The Oxford Movement by R.W. Church

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The tendency of this section of able men was unquestionably Romewards,
almost from the beginning of their connexion with the movement. Both the
theory and the actual system of Rome, so far as they understood it, had
attractions for them which nothing else had. But with whatever
perplexity and perhaps impatience, Mr. Newman's power held them back. He
kept before their minds continually those difficulties of fact which
stood in the way of their absolute and peremptory conclusions, and of
which they were not much inclined to take account. He insisted on those
features, neither few nor unimportant nor hard to see, which proved the
continuity of the English Church with the Church Universal. Sharing
their sense of anomaly in the Anglican theory and position, he pointed
out with his own force and insight that anomaly was not in England only,
but everywhere. There was much to regret, there was much to improve,
there were many unwelcome and dangerous truths, _invidiosi veri_, to be
told and defended at any cost. But patience, as well as honesty and
courage, was a Christian virtue; and they who had received their
Christianity at the hands of the English Church had duties towards it
from which neither dissatisfaction nor the idea of something better
could absolve them. _Spartam nactus es, hanc exorna_ is the motto for
every one whose lot is cast in any portion of Christ's Church. And as
long as he could speak with this conviction, the strongest of them could
not break away from his restraint. It was when the tremendous question
took shape, Is the English Church a true Church, a real part of the
Church Catholic?--when the question became to his mind more and more
doubtful, at length desperate--that they, of course, became more
difficult to satisfy, more confident in their own allegations, more
unchecked in their sympathies, and, in consequence, in their dislikes.
And in the continued effort--for it did continue--to make them pause and
wait and hope, they reacted on him; they asked him questions which he
found it hard to answer; they pressed him with inferences which he might
put by, but of which he felt the sting; they forced on him all the
indications, of which every day brought its contribution, that the
actual living system of the English Church was against what he had
taught to be Catholic, that its energetic temper and spirit condemned
and rejected him. What was it that private men were staunch and
undismayed? What was it that month by month all over England hearts and
minds were attracted to his side, felt the spell of his teaching, gave
him their confidence? Suspicion and disapprobation, which had only too
much to ground itself upon, had taken possession of the high places of
the Church. Authority in all its shapes had pronounced as decisively as
his opponents could wish; as decisively as they too could wish, who
desired no longer a barrier between themselves and Rome.

Thus a great and momentous change had come over the movement, over its
action and prospects. It had started in a heroic effort to save the
English Church. The claims, the blessings, the divinity of the English
Church, as a true branch of Catholic Christendom, had been assumed as
the foundation of all that was felt and said and attempted. The English
Church was the one object to which English Christians were called upon
to turn their thoughts. Its spirit animated the _Christian Year_, and
the teaching of those whom the _Christian Year_ represented. Its
interests were what called forth the zeal and the indignation recorded
in Froude's _Remains_. No one seriously thought of Rome, except as a
hopelessly corrupt system, though it had some good and Catholic things,
which it was Christian and honest to recognise. The movement of 1833
started out of the Anti-Roman feelings of the Emancipation time. It was
Anti-Roman as much as it was Anti-Sectarian and Anti-Erastian. It was to
avert the danger of people becoming Romanists from ignorance of Church
principles. This was all changed in one important section of the party.
The fundamental conceptions and assumptions were reversed. It was not
the Roman Church, but the English Church, which was put on its trial; it
was not the Roman Church, but the English, which was to be, if possible,
apologised for, perhaps borne with for a time, but which was to be
regarded as deeply fallen, holding an untenable position, and
incomparably, unpardonably, below both the standard and the practical
system of the Roman Church. From this point of view the object of the
movement was no longer to elevate and improve an independent English
Church, but to approximate it as far as possible to what was assumed to
be undeniable--the perfect Catholicity of Rome. More almost than ideas
and assumptions, the tone of feeling changed. It had been, towards the
English Church, affectionate, enthusiastic, reverential, hopeful. It
became contemptuous, critical, intolerant, hostile with the hostility
not merely of alienation but disgust This was not of course the work of
a moment, but it was of very rapid growth. "How I hate these Anglicans!"
was the expression of one of the younger men of this section, an
intemperate and insolent specimen of it. It did not represent the tone
or the language of the leader to whom the advanced section deferred,
vexed as he often was with the course of his own thoughts, and
irritated and impatient at the course of things without. But it
expressed but too truly the difference between 1833 and 1840.

