The Oxford Movement by R.W. Church

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Doubtless, many thought and felt like them about the perils which beset
the Church and religion. Loyalty to the Church, belief in her divine
mission, allegiance to her authority, readiness to do battle for her
claims, were anything but extinct in her ministers and laity. The
elements were all about of sound and devoted Churchmanship. Higher ideas
of the Church than the popular and political notion of it, higher
conceptions of Christian doctrine than those of the ordinary evangelical
theology--echoes of the meditations of a remarkable Irishman, Mr.
Alexander Knox--had in many quarters attracted attention in the works
and sermons of his disciple. Bishop Jebb, though it was not till the
movement had taken shape that their full significance was realised.
Others besides Keble and Froude and Newman were seriously considering
what could best be done to arrest the current which was running strong
against the Church, and discussing schemes of resistance and defence.
Others were stirring up themselves and their brethren to meet the new
emergencies, to respond to the new call. Some of these were in
communication with the Oriel men, and ultimately took part with them in
organising vigorous measures. But it was not till Mr. Newman made up his
mind to force on the public mind, in a way which could not be evaded,
the great article of the Creed--"I believe one Catholic and Apostolic
Church"--that the movement began. And for the first part of its course,
it was concentrated at Oxford. It was the direct result of the
searchings of heart and the communings for seven years, from 1826 to
1833, of the three men who have been the subject of this chapter.

FOOTNOTES:

[14] Isaac Williams's MS. Memoir.

[15] _Rem._ i. 232, 233. In 1828, Newman had preferred Hawkins to Keble,
for Provost.

[16] _Apol._ p. 84.

[17] _Remains_, i. 438; _Apol._ p. 77. "Do you know the story of the
murderer who had done one good thing in his life? Well, if I was asked
what good deed I have ever done, I should say I had brought Keble and
Newman to understand each other."

CHAPTER III[18]

RICHARD HURRELL FROUDE

The names of those who took the lead in this movement are
familiar--Keble, Newman, Pusey, Hugh James Rose, William Palmer. Much
has been written about them by friends and enemies, and also by one of
themselves, and any special notice of them is not to the purpose of the
present narrative. But besides these, there were men who are now almost
forgotten, but who at the time interested their contemporaries, because
they were supposed to represent in a marked way the spirit and character
of the movement, or to have exercised influence upon it. They ought not
to be overlooked in an account of it. One of them has been already
mentioned, Mr. Hurrell Froude. Two others were Mr. Isaac Williams and
Mr. Charles Marriott. They were all three of them men whom those who
knew them could never forget--could never cease to admire and love.

Hurrell Froude soon passed away before the brunt of the fighting came.
His name is associated with Mr. Newman and Mr. Keble, but it is little
more than a name to those who now talk of the origin of the movement.
Yet all who remember him agree in assigning to him an importance as
great as that of any, in that little knot of men whose thoughts and
whose courage gave birth to it.

Richard Hurrell Froude was born in 1803, and was thus two years younger
than Mr. Newman, who was born in 1801. He went to Eton, and in 1821 to
Oriel, where he was a pupil of Mr. Keble, and where he was elected
Fellow, along with Robert Wilberforce, at Easter 1826. He was College
Tutor from 1827 to 1830, having Mr. Newman and R. Wilberforce for
colleagues. His health failed in 1831 and led to much absence in warm
climates. He went with Mr. Newman to the south of Europe in 1832-33, and
was with him at Rome. The next two winters, with the intervening year,
he spent in the West Indies. Early in 1836 he died at Dartington--his
birthplace. He was at the Hadleigh meeting, in July 1833, when the
foundations of the movement were laid; he went abroad that winter, and
was not much in England afterwards. It was through correspondence that
he kept up his intercourse with his friends.

Thus he was early cut off from direct and personal action on the course
which things took. But it would be a great mistake to suppose that his
influence on the line taken and on the minds of others was
inconsiderable. It would be more true to say that with one exception no
one was more responsible for the impulse which led to the movement; no
one had more to do with shaping its distinct aims and its moral spirit
and character in its first stage; no one was more daring and more clear,
as far as he saw, in what he was prepared for. There was no one to whom
his friends so much looked up with admiration and enthusiasm. There was
no "wasted shade"[19] in Hurrell Froude's disabled, prematurely
shortened life.

