THE OXFORD MOVEMENT
 
 THE 
 
 OXFORD MOVEMENT 
 
 TWELVE YEARS 
 
 1833-1845 
 
 BY 
 
 R. W. CHURCH, M.A., D.C.L., 
 
 SOMETIME DEAN OF ST. PAUL'S, AND FELLOW OF ORIEL COLLEGE, OXFORD 
 
 MACMILLAN AND CO. 
 
 AND NEW YORK 
 
 A II rights reserved
 
 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 con- 
 siderable 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 
 
 2065274
 
 AD VER TISEMENT 
 
 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 ex- 
 ample he owes an infinite debt, and not he only, but 
 religious society in England of all kinds." 
 
 January ^lsf t 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 asso- 
 ciated 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 suc- 
 cesses. 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
 
 viii PREFACE 
 
 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 some- 
 times 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 
 
 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.
 
 PREFACE ix 
 
 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 some- 
 thing 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 re- 
 membrance 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
 
 x PREFACE 
 
 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.
 
 CONTENTS 
 
 CHAPTER I 
 
 PAGE 
 
 THE CHURCH IN THE REFORM DAYS i 
 
 CHAPTER II 
 
 THE BEGINNING OF THE MOVEMENT JOHN KEBLE . 20 
 
 CHAPTER III 
 
 RICHARD HURRELL FROUDE . ... 30 
 
 CHAPTER IV 
 
 MR. NEWMAN'S EARLY FRIENDS ISAAC WILLIAMS. . 57 
 
 CHAPTER V 
 
 CHARLES MARRIOTT . . . . 70 
 
 CHAPTER VI 
 THE OXFORD TRACTS . . . . .82 
 
 CHAPTER VII 
 THE TRACTARIANS in
 
 CONTENTS 
 
 CHAPTER VIII 
 
 PAGE 
 
 SUBSCRIPTION AT MATRICULATION AND ADMISSION OF 
 
 DISSENTERS . . . . . .127 
 
 CHAPTER IX 
 
 DR. HAMPDEN . . . . . .139 
 
 CHAPTER X 
 
 GROWTH OF THE MOVEMENT, 1835-1840 . 155 
 
 CHAPTER XI 
 THE ROMAN QUESTION . . . . .175 
 
 CHAPTER XII 
 
 CHANGES . . . . . . .190 
 
 CHAPTER XIII 
 
 THE AUTHORITIES AND THE MOVEMENT . . .212 
 
 CHAPTER XIV 
 
 No. 90 ....... 232 
 
 CHAPTER XV 
 AFTER No. 90 . . . . . .257 
 
 CHAPTER XVI 
 
 THE THREE DEFEATS: ISAAC WILLIAMS, MACMULLEN, PUSEY 271
 
 CONTENTS 
 
 CHAPTER XVII 
 
 PAGE 
 
 W. G. WARD ...... 292 
 
 CHAPTER XVIII 
 
 THE IDEAL OF A CHRISTIAN CHURCH . . .312 
 
 CHAPTER XIX 
 
 THE CATASTROPHE . . . . . 333
 
 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 super- 
 ficially it had its origin in the accident of an urgent 
 necessity. 1 The Church was really at the moment 
 imperilled amid the crude revolutionary projects of the 
 Reform epoch ; 2 and something bolder and more 
 effective than the ordinary apologies for the Church 
 
 1 The suppression of the Irish Copleston, July 1832. Life, i. 167). 
 
 bishoprics. Palmer, Narrative (1883), "If such an arrangement of the Ex- 
 
 pp. 44, 101. Maurice, Life, i. 180. ecutive Government is completed, it 
 
 2 "The Church, as it now stands, no will be a difficult, but great and glori- 
 
 human power can save" (Arnold to ous feat for your Lordship's ministry 
 
 Tyler, June 1832, Life, i. 326). to preserve the establishment from 
 
 ' ' Nothing, as it seems to me, can utter overthrow " ( Whately to Lord 
 
 save the Church but an union with the Grey, May 1832. Life, i. 156). It is 
 
 Dissenters ; now they are leagued with remarkable that Dean Stanley should 
 
 the antichristian party, and no merely have been satisfied with ascribing to 
 
 internal reforms will satisfy them" the movement an "origin entirely 
 
 (Arnold to Whately, January 1833, i. political,' 1 '' and should have seen a 
 
 348). He afterwards thought this ex- proof of this "thoroughly political 
 
 aggerated (Life, i. 336). " The Church origin " in Newman's observing the 
 
 has been for one hundred years without date of Mr. Keble's sermon "National 
 
 any government, and in such a stormy Apostasy " as the birthday of the 
 
 season it will not go on much longer movement. Edin. Rev. April 1880, 
 
 without a rudder" (Whately to Bp. pp. 309, 310. 
 
