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The Oxford Movement; Twelve Years, 1833-1845

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Title: The Oxford Movement; Twelve Years, 1833-1845

Author: R. W. Church


        
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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE OXFORD MOVEMENT; TWELVE YEARS, 1833-1845 ***

THE OXFORD MOVEMENT

TWELVE YEARS 1833-1845

R.W. CHURCH, M.A., D.C.L.

SOMETIME DEAN OF ST. PAUL'S AND FELLOW OF ORIEL COLLEGE, OXFORD




ADVERTISEMENT


The revision of these papers was a task to which the late Dean of St.
Paul's gave all the work he could during the last months of his life. At
the time of his death, fourteen of the papers had, so far as can be
judged, received the form in which he wished them to be published; and
these, of course, are printed here exactly as he left them. One more he
had all but prepared for publication; the last four were mainly in the
condition in which, six years ago, he had them privately put into type,
for the convenience of his own further work upon them, and for the
reading of two or three intimate friends. Those into whose care his work
has now come have tried, with the help of his pencilled notes, to bring
these four papers as nearly as they can into the form which they believe
he would have had them take. But it has seemed better to leave unaltered
a sentence here and there to which he might have given a more perfect
shape, rather than to run the risk of swerving from the thought which
was in his mind.

It is possible that the Dean would have made considerable changes in
the preface which is here printed; for only that which seems the first
draft of it has been found. But even thus it serves to show his wish and
purpose for the work he had in hand; and it has therefore been thought
best to publish it. Leave has been obtained to add here some fragments
from a letter which, three years ago, he wrote to Lord Acton about these
papers:

"If I ever publish them, I must say distinctly what I want to do, which
is, not to pretend to write a history of the movement, or to account for
it or adequately to judge it and put it in its due place in relation to
the religious and philosophical history of the time, but simply to
preserve a contemporary memorial of what seems to me to have been a true
and noble effort which passed before my eyes, a short scene of religious
earnestness and aspiration, with all that was in it of self-devotion,
affectionateness, and high and refined and varied character, displayed
under circumstances which are scarcely intelligible to men of the
present time; so enormous have been the changes in what was assumed and
acted upon, and thought practicable and reasonable, 'fifty years since.'
For their time and opportunities, the men of the movement, with all
their imperfect equipment and their mistakes, still seem to me the salt
of their generation.... I wish to leave behind me a record that one who
lived with them, and lived long beyond most of them, believed in the
reality of their goodness and height of character, and still looks back
with deepest reverence to those forgotten men as the companions to whose
teaching and example he owes an infinite debt, and not he only, but
religious society in England of all kinds."

_January_ 31st, 1891.




PREFACE


The following pages relate to that stage in the Church revival of this
century which is familiarly known as the Oxford Movement, or, to use its
nickname, the Tractarian Movement. Various side influences and
conditions affected it at its beginning and in its course; but the
impelling and governing force was, throughout the years with which these
pages are concerned, at Oxford. It was naturally and justly associated
with Oxford, from which it received some of its most marked
characteristics. Oxford men started it and guided it. At Oxford were
raised its first hopes, and Oxford was the scene of its first successes.
At Oxford were its deep disappointments, and its apparently fatal
defeat. And it won and lost, as a champion of English theology and
religion, a man of genius, whose name is among the illustrious names of
his age, a name which will always be connected with modern Oxford, and
is likely to be long remembered wherever the English language is
studied.

We are sometimes told that enough has been written about the Oxford
Movement, and that the world is rather tired of the subject. A good deal
has certainly been both said and written about it, and more is probably
still to come; and it is true that other interests, more immediate or
more attractive, have thrown into the background what is severed from us
by the interval of half a century. Still that movement had a good deal
to do with what is going on in everyday life among us now; and feelings
both of hostility to it, and of sympathy with it, are still lively and
keen among those to whom religion is a serious subject, and even among
some who are neutral in the questions which it raised, but who find in
it a study of thought and character. I myself doubt whether the interest
of it is so exhausted as is sometimes assumed. If it is, these pages
will soon find their appropriate resting-place. But I venture to present
them, because, though a good many judgments upon the movement have been
put forth, they have come mostly from those who have been more or less
avowedly opposed to it.[1] The men of most account among those who were
attracted by it and represented it have, with one illustrious exception,
passed away. A survivor of the generation which it stirred so deeply may
not have much that is new to tell about it. He may not be able to affect
much the judgment which will finally be accepted about it. But the fact
is not unimportant, that a number of able and earnest men, men who both
intellectually and morally would have been counted at the moment as part
of the promise of the coming time, were fascinated and absorbed by it.
It turned and governed their lives, lifting them out of custom and
convention to efforts after something higher, something worthier of what
they were. It seemed worth while to exhibit the course of the movement
as it looked to these men--as it seemed to them viewed from the inside.
My excuse for adding to so much that has been already written is, that I
was familiar with many of the chief actors in the movement. And I do not
like that the remembrance of friends and associates, men of singular
purity of life and purpose, who raised the tone of living round them,
and by their example, if not by their ideas, recalled both Oxford and
the Church to a truer sense of their responsibilities, should, because
no one would take the trouble to put things on record, "pass away like a
dream."

The following pages were, for the most part, written, and put into
printed shape, in 1884 and 1885. Since they were written, books have
appeared, some of them important ones, going over most of the same
ground; while yet more volumes may be expected. We have had ingenious
theories of the genesis of the movement, and the filiation of its ideas.
Attempts have been made to alter the proportions of the scene and of the
several parts played upon it, and to reduce the common estimate of the
weight and influence of some of the most prominent personages. The
point of view of those who have thus written is not mine, and they tell
their story (with a full right so to do) as I tell mine. But I do not
purpose to compare and adjust our respective accounts--to attack theirs,
or to defend my own. I have not gone through their books to find
statements to except to, or to qualify. The task would be a tiresome and
unprofitable one. I understand their point of view, though I do not
accept it. I do not doubt their good faith, and I hope that they will
allow mine.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] It is hardly necessary to say that these and the following words
were written before Dr. Newman's death, and the publication of his
letters.




CONTENTS


CHAPTER I
THE CHURCH IN THE REFORM DAYS

CHAPTER II
THE BEGINNING OF THE MOVEMENT--JOHN KEBLE

CHAPTER III
RICHARD HURRELL FROUDE

CHAPTER IV
MR. NEWMAN'S EARLY FRIENDS--ISAAC WILLIAMS

CHAPTER V
CHARLES MARRIOTT

CHAPTER VI
THE OXFORD TRACTS

CHAPTER VII
THE TRACTARIANS

CHAPTER VIII
SUBSCRIPTION AT MATRICULATION AND ADMISSION OF DISSENTERS

CHAPTER IX
DR. HAMPDEN

CHAPTER X
GROWTH OF THE MOVEMENT, 1835-1840

CHAPTER XI
THE ROMAN QUESTION

CHAPTER XII
CHANGES

CHAPTER XIII
THE AUTHORITIES AND THE MOVEMENT

CHAPTER XIV
NO. 90

CHAPTER XV
AFTER NO. 90

CHAPTER XVI
THE THREE DEFEATS: ISAAC WILLIAMS, MACMULLEN, PUSEY

CHAPTER XVII
W.G. WARD

CHAPTER XVIII
THE IDEAL OF A CHRISTIAN CHURCH

CHAPTER XIX
THE CATASTROPHE




THE OXFORD MOVEMENT




CHAPTER I

THE CHURCH IN THE REFORM DAYS


What is called the Oxford or Tractarian movement began, without doubt,
in a vigorous effort for the immediate defence of the Church against
serious dangers, arising from the violent and threatening temper of the
days of the Reform Bill. It was one of several and widely differing
efforts. Viewed superficially it had its origin in the accident of an
urgent necessity.[2] The Church was really at the moment imperilled amid
the crude revolutionary projects of the Reform epoch;[3] and something
bolder and more effective than the ordinary apologies for the Church
was the call of the hour. The official leaders of the Church were almost
stunned and bewildered by the fierce outbreak of popular hostility. The
answers put forth on its behalf to the clamour for extensive and even
destructive change were the work of men surprised in a moment of
security. They scarcely recognised the difference between what was
indefensible and what must be fought for to the death; they mistook
subordinate or unimportant points for the key of their position: in
their compromises or in their resistance they wanted the guidance of
clear and adequate principles, and they were vacillating and
ineffective. But stronger and far-seeing minds perceived the need of a
broad and intelligible basis on which to maintain the cause of the
Church. For the air was full of new ideas; the temper of the time was
bold and enterprising. It was felt by men who looked forward, that to
hold their own they must have something more to show than custom or
alleged expediency--they must sound the depths of their own convictions,
and not be afraid to assert the claims of these convictions on men's
reason and imagination as well as on their associations and feelings.
The same dangers and necessities acted differently on different minds;
but among those who were awakened by them to the presence of a great
crisis were the first movers in what came to be known as the Tractarian
movement. The stir around them, the perils which seemed to threaten,
were a call to them to examine afresh the meaning of their familiar
words and professions.

For the Church, as it had been in the quiet days of the eighteenth
century, was scarcely adapted to the needs of more stirring times. The
idea of clerical life had certainly sunk, both in fact and in the
popular estimate of it. The disproportion between the purposes for which
the Church with its ministry was founded and the actual tone of feeling
among those responsible for its service had become too great. Men were
afraid of principles; the one thing they most shrank from was the
suspicion of enthusiasm. Bishop Lavington wrote a book to hold up to
scorn the enthusiasm of Methodists and Papists; and what would have
seemed reasonable and natural in matters of religion and worship in the
age of Cranmer, in the age of Hooker, in the age of Andrewes, or in the
age of Ken, seemed extravagant in the age which reflected the spirit of
Tillotson and Secker, and even Porteus. The typical clergyman in English
pictures of the manners of the day, in the _Vicar of Wakefield,_ in Miss
Austen's novels, in Crabbe's _Parish Register,_ is represented, often
quite unsuspiciously, as a kindly and respectable person, but certainly
not alive to the greatness of his calling. He was often much, very much,
to the society round him. When communication was so difficult and
infrequent, he filled a place in the country life of England which no
one else could fill. He was often the patriarch of his parish, its
ruler, its doctor, its lawyer, its magistrate, as well as its teacher,
before whom vice trembled and rebellion dared not show itself. The idea
of the priest was not quite forgotten; but there was much--much even of
what was good and useful--to obscure it. The beauty of the English
Church in this time was its family life of purity and simplicity; its
blot was quiet worldliness. It has sometimes been the fashion in later
days of strife and disquiet to regret that unpretending estimate of
clerical duty and those easy-going days; as it has sometimes been the
fashion to regret the pomp and dignity with which well-born or scholarly
bishops, furnished with ample leisure and splendid revenues, presided in
unapproachable state over their clergy and held their own among the
great county families. Most things have a side for which something can
be said; and we may truthfully and thankfully recall that among the
clergy of those days there were not a few but many instances, not only
of gentle manners, and warm benevolence, and cultivated intelligence,
but of simple piety and holy life.[4] But the fortunes of the Church are
not safe in the hands of a clergy, of which a great part take their
obligations easily. It was slumbering and sleeping when the visitation
of days of change and trouble came upon it.

Against this state of things the Oxford movement was a determined
revolt; but, as has been said, it was not the only one, nor the first. A
profound discontent at the state of religion in England had taken
possession of many powerful and serious minds in the generation which
was rising into manhood at the close of the first quarter of the
century; and others besides the leaders of the movement were feeling
their way to firmer ground. Other writers of very different principles,
and with different objects, had become alive, among other things, to the
importance of true ideas about the Church, impatient at the ignorance
and shallowness of the current views of it, and alarmed at the dangers
which menaced it. Two Oxford teachers who commanded much attention by
their force and boldness--Dr. Whately and Dr. Arnold--had developed
their theories about the nature, constitution, and functions of the
Church. They were dissatisfied with the general stagnation of religious
opinion, on this as on other subjects. They agreed in resenting the
unintelligent shortsightedness which relegated such a matter to a third
or fourth rank in the scale of religious teaching. They agreed also in
seizing the spiritual aspect of the Church, and in raising the idea of
it above the level of the poor and worldly conceptions on the assumption
of which questions relating to it were popularly discussed. But in their
fundamental principles they were far apart. I assume, on the authority
of Cardinal Newman, what was widely believed in Oxford, and never
apparently denied, that the volume entitled _Letters of an
Episcopalian_,[5] 1826, was, in some sense at least, the work of Dr.
Whately. In it is sketched forth the conception of an organised body,
introduced into the world by Christ Himself, endowed with definite
spiritual powers and with no other, and, whether connected with the
State or not, having an independent existence and inalienable claims,
with its own objects and laws, with its own moral standard and spirit
and character. From this book Cardinal Newman tells us that he learnt
his theory of the Church, though it was, after all, but the theory
received from the first appearance of Christian history; and he records
also the deep impression which it made on others. Dr. Arnold's view was
a much simpler one. He divided the world into Christians and
non-Christians: Christians were all who professed to believe in Christ
as a Divine Person and to worship Him,[6] and the brotherhood, the
"Societas" of Christians, was all that was meant by "the Church" in the
New Testament. It mattered, of course, to the conscience of each
Christian what he had made up his mind to believe, but to no one else.
Church organisation was, according to circumstances, partly inevitable
or expedient, partly mischievous, but in no case of divine authority.
Teaching, ministering the word, was a thing of divine appointment, but
not so the mode of exercising it, either as to persons, forms, or
methods. Sacraments there were, signs and pledges of divine love and
help, in every action of life, in every sight of nature, and eminently
two most touching ones, recommended to Christians by the Redeemer
Himself; but except as a matter of mere order, one man might deal with
these as lawfully as another. Church history there was, fruitful in
interest, instruction, and warning; for it was the record of the long
struggle of the true idea of the Church against the false, and of the
fatal disappearance of the true before the forces of blindness and
wickedness.[7] Dr. Arnold's was a passionate attempt to place the true
idea in the light. Of the difficulties of his theory he made light
account. There was the vivid central truth which glowed through his soul
and quickened all his thoughts. He became its champion and militant
apostle. These doctrines, combined with his strong political liberalism,
made the Midlands hot for Dr. Arnold. But he liked the fighting, as he
thought, against the narrow and frightened orthodoxy round him. And he
was in the thick of this fighting when another set of ideas about the
Church--the ideas on which alone it seemed to a number of earnest and
anxious minds that the cause of the Church could be maintained--the
ideas which were the beginning of the Oxford movement, crossed his path.
It was the old orthodox tradition of the Church, with fresh life put
into it, which he flattered himself that he had so triumphantly
demolished. This intrusion of a despised rival to his own teaching about
the Church--teaching in which he believed with deep and fervent
conviction--profoundly irritated him; all the more that it came from men
who had been among his friends, and who, he thought, should have known
better.[8]

But neither Dr. Whately's nor Dr. Arnold's attempts to put the old
subject of the Church in a new light gained much hold on the public
mind. One was too abstract; the other too unhistorical and
revolutionary. Both in Oxford and in the country were men whose hearts
burned within them for something less speculative and vague, something
more reverent and less individual, more in sympathy with the inherited
spirit of the Church. It did not need much searching to find in the
facts and history of the Church ample evidence of principles distinct
and inspiring, which, however long latent, or overlaid by superficial
accretions, were as well fitted as they ever were to animate its
defenders in the struggle with the unfriendly opinion of the day. They
could not open their Prayer-Books, and think of what they read there,
without seeing that on the face of it the Church claimed to be something
very different from what it was assumed to be in the current
controversies of the time, very different from a mere institution of the
State, from a vague collection of Christian professions from one form
or denomination of religion among many, distinguished by larger
privileges and larger revenues. They could not help seeing that it
claimed an origin not short of the Apostles of Christ, and took for
granted that it was to speak and teach with their authority and that of
their Master. These were theological commonplaces; but now, the pressure
of events and of competing ideas made them to be felt as real and
momentous truths. Amid the confusions and inconsistencies of the
semi-political controversy on Church reform, and on the defects and
rights of the Church, which was going on in Parliament, in the press,
and in pamphlets, the deeper thoughts of those who were interested in
its fortunes were turned to what was intrinsic and characteristic in its
constitution: and while these thoughts in some instances only issued in
theory and argument, in others they led to practical resolves to act
upon them and enforce them.

