The Oxford Movement by R.W. Church

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On the other hand, Mr. Ward, with the greatest good-humour, was
unreservedly defiant and aggressive. There was something intolerably
provoking in his mixture of jauntiness and seriousness, his avowal of
utter personal unworthiness and his undoubting certainty of being in the
right, his downright charges of heresy and his ungrudging readiness to
make allowance for the heretics and give them credit for special virtues
greater than those of the orthodox. He was not a person to hide his own
views or to let others hide theirs. He lived in an atmosphere of
discussion with all around him, friends or opponents, fellows and tutors
in common-rooms, undergraduates after lecture or out walking. The most
amusing, the most tolerant man in Oxford, he had round him perpetually
some of the cleverest and brightest scholars and thinkers of the place;
and where he was, there was debate, cross-questioning, pushing
inferences, starting alarming problems, beating out ideas, trying the
stuff and mettle of mental capacity. Not always with real knowledge, or
a real sense of fact, but always rapid and impetuous, taking in the
whole dialectical chess-board at a glance, he gave no quarter, and a man
found himself in a perilous corner before he perceived the drift of the
game; but it was to clear his own thought, not--for he was much too
good-natured--to embarrass another. If the old scholastic disputations
had been still in use at Oxford, his triumphs would have been signal and
memorable. His success, compared with that of other leaders of the
movement, in influencing life and judgment, was a pre-eminently
intellectual success; and it cut two ways. The stress which he laid on
the moral side of questions, his own generosity, his earnestness on
behalf of fair play and good faith, elevated and purified intercourse.
But he did not always win assent in proportion to his power of argument.
Abstract reasoning, in matters with which human action is concerned, may
be too absolute to be convincing. It may not leave sufficient margin for
the play and interference of actual experience. And Mr. Ward, having
perfect confidence in his conclusions, rather liked to leave them in a
startling form, which he innocently declared to be manifest and
inevitable. And so stories of Ward's audacity and paradoxes flew all
over Oxford, shocking and perplexing grave heads with fear of they knew
not what. Dr. Jenkyns, the Master of Balliol, one of those curious
mixtures of pompous absurdity with genuine shrewdness which used to pass
across the University stage, not clever himself but an unfailing judge
of a clever man, as a jockey might be of a horse, liking Ward and proud
of him for his cleverness, was aghast at his monstrous and
unintelligible language, and driven half wild with it. Mr. Tait, a
fellow-tutor, though living on terms of hearty friendship with Ward,
prevailed on the Master after No. 90 to dismiss Ward from the office of
teaching mathematics. It seemed a petty step thus to mix up theology
with mathematics, though it was not so absurd as it looked, for Ward
brought in theology everywhere, and discussed it when his mathematics
were done. But Ward accepted it frankly and defended it. It was natural,
he said, that Tait, thinking his principles mischievous, should wish to
silence him as a teacher; and their friendship remained unbroken.

