The Oxford Movement by R.W. Church

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But these things were of gradual growth. Towards the end of 1834 a
question appeared in Oxford interesting to numbers besides Mr. Newman
and his friends, which was to lead to momentous consequences. The old,
crude ideas of change in the Church had come to appear, even to their
advocates, for the present impracticable, and there was no more talk for
a long time of schemes which had been in favour two years before. The
ground was changed, and a point was now brought forward on the Liberal
side, for which a good deal might be plausibly said. This was the
requirement of subscription to the Thirty-nine Articles from young men
at matriculation; and a strong pamphlet advocating its abolition, with
the express purpose of admitting Dissenters, was published by Dr.
Hampden, the Bampton Lecturer of two years before.

Oxford had always been one of the great schools of the Church. Its
traditions, its tone, its customs, its rules, all expressed or presumed
the closest attachment to that way of religion which was specially
identified with the Church, in its doctrinal and historical aspect.
Oxford was emphatically definite, dogmatic, orthodox, compared even with
Cambridge, which had largely favoured the Evangelical school, and had
leanings to Liberalism. Oxford, unlike Cambridge, gave notice of its
attitude by requiring every one who matriculated to subscribe the
Thirty-nine Articles: the theory of its Tutorial system, of its lectures
and examinations, implied what of late years in the better colleges,
though certainly not everywhere, had been realised in fact--a
considerable amount of religious and theological teaching. And whatever
might have been said originally of the lay character of the University,
the colleges, which had become coextensive with the University, were for
the most part, in the intention of their founders, meant to educate and
support theological students on their foundations for the service of the
Church. It became in time the fashion to call them lay institutions:
legally they may have been so, but judged by their statutes, they were
nearly all of them as ecclesiastical as the Chapter of a Cathedral. And
Oxford was the fulcrum from which the theological revival hoped to move
the Church. It was therefore a shock and a challenge of no light kind,
when not merely the proposal was made to abolish the matriculation
subscription with the express object of attracting Dissenters, and to
get Parliament to force the change on the University if the University
resisted, but the proposal itself was vindicated and enforced in a
pamphlet by Dr. Hampden by a definite and precise theory which stopped
not short of the position that all creeds and formularies--everything
which represented the authority of the teaching Church--however
incidentally and temporarily useful, were in their own nature the
inventions of a mistaken and corrupt philosophy, and invasions of
Christian liberty. This was cutting deep with a vengeance, though the
author of the theory seemed alone unable to see it. It went to the root
of the whole mutter; and if Dr. Hampden was right, there was neither
Church nor doctrine worth contending for, except as men contend about
the Newtonian or the undulatory theory of light.

No one ought now to affect, as some people used to affect at the time,
that the question was of secondary importance, and turned mainly on the
special fitness of the Thirty-nine Articles to be offered for the proof
of a young man's belief. It was a much more critical question. It was
really, however disguised, the question, asked then for the first time,
and since finally decided, whether Oxford was to continue to be a
school of the Church of England; and it also involved the wider
question, what part belief in definite religion should have in higher
education. It is speciously said that you have no right to forestall a
young man's inquiries and convictions by imposing on him in his early
years opinions which to him become prejudices. And if the world
consisted simply of individuals, entirely insulated and self-sufficing;
if men could be taught anything whatever, without presuming what is
believed by those who teach them; and if the attempt to exclude
religious prejudice did not necessarily, by the mere force of the
attempt, involve the creation of anti-religious prejudice, these
reasoners, who try in vain to get out of the conditions which hem them
in, might have more to say for themselves. To the men who had made such
an effort to restore a living confidence in the Church, the demand
implied giving up all that they had done and all that they hoped for. It
was not the time for yielding even a clumsy proof of the religious
character of the University. And the beginning of a long and doubtful
war was inevitable.