At the end of the first quarter of the century, say about 1825-30, two
characteristic forms of Church of England Christianity were popularly
recognised. One inherited the traditions of a learned and sober
Anglicanism, claiming as the authorities for its theology the great line
of English divines from Hooker to Waterland, finding its patterns of
devotion in Bishop Wilson, Bishop Horne, and the "Whole Duty of Man,"
but not forgetful of Andrewes, Jeremy Taylor, and Ken,--preaching,
without passion or excitement, scholarlike, careful, wise, often
vigorously reasoned discourses on the capital points of faith and
morals, and exhibiting in its adherents, who were many and important,
all the varieties of a great and far-descended school, which claimed for
itself rightful possession of the ground which it held. There was
nothing effeminate about it, as there was nothing fanatical; there was
nothing extreme or foolish about it; it was a manly school, distrustful
of high-wrought feelings and professions, cultivating self-command and
shy of display, and setting up as its mark, in contrast to what seemed
to it sentimental weakness, a reasonable and serious idea of duty. The
divinity which it propounded, though it rested on learning, was rather
that of strong common sense than of the schools of erudition. Its better
members were highly cultivated, benevolent men, intolerant of
irregularities both of doctrine and life, whose lives were governed by
an unostentatious but solid and unfaltering piety, ready to burst forth
on occasion into fervid devotion. Its worse members were jobbers and
hunters after preferment, pluralists who built fortunes and endowed
families out of the Church, or country gentlemen in orders, who rode to
hounds and shot and danced and farmed, and often did worse things. Its
average was what naturally in England would be the average, in a state
of things in which great religious institutions have been for a long
time settled and unmolested--kindly, helpful, respectable, sociable
persons of good sense and character, workers rather in a fashion of
routine which no one thought of breaking, sometimes keeping up their
University learning, and apt to employ it in odd and not very profitable
inquiries; apt, too, to value themselves on their cheerfulness and quick
wit; but often dull and dogmatic and quarrelsome, often insufferably
pompous. The custom of daily service and even of fasting was kept up
more widely than is commonly supposed. The Eucharist, though sparingly
administered, and though it had been profaned by the operation of the
Test Acts, was approached by religious people with deep reverence. But
besides the better, and the worse, and the average members of this,
which called itself the Church party, there stood out a number of men of
active and original minds, who, starting from the traditions of the
party, were in advance of it in thought and knowledge, or in the desire
to carry principles into action. At the Universities learning was still
represented by distinguished names. At Oxford, Dr. Routh was still
living and at work, and Van Mildert was not forgotten. Bishop Lloyd, if
he had lived, would have played a considerable part; and a young man of
vast industry and great Oriental learning, Mr. Pusey, was coming on the
scene. Davison, in an age which had gone mad about the study of
prophecy, had taught a more intelligent and sober way of regarding it;
and Mr. John Miller's Bampton Lectures, now probably only remembered by
a striking sentence, quoted in a note to the _Christian Year,_[9] had
impressed his readers with a deeper sense of the uses of Scripture.
Cambridge, besides scholars like Bishop Kaye, and accomplished writers
like Mr. Le Bas and Mr. Lyall, could boast of Mr. Hugh James Rose, the
most eminent person of his generation as a divine. But the influence of
this learned theology was at the time not equal to its value. Sound
requires atmosphere; and there was as yet no atmosphere in the public
mind in which the voice of this theology could be heard. The person who
first gave body and force to Church theology, not to be mistaken or
ignored, was Dr. Hook. His massive and thorough Churchmanship was the
independent growth of his own thoughts and reading. Resolute, through
good report and evil report, rough but very generous, stern both against
Popery and Puritanism, he had become a power in the Midlands and the
North, and first Coventry, then Leeds, were the centres of a new
influence. He was the apostle of the Church to the great middle class.

These were the orthodox Churchmen, whom their rivals, and not their
rivals only,[10] denounced as dry, unspiritual, formal, unevangelical,
self-righteous; teachers of mere morality at their best, allies and
servants of the world at their worst. In the party which at this time
had come to be looked upon popularly as best entitled to be the
_religious_ party, whether they were admired as Evangelicals, or abused
as Calvinists, or laughed at as the Saints, were inheritors not of
Anglican traditions, but of those which had grown up among the zealous
clergymen and laymen who had sympathised with the great Methodist
revival, and whose theology and life had been profoundly affected by it.
It was the second or third generation of those whose religious ideas had
been formed and governed by the influence of teachers like Hervey,
Romaine, Cecil, Venn, Fletcher, Newton, and Thomas Scott. The fathers of
the Evangelical school were men of naturally strong and vigorous
understandings, robust and rugged, and sometimes eccentric, but quite
able to cope with the controversialists, like Bishop Tomline, who
attacked them. These High Church controversialists were too half-hearted
and too shallow, and understood their own principles too imperfectly, to
be a match for antagonists who were in deadly earnest, and put them to
shame by their zeal and courage. But Newton and Romaine and the Milners
were too limited and narrow in their compass of ideas to found a
powerful theology. They undoubtedly often quickened conscience. But
their system was a one-sided and unnatural one, indeed in the hands of
some of its expounders threatening morality and soundness of
character.[11] It had none of the sweep which carried the justification
doctrines of Luther, or the systematic predestinarianism of Calvin, or
the "platform of discipline" of John Knox and the Puritans. It had to
deal with a society which laid stress on what was "reasonable," or
"polite," or "ingenious," or "genteel," and unconsciously it had come to
have respect to these requirements. The one thing by which its preachers
carried disciples with them was their undoubted and serious piety, and
their brave, though often fantastic and inconsistent, protest against
the world. They won consideration and belief by the mild persecution
which this protest brought on them--by being proscribed as enthusiasts
by comfortable dignitaries, and mocked as "Methodists" and "Saints" by
wits and worldlings. But the austere spirit of Newton and Thomas Scott
had, between 1820 and 1830, given way a good deal to the influence of
increasing popularity. The profession of Evangelical religion had been
made more than respectable by the adhesion of men of position and
weight. Preached in the pulpits of fashionable chapels, this religion
proved to be no more exacting than its "High and Dry" rival. It gave a
gentle stimulus to tempers which required to be excited by novelty. It
recommended itself by gifts of flowing words or high-pitched rhetoric to
those who expected _some_ demands to be made on them, so that these
demands were not too strict. Yet Evangelical religion had not been
unfruitful, especially in public results. It had led Howard and
Elizabeth Fry to assail the brutalities of the prisons. It had led
Clarkson and Wilberforce to overthrow the slave trade, and ultimately
slavery itself. It had created great Missionary Societies. It had given
motive and impetus to countless philanthropic schemes. What it failed in
was the education and development of character; and this was the result
of the increasing meagreness of its writing and preaching. There were
still Evangelical preachers of force and eloquence--Robert Hall, Edward
Irving, Chalmers, Jay of Bath--but they were not Churchmen. The circle
of themes dwelt on by this school in the Church was a contracted one,
and no one had found the way of enlarging it. It shrank, in its fear of
mere moralising, in its horror of the idea of merit or of the value of
good works, from coming into contact with the manifold realities of the
spirit of man: it never seemed to get beyond the "first beginnings" of
Christian teaching, the call to repent, the assurance of forgiveness: it
had nothing to say to the long and varied process of building up the new
life of truth and goodness: it was nervously afraid of departing from
the consecrated phrases of its school, and in the perpetual iteration of
them it lost hold of the meaning they may once have had. It too often
found its guarantee for faithfulness in jealous suspicions, and in
fierce bigotries, and at length it presented all the characteristics of
an exhausted teaching and a spent enthusiasm. Claiming to be exclusively
spiritual, fervent, unworldly, the sole announcer of the free grace of
God amid self-righteousness and sin, it had come, in fact, to be on very
easy terms with the world. Yet it kept its hold on numbers of
spiritually-minded persons, for in truth there seemed to be nothing
better for those who saw in the affections the main field of religion.
But even of these good men, the monotonous language sounded to all but
themselves inconceivably hollow and wearisome; and in the hands of the
average teachers of the school, the idea of religion was becoming poor
and thin and unreal.

But besides these two great parties, each of them claiming to represent
the authentic and unchanging mind of the Church, there were independent
thinkers who took their place with neither and criticised both. Paley
had still his disciples at Cambridge, or if not disciples, yet
representatives of his masculine but not very profound and reverent way
of thinking; and a critical school, represented by names afterwards
famous, Connop Thirlwall and Julius Hare, strongly influenced by German
speculation, both in theology and history, began to attract attention.
And at Cambridge was growing, slowly and out of sight, a mind and an
influence which were to be at once the counterpart and the rival of the
Oxford movement, its ally for a short moment, and then its earnest and
often bitter enemy. In spite of the dominant teaching identified with
the name of Mr. Simeon, Frederic Maurice, with John Sterling and other
members of the Apostles' Club, was feeling for something truer and
nobler than the conventionalities of the religious world.[12] In Oxford,
mostly in a different way, more dry, more dialectical, and, perhaps it
may be said, more sober, definite, and ambitious of clearness, the same
spirit was at work. There was a certain drift towards Dissent among the
warmer spirits. Under the leading of Whately, questions were asked about
what was supposed to be beyond dispute with both Churchmen and
Evangelicals. Current phrases, the keynotes of many a sermon, were
fearlessly taken to pieces. Men were challenged to examine the meaning
of their words. They were cautioned or ridiculed as the case might be,
on the score of "confusion of thought" and "inaccuracy of mind"; they
were convicted of great logical sins, _ignoratio elenchi,_ or
_undistributed middle terms;_ and bold theories began to make their
appearance about religious principles and teaching, which did not easily
accommodate themselves to popular conceptions. In very different ways
and degrees, Davison, Copleston, Whately, Hawkins, Milman, and not
least, a brilliant naturalised Spaniard who sowed the seeds of doubt
around him, Blanco White, had broken through a number of accepted
opinions, and had presented some startling ideas to men who had thought
that all religious questions lay between the orthodoxy of Lambeth and
the orthodoxy of Clapham and Islington. And thus the foundation was
laid, at least, at Oxford of what was then called the Liberal School of
Theology. Its theories and paradoxes, then commonly associated with the
"_Noetic_" character of one college, Oriel, were thought startling and
venturesome when discussed in steady-going common-rooms and country
parsonages; but they were still cautious and old-fashioned compared
with what was to come after them. The distance is indeed great between
those early disturbers of lecture-rooms and University pulpits, and
their successors.

While this was going on within the Church, there was a great movement of
thought going on in the country. It was the time when Bentham's
utilitarianism had at length made its way into prominence and
importance. It had gained a hold on a number of powerful minds in
society and political life. It was threatening to become the dominant
and popular philosophy. It began, in some ways beneficially, to affect
and even control legislation. It made desperate attempts to take
possession of the whole province of morals. It forced those who saw
through its mischief, who hated and feared it, to seek a reason, and a
solid and strong one, for the faith which was in them as to the reality
of conscience and the mysterious distinction between right and wrong.
And it entered into a close alliance with science, which was beginning
to assert its claims, since then risen so high, to a new and undefined
supremacy, not only in the general concerns of the world, but specially
in education. It was the day of Holland House. It was the time when a
Society of which Lord Brougham was the soul, and which comprised a great
number of important political and important scientific names, was
definitely formed for the _Diffusion of Useful Knowledge_. Their labours
are hardly remembered now in the great changes for which they paved the
way; but the Society was the means of getting written and of publishing
at a cheap rate a number of original and excellent books on science,
biography, and history. It was the time of the _Library of Useful
Knowledge,_ and its companion, the _Library of Entertaining Knowledge;_
of the _Penny Magazine,_ and its Church rival, the _Saturday Magazine,_
of the _Penny Cyclopaedia,_ and _Lardner's Cabinet Cyclopaedia,_ and
_Murray's Family Library_: popular series, which contained much of the
work of the ablest men of the day, and which, though for the most part
superseded now, were full of interest then. Another creation of this
epoch, and an unmistakable indication of its tendencies, was the British
Association for the Advancement of Science, which met for the first time
at Oxford in June 1832, not without a good deal of jealousy and
misgiving, partly unreasonable, partly not unfounded, among men in whose
hearts the cause and fortunes of religion were supreme.

Thus the time was ripe for great collisions of principles and aims; for
the decomposition of elements which had been hitherto united; for
sifting them out of their old combinations, and regrouping them
according to their more natural affinities. It was a time for the
formation and development of unexpected novelties in teaching and
practical effort. There was a great historic Church party, imperfectly
conscious of its position and responsibilities;[13] there was an active
but declining pietistic school, resting on a feeble intellectual basis
and narrow and meagre interpretations of Scripture, and strong only in
its circle of philanthropic work; there was, confronting both, a rising
body of inquisitive and, in some ways, menacing thought. To men deeply
interested in religion, the ground seemed confused and treacherous.
There was room, and there was a call, for new effort; but to find the
resources for it, it seemed necessary to cut down deep below the level
of what even good men accepted as the adequate expression of
Christianity, and its fit application to the conditions of the
nineteenth century. It came to pass that there were men who had the
heart to make this attempt. As was said at starting, the actual movement
began in the conviction that a great and sudden danger to the Church was
at hand, and that an unusual effort must be made to meet it. But if the
occasion was in a measure accidental, there was nothing haphazard or
tentative in the line chosen to encounter the danger. From the first it
was deliberately and distinctly taken. The choice of it was the result
of convictions which had been forming before the occasion came which
called on them. The religious ideas which governed the minds of those
who led the movement had been traced, in outline at least, firmly and
without faltering.

The movement had its spring in the consciences and character of its
leaders. To these men religion really meant the most awful and most
seriously personal thing on earth. It had not only a theological basis;
it had still more deeply a moral one. What that basis was is shown in a
variety of indications of ethical temper and habits, before the
movement, in those who afterwards directed it. The _Christian Year_ was
published in 1827, and tells us distinctly by what kind of standard Mr.
Keble moulded his judgment and aims. What Mr. Keble's influence and
teaching did, in training an apt pupil to deep and severe views of truth
and duty, is to be seen in the records of purpose and self-discipline,
often so painful, but always so lofty and sincere, of Mr. Hurrell
Froude's journal. But these indications are most forcibly given in Mr.
Newman's earliest preaching. As tutor at Oriel, Mr. Newman had made what
efforts he could, sometimes disturbing to the authorities, to raise the
standard of conduct and feeling among his pupils. When he became a
parish priest, his preaching took a singularly practical and
plain-spoken character. The first sermon of the series, a typical
sermon, "Holiness necessary for future Blessedness," a sermon which has
made many readers grave when they laid it down, was written in 1826,
before he came to St. Mary's; and as he began he continued. No sermons,
except those which his great opposite, Dr. Arnold, was preaching at
Rugby, had appealed to conscience with such directness and force. A
passionate and sustained earnestness after a high moral rule, seriously
realised in conduct, is the dominant character of these sermons. They
showed the strong reaction against slackness of fibre in the religious
life; against the poverty, softness; restlessness, worldliness, the
blunted and impaired sense of truth, which reigned with little check in
the recognised fashions of professing Christianity; the want of depth
both of thought and feeling; the strange blindness to the real
sternness, nay the austerity, of the New Testament. Out of this ground
the movement grew. Even more than a theological reform, it was a protest
against the loose unreality of ordinary religious morality. In the first
stage of the movement, moral earnestness and enthusiasm gave its impulse
to theological interest and zeal.

FOOTNOTES:

[2] The suppression of the Irish bishoprics. Palmer, _Narrative_ (1883),
pp. 44, 101. Maurice, _Life_, i. 180.

[3] "The Church, as it now stands, no human power can save" (Arnold to
Tyler, June 1832. _Life,_ i. 326). "Nothing, as it seems to me, can save
the Church but an union with the Dissenters; now they are leagued with
the antichristian party, and no merely internal reforms will satisfy
them" (Arnold to Whately, January 1833, i. 348). He afterwards thought
this exaggerated (_Life,_ i. 336). "The Church has been for one hundred
years without any government, and in such a stormy season it will not go
on much longer without a rudder" (Whately to Bp. Copleston, July 1832.
_Life_, i, 167). "If such an arrangement of the Executive Government is
completed, it will be a difficult, but great and glorious feat for your
Lordship's ministry to preserve the establishment from utter overthrow"
(Whately to Lord Grey, May 1832. _Life_, i. 156). It is remarkable that
Dean Stanley should have been satisfied with ascribing to the movement
an "origin _entirely political_" and should have seen a proof of this
"thoroughly political origin" in Newman's observing the date of Mr.
Keble's sermon "National Apostasy" as the birthday of the movement,
_Edin. Rev._ April 1880, pp. 309, 310.

[4] Readers of Wordsworth will remember the account of Mr. R. Walker
(Notes to the "River Duddon").

[5] Compare _Life of Whately_ (ed. 1866), i. 52, 68.

[6] Arnold to W. Smith, _Life_, i. 356-358; ii. 32.

[7] _Life_, i. 225 _sqq_.

[8] "I am vexed to find how much hopeless bigotry lingers in minds, οἶς
ἥκιστα ἕχρη" (Arnold to Whately, Sept. 1832. _Life,_ i. 331; ii. 3-7).

[9] St. Bartholomew's Day

[10] "The mere barren orthodoxy which, from all that I can hear, is
characteristic of Oxford." Maurice in 1829 (_Life,_ i. 103). In 1832 he
speaks of his "high endeavours to rouse Oxford from its lethargy having
so signally failed" (i. 143).

[11] Abbey and Overton, _English Church in the Eighteenth Century,_ ii.
180, 204.

[12] _V._ Maurice, _Life,_ i. 108-111; Trench's _Letters;_ Carlyle's
_Sterling_.

[13] "In what concerns the Established Church, the House of Commons
seems to feel no other principle than that of vulgar policy. The old
High Church race is worn out." Alex. Knox (June 1816), i. 54.




CHAPTER II

THE BEGINNING OF THE MOVEMENT--JOHN KEBLE


Long before the Oxford movement was thought of, or had any definite
shape, a number of its characteristic principles and ideas had taken
strong hold of the mind of a man of great ability and great seriousness,
who, after a brilliant career at Oxford as student and tutor, had
exchanged the University for a humble country cure. John Keble, by some
years the senior, but the college friend and intimate of Arnold, was the
son of a Gloucestershire country clergyman of strong character and
considerable scholarship. He taught and educated his two sons at home,
and then sent them to Oxford, where both of them made their mark, and
the elder, John, a mere boy when he first appeared at his college,
Corpus, carried off almost everything that the University could give in
the way of distinction. He won a double first; he won the Latin and
English Essays in the same year; and he won what was the still greater
honour of an Oriel Fellowship. His honours were borne with meekness and
simplicity; to his attainments he joined a temper of singular sweetness
and modesty, capable at the same time, when necessary, of austere
strength and strictness of principle. He had become one of the most
distinguished men in Oxford, when about the year 1823 he felt himself
bound to give himself more exclusively to the work of a clergyman, and
left Oxford to be his father's curate. There was nothing very unusual in
his way of life, or singular and showy in his work as a clergyman; he
went in and out among the poor, he was not averse to society, he
preached plain, unpretending, earnest sermons; he kept up his literary
interests. But he was a deeply convinced Churchman, finding his standard
and pattern of doctrine and devotion in the sober earnestness and
dignity of the Prayer Book, and looking with great and intelligent
dislike at the teaching and practical working of the more popular system
which, under the name of Evangelical Christianity, was aspiring to
dominate religious opinion, and which, often combining some of the most
questionable features of Methodism and Calvinism, denounced with fierce
intolerance everything that deviated from its formulas and watchwords.
And as his loyalty to the Church of England was profound and intense,
all who had shared her fortunes, good or bad, or who professed to serve
her, had a place in his affections; and any policy which threatened to
injure or oppress her, and any principles which were hostile to her
influence and teaching, roused his indignation and resistance. He was a
strong Tory, and by conviction and religious temper a thorough High
Churchman.

