The Oxford movement and the Catholic revival fJ/\ /I*<*'£• l- u r CC-Sl- kArV~t- f)s~ ft ft ^ “ ‘ A . ?l>> /y-t*-'i~>d-' «•*nw - \t Cburcb Club Xectures ^sru ois~ Y~(2\ SX THE OXFORD MOVEMENT AND THE CATHOLIC REVIVAL BY THE RIGHT REV. W. E. MCLAREN, D.D., D.C.L. BISHOP OF CHICAGO NEW YORK E. & J. B. YOUNG & CO. Cooper Union, Fourth Avenue 1892 Price, 5 cents, or $3.00 per hundred LECTURE IV. THE RT. REV. WILLIAM E. McLAREN, D.D., D.C.L., Bishop of Chicago. THE OXFORD MOVEMENT AND THE CATHOLIC REVIVAL. From every point of view, whether sympathet- ic, hostile, or indifferent, the Catholic Revival will appear upon the pages of history as the dis- tinguishing religious movement of the nineteenth century, great in itself and great in relation to its environment. It arose in the midst of one of those ever- recurring periods when naturalistic forces rise in rebellion against the supernatural character of the Christian Church and Creeds. The deathly vapors of that miasm of unbelief which had its rise in the first French revolution were still hang- ing over England. It largely cleared the atmosphere, and has grown in power and pervasiveness, in direct and indirect influence, till the whole world has felt its vital strength. It has accentuated its princi- ples with more distinctness, while, on one hand, the Protestant bodies have been learning to pro- 4 “ THE OXFORD MOVEMENT AND nounce their sixteenth-century shibboleths with diminished emphasis, and while, on the other hand, the Roman Catholic Church has been sur- rendering itself in faith and morals to an autoc- racy to which the English Catholic Church did in the sixteenth century offer successful resistance. Such a movement arrests attention and com- mands scrutiny. It is the purpose of this lecture to attempt such careful study of this movement as may be practicable within limits so very brief and inade- quate. While from the lecturer’s point of view he cannot choose but render to its principles the most absolute allegiance of head and heart, he has no conscious purpose to consider it as a par- tisan, or in a spirit of intolerance toward those who may not share that allegiance. I. The present student of this movement possesses many advantages , as compared with those which existed while it was yet in its adolescence. We i behold it in its maturity, and can apply to it the law of perspective, seeing its present status in relation to the process of its development. It is now no longer the dream of a few, dawn- ing upon their minds in dim and mysterious light, and to be hedged about as by a disciplina arcani. It is the inspiration of millions. THE CATHOLIC REVIVAL.” 5 Nursed in the cloisters of a University, as an esoteric devotion to ancient truths, it has passed out into the common life of the Church, and in- fluenced, if not moulded, it beyond the power of figures to compute or of words to describe. The predictions of its earlier devotees have been fulfilled. The forebodings of its antagonists have not been realized. If its influence has been incalculable upon those who surrender themselves without compromise or hesitation to its claims upon the reason and the heart, it has shown itself very forceful as an indirect influence over those who have opposed, as well as over such as have refused to follow on to its proper conclusions. The era of deaf and peremptory hostility was succeeded by the era of enforced toleration; and now we have reached the era in which wise men are thinking it to be well to lay aside all thumb- screws and all thought of them (save as a bad memory!), to recognize the honest loyalty of all who claim to be honestly loyal to the Church, the Creeds, and the Bible, and to turn their atten- tion somewhat more manfully to common enemies. This is assuredly a great change. Contrast this year of grace with that in which “ The Christian Year ” of John Keble was publicly burned at Oxford, or that in which a puritanic insanity pre- cipitated the “ surplice riot,” in London. 6 “THE OXFORD MOVEMENT AND There is, further, now observable in the minds of scholarly men of all kinds, a disposition to consider this movement with equipoise of judg- ment—a thing quite impossible in the earlier days when the atmosphere was lurid with passion and prejudice.* The movement now has no leaders as it had when it first disturbed the deathly sleep of an Erastian establishment. No coterie represents it or controls its development. No mighty name invites our adjuration as once when William George Ward flippantly said, “My creed is very short : Credo in Newmannum” f Its true ex- ponents of the early days have shared the com- mon lot and gone to gaze with unclouded vision upon the glories of Jerusalem the Golden. Even Pusey, easily chief among them all, “faithful found among the faithless,” sleeps in Christ; and * “ It is a sign of the times that the modern reformation in the English Church should at last be recognized by German Protes- tant scholars as by far the most significant and epoch-making event in the ecclesiastical history of our century. ... A critical and historical account of ‘ Tractarianism ’ more unacceptable to the British Church Association can hardly be conceived, and if the orators of that school could be suspected of studying German Protestant theology, they would probably write down Dr. Schoell as a Jesuit in disguise.”—Church Quarterly Review, January, 1886, on Dr. SchoeH’s exhaustive article, “ Traktarianismus,” in Real-Encyclopadie fur Protestantische Theologie und Kirche, vol. xv., pp. 738-791, Leipsic, 1885. J William George Ward and the Oxford Movement, 1889, p. 33. THE CATHOLIC RE VIVALT 7 let it ever be remembered that he, knowing whose minister he was, and understanding the move- ment better than some who wished to assert lordly control over it, never assumed to be any- thing but a humble follower of the truth.* With all the inextinguishable vitality of a cause that is best represented by the Name that is above every name, it has passed wholly out of the sphere of representative mastership. Another advantage which the present student of this movement enjoys is the perception of the ever-strengthening tenacity with which it has adhered to the Communion in which it took its rise, in the teeth of the supreme argument, the slogan of its enemies, the untiringly iterated charge that it tended to conduct the Anglican Church back to the allegiance of Rome. As the appeal to prejudice, that argument was almost over- whelming in its effects. The enlightened and reasonable prejudice of those who understood the astounding pertinacity of the power which had * In 1870, he wrote these words : I never was a party leader, I never acted on any system. My name wTas first used to designate those of us who gave themselves to revive the teaching of forgot- ten truth and piety, because I first had occasion to write on bap- tismal regeneration ; but it was by opponents and not confederates. We should have thought it a note against us to have deserved any party name, or to have been anything but followers of Jesus, the disciples of the Church, the sons and pupils of the Great Fathers whom he raised up in her.” 8 “ THE OXFORD MOVEMENT AND never given over its purpose to bind the Church back to its obedience would naturally regard such a movement with suspicion, for a time at least. Ignorant prejudice would catch up and repeat the outcry with tireless vociferation. It had great force with those extremists, mostly without the Church’s pale, who held the old position of Cartwright (1573) “that we may not in any wise or on any consideration retain in the Church anything that hath been abused under the pope.”