The Oxford Movement by R.W. Church

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Another difficult matter, not altogether successfully managed--at least
from the original point of view of the movement, and of those who saw in
it a great effort for the good of the English Church--was the treatment
of the Roman controversy. The general line which the leaders proposed to
take was the one which was worthy of Christian and truth-loving
teachers. They took a new departure; and it was not less just than it
was brave, when, recognising to the full the overwhelming reasons why
"we should not be Romanists," they refused to take up the popular and
easy method of regarding the Roman Church as apostate and antichristian;
and declined to commit themselves to the vulgar and indiscriminate abuse
of it which was the discreditable legacy of the old days of controversy.
They did what all the world was loudly professing to do, they looked
facts in the face; they found, as any one would find who looked for
himself into the realities of the Roman Church, that though the bad was
often as bad as could be, there was still, and there had been all
along, goodness of the highest type, excellence both of system and of
personal life which it was monstrous to deny, and which we might well
admire and envy. To ignore all this was to fail in the first duty, not
merely of Christians, but of honest men; and we at home were not so
blameless that we could safely take this lofty tone of contemptuous
superiority. If Rome would only leave us alone, there would be
estrangement, lamentable enough among Christians, but there need be no
bitterness. But Rome would not leave us alone. The moment that there
were signs of awakening energy in England, that moment was chosen by its
agents, for now it could be done safely, to assail and thwart the
English Church. Doubtless they were within their rights, but this made
controversy inevitable, and for controversy the leaders of the movement
prepared themselves. It was an obstacle which they seemed hardly to have
expected, but which the nature of things placed in their way. But the
old style of controversy was impossible; impossible because it was so
coarse, impossible because it was so hollow.

If the argument (says the writer of Tract 71, in words which are
applicable to every controversy) is radically unreal, or (what may be
called) rhetorical or sophistical, it may serve the purpose of
encouraging those who are really convinced, though scarcely without
doing mischief to them, but certainly it will offend and alienate the
more acute and sensible; while those who are in doubt, and who desire
some real and substantial ground for their faith, will not bear to be
put off with such shadows. The arguments (he continues) which we use
must be such as are likely to convince serious and earnest minds, which
are really seeking for the truth, not amusing themselves with
intellectual combats, or desiring to support an existing opinion anyhow.
However popular these latter methods may be, of however long standing,
however easy both to find and to use, they are a scandal; and while they
lower our religious standard from the first, they are sure of hurting
our cause in the end.

And on this principle the line of argument in _The Prophetical Office of
the Church_ was taken by Mr. Newman. It was certainly no make-believe,
or unreal argument. It was a forcible and original way of putting part
of the case against Rome. It was part of the case, a very important
part; but it was not the whole case, and it ought to have been evident
from the first that in this controversy we could not afford to do
without the whole case. The argument from the claim of infallibility
said nothing of what are equally real parts of the case--the practical
working of the Roman Church, its system of government, the part which it
and its rulers have played in the history of the world. Rome has not
such a clean record of history, it has not such a clean account of what
is done and permitted in its dominions under an authority supposed to be
irresistible, that it can claim to be the one pure and perfect Church,
entitled to judge and correct and govern all other Churches. And if the
claim is made, there is no help for it, we must not shrink from the task
of giving the answer.[81] And, as experience has shown, the more that
rigid good faith is kept to in giving the answer, the more that
strictness and severity of even understatement are observed, the more
convincing will be the result that the Roman Church cannot be that which
it is alleged to be in its necessary theory and ideal.

But this task was never adequately undertaken. It was one of no easy
execution.[82] Other things, apparently more immediately pressing,
intervened. There was no question for the present of perfect and
unfeigned confidence in the English Church, with whatever regrets for
its shortcomings, and desires for its improvement But to the outside
world it seemed as if there were a reluctance to face seriously the
whole of the Roman controversy; a disposition to be indulgent to Roman
defects, and unfairly hard on English faults. How mischievously this
told in the course of opinion outside and inside of the movement; how it
was misinterpreted and misrepresented; how these misinterpretations and
misrepresentations, with the bitterness and injustice which they
engendered, helped to realise themselves, was seen but too clearly at a
later stage.

