The Oxford Movement by R.W. Church

R >> R.W. Church >> The Oxford Movement

Pages:
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 | 21 | 22 | 23 | 24 | 25

This is not too much to say of the effect of Dr. Pusey's adhesion. It
gave the movement a second head, in close sympathy with its original
leader, but in many ways very different from him. Dr. Pusey became, as
it were, its official chief in the eyes of the world. He became also, in
a remarkable degree, a guarantee for its stability and steadiness: a
guarantee that its chiefs knew what they were about, and meant nothing
but what was for the benefit of the English Church. "He was," we read in
the _Apologia_, "a man of large designs; he had a hopeful, sanguine
mind; he had no fear of others; he was haunted by no intellectual
perplexities.... If confidence in his position is (as it is) a first
essential in the leader of a party, Dr. Pusey had it." An inflexible
patience, a serene composure, a meek, resolute self-possession, was the
habit of his mind, and never deserted him in the most trying days. He
never for an instant, as the paragraph witnesses, wavered or doubted
about the position of the English Church.

He was eminently, as his friend justly observes, "a man of large
designs." It is doubtless true, as the _Apologia_ goes on to say, that
it was due to the place which he now took in the movement that great
changes were made in the form and character of the Tracts. To Dr.
Pusey's mind, accustomed to large and exhaustive theological reading,
they wanted fulness, completeness, the importance given by careful
arrangement and abundant knowledge. It was not for nothing that he had
passed an apprenticeship among the divines of Germany, and been the
friend and correspondent of Tholuck, Schleiermacher, Ewald, and Sack. He
knew the meaning of real learning. In controversy it was his
sledge-hammer and battle-mace, and he had the strong and sinewy hand to
use it with effect. He observed that when attention had been roused to
the ancient doctrines of the Church by the startling and peremptory
language of the earlier Tracts, fairness and justice demanded that these
doctrines should be fully and carefully explained and defended against
misrepresentation and mistake. Forgetfulness and ignorance had thrown
these doctrines so completely into the shade that, identified as they
were with the best English divinity, they now wore the air of amazing
novelties; and it was only due to honest inquirers to satisfy them with
solid and adequate proof. "Dr. Pusey's influence was felt at once. He
saw that there ought to be more sobriety, more gravity, more careful
pains, more sense of responsibility in the Tracts and in the whole
movement." At the end of 1835 Dr. Pusey gave an example of what he
meant. In place of the "short and incomplete papers," such as the
earlier Tracts had been, Nos. 67, 68, and 69 formed the three parts of a
closely-printed pamphlet of more than 300 pages.[50] It was a treatise
on Baptism, perhaps the most elaborate that has yet appeared in the
English language. "It is to be regarded," says the advertisement to the
second volume of the Tracts, "not as an inquiry into a single or
isolated doctrine, but as a delineation and serious examination of a
modern system of theology, of extensive popularity and great
speciousness, in its elementary and characteristic principles." The
Tract on Baptism was like the advance of a battery of heavy artillery on
a field where the battle has been hitherto carried on by skirmishing and
musketry. It altered the look of things and the condition of the
fighting. After No. 67 the earlier form of the Tracts appeared no more.
Except two or three reprints from writers like Bishop Wilson, the Tracts
from No. 70 to No. 90 were either grave and carefully worked out essays
on some question arising out of the discussions of the time, or else
those ponderous _catenae_ of patristic or Anglican divinity, by which
the historical continuity and Church authority of various points of
doctrine were established.