FOOTNOTES:

[73] See Sermons on _Subjects of the Day_, 1843.

CHAPTER XIII

THE AUTHORITIES AND THE MOVEMENT

While the movement was making itself felt as a moral force, without a
parallel in Oxford for more than two centuries, and was impressing
deeply and permanently some of the most promising men in the rising
generation in the University, what was the attitude of the University
authorities? What was the attitude of the Bishops?

At Oxford it was that of contemptuous indifference, passing into
helpless and passionate hostility. There is no sadder passage to be
found in the history of Oxford than the behaviour and policy of the
heads of this great Christian University towards the religious movement
which was stirring the interest, the hopes, the fears of Oxford. The
movement was, for its first years at least, a loyal and earnest effort
to serve the cause of the Church. Its objects were clear and reasonable;
it aimed at creating a sincere and intelligent zeal for the Church, and
at making the Church itself worthy of the great position which her
friends claimed for her. Its leaders were men well known in the
University, in the first rank in point of ability and character; men of
learning, who knew what they were talking about; men of religious and
pure, if also severe lives. They were not men merely of speculation and
criticism, but men ready to forego anything, to devote everything for
the practical work of elevating religious thought and life. All this did
not necessarily make their purposes and attempts wise and good; but it
did entitle them to respectful attention. If they spoke language new to
the popular mind or the "religious world," it was not new--at least it
ought not to have been new--to orthodox Churchmen, with opportunities of
study and acquainted with our best divinity. If their temper was eager
and enthusiastic, they alleged the presence of a great and perilous
crisis. Their appeal was mainly not to the general public, but to the
sober and the learned; to those to whom was entrusted the formation of
faith and character in the future clergy of the Church; to those who
were responsible for the discipline and moral tone of the first
University of Christendom, and who held their conspicuous position on
the understanding of that responsibility. It behoved the heads of the
University to be cautious, even to be suspicious; movements might be
hollow or dangerous things. But it behoved them also to become
acquainted with so striking a phenomenon as this; to judge it by what it
appealed to--the learning of English divines, the standard of a high and
generous moral rule; to recognise its aims at least, with equity and
sympathy, if some of its methods and arguments seemed questionable. The
men of the movement were not mere hostile innovators; they were fighting
for what the University and its chiefs held dear and sacred, the
privileges and safety of the Church. It was the natural part of the
heads of the University to act as moderators; at any rate, to have
shown, with whatever reserve, that they appreciated what they needed
time to judge of. But while on the one side there was burning and
devouring earnestness, and that power of conviction which doubles the
strength of the strong, there was on the other a serene ignoring of all
that was going on, worthy of a set of dignified French _abbes_ on the
eve of the Revolution. This sublime or imbecile security was
occasionally interrupted by bursts of irritation at some fresh piece of
Tractarian oddness or audacity, or at some strange story which made its
way from the gossip of common rooms to the society of the Heads of
Houses. And there was always ready a stick to beat the offenders;
everything could be called Popish. But for the most part they looked on,
with smiles, with jokes, sometimes with scolding.[74] Thus the men who
by their place ought to have been able to gauge and control the
movement, who might have been expected to meet half-way a serious
attempt to brace up the religious and moral tone of the place, so
incalculably important in days confessed to be anxious ones, simply set
their faces steadily to discountenance and discredit it. They were good
and respectable men, living comfortably in a certain state and ease.
Their lives were mostly simple compared with the standard of the outer
world, though Fellows of Colleges thought them luxurious. But they were
blind and dull as tea-table gossips as to what was the meaning of the
movement, as to what might come of it, as to what use might be made of
it by wise and just and generous recognition, and, if need be, by wise
and just criticism and repression. There were points of danger in it;
but they could only see what _seemed_ to be dangerous, whether it was
so or not; and they multiplied these points of danger by all that was
good and hopeful in it. It perplexed and annoyed them; they had not
imagination nor moral elevation to take in what it aimed at; they were
content with the routine which they had inherited; and, so that men read
for honours and took first classes, it did not seem to them strange or a
profanation that a whole mixed crowd of undergraduates should be
expected to go on a certain Sunday in term, willing or unwilling, fit or
unlit, to the Sacrament, and be fined if they did not appear. Doubtless
we are all of us too prone to be content with the customary, and to be
prejudiced against the novel, nor is this condition of things without
advantage. But we must bear our condemnation if we stick to the
customary too long, and so miss our signal opportunities. In their
apathy, in their self-satisfied ignorance, in their dulness of
apprehension and forethought, the authorities of the University let pass
the great opportunity of their time. As it usually happens, when this
posture of lofty ignoring what is palpable and active, and the object of
everybody's thought, goes on too long, it is apt to turn into impatient
dislike and bitter antipathy. The Heads of Houses drifted insensibly
into this position. They had not taken the trouble to understand the
movement, to discriminate between its aspects, to put themselves frankly
into communication with its leading persons, to judge with the knowledge
and justice of scholars and clergymen of its designs and ways. They let
themselves be diverted from this, their proper though troublesome task,
by distrust, by the jealousies of their position, by the impossibility
of conceiving that anything so strange could really be true and sound.
And at length they found themselves going along with the outside
current of uninstructed and ignoble prejudice, in a settled and
pronounced dislike, which took for granted that all was wrong in the
movement, which admitted any ill-natured surmise and foolish
misrepresentation, and really allowed itself to acquiesce in the belief
that men so well known in Oxford, once so admired and honoured, had sunk
down to deliberate corrupters of the truth, and palterers with their own
intellects and consciences. It came in a few years to be understood on
both sides, that the authorities were in direct antagonism to the
movement; and though their efforts in opposition to it were feeble and
petty, it went on under the dead weight of official University
disapproval. It would have been a great thing for the English
Church--though it is hard to see how, things being as they were, it
could have come about--if the movement had gone on, at least with the
friendly interest, if not with the support, of the University rulers.
Instead of that, after the first two or three years there was one long
and bitter fight in Oxford, with the anger on one side created by the
belief of vague but growing dangers, and a sense of incapacity in
resisting them, and with deep resentment at injustice and stupidity on
the other.