* This dismal echo of a voice that sought in the reign of Elizabeth to do away with Bishops as being of “ antichrist’s brood,” and the authority of the Fathers as being “ the summoning of hell,” reminds us of the antiquity of that style of argu- ment. To Calvin, the Prayer-Book was “the dregs of popery.” To Beza, the English clergy were an imitation of “ Baal’s priests in their square caps, tippets, and such sort of equipages.” The lineal descendants of these worthies never gave up their supreme argument. It has been their war-cry through three centuries of contro- versy. But three centuries of controversy have shown the invincible tenacity to the Church of the prin- ciples of the Catholic Revival. Had the original impetus of this Movement, beginning about 1833, * The Life and Acts of Archbishop Whitgift, Strype, London, 1718, p. 50. THE CATHOLIC REVIVALT 9 been toward Rome, it could not have maintained itself in an incongenial clime so long and in the face of such virulence of opposition. If the cause for which they were willing to suffer had not supplied them with motives for heroism, you had scarcely seen priests glad to languish in English prisons for its sake when they might have opened the door of the jail and the door of the Church of Rome at the same moment, by one word of submission. The real question at issue is, does the Church of Rome stand as the sole exponent of the Catholic religion of Christ in Western Christendom ? is the Church of England a modern institution or has she an organic life more vener- able than the foundations of St. Martin’s of Can- terbury or the ruined arches of Iona ? has she preserved the continuity of the ages in her line of bishops ? does she mean herself when she pro- fesses her faith in the Holy Catholic Church? In other words, is she what the Puritans sought to make her, or what she was through all time ? Shall Cartwright’s principle prevail, or the prin- ciple enunciated in her own canons of 1603 — “ the abuse of a thing doth not take away the lawful use of it?” “Nay,” adds the canon, “so far was it from the purpose of the Church of England to forsake and reject the Churches of Italy, France, Spain, Germany, or any such like Churches, in all things which they held and prac- io “ THE OXFORD MOVEMENT AND tised, that it doth with reverence retain those ceremonies which do neither endamage the Church of God, nor offend the minds of sober men ; and only departed from them in those particular points wherein they were fallen both from them- selves in their ancient integrity and from the apostolical Churches, which were their first founders.” * What is this but the statement in other words of Hooker’s emphatic declaration? “To say that in nothing they may be followed which are of the Church of Rome, were violent and extreme. Some things they do in that they are men ; in that they are wise and Christian men some things ; some things in that they are men misled and blinded with error. As far as they follow reason and truth, we fear not to tread the self-same steps wherein they have gone and be their followers. When Rome keepeth that which is ancienter and better—others whom we much more affect leav- ing it for newer and changing it for worse—we had rather follow the perfections of them whom we like not than in defects resemble those whom we love.” f But there have been defections to Rome, since the Revival began ! Undoubtedly. But are these fairly chargeable to the Revival ? * Constitutions and Canons Ecclesiastical, 1603, xxx. f Hooker, Book v., ch. xxxiii., sec. 1. THE CATHOLIC REVIVAL.” n Since the beginning of the Reformation there has ever been a leakage to Rome, not only in England but on the Continent. In Germany it has attained colossal proportions. In England during the present century some of the most eminent names in the list of perverts were added before 1833, and many of those which have been since added were wholly unacquainted with the underlying principles of the Catholic Revival* Thoroughly Protestant in their training, they were unconscious of any refuge save Rome from the incongenial atmosphere which they could no longer breathe. Perverts from the ranks of those who have been under the influence of the Revival have always denied and disparaged the principles of that Revival as their justification, plainly show- ing how impossible their defection would have been, had they remained loyal to those principles. It must be noted, too, that the most of those who have gone to Rome were originally of the Puri- tan and Calvinistic type, as for example Newman, Simeon, Wilberforce, Manning, and Faber. The excessive force of their recoil from the theology of their youth is enough to account for their secession. But the original promoters of the Oxford Move- ment declared it to be part of their purpose to prevent such losses. Just think what an exodus would have ensued if the Erastians had succeeded I 2 “ THE OXFORD MOVEMENT AND in abolishing the foundations of the English Church and turning it into an “ omniumgatherum ” moral society! It was to save the Church from such a fate that her Catholicity was reasserted and defended against all gainsayers within and without. Those brave and noble men preferred to rescue the Church from her dangers not by appeals to prejudice and panic shouts of “No Popery,” but by proclaiming her to be truly Catholic, and by living up to the Creeds, the Services, and the Sacraments, without fear of consequences; and they saved thousands from submission to Rome. They brought to light the hidden treasures of the Prayer-Book because (wrote the editor of the Tracts in 1834) “ 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.” The. Revival has largely neutralized that tendency. It will have much to do hereafter on that line. The movement has 'ministered much disap- pointment in two opposite quarters. It has not accepted the counsels of those who denounce it as an evil only less malignant than popery and in the same breath urge its adherents to surrender themselves to the tender mercies of the greater evil. The “ Romanizer ” has persistently declined to romanize, and has as pertinaciously continued THE CATHOLIC RE VIVALT 13 to assert, defend, and propagate the Catholic Faith and Life—in one word, to catholicize. The present issue, therefore, does not appear to be whether he shall be thrust out of his home, but whether he shall mould the family into his spirit. On the other hand, the movement has been a bitter disappointment to the Roman Church, ex- ultant as she was fifty years ago, with expecta- tions of an immense defection. That dream has faded into airy nothingness. All the energies of an able hierarchy, with convert-cardinals presid- ing, have been expended without proportionate returns. Indeed, it is a question whether our gains from, have not been greater than our losses to, Rome. And thus the “ Romanizers ” have de- feated Rome. Roman-Catholicism cannot fight Anglo-Catholicism on its own ground. Anglo- Catholicism knows where its own ground is. It cannot be deemed other than a very impres- sive vindication of the Catholic Revival from the old outcry, that its principles have not only gained an immense hold on the Church, but have likewise borne much fruit among the dissenting bodies in England, the “ Kirk ” in Scotland, and some of the most influential denominations in America. It is really astonishing to observe how Catholic truths in theology and Catholic methods of worship and spiritual growth are looked upon with favor by the descendants of Calvin, Knox, and Cartwright 14 6s THE OXFORD MOVEMENT AND The old outcry, therefore, should be dismissed from minds that would be swayed by facts and reason. It will have force only with those whose want of logic. Archbishop Laud quaintly exposed when he said, “ I have converted several from popery ; I have taken an oath against it ; I have held a controversv against it ; I have been twice offered a cardinal’s hat and refused it; I have been twice in danger of my life from a popish plot ; I have endeavored to reconcile the Luther- ans and Calvinists; and therefore have endeav- ored to introduce popery.’* But there is yet another advantage in favor of the present study of the Catholic Revival. We may now judge the tree by its fruits. The case has been luminously stated by the “ Church Quar- terly Review " of London, in its notice of the arti- cle on Tractarianism by Dr. Schoell in his ency- clopedia of theology, previously mentioned. * ‘ Anglo-Catholicism. says Dr. Schoeli, “has now stood the test of half a century ; no man can ignore its results. What Methodism vainly attempted to do one hundred years ago— namely, to pour a new life into the English Church—Anglo- Catholicism has successfully achieved. The older religious move- ment was forced out of the Church, and had to develop itself independently. The newer movement, on the contrary has man- aged so to possess itself of the National Church, that the Church can never again loosen herself from it. It has known how to beget in English folk a new passion for their Church, as the old Catholic Church originally planted in England. Inwardly, out of the Church’s own self, and not outwardly, and merely at the THE CATHOLIC REVIVAL.” 