From ‘The Oxford Counter-Reformation’ in ‘Short Studies on Great Subjects.’ Series IV. By James Anthony Froude. London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1883.
[By the kind permission of Miss Froude and of Messrs. Longmans.]
‘… The last forty or fifty years will be memorable hereafter in the history of English opinion. The number of those who recollect the beginnings of the Oxford Revival is shrinking fast; and such of us as survive may usefully note down their personal recollections as a contribution, so far as it goes, to the general narrative. It is pleasant, too, to recall the figures of those who played the chief parts in the drama. If they had not been men of ability, they could not have produced the revolution that was brought about by them. Their personal characters were singularly interesting. Two of them were distinctly men of real genius. My own brother was, at starting, the foremost of the party; the flame, therefore, naturally burnt hot in my own immediate environment. The phrases and formulas of Anglo-Catholicism had become household words in our family, before I understood coherently what the stir and tumult was about.
‘We fancy that we are free agents. We are conscious of what we do; we are not conscious of the causes which make us do it; and therefore we imagine that the cause is in ourselves. The Oxford leaders believed that they were fighting against the spirit of the age. They were themselves most completely the creatures of their age. It was one of those periods when conservative England had been seized with a passion for reform. Parliament was to be reformed; the municipal institutions were to be reformed; there was to be an end of monopolies and privileges. The Constitution was to be cut in pieces and boiled in the Benthamite caldron, from which it was to emerge in immortal youth. In a reformed State there needed a reformed Church. My brother and his friends abhorred Bentham and all his works. The Establishment, in its existing state, was too weak to do battle with the new enemy. Protestantism was the chrysalis of Liberalism. The Church, therefore, was to be unprotestantised. The Reformation, my brother said, “was a bad setting of a broken limb.” The limb needed breaking a second time, and then it would be equal to its business.
‘My brother exaggerated the danger, and underestimated the strength, which existing institutions and customs possess, so long as they are left undisturbed. Before he and his friends undertook the process of reconstruction, the Church was perhaps in the healthiest condition which it had ever known…. The average English incumbent of fifty years ago was a man of private fortune, the younger brother of the landlord perhaps, and holding the family living; or it might be the landlord himself, his advowson being part of the estate. His professional duties were his services on Sunday, funerals and weddings on week-days, and visits, when needed, among the sick. In other respects he lived like his neighbours, distinguished from them only by a black coat and white neckcloth, and greater watchfulness over his words and actions. He farmed his own glebe; he kept horses; he shot and hunted moderately, and mixed in general society. He was generally a magistrate; he attended public meetings, and his education enabled him to take a leading part in county business. His wife and daughters looked after the poor, taught in the Sunday school, and managed the penny clubs and clothing clubs. He himself was spoken of in the parish as “the master,” the person who was responsible for keeping order there, and who knew how to keep it. The labourers and the farmers looked up to him. The family in the “great house” could not look down upon him. If he was poor, it was still his pride to bring up his sons as gentlemen; and economies were cheerfully submitted to at home to give them a start in life at the University, or in the Army or Navy.
‘Our own household was a fair representative of the order. My father was Rector of the parish. He was Archdeacon, he was Justice of the Peace. He had a moderate fortune of his own, consisting chiefly in land, and he belonged, therefore, to the “landed interest.” Most of the magistrates’ work of the neighbourhood passed through his hands. If anything was amiss, it was his advice which was most sought after; and I remember his being called upon to lay a troublesome ghost. In his younger days, he had been a hard rider across country. His children knew him as a continually busy, useful man of the world, a learned and cultivated antiquary, and an accomplished artist. My brothers and I were excellently educated, and were sent to School and College. Our spiritual lessons did not go beyond the Catechism. We were told that our business in life was to work, and to make an honourable position for ourselves. About doctrine, Evangelical or Catholic, I do not think that in my early boyhood I ever heard a single word, in Church or out of it. The institution had drifted into the condition of what I should call moral health. It did not instruct us in mysteries, it did not teach us to make religion a special object of our thoughts; it taught us to use religion as a light by which to see our way along the road of duty. Without the sun, our eyes would be of no use to us; but if we look at the sun we are simply dazzled, and can see neither it nor anything else. It is precisely the same with theological speculations. If the beacon lamp is shining, a man of healthy mind will not discuss the composition of the flame. Enough if it shows him how to steer, and keep clear of shoals and breakers. To this conception of the thing we had practically arrived. Doctrinal controversies were sleeping. People went to Church because they liked it, because they knew that they ought to go, and because it was the custom. They had received the Creeds from their fathers, and doubts about them had never crossed their minds. Christianity had wrought itself into the constitution of their natures. It was a necessary part of the existing order of the universe, as little to be debated about as the movements of the planets or the changes of the seasons.
