle resist doing a good deal that I am tempted to. One of the Bishop’s horses has contributed much to my recovery, as well as amusement. To my great satisfaction, I have found that just beyond the range of my longer walks there is a range of real fine scenery that I had not a dream of.

‘I am ashamed of myself for having grumbled at you; your letter[213] almost made me cry! My dumps are my only excuse, and you may guess I have had a good dose of them. Now I am in much better spirits about myself, and flooded with letters to boot, so I ought to be in a good humour; yet I don’t know whether the prospect of being home again soon, and the knowledge of what is going on there, has not made me less contented…. I am sorry to hear such poor accounts of you and Isaac. Keble says you are overworked. So does Christie; yet I would not have you leave any of it except the Deanship. On one or two points I am inclined to grumble at you. You seem to be finessing too deep. Why publish poor Bishop Cosin’s Tract on Transubstantiation?[214] Surely no member of the Church of England is in any danger of overrating the miracle of the Eucharist?… I am more and more indignant at the Protestant doctrine on the subject of the Eucharist, and think that the principle on which it is founded is as proud, irreverent, and foolish as that of any heresy, even Socinianism. I must write you out a sentence of Pascal on this. (My edition is differently arranged from most, so I cannot refer you to it.[215]) Speaking of Isa. xlv. 15, he says: “Il a demeuré caché sous la voile de la nature qui nous le couvre, jusqu’à l’Incarnation; et quand il a fallu qu’il ait paru, il s’est encore plus caché, en se couvrant de l’humanité…. Enfin, quand il a voulu accomplir la promesse qu’il fit à ses apôtres de demeurer avec les hommes jusqu’à son dernier avènement, il a choisi demeurer dans le plus étrange et le plus obscur secret de tous: savoir, sous les espèces de l’Eucharistie.” And then he goes on to say that deists penetrate the veil of Nature, heretics that of the Incarnation; “mais pour nous, nous devons nous estimer heureux de ce que Dieu nous éclaire jusqu’à le reconnaître sous les espèces du pain et du vin.” I believe you will agree with me that this is orthodox…. Also, why do you praise Ridley?[216] Do you know sufficient good about him to counterbalance the fact that he was the associate of Cranmer, Peter Martyr, and Bucer? (N.B.—How beautifully the Edinburgh Review[217] has shown up Luther, Melancthon, and Co.! What good genius has possessed them to do our dirty work?) I have also to grumble at you for letting Pusey call the Reformers “the Founders of our Church,” in that excellent and much-to-be-studied paper on Fasting.[218] Pour moi, I never mean, if I can help it, to use any phrases even, which can connect me with such a set. I shall never call the Holy Eucharist “the Lord’s Supper,” nor God’s priests “Ministers of the Word,” nor the Altar “the Lord’s Table,” etc., etc.; innocent as such phrases are in themselves, they have been dirtied: a fact of which you seem oblivious on many occasions. Nor shall I even abuse the Roman Catholics as a Church for anything except excommunicating us. So much for fault-finding…. I am amused to see among your Sermons the Naples one and the Dartington one. I can see the train of thought which suggested the latter.[219] Since then I have never been well, and then came my poor sister’s business, who, by the bye, is now at Madeira…. I have two schemes about the Tracts…. 1st, I should like a series of the Apostolical Divines of the Church of England…. 2nd, I think one might take the Jansenist saints, Francis de Sales,[220] the nuns of Port Royal, Pascal, etc., who seem to me to be of a more sentimental imaginative cast than any of our own, and to give more room for writing ad captandum…. Must it not be owned that the Church of England Saints, however good in essentials, are, with a few rare exceptions, deficient in the austere beauty of the Catholic ἦθος? K[eble] will be severe on me for this, but I cannot deny that Laud’s architecture seems to me typical.’

This is the letter so charmingly annotated for us by Lord Blachford’s anecdote. ‘There’s a Basil for you!’ said Newman, with humorous deprecation, when he read the grudging advice to lay by, in his great weariness, ever so little of his accustomed work. The comparison rose readily to his lips, for he had been busy writing the chapters of his Church of the Fathers, month by month, and he was fresh from the beautiful portraiture of SS. Basil and Gregory Nazianzum.[221] He had called Hurrell his Basil under no mere momentary sense of a certain ineradicable blithe hardness in his friend. Newman, as sensitive and seeing as S. Gregory himself, must have been conscious at the time how mysteriously fragments of modern biography were getting lodged into his Early Christian exegetics: for in truth he and Hurrell were as like Gregory and Basil as their impersonators in a miracle play. The analogy is not irrelevant, and it is the more attractive the more it is followed out, especially as there is in it nothing akin to the painful difference which long severed the loving-hearted great Saints from each other. ‘Basil’ at Dartington pitied no one much, himself least of all; the personal consideration affected him at all times as little as it had affected his mighty archetype, a man of yea and nay, of cloudless vision and unstinted enterprise.

Newman writes again most tenderly on Jan. 18, from London.