15 side of the Church, Anglo-Catholicism has produced her manifold new works, social as well as directly ecclesiastical, foreign as well as native.” Dr. Schoell includes in his catalogue the significant foundation of the S. Augustine College at Canterbury, and the extraordinary development of the colonial episcopate. . . . “In its inherent vitality and its practical outward force,” he says, “ Anglo-Catholicism exceeds all the other parties in the Church of ^England. Not only so, but it draws them after, or adopts them into it.” Again, “ It has restored the Christian equality of rich and poor in the common House of God. It has extended its care to the most degraded and hopeless classes of the population ; but while doing this, it has at the same time discovered (a secret lost, or not gained by the German Protestant churches) how to give the Church a shape which attracts the higher classes.” Dr. Schoell throughout speaks of the English Catholic movement as a “ Reform.” “ It has taken a wider and more generous reach, in regard to men and things, than the antecedent reform in the Church of England”—the Evangelical. “It has restored the Cross and other Christian symbols to their rights within the Church, and its realistic tendency has revived art and music in their ancient character, as handmaidens of the Church. It has thus acted as a force outside the Church.” “ Pre Raphaeiitism,” in Dr. Schoell’s judgment, “ if not directly, is indirectly a child of Tractarianism.” “ The Church, as the common unity of all the faithful, must be an organism, and hence its religion, like a net, must extend over the entirety of life, and touch it at all points, from birth to death.” This gives to man, as man, a high charac- ter. “ The Evangelical school in England conceived of the indi- vidual.man, as of one standing outside the true Church until he was converted, whereas the Tractarian school claimed every man as an integral portion of the true Church, from the moment of his baptism. Hence it does not lay the chief strain of religious ac- tivity upon getting the individual converted, but upon the cul- ture and fuller evolution of the Christian life, which has already been made his through the sacrament.”* * See also Dr. Plumptre’s “ Movements of Religious Thought,” i6 “THE OXFORD MOVEMENT AND II. Having shown the advantages enjoyed in a present study of this movement, let us look at ike Catholic Revival as in its very essence a reform- ing movement , that is, a movement for the correc- tion of abuses in an existing institution. The necessity of reformation in the Church will be conceded by all who have sought impartial knowledge of the condition of England during the first third of this century. Had no force arisen to stop the process of degeneration, it is not difficult to imagine what would have been its outcome. Reform was imperative. A reformation in the Church of God, whenever and wherever effected, must take its rise in the mercy of God the Holy Ghost. For, while the study of the Church, in its struggles up toward the Divine ideal, includes o-f necessity a consid- eration of earthly forces in all their variety of action and reaction, of secular as well as spiritual environment, of the imperfections, mistakes, and, often, follies of men—as well of men who work together with God as of men who may “ be found even to fight against God ”—it includes chiefly the contemplation of Him Who has promised that the gates of hell shall not prevail against His Church. Divine interposition is intensely THE CATHOLIC RE VIVALT 17 real, productive of severe collisions between truth and error, attended by violent upheavals in es- tablished conditions of corruption, and, finally, irresistible. A reformatory movement, on its human side, will, therefore, be positive, aggressive, and, in de- gree as it is opposed, controversial. It was a mistake on the part of some of its earlier advocates when they represented the movement as a via media between Romanism and Protestantism, so far, at least, as the term repre- sents the comfortable avoidance of positive con- viction—that amiable spirit of compromise which makes tranquillity a higher blessing than truth. This was the characteristic weakness of the Church of England at that time ; it was dying of all sorts of via media-\sm . We admit, of course, that the idea of a via media is not always the refuge of an invertebrate mental condition, though it may be a relief for moral irresoluteness. The strongest thinker is apt to seek a point of refuge between opposite uncertainties ; but he has ceased to think when he maintains his place after uncer- tainties are resolved. Now the Catholic Move- ment was neither a compromise nor a trumpet of uncertain sound. It was not an eclecticism — a safe mean between the Scylla of Protestantism and the Charybdis of Popery. “ There can be no mean in Divine realities which either are or 1 8 " THE OXFORD MOVEMENT AND are not, and cannot have an intermediate sort of being, corresponding to the vacillations or sus- pensions of human opinion. Truth is one ex- treme, and falsehood another; there is no mean between them/’ * The great spiritual upheaval we are considering was a reforming conflict, an aggressive movement, against error in whatever quarter found. It was the Church of England rising into new life to oppose the enemy that ap- proached from the Tiber, but no less the Trojan horse within the walls. It was a definite aggres- sive marshalling of forces against foes that from opposite quarters menaced the integrity of her Catholic life. It was positive, heroic, uncom- promising. Looking for and discovering ex- tremes, not to avoid them for the sake of com- fort and peace, but to “ collide ” with them and so defeat their onslaughts upon the truth, it was essentially a reform and therefore originatively the work of God the Holy Ghost. But it had its human side. Whether we con- sider the life in Christ individually or corporately, four basic truths should be kept in mind : (i) The ideal Christian life is exemplified only in our Lord Himself; the Church is perfect only in respect of her Divine Head. (2) Our Lord has taught us that His commandments, illustrated by His pre- cepts and example, will have imperfect realiza- British Critic,” 1843, p. 278. THE CATHOLIC REVIVAL 19 tion in regenerate men; the wheat and the tares grow together. (3) There is an age-long conflict between the forces of good and evil. (4) There is an ever-present tendency to degeneration, and the result is the alternation of action and reac- tion, which accounts- for the unevenness of indi- vidual and Church history; evil as well as good has its reactionary sequence, and the reaction from evil is reformation, overcoming degenerated conditions. A religious reformation must take its rise in the operation of Divine mercy. But as it is a treasure committed to earthen vessels, it will partake of their imperfections, being subject to the contingencies of free-will, to extravagances of self-will, to the follies of unregenerated enthusi- asm, and to the influences of secular environ- ment. It would be a violence done to the pres- ent nature of things to claim for a heavenly in- terposition freedom from the contingencies of its earthly reception, or to demand Divine perfec- tion from human administration. But it would be most irrational and contrary to the analogies of experience to condemn such a visitation of mercy because of the shortcomings of its earthly development. The application of these truths to the Catholic Revival will forestall the injustice that would reject it because of extravagances and mistakes. 20 4 THE OXFORD MOVEMENT AND Few who intelligently study it would venture to doubt its Divine origin. It was greater than the men who felt its touch as the winds of heaven are mightier than the strings of the Eolian harp from which they evoke melodious strains. No human mind contrived the Anglican Revival. It was not so much an epoch of history as it was a breath from above—-the ruach Elohim *—which brooded over the spiritual chaos of the Church of England, in the first third of this century. It was gently smiting the hearts of many humble souls who watched for the signs of a better day, even before it reached the loftier spirits whose names were afterward identified with it, to whom it gave so much—receiving back from some life- long devotion, from others, treason and flight. It found Keble as he sat at his lyre. It found Rose offering the Holy Sacrifice at Lambeth’s altar. It found Hook working out a new con- ception of the priestly life. It found Newman emancipated, but only in part, from the bondage of a narrow theology and a one-sided pietism. It found Palmer burning with resentment but devising practical resistance to the encroaching State. A year or two later on, it found Pusey deep in the scudy of Arabic manuscripts and German rationalism. It came to them like an inspiration when all the heavens were dark : when * Genesis, i. , 2. THE CA THOLIC RE VIVALE 21 irresolute minds were suggesting that Christian- ity, to survive in the world, must be made over again after the pattern which the spirit of the age might dictate ; when latitudinarianism was urg- ing the abolition of the Church to the intent that a system of moral police, made up of all the cur- rent religions, might be organized upon its ruins ; when ten bishoprics had been rooted up by the sacrilege of Caesar; when a hostile prime minister had notified the Church that its course was run and that the Bishops might as well set their house in order; when the episcopate itself was hardly worthy of a better fate, many of its incumbents justifying Sydney Smith’s rhymed burlesque on a charge of one of them to his clergy: — “ Hunt not, fish not, shoot not ; Dance not, fiddle not, flute not ; But, before all things, it is my particular desire That, once at least in every week, you take Your dinner with the Squire ” *— when hundreds of the clergy neglected to give ear to these modest monitions without declining the prandial injunction; when church edifices were miserably out of repair, hideously furnished, and deserted by the people; when the services were barren and jejune to the last degree, sac- raments were regarded as empty forms, and ser- mons were a monotony of moral platitudes. The * “ Life of Dean Hook,” W. R. W. Stephens, p. 102. 