A war of pamphlets ensued. By the one side the distinction was strongly
insisted on between mere instruction and education, the distinctly
religious character of the University education was not perhaps
overstated in its theory, but portrayed in stronger colours than was
everywhere the fact; and assertions were made, which sound strange in
their boldness now, of the independent and constitutional right to
self-government in the great University corporations. By the other side,
the ordinary arguments were used, about the injustice and mischief of
exclusion, and the hurtfulness of tests, especially such tests as the
Articles applied to young and ignorant men. Two pamphlets had more than
a passing interest: one, by a then unknown writer who signed himself
_Rusticus_, and whose name was Mr. F.D. Maurice, defended subscription
on the ground that the Articles were signed, not as tests and
confessions of faith, but as "conditions of thought," the expressly
stated conditions, such as there must be in all teaching, under which
the learners are willing to learn and the teacher to teach: and he
developed his view at great length, with great wealth of original
thought and illustration and much eloquence, but with that fatal want of
clearness which, as so often afterwards, came from his struggles to
embrace in one large view what appeared opposite aspects of a difficult
subject. The other was the pamphlet, already referred to, by Dr.
Hampden: and of which the importance arose, not from its conclusions,
but from its reasons. Its ground was the distinction which he had argued
out at great length in his Bampton Lectures--the distinction between the
"Divine facts" of revelation, and all human interpretations of them and
inferences from them. "Divine facts," he maintained, were of course
binding on all Christians, and in matter of fact were accepted by all
who called themselves Christians, including Unitarians. Human
interpretations and inferences--and all Church formularies were
such--were binding on no one but those who had reason to think them
true; and therefore least of all on undergraduates who could not have
examined them. The distinction, when first put forward, seemed to mean
much; at a later time it was explained to mean very little. But at
present its value as a ground of argument against the old system of the
University was thought much of by its author and his friends. A warning
note was at once given that its significance was perceived and
appreciated. Mr. Newman, in acknowledging a presentation copy, added
words which foreshadowed much that was to follow. "While I respect," he
wrote, "the tone of piety which the pamphlet displays, I dare not trust
myself to put on paper my feelings about the principles contained in it;
_tending, as they do, in my opinion, to make ship-wreck of Christian
faith_. I also lament that, by its appearance, the first step has been
taken towards interrupting that peace and mutual good understanding
which has prevailed so long in this place, and which, if once seriously
disturbed, will be succeeded by discussions the more intractable,
because justified in the minds of those who resist innovation by a
feeling of imperative duty." "Since that time," he goes on in the
_Apologia_, where he quotes this letter, "Phaeton has got into the
chariot of the sun."[55] But they were early days then; and when the
Heads of Houses, who the year before had joined with the great body of
the University in a declaration against the threatened legislation, were
persuaded to propose to the Oxford Convocation the abolition of
subscription at matriculation in May 1835, this proposal was rejected by
a majority of five to one.

This large majority was a genuine expression of the sense of the
University. It was not specially a "Tractarian" success, though most of
the arguments which contributed to it came from men who more or less
sympathised with the effort to make a vigorous fight for the Church and
its teaching; and it showed that they who had made the effort had
touched springs of thought and feeling, and awakened new hopes and
interest in those around them, in Oxford, and in the country. But graver
events were at hand. Towards the end of the year (1835), Dr. Burton, the
Regius Professor of Divinity, suddenly died, still a young man. And Lord
Melbourne was induced to appoint as his successor, and as the head of
the theological teaching of the University, the writer who had just a
second time seemed to lay the axe to the root of all theology; who had
just reasserted that he looked upon creeds, and all the documents which
embodied the traditional doctrine and collective thought of the Church,
as invested by ignorance and prejudice with an authority which was
without foundation, and which was misleading and mischievous.

FOOTNOTES:

[52] The conversation between Mr. Sikes of Guilsborough and Mr. Copeland
is given in full in Dr. Pusey's _Letter to the Archbishop of Canterbury_
(1842), pp. 32-34.

[53] "Dr. Wilson was mightily pleased with my calling the traditionals
the 'Children of the Mist.' The title of 'Veiled Prophets' he thought
too severe" (1838), _Life_, ed. 1875, p. 167. Compare "Hints to
Transcendentalists for Working Infidel Designs through Tractarianism," a
_jeu d'esprit_ (1840), _ib._ p. 188. "As for the suspicion of secret
infidelity, I have said no more than I sincerely feel," _ib._ p. 181.