4. Lastly, looking back on the publications, regarded as characteristic
of the party, it is difficult not to feel that some of them gave an
unfortunate and unnecessary turn to things.

The book which made most stir and caused the greatest outcry was
Froude's _Remains_. It was undoubtedly a bold experiment; but it was not
merely boldness. Except that it might be perverted into an excuse by the
shallow and thoughtless for merely "strong talk," it may fairly be said
that it was right and wise to let the world know the full measure and
depth of conviction which gave birth to the movement; and Froude's
_Remains_ did that in an unsuspiciously genuine way that nothing else
could have done. And, besides, it was worth while for its own sake to
exhibit with fearless honesty such a character, so high, so true, so
refined, so heroic. So again, Dr. Pusey's Tract on Baptism was a bold
book, and one which brought heavy imputations and misconstructions on
the party. In the teaching of his long life, Dr. Pusey has abundantly
dispelled the charges of harshness and over-severity which were urged,
not always very scrupulously, against the doctrine of the Tract on
Post-baptismal Sin. But it was written to redress the balance against
the fatally easy doctrines then in fashion; it was like the Portroyalist
protest against the fashionable Jesuits; it was one-sided, and
sometimes, in his earnestness, unguarded; and it wanted as yet the
complement of encouragement, consolation, and tenderness which his
future teaching was to supply so amply. But it was a blow struck, not
before it was necessary, by a strong hand; and it may safely be said
that it settled the place of the sacrament of baptism in the living
system of the English Church, which the negations and vagueness of the
Evangelical party had gravely endangered. But two other essays appeared
in the Tracts, most innocent in themselves, which ten or twenty years
later would have been judged simply on their merits, but which at the
time became potent weapons against Tractarianism. They were the
productions of two poets--of two of the most beautiful and religious
minds of their time; but in that stage of the movement it is hardly too
much to say that they were out of place. The cause of the movement
needed clear explanations; definite statements of doctrines which were
popularly misunderstood; plain, convincing reasoning on the issues which
were raised by it; a careful laying out of the ground on which English
theology was to be strengthened and enriched. Such were Mr. Newman's
_Lectures on Justification_, a work which made its lasting mark on
English theological thought; Mr. Keble's masterly exposition of the
meaning of Tradition; and not least, the important collections which
were documentary and historical evidence of the character of English
theology, the so-called laborious _Catenas_. These were the real tasks
of the hour, and they needed all that labour and industry could give.
But the first of these inopportune Tracts was an elaborate essay, by Mr.
Keble, on the "Mysticism of the Fathers in the use and interpretation of
Scripture." It was hardly what the practical needs of the time required,
and it took away men's thoughts from them; the prospect was hopeless
that in that state of men's minds it should be understood, except by a
very few; it merely helped to add another charge, the vague but
mischievous charge of mysticism, to the list of accusations against the
Tracts. The other, to the astonishment of every one, was like the
explosion of a mine. That it should be criticised and objected to was
natural; but the extraordinary irritation caused by it could hardly have
been anticipated. Written in the most devout and reverent spirit by one
of the gentlest and most refined of scholars, and full of deep
Scriptural knowledge, it furnished for some years the material for the
most savage attacks and the bitterest sneers to the opponents of the
movement. It was called "On Reserve in communicating Religious
Knowledge"; and it was a protest against the coarseness and shallowness
which threw the most sacred words about at random in loud and
declamatory appeals, and which especially dragged in the awful mystery
of the Atonement, under the crudest and most vulgar conception of it, as
a ready topic of excitement in otherwise commonplace and helpless
preaching. The word "Reserve" was enough. It meant that the
Tract-writers avowed the principle of keeping back part of the counsel
of God. It meant, further, that the real spirit of the party was
disclosed; its love of secret and crooked methods, its indifference to
knowledge, its disingenuous professions, its deliberate concealments,
its holding doctrines and its pursuit of aims which it dared not avow,
its _disciplina arcani_, its conspiracies, its Jesuitical spirit. All
this kind of abuse was flung plentifully on the party as the controversy
became warm; and it mainly justified itself by the Tract on "Reserve."
The Tract was in many ways a beautiful and suggestive essay, full of
deep and original thoughts, though composed in that spirit of the
recluse which was characteristic of the writer, and which is in strong
contrast with the energetic temper of to-day.[83] But it could well have
been spared at the moment, and it certainly offered itself to an
unfortunate use. The suspiciousness which so innocently it helped to
awaken and confirm was never again allayed.