Dr. Pusey was indeed a man of "large designs." The vision rose before
him of a revived and instructed Church, earnest in purpose and strict in
life, and of a great Christian University roused and quickened to a
sense of its powers and responsibilities. He thought of the enormous
advantages offered by its magnificent foundations for serious study and
the production of works for which time and deep learning and continuous
labour were essential. Such works, in the hands of single-minded
students, living lives of simplicity and hard toil, had in the case of
the Portroyalists, the Oratorians, and above all, the Benedictines of
St. Maur, splendidly redeemed the Church of France, in otherwise evil
days, from the reproach of idleness and self-indulgence. He found under
his hand men who had in them something of the making of students; and he
hoped to see college fellowships filled more and more by such men, and
the life of a college fellow more and more recognised as that of a man
to whom learning, and especially sacred learning, was his call and
sufficient object, as pastoral or educational work might be the call of
others. Where fellowships were not to be had, he encouraged such men to
stay up in Oxford; he took them into his own house; later, he tried a
kind of hall to receive them. And by way of beginning at once, and
giving them something to do, he planned on a large scale a series of
translations and also editions of the Fathers. It was announced, with an
elaborate prospectus, in 1836, under the title, in conformity with the
usage of the time, which had _Libraries of Useful Knowledge, etc._, of a
_Library of Fathers of the Holy Catholic Church anterior to the Division
of the East and West_, under the editorship of Dr. Pusey, Mr. Keble,
and Mr. Newman. It was dedicated to the Archbishop of Canterbury, and
had a considerable number of Bishops among its subscribers. Down to a
very late date, the _Library of the Fathers_, in which Charles Marriott
came to take a leading part, was a matter of much concern to Dr. Pusey.
And to bring men together, and to interest them in theological subjects,
he had evening meetings at his own house, where papers were read and
discussed. "Some persons," writes a gossiping chronicler of the
time,[51] "thought that these meetings were liable to the statute, _De
conventiculis illicitis reprimendis_." Some important papers were the
result of these meetings; but the meetings themselves were irresistibly
sleepy, and in time they were discontinued. But indefatigable and
powerful in all these beginnings Dr. Pusey stirred men to activity and
saw great ground of hope. He was prepared for opposition, but he had
boundless reliance on his friends and his cause. His forecast of the
future, of great days in store for the Church of England, was, not
unreasonably, one of great promise. Ten years might work wonders. The
last fear that occurred to him was that within ten years a hopeless
rift, not of affection but of conviction, would have run through that
company of friends, and parted irrevocably their course and work in
life.

FOOTNOTES:

[48] The subjoined extracts record the impression made by Mr. Newman's
preaching on contemporaries well qualified to judge, and standing
respectively in very different relations to the movement. This is the
judgment of a very close observer, and very independent critic, James
Mozley. In an article in the _Christian Remembrancer_, January 1846 (p.
169), after speaking of the obvious reasons of Mr. Newman's influence,
he proceeds:--

We inquire further, and we find that this influence has been of a
peculiarly ethical and inward kind; that it has touched the deepest
part of our minds, and that the great work on which it has been
founded is a practical, religious one--his Sermons. We speak not from
our own fixed impression, however deeply felt, but from what we have
heard and observed everywhere, from the natural, incidental,
unconscious remarks dropped from persons' mouths, and evidently
showing what they thought and felt. For ourselves, we must say, one of
Mr. Newman's sermons is to us a marvellous production. It has perfect
power, and perfect nature; but the latter it is which makes it so
great. A sermon of Mr. Newman's enters into all our feelings, ideas,
modes of viewing things. He wonderfully realises a state of mind,
enters into a difficulty, a temptation, a disappointment, a grief; he
goes into the different turns and incidental, unconscious symptoms of
a case, with notions which come into the head and go out again, and
are forgotten, till some chance recalls them.... To take the first
instance that happens to occur to us ... we have often been struck by
the keen way in which he enters into a regular tradesman's
vice--avarice, fortune-getting, amassing capital, and so on. This is
not a temper to which we can imagine Mr. Newman ever having felt in
his own mind even the temptation; but he understands it, and the
temptation to it, as perfectly as any merchant could. No man of
business could express it more naturally, more pungently, more _ex
animo_.... So with the view that worldly men take of religion, in a
certain sense, he quite enters into it, and the world's point of view:
he sees, with a regular worldly man's eye, religion vanishing into
nothing, and becoming an unreality, while the visible system of life
and facts, politics and society, gets more and more solid and grows
upon him. The whole influence of the world on the imagination; the
weight of example; the force of repetition; the way in which maxims,
rules, sentiments, by being simply sounded in the ear from day to day,
seem to prove themselves, and make themselves believed by being often
heard,--every part of the easy, natural, passive process by which a
man becomes a man of the world is entered into, as if the preacher
were going to justify or excuse him, rather than condemn him. Nay, he
enters deeply into what even scepticism has to say for itself; he puts
himself into the infidel's state of mind, in which the world, as a
great fact, seems to give the lie to all religions, converting them
into phenomena which counterbalance and negative each other, and he
goes down into that lowest abyss and bottom of things, at which the
intellect undercuts spiritual truth altogether. He enters into the
ordinary common states of mind just in the same way. He is most
consoling, most sympathetic. He sets before persons their own feelings
with such truth of detail, such natural expressive touches, that they
seem not to be ordinary states of mind which everybody has, but very
peculiar ones; for he and the reader seem to be the only two persons
in the world that have them in common. Here is the point. Persons look
into Mr. Newman's sermons and see their own thoughts in them. This is,
after all, what as much as anything gives a book hold upon minds....
Wonderful pathetic power, that can so intimately, so subtilely and
kindly, deal with the soul!--and wonderful soul that can be so dealt
with.