But there was nothing in him to foreshadow the leader in a bold and
wide-reaching movement. He was absolutely without ambition. He hated
show and mistrusted excitement. The thought of preferment was steadily
put aside both from temper and definite principle. He had no popular
aptitudes, and was very suspicious of them. He had no care for the
possession of influence; he had deliberately chosen the _fallentis
semita vitae,_ and to be what his father had been, a faithful and
contented country parson, was all that he desired. But idleness was not
in his nature. Born a poet, steeped in all that is noblest and tenderest
and most beautiful in Greek and Roman literature, with the keenest
sympathy with that new school of poetry which, with Wordsworth as its
representative, was searching out the deeper relations between nature
and the human soul, he found in poetical composition a vent and relief
for feelings stirred by the marvels of glory and of awfulness, and by
the sorrows and blessings, amid which human life is passed. But his
poetry was for a long time only for himself and his intimate friends;
his indulgence in poetical composition was partly playful, and it was
not till after much hesitation on his own part and also on theirs, and
with a contemptuous undervaluing of his work, which continued to the end
of his life, that the anonymous little book of poems was published which
has since become familiar wherever English is read, as the _Christian
year_. His serious interests were public ones. Though living in the
shade, he followed with anxiety and increasing disquiet the changes
which went on so rapidly and so formidably, during the end of the first
quarter of this century, in opinion and in the possession of political
power. It became more and more plain that great changes were at hand,
though not so plain what they would be. It seemed likely that power
would come into the hands of men and parties hostile to the Church in
their principles, and ready to use to its prejudice the advantages which
its position as an establishment gave them; and the anticipation grew in
Keble's mind, that in the struggles which seemed likely, not only for
the legal rights but for the faith of the Church, the Church might have
both to claim more, and to suffer more, at the hands of Government. Yet
though these thoughts filled his mind, and strong things were said in
the intercourse with friends about what was going on about them, no
definite course of action had been even contemplated when Keble went
into the country in 1823. There was nothing to distinguish him from
numbers of able clergymen all over England, who were looking on with
interest, with anxiety, often with indignation, at what was going on.
Mr. Keble had not many friends and was no party chief. He was a
brilliant university scholar overlaying the plain, unworldly country
parson; an old-fashioned English Churchman, with great veneration for
the Church and its bishops, and a great dislike of Rome, Dissent, and
Methodism, but with a quick heart; with a frank, gay humility of soul,
with great contempt of appearances, great enjoyment of nature, great
unselfishness, strict and severe principles of morals and duty.

What was it that turned him by degrees into so prominent and so
influential a person? It was the result of the action of his convictions
and ideas, and still more of his character, on the energetic and
fearless mind of a pupil and disciple, Richard Hurrell Froude. Froude
was Keble's pupil at Oriel, and when Keble left Oriel for his curacy at
the beginning of the Long Vacation of 1823, he took Froude with him to
read for his degree. He took with him ultimately two other pupils,
Robert Wilberforce and Isaac Williams of Trinity. One of them, Isaac
Williams, has left some reminiscences of the time, and of the terms on
which the young men were with their tutor, then one of the most famous
men at Oxford. They were on terms of the utmost freedom. "Master is the
greatest boy of them all," was the judgment of the rustic who was
gardener, groom, and parish clerk to Mr. Keble. Froude's was a keen
logical mind, not easily satisfied, contemptuous of compromises and
evasions, and disposed on occasion to be mischievous and aggressive; and
with Keble, as with anybody else, he was ready to dispute and try every
form of dialectical experiment. But he was open to higher influences
than those of logic, and in Keble he saw what subdued and won him to
boundless veneration and affection. Keble won the love of the whole
little society; but in Froude he had gained a disciple who was to be the
mouthpiece and champion of his ideas, and who was to react on himself
and carry him forward to larger enterprises and bolder resolutions than
by himself he would have thought of. Froude took in from Keble all he
had to communicate--principles, convictions, moral rules and standards
of life, hopes, fears, antipathies. And his keenly-tempered intellect,
and his determination and high courage, gave a point and an impulse of
their own to Keble's views and purposes. As things came to look darker,
and dangers seemed more serious to the Church, its faith or its rights,
the interchange of thought between master and disciple, in talk and in
letter, pointed more and more to the coming necessity of action; and
Froude at least had no objections to the business of an agitator. But
all this was very gradual; things did not yet go beyond discussion;
ideas, views, arguments were examined and compared; and Froude, with all
his dash, felt as Keble felt, that he had much to learn about himself,
as well as about books and things. In his respect for antiquity, in his
dislike of the novelties which were invading Church rules and
sentiments, as well as its creeds, in his jealousy of the State, as well
as in his seriousness of self-discipline, he accepted Keble's guidance
and influence more and more; and from Keble he had more than one lesson
of self-distrust, more than one warning against the temptations of
intellect. "Froude told me many years after," writes one of his friends,
"that Keble once, before parting with him, seemed to have something on
his mind which he wished to say, but shrank from saying, while waiting,
I think, for a coach. At last he said, just before parting, 'Froude, you
thought Law's _Serious Call_ was a clever book; it seemed to me as if
you had said the Day of Judgment will be a pretty sight.' This speech,
Froude told me, had a great effect on his after life."[14]

At Easter 1826 Froude was elected Fellow of Oriel. He came back to
Oxford, charged with Keble's thoughts and feelings, and from his more
eager and impatient temper, more on the look-out for ways of giving them
effect. The next year he became tutor, and he held the tutorship till
1830. But he found at Oriel a colleague, a little his senior in age and
standing, of whom Froude and his friends as yet knew little except that
he was a man of great ability, that he had been a favourite of
Whately's, and that in a loose and rough way he was counted among the
few Liberals and Evangelicals in Oxford. This was Mr. Newman. Keble had
been shy of him, and Froude would at first judge him by Keble's
standard. But Newman was just at this time "moving," as he expresses it,
"out of the shadow of Liberalism." Living not apart like Keble, but in
the same college, and meeting every day, Froude and Newman could not but
be either strongly and permanently repelled, or strongly attracted. They
were attracted; attracted with a force which at last united them in the
deepest and most unreserved friendship. Of the steps of this great
change in the mind and fortunes of each of them we have no record:
intimacies of this kind grow in college out of unnoticed and
unremembered talks, agreeing or differing, out of unconscious
disclosures of temper and purpose, out of walks and rides and quiet
breakfasts and common-room arguments, out of admirations and dislikes,
out of letters and criticisms and questions; and nobody can tell
afterwards how they have come about. The change was gradual and
deliberate. Froude's friends in Gloucestershire, the Keble family, had
their misgivings about Newman's supposed liberalism; they did not much
want to have to do with him. His subtle and speculative temper did not
always square with Froude's theology. "N. is a fellow that I like more,
the more I think of him," Froude wrote in 1828; "only I would give a few
odd pence if he were not a heretic."[15] But Froude, who saw him every
day, and was soon associated with him in the tutorship, found a spirit
more akin to his own in depth and freedom and daring, than he had yet
encountered. And Froude found Newman just in that maturing state of
religious opinion in which a powerful mind like Froude's would be likely
to act decisively. Each acted on the other. Froude represented Keble's
ideas, Keble's enthusiasm. Newman gave shape, foundation, consistency,
elevation to the Anglican theology, when he accepted it, which Froude
had learned from Keble. "I knew him first," we read in the _Apologia_,
"in 1826, and was in the closest and most affectionate friendship with
him from about 1829 till his death in 1836."[16] But this was not all.
Through Froude, Newman came to know and to be intimate with Keble; and
a sort of _camaraderie_ arose, of very independent and outspoken people,
who acknowledged Keble as their master and counsellor.

"The true and primary author of it" (the Tractarian movement), we read
in the _Apologia_, "as is usual with great motive powers, was out of
sight.... Need I say that I am speaking of John Keble?" The statement is
strictly true. Froude never would have been the man he was but for his
daily and hourly intercourse with Keble; and Froude brought to bear upon
Newman's mind, at a critical period of its development, Keble's ideas
and feelings about religion and the Church, Keble's reality of thought
and purpose, Keble's transparent and saintly simplicity. And Froude, as
we know from a well-known saying of his,[17] brought Keble and Newman to
understand one another, when the elder man was shy and suspicious of the
younger, and the younger, though full of veneration for the elder, was
hardly yet in full sympathy with what was most characteristic and most
cherished in the elder's religious convictions. Keble attracted and
moulded Froude: he impressed Froude with his strong Churchmanship, his
severity and reality of life, his poetry and high standard of scholarly
excellence. Froude learned from him to be anti-Erastian,
anti-methodistical, anti-sentimental, and as strong in his hatred of the
world, as contemptuous of popular approval, as any Methodist. Yet all
this might merely have made a strong impression, or formed one more
marked school of doctrine, without the fierce energy which received it
and which it inspired. But Froude, in accepting Keble's ideas, resolved
to make them active, public, aggressive; and he found in Newman a
colleague whose bold originality responded to his own. Together they
worked as tutors; together they worked when their tutorships came to an
end; together they worked when thrown into companionship in their
Mediterranean voyage in the winter of 1832 and the spring of 1833. They
came back, full of aspirations and anxieties which spurred them on;
their thoughts had broken out in papers sent home from time to time to
Rose's _British Magazine_--"Home Thoughts Abroad," and the "Lyra
Apostolica." Then came the meeting at Hadleigh, and the beginning of the
Tracts. Keble had given the inspiration, Froude had given the impulse;
then Newman took up the work, and the impulse henceforward, and the
direction, were his.

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, δαιμόνιε, αἰνότατε, πέπον, _Carissime, "Sir, my dear friend"_
or "Ἀργείων ὄχ' ἄριστε, 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.

In this unsparing and absorbing warfare, what did Froude aim at--what
was the object he sought to bring about, what were the obstacles he
sought to overthrow?

He was accused, as was most natural, of Romanising; of wishing to bring
back Popery. It is perfectly certain that this was not what he meant,
though he did not care for the imputation of it. He was, perhaps, the
first Englishman who attempted to do justice to Rome, and to use
friendly language of it, without the intention of joining it. But what
he fought for was not Rome, not even a restoration of unity, but a
Church of England such as it was conceived of by the Caroline divines
and the Non-jurors. The great break-up of 1830 had forced on men the
anxious question, "What is the Church as spoken of in England? Is it the
Church of Christ?" and the answers were various. Hooker had said it was
"the nation"; and in entirely altered circumstances, with some
qualifications. Dr. Arnold said the same. It was "the Establishment"
according to the lawyers and politicians, both Whig and Tory. It was an
invisible and mystical body, said the Evangelicals. It was the aggregate
of separate congregations, said the Nonconformists. It was the
parliamentary creation of the Reformation, said the Erastians. The true
Church was the communion of the Pope, the pretended Church was a
legalised schism, said the Roman Catholics. All these ideas were
floating about, loose and vague, among people who talked much about the
Church. Whately, with his clear sense, had laid down that it was a
divine religious society, distinct in its origin and existence, distinct
in its attributes from any other. But this idea had fallen dead, till
Froude and his friends put new life into it Froude accepted Whately's
idea that the Church of England was the one historic uninterrupted
Church, than which there could be no other, locally in England; but into
this Froude read a great deal that never was and never could be in
Whately's thoughts. Whately had gone very far in viewing the Church from
without as a great and sacred corporate body. Casting aside the Erastian
theory, he had claimed its right to exist, and if necessary, govern
itself, separate from the state. He had recognised excommunication as
its natural and indefeasible instrument of government. But what the
internal life of the Church was, what should be its teaching and organic
system, and what was the standard and proof of these, Whately had left
unsaid. And this outline Froude filled up. For this he went the way to
which the Prayer Book, with its Offices, its Liturgy, its Ordination
services, pointed him. With the divines who had specially valued the
Prayer Book, and taught in its spirit, Bishop Wilson, William Law,
Hammond, Ken, Laud, Andrewes, he went back to the times and the sources
from which the Prayer Book came to us, the early Church, the reforming
Church for such with all its faults it was--of the eleventh, twelfth,
and thirteenth centuries, before the hopelessly corrupt and fatal times
of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, which led to the break-up of
the sixteenth. Thus to the great question, What is the Church? he gave
without hesitation, and gave to the end, the same answer that Anglicans
gave and are giving still. But he added two points which were then very
new to the ears of English Churchmen: (1) that there were great and to
most people unsuspected faults and shortcomings in the English Church,
for some of which the Reformation was gravely responsible; (2) that the
Roman Church was more right than we had been taught to think in many
parts both of principle and practice, and that our quarrel with it on
these points arose from our own ignorance and prejudices. To people who
had taken for granted all their lives that the Church was thoroughly
"Protestant" and thoroughly right in its Protestantism, and that Rome
was Antichrist, these confident statements came with a shock. He did not
enter much into dogmatic questions. As far as can be judged from his
_Remains_, the one point of doctrine on which he laid stress, as being
inadequately recognised and taught in the then condition of the English
Church, was the primitive doctrine of the Eucharist. His other
criticisms pointed to practical and moral matters; the spirit of
Erastianism, the low standard of life and purpose and self-discipline in
the clergy, the low tone of the current religious teaching. The
Evangelical teaching seemed to him a system of unreal words. The
opposite school was too self-complacent, too comfortable, too secure in
its social and political alliances; and he was bent on shaming people
into severer notions. "We will have a _vocabularium apostolicum,_ and I
will start it with four words: 'pampered aristocrats,' 'resident
gentlemen,' 'smug parsons,' and _'pauperes Christi'_. I shall use the
first on all occasions; it seems to me just to hit the thing." "I think
of putting the view forward (about new monasteries), under the title of
a 'Project for Reviving Religion in Great Towns.' Certainly colleges of
unmarried priests (who might, of course, retire to a living, when they
could and liked) would be the cheapest possible way of providing
effectively for the spiritual wants of a large population." And his
great quarrel with the existing state of things was that the spiritual
objects of the Church were overlaid and lost sight of in the anxiety not
to lose its political position. In this direction he was, as he
proclaims himself, an out-and-out Radical, and he was prepared at once
to go very far. "If a national Church means a Church without discipline,
my argument for discipline is an argument against a national Church; and
the best thing we can do is to unnationalise ours as soon as possible";
"let us tell the truth and shame the devil; let us give up a _national_
Church and have a _real_ one." His criticism did not diminish in
severity, or his proposals become less daring, as he felt that his time
was growing short and the hand of death was upon him. But to the end,
the elevation and improvement of the English Church remained his great
purpose. To his friend, as we know, the Roman Church was _either_ the
Truth or Antichrist. To Froude it was neither the whole Truth nor
Antichrist; but like the English Church itself, a great and defective
Church, whose defects were the opposite to ours, and which we should do
wisely to learn from rather than abuse. But to the last his allegiance
never wavered to the English Church.

It is very striking to come from Froude's boisterous freedom in his
letters to his sermons and the papers he prepared for publication. In
his sermons his manner of writing is severe and restrained even to
dryness. If they startle it is by the force and searching point of an
idea, not by any strength of words. The style is chastened, simple,
calm, with the most careful avoidance of over-statement or anything
rhetorical. And so in his papers, his mode of argument, forcible and
cogent as it is, avoids all appearance of exaggeration or even
illustrative expansion; it is all muscle and sinew; it is modelled on
the argumentative style of Bishop Butler, and still more, of William
Law. No one could suppose from these papers Froude's fiery impetuosity,
or the frank daring of his disrespectful vocabulary. Those who can read
between the lines can trace the grave irony which clung everywhere to
his deep earnestness.