Mr. Ward's theological position was really a provisional one, though, at
starting at least, he would not have allowed it. He had no early or
traditional attachment to the English Church, such as that which acted
so strongly on the leaders of the movement: but he found himself a
member of it, and Mr. Newman had interpreted it to him. He so accepted
it, quite loyally and in earnest, as a point of departure. But he
proceeded at once to put "our Church" (as he called it) on its trial, in
comparison with its own professions, and with the ideal standard of a
Church which he had thought out for himself; and this rapidly led to
grave consequences. He accepted from authority which satisfied him both
intellectually and morally the main scheme of Catholic theology, as the
deepest and truest philosophy of religion, satisfying at once conscience
and intellect. The Catholic theology gave him, among other things, the
idea and the notes of the Church; with these, in part at least, the
English Church agreed; but in other respects, and these very serious
ones, it differed widely; it seemed inconsistent and anomalous. The
English Church was separate and isolated from Christendom. It was
supposed to differ widely from other Churches in doctrine. It admitted
variety of opinion and teaching, even to the point of tolerating alleged
heresy. With such data as these, he entered on an investigation which
ultimately came to the question whether the English Church could claim
to be a part of the Church Catholic. He postulated from the first, what
he afterwards developed in the book in which his Anglican position
culminated,--the famous _Ideal_,--the existence at some time or another
of a Catholic Church which not only aimed at, but fulfilled all the
conditions of a perfect Church in creed, communion, discipline, and
life. Of course the English and, as at starting he held, the Roman
Church, fell far short of this perfection. But at starting, the moral
which he drew was, not to leave the English Church, but to do his best
to raise it up to what it ought to be. Whether he took in all the
conditions of the problem, whether it was not far more complicated and
difficult than he supposed, whether his knowledge of the facts of the
case was accurate and adequate, whether he was always fair in his
comparisons and judgments, and whether he did not overlook elements of
the gravest importance in the inquiry; whether, in fact, save for
certain strong and broad lines common to the whole historic Church, the
reign of anomaly, inconsistency, difficulty did not extend much farther
over the whole field of debate than he chose to admit: all this is
fairly open to question. But within the limits which he laid down, and
within which he confined his reasonings, he used his materials with
skill and force; and even those who least agreed with him and were most
sensible of the strong and hardly disguised bias which so greatly
affected the value of his judgments, could not deny the frankness and
the desire to be fair and candid, with which, as far as intention went,
he conducted his argument. His first appearance as a writer was in the
controversy, as has been said before, on the subject of No. 90. That
tract had made the well-worn distinction between what was Catholic and
what was distinctively Roman, and had urged--what had been urged over
and over again by English divines--that the Articles, in their
condemnation of what was Roman, were drawn in such a way as to leave
untouched what was unquestionably Catholic. They were drawn indeed by
Protestants, but by men who also earnestly professed to hold with the
old Catholic doctors and disavowed any purpose to depart from their
teaching, and who further had to meet the views and gain the assent of
men who were much less Protestant than themselves--men who were willing
to break with the Pope and condemn the abuses associated with his name,
but by no means willing to break with the old theology. The Articles
were the natural result of a compromise between two strong parties--the
Catholics agreeing that the abuses should be condemned, so that the
Catholic doctrine was not touched; the Protestants insisting that, so
that the Catholic doctrine was not touched, the abuses of it should be
denounced with great severity: that there should be no question about
the condemnation of the abuses, and of the system which had maintained
them. The Articles were undoubtedly anti-Roman; that was obvious from
the historical position of the English Church, which in a very real
sense was anti-Roman; but were they so anti-Roman as to exclude
doctrines which English divines had over and over again maintained as
Catholic and distinguished from Romanism, but which the popular opinion,
at this time or that, identified therewith?[108] With flagrant
ignorance--ignorance of the history of thought and teaching in the
English Church, ignorance far more inexcusable of the state of parties
and their several notorious difficulties in relation to the various
formularies of the Church, it was maintained on the other side that the
"Articles construed by themselves" left no doubt that they were not only
anti-Roman but anti-Catholic, and that nothing but the grossest
dishonesty and immorality could allow any doubt on the subject.

Neither estimate was logical enough to satisfy Mr. Ward. The charge of
insincerity, he retorted with great effect on those who made it: if
words meant anything, the Ordination Service, the Visitation Service,
and the Baptismal Service were far greater difficulties to Evangelicals,
and to Latitudinarians like Whately and Hampden, than the words of any
Article could be to Catholics; and there was besides the tone of the
whole Prayer Book, intelligible, congenial, on Catholic assumptions, and
on no other. But as to the Articles themselves, he was indisposed to
accept the defence made for them. He criticised indeed with acuteness
and severity the attempt to make the loose language of many of them
intolerant of primitive doctrine; but he frankly accepted the allegation
that apart from this or that explanation, their general look, as regards
later controversies, was visibly against, not only Roman doctrines or
Roman abuses, but that whole system of principles and mode of viewing
religion which he called Catholic. They were, he said, _patient_ of a
Catholic meaning, but _ambitious_ of a Protestant meaning; whatever
their logic was, their rhetoric was Protestant. It was just possible,
but not more, for a Catholic to subscribe to them. But they were the
creation and the legacy of a bad age, and though they had not
extinguished Catholic teaching and Catholic belief in the English
Church, they had been a serious hindrance to it, and a support to its
opponents.