FOOTNOTES:

[74] Fifty years ago there was much greater contrast than now between
old and young. There was more outward respect for the authorities, and
among the younger men, graduates and undergraduates, more inward
amusement at foibles and eccentricities. There still lingered the
survivals of a more old-fashioned type of University life and character,
which, quite apart from the movements of religious opinion, provoked
those [Greek: neanieumata idioton eis tous archontas],[75]
_impertinences of irresponsible juniors towards superiors_, which
Wordsworth, speaking of a yet earlier time, remembered at Cambridge--

"In serious mood, but oftener, I confess,
With playful zest of fancy, did we note
(How could we less?) the manners and the ways
Of those who lived distinguished by the badge
Of good or ill report; or those with whom
By frame of Academic discipline
We were perforce connected, men whose sway
And known authority of office served
To set our minds on edge, and did no more.
Nor wanted we rich pastime of this kind,
Found everywhere, but chiefly in the ring
Of the grave Elders, men unsecured, grotesque
In character, tricked out like aged trees
Which through the lapse of their infirmity
Give ready place to any random seed
That chooses to be reared upon their trunks."

_Prelude_, bk. iii.

[75] Plat. _R.P._ iii. 390.

[76] _Tracts for the Times_, No. 1, 9th September 1833.

[77] _An Advertisement touching the Controversies of the Church of
England:_ printed in the _Resuscitatio_, p. 138 (ed. 1671).

[78] See Mr. Newman's article, "The State of Religious Parties," in the
_British Critic_, April 1839, reprinted in his _Essays Historical and
Critical_, 1871, Vol. 1., essay vi.

[79] "It would not be at all surprising, though, in spite of the
earnestness of the principal advocates of the views in question, for
which every one seems to give them credit, there should be among their
followers much that is enthusiastic, extravagant, or excessive. All
these aberrations will be and are imputed to the doctrines from which
they proceed; nor unnaturally, but hardly fairly, for aberrations there
must be, whatever the doctrine is, while the human heart is sensitive,
capricious, and wayward.... There will ever be a number of persons
professing the opinions of a movement party, who talk loudly and
strangely, do odd and fierce things, display themselves unnecessarily,
and disgust other people; there will ever be those who are too young to
be wise, too generous to be cautious, too warm to be sober, or too
intellectual to be humble; of whom human sagacity cannot determine,
only the event, and perhaps not even that, whether they feel what
they say, or how far; whether they are to be encouraged or
discountenanced."--_British Critic_, April 1839, "State of Religious
Parties," p. 405.

[80] Cardinal Newman, _Grammar of Assent_.

[81] The argument from history is sketched fairly, but only sketched in
_The Prophetic Office_, Lect. xiv.

[82] In the Roman controversy it is sometimes hard to be just without
appearing to mean more than is said; for the obligation of justice
sometimes forces one who wishes to be a fair judge to be apparently an
apologist or advocate. Yet the supreme duty in religious controversy is
justice. But for the very reason that these controversialists wished to
be just to Rome, they were bound to be just against her. They meant to
be so; but events passed quickly, and leisure never came for a work
which involved a serious appeal to history.

[83] _Vide_ a striking review in the _British Critic_, April 1839,
partly correcting and guarding the view given in the Tract.