 B
 
 2 THE OXFORD MOVEMENT CHAP. 
 
 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 sur- 
 prised in a moment of security. They scarcely recog- 
 nised 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 per- 
 ceived 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 some- 
 thing 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 con- 
 victions 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
 
 i THE CHURCH IN THE REFORM DA YS 3 
 
 estimate of it. The disproportion between the pur- 
 poses 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 Seeker, 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 communica- 
 tion 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 un- 
 pretending estimate of clerical duty and those easy- 
 going days ; as it has sometimes been the fashion to
 
 THE OXFORD MOVEMENT 
 
 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 truth- 
 fully 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. 1 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 pos- 
 session 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 de- 
 veloped their theories about the nature, constitution,' 
 
 1 Readers of Wordsworth will remember the account of Mr. R. Walker 
 (Notes to the "River Duddon").
 
 i THE CHURCH IN THE REFORM DA YS 5 
 
 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 con- 
 ceptions on the assumption of which questions relating 
 to it were popularly discussed. But in their funda- 
 mental 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? 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, 2 and the brotherhood, 
 the "Societas" of Christians, was all that was meant 
 
 1 Compare Life of 'Whately (ed. 1866), 2 Arnold to W. Smith, Life, i. 356- 
 
 i. 52, 68. 358 ; ii. 32.
 
 THE OXFORD MOVEMENT 
 
 by "the Church" in the New Testament. It mat- 
 tered, 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 disappear- 
 ance of the true before the forces of blindness and 
 wickedness. 1 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 not 
 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 fight- 
 ing 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 
 
 1 Life, \. 225 sqq.
 
 i THE CHURCH IN THE REFORM DA YS 7 
 
 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 in- 
 trusion 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. 1 
 
 But neither Dr. Whately's nor Dr. Arnold's at- 
 tempts 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 revolu- 
 tionary. 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 accre- 
 tions, 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 
 
 1 "I am vexed to find how much ^KKSTO. ^XP 7 ? " (Arnold to Whately, 
 hopeless bigotiy lingers in minds, oh Sept. 1832. Life, i. 331 ; ii. 3-7).
 
 8 THE OXFORD MOVEMENT CHAP. 
 
 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 Angli- 
 canism, claiming as the authorities for its theology the 
 great line of English divines from Hooker to Water- 
 land, finding its patterns of devotion in Bishop Wilson, 
 Bishop Home, 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,
 
 i THE CHURCH IN THE REFORM DA YS 9 
 
 distrustful of high -wrought feelings and professions, 
 cultivating self-command and shy of display, and set- 
 ting 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, respect- 
 able, 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 them- 
 selves 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 admin- 
 istered, and though it had been profaned by the 
 operation of the Test Acts, was approached by reli- 
 gious people with deep reverence. But besides the 
 better, and the worse, and the average members of
 
 io THE OXFORD MOVEMENT CHAP. 
 
 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 Univer- 
 sities 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 consider- 
 able 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, 1 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 genera- 
 tion 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 
 
 1 St. Bartholomew's Day.
 
 i THE CHURCH IN THE REFORM DAYS 1 1 
 
 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, 1 denounced as dry, un- 
 spiritual, 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 religions party, whether they were 
 admired as Evangelicals, or abused as Calvinists, or 
 laughed at as the Saints, were inheritors not of Angli- 
 can traditions, but of those which had grown up among 
 the zealous clergymen and laymen who had sympa- 
 thised 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 
 
 1 "The mere barren orthodoxy speaks of his "high endeavours to 
 
 which, from all that I can hear, is rouse Oxford from its lethargy having 
 
 characteristic of Oxford." Maurice in so signally failed " (i. 143). 
 1829 (Life, i. 103). In 1832 he
 
 12 THE OXFORD MOVEMENT CHAP. 
 
 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. 1 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 
 
 1 Abbey and Overton, English Church in the Eighteenth Century, ii. 1 80, 
 204.
 
 i THE CHURCH IN THE REFORM DAYS 13 
 
 results. It had led Howard and Elizabeth Fry to 
 assail the brutalities of the prisons. It had led Clark- 
 son and Wilberforce to overthrow the slave trade, and 
 ultimately slavery itself. It had created great Mission- 
 ary Societies. It had given motive and impetus to 
 countless philanthropic schemes. What it failed in 
 was the education and development of character ; and 
 this w r as 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 teach- 
 ing and a spent enthusiasm. Claiming to be exclu- 
 sively 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 spirit- 
 ually minded persons, for in truth there seemed to be
 