22 “ THE OXFORD MOVEMENT AND evils of pluralities, non-residence, and nepotism were rampant. Those strong spiritual forces which took their rise in the Evangelical move- ment of the preceding century were now mori- bund, as the penalty of their divorce from essen- tial factors of the Gospel. To this it must be added that “ there was also a faint-heartedness among sincere Churchmen—a disposition to sit still and wait the storm—a want of that bold and faithful spirit which fearlessly proclaims and fights for the truth/’ * The Rev. William Palmer in his “ Narrative of Events ” (pp. 4, 5), thus graphically describes the condition of things : “Such was the disorganization of the pubhc mind, that Dr. Arnold, of Rugby, ventured to propose that all sects should be united by Act of Parliament with the Church of England, on the principle of retaining all their distinctive errors and absurdities. Reports, apparently well founded, were prevalent that some of the prelates . . were favorable to alterations in the Liturgy. Pamphlets were in wide circulation, recommending the abolition of the Creeds (at least in public worship), and 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. In fact, there was not a single stone of the sacred edifice of the Church which was not examined, shaken, undermined, by a meddling and ignorant curiosity. “ Such was our condition in the early part of the summer of 1833. We knew not to what quarter to look for support. A * Charge of Bishop Strachan, Toronto, 1841, quoted in Bick nell’s “Judgments of the Bishops,” p. 35, London, 1845. THE CATHOLIC REVIVAL." 23 prelacy threatened, and apparently intimidated ; a government making its powers subservient to agitators who avowedly sought the destruction of the Church. The State, so long the guardian of that Church, now become its enemy and its tyrant. Enemies within the Church, seeking the subversion of its essential characteristics. And, what was 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 among all classes of politicians. There was in all this enough to appal the stoutest hearts ; and those who can recall the feelings of those days will at once remember the deep depression into which the Church had fallen, and the gloomy forebodings which were uni- versally prevalent.” In such a condition of things it was like a new revelation from above to be assured that our Lord God had stooped to incarnation and had dwelt among men to found an Universal Divine Society, a Kingdom, “ the Kingdom of the heavens,” a spiritual organism, having temporal visibility and historic continuity, and all the notes and attributes consonant with such a society— a human ministry representing the great High Priest, acting in His stead, and self-perpetuating through the ages by the power of the Holy Ghost —a series of visible instruments and media through which the Holy Ghost effectuates God’s grace upon men’s souls and bodies, and by which re- generated men may worship God and maintain visible communion with Him and with all who 24 THE OXFORD MOVEMENT AND are in Him—a society in which our Divine-Human Lord dwells as in a Body by he power of the One Spirit and in which the unity of the Spirit is exhibited by one Hope, one Lord, one Faith, one Baptism, one God and Father of all; a so- ciety by which God, Who is above all, and through all, and in all, matures souls in grace from the rudiments of it, up through all the processes of spiritual growth, to the heights of heroic sanctity; a society in which, in one word, the Mediator of the New Covenant potentially abides to accom- plish all the purposes of the Incarnation. Such a conception of the Church and of our Lord’s relation to it was as old as the Church, but it wore the appearance of novelty to the English mind, because of the long prevalence of radical errors on the subject. One error viewed the Church as the creature of the State and merely its instrument of moral police. Another less revolting but still pernicious, re- garded the organic expression of visible and his- torical religion as not so distinctly included in the contents of revelation as to forbid it from being abandoned to the operation of naturalistic development—the true Body of Christ being a definite constituency visible only to a Sovereign Whose chief attribute was will, by Whom from eternity the limitations of that Body had been THE CATHOLIC RE VIVALE unconditionally fixed. These were the novel- ties. The nobler truths now brought forward seemed like a revelation : they were in reality a renais- sance—a. Catholic Revival. It is difficult to imagine, unless they have been experienced, the fascinations of a system which calmed the doubts of those who had been breath- ing the rationalistic atmosphere; which supplied not only motives but means for a higher form of devotion, nay, a wholly different ideal of attain- ment with respect to the reproduction within us of the life of Christ from that which the most ar- dent pietists of preceding years had suggested, an ideal which England had lost even as a mem- ory, a tradition ; which substituted the theology of the Incarnation in place of the theory of Di- vine Caprice, and shook off from the Scriptures the tangled masses of modern interpretation whereby their teachings had been obscured and their inspired language forced to express ideas foreign to its original meaning and contradictory of the Catholic Faith; which contemplated the external factors of religion as forms and appoint- ments to be spiritualized and not parasitic growths to be torn up root and branch; which supplied the irenicon whereby old truth could be harmo- nized with what was not error in the new age, liberty and authority be made to meet and kiss 26 44 THE OXFORD MOVEMENT AND each other, and the Church of England be shown to be in touch with the Catholic life of all the ages, without surrender to the unhistorical pre- tensions of the papacy, and without compromise with other influences which from the time of the Lutheran delegates down (1536), sought to re- form her Reformation. To some, at the first, such a movement was like a dove from the wild waste of waters, bear- ing an olive-leaf in her mouth. To others, it was a bird of ill omen. It aroused the virulent hos- tility of those who saw in it “another Gospel;” and, indeed, it was another than theirs. A Bish- op pronounced it a device of the great spiritual adversary.* The pulpit exceeded even the press in vitriolic denunciation. Others saw in it a dan- gerous commixture of evil and good. On the other hand, another Bishop, while cautious not to commit himself to its principles, declared that they were “ forming the most remarkable move- ment which for three centuries at least has taken place among us.” " Certainly,” he added, “they have been fostered with no friendly hand. No adscititious aid of powerful patronage has helped them forward—no gale of popular applause has urged them on. On the contrary, they seem to have been the single exception which an age of * Ordination sermon preached by Bishop Wilson in the Cathe- dral Church of S. John, Calcutta, May 2, 1S41. THE CATHOLIC REVIVAL." « 27 latitudinarian liberality could discover, against the rule of tolerating any religious belief.”* He might have added that while there was toleration for almost every form of unbelief \ there was every instrument of moral torture for the revived prin- ciples of the Reformation. But the spark was not quenched: it increased to a flame which no \ human power could extinguish. One whose character and scholarship adorned the movement for half a century said of it : “ From the very first these views spread with a rapidity which startled us. We then dreaded lest what spread so rapidly, should not root deeply. Even at the first the light seemed to spread like watch- fires from mountain-top to top, each who re- ceived it conveying it on to another so that they who struck the first faint spark, knew not how or to whom it was borne onward. The sacred torch passed from hand to hand ; their own neither carried nor could withhold it. And now the light has been reflected from hill-top to valley, has penetrated into recesses ; abroad, at home, within, without, in palace or cottage; has passed from continent to continent; we see it spread daily, until the whole heaven be kindled ; every- where opposed, yet finding entrance. The indirect influences, as is always the case in all great move- ments, have been far greater than the direct. It * Charge of Bishop Bagot, Oxford, 1842. 