The Bishops were farther from the immediate scene of the movement, and
besides, had other things to think of. Three or four of them might be
considered theologians--Archbishop Howley, Phillpotts of Exeter, Kaye of
Lincoln, Marsh of Peterborough. Two or three belonged to the Evangelical
school, Ryder of Lichfield, and the two Sumners at Winchester and
Chester. The most prominent among them, and next to the Bishop of Exeter
the ablest, alive to the real dangers of the Church, anxious to infuse
vigour into its work, and busy with plans for extending its influence,
was Blomfield, Bishop of London. But Blomfield was not at his best as a
divine, and, for a man of his unquestionable power, singularly unsure of
his own mind. He knew, in fact, that when the questions raised by the
Tracts came before him he was unqualified to deal with them; he was no
better furnished by thought or knowledge or habits to judge of them than
the average Bishop of the time, appointed, as was so often the case, for
political or personal reasons. At the first start of the movement, the
Bishops not unnaturally waited to see what would come of it. It was
indeed an effort in favour of the Church, but it was in irresponsible
hands, begun by men whose words were strong and vehement and of unusual
sound, and who, while they called on the clergy to rally round their
fathers the Bishops, did not shrink from wishing for the Bishops the
fortunes of the early days: "we could not wish them a more blessed
termination of their course than the spoiling of their goods and
martyrdom."[76] It may reasonably be supposed that such good wishes were
not to the taste of all of them. As the movement developed, besides that
it would seem to them extravagant and violent, they would be perplexed
by its doctrine. It took strong ground for the Church; but it did so in
the teeth of religious opinions and prejudices, which were popular and
intolerant. For a moment the Bishops were in a difficulty; on the one
hand, no one for generations had so exalted the office of a Bishop as
the Tractarians; no one had claimed for it so high and sacred an origin;
no one had urged with such practical earnestness the duty of Churchmen
to recognise and maintain the unique authority of the Episcopate against
its despisers or oppressors. On the other hand, this was just the time
when the Evangelical party, after long disfavour, was beginning to gain
recognition, for the sake of its past earnestness and good works, with
men in power, and with ecclesiastical authorities of a different and
hitherto hostile school; and in the Tractarian movement the Evangelical
party saw from the first its natural enemy. The Bishops could not have
anything to do with the Tractarians without deeply offending the
Evangelicals. The result was that, for the present, the Bishops held
aloof. They let the movement run on by itself. Sharp sarcasms,
worldly-wise predictions, kind messages of approval, kind cautions,
passed from mouth to mouth, or in private correspondence from high
quarters, which showed that the movement was watched. But for some time
the authorities spoke neither good nor bad of it publicly. In his Charge
at the close of 1836, Bishop Phillpotts spoke in clear and unfaltering
language--language remarkable for its bold decision--of the necessity of
setting forth the true idea of the Church and the sacraments; but he was
silent about the call of the same kind which had come from Oxford. It
would have been well if the other Bishops later on, in their charges,
had followed his example. The Bishop of Oxford, in his Charge of 1838,
referred to the movement in balanced terms of praise and warning. The
first who condemned the movement was the Bishop of Chester, J. Bird
Sumner; in a later Charge he came to describe it as the work of Satan;
in 1838 he only denounced the "undermining of the foundations of our
Protestant Church by men who dwell within her walls," and the bad faith
of those "who sit in the Reformers' seat, and traduce the Reformation."