There was yet another side of Froude's character which was little
thought of by his critics, or recognised by all his friends. With all
his keenness of judgment and all his readiness for conflict, some who
knew him best were impressed by the melancholy which hung over his life,
and which, though he ignored it, they could detect. It is remembered
still by Cardinal Newman. "I thought," wrote Mr. Isaac Williams, "that
knowing him, I better understood Hamlet, a person most natural, but so
original as to be unlike any one else, hiding depth of delicate thought
in apparent extravagances. _Hamlet_, and the _Georgics_ of Virgil, he
used to say, he should have bound together." "Isaac Williams," wrote Mr.
Copeland, "mentioned to me a remark made on Froude by S. Wilberforce in
his early days: 'They talk of Froude's fun, but somehow I cannot be in a
room with him alone for ten minutes without feeling so intensely
melancholy, that I do not know what to do with myself. At Brightstone,
in my Eden days, he was with me, and I was overwhelmed with the deep
sense which possessed him of yearning which nothing could satisfy and of
the unsatisfying nature of all things.'"[25]

Froude often reminds us of Pascal. Both had that peculiarly bright,
brilliant, sharp-cutting intellect which passes with ease through the
coverings and disguises which veil realities from men. Both had
mathematical powers of unusual originality and clearness; both had the
same imaginative faculty; both had the same keen interest in practical
problems of science; both felt and followed the attraction of deeper and
more awful interests. Both had the same love of beauty; both suppressed
it. Both had the same want of wide or deep learning; they made skilful
use of what books came to their hand, and used their reading as few
readers are able to use it; but their real instrument of work was their
own quick and strong insight, and power of close and vigorous reasoning.
Both had the greatest contempt for fashionable and hollow "shadows of
religion." Both had the same definite, unflinching judgment. Both used
the same clear and direct language. Both had a certain grim delight in
the irony with which they pursued their opponents. In both it is
probable that their unmeasured and unsparing criticism recoiled on the
cause which they had at heart. But in the case of both of them it was
not the temper of the satirist, it was no mere love of attacking what
was vulnerable, and indulgence in the cruel pleasure of stinging and
putting to shame, which inspired them. Their souls were moved by the
dishonour done to religion, by public evils and public dangers. Both of
them died young, before their work was done. They placed before
themselves the loftiest and most unselfish objects, the restoration of
truth and goodness in the Church, and to that they gave their life and
all that they had. And what they called on others to be they were
themselves. They were alike in the sternness, the reality, the
perseverance, almost unintelligible in its methods to ordinary men, of
their moral and spiritual self-discipline.


SUPPLEMENTARY TO CHAPTER III[26]

Hurrell Froude was, when I, as an undergraduate, first knew him in 1828,
tall and very thin, with something of a stoop, with a large skull and
forehead, but not a large face, delicate features, and penetrating gray
eyes, not exactly piercing, but bright with internal conceptions, and
ready to assume an expression of amusement, careful attention, inquiry,
or stern disgust, but with a basis of softness. His manner was cordial
and familiar, and assured you, as you knew him well, of his affectionate
feeling, which encouraged you to speak your mind (within certain
limits), subject to the consideration that if you said anything absurd
it would not be allowed to fall to the ground. He had more of the
undergraduate in him than any "don" whom I ever knew; absolutely unlike
Newman in being always ready to skate, sail, or ride with his
friends--and, if in a scrape, not pharisaical as to his means of getting
out of it. I remember, _e.g._, climbing Merton gate with him in my
undergraduate days, when we had been out too late boating or skating.
And unless authority or substantial decorum was really threatened he was
very lenient--or rather had an amused sympathy with the irregularities
that are mere matters of mischief or high spirits. In lecture it was,
_mutatis mutandis_, the same man. Seeing, from his _Remains_, the "high
view of his own capacities of which he could not divest himself," and
his determination not to exhibit or be puffed up by it, and looking back
on his tutorial manner (I was in his lectures both in classics and
mathematics), it was strange how he disguised, not only his _sense_ of
superiority, but the appearance of it, so that his pupils felt him more
as a fellow-student than as the refined scholar or mathematician which
he was. This was partly owing to his carelessness of those formulae,
the familiarity with which gives even second-rate lecturers a position
of superiority which is less visible in those who, like their pupils,
are themselves always struggling with principles--and partly to an
effort, perhaps sometimes overdone, not to put himself above the level
of others. In a lecture on the _Supplices_ of Aeschylus, I have heard
him say _tout bonnement,_ "I can't construe that--what do you make of
it, A.B.?" turning to the supposed best scholar in the lecture; or, when
an objection was started to his mode of getting through a difficulty,
"Ah! I had not thought of that--perhaps your way is the best." And this
mode of dealing with himself and the undergraduates whom he liked, made
them like him, but also made them really undervalue his talent, which,
as we now see, was what he meant they should do. At the same time,
though watchful over his own vanity, he was keen and prompt in
snubs--playful and challenging retort--to those he liked, but in the
nature of scornful exposure, when he had to do with coarseness or
coxcombry, or shallow display of sentiment. It was a paradoxical
consequence of his suppression of egotism that he was more solicitous to
show that you were wrong than that he was right.

He also wanted, like Socrates or Bishop Butler, to make others, if
possible, think for themselves.

However, it is not to be inferred that his conversation was made of
controversy. To a certain extent it turned that way, because he was fond
of paradox. (His brother William used to say that he, William, never
felt he had really mastered a principle till he had thrown it into a
paradox.) And paradox, of course, invites contradiction, and so
controversy. On subjects upon which he considered himself more or less
an apostle, he liked to stir people's minds by what startled them,
waking them up, or giving them "nuts to crack." An almost solemn gravity
with amusement twinkling behind it--not invisible--and ready to burst
forth into a bright low laugh when gravity had been played out, was a
very frequent posture with him.

But he was thoroughly ready to amuse and instruct, or to be amused and
instructed, as an eager and earnest speaker or listener on most matters
of interest. I do not remember that he had any great turn for beauty of
colour; he had none, I think, or next to none, for music--nor do I
remember in him any great love of humour--but for beauty of physical
form, for mechanics, for mathematics, for poetry which had a root in
true feeling, for wit (including that perception of a quasi-logical
absurdity of position), for history, for domestic incidents, his
sympathy was always lively, and he would throw himself naturally and
warmly into them. From his general demeanour (I need scarcely say) the
"odour of sanctity" was wholly absent. I am not sure that his height and
depth of aim and lively versatility of talent did not leave his
_compassionate_ sympathies rather undeveloped; certainly to himself,
and, I suspect, largely in the case of others, he would view suffering
not as a thing to be cockered up or made much of, though of course to be
alleviated if possible, but to be viewed calmly as a Providential
discipline for those who can mitigate, or have to endure it.

J.H.N. was once reading me a letter just received from him in which (in
answer to J.H.N.'s account of his work and the possibility of his
breaking down) he said in substance: "I daresay you have more to do than
your health will bear, but I would not have you give up anything except
perhaps the deanery" (of Oriel). And then J.H.N. paused, with a kind of
inner exultant chuckle, and said, "Ah! there's a Basil for you"; as if
the friendship which sacrificed its friend, as it would sacrifice itself
to a cause, was the friendship which was really worth having.

As I came to know him in a more manly way, as a brother Fellow, friend,
and collaborateur, the character of "ecclesiastical agitator" was of
course added to this.

In this capacity his great pleasure was taking bulls by their horns.
Like the "gueux" of the Low Countries, he would have met half-way any
opprobrious nickname, and I believe coined the epithet "apostolical" for
his party because it was connected with everything in Spain which was
most obnoxious to the British public. I remember one day his grievously
shocking Palmer of Worcester, a man of an opposite texture, when a
council in J.H.N.'s rooms had been called to consider some memorial or
other to which Palmer wanted to collect the signatures of many, and
particularly of dignified persons, but in which Froude wished to express
the determined opinions of a few. Froude stretched out his long length
on Newman's sofa, and broke in upon one of Palmer's judicious harangues
about Bishops and Archdeacons and such like, with the ejaculation, "I
don't see why we should disguise from ourselves that our object is to
dictate to the clergy of this country, and I, for one, do not want any
one else to get on the box." He thought that true Churchmen must be few
before they were many--that the sin of the clergy in all ages was that
they tried to make out that Christians were many when they were only
few, and sacrificed to this object the force derivable from downright
and unmistakable enforcement of truth in speech or action.

As simplicity in thought, word, and deed formed no small part of his
ideal, his tastes in architecture, painting, sculpture, rhetoric, or
poetry were severe. He had no patience with what was artistically
dissolute, luscious, or decorated more than in proportion to its
animating idea--wishy-washy or sentimental. The ornamental parts of his
own rooms (in which I lived in his absence) were a slab of marble to
wash upon, a print of Rubens's "Deposition," and a head (life-size) of
the Apollo Belvidere. And I remember still the tall scorn, with
something of surprise, with which, on entering my undergraduate room, he
looked down on some Venuses, Cupids, and Hebes, which, freshman-like, I
had bought from an Italian.

He was not very easy even under conventional vulgarity, still less under
the vulgarity of egotism; but, being essentially a partisan, he could
put up with both in a man who was really in earnest and on the right
side. Nothing, however, I think, would have induced him to tolerate
false sentiment, and he would, I think, if he had lived, have exerted
himself very trenchantly to prevent his cause being adulterated by it.

He was, I should say, sometimes misled by a theory that genius cut
through a subject by logic or intuition, without looking to the right or
left, while common sense was always testing every step by consideration
of surroundings (I have not got his terse mode of statement), and that
genius was right, or at least had only to be corrected here and there by
common sense. This, I take it, would hardly have answered if his
trenchancy had not been in practice corrected by J.H.N.'s wider
political circumspection.

He submitted, I suppose, to J.H.N.'s axiom, that if the movement was to
do anything it must become "respectable"; but it was against his nature.

He would (as we see in the _Remains_) have wished Ken to have the
"courage of his convictions" by excommunicating the Jurors in William
III.'s time, and setting up a little Catholic Church, like the
Jansenists in Holland. He was not (as has been observed) a theologian,
but he was as jealous for orthodoxy as if he were. He spoke slightingly
of Heber as having ignorantly or carelessly communicated with (?)
Monophysites. But he probably knew no more about that and other
heresies than a man of active and penetrating mind would derive from
text-books. And I think it likely enough--not that his reverence for the
Eucharist, but--that his special attention to the details of Eucharistic
doctrine was due to the consideration that it was the foundation of
ecclesiastical discipline and authority--matters on which his mind
fastened itself with enthusiasm.

FOOTNOTES:

[18] I ought to say that I was not personally acquainted with Mr.
Froude. I have subjoined to this chapter some recollections of him by
Lord Blachford, who was his pupil and an intimate friend.

[19] "In this mortal journeying wasted shade Is worse than wasted
sunshine."

HENRY TAYLOR, _Sicilian Summer_, v. 3.

[20] _Remains_, Second Part, i. 47.

[21] _Remains_, i. 82.

[22] _Apologia_, p. 84.

[23] The following shows the feeling about him in friends apt to be
severe critics:--"The contents of the present collection are rather
fragments and sketches than complete compositions. This might be
expected in the works of a man whose days were few and interrupted by
illness, if indeed that may be called an interruption, which was every
day sensibly drawing him to his grave. In Mr. Froude's case, however, we
cannot set down much of this incompleteness to the score of illness. The
strength of his religious impressions, the boldness and clearness of his
views, his long habits of self-denial, and his unconquerable energy of
mind, triumphed over weakness and decay, till men with all their health
and strength about them might gaze upon his attenuated form, struck with
a certain awe of wonderment at the brightness of his wit, the
intenseness of his mental vision, and the iron strength of his
argument.... We will venture a remark as to that ironical turn, which
certainly does appear in various shapes in the first part of these
_Remains_. Unpleasant as irony may sometimes be, there need not go with
it, and in this instance there did not go with it, the smallest real
asperity of temper. Who that remembers the inexpressible sweetness of
his smile, and the deep and melancholy pity with which he would speak of
those whom he felt to be the victims of modern delusions, would not be
forward to contradict such a suspicion? Such expressions, we will
venture to say, and not harshness, anger, or gloom, animate the features
of that countenance which will never cease to haunt the memory of those
who knew him. His irony arose from that peculiar mode in which he viewed
all earthly things, himself and all that was dear to him not excepted.
It was his poetry." From an article in the _British Critic_, April 1840,
p. 396, by Mr. Thomas Mozley, quoted in _Letters of J.B. Mozley,_ p.
102.

[24] Such as the "Daniel" in the _Lyra Apostolica,_ the "Dialogue
between Old Self and New Self," and the lines in the _Remains_ (i 208,
209).

[25] A few references to the _Remains_ illustrating this are subjoined
if any one cares to compare them with these recollections, i. 7, 13, 18,
26, 106, 184, 199, 200-204.

[26] I am indebted for these recollections to the late Lord Blachford.
They were written in Oct. 1884.




CHAPTER IV

MR. NEWMAN'S EARLY FRIENDS--ISAAC WILLIAMS


In the early days of the movement, among Mr. Newman's greatest friends,
and much in his confidence, were two Fellows of Trinity--a college
which never forgot that Newman had once belonged to it,--Isaac Williams
and William John Copeland. In mind and character very different, they
were close friends, with the affection which was characteristic of those
days; and for both of them Mr. Newman "had the love which passes that of
common relation."[27] Isaac Williams was born among the mountains of
Wales, and had the true poetic gift, though his power of expression was
often not equal to what he wanted to say. Copeland was a Londoner, bred
up in the strict school of Churchmanship represented by Mr. Norris of
Hackney, tempered by sympathies with the Non-jurors. At Oxford he lived,
along with Isaac Williams, in the very heart of the movement, which was
the interest of his life; but he lived, self-forgetting or
self-effacing, a wonderful mixture of tender and inexhaustible sympathy,
and of quick and keen wit, which yet, somehow or other, in that time of
exasperation and bitterness, made him few enemies. He knew more than
most men of the goings on of the movement, and he ought to have been its
chronicler. But he was fastidious and hard to satisfy, and he left his
task till it was too late.

Isaac Williams was born in Wales in 1802, a year after Newman, ten years
after John Keble. His early life was spent in London, but his affection
for Wales and its mountain scenery was great and undiminished to the end
of his life. At Harrow, where Henry Drury was his tutor, he made his
mark by his mastery of Latin composition and his devotion to Latin
language and literature. "I was so used to think in Latin that when I
had to write an English theme, which was but seldom, I had to translate
my ideas, which ran in Latin, into English";[28] and later in life he
complained of the Latin current which disturbed him when he had to write
English. He was also a great cricketer; and he describes himself as
coming up to Trinity, where he soon got a scholarship, an ambitious and
careless youth, who had never heard a word about Christianity, and to
whom religion, its aims and its restraints, were a mere name.

This was changed by what, in the language of devotional schools, would
have been called his conversion. It came about, as men speak, as the
result of accidents; but the whole course of his thoughts and life was
turned into a channel from which it nevermore diverged. An old Welsh
clergyman gave the undergraduate an introduction to John Keble, who then
held a place in Oxford almost unique. But the Trinity undergraduate and
the Oriel don saw little of one another till Isaac Williams won the
Latin prize poem, _Ars Geologica_. Keble then called on Isaac Williams
and offered his help in criticising the poem and polishing it for
printing. The two men plainly took to one another at first sight; and
that service was followed by a most unexpected invitation on Keble's
part. He had chanced to come to Williams's room, and on Williams saying
that he had no plan of reading for the approaching vacation, Keble said,
"I am going to leave Oxford for good. Suppose you come and read with me.
The Provost has asked me to take Wilberforce, and I declined; but if you
would come, you would be companions." Keble was going down to Southrop,
a little curacy near his father's; there Williams joined him, with two
more--Robert Wilberforce and R.H. Froude; and there the Long Vacation of
1823 was spent, and Isaac Williams's character and course determined.
"It was this very trivial accident, this short walk of a few yards, and
a few words spoken, which was the turning-point of my life. If a
merciful God had miraculously interposed to arrest my course, I could
not have had a stronger assurance of His presence than I always had in
looking back to that day." It determined Isaac Williams's character,
and it determined for good and all his theological position. He had
before him all day long in John Keble a spectacle which was absolutely
new to him. Ambitious as a rising and successful scholar at college, he
saw a man, looked up to and wondered at by every one, absolutely without
pride and without ambition. He saw the most distinguished academic of
his day, to whom every prospect was open, retiring from Oxford in the
height of his fame to bury himself with a few hundreds of
Gloucestershire peasants in a miserable curacy. He saw this man caring
for and respecting the ignorant and poor as much as others respected the
great and the learned. He saw this man, who had made what the world
would call so great a sacrifice, apparently unconscious that he had made
any sacrifice at all, gay, unceremonious, bright, full of play as a boy,
ready with his pupils for any exercise, mental or muscular--for a hard
ride, or a crabbed bit of Aeschylus, or a logic fence with disputatious
and paradoxical undergraduates, giving and taking on even ground. These
pupils saw one, the depth of whose religion none could doubt, "always
endeavouring to do them good as it were unknown to themselves and in
secret, and ever avoiding that his kindness should be felt and
acknowledged"; showing in the whole course of daily life the purity of
Christian love, and taking the utmost pains to make no profession or
show of it. This unostentatious and undemonstrative religion--so frank,
so generous in all its ways--was to Isaac Williams "quite a new world."
It turned his mind in upon itself in the deepest reverence, but also
with something of morbid despair of ever reaching such a standard. It
drove all dreams of ambition out of his mind. It made humility,
self-restraint, self-abasement, objects of unceasing, possibly not
always wise and healthy, effort. But the result was certainly a
character of great sweetness, tenderness, and lowly unselfishness,
pure, free from all worldliness, and deeply resigned to the will of God.
He caught from Mr. Keble, like Froude, two characteristic habits of
mind--a strong depreciation of mere intellect compared with the less
showy excellences of faithfulness to conscience and duty; and a horror
and hatred of everything that seemed like display or the desire of
applause or of immediate effect. Intellectual depreciators of intellect
may deceive themselves, and do not always escape the snare which they
fear; but in Isaac Williams there was a very genuine carrying out of the
Psalmist's words: "Surely I have behaved and quieted myself; I refrain
my soul and keep it low, as a child that is weaned from his mother."
This fear of display in a man of singularly delicate and fastidious
taste came to have something forced and morbid in it. It seemed
sometimes as if in preaching or talking he aimed at being dull and
clumsy. But in all that he did and wrote he aimed at being true at all
costs and in the very depths of his heart; and though, in his words, we
may wish sometimes for what we should feel to be more natural and
healthy in tone, we never can doubt that we are in the presence of one
who shrank from all conscious unreality like poison.