28 “THE OXFORD MOVEMENT AND reappears here and there, one knows not how. One may say reverently, firmly believing Whose work it is, “ It bloweth where It listeth, and thou hearest the sound thereof, but canst not tell whence It cometh and whither It goeth.” This language from the pen of one eminent for sobriety of judgment was addressed to the Archbishop of Canterbury. It describes the marks and tokens of a true reformation, and may fairly be applied to the progress of this move- ment through the sweep of half a century since that date. Dr. Pusey’s words were prophetic as well as descriptive. III. We do not, however, exhaust the full signifi- cance of the Catholic Revival in speaking of it as a reforming movement. It was also, in its es- sential features, the reappearance of the original reforming movement of the sixteenth century. There is a singular quality of continuity in English history. Freeman speaks of this as its distinctive characteristic. He says, “ no broad gap separates the present from the past.” “ The * “ A Letter to Ilis Grace the Archbishop of Canterbury, on Some Circumstances connected with the Present Crisis in the English Church,” by the Rev. E. B. Pusey, D.D., 1S41. THE CATHOLIC REVIVALS 2 9 England of Edward the First is essentially the still living England in which we have our being. A statute of Edward the First . . . unless it can be shown to have been repealed by some later statute, is just as good to this day as a statute of Queen Victoria/’ * It is not a difficult task, for this reason, to trace the progress of the Reformation along a varying line of triumphs and defeats, and to identify its salient features in the modern Catho- lic Revival. The Reformation, viewed as the termination of the power of a foreign Bishop in England, was simply the culmination of centuries of protest and resistance. When that power was at its zenith in the eleventh century Cardinal Langton suc- cessfully opposed it, and Magna Charta declared the Anglican Church to be free.f In Edward the First’s reign, the rough draft of the English Convocation appeared, and a statute repressed excessive tribute-money to Rome. More decided action was taken in Edward the Third’s time. The statute of prcemunire was enacted in the reign of Richard the Second, by which the three estates engaged to stand by the king against the * “ Historical Essays,” by Edward A. Freeman, M.A., Regius Professor of Modern History in the University of Oxford, First Series, 1886. f “ Anglicana Ecclesia libera sit." 3° "THE OXFORD MO YEMENI' AND claims of supremacy, and, in spite of frantic ef- forts in subsequent reactionary periods, the “ hideous encroachment ” (as the Pope termed it) held its place. It is a significant fact that a large deputation of English Bishops were present at the Council of Constance (1414), when the famous decree was issued claiming synodical authority over all persons, “ the papal dignity not excepted,” “ in things relating to faith and the extirpation of schism, and likewise with reference to a general reformation of manners in the Church of God, both in head and members.” Eighteen years after, the Council of Basil promulgated a similar decree, the English Bishops voting in the nega- tive only because the Council changed the form of voting by nations. The principle of national- ism was the very genius of the Church of Eng- land. Well does Lecky remark, “ hatred of for- eign interference lay at the root of that old antipathy to Rome which alone rendered possible the English Reformation.” * But England was, as she now is, one of the most religious of the Christian nations. For centuries she drew her great statesmen, patriots, judges, and orators from the ranks of the clergy. Her people were intensely devoted to the Faith, and in the most degenerate epochs were singu- larly influenced by appeals to the conscience. In * “ England in the XVIIXth Century,” i., p. 19. THE CATHOLIC RE VI VALE 3 l the dark days of the thirteenth century, the Brothers Preachers roused the nation to a pitch of religious enthusiasm. “ It was a ‘ revival ’ akin to that initiated by the Methodists in the eighteenth century/’* The age immediately preceding the Reformation was as much influ- enced by spiritual hunger as by the new learning. The conscience of the nation cried aloud for re- form. New spiritual aspirations inspired multi- tudes. When Henry the Eighth came to the throne, that quiet constituency which does not rise to much prominence in written history was ardently longing for a movement that would touch deeper questions than that of papal rule. Archbishop Warham had a definite scheme of reform, and Wolsey has been fairly called u a reforming Cardinal.” Henry the Eighth may excite detestation as part beast, part demigod, but whatever our estimate of his character, cer- tainly the policy of his prime-minister represented him. “ They had no wish for any violent break with the forms of the past. They desired re- ligious reform rather than religious revolution, a simplification of doctrine rather than any radical change in it, the purification of worship rather than the introduction of any wholly new ritual. Their theology remained, as they believed, a Catholic theology, but a theology cleared of the * “Ecclesia Anglicana,” Jennings, p. 106. 32 t THE OXFORD MOVEMENT AND superstitious growths which obscured the true Catholicism of the early Church.”* The first chapter of the Reformation closed with the death of Henry in 1546, and what were the fruits of it ? The papal power was destroyed, and the Church of England declared competent to administer her own affairs. The headship of the king was ac- cepted with the qualifying phrase — “ so far as the law of Christ will allow.” The law of Christ al- lowed his headship as much as it allowed that of the Bishop of Rome. It allowed neither. But those were days when Church and State were deemed necessary copartners. The continuity of the Episcopate was kept up without break, Cranmer duly succeeding Warham. The Holy Scriptures were printed in the vernacular, and commanded to be read in all the churches. The Creed, the Lord’s Prayer, and the Ten Com- mandments were translated, and recited slowly in church that the people might memorize them, and every schoolmaster and head of a family was ordered to teach them to the children. Primers or devotional books, in English, for popular use, were widely circulated. The number of holy days was diminished. Superstitious image-wor- ship and pilgrimages were forbidden. The Arti- cles of 1536, while in contrast with subsequent * “ History of the English People,” Green, ii. , p. 178. 33THE CATHOLIC REVIVALE f formularies, were a compromise between the re- formers and the ultraists of the old learning, and have left their marks on the Prayer Book as it now is. The Rule of Faith was declared to be the whole body of Scripture expounded according to the sense of the words and the teachings of early doctors and councils. So much for the positive side of the Reformation. On its negative side it was distinctly not con- fessional, that is, it did not formulate a new creed, setting forth novel conceptions of the religion of Christ. It was not anti-liturgical. It was not anti-sacramental. It was not anti-sacerdotal. It was not anti-episcopal. The reformers most in- fluenced by the new learning did not dream of any measure that would decatholicize the Church, and the nation— a Catholic nation—accepted the Reformation with approbation and loyalty. At this date, let it be remembered, the Council of Trent had not yet issued a decree, and Calvinis- tic Presbyterianism had not yet subjugated the Genevese. All this indicates a most healthful reformatory process. It was in a deep and real sense a Catho- lic revival. It was a salutary regression to the better life of the ancient Church. Whatever we may think of “the majestic lord who broke the bonds of Rome,” as to his personal character, we must recognize him as an instrument of God by 54 “ THE OXFORD MOVEMEXT AXD whom great and beneficent results were accom- plished. But it is also apparent that multiform forces, acting in a large measure independently of his will, produced these results. Because they did not originate with Henry, they did not die with him. But other forces were alreadv working or about to become active, which must be taken into the account, if we would understand subsequent ec- clesiastical developments and, particularly, the significance of the Catholic Revival. The first of these was the Roman party, pure and simple—an irreconcilable faction from the beginning, and in existence to-day. During the present century it has set up an intrusive hierarchy in England to fight the Catholic Revival on its native soil, and to bring Catholic nationalism into subjection to papal universalism.