Like Henry Martyn he was made by strong and even merciless
self-discipline over a strong and for a long time refractory nature. He
was a man of great gifts, with much that was most attractive and noble;
but joined with this them was originally in his character a vein of
perversity and mischief, always in danger of breaking out, and with
which he kept up a long and painful struggle. His inmost thought and
knowledge of himself have been laid bare in the papers which his friends
published after his death. He was in the habit of probing his motives to
the bottom, and of recording without mercy what he thought his
self-deceits and affectations. The religious world of the day made merry
over his methods of self-discipline; but whatever may be said of them,
and such things are not easy to judge of, one thing is manifest, that
they were true and sincere efforts to conquer what he thought evil in
himself, to keep himself in order, to bring his inmost self into
subjection to the law and will of God. The self-chastening, which his
private papers show, is no passion or value for asceticism, but a purely
moral effort after self-command and honesty of character; and what makes
the struggle so touching is its perfect reality and truth. He "turned
his thoughts on that desolate wilderness, his own conscience, and said
what he saw there."[20] A man who has had a good deal to conquer in
himself, and has gone a good way to conquer it, is not apt to be
indulgent to self-deceit or indolence, or even weakness. The basis of
Froude's character was a demand which would not be put off for what was
real and thorough; an implacable scorn and hatred for what he counted
shams and pretences. "His highest ambition," he used to say, "was to be
a humdrum."[21] The intellectual and the moral parts of his character
were of a piece. The tricks and flimsinesses of a bad argument provoked
him as much as the imposture and "flash" of insincere sentiment and fine
talking; he might be conscious of "flash" in himself and his friends,
and he would admit it unequivocally; but it was as unbearable to him to
pretend not to see a fallacy as soon as it was detected, as it would
have been to him to arrive at the right answer of a sum or a problem by
tampering with the processes. Such a man, with strong affections and
keen perception of all forms of beauty, and with the deepest desire to
be reverent towards all that had a right to reverence, would find
himself in the most irritating state of opposition and impatience with
much that passed as religion round him. Principles not attempted to be
understood and carried into practice, smooth self-complacency among
those who looked down on a blind and unspiritual world, the continual
provocation of worthless reasoning and ignorant platitudes, the dull
unconscious stupidity of people who could not see that the times were
critical--that truth had to be defended, and that it was no easy or
light-hearted business to defend it--threw him into an habitual attitude
of defiance, and half-amused, half-earnest contradiction, which made him
feared by loose reasoners and pretentious talkers, and even by quiet
easy-going friends, who unexpectedly found themselves led on blindfold,
with the utmost gravity, into traps and absurdities by the wiles of his
mischievous dialectic. This was the outside look of his relentless
earnestness. People who did not like him, or his views, and who,
perhaps, had winced under his irony, naturally put down his strong
language, which on occasion could certainly be unceremonious, to
flippancy and arrogance. But within the circle of those whom he trusted,
or of those who needed at anytime his help, another side disclosed
itself--a side of the most genuine warmth of affection, an awful reality
of devoutness, which it was his great and habitual effort to keep
hidden, a high simplicity of unworldliness and generosity, and in spite
of his daring mockeries of what was commonplace or showy, the most
sincere and deeply felt humility with himself. Dangerous as he was often
thought to be in conversation, one of the features of his character
which has impressed itself on the memory of one who knew him well, was
his "patient, winning considerateness in discussion, which, with other
qualities, endeared him to those to whom he opened his heart."[22] "It
is impossible," writes James Mozley in 1833, with a mixture of
amusement, speaking of the views about celibacy which were beginning to
be current, "to talk with Froude without committing one's self on such
subjects as these, so that by and by I expect the tergiversants will be
a considerable party." His letters, with their affectionately playful
addresses, [Greek: daimonie, ainotate, pepon], _Carissime, "Sir, my dear
friend"_ or "[Greek: Argeion och' ariste], have you not been a spoon?"
are full of the most delightful ease and _verve_ and sympathy.