From Keble, or, it may be said, from the Kebles, he received his
theology. The Kebles were all of them men of the old-fashioned High
Church orthodoxy, of the Prayer Book and the Catechism--the orthodoxy
which was professed at Oxford, which was represented in London by Norris
of Hackney and Joshua Watson; which valued in religion sobriety,
reverence, and deference to authority, and in teaching, sound learning
and the wisdom of the great English divines; which vehemently disliked
the Evangelicals and Methodists for their poor and loose theology, their
love of excitement and display, their hunting after popularity. This
Church of England divinity was the theology of the old Vicar of Coln St.
Aldwyn's, a good scholar and a good parish priest, who had brought up
his two sons at home to be scholars; and had impressed his solid and
manly theology on them so strongly that amid all changes they remained
at bottom true to their paternal training. John Keble added to it great
attainments and brilliant gifts of imagination and poetry; but he never
lost the plain, downright, almost awkward ways of conversation and
manner of his simple home--ways which might have seemed abrupt and rough
but for the singular sweetness and charm of his nature. To those who
looked on the outside he was always the homely, rigidly orthodox country
clergyman. On Isaac Williams, with his ethical standard, John Keble also
impressed his ideas of religious truth; he made him an old-fashioned
High Churchman, suspicious of excitement and "effect," suspicious of the
loud-talking religious world, suspicious of its novelties and
shallowness, and clinging with his whole soul to ancient ways and sound
Church of England doctrine reflected in the Prayer Book. And from John
Keble's influence he passed under the influence of Thomas Keble, the
Vicar of Bisley, a man of sterner type than his brother, with strong and
definite opinions on all subjects; curt and keen in speech; intolerant
of all that seemed to threaten wholesome teaching and the interests of
the Church; and equally straightforward, equally simple, in manners and
life. Under him Isaac Williams began his career as a clergyman; he spent
two years of solitary and monotonous life in a small cure, seeking
comfort from solitude in poetical composition ("It was very calm and
subduing," he writes); and then he was recalled to Oxford as Fellow and
Tutor of his college, to meet a new and stronger influence, which it was
part of the work and trial of the rest of his life both to assimilate
and to resist.

For, with Newman, with whom he now came into contact, he did both. There
opened to him from intercourse with Newman a new world of thought; and
yet while feeling and answering to its charm, he never was quite at ease
with him. But Williams and Froude had always been great friends since
the reading party of 1823, in spite of Froude's audacities. Froude was
now residing in Oxford, and had become Newman's most intimate friend,
and he brought Newman and Williams together. "Living at that time," he
says, "so much with Froude, I was now in consequence for the first time
brought into intercourse with Newman. We almost daily walked and often
dined together." Newman and Froude had ceased to be tutors; their
thoughts were turned to theology and the condition of the Church. Newman
had definitely broken with the Evangelicals, to whom he had been
supposed to belong, and Whately's influence over him was waning, and
with Froude he looked up to Keble as the pattern of religious wisdom. He
had accepted the position of a Churchman as it was understood by Keble
and Froude; and thus there was nothing to hinder Williams's full
sympathy with him. But from the first there seems to have been an almost
impalpable bar between them, which is the more remarkable because
Williams appears to have seen with equanimity Froude's apparently more
violent and dangerous outbreaks of paradox and antipathy. Possibly,
after the catastrophe, he may, in looking back, have exaggerated his
early alarms. But from the first he says he saw in Newman what he had
learned to look upon as the gravest of dangers--the preponderance of
intellect among the elements of character and as the guide of life. "I
was greatly delighted and charmed with Newman, who was extremely kind to
me, but did not altogether trust his opinions; and though Froude was in
the habit of stating things in an extreme and paradoxical manner, yet
one always felt conscious of a ground of entire confidence and
agreement; but it was not so with Newman, even though one appeared more
in unison with his more moderate views."

But, in spite of all this, Newman offered and Isaac Williams accepted
the curacy of St. Mary's. "Things at Oxford [1830-32] at that time were
very dull." "Froude and I seemed entirely alone, with Newman only
secretly, as it were, beginning to sympathise. I became at once very
much attached to Newman, won by his kindness and delighted by his good
and wonderful qualities; and he proposed that I should be his curate at
St. Mary's.... I can remember a strong feeling of difference I first
felt on acting together with him from what I had been accustomed to:
that he was in the habit of looking for effect, and for what was
sensibly effective, which from the Bisley and Fairford School I had been
long habituated to avoid; but to do one's duty in faith and leave it to
God, and that all the more earnestly, because there were no sympathies
from without to answer. There was a felt but unexpressed difference of
this kind, but perhaps it became afterwards harmonised as we acted
together."[29]

Thus early, among those most closely united, there appeared the
beginnings of those different currents which became so divergent as time
went on. Isaac Williams, dear as he was to Newman, and returning to the
full Newman's affection, yet represented from the first the views of
what Williams spoke of as the "Bisley and Fairford School," which,
though sympathising and co-operating with the movement, was never quite
easy about it, and was not sparing of its criticism on the stir and
agitation of the Tracts.

Isaac Williams threw himself heartily into the early stages of the
movement; in his poetry into its imaginative and poetical side, and also
into its practical and self-denying side. But he would have been quite
content with its silent working, and its apparent want of visible
success. He would have been quite content with preaching simple homely
sermons on the obvious but hard duties of daily life, and not seeing
much come of them; with finding a slow abatement of the self-indulgent
habits of university life, with keeping Fridays, with less wine in
common room. The Bisley maxims bade men to be very stiff and
uncompromising in their witness and in their duties, but to make no show
and expect no recognition or immediate fruit, and to be silent under
misconstruction. But his was not a mind which realised great
possibilities of change in the inherited ways of the English Church. The
spirit of change, so keenly discerned by Newman, as being both certain
and capable of being turned to good account as well as bad, to him was
unintelligible or bad. More reality, more severity and consistency,
deeper habits of self-discipline on the accepted lines of English Church
orthodoxy, would have satisfied him as the aim of the movement, as it
undoubtedly was a large part of its aim; though with Froude and Newman
it also aimed at a widening of ideas, of interests and sympathies,
beyond what had been common in the English Church.

In the history of the movement Isaac Williams took a forward part in two
of its events, with one of which his connexion was most natural, with
the other grotesquely and ludicrously incongruous. The one was the plan
and starting of the series of _Plain Sermons_ in 1839, to which not only
the Kebles, Williams, and Copeland contributed their volumes, but also
Newman and Dr. Pusey. Isaac Williams has left the following account of
his share in the work.

"It seemed at this time (about 1838-39) as if Oxford, from the strength
of principle shown there (and an almost unanimous and concentrated
energy), was becoming a rallying point for the whole kingdom: but I
watched from the beginning and saw greater dangers among ourselves than
those from without; which I endeavoured to obviate by publishing the
_Plain Sermons_. [_Plain Sermons_, by contributors to the _Tracts for
the Times_, 1st Series, January 1839.] I attempted in vain to get the
Kebles to publish, in order to keep pace with Newman, and so maintain a
more practical turn in the movement. I remember C. Cornish (C.L.
Cornish, Fellow and Tutor of Exeter) coming to me and saying as we
walked in Trinity Gardens, 'People are a little afraid of being carried
away by Newman's brilliancy; they want more of the steady sobriety of
the Kebles infused into the movement to keep us safe; we have so much
sail and want ballast.' And the effect of the publication of the _Plain
Sermons_ was at the time very quieting. In first undertaking the _Plain
Sermons_, I had no encouragement from any one, not even from John Keble;
acquiescence was all that I could gain. But I have heard J.K. mention a
saying of Judge Coleridge, long before the _Tracts_ were thought of: 'If
you want to propagate your opinions you should lend your sermons; the
clergy would then preach them, and adopt your opinions.' Now this has
been the effect of the publication of the _Plain Sermons_."

Isaac Williams, if any man, represented in the movement the moderate and
unobtrusive way of religious teaching. But it was his curious fate to be
dragged into the front ranks of the fray, and to be singled out as
almost the most wicked and dangerous of the Tractarians. He had the
strange fortune to produce the first of the Tracts[30] which was by
itself held up to popular indignation as embodying all the mischief of
the series and the secret aims of the movement. The Tract had another
effect. It made Williams the object of the first great Tractarian battle
in the University, the contest for the Poetry Professorship: the first
decisive and open trial of strength, and the first Tractarian defeat.
The contest, even more than the result, distressed him greatly; and the
course of things in the movement itself aggravated his distress. His
general distrust of intellectual restlessness had now passed into the
special and too well grounded fear that the movement, in some of its
most prominent representatives, was going definitely in the direction of
Rome. A new generation was rising into influence, to whom the old Church
watchwords and maxims, the old Church habits of mind, the old Church
convictions, had completely lost their force, and were become almost
objects of dislike and scorn; and for this change Newman's approval and
countenance were freely and not very scrupulously quoted. Williams's
relation to him had long been a curious mixture of the most affectionate
attachment and intimacy with growing distrust and sense of divergence.
Newman was now giving more and more distinct warning that he was likely
to go where Williams could not follow him, and the pain on both sides
was growing. But things moved fast, and at length the strain broke.

The estrangement was inevitable; but both cherished the warmest feelings
of affection, even though such a friendship had been broken. But Oxford
became distasteful to Williams, and he soon afterwards left it for
Bisley and Stinchcombe, the living of his brother-in-law, Sir G.
Prevost. There he married (22d June 1842), and spent the remainder of
his life devoting himself to the preparation of those devotional
commentaries, which are still so well known. He suffered for the
greatest part of his life from a distressing and disabling chronic
asthma--from the time that he came back to Oxford as Fellow and
Tutor--and he died in 1865. The old friends met once more shortly before
Isaac Williams's death; Newman came to see him, and at his departure
Williams accompanied him to the station.

Isaac Williams wrote a great deal of poetry, first during his solitary
curacy at Windrush, and afterwards at Oxford. It was in a lower and
sadder key than the _Christian Year_, which no doubt first inspired it;
it wanted the elasticity and freshness and variety of Keble's verse, and
it was often careless in structure and wanting in concentration. But it
was the outpouring of a very beautiful mind, deeply impressed with the
realities of failure in the Church and religion, as well as in human
life, full of tenderness and pathetic sweetness, and seeking a vent for
its feelings, and relief for its trouble, in calling up before itself
the images of God's goodness and kingdom of which nature and the world
are full. His poetry is a witness to the depth and earnestness and
genuine delicacy of what seemed hard and narrow in the Bisley School;
there are passages in it which are not easily forgotten; but it was not
strong enough to arrest the excitement which soon set in, and with its
continual obscurity and its want of finish it never had the recognition
really due to its excellence. Newman thought it too soft. It certainly
wanted the fire and boldness and directness which he threw into his own
verse when he wrote; but serious earnestness and severity of tone it
certainly did not want.

FOOTNOTES:

[27] Mozley, _Reminiscences_, i. 18.

[28] I. Williams, _MS. Memoir_.

[29] I. Williams, _MS. Memoir_.

[30] The history of this famous Tract, No. 80, on _Reserve in
communicating Religious Knowledge_, belongs to a later stage of the
movement.




CHAPTER V

CHARLES MARRIOTT


Charles Marriott was a man who was drawn into the movement, almost in
spite of himself, by the attraction of the character of the leaders,
the greatness of its object, and the purity and nobleness of the motives
which prompted it. He was naturally a man of metaphysical mind, given
almost from a child to abstract and indeed abstruse thought.[31] He had
been a student of S.T. Coleridge, whom the Oriel men disliked as a misty
thinker. He used to discuss Coleridge with a man little known then, but
who gained a high reputation on the Continent as a first-rate Greek
scholar, and became afterwards Professor of Greek in the University of
Sydney, Charles Badham. Marriott also appreciated Hampden as a
philosopher, whom the Oriel men thoroughly distrusted as a theologian.
He might easily under different conditions have become a divine of the
type of F.D. Maurice. He was by disposition averse to anything like
party, and the rough and sharp proceedings which party action sometimes
seems to make natural. His temper was eminently sober, cautious and
conciliatory in his way of looking at important questions. He was a man
with many friends of different sorts and ways, and of boundless though
undemonstrative sympathy. His original tendencies would have made him an
eclectic, recognising the strength of position in opposing schools or
theories, and welcoming all that was good and high in them. He was
profoundly and devotedly religious, without show, without extravagance.
His father, who died when he was only fourteen, had been a distinguished
man in his time. He was a Christ Church man, and one of two in the first
of the Oxford Honour lists in 1802, with E. Copleston, H. Phillpotts,
and S.P. Rigaud for his examiners. He was afterwards tutor to the Earl
of Dalkeith, and he became the friend of Walter Scott, who dedicated to
him the Second Canto of _Marmion_; and having ready and graceful
poetical talent, he contributed several ballads to the _Minstrelsy of
the Scottish Border, The Feast of Spurs_, and _Archie Armstrong's Aith_.
He was a good preacher; his sympathies--of friendship, perhaps, rather
than of definite opinion--were with men like Mr. John Bowdler and the
Thorntons. While he lived he taught Charles Marriott himself. After his
death, Charles, a studious boy, with ways of his own of learning, and
though successful and sure in his work, very slow in the process of
doing it, after a short and discouraging experiment at Rugby, went to
read with a private tutor till he went to Oxford. He was first at
Exeter, and then gained a scholarship at Balliol. He gained a Classical
First Class and a Mathematical Second in the Michaelmas Term of 1832,
and the following Easter he was elected Fellow at Oriel.

For a man of his power and attainments he was as a speaker, and in
conversation, surprisingly awkward. He had a sturdy, penetrating,
tenacious, but embarrassed intellect--embarrassed, at least, by the
crowd and range of jostling thoughts, in its outward processes and
manifestations, for he thoroughly trusted its inner workings, and was
confident of the accuracy of the results, even when helplessly unable to
justify them at the moment.[32] In matters of business he seemed at
first sight utterly unpractical. In discussing with keen, rapid, and
experienced men like the Provost, the value of leases, or some question
of the management of College property, Marriott, who always took great
interest in such inquiries, frequently maintained some position which to
the quicker wits round him seemed a paradox or a mare's nest. Yet it
often happened that after a dispute, carried on with a brisk fire of not
always respectful objections to Marriott's view, and in which his only
advantage was the patience with which he clumsily, yet surely, brought
out the real point of the matter, overlooked by others, the debate
ended in the recognition that he had been right. It was often a strange
and almost distressing sight to see the difficulty under which he
sometimes laboured of communicating his thoughts, as a speaker at a
meeting, or as a teacher to his hearers, or even in the easiness of
familiar talk. The comfort was that he was not really discouraged. He
was wrestling with his own refractory faculty of exposition and speech;
it may be, he was busy deeper down in the recesses and storehouses of
his mind; but he was too much taken up with the effort to notice what
people thought of it, or even if they smiled; and what he had to say was
so genuine and veracious, as an expression of his meaning, so full of
benevolence, charity, and generosity, and often so weighty and
unexpected, that men felt it a shame to think much of the peculiarities
of his long look of blank silence, and the odd, clumsy explanations
which followed it. He was a man, under an uncouth exterior, of the
noblest and most affectionate nature; most patient, indulgent, and
hopeful to all in whom he took an interest, even when they sorely tried
his kindness and his faith in them. Where he loved and trusted and
admired, he was apt to rate very highly, sometimes too highly. His
gratitude was boundless. He was one of those who deliberately gave up
the prospect of domestic life, to which he was naturally drawn, for the
sake of his cause. Capable of abstract thought beyond most men of his
time, and never unwilling to share his thoughts with those at all
disposed to venture with him into deep waters, he was always ready to
converse or to discuss on much more ordinary ground. As an undergraduate
and a young bachelor, he had attained, without seeking it, a position of
almost unexampled authority in the junior University world that was
hardly reached by any one for many years at least after him. He was
hopeless as a speaker in the Union; but with all his halting and
bungling speeches, that democratic and sometimes noisy assembly bore
from him with kindly amusement and real respect what they would bear
from no one else, and he had an influence in its sometimes turbulent
debates which seems unaccountable. He was the _vir pietate gravis_. In a
once popular squib, occasioned by one of the fiercest of these debates,
this unique position is noticed and commemorated--

  Οὐδ' ἔλαθεν Μαρίωτα, φιλαίτατον Ὠρειήλων

         *       *       *       *       *

  Ἦλθε μέγα γρώνων, Μασιχοῖς καὶ πᾶσ' ἀγαπητός,
  Καὶ σμείλων, προσέφη πάντας κείνδοις ἐπέεσιν.[33]

His ways and his talk were such as to call forth not unfrequent mirth
among those who most revered him. He would meet you and look you in the
face without speaking a word. He was not without humour; but his jokes,
carried off by a little laugh of his own, were apt to be recondite in
their meaning and allusions. With his great power of sympathy, he yet
did not easily divine other men's lighter or subtler moods, and odd and
sometimes even distressing mistakes were the consequence. His health was
weak, and a chronic tenderness of throat and chest made him take
precautions which sometimes seemed whimsical; and his well-known figure
in a black cloak, with a black veil over his college cap, and a black
comforter round his neck, which at one time in Oxford acquired his name,
sometimes startled little boys and sleepy college porters when he came
on them suddenly at night.