* Strong, defiant, pertinacious, it has never approximated success, except during the brief reign of Mary, and was never farther from it than it now is. But there were other forces which were dis- tinctly new. So far as they were due to reaction from abounding ecclesiastical corruption, gross ceremonialism, and papal despotism, they may be said to have shared in common the spirit of the people of England. But so far as their methods of reform and their corruptions of the THE CATHOLIC REVIVAL.” 35 Faith were concerned, they cannot be regarded as a return to ancient purity, but, rather, they were novel and revolutionary. They favored a Christianity reconstructed on sixteenth-century ideals rather than a Church reformed by the res- toration of ancient truth and purity. And it will be instructive to notice that they were differen- tiated from the Anglican conception of reform in other particulars. This latter was a movement in which the rulers of the Church and State and the mass of the people moved together as by common impulse. In the continental reform, the leadership was that of individual men with great powers and revolutionary propensities, acting in- dependently of even legitimate authority. In England there was a unity of spirit in the na- tional sense, which was wholly wanting on the Continent. And this leads on to the remark that as the spirit of nationalism made a conservative reformation possible in England, the radical forces which opposed the Catholic idea of reform were continental in their birth and nurture. The intrusion of these exotic forces naturally produced conflict. It was a battle of the Titans. It was a struggle for life, and a struggle which furnishes us the key to the subsequent history of the Reformation up to the Elizabethan settle- ment, and indeed of the Anglican Communion during the succeeding three hundred years. It 36 “ THE OXFORD MOVEMENT AND has been long and deadly. The tide of battle has at one time favored the banner of the Reforma- tion as involving no break with antiquity and no surrender of the principles of Catholicity; and again the idea of a new start on new foundations, a fresh genesis, getting all its inspiration from the spirit of the passing age, has made perilous approaches to victory. The contest is still an undecided one. We are in the thick of the fight to-day. These foreign forces were three in number. The first was Lollardism—an atmosphere rather than a party. It had lurked in England for many years, essentially a social and political tendency, seeking to overthrow the established order of things in state as well as church. It was an an- ticipation of the French revolution. “ Were we to connect the Lollards with any set of views in after-times, we should say that they were the precursors of the puritanical party rather than of the Reformers. They have indeed a great deal in common with the Puritans, making due allowance for the difference of times. They are Puritans, we may say, before the Reformation, instead of after; they were Puritans and opposed to the Church under the influence of Romish errors, instead of the Church under Laud and Charles the First freed from those errors and only chargeable with the offence of being a THE CATHOLIC REVIVAL.” 37 Church.” * They were also the natural congeners of the turbulent Anabaptists, some of whom, driven from the Continent for their misdeeds, found their way to England. Another force was Lutheranism. As early as 1536, the Lutheran princes sought to secure Eng- land’s “co-operation” in the Smalcald League, and that would have brought the Church under the doctrinal influence of the Augsburg Confes- sion, which, while strongly Catholic in its general tone, was wholly defective in respect to the apos- tolical polity and this without external necessity. f Two years later an attempt was made by a depu- tation of Lutherans to induce England to accede to the Confession, fortunately without success. More radical influences, begotten of the Ger- manic movement but appalling to Luther himself, were not slow to appear on English soil. But the temper of the nation as a whole remained re- ligiously conservative through Henry's reign. The third force was Calvinism. This was a mode of reform much more revolutionary than that of Luther, and much more the fruit of one strong brain and will. As a movement, its actual rule of faith was a book of theology written by a young man before he was twenty-six years of age. It presented a reconstructed Christianity — * “ British Critic,” January, 1839, p. 102. f “ Reunion of the Churches,” Bollinger, p. — . 3$ “THE OXFORD MOVEMENT AND a totally new departure in its doctrinal aspects and methods of church-government—a Christian- ity dominated by the philosophy of fatalism. In its very essence it amounted to a spiritual and ecclesiastical nihilism or the abolition of an old order for the purpose of rearing a new one upon its ruins. It was a creation of human genius, and its surpassing power as a logically consistent sys- tem is witnessed by its history, for after three centuries of intense vitality it only now seems about to die amidst its worshippers. No other foe like it has the Anglican Reformation stood confronted by. The history of the Church of England since 1 540 has been the history of reformed Catholicity resisting these contrariant and aggressive forces. A brief survey of the past, particularly of its earlier stages—all that the limits of this lecture will permit—will illustrate this statement, and to such a survey we now proceed. It was only when the youthful Edward ascended the throne that foreign influences came to the front in a determined way. They were invited by the Protector Somerset, himself of Calvinistic sympathies, eager to disparage a reform that thus far had gone forward on Anglican lines. The party of intrusion soon made England a scene of chaotic confusion. If the Prayer Book of 1549 is a marvel of Catholicity—and for that reason THE CATHOLIC RE VIVALT 39 it was a sore disappointment to the foreign di- vines—it is not without some scars from the fray. But not many months elapsed before its conserva- tive character was modified by the intrigues of those who would gladly have robbed even the Second Book of its churchly remnants. The great mass of the people were out of sympathy with their iconoclastic zeal, and, by the time of Edward the Sixth’s death, a strong reaction against continentalism had set in. They were quite prepared to have an end of religious an- archy, even though they must pay for it the price of a disgraceful surrender to Rome. Mary was welcomed as the lesser evil ; and then, England, maddened by the insolence of the party of disorder, passively accepted the papal despot- ism as a relief from their insufferable supremacy. It was a disastrous step, but it seemed to be the only practicable method of saving from utter overthrow those Catholic principles to which the national conscience was supremely loyal. The orders of the Reformation Bishops, however, were not questioned under Mary, and, in that respect, no break occurred. Neither were many of the good fruits of the reform obliterated. Spanish in- fluence, however, induced a policy of persecution, and ere long England could count her profit and loss in fleeing from anarchy to despotism. At the close of Mary’s reign all the conditions were 40 “ THE OXFORD MOVEMENT AND at hand for a Catholic revival, since both Rome and Dissent had been tried and found wanting. That revival came with Elizabeth, who was not an admirer of foreign “ new fangleness,” * as she termed it. With the great mass of the people she believed in one National Catholic Church, reformed. But again continental influences made themselves felt. The English exiles of Mary’s oppressive reign had imbibed the opinions of Calvin, during their stay on the Continent, and by their return a formidable addition was made to the ranks of the ultra-protestants. The con- flict was resumed. Saturated with Calvinistic and Zwinglian errors, they began to seek the dignities of the Church with fixed purpose to de- stroy its Catholic character. The pulpit of the Temple Church, Strype tells us, was “forenoons, Canterbury; afternoons, Geneva.” “ Hooker has hopes of our forefathers that died papists ; Travers would not allow them to be saved.” “ Hooker plead for universal redemption ; Travers for the decree of reprobation.” f The Church was on her defence. Her enemies, filled with crotchets and inflamed with intolerant fanaticism, deter- mined to rule or ruin, sought to reform her Reformation by receding from Catholicity to the opposite pole. In the end there was a truce, by *Strype’s “ Life of Archbishop Whitgift,” p. 207. f Ibid., p. 235. THE CATHOLIC REVIVAL.” 