[54] "It would be a curious thing if you (the Provost of Oriel) were to
bring into your Bampton Lectures a mention of the Thugs.... Observe
their submissive piety, their faith in long-preserved _tradition_, their
regular succession of ordinations to their offices, their _faith_ in the
sacramental virtue of the consecrated governor; in short, compare our
religion with the _Thuggee, putting out of account all those
considerations which the traditionists deprecate the discussion of,_ and
where is the difference?" (1840), _ib._ p. 194.

[55] _Apologia_, pp. 131, 132.

CHAPTER IX

DR. HAMPDEN

The stage on which what is called the Oxford movement ran through its
course had a special character of its own, unlike the circumstances in
which other religious efforts had done their work. The scene of
Jansenism had been a great capital, a brilliant society, the precincts
of a court, the cells of a convent, the studies and libraries of the
doctors of the Sorbonne, the council chambers of the Vatican. The scene
of Methodism had been English villages and country towns, the moors of
Cornwall, and the collieries of Bristol, at length London fashionable
chapels. The scene of this new movement was as like as it could be in
our modern world to a Greek _polis_, or an Italian self-centred city of
the Middle Ages. Oxford stood by itself in its meadows by the rivers,
having its relations with all England, but, like its sister at
Cambridge, living a life of its own, unlike that of any other spot in
England, with its privileged powers, and exemptions from the general
law, with its special mode of government and police, its usages and
tastes and traditions, and even costume, which the rest of England
looked at from the outside, much interested but much puzzled, or knew
only by transient visits. And Oxford was as proud and jealous of its own
ways as Athens or Florence; and like them it had its quaint fashions of
polity; its democratic Convocation and its oligarchy; its social ranks;
its discipline, severe in theory and usually lax in fact; its
self-governed bodies and corporations within itself; its faculties and
colleges, like the guilds and "arts" of Florence; its internal rivalries
and discords; its "sets" and factions. Like these, too, it professed a
special recognition of the supremacy of religion; it claimed to be a
home of worship and religious training, _Dominus illuminatio mea_, a
claim too often falsified in the habit and tempers of life. It was a
small sphere, but it was a conspicuous one; for there was much strong
and energetic character, brought out by the aims and conditions of
University life; and though moving in a separate orbit, the influence of
the famous place over the outside England, though imperfectly
understood, was recognised and great. These conditions affected the
character of the movement, and of the conflicts which it caused. Oxford
claimed to be eminently the guardian of "true religion and sound
learning"; and therefore it was eminently the place where religion
should be recalled to its purity and strength, and also the place where
there ought to be the most vigilant jealousy against the perversions and
corruptions of religion, Oxford was a place where every one knew his
neighbour, and measured him, and was more or less friendly or repellent;
where the customs of life brought men together every day and all day, in
converse or discussion; and where every fresh statement or every new
step taken furnished endless material for speculation or debate, in
common rooms or in the afternoon walk. And for this reason, too,
feelings were apt to be more keen and intense and personal than in the
larger scenes of life; the man who was disliked or distrusted was so
close to his neighbours that he was more irritating than if he had been
obscured by a crowd; the man who attracted confidence and kindled
enthusiasm, whose voice was continually in men's ears, and whose private
conversation and life was something ever new in its sympathy and charm,
created in those about him not mere admiration, but passionate
friendship, or unreserved discipleship. And these feelings passed from
individuals into parties; the small factions of a limited area. Men
struck blows and loved and hated in those days in Oxford as they hardly
did on the wider stage of London politics or general religious
controversy.