With more power than most men of standing alone, and of arranging his
observations on life and the world in ways of his own, he had
pre-eminently above all men round him, in the highest and noblest form,
the spirit of a disciple. Like most human things, discipleship has its
good and its evil, its strong and its poor and dangerous side; but it
really has, what is much forgotten now, a good and a strong side. Both
in philosophy and religion, the μαθητὴς is a distinct character, and
Charles Marriott was an example of it at its best. He had its manly and
reasonable humility, its generous trustfulness, its self-forgetfulness;
he had, too, the enthusiasm of having and recognising a great master and
teacher, and doing what he wanted done; and he learned from the love of
his master to love what he believed truth still more. The character of
the disciple does not save a man from difficulties, from trouble and
perplexity; but it tends to save him from idols of his own making. It is
something, in the trials of life and faith, to have the consciousness of
knowing or having known some one greater and better and wiser than
oneself, of having felt the spell of his guidance and example.
Marriott's mind, quick to see what was real and strong, and at once
reverent to it as soon as he saw it, came very much, as an undergraduate
at Balliol, under the influence of a very able and brilliant tutor,
Moberly, afterwards Headmaster of Winchester and Bishop of Salisbury;
and to the last his deference and affection to his old tutor remained
unimpaired. But he came under a still more potent charm when he moved to
Oriel, and became the friend of Mr. Newman. Master and disciple were as
unlike as any two men could be; they were united by their sympathy in
the great crisis round them, by their absorbing devotion to the cause of
true religion. Marriott brought to the movement, and especially to its
chief, a great University character, and an unswerving and touching
fidelity. He placed himself, his life, and all that he could do, at the
service of the great effort to elevate and animate the Church; to the
last he would gladly have done so under him whom he first acknowledged
as his master. This was not to be; and he transferred his allegiance, as
unreservedly, with equal loyalty and self-sacrifice, to his successor.
But to the end, while his powers lasted, with all his great gifts and
attainments, with every temptation to an independent position and
self-chosen employment, he continued a disciple. He believed in men
wiser than himself; he occupied himself with what they thought best for
him to do.

This work was, for the most part, in what was done to raise the standard
of knowledge of early Christian literature, and to make that knowledge
accurate and scholarlike. He was, for a time, the Principal of the
Theological College at Chichester, under Bishop Otter. He was also for a
time Tutor at Oriel, and later, Vicar of St. Mary's. He was long bent on
setting on foot some kind of Hall for poor students; and he took over
from Mr. Newman the buildings at Littlemore, which he turned into a
place for printing religious works. But though he was connected more or
less closely with numberless schemes of Christian work in Oxford and out
of it, his special work was that of a theological student. Marriott had
much to do with the Library of the Fathers, with correcting
translations, collating manuscripts, editing texts.[34] Somehow, the
most interesting portions hardly came to his share; and what he did in
the way of original writing, little as it was, causes regret that so
much of his time was spent on the drudgery of editing. Some sermons, a
little volume of _Thoughts on Private Devotion_, and another on the
_Epistle to the Romans_, are nearly all that he has left of his own.
Novelty of manner or thought in them there is none, still less anything
brilliant or sharp in observation or style; but there is an undefinable
sense, in their calm, severe pages, of a deep and serious mind dwelling
on deep and very serious things. It is impossible not to wish that a
man who could so write and impress people might have had the leisure to
write more.

But Marriott never had any leisure. It has been said above that he
placed himself at the service of those whom he counted his teachers. But
the truth is that he was at every one's service who wanted or who asked
his help. He had a large, and what must have been often a burdensome,
correspondence. With pupils or friends he was always ready for some
extra bit of reading. To strangers he was always ready to show attention
and hospitality, though Marriott's parties were as quaint as himself.
His breakfast parties in his own room were things to have seen--a crowd
of undergraduates, finding their way with difficulty amid lanes and
piles of books, amid a scarcity of chairs and room, and the host,
perfectly unconscious of anything grotesque, sitting silent during the
whole of the meal, but perfectly happy, at the head of the table. But
there was no claimant on his purse or his interest who was too strange
for his sympathy--raw freshmen, bores of every kind, broken-down
tradesmen, old women, distressed foreigners, converted Jews, all the odd
and helpless wanderers from beaten ways, were to be heard of at
Marriott's rooms; and all, more or less, had a share of his time and
thoughts, and perhaps counsel. He was sensible of worry as he grew
older; but he never relaxed his efforts to do what any one asked of him.
There must be even now some still living who know what no one else
knows, how much they owe, with no direct claim on him, to Charles
Marriott's inexhaustible patience and charity. The pains which he would
take with even the most uncongenial and unpromising men, who somehow had
come in his way, and seemed thrown on his charge, the patience with
which he would bear and condone their follies and even worse, were not
to be told, for, indeed, few knew what they were.

"He was always ready to be the friend of any one whose conduct gave
proofs of high principle, however inferior to himself in knowledge or
acquirements, and his friendship once gained was not easily lost. I
believe there was nothing in his power which he was not ready to do for
a friend who wanted his help. It is not easy to state instances of such
kindness without revealing what for many reasons had better be left
untold. But many such have come to my knowledge, and I believe there are
many more known only to himself and to those who derived benefit from
his disinterested friendship."[35]

Marriott's great contribution to the movement was his solid, simple
goodness, his immovable hope, his confidence that things would come
right. With much imaginativeness open to poetical grandeur and charm,
and not without some power of giving expression to feeling, he was
destitute of all that made so many others of his friends interesting as
men. He was nothing, as a person to know and observe, to the genius of
the two Mozleys, to the brilliant social charm of Frederic Faber, to the
keen, refined intelligence of Mark Pattison, to the originality and
clever eccentricity of William Palmer of Magdalen. And he was nothing as
a man of practical power for organising and carrying out successful
schemes: such power was not much found at Oxford in those days. But his
faith in his cause, as the cause of goodness and truth, was proof
against mockery or suspicion or disaster. When ominous signs disturbed
other people he saw none. He had an almost perverse subtlety of mind
which put a favourable interpretation on what seemed most formidable. As
his master drew more and more out of sympathy with the English Church,
Marriott, resolutely loyal to it and to him, refused to understand hints
and indications which to others were but too plain. He vexed and even
provoked Newman, in the last agonies of the struggle, by the optimism
with which he clung to useless theories and impossible hopes. For that
unquenchable hoping against hope, and hope unabated still when the
catastrophe had come, the English Church at least owes him deep
gratitude. Throughout those anxious years he never despaired of her.

All through his life he was a beacon and an incitement to those who
wished to make a good use of their lives. In him all men could see,
whatever their opinions and however little they liked him, the
simplicity and the truth of a self-denying life of suffering--for he was
never well--of zealous hard work, unstinted, unrecompensed; of unabated
lofty hopes for the great interests of the Church and the University; of
deep unpretending matter-of-course godliness and goodness--without "form
or comeliness" to attract any but those who cared for them, for
themselves alone. It is almost a sacred duty to those who remember one
who cared nothing for his own name or fame to recall what is the
truth--that no one did more to persuade those round him of the solid
underground religious reality of the movement. Mr. Thomas Mozley, among
other generous notices of men whom the world and their contemporaries
have forgotten, has said what is not more than justice.[36] Speaking of
the enthusiasm of the movement, and the spirit of its members, "There
had never been seen at Oxford, indeed seldom anywhere, so large and
noble a sacrifice of the most precious gifts and powers to a sacred
cause," he points out what each of the leaders gave to it: "Charles
Marriott threw in his scholarship and something more, for he might have
been a philosopher, and he had poetry in his veins, being the son of the
well-known author of the 'Devonshire Lane.' No one sacrificed himself so
entirely to the cause, giving to it all that he had and all that he was,
as Charles Marriott. He did not gather large congregations; he did not
write works of genius to spread his name over the land, and to all time;
he had few of the pleasures or even of the comforts that spontaneously
offer themselves in any field of enterprise. He laboured day and night
in the search and defence of Divine Truth. His admirers were not the
thousands, but the scholars who could really appreciate. I confess to
have been a little ashamed of myself when Bishop Burgess asked me about
Charles Marriott, as one of the most eminent scholars of the day.
Through sheer ignorance I had failed in adequate appreciation." In his
later years he became a member of the new Hebdomadal Council at Oxford,
and took considerable part in working the new constitution of the
University. In an epidemic of smallpox at Oxford in 1854, he took his
full share in looking after the sick, and caught the disorder; but he
recovered. At length, in the midst of troublesome work and many
anxieties, his life of toil was arrested by a severe paralytic seizure,
29th June 1855. He partially rallied, and survived for some time longer;
but his labours were ended. He died at Bradfield, 25th September 1858.
He was worn out by variety and pressure of unintermitted labour, which
he would scarcely allow any change or holiday to relieve. Exhaustion
made illness, when it came, fatal.

FOOTNOTES:

[31] "He told me," writes a relative, "that questions about trade used
to occupy him very early in life. He used to ponder how it could be
right to sell things for more than they cost you."

[32] "He had his own way of doing everything, and used most stoutly to
protest that it was quite impossible that he should do it in any
other."--_MS. Memoir_ by his brother, John Marriott.

[33] _Uniomachia_, 1833.

[34] "This became the main task of his life us long as health was
continued to him. All who knew him well will remember how laboriously he
worked at it, and how, in one shape or another, it was always on hand.
Either he was translating, or correcting the translation of others; or
he was collating MSS., or correcting the press. This last work was
carried on at all times and wherever he was--on a journey, after
dinner--even in a boat, he would pull out a sheet and go to write upon
it in haste to get it finished for the next post. The number of volumes
in the Library of the Fathers which bear the signature C.M. attest his
diligence."--John Marriott's Memoir of him (MS.)

[35] J.M., _MS. Memoir_.

[36] _Rem._ i. 447.




CHAPTER VI

THE OXFORD TRACTS


"On 14th July 1833," we read in Cardinal Newman's _Apologia_, "Mr. Keble
preached the assize sermon in the University Pulpit. It was published
under the title of _National Apostasy_. I have ever considered and kept
the day as the start of the religious movement of 1833."[37]

This memorable sermon was a strong expression of the belief common to a
large body of Churchmen amid the triumphs of the Reform Bill, that the
new governors of the country were preparing to invade the rights, and to
alter the constitution, and even the public documents, of the Church.
The suppression of ten Irish Bishoprics, in defiance of Church opinion,
showed how ready the Government was to take liberties in a high-handed
way with the old adjustments of the relations of Church and State.
Churchmen had hitherto taken for granted that England was "a nation
which had for centuries acknowledged, as an essential part of its
theory of government, that, _as_ a Christian nation, she is also a part
of Christ's Church, and bound, in all her legislation and policy, by the
fundamental laws of that Church." When "a Government and people, so
constituted, threw off the restraint which in many respects such a
principle would impose upon them, nay, disavowed the principle itself,"
this, to those whose ideas Mr. Keble represented, seemed nothing short
of a "direct disavowal of the sovereignty of God. If it be true anywhere
that such enactments are forced on the legislature by public opinion, is
Apostasy too hard a word to describe the temper of such a nation?" The
sermon was a call to face in earnest a changed state of things, full of
immediate and pressing danger; to consider how it was to be met by
Christians and Churchmen, and to watch motives and tempers. "Surely it
will be no unworthy principle if any man is more circumspect in his
behaviour, more watchful and fearful of himself, more earnest in his
petitions for spiritual aid, from a dread of disparaging the holy name
of the English Church in her hour of peril by his own personal fault and
negligence. As to those who, either by station or temper, feel
themselves more deeply interested, they cannot be too careful in
reminding themselves that one chief danger in times of change and
excitement arises from their tendency to engross the whole mind. Public
concerns, ecclesiastical or civil, will prove indeed ruinous to those
who permit them to occupy all their care and thought, neglecting or
undervaluing ordinary duties, more especially those of a devotional
kind. These cautions being duly observed, I do not see how any person
can devote himself too entirely to the cause of the Apostolic Church in
these realms. There may be, as far as he knows, but a very few to
sympathise with him. He may have to wait long, and very likely pass out
of this world, before he see any abatement in the triumph of disorder
and irreligion. But, _if he be consistent_, he possesses to the utmost
the personal consolations of a good Christian; and as a true Churchman,
he has the encouragement which no other cause in the world can impart in
the same degree: he is calmly, soberly, demonstrably _sure_ that, sooner
or later, _his will be the winning side_, and that the victory will be
complete, universal, eternal."

But if Mr. Keble's sermon was the first word of the movement, its first
step was taken in a small meeting of friends, at Mr. Hugh James Rose's
parsonage at Hadleigh, in Suffolk, between the 25th and the 29th of the
same July. At this little gathering, the ideas and anxieties which for
some time past had filled the thoughts of a number of earnest Churchmen,
and had brought them into communication with one another, came to a
head, and issued in the determination to move. Mr. Rose, a man of high
character and distinction in his day, who had recently started the
_British Magazine_, as an organ of Church teaching and opinion, was the
natural person to bring about such a meeting.[38] It was arranged that a
few representative men, or as many as were able, should meet towards the
end of July at Hadleigh Rectory. They were men in full agreement on the
main questions, but with great differences in temperament and habits of
thought. Mr. Rose was the person of most authority, and next to him, Mr.
Palmer; and these, with Mr. A. Perceval, formed as it were the right
wing of the little council. Their Oxford allies were the three Oriel
men, Mr. Keble, Mr. Froude, and Mr. Newman, now fresh from his escape
from death in a foreign land, and from the long solitary musings in his
Mediterranean orange-boat, full of joyful vigour and ready for
enterprise and work.[39] In the result, Mr. Keble and Mr. Newman were
not present, but they were in active correspondence with the others.[40]
From this meeting resulted the _Tracts for the Times_, and the agitation
connected with them.

These friends were all devoted Churchmen, but, as has been said, each
had his marked character, not only as a man but as a Churchman. The most
important among them was as yet the least prominent. Two of them were
men of learning, acquainted with the great world of London, and who,
with all their zeal, had some of the caution which comes of such
experience. At the time, the most conspicuous was Mr. Hugh James Rose.

Mr. Rose was a man whose name and whose influence, as his friends
thought, have been overshadowed and overlooked in the popular view of
the Church revival. It owed to him, they held, not only its first
impulse, but all that was best and most hopeful in it; and when it lost
him, it lost its wisest and ablest guide and inspirer. It is certainly
true that when that revival began he was a much more distinguished and
important person than any of the other persons interested in it. As far
as could be seen at the time, he was the most accomplished divine and
teacher in the English Church. He was a really learned man. He had the
intellect and energy and literary skill to use his learning. He was a
man of singularly elevated and religious character; he had something of
the eye and temper of a statesman, and he had already a high position.
He was profoundly loyal to the Church, and keenly interested in whatever
affected its condition and its fortunes. As early as 1825 he had in some
lectures at Cambridge called the attention of English Churchmen to the
state of religious thought and speculation in Germany, and to the
mischiefs likely to react on English theology from the rationalising
temper and methods which had supplanted the old Lutheran teaching; and
this had led to a sharp controversy with Mr. Pusey, as he was then, who
thought that Mr. Rose[41] had both exaggerated the fact itself and had
not adequately given the historical account of it. He had the prudence,
but not the backwardness, of a man of large knowledge, and considerable
experience of the world. More alive to difficulties and dangers than his
younger associates, he showed his courage and his unselfish earnestness
in his frank sympathy with them, daring and outspoken as they were, and
in his willingness to share with them the risks of an undertaking of
which no one knew better than he what were likely to be the
difficulties. He certainly was a person who might be expected to have a
chief part in directing anything with which he was connected. His
countenance and his indirect influence were very important elements,
both in the stirring of thought which led to the Hadleigh resolutions,
and in giving its form to what was then decided upon. But his action in
the movement was impeded by his failure in health, and cut short by his
early death, January 1839. How he would have influenced the course of
things if he had lived, it is not now easy to say. He must have been
reckoned with as one of the chiefs. He would have been opposed to
anything that really tended towards Rome. But there is no reason to
think that he would have shrunk from any step only because it was bold.
He had sympathy for courage and genius, and he had knowledge and
authority which would have commanded respect for his judgment and
opinion. But it is too much to say either that the movement could not
have been without him, or that it was specially his design and plan, or
that he alone could have given the impulse which led to it; though it
seemed at one time as if he was to be its leader and chief. Certainly he
was the most valuable and the most loyal of its early auxiliaries.

Another coadjutor, whose part at the time also seemed rather that of a
chief, was Mr. William Palmer, of Worcester College. He had been
educated at Trinity College, Dublin, but he had transferred his home to
Oxford, both in the University and the city. He was a man of exact and
scholastic mind, well equipped at all points in controversial theology,
strong in clear theories and precise definitions, familiar with
objections current in the schools and with the answers to them, and well
versed in all the questions, arguments, and authorities belonging to the
great debate with Rome. He had definite and well-arranged ideas about
the nature and office of the Church; and, from his study of the Roman
controversy, he had at command the distinctions necessary to
discriminate between things which popular views confused, and to protect
the doctrines characteristic of the Church from being identified with
Romanism. Especially he had given great attention to the public
devotional language and forms of the Church, and had produced by far the
best book in the English language on the history and significance of the
offices of the English Church--the _Origines Liturgicae_, published at
the University Press in 1832. It was a book to give a man authority with
divines and scholars; and among those with whom at this time he acted no
one had so compact and defensible a theory, even if it was somewhat
rigid and technical, of the peculiar constitution of the English Church
as Mr. Palmer. With the deepest belief in this theory, he saw great
dangers threatening, partly from general ignorance and looseness of
thought, partly from antagonistic ideas and principles only too distinct
and too popular; and he threw all his learning and zeal on the side of
those who, like himself, were alive to those dangers, and were prepared
for a great effort to counteract them.

The little company which met at Hadleigh Rectory, from 25th to 29th July
1833, met--as other knots of men have often met, to discuss a question
or a policy, or to found an association, or a league, or a newspaper--to
lay down the outlines of some practical scheme of work; but with little
foresight of the venture they were making, or of the momentous issues
which depended on their meeting. Later on, when controversy began, it
became a favourite rhetorical device to call it by the ugly name of a
"conspiracy." Certainly Froude called it so, and Mr. Palmer; and Mr.
Perceval wrote a narrative to answer the charge. It was a "conspiracy,"
as any other meeting would be of men with an object which other men
dislike.