CHAPTER XIV

NO. 90

The formation of a strong Romanising section in the Tractarian party was
obviously damaging to the party and dangerous to the Church. It was _pro
tanto_ a verification of the fundamental charge against the party, a
charge which on paper they had met successfully, but which acquired
double force when this paper defence was traversed by facts. And a great
blow was impending over the Church, if the zeal and ability which the
movement had called forth and animated were to be sucked away from the
Church, and not only lost to it, but educated into a special instrument
against it. But the divergence became clear only gradually, and the hope
that after all it was only temporary and would ultimately disappear was
long kept up by the tenacity with which Mr. Newman, in spite of
misgivings and disturbing thoughts, still recognised the gifts and
claims of the English Church. And on the other hand, the bulk of the
party, and its other Oxford leaders, Dr. Pusey, Mr. Keble, Mr. Isaac
Williams, Mr. Marriott, were quite unaffected by the disquieting
apprehensions which were beginning to beset Mr. Newman. With a humbling
consciousness of the practical shortcomings of the English Church, with
a ready disposition to be honest and just towards Rome, and even to
minimise our differences with it, they had not admitted for a moment any
doubt of the reality of the English Church. The class of arguments which
specially laid hold of Mr. Newman's mind did not tell upon them--the
peculiar aspect of early precedents, about which, moreover, a good deal
of criticism was possible; or the large and sweeping conception of a
vast, ever-growing, imperial Church, great enough to make flaws and
imperfections of no account, which appealed so strongly to his
statesmanlike imagination. Their content with the Church in which they
had been brought up, in which they had been taught religion, and in
which they had taken service, their deep and affectionate loyalty and
piety to it, in spite of all its faults, remained unimpaired; and
unimpaired, also, was their sense of vast masses of practical evil in
the Roman Church, evils from which they shrank both as Englishmen and as
Christians, and which seemed as incurable as they were undeniable.
Beyond the hope which they vaguely cherished that some day or other, by
some great act of Divine mercy, these evils might disappear, and the
whole Church become once more united, there was nothing to draw them
towards Rome; submission was out of the question, and they could only
see in its attitude in England the hostility of a jealous and
unscrupulous disturber of their Master's work. The movement still went
on, with its original purpose, and on its original lines, in spite of
the presence in it, and even the co-operation, of men who might one day
have other views, and serious and fatal differences with their old
friends.

The change of religion when it comes on a man gradually,--when it is not
welcomed from the first, but, on the contrary, long resisted, must
always be a mysterious and perplexing process, hard to realise and
follow by the person most deeply interested, veiled and clouded to
lookers-on, because naturally belonging to the deepest depths of the
human conscience, and inevitably, and without much fault on either side,
liable to be misinterpreted and misunderstood. And this process is all
the more tangled when it goes on, not in an individual mind, travelling
in its own way on its own path, little affected by others, and little
affecting them, but in a representative person, with the
responsibilities of a great cause upon him, bound by closest ties of
every kind to friends, colleagues, and disciples, thinking, feeling,
leading, pointing out the way for hundreds who love and depend on him.
Views and feelings vary from day to day, according to the events and
conditions of the day. How shall he speak, and how shall he be silent?
How shall he let doubts and difficulties appear, yet how shall he
suppress them?--doubts which may grow and become hopeless, but which, on
the other hand, may be solved and disappear. How shall he go on as if
nothing had happened, when all the foundations of the world seem to have
sunk from under him? Yet how shall he disclose the dreadful secret, when
he is not yet quite sure whether his mind will not still rally from its
terror and despair? He must in honesty, in kindness, give some warning,
yet how much? and how to prevent it being taken for more than it means?
There are counter-considerations, to which he cannot shut his eyes.
There are friends who will not believe his warnings. There are watchful
enemies who are on the look-out for proofs of disingenuousness and bad
faith. He could cut through his difficulties at once by making the
plunge in obedience to this or that plausible sign or train of
reasoning, but his conscience and good faith will not let him take
things so easily; and yet he knows that if he hangs on, he will be
accused by and by, perhaps speciously, of having been dishonest and
deceiving. So subtle, so shifting, so impalpable are the steps by which
a faith is disintegrated; so evanescent, and impossible to follow, the
shades by which one set of convictions pass into others wholly opposite;
for it is not knowledge and intellect alone which come into play, but
all the moral tastes and habits of the character, its likings and
dislikings, its weakness and its strength, its triumphs and its
vexations, its keenness and its insensibilities, which are in full
action, while the intellect alone seems to be busy with its problems. A
picture has been given us, belonging to this time, of the process, by a
great master of human nature, and a great sufferer under the process; it
is, perhaps, the greatest attempt ever made to describe it; but it is
not wholly successful. It tells us much, for it is written with touching
good faith, but the complete effect as an intelligible whole is wanting.