The conflicts which for a time turned Oxford into a kind of image of
what Florence was in the days of Savonarola, with its nicknames,
Puseyites, and Neomaniacs, and High and Dry, counterparts to the
_Piagnoni_ and _Arrabbiati_, of the older strife, began around a student
of retired habits, interested more than was usual at Oxford in abstruse
philosophy, and the last person who might be expected to be the occasion
of great dissensions in the University. Dr. Hampden was a man who, with
no definite intentions of innovating on the received doctrines of the
Church--indeed, as his sermons showed, with a full acceptance of
them--had taken a very difficult subject for a course of Bampton
Lectures, without at all fathoming its depth and reach, and had got into
a serious scrape in consequence. Personally he was a man of serious but
cold religion, having little sympathy with others, and consequently not
able to attract any. His isolation during the whole of his career is
remarkable; he attached no one, as Whately or Arnold attached men. His
mind, which was a speculative one, was not one, in its own order, of the
first class. He had not the grasp nor the subtlety necessary for his
task. He had a certain power of statement, but little of co-ordination;
he seems not to have had the power of seeing when his ideas were really
irreconcilable, and he thought that simply by insisting on his
distinctly orthodox statements he not only balanced, but neutralised,
and did away with his distinctly unorthodox ones. He had read a good
deal of Aristotle and something of the Schoolmen, which probably no one
else in Oxford had done except Blanco White; and the temptation of
having read what no one else knows anything about sometimes leads men to
make an unprofitable use of their special knowledge, which they consider
their monopoly.

The creed and dogmas of the Christian Church are at least in their
broad features, not a speculation, but a fact. That not only the
Apostles' Creed, but the Nicene and Constantinopolitan Creeds, are
assumed as facts by the whole of anything that can be called the Church,
is as certain as the reception by the same body, and for the same time,
of the Scriptures. Not only the Creed, but, up to the sixteenth century,
the hierarchy, and not only Creed and hierarchy and Scriptures, but the
sacramental idea as expressed in the liturgies, are equally in the same
class of facts. Of course it is open to any one to question the genuine
origin of any of these great portions of the constitution of the Church;
but the Church is so committed to them that he cannot enter on his
destructive criticism without having to criticise, not one only, but all
these beliefs, and without soon having to face the question whether the
whole idea of the Church, as a real and divinely ordained society, with
a definite doctrine and belief, is not a delusion, and whether
Christianity, whatever it is, is addressed solely to each individual,
one by one, to make what he can of it. It need hardly be said that
within the limits of what the Church is committed to there is room for
very wide differences of opinion; it is also true that these limits
have, in different times of the Church, been illegitimately and
mischievously narrowed by prevailing opinions, and by documents and
formularies respecting it. But though we may claim not to be bound by
the Augsburg Confession, or by the Lambeth articles, or the Synod of
Dort, or the Bull _Unigenitus_, it does not follow that, if there is a
Church at all, there is no more binding authority in the theology of the
Nicene and Athanasian Creeds. And it is the province of the divine who
believes in a Church at all, and in its office to be the teacher and
witness of religious truth, to distinguish between the infinitely
varying degrees of authority with which professed representations of
portions of this truth are propounded for acceptance. It may be
difficult or impossible to agree on a theory of inspiration; but that
the Church doctrine of some kind of special inspiration of Scripture is
part of Christianity is, unless Christianity be a dream, certain. No one
can reasonably doubt, with history before him, that the answer of the
Christian Church was, the first time the question was asked, and has
continued to be through ages of controversy, _against_ Arianism,
_against_ Socinianism, _against_ Pelagianism, _against_ Zwinglianism. It
does not follow that the Church has settled everything, or that there
are not hundreds of questions which it is vain and presumptuous to
attempt to settle by any alleged authority.