Of the Oriel men, only Froude went to Hadleigh. Keble and Newman were
both absent, but in close correspondence with the others. Their plans
had not taken any definite shape; but they were ready for any sacrifice
and service, and they were filled with wrath against the insolence of
those who thought that the Church was given over into their hands, and
against the apathy and cowardice of those who let her enemies have their
way. Yet with much impatience and many stern determinations in their
hearts, they were all of them men to be swayed by the judgment and
experience of their friends.

The state of mind under which the four friends met at the Hadleigh
conference has been very distinctly and deliberately recorded by all of
them. Churchmen in our days hardly realise what the face of things then
looked like to men who, if they felt deeply, were no mere fanatics or
alarmists, but sober and sagacious observers, not affected by mere
cries, but seeing dearly beneath the surface of things their certain and
powerful tendencies. "We felt ourselves," writes Mr. Palmer some years
afterwards,[42] "assailed by enemies from without and foes within. Our
Prelates insulted and threatened by Ministers of State. In Ireland ten
bishoprics suppressed. We were advised to feel thankful that a more
sweeping measure had not been adopted. What was to come next?... Was the
same principle of concession to popular clamour ... to be exemplified in
the dismemberment of the English Church?... We were overwhelmed with
pamphlets on Church reform. Lord Henley, brother-in-law of Sir Robert
Peel, Dr. Burton, and others of name and influence led the way. Dr.
Arnold of Rugby ventured to propose that all sects should be united by
Act of Parliament with the Church of England. Reports, apparently well
founded, were prevalent that some of the Prelates were favourable to
alterations in the Liturgy. Pamphlets were in wide circulation
recommending the abolition of the Creeds (at least in public worship),
especially urging the expulsion of the Athanasian Creed; the removal of
all mention of the Blessed Trinity; of the doctrine of baptismal
regeneration; of the practice of absolution. We knew not to what quarter
to look for support. A Prelacy threatened and apparently intimidated; a
Government making its power subservient to agitators, who avowedly
sought the destruction of the Church ... And, worst of all, _no
principle in the public mind to which we could appeal_; an utter
ignorance of all rational grounds of attachment to the Church; an
oblivion of its spiritual character, as an institution not of man but of
God; the grossest Erastianism most widely prevalent, especially amongst
all classes of politicians. There was in all this enough to appal the
stoutest heart; and those who can recall the feeling of those days will
at once remember the deep depression into which the Church had fallen,
and the gloomy forebodings universally prevalent."

"Before the spirit and temper of those who met at the conference is
condemned as extravagant," writes Mr. Perceval in 1842,[43] "let the
reader call to mind what was then actually the condition as well as the
prospect of the Church and nation: an agrarian and civic insurrection
against the bishops and clergy, and all who desired to adhere to the
existing institutions of the country; the populace goaded on, openly by
the speeches, covertly (as was fully believed at the time) by the paid
emissaries of the ministers of the Crown; the chief of those ministers
in his place in Parliament bidding the bishops 'set their house in
order'; the mob taking him at his word, and burning to the ground the
palace of the Bishop of Bristol, with the public buildings of the city,
while they shouted the Premier's name in triumph on the ruins." The
pressing imminence of the danger is taken for granted by the calmest and
most cautious of the party, Mr. Rose, in a letter of February 1833.
"That something is requisite, is certain. The only thing is, that
whatever is done ought to be _quickly_ done, for the danger is
immediate, and _I should have little fear if I thought that we could
stand for ten or fifteen years as we are_."[44] In the _Apologia_
Cardinal Newman recalls what was before him in those days. "The Whigs
had come into power; Lord Grey had told the bishops to 'set their house
in order,' and some of the prelates had been insulted and threatened in
the streets of London. The vital question was. How were we to keep the
Church from being Liberalised? There was so much apathy on the subject
in some quarters, such imbecile alarm in others; the true principles of
Churchmanship seemed so radically decayed, and there was such
distraction in the councils of the clergy. The Bishop of London of the
day, an active and open-hearted man, had been for years engaged in
diluting the high orthodoxy of the Church by the introduction of the
Evangelical body into places of influence and trust. He had deeply
offended men who agreed with myself by an off-hand saying (as it was
reported) to the effect that belief in the apostolical succession had
gone out with the Non-jurors. '_We can count you_,' he said to some of
the gravest and most venerated persons of the old school.... I felt
affection for my own Church, but not tenderness: I felt dismay at her
prospects, anger and scorn at her do-nothing perplexity. I thought that
if Liberalism once got a footing within her, it was sure of victory in
the event. I saw that Reformation principles were powerless to rescue
her. As to leaving her, the thought never crossed my imagination: still
I ever kept before me that there was something greater than the
Established Church, and that that was the Church Catholic and Apostolic,
set up from the beginning, of which she was but the local presence and
organ. She was nothing unless she was this. She must be dealt with
strongly or she would be lost. There was need of a second Reformation."

"If _I thought that we could stand ten or fifteen years as we are_, I
should have little fear," said Mr. Rose. He felt that, if only he could
secure a respite, he had the means and the hope of opening the eyes of
Churchmen. They were secure and idle from long prosperity, and now they
were scared and perplexed by the suddenness of an attack for which they
were wholly unprepared. But he had confidence in his own convictions.
He had around him ability and zeal, in which he had the best reason to
trust. He might hope, if he had time, to turn the tide. But this time to
stand to arms was just what he had not. The danger, he felt, was upon
him. He could not wait. So he acquiesced in an agitation which so
cautious and steady a man would otherwise hardly have chosen. "That
_something must be done_ is certain. The only thing is, that whatever is
done ought to be _quickly_ done." Nothing can show more forcibly the
imminence and pressure of the crisis than words like these, not merely
from Froude and his friends, but from such a man as Mr. Hugh James Rose.

"Something must be done," but what? This was not so easy to say. It was
obvious that men must act in concert, and must write; but beyond these
general points, questions and difficulties arose. The first idea that
suggested itself at Hadleigh was a form of association, which would have
been something like the _English Church Union_ or the _Church Defence
Association_ of our days. It probably was Mr. Palmer's idea; and for
some time the attempt to carry it into effect was followed up at Oxford.
Plans of "Association" were drawn up and rejected. The endeavour brought
out differences of opinion--differences as to the rightness or the
policy of specific mention of doctrines; differences as to the union of
Church and State, on the importance of maintaining which, as long as
possible, Mr. Newman sided with Mr. Palmer against Mr. Keble's more
uncompromising view. A "_third_ formulary" was at length adopted.
"Events," it said, "have occurred within the last few years calculated
to inspire the true members and friends of the Church with the deepest
uneasiness." It went on to notice that political changes had thrown
power into the hands of the professed enemies of the Church as an
establishment; but it was not merely as an establishment that it was in
most serious danger. "Every one," it says, "who has become acquainted
with the literature of the day, must have observed the sedulous attempts
made in various quarters to reconcile members of the Church to
alterations in its doctrines and discipline. Projects of change, which
include the annihilation of our Creeds and the removal of doctrinal
statements incidentally contained in our worship, have been boldly and
assiduously put forth. Our services have been subjected to licentious
criticism, with the view of superseding some of them and of entirely
remodelling others. The very elementary principles of our ritual and
discipline have been rudely questioned; our apostolical polity has been
ridiculed and denied." The condition of the times made these things
more than ordinarily alarming, and the pressing danger was urged as a
reason for the formation, by members of the Church in various parts of
the kingdom, of an association on a few broad principles of union for
the defence of the Church. "They feel strongly," said the authors of the
paper, "that no fear of the appearance of forwardness should dissuade
them from a design, which seems to be demanded of them by their
affection towards that spiritual community to which they owe their hopes
of the world to come; and by a sense of duty to that God and Saviour who
is its Founder and Defender." But the plan of an Association, or of
separate Associations, which was circulated in the autumn of 1833, came
to nothing. "Jealousy was entertained of it in high quarters." Froude
objected to any association less wide than the Church itself. Newman had
a horror of committees and meetings and great people in London. And
thus, in spite of Mr. Palmer's efforts, favoured by a certain number of
influential and dignified friends, the Association would not work. But
the stir about it was not without result. Mr. Palmer travelled about the
country with the view of bringing the state of things before the clergy.
In place of the Association, an Address to the Archbishop of Canterbury
was resolved upon. It was drawn up by Mr. Palmer, who undertook the
business of circulating it. In spite of great difficulties and trouble
of the alarm of friends like Mr. Rose, who was afraid that it would
cause schism in the Church; of the general timidity of the dignified
clergy; of the distrust and the crotchets of others; of the coldness of
the bishops and the opposition of some of them--it was presented with
the signatures of some 7000 clergy to the Archbishop in February 1834.
It bore the names, among others, of Dr. Christopher Wordsworth, Master
of Trinity; Dr. Gilbert, of Brasenose College; Dr. Faussett, and Mr.
Keble. And this was not all. A Lay Address followed. There were
difficulties about the first form proposed, which was thought to say too
much about the doctrine and discipline of the Church; and it was laid
aside for one with more vague expressions about the "consecration of the
State," and the practical benefits of the Established Church. In this
form it was signed by 230,000 heads of families, and presented to the
Archbishop in the following May. "From these two events," writes Mr.
Perceval in 1842, "we may date the commencement of the turn of the tide,
which had threatened to overwhelm our Church and our religion."[45]
There can, at any rate, be little doubt that as regards the external
position of the Church in the country, this agitation was a success. It
rallied the courage of Churchmen, and showed that they were stronger and
more resolute than their enemies thought. The revolutionary temper of
the times had thrown all Churchmen on the Conservative side; and these
addresses were partly helped by political Conservatism, and also reacted
in its favour.

Some of the Hadleigh friends would probably have been content to go on
in this course, raising and keeping alive a strong feeling in favour of
things as they were, creating a general sympathy with the Church, and
confidence in the peculiar excellency of its wise and sober
institutions, sedulously but cautiously endeavouring to correct popular
mistakes about them, and to diffuse a sounder knowledge and a sounder
tone of religious feeling. This is what Mr. H.J. Rose would have wished,
only he felt that he could not insure the "ten or fifteen years" which
he wanted to work this gradual change. Both he and Mr. Palmer would have
made London, to use a military term, their base of operations. The Oriel
men, on the other hand, thought that "Universities are the natural
centres of intellectual movements"; they were for working more
spontaneously in the freedom of independent study; they had little faith
in organisation; "living movements," they said, "do not come of
committees." But at Hadleigh it was settled that there was writing to be
done, in some way or other; and on this, divergence of opinion soon
showed itself, both as to the matter and the tone of what was to be
written.

For the writers of real force, the men of genius, were the three Oriel
men, with less experience, at that time, with less extensive learning,
than Mr. Rose and Mr. Palmer. But they were bolder and keener spirits;
they pierced more deeply into the real condition and prospects of the
times; they were not disposed to smooth over and excuse what they
thought hollow and untrue, to put up with decorous compromises and
half-measures, to be patient towards apathy, negligence, or insolence.
They certainly had more in them of the temper of warfare. We know from
their own avowals that a great anger possessed them, that they were
indignant at the sacred idea of the Church being lost and smothered by
selfishness and stupidity; they were animated by the spirit which makes
men lose patience with abuses and their apologists, and gives them no
peace till they speak out. Mr. Newman felt that, though associations and
addresses might be very well, what the Church and the clergy and the
country wanted was plain speaking; and that plain speaking could not be
got by any papers put forth as joint manifestoes, or with the revision
and sanction of "safe" and "judicious" advisers. It was necessary to
write, and to write as each man felt: and he determined that each man
should write and speak for himself, though working in concert and
sympathy with others towards the supreme end--the cause and interests of
the Church.

And thus were born the _Tracts for the Times._[46] For a time Mr.
Palmer's line and Mr. Newman's line ran on side by side; but Mr.
Palmer's plan had soon done all that it could do, important as that was;
it gradually faded out of sight, and the attention of all who cared for,
or who feared or who hated the movement, was concentrated on the "Oxford
Tracts." They were the watchword and the symbol of an enterprise which
all soon felt to be a remarkable one--remarkable, if in nothing else, in
the form in which it was started. Great changes and movements have been
begun in various ways; in secret and underground communications, in
daring acts of self-devotion or violence, in the organisation of an
institution, in the persistent display of a particular temper and set of
habits, especially in the form of a stirring and enthralling eloquence,
in popular preaching, in fierce appeals to the passions. But though
tracts had become in later times familiar instruments of religious
action, they had, from the fashion of using them, become united in the
minds of many with rather disparaging associations. The pertinacity of
good ladies who pressed them on chance strangers, and who extolled their
efficacy as if it was that of a quack medicine, had lowered the general
respect for them. The last thing that could have been thought of was a
great religions revolution set in motion by tracts and leaflets, and
taking its character and name from them.

But the ring of these early Tracts was something very different from
anything of the kind yet known in England. They were clear, brief, stern
appeals to conscience and reason, sparing of words, utterly without
rhetoric, intense in purpose. They were like the short, sharp, rapid
utterances of men in pain and danger and pressing emergency. The first
one gave the keynote of the series. Mr. Newman "had out of his own head
begun the Tracts": he wrote the opening one in a mood which he has
himself described. He was in the "exultation of health restored and home
regained": he felt, he says, an "exuberant and joyous energy which he
never had before or since"; "his health and strength had come back to
him with such a rebound" that some of his friends did not know him. "I
had the consciousness that I was employed in that work which I had been
dreaming about, and which I felt to be so momentous and inspiring. I had
a supreme confidence in our cause; we were upholding that primitive
Christianity which was delivered for all time by the early teachers of
the Church, and which was registered and attested in the Anglican
formularies and by the Anglican divines. That ancient religion had
well-nigh faded out of the land through the political changes of the
last 150 years, and it must be restored. It would be, in fact, a second
Reformation--a better Reformation, for it would return, not to the
sixteenth century, but to the seventeenth. No time was to be lost, for
the Whigs had come to do their worst, and the rescue might come too
late. Bishoprics were already in course of suppression; Church property
was in course of confiscation; sees would be soon receiving unsuitable
occupants. We knew enough to begin preaching, and there was no one else
to preach. I felt," he goes on,[47] with a characteristic recollection
of his own experience when he started on his voyage with Froude in the
_Hermes_, "as on a vessel, which first gets under weigh, and then clears
out the deck, and stores away luggage and live stock into their proper
receptacles." The first three Tracts bear the date of 9th September
1833. They were the first public utterance of the movement. The opening
words of this famous series deserve to be recalled. They are new to most
of the present generation.

  TO MY BRETHREN IN THE SACRED MINISTRY, THE PRESBYTERS AND DEACONS OF
  THE CHURCH OF CHRIST IN ENGLAND, ORDAINED THEREUNTO BY THE HOLY GHOST
  AND THE IMPOSITION OF HANDS.

  FELLOW-LABOURERS,--I am but one of yourselves--Presbyter; and
  therefore I conceal my name, lest I should take too much on myself by
  speaking in my own person. Yet speak I must; for the times are very
  evil, yet no one speaks against them.

  Is not this so? Do not we "look one upon another," yet perform
  nothing? Do we not all confess the peril into which the Church is
  come, yet sit still each in his own retirement, as if mountains and
  seas cut off brother from brother? Therefore suffer me, while I try to
  draw you forth from those pleasant retreats, which it has been our
  blessedness hitherto to enjoy, to contemplate the condition and
  prospects of our Holy Mother in a practical way; so that one and all
  may unlearn that idle habit, which has grown upon us, of owning the
  state of things to be bad, yet doing nothing to remedy it.

  Consider a moment. Is it fair, is it dutiful, to suffer our bishops to
  stand the brunt of the battle without doing our part to support them?
  Upon them comes "the care of all the Churches." This cannot be helped;
  indeed it is their glory. Not one of us would wish in the least to
  deprive them of the duties, the toils, the responsibilities of their
  high office. And, black event as it would be for the country, yet (as
  far as they are concerned) we could not wish them a more blessed
  termination of their course than the spoiling of their goods and
  martyrdom.

  To them then we willingly and affectionately relinquish their high
  privileges and honours; we encroach not upon the rights of the
  SUCCESSORS OF THE APOSTLES; we touch not their sword and crozier. Yet
  surely we may be their shield-bearers in the battle without offence;
  and by our voice and deeds be to them what Luke and Timothy were to
  St. Paul.

  Now then let me come at once to the subject which leads me to address
  you. Should the Government and the Country so far forget their God as
  to cast off the Church, to deprive it of its temporal honours and
  substance, _on what_ will you rest the claim of respect and attention
  which you make upon your flocks? Hitherto you have been upheld by your
  birth, your education, your wealth, your connexions; should these
  secular advantages cease, on what must Christ's Ministers depend? Is
  not this a serious practical question? We know how miserable is the
  state of religious bodies not supported by the State. Look at the
  Dissenters on all sides of you, and you will see at once that their
  Ministers, depending simply upon the people, become the _creatures_ of
  the people. Are you content that this should be your case? Alas! can a
  greater evil befall Christians, than for their teachers to be guided
  by them, instead of guiding? How can we "hold fast the form of sound
  words," and "keep that which is committed to our trust," if our
  influence is to depend simply on our popularity? Is it not our very
  office to _oppose_ the world? Can we then allow ourselves to _court_
  it? to preach smooth things and prophesy deceits? to make the way of
  life easy to the rich and indolent, and to bribe the humbler classes
  by excitements and strong intoxicating doctrine? Surely it must not be
  so;--and the question recurs, _on what_ are we to rest our authority
  when the State deserts us?