These were grave mistakes on the part of those who were responsible for
the government of the University and the Church. They treated as absurd,
mischievous, and at length traitorous, an effort, than which nothing
could be more sincere, to serve the Church, to place its claims on
adequate grounds, to elevate the standard of duty in its clergy, and in
all its members. To have missed the aim of the movement and to have been
occupied and irritated by obnoxious details and vulgar suspicions was a
blunder which gave the measure of those who made it, and led to great
evils. They alienated those who wished for nothing better than to help
them in their true work. Their "unkindness" was felt to be, in Bacon's
phrase,[77] _injuriae potentiorum_. But on the side of the party of the
movement there were mistakes also.

1. The rapidity with which the movement had grown, showing that some
deep need had long been obscurely felt, which the movement promised to
meet,[78] had been too great to be altogether wholesome. When we compare
what was commonly received before 1833, in teaching, in habits of life,
in the ordinary assumptions of history, in the ideas and modes of
worship, public and private--the almost sacramental conception of
preaching, the neglect of the common prayer of the Prayer Book, the
slight regard to the sacraments--with what the teaching of the Tracts
and their writers had impressed for good and all, five years later, on
numbers of earnest people, the change seems astonishing. The change was
a beneficial one and it was a permanent one. The minds which it
affected, it affected profoundly. Still it was but a short time, for
young minds especially, to have come to a decision on great and debated
questions. There was the possibility, the danger, of men having been
captivated and carried away by the excitement and interest of the time;
of not having looked all round and thought out the difficulties before
them; of having embraced opinions without sufficiently knowing their
grounds or counting the cost or considering the consequences. There was
the danger of precipitate judgment, of ill-balanced and disproportionate
views of what was true and all-important. There was an inevitable
feverishness in the way in which the movement was begun, in the way in
which it went on. Those affected by it were themselves surprised at the
swiftness of the pace. When a cause so great and so sacred seemed thus
to be flourishing, and carrying along with it men's assent and
sympathies, it was hardly wonderful that there should often be
exaggeration, impatience at resistance, scant consideration for the
slowness or the scruples or the alarms of others. Eager and sanguine men
talked as if their work was accomplished, when in truth it was but
beginning. No one gave more serious warnings against this and other
dangers than the leaders; and their warnings were needed.[79]

2. Another mistake, akin to the last, was the frequent forgetfulness of
the apostolic maxim, "All things are lawful for me, but all things are
not expedient." In what almost amounted to a revolution in many of the
religious ideas of the time, it was especially important to keep
distinct the great central truths, the restoration of which to their
proper place justified and made it necessary, and the many subordinate
points allied with them and naturally following from them, which yet
were not necessary to their establishment or acceptance. But it was on
these subordinate points that the interest of a certain number of
followers of the movement was fastened. Conclusions which they had a
perfect right to come to, practices innocent and edifying to themselves,
but of secondary account, began to be thrust forward into prominence,
whether or not these instances of self-will really helped the common
cause, whether or not they gave a handle to ill-nature and ill-will.
Suspicion must always have attached to such a movement as this; but a
great deal of it was provoked by indiscreet defiance, which was rather
glad to provoke it.