Compare with this the judgment pronounced by one of quite a different
school, the late Principal Shairp:--

Both Dr. Pusey and Mr. Keble at that time were quite second in
importance to Mr. Newman. The centre from which his power went forth
was the pulpit of St. Mary's, with those wonderful afternoon sermons.
Sunday after Sunday, year by year, they went on, each continuing and
deepening the impression produced by the last. As the hour interfered
with the dinner-hour of the Colleges, most men preferred a warm dinner
without Newman's sermon to a cold one with it; so the audience was not
crowded--the large church little more than half filled. The service
was very simple, no pomp, no ritualism; for it was characteristic of
the leading men of the movement that they left these things to the
weaker brethren. Their thoughts, at all events, were set on great
questions which touched the heart of unseen things. About the service,
the most remarkable thing was the beauty, the silver intonation of Mr.
Newman's voice as he read the lessons.... When he began to preach, a
stranger was not likely to be much struck. Here was no vehemence, no
declamation, no show of elaborated argument, so that one who came
prepared to hear "a great intellectual effort" was almost sure to go
away disappointed. Indeed, we believe that if he had preached one of
his St. Mary's sermons before a Scotch town congregation, they would
have thought the preacher a "silly body".... Those who never heard him
might fancy that his sermons would generally be about apostolical
succession, or rights of the Church, or against Dissenters. Nothing of
the kind. You might hear him preach for weeks without an allusion to
these things. What there was of High Church teaching was implied
rather than enforced. The local, the temporary, and the modern were
ennobled by the presence of the Catholic truth belonging to all ages
that pervaded the whole. His power showed itself chiefly in the new
and unlooked-for way in which he touched into life old truths, moral
or spiritual, which all Christians acknowledge, but most have ceased
to feel--when he spoke of "unreal words," of the "individuality of the
soul," of the "invisible world," of a "particular Providence," or
again, of the "ventures of faith," "warfare the condition of victory,"
"the Cross of Christ the measure of the world," "the Church a Home for
the lonely." As he spoke, how the old truth became new; how it came
home with a meaning never felt before! He laid his finger how gently,
yet how powerfully, on some inner place in the hearer's heart, and
told him things about himself he had never known till then. Subtlest
truths, which it would have taken philosophers pages of circumlocution
and big words to state, were dropt out by the way in a sentence or two
of the most transparent Saxon. What delicacy of style, yet what
strength! how simple, yet how suggestive! how homely, yet how refined!
how penetrating, yet how tender-hearted! If now and then there was a
forlorn undertone which at the time seemed inexplicable, you might be
perplexed at the drift of what he said, but you felt all the more
drawn to the speaker. ... After hearing these sermons you might come
away still not believing the tenets peculiar to the High Church
system; but you would be harder than most men, if you did not feel
more than ever ashamed of coarseness, selfishness, worldliness, if you
did not feel the things of faith brought closer to the soul.--_John
Keble,_ by J. C. Shairp, Professor of Humanity, St. Andrews (1866),
pp. 12-17.