With a keen sense of English faults he was, as Cardinal Newman has said,
"an Englishman to the backbone"; and he was, further, a fastidious,
high-tempered English gentleman, in spite of his declaiming about
"pampered aristocrats" and the "gentleman heresy." His friends thought
of him as of the "young Achilles," with his high courage, and noble
form, and "eagle eye," made for such great things, but appointed so soon
to die. "Who can refrain from tears at the thought of that bright and
beautiful Froude?" is the expression of one of them shortly before his
death, and when it was quite certain that the doom which had so long
hung over him was at hand.[23] He had the love of doing, for the mere
sake of doing, what was difficult or even dangerous to do, which is the
mainspring of characteristic English sports and games. He loved the sea;
he liked to sail his own boat, and enjoyed rough weather, and took
interest in the niceties of seamanship and shipcraft. He was a bold
rider across country. With a powerful grasp on mathematical truths and
principles, he entered with whole-hearted zest into inviting problems,
or into practical details of mechanical or hydrostatic or astronomical
science. His letters are full of such observations, put in a way which
he thought would interest his friends, and marked by his strong habit of
getting into touch with what was real and of the substance of questions.
He applied his thoughts to architecture with a power and originality
which at the time were not common. No one who only cared for this world
could be more attracted and interested than he was by the wonder and
beauty of its facts and appearances. With the deepest allegiance to his
home and reverence for its ties and authority, a home of the
old-fashioned ecclesiastical sort, sober, manly, religious, orderly, he
carried into his wider life the feelings with which he had been brought
up; bold as he was, his reason and his character craved for authority,
but authority which morally and reasonably he could respect. Mr. Keble's
goodness and purity subdued him, and disposed him to accept without
reserve his master's teaching: and towards Mr. Keble, along with an
outside show of playful criticism and privileged impertinence, there was
a reverence which governed Froude's whole nature. In the wild and rough
heyday of reform, he was a Tory of the Tories. But when authority failed
him, from cowardice or stupidity or self-interest, he could not easily
pardon it; and he was ready to startle his friends by proclaiming
himself a Radical, prepared for the sake of the highest and greatest
interests to sacrifice all second-rate and subordinate ones.

When his friends, after his death, published selections from his
journals and letters, the world was shocked by what seemed his amazing
audacity both of thought and expression about a number of things and
persons which it was customary to regard as almost beyond the reach of
criticism. The _Remains_ lent themselves admirably to the controversial
process of culling choice phrases and sentences and epithets
surprisingly at variance with conventional and popular estimates.
Friends were pained and disturbed; foes naturally enough could not hold
in their overflowing exultation at such a disclosure of the spirit of
the movement. Sermons and newspapers drew attention to Froude's
extravagances with horror and disgust. The truth is that if the off-hand
sayings in conversation or letters of any man of force and wit and
strong convictions about the things and persons that he condemns, were
made known to the world, they would by themselves have much the same
look of flippancy, injustice, impertinence to those who disagreed in
opinion with the speaker or writer they are allowed for, or they are not
allowed for by others, according to what is known of his general
character. The friends who published Froude's _Remains_ knew what he
was; they knew the place and proportion of the fierce and scornful
passages; they knew that they really did not go beyond the liberty and
the frank speaking which most people give themselves in the _abandon_
and understood exaggeration of intimate correspondence and talk. But
they miscalculated the effect on those who did not know him, or whose
interest it was to make the most of the advantage given them. They seem
to have expected that the picture which they presented of their friend's
transparent sincerity and singleness of aim, manifested amid so much
pain and self-abasement, would have touched readers more. They
miscalculated in supposing that the proofs of so much reality of
religious earnestness would carry off the offence of vehement language,
which without these proofs might naturally be thought to show mere
random violence. At any rate the result was much natural and genuine
irritation, which they were hardly prepared for. Whether on general
grounds they were wise in startling and vexing friends, and putting
fresh weapons into the hands of opponents by their frank disclosure of
so unconventional a character, is a question which may have more than
one answer; but one thing is certain, they were not wise, if they only
desired to forward the immediate interests of their party or cause. It
was not the act of cunning conspirators; it was the act of men who were
ready to show their hands, and take the consequences. Undoubtedly, they
warned off many who had so far gone along with the movement, and who now
drew back. But if the publication was a mistake, it was the mistake of
men confident in their own straight-forwardness.