This was going beyond the position of No. 90. No. 90 had made light of
the difficulties of the Articles.

That there are real difficulties to a Catholic Christian in the
ecclesiastical position of our Church at this day, no one can deny; but
the statements of the Articles are not in the number. Our present scope
is merely to show that, while our Prayer Book is acknowledged on all
hands to be of Catholic origin, our Articles also--the offspring of an
uncatholic age--are, through God's good providence, to say the least,
not uncatholic, and may be subscribed by those who aim at being Catholic
in heart and doctrine.

Mr. Ward not only went beyond this position, but in the teeth of these
statements; and he gave a new aspect and new issues to the whole
controversy. The Articles, to him, were a difficulty, which they were
not to the writer of No. 90, or to Dr. Pusey, or to Mr. Keble. To him
they were not only the "offspring of an uncatholic age," but in
themselves uncatholic; and his answer to the charge of dishonest
subscription was, not that the Articles "in their natural meaning are
Catholic,"[109] but that the system of the English Church is a
compromise between what is Catholic and what is Protestant, and that
the Protestant parties in it are involved in even greater difficulties,
in relation to subscription and use of its formularies, than the
Catholic. He admitted that he _did_ evade the spirit, but accepted the
"statements of the Articles," maintaining that this was the intention of
their original sanctioners. With characteristic boldness, inventing a
phrase which has become famous, he wrote: "Our twelfth Article is as
plain as words can make it on the Evangelical side; of course I think
its natural meaning may be explained away, for I subscribe it myself in
a non-natural sense":[110] but he showed that Evangelicals, high church
Anglicans, and Latitudinarians were equally obliged to have recourse to
explanations, which to all but themselves were unsatisfactory.

But he went a step beyond this. Hitherto the distinction had been
uniformly insisted upon between what was Catholic and what was Roman;
between what was witnessed to by the primitive and the undivided Church,
and what had been developed beyond that in the Schools, and by the
definitions and decisions of Rome, and in the enormous mass of its
post-Reformation theology, at once so comprehensive, and so minute in
application. This distinction was the foundation of what was,
characteristically, Anglican theology, from Hooker downwards. This
distinction, at least for all important purposes, Mr. Ward gradually
gave up. It was to a certain degree recognised in his early controversy
about No. 90; but it gradually grew fainter till at last it avowedly
disappeared. The Anglican writers had drawn their ideas and their
inspiration from the Fathers; the Fathers lived long ago, and the
teaching drawn from them, however spiritual and lofty, wanted the modern
look, and seemed to recognise insufficiently modern needs. The Roman
applications of the same principles were definite and practical, and Mr.
Ward's mind, essentially one of his own century, and little alive to
what touched more imaginative and sensitive minds, turned at once to
Roman sources for the interpretation of what was Catholic. In the
_British Critic_, and still more in the remarkable volume in which his
Oxford controversies culminated, the substitution of _Roman_ for the old
conception of _Catholic_ appears, and the absolute identification of
Roman with Catholic. Roman authorities become more and more the measure
and rule of what is Catholic. They belong to the present in a way in
which the older fountains of teaching do not; in the recognised teaching
of the Latin Church, they have taken their place and superseded them.