I venture to add the judgment of another contemporary, on the effect of
this preaching, from the _Reminiscences_ of Sir F. Doyle, p. 145:--

That great man's extraordinary genius drew all those within his
sphere, like a magnet, to attach themselves to him and his doctrines.
Nay, before he became a Romanist, what we may call his mesmeric
influence acted not only on his Tractarian adherents, but even in some
degree on outsiders like myself. Whenever I was at Oxford, I used to
go regularly on Sunday afternoons to listen to his sermon at St.
Mary's, and I have never heard such preaching since. I do not know
whether it is a mere fancy of mine, or whether those who know him
better will accept and endorse my belief, that one element of his
wonderful power showed itself after this fashion. He always began as
if he had determined to set forth his idea of the truth in the
plainest and simplest language--language, as men say, "intelligible to
the meanest understanding." But his ardent zeal and fine poetical
imagination were not thus to be controlled. As I hung upon his words,
it seemed to me as if I could trace behind his will, and pressing, so
to speak, against it, a rush of thoughts, of feelings which he kept
struggling to hold back, but in the end they were generally too strong
for him, and poured themselves out in a torrent of eloquence all the
more impetuous from having been so long repressed. The effect of these
outbursts was irresistible, and carried his hearers beyond themselves
at once. Even when his efforts of self-restraint were more successful,
those very efforts gave a life and colour to his style which riveted
the attention of all within the reach of his voice. Mr. Justin
McCarthy, in his _History of Our Own Times_, says of him: "In all the
arts that make a great preacher or orator, Cardinal Newman was
deficient. His manner was constrained and ungraceful, and even
awkward; his voice was thin and weak, his bearing was not at first
impressive in any way--a gaunt emaciated figure, a sharp eagle face,
and a cold meditative eye, rather repelled than attracted those who
saw him for the first time." I do not think Mr. McCarthy's phrases
very happily chosen to convey his meaning. Surely a gaunt emaciated
frame and a sharp eagle face are the very characteristics which we
should picture to ourselves as belonging to Peter the Hermit, or
Scott's Ephraim Macbriar in _Old Mortality_. However unimpressive the
look of an eagle may be in Mr. McCarthy's opinion, I do not agree with
him about Dr. Newman.

When I knew him at Oxford, these somewhat disparaging remarks would
not have been applicable. His manner, it is true, may have been
self-repressed, constrained it was not. His bearing was neither
awkward nor ungraceful; it was simply quiet and calm, because under
strict control; but beneath that calmness, intense feeling, I think,
was obvious to those who had any instinct of sympathy with him. But if
Mr. McCarthy's acquaintance with him only began when he took office in
an Irish Catholic university, I can quite understand that (flexibility
not being one of his special gifts) he may have failed now and again
to bring himself into perfect harmony with an Irish audience. He was
probably too much of a typical Englishman for his place; nevertheless
Mr. McCarthy, though he does not seem to have admired him in the
pulpit, is fully sensible of his intellectual powers and general
eminence.

Dr. Pusey, who used every now and then to take Newman's duties at St.
Mary's, was to me a much less interesting person. [A learned man, no
doubt, but dull and tedious as a preacher.] Certainly, in spite of the
name Puseyism having been given to the Oxford attempt at a new
Catholic departure, he was not the Columbus of that voyage of
discovery undertaken to find a safer haven for the Church of England.
I may, however, be more or less unjust to him, as I owe him a sort of
grudge. His discourses were not only less attractive than those of Dr.
Newman, but always much longer, and the result of this was that the
learned Canon of Christ Church generally made me late for dinner at my
College, a calamity never inflicted on his All Souls' hearers by the
terser and swifter fellow of Oriel whom he was replacing.