  Christ has not left His Church without claim of its own upon the
  attention of men. Surely not. Hard Master He cannot be, to bid us
  oppose the world, yet give us no credentials for so doing. There are
  some who rest their divine mission on their own unsupported assertion;
  others, who rest it upon their popularity; others, on their success;
  and others, who rest it upon their temporal distinctions. This last
  case has, perhaps, been too much our own; I fear we have neglected the
  real ground on which our authority is built--OUR APOSTOLICAL DESCENT.

  We have been born, not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of
  the will of man, but of God. The Lord Jesus Christ gave His Spirit to
  His Apostles; they in turn laid their hands on those who should
  succeed them; and these again on others; and so the sacred gift has
  been handed down to our present bishops, who have appointed us as
  their assistants, and in some sense representatives.

  Now every one of us believes this. I know that some will at first deny
  they do; still they do believe it. Only, it is not sufficiently,
  practically impressed on their minds.

  They _do_ believe it; for it _is_ the doctrine of the Ordination
  Service, which they have recognised as truth in the most solemn season
  of their lives. In order, then, not to prove, but to remind and
  impress, I entreat your attention to the words used when you were made
  ministers of Christ's Church.

  The office of Deacon was thus committed to you: "Take thou authority
  to execute the office of a Deacon in the Church of God committed unto
  thee: In the name, etc."

  And the Priesthood thus:

  "Receive the Holy Ghost, for the office and work of a Priest, in the
  Church of God, now committed unto thee by the imposition of our hands.
  Whose sins thou dost forgive, they are forgiven; and whose sins thou
  dost retain, they are retained. And be thou a faithful dispenser of
  the Word of God, and of His Holy Sacraments: In the name, etc."

  These, I say, were words spoken to us, and received by us, when we
  were brought nearer to God than at any other time of our lives. I know
  the grace of ordination is contained in the laying on of hands, not in
  any form of words;--yet in our own case (as has ever been usual in the
  Church) words of blessing have accompanied the act. Thus we have
  confessed before God our belief that the bishop who ordained us gave
  us the Holy Ghost, gave us the power to bind and to loose, to
  administer the Sacraments, and to preach. Now _how_ is he able to give
  these great gifts? _Whence_ is his right? Are these words idle (which
  would be taking God's name in vain), or do they express merely a wish
  (which surely is very far below their meaning), or do they not rather
  indicate that the speaker is conveying a gift? Surely they can mean
  nothing short of this. But whence, I ask, his right to do so? Has he
  any right, except as having received the power from those who
  consecrated him to be a bishop? He could not give what he had never
  received. It is plain then that he but _transmits_; and that the
  Christian Ministry is a _succession_. And if we trace back the power
  of ordination from hand to hand, of course we shall come to the
  Apostles at last. We know we do, as a plain historical fact; and
  therefore all we, who have been ordained clergy, in the very form of
  our ordination acknowledged the doctrine of the APOSTOLICAL
  SUCCESSION.

  And for the same reason, we must necessarily consider none to be
  _really_ ordained who have not _thus_ been ordained. For if ordination
  is a divine ordinance, it must be necessary; and if it is not a divine
  ordinance, how dare we use it? Therefore all who use it, all of _us_,
  must consider it necessary. As well might we pretend the Sacraments
  are not necessary to salvation, while we make use of the offices in
  the Liturgy; for when God appoints means of grace, they are _the_
  means.

  I do not see how any one can escape from this plain view of the
  subject, except (as I have already hinted) by declaring that the words
  do not mean all that they say. But only reflect what a most unseemly
  time for random words is that in which ministers are set apart for
  their office. Do we not adopt a Liturgy _in order to_ hinder
  inconsiderate idle language, and shall we, in the most sacred of all
  services, write down, subscribe, and use again and again forms of
  speech which have not been weighed, and cannot be taken strictly?

  Therefore, my dear brethren, act up to your professions. Let it not
  be said that you have neglected a gift; for if you have the Spirit of
  the Apostles on you, surely this _is_ a great gift. "Stir up the gift
  of God which is in you." Make much of it. Show your value of it. Keep
  it before your minds as an honourable badge, far higher than that
  secular respectability, or cultivation, or polish, or learning, or
  rank, which gives you a hearing with the many. Tell _them_ of your
  gift. The times will soon drive you to do this, if you mean to be
  still anything. But wait not for the times. Do not be compelled, by
  the world's forsaking you, to recur as if unwillingly to the high
  source of your authority. Speak out now, before you are forced, both
  as glorying in your privilege and to insure your rightful honour from
  your people. A notion has gone abroad that they can take away your
  power. They think they have given and can take it away. They think it
  lies in the Church property, and they know that they have politically
  the power to confiscate that property. They have been deluded into a
  notion that present palpable usefulness, producible results,
  acceptableness to your flocks, that these and such like are the tests
  of your divine commission. Enlighten them in this matter. Exalt our
  Holy Fathers the bishops, as the representatives of the Apostles, and
  the Angels of the Churches; and magnify your office, as being ordained
  by them to take part in their Ministry.

  But, if you will not adopt my view of the subject, which I offer to
  you, not doubtingly, yet (I hope) respectfully, at all events, CHOOSE
  YOUR SIDE. To remain neuter much longer will be itself to take a part.
  _Choose_ your side; since side you shortly must, with one or other
  party, even though you do nothing. Fear to be of those whose line is
  decided for them by chance circumstances, and who may perchance find
  themselves with the enemies of Christ, while they think but to remove
  themselves from worldly politics. Such abstinence is impossible in
  troublous times. HE THAT IS NOT WITH ME IS AGAINST ME, AND HE THAT
  GATHERETH NOT WITH ME SCATTERETH ABROAD.

While Mr. Palmer was working at the Association and the Address, Mr.
Newman with his friends was sending forth the Tracts, one after another,
in rapid succession, through the autumn and winter of 1833. They were
short papers, in many cases mere short notes, on the great questions
which had suddenly sprung into such interest, and were felt to be full
of momentous consequence,--the true and essential nature of the
Christian Church, its relation to the primitive ages, its authority and
its polity and government, the current objections to its claims in
England, to its doctrines and its services, the length of the prayers,
the Burial Service, the proposed alterations in the Liturgy, the neglect
of discipline, the sins and corruptions of each branch of Christendom.
The same topics were enforced and illustrated again and again as the
series went on; and then there came extracts from English divines, like
Bishop Beveridge, Bishop Wilson, and Bishop Cosin, and under the title
"Records of the Church," translations from the early Fathers, Ignatius,
Justin, Irenaeus, and others. Mr. Palmer contributed to one of these
papers, and later on Mr. Perceval wrote two or three; but for the most
part these early Tracts were written by Mr. Newman, though Mr. Keble and
one or two others also helped. Afterwards, other writers joined in the
series. They were at first not only published with a notice that any one
might republish them with any alterations he pleased, but they were
distributed by zealous coadjutors, ready to take any trouble in the
cause. Mr. Mozley has described how he rode about Northamptonshire,
from parsonage to parsonage, with bundles of the Tracts. The _Apologia_
records the same story. "I called upon clergy," says the writer, "in
various parts of the country, whether I was acquainted with them or not,
and I attended at the houses of friends where several of them were from
time to time assembled.... I did not care whether my visits were made to
High Church or Low Church: I wished to make a strong pull in union with
all who were opposed to the principles of Liberalism, whoever they might
be." He adds that he does not think that much came of these visits, or
of letters written with the same purpose, "except that they advertised
the fact that a rally in favour of the Church was commencing."

The early Tracts were intended to startle the world, and they succeeded
in doing so. Their very form, as short earnest leaflets, was perplexing;
for they came, not from the class of religionists who usually deal in
such productions, but from distinguished University scholars, picked men
of a picked college; and from men, too, who as a school were the
representatives of soberness and self-control in religious feeling and
language, and whose usual style of writing was specially marked by its
severe avoidance of excitement and novelty; the school from which had
lately come the _Christian Year_, with its memorable motto "_In
quietness and confidence shall be your strength_." Their matter was
equally unusual. Undoubtedly they "brought strange things to the ears"
of their generation. To Churchmen now these "strange things" are such
familiar commonplaces, that it is hard to realise how they should have
made so much stir. But they were novelties, partly audacious, partly
unintelligible, then. The strong and peremptory language of the Tracts,
their absence of qualifications or explanations, frightened friends like
Mr. Palmer, who, so far, had no ground to quarrel with their doctrine,
and he wished them to be discontinued. The story went that one of the
bishops, on reading one of the Tracts on the Apostolical Succession,
could not make up his mind whether he held the doctrine or not. They
fell on a time of profound and inexcusable ignorance on the subjects
they discussed, and they did not spare it. The cry of Romanism was
inevitable, and was soon raised, though there was absolutely nothing in
them but had the indisputable sanction of the Prayer Book, and of the
most authoritative Anglican divines. There was no Romanism in them, nor
anything that showed a tendency to it. But custom, and the prevalence of
other systems and ways, and the interest of later speculations, and the
slackening of professional reading and scholarship in the Church, had
made their readers forget some of the most obvious facts in Church
history, and the most certain Church principles; and men were at sea as
to what they knew or believed on the points on which the Tracts
challenged them. The scare was not creditable; it was like the Italian
scare about cholera with its quarantines and fumigations; but it was
natural. The theological knowledge and learning were wanting which would
have been familiar with the broad line of difference between what is
Catholic and what is specially Roman. There were many whose teaching was
impugned, for it was really Calvinist or Zwinglian, and not Anglican.
There were hopeful and ambitious theological Liberals, who recognised in
that appeal to Anglicanism the most effective counter-stroke to their
own schemes and theories. There were many whom the movement forced to
think, who did not want such addition to their responsibilities. It
cannot be thought surprising that the new Tracts were received with
surprise, dismay, ridicule, and indignation. But they also at once
called forth a response of eager sympathy from numbers to whom they
brought unhoped-for relief and light in a day of gloom, of rebuke and
blasphemy. Mr. Keble, in the preface to his famous assize sermon, had
hazarded the belief that there were "hundreds, nay, thousands of
Christians, and that there soon will be tens of thousands, unaffectedly
anxious to be rightly guided" in regard to subjects that concern the
Church. The belief was soon justified.

When the first forty-six Tracts were collected into a volume towards the
end of 1834, the following "advertisement" explaining their nature and
objects was prefixed to it. It is a contemporary and authoritative
account of what was the mind of the leaders of the movement; and it has
a significance beyond the occasion which prompted it.

  The following-Tracts were published with the object of
  contributing-something towards the practical revival of doctrines,
  which, although held by the great divines of our Church, at present
  have become obsolete with the majority of her members, and are
  withdrawn from public view even by the more learned and orthodox few
  who still adhere to them. The Apostolic succession, the Holy Catholic
  Church, were principles of action in the minds of our predecessors of
  the seventeenth century; but, in proportion as the maintenance of the
  Church has been secured by law, her ministers have been under the
  temptation of leaning on an arm of flesh instead of her own
  divinely-provided discipline, a temptation increased by political
  events and arrangements which need not here be more than alluded to. A
  lamentable increase of sectarianism has followed; being occasioned (in
  addition to other more obvious causes), first, by the cold aspect
  which the new Church doctrines have presented to the religious
  sensibilities of the mind, next to their meagreness in suggesting
  motives to restrain it from seeking out a more influential discipline.
  Doubtless obedience to the law of the land, and the careful
  maintenance of "decency and order" (the topics in usage among us),
  are plain duties of the Gospel, and a reasonable ground for keeping in
  communion with the Established Church; yet, if Providence has
  graciously provided for our weakness more interesting and constraining
  motives, it is a sin thanklessly to neglect them; just as it would be
  a mistake to rest the duties of temperance or justice on the mere law
  of natural religion, when they are mercifully sanctioned in the Gospel
  by the more winning authority of our Saviour Christ. Experience has
  shown the inefficacy of the mere injunctions of Church order, however
  scripturally enforced, in restraining from schism the awakened and
  anxious sinner; who goes to a dissenting preacher "because" (as he
  expresses it) "he gets good from him": and though he does not stand
  excused in God's sight for yielding to the temptation, surely the
  ministers of the Church are not blameless if, by keeping back the more
  gracious and consoling truths provided for the little ones of Christ,
  they indirectly lead him into it. Had he been taught as a child, that
  the Sacraments, not preaching, are the sources of Divine Grace; that
  the Apostolical ministry had a virtue in it which went out over the
  whole Church, when sought by the prayer of faith; that fellowship with
  it was a gift and privilege, as well as a duty, we could not have had
  so many wanderers from our fold, nor so many cold hearts within it.

  This instance may suggest many others of the superior _influence_ of
  an apostolical over a mere secular method of teaching. The awakened
  mind knows its wants, but cannot provide for them; and in its hunger
  will feed upon ashes, if it cannot obtain the pure milk of the word.
  Methodism and Popery are in different ways the refuge of those whom
  the Church stints of the gifts of grace; they are the foster-mothers
  of abandoned children. The neglect of the daily service, the
  desecration of festivals, the Eucharist scantily administered,
  insubordination permitted in all ranks of the Church, orders and
  offices imperfectly developed, the want of societies for particular
  religious objects, and the like deficiencies, lead the feverish mind,
  desirous of a vent to its feelings, and a stricter rule of life, to
  the smaller religious communities, to prayer and Bible meetings, and
  ill-advised institutions and societies, on the one hand, on the other,
  to the solemn and captivating services by which Popery gains its
  proselytes. Moreover, the multitude of men cannot teach or guide
  themselves; and an injunction given them to depend on their private
  judgment, cruel in itself, is doubly hurtful, as throwing them on such
  teachers as speak daringly and promise largely, and not only aid but
  supersede individual exertion.

  These remarks may serve as a clue, for those who care to pursue it, to
  the views which have led to the publication of the following Tracts.
  The Church of Christ was intended to cope with human nature in all its
  forms, and surely the gifts vouchsafed it are adequate for that
  gracious purpose. There are zealous sons and servants of her English
  branch, who see with sorrow that she is defrauded of her full
  usefulness by particular theories and principles of the present age,
  which interfere with the execution of one portion of her commission;
  and while they consider that the revival of this portion of truth is
  especially adapted to break up existing parties in the Church, and to
  form instead a bond of union among all who love the Lord Jesus Christ
  in sincerity, they believe that nothing but these neglected doctrines,
  faithfully preached, will repress that extension of Popery, for which
  the ever multiplying divisions of the religious world are too clearly
  preparing the way.

Another publication ought to be noticed, a result of the Hadleigh
meeting, which exhibited the leading ideas of the conference, and
especially of the more "conservative" members of it. This was a little
work in question and answer, called the "Churchman's Manual," drawn up
in part some time before the meeting by Mr. Perceval, and submitted to
the revision of Mr. Rose and Mr. Palmer. It was intended to be a
supplement to the "Church Catechism," as to the nature and claims of the
Church and its Ministers. It is a terse, clear, careful, and, as was
inevitable, rather dry summary of the Anglican theory, and of the
position which the English Church holds to the Roman Church, and to the
Dissenters. It was further revised at the conference, and "some
important suggestions were made by Froude"; and then Mr. Perceval, who
had great hopes from the publication, and spared himself no pains to
make it perfect, submitted it for revision and advice to a number of
representative Churchmen. The Scotch Bishops whom he consulted were warm
in approval, especially the venerable and saintly Bishop Jolly; as were
also a number of men of weight and authority in England: Judge Allan
Park, Joshua Watson, Mr. Sikes of Guilsborough, Mr. Churton of Crayke,
Mr. H.H. Norris, Dr. Wordsworth, and Dr. Routh. It was then laid before
the Archbishop for correction, or, if desirable, suppression; and for
his sanction if approved. The answer was what might have been expected,
that there was no objection to it, but that official sanction must be
declined on general grounds. After all this Mr. Perceval not unnaturally
claimed for it special importance. It was really, he observed, the
"first Tract," systematically put forth, and its preparation "apparently
gave rise" to the series; and it was the only one which received the
approval of all immediately concerned in the movement. "The care
bestowed on it," he says, "probably exceeds that which any theological
publication in the English communion received for a long time;" and
further, it shows "that the foundation of the movement with which Mr.
Rose was connected, was laid with all the care and circumspection that
reason could well suggest." It appears to have had a circulation, but
there is no reason to think that it had any considerable influence, one
way or other, on opinion in the Church. When it was referred to in
after-years by Mr. Perceval in his own vindication, it was almost
forgotten. More interesting, if not more important, Tracts had thrown it
into the shade.

FOOTNOTES:

[37] _Apol._ p. 100.

[38] Palmer, _Narrative_, 1843 (republished 1883), pp. 5, 18.

[39] Palmer (1883), pp. 40, 43, "June 1833, when he joined us at
Oxford."

[40] See Palmer's account (1883), pp. 45-47, and (1843), pp. 6,7.

[41] "Mr. Rose ... was the one commanding figure and very lovable man,
that the frightened and discomfited Church people were now rallying
round. Few people have left so distinct an impression of themselves as
this gentleman. For many years after, when he was no more, and Newman
had left Rose's standpoint far behind, he could never speak of him or
think of him without renewed tenderness" (Mr. T. Mozley,
_Reminiscences_, i. 308).

In November 1838, shortly before Mr. Rose's death, Mr. Newman had
dedicated a volume of sermons to him--"who, when hearts were failing,
bade us stir up the gift that was in us, and betake ourselves to our
true mother" (_Parochial Sermons_, vol. iv.)

[42] _Narrative of Events connected with the publication of Tracts for
the Times_, by W. Palmer (published 1843, republished 1883), pp. 96-100

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