Dr. Hampden was in fact unexceptionably, even rigidly orthodox in his
acceptance of Church doctrine and Church creeds. He had published a
volume of sermons containing, among other things, an able statement of
the Scriptural argument for the doctrine of the Trinity, and an equally
able defence of the Athanasian Creed. But he felt that there are
formularies which may be only the interpretations of doctrine and
inferences from Scripture of a particular time or set of men; and he
was desirous of putting into their proper place the authority of such
formularies. His object was to put an interval between them and the
Scriptures from which they professed to be derived, and to prevent them
from claiming the command over faith and conscience which was due only
to the authentic evidences of God's revelation. He wished to make room
for a deeper sense of the weight of Scripture. He proposed to himself
the same thing which was aimed at by the German divines, Arndt,
Calixtus, and Spener, when they rose up against the grinding oppression
which Lutheran dogmatism had raised on its _Symbolical Books_,[56] and
which had come to outdo the worst extravagances of scholasticism. This
seems to have been his object--a fair and legitimate one. But in arguing
against investing the Thirty-nine Articles with an authority which did
not belong to them, he unquestionably, without seeing what he was
doing, went much farther--where he never meant to go. In fact, he so
stated his argument that he took in with the Thirty-nine Articles every
expression of collective belief, every document, however venerable,
which the Church had sanctioned from the first. Strangely enough,
without observing it, he took in--what he meant to separate by a wide
interval from what he called dogma--the doctrine of the infallible
authority and sufficiency of Scripture. In denying the worth of the
_consensus_ and immemorial judgment of the Church, he cut from under
him the claim to that which he accepted as the source and witness of
"divine facts." He did not mean to do this, or to do many other things;
but from want of clearness of head, he certainly, in these writings
which were complained of, did it. He was, in temper and habit, too
desirous to be "orthodox," as Whately feared, to accept in its
consequences his own theory. The theory which he put forward in his
Bampton Lectures, and on which he founded his plan of comprehension in
his pamphlet on Dissent, left nothing standing but the authority of the
letter of Scripture. All else--right or wrong as it might be--was
"speculation," "human inference," "dogma." With perfect consistency, he
did not pretend to take even the Creeds out of this category. But the
truth was, he did not consciously mean all that he said; and when keener
and more powerful and more theological minds pointed out with relentless
accuracy what he _had said_ he was profuse and overflowing with
explanations, which showed how little he had perceived the drift of his
words. There is not the least reason to doubt the sincerity of these
explanations; but at the same time they showed the unfitness of a man
who had so to explain away his own speculations to be the official guide
and teacher of the clergy. The criticisms on his language, and the
objections to it, were made before these explanations were given; and
though he gave them, he was furious with those who called for them, and
he never for a moment admitted that there was anything seriously wrong
or mistaken in what he had said. To those who pointed out the meaning
and effect of his words and theories, he replied by the assertion of his
personal belief. If words mean anything, he had said that neither
Unitarians nor any one else could get behind the bare letter, and what
he called "facts," of Scripture, which all equally accepted in good
faith; and that therefore there was no reason for excluding Unitarians
as long as they accepted the "facts." But when it was pointed out that
this reasoning reduced all belief in the realities behind the bare
letter to the level of personal and private opinion, he answered by
saying that he valued supremely the Creeds and Articles, and by giving a
statement of the great Christian doctrines which he held, and which the
Church taught. But he never explained what their authority could be with
any one but himself. There might be interpretations and inferences from
Scripture, by the hundred or the thousand, but no one certain and
authoritative one; none that warranted an organised Church, much more a
Catholic and Apostolic Church, founded on the assumption of this
interpretation being the one true faith, the one truth of the Bible. The
point was brought out forcibly in a famous pamphlet written by Mr.
Newman, though without his name, called "Elucidations of Dr. Hampden's
Theological Statements." This pamphlet was a favourite object of attack
on the part of Dr. Hampden's supporters as a flagrant instance of
unfairness and garbled extracts. No one, they said, ever read the
Bampton Lectures, but took their estimate of the work from Mr. Newman's
quotations. Extracts are often open to the charge of unfairness, and
always to suspicion. But in this case there was no need of unfairness.
Dr. Hampden's theory lay on the very surface of his Hampton Lectures and
pamphlet; and any unbiassed judge may be challenged to read these works
of his, and say whether the extracts in the "Elucidations" do not
adequately represent Dr. Hampden's statements and arguments, and whether
the comments on them are forced or strained. They do not represent his
explanations, for the explanations had not been given; and when the
explanations came, though they said many things which showed that Dr.
Hampden did not mean to be unorthodox and unevangelical, but only
anti-scholastic and anti-Roman, they did not unsay a word which he had
said. And what this was, what had been Dr. Hampden's professed
theological theory up to the time when the University heard the news of
his appointment, the "Elucidations" represent as fairly as any adverse
statement can represent the subject of its attack.

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