It was characteristic of Mr. Ward that his chief quarrel with the
Articles was not about the Sacraments, not about their language on
alleged Roman errors, but about the doctrine of grace, the relation of
the soul of man to the law, the forgiveness, the holiness of God,--the
doctrine, that is, in all its bearings, of justification. Mr. Newman had
examined this doctrine and the various language held about it with great
care, very firmly but very temperately, and had attempted to reconcile
with each other all but the extreme Lutheran statements. It was, he
said, among really religious men, a question of words. He had recognised
the faulty state of things in the pre-Reformation Church, the faulty
ideas about forgiveness, merit, grace, and works, from which the
Protestant language was a reaction, natural, if often excessive; and in
the English authoritative form of this language, he had found nothing
but what was perfectly capable of a sound and true meaning. From the
first, Mr. Ward's judgment was far more severe than this. To him, the
whole structure of the Articles on Justification and the doctrines
connected with it seemed based on the Lutheran theory, and for this
theory, as fundamentally and hopelessly immoral, he could not find words
sufficiently expressive of detestation and loathing. For the basis of
his own theory of religious knowledge was a moral basis; men came to the
knowledge of religious truth primarily not by the intellect, but by
absolute and unfailing loyalty to conscience and moral light; and a
doctrine which separated faith from morality and holiness, which made
man's highest good and his acceptance with God independent of what he
was as a moral agent, which relegated the realities of moral discipline
and goodness to a secondary and subordinate place,--as a mere sequel to
follow, almost mechanically and of course, on an act or feeling which
had nothing moral in it,--which substituted a fictitious and imputed
righteousness for an inherent and infused and real one, seemed to him
to confound the eternal foundations of right and wrong, and to be a
blasphemy against all that was true and sacred in religion.

Of the Lutheran doctrine[111] of justification, and the principle of
private judgment, I have argued that, in their abstract nature and
necessary tendency, they sink below atheism itself.... A religious
person who shall be sufficiently clear-headed to understand the meaning
of words, is warranted in rejecting Lutheranism on the very same grounds
which would induce him to reject atheism, viz. as being the
contradiction of truths which he feels on most certain grounds to be
first principles.[112]

There is nothing which he looks back on with so much satisfaction in his
writings as on this, that he has "ventured to characterise that hateful
and fearful type of Antichrist in terms not wholly inadequate to its
prodigious demerits."[113]

Mr. Ward had started with a very definite idea of the Church and of its
notes and tests. It was obvious that the Anglican Church--and so, it was
thought, the Roman--failed to satisfy these notes in their completeness;
but it seemed, at least at first, to satisfy some of them, and to do
this so remarkably, and in such strong contrast to other religious
bodies, that in England at all events it seemed the true representative
and branch of the Church Catholic; and the duty of adhering to it and
serving it was fully recognised, even by those who most felt its
apparent departure from the more Catholic principles and temper
preserved in many points by the Roman Church. From this point of view
Mr. Ward avowedly began. But the position gradually gave way before his
relentless and dissolving logic. The whole course of his writing in the
_British Critic_ may be said to have consisted in a prolonged and
disparaging comparison of the English Church, in theory, in doctrine, in
moral and devotional temper, in discipline of character, in education,
in its public and authoritative tone in regard to social, political, and
moral questions, and in the type and standard of its clergy, with those
of the Catholic Church, which to him was represented by the mediaeval
and later Roman Church. And in the general result, and in all important
matters, the comparison became more and more fatally disadvantageous to
the English Church. In the perplexing condition of Christendom, it had
just enough good and promise to justify those who had been brought up in
it remaining where they were, as long as they saw any prospect of
improving it, and till they were driven out. That was a
duty--uncomfortable and thankless as it was, and open to any amount of
misconstruction and misrepresentation--which they owed to their
brethren, and to the Lord of the Church. But it involved plain speaking
and its consequences; and Mr. Ward never shrank from either.