 14 THE OXFORD MOVEMENT CHAP. 
 
 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 them- 
 selves 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 influ- 
 ence 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. 1 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. U nder the leading of Whately, questions 
 were asked about what was supposed to be beyond dis- 
 
 1 V. Maurice, Life, i. 108-111 ; Trench's Letters ; Carlyle's Sterling.
 
 i THE CHURCH IN THE REFORM DAYS 15 
 
 pute with both Churchmen and Evangelicals. Current 
 phrases, the keynotes of many a sermon, were fear- 
 lessly 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 reli- 
 gious 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 dis- 
 cussed 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 im-
 
 1 6 THE OXFORD MOVEMENT CHAP. 
 
 portance. 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 unde- 
 fined 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 Cyclopedia, and Lardner s Cabinet 
 Cyclopedia, 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
 
 i THE CHURCH IN THE REFORM DAYS 17 
 
 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 prin- 
 ciples 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 his- 
 toric Church party, imperfectly conscious of its position 
 and responsibilities ; l 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 
 
 1 " In what concerns the Established vulgar policy. The old High Church 
 Church, the House of Commons seems race is worn out." Alex. Knox 
 to feel no other principle than that of (June 1816), i. 54. 
 
 C
 
 1 8 THE OXFORD MOVEMENT CHAP. 
 
 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 per- 
 sonal 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 pur- 
 pose 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. W T hen he be- 
 came 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
 
 i THE CHURCH IN THE REFORM DA YS 19 
 
 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.
 
 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 character- 
 istic 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 every- 
 thing 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 Fellow- 
 ship. 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 strict- 
 ness of principle. He had become one of the most
 
 CHAP, ii THE BEGINNING. OF THE MOVEMENT 21 
 
 distinguished men in Oxford, when about the year 
 1823 he felt himself bound to give himself more ex- 
 clusively 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 doc- 
 trine and devotion in the sober earnestness and dig- 
 nity 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 Cal- 
 vinism, denounced with fierce intolerance everything 
 that deviated from its formulas and watchwords. And 
 as his loyalty to the Church of England was pro- 
 found 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 indig- 
 nation 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 prin- 
 ciple. He had no popular aptitudes, and was very
 
 22 THE OXFORD MOVEMENT CHAP. 
 
 suspicious of them. He had no care for the possession 
 of influence ; he had deliberately chosen the fallentis 
 semita vitce, 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 bless- 
 ings, 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 contempt- 
 uous 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
 
 ii THE BEGINNING OF THE MO VEMENT 23 
 
 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 con- 
 templated 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 fear- 
 less 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 ulti- 
 mately 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,
 
 24 THE OXFORD MOVEMENT CHAP. 
 
 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, argu- 
 ments 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
 
 ii THE BEGINNING OF THE MOVEMENT 25 
 
 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." * 
 
 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 stand- 
 ing, 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 
 
 1 Isaac Williams's MS. Memoir.
 
 26 THE OXFORD MOVEMENT CHAP. 
 
 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 mis- 
 givings 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." 1 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 
 
 1 Rent. i. 232, 233. In 1828, Newman had preferred Hawkins to Keble, 
 for Provost.
 
 n THE BEGINNING OF THE MOVEMENT 27 
 
 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." x 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 state- 
 ment is strictly true. Froude never would have been 
 the man he was but for his daily and hourly inter- 
 course with Keble ; and Froude brought to bear upon 
 Newman's mind, at a critical period of its develop- 
 ment, 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, 2 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 excel- 
 lence. Froude learned from him to be anti-Erastian, 
 
 1 Apol. p. 84. life ? Well, if I was asked what good 
 
 2 Remains, i. 438; Apol. p. 77. "Do deed I have ever done, I should say I 
 you know the story of the murderer had brought Keble and Newman to 
 who had done one good thing in his understand each other."
 
 28 THE OXFORD MOVEMENT CHAP. 
 
 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 medita- 
 tions of a remarkable Irishman, Mr. Alexander Knox 
 had in many quarters attracted attention in the works
 
 ii THE BEGINNING OF THE MOVEMENT 29 
 
 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.
 
 CHAPTER III 1 
 
 RICHARD HURRELL FROUDE 
 
 THE names of those who took the lead in this move- 
 ment 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 con- 
 temporaries, because they were supposed to represent 
 in a marked way the spirit and character of the move- 
 ment, 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 
 
 1 I ought to say that I was not per- recollections of him by Lord Blachford, 
 sonally acquainted with Mr. Froude. who was his pupil and an intimate 
 I have subjoined to this chapter some friend.
 