41 which room and verge enough was supposed to be provided for the old wine and the new in the same bottle. But, as to the Prayer Book, while Edward’s Second Book was revived, it was set forth with important alterations in the Catholic direction. The integrity of its Catholic character has endeared it to subsequent generations, who to this day have looked askance at revisions and reduced such movements to a minimum of change. It was during Elizabeth’s reign that the old Roman irreconcilables withdrew; and the Puri- tans, rejecting episcopacy, sacramental truth, the priesthood, and the memorial sacrifice, with a ferocity of temper that seemed to be a mono- mania, having failed to obliterate what they did not like, as they had succeeded in doing in Scot- land, lashed themselves into a revolutionary frenzy. The Church of England was still episco- pal, sacerdotal, sacramental, conservative, Catho- lic; and by the beginning of the seventeenth century the majority of the people were satisfied to have her so. A strong reaction against the Puritan faction, the Genevan discipline, and the doctrines of Calvin, had set in. It was a Catho- lic revival. Under James the First the general tendency was “ to emphasize sharply those distinctive fea- tures which separate the Anglican system from Romanism and sectarianism;” but the ancient 42 ‘'THE OXFORD MOVEMENT AND enemy was by no means dead and the struggle was resumed. In 1610, Abbott, a Calvinistic bigot, gained the chair of St. Augustine. In the next reign, that of Charles the First, the fight went on. But the formularies and laws of the Church were unchanged and her ritual still ex- pressed her allegiance to the original principles of the Reformation. Meanwhile in Scotland the Presbyterians by “ Solemn League and Cove- nant ” pledged themselves to extirpate prelacy; and the Puritans resolved to do the same in Eng- land. The Long Parliament began its sessions in 1640. Episcopacy was abolished as “a great impediment to reformation/' More than seven thousand of the clergy, charged with popery, idolatry, superstition, enmity to godliness—the gravamen in reality implying nothing more than attachment to the true principles of Catholic reformation—were driven from their cures, while these were taken up by Presbyterians and Brown- ists. The Westminster Confession of Faith and the Presbyterian Directory of Worship were re- quired to be used in place of the Book of Com- mon Prayer under severe penalties. The king was beheaded. Of the Bishops, “ one was be- headed without any color of law and one joined the faction which had ruined his brethren; eigh- teen died in poverty; only nine survived the confusion and were restored to their sees, and of THE CATHOLIC EE VIVALE 43 these one had been imprisoned for eighteen years.” * With iconoclastic frenzy churches were pillaged and desecrated. It looked as though Catholicity had finally succumbed to the conti- nental fury But the Presbyterian reign of terror had ter- rors awaiting it. Its revolution was watched by revolutionists more radical still. The Independ- ents denounced it as only a mild form of prelacy. Then, for eleven years, England had to endure the curse of the Commonwealth. The closing of that lurid chapter was the be- ginning of another Catholic revival, for although the Church had been forced to hide in the cata- combs, she had not died. She came out of dark corners and upper rooms; the surviving Bishops were reinstated ; persecuted priests again minis- tered to their rejoicing flocks; altars were again set up and restored to their due position in the chancel, and the proper vestments of the priest were put on, that the Church’s sublimest act of worship might point the way to God ; while the crowning act of restoration was the putting forth of the Prayer Book, amended in a churchly spirit, in the form in which it has existed to this day. And all this met the approval of the nation, for non-conformists, Romanists included, did not at * Walker’s “ Sufferings of the Clergy,” p. 57, Oxford and London epitomized edition, 1862. 44 “ THE OXFORD MOVEMENT AND this juncture constitute one-twentieth part of the population. Thus was terminated to a great extent the tremendous conflict that had been raging since the death of Henry the Eighth, a period of one hundred and twenty years. I say terminated only in the sense that England’s Catholic heri- tage was not taken from her. She was trium- phantly episcopal, sacerdotal, sacramental, litur- gical, Catholic. Conflict did not cease, opposing systems did not surrender their forces, the revo- lutionary spirit was not wholly exorcised. But that settlement has not been reversed. What- ever the Church of England was at this epoch, that she is to-day. Time does not permit me to follow more closely the subsequent chapters of English history. James the Second failed to deliver the Church to Ro- manism. Under William of Orange, dissent failed to subjugate her, even when she had lost the flower of her Catholic-minded clergy by their fanatical adherence to a political crotchet. Wil- liam the Third was a Presbyterian, but his attempt to revolutionize the Church in the interest of Protestant non-conformity and to mutilate her Prayer Book in the interest of latitudinarianism, proved abortive. The reign of Queen Anne was marked by the ascendency of High Church prin- ciples, and by efforts to confer the episcopal pol- THE CATHOLIC REVIVAL.” 45 ity on Lutherans and Calvinists. A change of dynasty came with the accession of a Lutheran prince to the throne, and another dark day for the Catholic Reformation dawned. It brought spiritual paralysis with it. Convocation was sup- pressed as being the fortress of Anglo-Catholi- cism. The Latitudinarians began to drift toward their natural terminus—Arianism. The Presby- terian body was honeycombed and almost de- stroyed by Socinianism. Deism sought to dis- miss supernatural religion from the world. The religious life of all parties was sapped. Such were the products of the Georgian era. But the Church had within her the power of an endless life. First came the Methodist move- ment, with all the features of a Catholic revival ; and later on the Evangelical, modelled after the Calvinistic teachings of Whitefield. But the former was pooh-poohed into schism and the latter was too one-sided to survive. The spirit of each, as far as it represented the inner life of the Church, found its complement and transfiguration in the Oxford Movement. And thus again, as so often during the past three hundred years, the original reformation principles reasserted themselves. The light that had waxed bright and been dimmed so often, now burst forth in blazing splendor once more. Its persistent continuity, its intense vitality, its 46 “ THE OXFORD MOVEMENT AND recurrence to the original norm of reformation, its assured revival when all antagonistic forces have taxed their best energies to crush it—all this is to the impartial student the characteristic feature of the history of the Catholic Church in England. Two remarks must close this lecture. I. The Catholic Movement is essentially a the- ological one. It is a reversion to the primitive theology of the Incarnation, and it justifies its appeal to the past by the fact of the Incarnation. Its fundamental conception of that stupendous act of God is that it was His descent in the per- son of the Son to the sphere of the Finite, to the limitations of time and space, to the human body and soul, to history; and that when the Incarnate One ascended in His theanthropic personality to the world above, He still remained among us by the representative and potential agency of a Body Mystical which was to be visible, organic, and historic, unto His Second Appearing. The Incarnation, therefore, makes it of the very es- sence of Christianity that it shall be perpetually expressed through a historic creed and polity, maintaining their energy and integrity through all the contingencies of error, corruption, and de- generation—sad consequences of human frailty; and not merely an ethos , a spirit, a moral 'atmos- phere. Hence, the determination of its character THE CATHOLIC REVIVAL." 47 at any particular epoch necessitates the appeal to history.