Most people, looking back, would probably agree, whatever their general
judgment on these matters, and whatever they may think of Mr. Ward's
case, that he was, at the time at least, the most unpersuasive of
writers. Considering his great acuteness, and the frequent originality
of his remarks--considering, further, his moral earnestness, and the
place which the moral aspects of things occupy in his thoughts, this is
remarkable; but so it is. In the first place, in dealing with these
eventful questions, which came home with such awful force to thousands
of awakened minds and consciences, full of hope and full of fear, there
was an entire and ostentatious want of sympathy with all that was
characteristically English in matters of religion. This arose partly
from his deep dislike to habits, very marked in Englishmen, but not
peculiar to them, of self-satisfaction and national self-glorification;
but it drove him into a welcoming of opposite foreign ways, of which he
really knew little, except superficially. Next, his boundless confidence
in the accuracy of his logical processes led him to habits of extreme
and absolute statement, which to those who did not agree with him, and
also to some who did, bore on their face the character of
over-statement, exaggeration, extravagance, not redeemed by an
occasional and somewhat ostentatious candour, often at the expense of
his own side and in favour of opponents to whom he could afford to be
frank. And further, while to the English Church he was merciless in the
searching severity of his judgment, he seemed to be blind to the whole
condition of things to which she, as well as her rival, had for the last
three centuries been subjected, and in which she had played a part at
least as important for Christian faith as that sustained by any portion
of Christendom; blind to all her special and characteristic excellences,
where these did not fit the pattern of the continental types (obviously,
in countless instances, matters of national and local character and
habits); blind to the enormous difficulties in which the political game
of her Roman opponents had placed her; blind to the fact that, judged
with the same adverse bias and prepossessions, the same unsparing
rigour, the same refusal to give real weight to what was good, on the
ground that it was mixed with something lower, the Roman Church would
show just as much deflection from the ideal as the English. Indeed, he
would have done a great service--people would have been far more
disposed to attend to his really interesting, and, to English readers,
novel, proofs of the moral and devotional character of the Roman popular
discipline, if he had not been so unfair on the English: if he had not
ignored the plain fact that just such a picture as he gave of the
English Church, as failing in required notes, might be found of the
Roman before the Reformation, say in the writings of Gerson, and in our
own days in those of Rosmini. Mr. Ward, if any one, appealed to fair
judgment; and to this fair judgment he presented allegations on the face
of them violent and monstrous. The English Church, according to him, was
in the anomalous position of being "gifted with the power of dispensing
sacramental grace,"[114] and yet, at the same time, "_wholly destitute_
of external notes, and _wholly indefensible_ as to her position, by
external, historical, ecclesiastical arguments": and he for his part
declares, correcting Mr. Newman, who speaks of "outward notes as partly
gone and partly going," that he is "_wholly unable_ to discern the
outward notes of which Mr. Newman speaks, during any part of the last
three hundred years." He might as well have said at once that she did
not exist, if the outward aspects of a Church--orders, creeds,
sacraments, and, in some degree at any rate, preaching and witnessing
for righteousness--are not some of the "outward notes" of a Church.
"Should the pure light of the Gospel be ever restored to _this benighted
land_,"[115] he writes, at the beginning, as the last extract was
written at the end, of his controversial career at Oxford. Is not such
writing as if he wished to emulate in a reverse sense the folly and
falsehood of those who spoke of English Protestants having a monopoly
of the Gospel? He was unpersuasive, he irritated and repelled, in spite
of his wish to be fair and candid, in spite of having so much to teach,
in spite of such vigour of statement and argument, because on the face
of all his writings he was so extravagantly one-sided, so incapable of
an equitable view, so much a slave to the unreality of extremes.

FOOTNOTES:

[107] Cf. T. Mozley, _Reminiscences_, vol. ii. p. 5.

[108] In dealing with the Articles either as a test or as a text-book,
this question was manifestly both an honest and a reasonable one. As a
test, and therefore penal, they must be construed strictly; like
judicial decisions, they only ruled as much as was necessary, and in the
wide field of theology confined themselves to the points at issue at the
moment. And as a text-book for instruction, it was obvious that while on
some points they were precise and clear, on others they were vague and
imperfect. The first five Articles left no room for doubt. When the
compilers came to the controversies of their day, for all their strong
language, they left all kinds of questions unanswered. For instance,
they actually left unnoticed the primacy, and much more the
infallibility of the Pope. They condemned the "sacrifices of
Masses"--did they condemn the ancient and universal doctrine of a
Eucharistic sacrifice? They condemned the Romish doctrine of Purgatory,
with its popular tenet of material fire--did that exclude every doctrine
of purgation after death? They condemned Transubstantiation--did they
condemn the Real Presence? They condemned a great popular system--did
they condemn that of which it was a corruption and travesty? These
questions could not be foreclosed, unless on the assumption that there
was no doctrine on such points which could be called Catholic _except
the Roman_. The inquiry was not new; and divines so stoutly anti-Roman
as Dr. Hook and Mr. W. Palmer of Worcester had answered it substantially
in the same sense as Mr. Newman in No. 90.

[109] W.G. Ward, _The Ideal of a Christian Church_, p. 478.

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