There is a natural Nemesis to all over-strong and exaggerated language.
The weight of Froude's judgments was lessened by the disclosure of his
strong words, and his dashing fashion of condemnation and dislike gave
a precedent for the violence of shallower men. But to those who look
back on them now, though there can be no wonder that at the time they
excited such an outcry, their outspoken boldness hardly excites
surprise. Much of it might naturally be put down to the force of first
impressions; much of it is the vehemence of an Englishman who claims the
liberty of criticising and finding fault at home; much of it was the
inevitable vehemence of a reformer. Much of it seems clear foresight of
what has since come to be recognised. His judgments on the Reformers,
startling as they were at the time, are not so very different, as to the
facts of the case, from what most people on all sides now agree in; and
as to their temper and theology, from what most churchmen would now
agree in. Whatever allowances may be made for the difficulties of their
time, and these allowances ought to be very great, and however well they
may have done parts of their work, such as the translations and
adaptations of the Prayer Book, it is safe to say that the divines of
the Reformation never can be again, with their confessed Calvinism, with
their shifting opinions, their extravagant deference to the foreign
oracles of Geneva and Zurich, their subservience to bad men in power,
the heroes and saints of churchmen. But when all this is said, it still
remains true that Froude was often intemperate and unjust. In the hands
of the most self-restrained and considerate of its leaders, the movement
must anyhow have provoked strong opposition, and given great offence.
The surprise and the general ignorance were too great; the assault was
too rude and unexpected. But Froude's strong language gave it a
needless exasperation.

Froude was a man strong in abstract thought and imagination, who wanted
adequate knowledge. His canons of judgment were not enlarged, corrected,
and strengthened by any reading or experience commensurate with his
original powers of reasoning or invention. He was quite conscious of it,
and did his best to fill up the gap in his intellectual equipment. He
showed what he might have done under more favouring circumstances in a
very interesting volume on Becket's history and letters. But
circumstances were hopelessly against him; he had not time, he had not
health and strength, for the learning which he so needed, which he so
longed for. But wherever he could, he learned. He was quite ready to
submit his prepossessions to the test and limitation of facts. Eager and
quick-sighted, he was often apt to be hasty in conclusions from
imperfect or insufficient premisses; but even about what he saw most
clearly he was willing to hold himself in suspense, when he found that
there was something more to know. Cardinal Newman has noted two
deficiencies which, in his opinion, were noticeable in Froude. "He had
no turn for theology as such"; and, further, he goes on: "I should say
that his power of entering into the minds of others was not equal to his
other gifts"--a remark which he illustrates by saying that Froude could
not believe that "I really held the Roman Church to be antichristian."
The want of this power--in which he stood in such sharp contrast to his
friend--might be either a strength or a weakness; a strength, if his
business was only to fight; a weakness, if it was to attract and
persuade. But Froude was made for conflict, not to win disciples. Some
wild solemn poetry, marked by deep feeling and direct expression, is
scattered through his letters,[24] kindled always by things and thoughts
of the highest significance, and breaking forth with force and fire. But
probably the judgment passed on him by a clever friend, from the
examination of his handwriting, was a true one: "This fellow has a great
deal of imagination, but not the imagination of a poet." He felt that
even beyond poetry there are higher things than anything that
imagination can work upon. It was a feeling which made him blind to the
grandeur of Milton's poetry. He saw in it only an intrusion into the
most sacred of sanctities.