3. Apart from these incidents--common wherever a number of men are
animated with zeal for an inspiring cause--there were what to us now
seem mistakes made in the conduct itself of the movement. Considering
the difficulties of the work, it is wonderful that there were not more;
and none of them were discreditable, none but what arose from the
limitation of human powers matched against confused and baffling
circumstances.

In the position claimed for the Church of England, confessedly unique
and anomalous in the history of Christendom, between Roman authority and
infallibility on one side, and Protestant freedom of private judgment on
the other, the question would at once arise as to the grounds of belief.
What, if any, are the foundations of conviction and certitude, apart
from personal inquiry, and examination of opposing arguments on
different sides of the case, and satisfactory logical conclusions? The
old antithesis between Faith and Reason, and the various problems
connected with it, could not but come to the front, and require to be
dealt with. It is a question which faces us from a hundred sides, and,
subtly and insensibly transforming itself, looks different from them
all. It was among the earliest attempted to be solved by the chief
intellectual leader of the movement, and it has occupied his mind to the
last.[80] However near the human mind seems to come to a solution, it
only, if so be, comes near; it never arrives. In the early days of the
movement it found prevailing the specious but shallow view that
everything in the search for truth was to be done by mere producible and
explicit argumentation; and yet it was obvious that of this two-thirds
of the world are absolutely incapable. Against this Mr. Newman and his
followers pressed, what was as manifestly certain in fact as it accorded
with any deep and comprehensive philosophy of the formation and growth
of human belief, that not arguments only, but the whole condition of the
mind to which they were addressed--and not the reasonings only which
could be stated, but those which went on darkly in the mind, and which
"there was not at the moment strength to bring forth," real and weighty
reasons which acted like the obscure rays of the spectrum, with their
proper force, yet eluding distinct observation--had their necessary and
inevitable and legitimate place in determining belief. All this was
perfectly true; but it is obvious how easily it might be taken hold of,
on very opposite sides, as a ground for saying that Tractarian or Church
views did not care about argument, or, indeed, rather preferred weak
arguments to strong ones in the practical work of life. It was ludicrous
to say it in a field of controversy, which, on the "Tractarian" side,
was absolutely bristling with argument, keen, subtle, deep, living
argument, and in which the victory in argument was certainly not always
with those who ventured to measure swords with Mr. Newman or Dr. Pusey.
Still, the scoff could be plausibly pointed at the "young enthusiasts
who crowded the Via Media, and who never presumed to argue, except
against the propriety of arguing at all." There was a good deal of
foolish sneering at reason; there was a good deal of silly bravado about
not caring whether the avowed grounds of opinions taken up were strong
or feeble. It was not merely the assent of a learner to his teacher, of
a mind without means of instruction to the belief which it has
inherited, or of one new to the ways and conditions of life to the
unproved assertions and opinions of one to whom experience had given an
open and sure eye. It was a positive carelessness, almost accounted
meritorious, to inquire and think, when their leaders called them to do
so. "The Gospel of Christ is not a matter of mere argument." It is not,
indeed, when it comes in its full reality, in half a hundred different
ways, known and unsearchable, felt and unfelt, moral and intellectual,
on the awakened and quickened soul. But the wildest fanatic can take the
same words into his mouth. Their true meaning was variously and
abundantly illustrated, especially in Mr. Newman's sermons. Still, the
adequate, the emphatic warning against their early abuse was hardly
pressed on the public opinion and sentiment of the party of the movement
with the force which really was requisite. To the end there were men who
took up their belief avowedly on insufficient and precarious grounds,
glorying in the venturesomeness of their faith and courage, and
justifying their temper of mind and their intellectual attitude by
alleging misinterpreted language of their wiser and deeper teachers. A
recoil from Whately's hard and barren dialectics, a sympathy with many
tender and refined natures which the movement had touched, made the
leaders patient with intellectual feebleness when it was joined with
real goodness and Christian temper; but this also sometimes made them
less impatient than they might well have been with that curious form of
conceit and affectation which veils itself under an intended and
supposed humility, a supposed distrust of self and its own powers.

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