"In the spring of 1839," we read in the _Apologia_, "my position in the
Anglican Church was at its height. I had a supreme confidence in my
controversial _status_, and I had a great and still growing success in
recommending it to others."[84] This, then, may be taken as the point
from which, in the writer's own estimate, the change is to be traced. He
refers for illustration of his state of mind to the remarkable article
on the "State of Religious Parties," in the April number of the _British
Critic_ for 1839, which he has since republished under the title of
"Prospects of the Anglican Church."[85] "I have looked over it now," he
writes in 1864, "for the first time since it was published; and have
been struck by it for this reason: it contains _the last words which I
ever spoke as an Anglican to Anglicans_.... It may now be read as my
parting address and valediction, made to my friends. I little knew it at
the time." He thus describes the position which he took in the article
referred to:--

Conscious as I was that my opinions in religious matters were not
gained, as the world said, from Roman sources, but were, on the
contrary, the birth of my own mind and of the circumstances in which I
had been placed, I had a scorn of the imputations which were heaped
upon me. It was true that I held a large, bold system of religion,
very unlike the Protestantism of the day, but it was the concentration
and adjustment of the statements of great Anglican authorities, and I
had as much right to do so as the Evangelical party had, and more
right than the Liberal, to hold their own respective doctrines. As I
spoke on occasion of Tract 90, I claimed, on behalf of the writer,
that he might hold in the Anglican Church a comprecation of the Saints
with Bramhall; and the Mass, all but Transubstantiation, with
Andrewes; or with Hooker that Transubstantiation itself is not a point
for Churches to part communion upon; or with Hammond that a General
Council, truly such, never did, never shall err in a matter of faith;
or with Bull that man lost inward grace by the Fall; or with Thorndike
that penance is a propitiation for post-baptismal sin; or with Pearson
that the all-powerful name of Jesus is no otherwise given than in the
Catholic Church. "Two can play at that game" was often in my mouth,
when men of Protestant sentiments appealed to the Articles, Homilies,
and Reformers, in the sense that if they had a right to speak loud I
had both the liberty and the means of giving them tit for tat. I
thought that the Anglican Church had been tyrannised over by a Party,
and I aimed at bringing into effect the promise contained in the motto
to the _Lyra_: "They shall know the difference now." I only asked to
be allowed to show them the difference.

I have said already (he goes on) that though the object of the
movement was to withstand the Liberalism of the day, I found and felt
that this could not be done by negatives. It was necessary for me to
have a positive Church theory erected on a definite basis. This took
me to the great Anglican divines; and then, of course, I found at once
that it was impossible to form any such theory without cutting across
the teaching of the Church of Rome. Thus came in the Roman
controversy. When I first turned myself to it I had neither doubt on
the subject, nor suspicion that doubt would ever come on me. It was in
this state of mind that I began to read up Bellarmine on the one hand,
and numberless Anglican writers on the other.[86]

And he quotes from the article the language which he used, to show the
necessity of providing some clear and strong basis for religious thought
in view of the impending conflict of principles, religious and
anti-religious, "Catholic and Rationalist," which to far-seeing men,
even at that comparatively early time, seemed inevitable:--

Then indeed will be the stern encounter, when two real and living
principles, simple, entire, and consistent, one in the Church, the
other out of it, at length rush upon each other, contending not for
names and words, a half view, but for elementary notions and
distinctive moral characters. Men will not keep standing in that very
attitude which you call sound Church-of-Englandism or orthodox
Protestantism. They will take one view or another, but it will be a
consistent one ... it will be real.... Is it sensible, sober,
judicious, to be so very angry with the writers of the day who point
to the fact, that our divines of the seventeenth century have occupied
a ground which is the true and intelligible mean between extremes?...
Would you rather have your sons and your daughters members of the
Church of England or of the Church of Rome?[87]

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