‘I would give twopence if circumstances should ever so turn up that you could make an occasional residence in Oxford compatible with your clerical duties,[222] and that we could concoct a second edition of old times again. It makes me laugh when I think of your old clipped horse, and how I was choused[223] by John G.; and sundry other matters which come into one’s head when more serious matters ought to be there. I wonder if you are the same fellow now that you used to be? I am afraid my old self is determined to stick by me till the last. But to talk sense: I really do indulge the hope that sometime we may be thrown together again. Undoubtedly you owe a debt to your destinies, which as a mere parish priest you can never repay. Your old project about the Mendicant Orders was the sort of thing: though perhaps something connected with later times would tell more just at present. As to myself, θεῶν ἐν γούνασι κεῖται whether I am ever to be of any use, though I now begin to entertain serious hopes that I shall recover. Perhaps you know that I have been out here, in exile inter nigridas, for this year and a quarter. The first winter I got very little good; and in the summer the heat kept me in a feverish state, which low diet could not counteract; so I began to think it was up with me; ὅταιν ὕδωρ πνίγῃ, etc., and I own I felt very doleful: but since the cool weather set in I have made a decided start, which has put me in a better humour; and the cooler it is the better I am; so that I dare say if I had gone to Madeira, or to Rome a second time, I might have been well. I shall not be sorry for an excuse for spending another winter in the south of Europe.

‘While out here I have stuck to my old prejudices as tight as I could; yet I fairly own that I think the niggers less incapable of being raised in the scale of being than I used. I don’t mean that, generally speaking, they are at all fit for the situation in which the law has placed them; but that here and there you see specimens which prove them, unequivocally enough, to be of the race of Adam, is not to be denied. Many of them are clever, and some affectionate and even honest, and if a more judicious system had been pursued, I should not have despaired of seeing them become generally so. As it is, the prospect is even in this island a very gloomy one, and in the others, the state of things seems next to hopeless. In Antigua, where they are quite let loose, they have been playing a very clever trick in many places: which is very characteristic of the negro intellect, sharp enough as to the moment, and absolutely without thought as to the next. In making sugar it is very important that the canes should be squeezed as soon as possible after they are cut: a few hours hurts them, and twenty-four spoils them; so our friends Quakoo and Co. cut away very diligently, and then strike for wages. Here in Barbados they cannot play the same trick, as the magistrates would flog them; and indeed flogging is scarcely less common, and more severe now, than under the old system. In this island, the most melancholy result of the change yet discernible is the condition of the emancipated children under six. The mothers, who have gone on hitherto in their lax amours with a certainty that any consequences that might result would be rather in their favour than otherwise, have been bringing a host of wretched urchins into the world and consigning them over to the estate nurses, sans soin; and now the produce of the last six years is returned upon their hands, unless they will consent to apprentice them; this they will not do, out of spite to their masters, but take the trouble on themselves they will not: so the squalid little wretches starve and die off shockingly; and those that live are locked up in their mother’s house while she is at work, doing nothing but quarrel, growing up in absolute uselessness, and with no chance of improving…. As to the religious prospects of these colonies, I think them very bad indeed. If the Church was thrown on the voluntary system, and left to make its way as the Wesleyans do among the poorer classes, it would make sure as it went, though perhaps the progress might at first seem slow; but now all is mere show and rottenness…. Another difficulty arises from the views of the Clergy: those who have any deference for Church authority are too generally mere Z’s…. Religious instruction out here means marrying the niggers, baptizing them, and teaching them to read.

‘Vivas, valeas, et Apostolicus fias. I shall be back in May.’

Sir James Stephen was very wroth with Froude for his attitude towards the slaves of the West Indian Colonies, deducing that attitude from some allusions of Froude’s own to ‘anti-slavery cant.’ The Editors of the Remains attest that Hurrell did not suffer (as later Mr. J. A. Froude was said to do, from other alleged causes) from negrophobia. But certainly his speech about ‘the niggers’ does not always sound reassuring. Perhaps in this, as in other matters, he leans upon the reader’s general knowledge of him, and requires that to supply the marginal comment.

‘I have a miscellaneous jumble of things that I want to talk to you about, if I can but arrange them in any sort of order…. And first, I shall attack you for the expression “The Church teaches” so-and-so, which I observe is in the Tract[225] equivalent to “The Prayer-Book etc. teach[es] us” so-and-so. Now suppose a conscientious layman to inquire on what grounds the Prayer-Book etc., are called the teaching of the Church: how shall we answer him? Shall we tell him that they are embodied in an Act of Parliament? So is the Spoliation Bill. Shall we tell him that they were formerly enacted by Convocation in the reign of Charles II.? But what especial claim had this Convocation to monopolise the name and authority of the Church? Shall we tell him that all the clergy assented to them ever since their enactment? But to what interpretation of them have all, or even the major part of the clergy assented? For if it is the assent of the clergy that makes the Prayer-Book etc. the teaching of the Church, the Church teaches only that interpretation of them to which all, or at least the majority of the clergy have assented; and in order to ascertain this, it will be necessary to inquire, not for what may seem to the inquirer to be their real meaning, but for the meaning which the majority of the clergy have, in fact, attached to them! It will be necessary to poll the Hoadleians, Puritans, and Laudians, and to be determined by [the] most votes. Again, supposing him to have ascertained these, another question occurs. Why is the opinion of the English clergy, since the enactment of the Prayer-Book, entitled to be called the teaching of the Church, more than that of the clergy of the sixteen previous centuries; or, again, than the clergy of France, Italy, Spain, Russia, etc., etc.? I can see no other claim which the Prayer-Book has on a layman’s deference, as the teaching of the Church, which the Breviary and Missal have not in a far greater degree…. I know you will snub me for this…. Surely no teaching nowadays is authoritative in the sense in which the Apostles’ was, except the Bible? nor any in the sense in which Timothy’s was, except that of Primitive Tradition? To find a sense in which the teaching of the modern clergy is authoritative, I confess baffles me.[226] …

‘Next, as to The Christian Year. In the Fifth of November—[as to]