‘Such the Church of England was, in the country districts, before the Tractarian Movement. It was not perfect, but it was doing its work satisfactorily. It is easier to alter than to improve, and the beginning of change, like the beginning of strife, is like the letting out of water. Jupiter, in Lessing’s fable, was invited to mend a fault in human nature. The fault was not denied, but Jupiter said that man was a piece of complicated machinery, and if he touched a part he might probably spoil the whole.
‘But a new era was upon us. The miraculous nineteenth century was coming of age, and all the world was to be remade…. History was reconstructed for us. I had learned, like other Protestant children, that the Pope was Antichrist, and that Gregory VII. had been a special revelation of that being. I was now taught that Gregory VII. was a Saint. I had been told to honour the Reformers. The Reformation became the Great Schism, Cranmer a traitor, and Latimer a vulgar ranter. Milton was a name of horror, and Charles I. was canonised and spoken of as the holy and blessed Martyr St. Charles. I asked once whether the Church of England was able properly to create a Saint? St. Charles was immediately pointed out to me. Similarly, we were to admire the Nonjurors, to speak of James III. instead of The Pretender; to look for Antichrist, not in the Pope, but in Whigs and revolutionists and all their works. Henry of Exeter,[377] so famous in those days, announced once, in my hearing, that the Court of Rome had regretted the Emancipation Act as a victory of Latitudinarianism. I suppose he believed what he was saying….
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‘These were the views which we used to hear in our home-circle, when the Tracts were first beginning. We had been bred, all of us, Tories of the old school. This was Toryism in ecclesiastical costume. My brother was young, gifted, brilliant, and enthusiastic. No man is ever good for much who has not been carried off his feet by enthusiasm, between twenty and thirty; but it needs to be bridled and bitted; and my brother did not live to be taught the difference between fact and speculation. Taught it he would have been, if time had been allowed him. No one ever recognised facts more loyally than he, when once he saw them. This I am sure of, that when the intricacies of the situation pressed upon him, when it became clear to him that if his conception of the Church, and of its rights and position, was true at all, it was not true of the Church of England in which he was born, and that he must renounce his theory as visionary or join another Communion, he would not have “minimised” the Roman doctrines that they might be more easy for him to swallow, or have explained away plain propositions till they meant anything or nothing. Whether he would have swallowed them, or not, I cannot say; I was not eighteen when he died, and I do not so much as form an opinion about it; but his course, whatever it was, would have been direct and straightforward; he was a man far more than a theologian: and if he had gone, he would have gone with his whole heart and conscience, unassisted by subtleties and nice distinctions. It is, however, at least equally possible that he would not have gone at all….
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‘The terminus, however, towards which he and his friends were moving, had not come in sight in my brother’s lifetime. He went forward, hesitating at nothing, taking the fences as they came, passing lightly over them all, and sweeping his friends along with him. He had the contempt of an intellectual aristocrat for private judgement and the rights of a man. In common things, a person was a fool who preferred his own judgement to that of an expert. Why, he asked, should it be wiser to follow private judgement in religion? As to rights, the right of wisdom was to rule, and the right of ignorance was to be ruled. But he belonged himself to the class whose business was to order rather than obey. If his own Bishop had interfered with him, his theory of episcopal authority would have been found inapplicable in that particular instance.
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‘… The triumvirs who became a national force, and gave its real character to the Oxford Movement, were Keble, Pusey, and John Henry Newman. Newman himself was the moving power; the two others were powers also, but of inferior mental strength. Without the third, they would have been known as men of genius and learning; but their personal influence would have been limited to and have ended with themselves. Of Pusey I knew but little, and need not do more than mention him. Of Keble I can only venture to say a few words…. The inability to appreciate the force of arguments which he did not like saved him from Rome, but did not save him from Roman doctrine. It would, perhaps, have been better if he had left the Church of England, instead of remaining there to shelter behind his high authority a revolution in its teaching. The Mass has crept back among us, with which we thought we had done for ever, and the honourable name of Protestant, once our proudest distinction, has been made over to the Church of Scotland and the Dissenters.
‘Far different from Keble, from my brother, from Dr. Pusey, from all the rest, was the true chief of the Catholic revival—John Henry Newman. Compared with him, they were all but as ciphers, and he the indicating number.’