The Oxford Movement by R.W. Church

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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
[Greek: monea]. 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.

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