It was this fearless and powerful spirit, keen and quick to see
inferences and intolerant of compromises, that the disturbances of Roman
Catholic Emancipation and of the Reform time roused from the common
round of pursuits, natural to a serious and thoughtful clergyman of
scholarlike mind and as yet no definite objects, and brought him with
all his enthusiasm and thoroughness into a companionship with men who
had devoted their lives, and given up every worldly object, to save the
Church by raising it to its original idea and spirit. Keble had lifted
his pupil's thoughts above mere dry and unintelligent orthodoxy, and
Froude had entered with earnest purpose into Church ways of practical
self-discipline and self-correction. Bishop Lloyd's lectures had taught
him and others, to the surprise of many, that the familiar and venerated
Prayer Book was but the reflexion of mediaeval and primitive devotion,
still embodied in its Latin forms in the Roman Service books; and so
indirectly had planted in their minds the idea of the historical
connexion, and in a very profound way the spiritual sympathy, of the
modern with the pre-Reformation Church. But it is not till 1829 or 1830
that we begin in his _Remains_ to see in him the sense of a pressing and
anxious crisis in religious matters. In the summer of 1829 he came more
closely than hitherto across Mr. Newman's path. They had been Fellows
together since 1826, and Tutors since 1827. Mr. Froude, with his Toryism
and old-fashioned churchmanship, would not unnaturally be shy of a
friend of Whately's with his reputation for theological liberalism.
Froude's first letter to Mr. Newman is in August 1828. It is the letter
of a friendly and sympathising colleague in college work, glad to be
free from the "images of impudent undergraduates"; he inserts some lines
of verse, talks about Dollond and telescopes, and relates how he and a
friend got up at half-past two in the morning, and walked half a mile
to see Mercury rise; he writes about his mathematical studies and
reading for orders, and how a friend had "read half through Prideaux and
yet accuses himself of idleness"; but there is no interchange of
intimate thought. Mr. Newman was at this time, as he has told us,
drifting away from under the shadow of liberalism; and in Froude he
found a man who, without being a liberal, was as quick-sighted, as
courageous, and as alive to great thoughts and new hopes as himself.
Very different in many ways, they were in this alike, that the
commonplace notions of religion and the Church were utterly
unsatisfactory to them, and that each had the capacity for affectionate
and whole-hearted friendship. The friendship began and lasted on,
growing stronger and deeper to the end. And this was not all. Froude's
friendship with Mr. Newman overcame Mr. Keble's hesitations about Mr.
Newman's supposed liberalism. Mr. Newman has put on record what he
thought and felt about Froude; no one, probably, of the many whom
Cardinal Newman's long life has brought round him, ever occupied
Froude's place in his heart. The correspondence shows in part the way in
which Froude's spirit rose, under the sense of having such a friend to
work with in the cause which day by day grew greater and more sacred in
the eyes of both. Towards Mr. Keble Froude felt like a son to a father;
towards Mr. Newman like a soldier to his comrade, and him the most
splendid and boldest of warriors. Each mind caught fire from the other,
till the high enthusiasm of the one was quenched in an early death.

Shortly after this friendship began, the course of events also began
which finally gave birth to the Oxford movement. The break-up of parties
caused by the Roman Catholic emancipation was followed by the French and
Belgian revolutions of 1830, and these changes gave a fresh stimulus to
all the reforming parties in England--Whigs, Radicals, and liberal
religionists. Froude's letters mark the influence of these changes on
his mind. They stirred in him the fiercest disgust and indignation, and
as soon as the necessity of battle became evident to save the
Church--and such a necessity was evident--he threw himself into it with
all his heart, and his attitude was henceforth that of a determined and
uncompromising combatant. "Froude is growing stronger and stronger in
his sentiments every day," writes James Mozley, in 1832, "and cuts about
him on all sides. It is extremely fine to hear him talk. The aristocracy
of the country at present are the chief objects of his vituperation, and
he decidedly sets himself against the modern character of the gentleman,
and thinks that the Church will eventually depend for its support, as it
always did in its most influential times, on the very poorest classes."
"I would not set down anything that Froude says for his deliberate
opinion," writes James Mozley a year later, "for he really hates the
present state of things so excessively that any change would be a relief
to him." ... "Froude is staying up, and I see a great deal of him." ...
"Froude is most enthusiastic in his plans, and says, 'What fun it is
living in such times as these! how could one now go back to the times of
old Tory humbug?'" From henceforth his position among his friends was
that of the most impatient and aggressive of reformers, the one who most
urged on his fellows to outspoken language and a bold line of action.
They were not men to hang back and be afraid, but they were cautious and
considerate of popular alarms and prejudices, compared with Froude's
fearlessness. Other minds were indeed moving--minds as strong as his,
indeed, it may be, deeper, more complex, more amply furnished, with a
wider range of vision and a greater command of the field. But while he
lived, he appears as the one who spurs on and incites, where others
hesitate. He is the one by whom are visibly most felt the _gaudia
certaminis,_ and the confidence of victory, and the most profound
contempt for the men and the ideas of the boastful and short-sighted
present.

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