- This is the criterion which lies at the very basis of the Anglican Reform, as witnessed by all her representative bishops, doctors, and councils down to the Lambeth Conference of 1867. “The Faith in its purity and integrity as taught in the Holy Scriptures, held by the Primi- tive Church, summed up in the ’Creeds, and af- firmed by the undisputed General Councils, ” to quote the language of that Conference, is the antidote to all error. The Church has at times encountered a natu- ralistic theology, but this has at no time shown any constructive capacity. It is strong only in negations and suggestions of doubt, and, with its tendency to haze, it can never do more than ren- der the atmosphere a little cloudy for a while. The Church’s giant foe in theology in modern times, has been the philosophy of Geneva. The Catholic theology meets it by denying its postu- lates and proclaiming the ancient basis of truth. It recognizes the Manger of Bethlehem as its point of departure rather than the secret coun- sels of an Infinite Being Whose ways we know but in part and Whose thoughts we cannot ex- haustively express in any system, however logi- cally symmetrical it may be in itself. A theology which professes to have sounded the abysmal depths of Godhood is by that token a human de- 48 u THE OXFORD MOVEMENT AND vice. The Incarnation is the Catholic's horizon: he dare not formulate the infinite spaces beyond. Bowing in worship before the solemnity of God Manifest in the Flesh, he sees chiefly a Heavenly Father’s love: while his antagonist makes of God an inexorable Law. The latter’s concept of the Church is that of a limited aristocracy of grace. The Catholic Church is, as its name imports, for all, even for the world for which Christ died. The theology of the Incarnation leads on, as it has always done, to the Catholic religion. If you work consistently forward from the Word made Flesh, you arrive at the Church as the Body of Christ, having historic extension, with a definite Faith, an unchangeable depositum of truth, an un- broken line of ministries and sacraments, and a characteristic inner life. It is ecclesiasticism, but it is Christocentric ecclesiasticism. He, the Head, is All in all. 2. The Catholic Movement is essentially a spir- itual revival, its history being the test and wit- ness. It exalts the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost, ever One God, as the true and only end of being, and believes the Paraclete to be the very atmosphere of the Church. Equally removed from a one-sided subjectivism because man has a body, and from a frigid ceremonialism because man has a soul, it discovers in the sacra- ment of the Incarnation the type of all other THE CATHOLIC REVIVAL.” 49 sacraments, of which we are no more to deny the outward form than the inward grace. The Church believes in the means of grace because she believes in the doctrines of grace. She honors the form because she reverences the spirit. The relation of the Catholic Revival to its ex- pression in the forms of worship is intensely spiritual. It has not been as distinctly perceived as it might have been that there is a world-wide difference between ritual as essential and ritual as necessary. Strictly speaking, ritual expression is not of the essence of worship, for the same reason that speech is not of the essence of thought. That only is essential to a thing which makes the thing what it is. Thought is the activity of the mind, but as it may be confined to the inner chambers of the mind, speech is not of its essence; and, pari passu, worship is the prostration of the soul before God, and as it may be wholly an interior state and act, ritual is not of its essence. Nor can any evade the force of this proposition by pleading that it has only an ideal existence, for the simple reason that as an interior condition it is practically essential to every real outward ex- pression. “ God is a Spirit, and they that wor- ship Him must worship in spirit and in truth.” Speech without thought becomes idiotic babbling. The observance of forms of worship for the sake 5 ° “ THE OXFORD MOVEMENT AND of the forms is as serious a perversion of the di- vine ordering as speech for the purpose of mak- ing sounds would be. So, then, ritual expression is not, strictly speaking, of the essence of wor- ship, while the spirit of worship is essential to the reality of all outward expression. But, on the other hand, ritual expression is in the order of grace as necessary as speech in the order of nature. In either case the necessity grows out of the constitution of man’s nature. God has made us what we are. He has given us the power of thought and then added the faculty of speech as necessary to the expression of thought. A like necessity justifies all the divinely appointed media of expression in the Church. It is true that they are more than this, but they are not less, and hence we infer that to disuse them is to dishonor God. They are more than this because they are also media of divine imparta- tion : they cannot be less because God has ap- pointed them as necessary instruments whereby man in the duality of his being, as body and spirit, may acceptably approach and honor Him. The Catholic religion therefore maintains the spirituality of worship as of its essence, and the outward expression of worship as necessary to man as he is constituted. But it goes farther and maintains that among all possible and congruous methods of expression, those are of primary THE CA THOLIC RE VJVAL. ” 5 1 obligation which bear the insignia of divine ap- pointment. As its theology is that of the Incar- nation, its uniform approach to God is “ through Jesus Christ our Lord,” Whom with the Father and the Holy Ghost it worships and glorifies. As the theology of the Incarnation includes the sacrificial death once for all of the Son of God and its perpetual memorial and oblation as in heaven by the great High Priest, so on earth by His vicarious priesthood, it places that Holy Sac- rament in the position of honor next after His Own theanthropic Person as the method com- manded by Himself whereby we may make the most solemn outward expression of all the faith, love, adoration, penitence, gratitude, desire, and consecration that exist in His Body the Church. And it is in the same devout and grateful obedi- ence to the orderings of God in His Church that the Catholic approaches all other sacraments or means of grace, and as a Catholic, if true to his principles, he rests satisfied with the ritual law of the Church. Hence the Catholic Revival honors the Prayer Book as enshrining the princi- ples of the Catholic religion and the law of Anglo- Catholic ritual, and will evermore defend it as such. And why not, since the Revival was a re- turn to the Prayer Book and the reassertion of its authority ? In conclusion, the spirituality of the Catholic 52 11 THE OXFORD MOVEMENT AND Revival is seen in its effects upon personal char- acter. In the sanctified atmosphere of the sacra- mental life, the ideal of attainment is none other than the Lord’s — “ Be ye perfect even as your Father Which is in heaven is perfect.” Thus the Church not only saves sinners but produces saints. All the tendencies of its life are toward the in- finite blue spaces of perfection. It provides for more than the development of man’s natural sus- ceptibility to religious motives, for it bids him advance into Emmanuel’s land—the region of the supernatural where motives are not only nobler but different in kind from those of nature. This loftier development, because so much more ardu- ous of attainment than reception of theological statements and practice of ritual expression, moves with more measured pace and accentuates itself only imperfectly as yet in the Church’s life; but the movement toward the loftier ideals of Catholic piety in the priesthood as in the people is a shining light which shineth more and more unto the perfect day. Is it too much to say that the reality of this interior culture is the measure of the reality of the Catholic Revival ? If not too much to say, then the future of this majestic God-descended movement is bound up in the fidelity of the Church not only to the Creeds and the Polity, but to the Supernatural Life—the very life-blood of the Body of Christ. As this mighty THE CATHOLIC RE VI VALT 53 current shall swell in voltime and flow with re- generating affluence through all the Church, its fructifying power will glorify as well as justify the principles which gave to the world the Eng- lish Reformation, and to the Anglican Commu- nion, at every epoch of peril, a God-breathed re- vival of those principles. NEW PUBLICATIONS OF THE LONDON Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge. NOTES OF LESSONS ON THE CHURCH IN THE NEW TESTAMENT. By the Rev. Edward L. Cutts, D.D. With colored map. i2mo, cloth, $1.00. SERMONS TO YOUNG MEN. i6mo, cloth, 40c. The Secret Voice. By the Bishop of London. The Religions Duty of Thought. By Bishop Barry. Christian Strength. By the Rev. H. Wace. The Joy of the Lord. By Canon H. 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