[49] _Apologia_, p 136.

[50] It swelled in the second edition to 400 pages [in spite of the fact
that in that edition the historical range of the treatise was greatly
reduced].

[51] _Recollections of Oxford_, by G.V. Cox, p. 278.

CHAPTER VIII

SUBSCRIPTION AT MATRICULATION AND ADMISSION OF DISSENTERS

"Depend upon it," an earnest High Churchman of the Joshua Watson type
had said to one of Mr. Newman's friends, who was a link between the old
Churchmanship and the new--"depend upon it, the day will come when those
great doctrines" connected with the Church, "now buried, will be brought
out to the light of the day, and then the effect will be quite
fearful."[52] With the publication of the _Tracts for the Times_, and
the excitement caused by them, the day had come.

Their unflinching and severe proclamation of Church principles and
Church doctrines coincided with a state of feeling and opinion in the
country, in which two very different tendencies might be observed. They
fell on the public mind just when one of these tendencies would help
them, and the other be fiercely hostile. On the one hand, the issue of
the political controversy with the Roman Catholics, their triumph all
along the line, and the now scarcely disguised contempt shown by their
political representatives for the pledges and explanations on which
their relief was supposed to have been conceded, had left the public
mind sore, angry, and suspicious. Orthodox and Evangelicals were alike
alarmed and indignant; and the Evangelicals, always doctrinally jealous
of Popery, and of anything "unsound" in that direction, had been roused
to increased irritation by the proceedings of the Reformation Society,
which had made it its business to hold meetings and discussions all over
the country, where fervid and sometimes eloquent and able Irishmen, like
Mr. E. Tottenham, afterwards of Laura Chapel, Bath, had argued and
declaimed, with Roman text-books in hand, on such questions as the Right
of Private Judgment, the Rule of Faith, and the articles of the
Tridentine Creed--not always with the effect which they intended on
those who heard them, with whom their arguments, and those which they
elicited from their opponents, sometimes left behind uncomfortable
misgivings, and questions even more serious than the controversy itself.
On the other hand, in quarters quite unconnected with the recognised
religious schools, interest had been independently and strongly awakened
in the minds of theologians and philosophical thinkers, in regard to the
idea, history, and relations to society of the Christian Church. In
Ireland, a recluse, who was the centre of a small knot of earnest
friends, a man of deep piety and great freedom and originality of mind,
Mr. Alexander Knox, had been led, partly, it may be, by his intimacy
with John Wesley, to think out for himself the character and true
constitution of the Church, and the nature of the doctrines which it was
commissioned to teach. In England, another recluse, of splendid genius
and wayward humour, had dealt in his own way, with far-reaching insight,
with vast reading, and often with impressive eloquence, with the same
subject; and his profound sympathy and faith had been shared and
reflected by a great poet. What Coleridge and Wordsworth had put in the
forefront of their speculations and poetry, as the object of their
profoundest interest, and of their highest hopes for mankind, might, of
course, fail to appear in the same light to others; but it could not
fail, in those days at least, to attract attention, as a matter of
grave and well-founded importance. Coleridge's theories of the Church
were his own, and were very wide of theories recognised by any of those
who had to deal practically with the question, and who were influenced,
in one way or another, by the traditional doctrines of theologians. But
Coleridge had lifted the subject to a very high level. He had taken the
simple but all-important step of viewing the Church in its spiritual
character as first and foremost and above all things essentially a
religious society of divine institution, not dependent on the creation
or will of man, or on the privileges and honours which man might think
fit to assign to it; and he had undoubtedly familiarised the minds of
many with this way of regarding it, however imperfect, or cloudy, or
unpractical they might find the development of his ideas, and his
deductions from them. And in Oxford the questions which had stirred the
friends at Hadleigh had stirred others also, and had waked up various
responses. Whately's acute mind had not missed these questions, and had
given original if insufficient answers to them. Blanco White knew only
too well their bearing and importance, and had laboured, not without
success, to leave behind him his own impress on the way in which they
should be dealt with. Dr. Hampden, the man in Oxford best acquainted
with Aristotle's works and with the scholastic philosophy, had thrown
Christian doctrines into a philosophical calculus which seemed to leave
them little better than the inventions of men. On the other hand, a
brilliant scholar, whose after-career was strangely full of great
successes and deplorable disasters, William Sewell of Exeter College,
had opened, in a way new to Oxford, the wealth and magnificence of
Plato; and his thoughts had been dazzled by seeming to find in the
truths and facts of the Christian Church the counterpart and realisation
of the grandest of Plato's imaginations. The subjects treated with such
dogmatic severity and such impetuous earnestness in the Tracts were, in
one shape or another, in all men's minds, when these Tracts broke on the
University and English society with their peremptory call to men "to
take their side."

There was just a moment of surprise and uncertainty--uncertainty as to
what the Tracts meant; whether they were to be a new weapon against the
enemies of the Church, or were simply extravagant and preposterous
novelties--just a certain perplexity and hesitation at their conflicting
aspects; on the one hand, the known and high character of the writers,
their evident determination and confidence in their cause, the
attraction of their religious warmth and unselfishness and nobleness,
the dim consciousness that much that they said was undeniable; and on
the other hand, the apparent wildness and recklessness of their words:
and then public opinion began steadily to take its "ply," and to be
agreed in condemning them. It soon went farther, and became vehement in
reprobating them as scandalous and dangerous publications. They incensed
the Evangelicals by their alleged Romanism, and their unsound views
about justification, good works, and the sacraments; they angered the
"two-bottle orthodox" by their asceticism--the steady men, by their
audacity and strong words--the liberals, by their dogmatic severity;
their seriously practical bearing was early disclosed in a tract on
"Fasting." But while they repelled strongly, they attracted strongly;
they touched many consciences, they won many hearts, they opened new
thoughts and hopes to many minds. One of the mischiefs of the Tracts,
and of those sermons at St. Mary's which were the commentaries on them,
was that so many people seemed to like them and to be struck by them.
The gathering storm muttered and growled for some time at a distance,
and men seemed to be taking time to make up their minds; but it began to
lour from early days, till after various threatenings it broke in a
furious article in the _Edinburgh_, by Dr. Arnold, on the "Oxford
Malignants"; and the Tract-writers and their friends became, what they
long continued to be, the most unpopular and suspected body of men in
the Church, whom everybody was at liberty to insult, both as dishonest
and absurd, of whom nothing was too cruel to say, nothing too ridiculous
to believe. It is only equitable to take into account the unprepared
state of the public mind, the surprise and novelty of even the commonest
things when put in a new light, the prejudices which the Tract-writers
were thought wantonly to offend and defy, their militant and
uncompromising attitude, where principles were at stake. But considering
what these men were known to be in character and life, what was the
emergency and what were the pressing motives which called for action,
and what is thought of them now that their course is run, it is strange
indeed to remember who they were, to whom the courtesies of controversy
were denied, not only by the vulgar herd of pamphleteers, but by men of
ability and position, some of whom had been their familiar friends. Of
course a nickname was soon found for them: the word "Tractarian" was
invented, and Archbishop Whately thought it worth while, but not
successfully, to improve it into "Tractites." Archbishop Whately, always
ingenious, appears to have suspected that the real but concealed object
of the movement was to propagate a secret infidelity; they were
"Children of the Mist," or "Veiled Prophets";[53] and he seriously
suggested to a friend who was writing against it,--"this rapidly
spreading pestilence,"--to parallel it, in its characteristics and modes
of working, with Indian Thuggee.[54]

Pages:
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 | 21 | 22 | 23 | 24 | 25