 CHAP, in RICHARD HURRELL FROUDE 31 
 
 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, an< ^ 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. New- 
 man 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 inconsider- 
 able. 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 pre- 
 pared for. There was no one to whom his friends so
 
 32 THE OXFORD MOVEMENT CHAP. 
 
 much looked up with admiration and enthusiasm. 
 There was no "wasted shade" 1 in Hurrell Froude's 
 disabled, prematurely shortened life. 
 
 Like Henry Marty n 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 there was originally in his char- 
 acter 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-discip- 
 line ; 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."' 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- 
 
 1 "In this mortal journeying wasted shade 
 Is worse than wasted sunshine." 
 
 HENRY TAYLOR, Sicilian Summer, v. 3. 
 2 Remains, Second Part, i. 47.
 
 in RICHARD HURRELL FROUDE 33 
 
 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 pre- 
 tences. " His highest ambition," he used to say, "was 
 to be a humdrum." 1 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 un- 
 equivocally ; 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 pro- 
 cesses. 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 at- 
 tempted 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 plati- 
 tudes, 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 
 
 1 Remains, i. 82. 
 D
 
 34 THE OXFORD MOVEMENT CHAP. 
 
 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 any time his help, another side dis- 
 closed 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 common- 
 place 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." 1 "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, Sai/Awie, 
 alvorare, Treirov, Carissime, "Sir, my dear friend" or 
 "'Ap7eiW o% apurre, 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, 
 
 1 Apologia, p. 84.
 
 RICHARD HURRELL FROUDE 
 
 35 
 
 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. 1 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 
 
 1 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 bright- 
 ness 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.
 
 36 THE OXFORD MOVEMENT CHAP. 
 
 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 eccle- 
 siastical 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 selec-
 
 in RICHARD HURRELL FROUDE 37 
 
 tions 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 con- 
 demns, 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
 
 38 THE OXFORD MOVEMENT CHAP. 
 
 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 ques- 
 tion 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 con- 
 spirators ; 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 
 straightforwardness. 
 
 There is a natural Nemesis to all over-strong and 
 exaggerated language. The weight of Fronde's judg- 
 ments 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
 
 in RICHARD HURRELL FROUDE 39 
 
 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 allow- 
 ances ought to be very great, and however well they 
 may have done parts of their work, such as the trans- 
 lations 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 shift- 
 ing 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 commen- 
 surate with his original powers of reasoning or in- 
 vention. 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
 
 40 THE OXFORD MOVEMENT CHAP. 
 
 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 weak- 
 ness, 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, 1 
 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 imagina- 
 tion, but not the imagination of a poet." He felt that 
 
 1 Such as the " Daniel " in the tween Old Self and New Self," and 
 Lyra Apostolica, the " Dialogue be- the lines in the Remains (i. 208, 209).
 
 in RICHARD HURRELL FROUDE 41 
 
 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 com- 
 promises, 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 en- 
 thusiasm 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-
 
 42 THE OXFORD MOVEMENT CHAP. 
 
 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 under- 
 graduates " ; 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 common- 
 place 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
 
 in RICHARD HURRELL FROUDE 43 
 
 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 hence- 
 forth that of a determined and uncompromising com- 
 batant. " 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 ex- 
 tremely fine to hear him talk. The aristocracy of the 
 country at present are the chief objects of his vitupera- 
 tion, 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
 
 44 THE OXFORD MOVEMENT CHAP. 
 
 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, com- 
 pared 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 Romanis- 
 ing ; 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
 
 in RICHARD HURRELL FROUDE 45 
 
 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 neces- 
 sary, govern itself, separate from the state. He had 
 recognised excommunication as its natural and inde- 
 feasible instrument of government. But what the in- 
 ternal life of the Church was, what should be its teaching 
 and organic system, and what was the standard and
 
 46 THE OXFORD MOVEMENT CHAP. 
 
 proof of these, Whately had left unsaid. And this out- 
 line 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 : (i) 
 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 5(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
 
 in RICHARD HURRELL FROUDE 47 
 
 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 pro- 
 posals become less daring, as he felt that his time was 
 growing short and the hand of death was upon him.
 
 48 THE OXFORD MOVEMENT CHAP. 
 
 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.
 
 in RICHARD HURRELL FROUDE 49 
 
 " 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.' ni 
 
 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 
 
 1 A few references to the Remains collections, i. 7, 13, 18, 26, 106, 184, 
 illustrating this are subjoined if any one 199, 200-204. 
 cares to compare them with these re- 
 
 E
 
 So THE OXFORD MOVEMENT CHAP. 
 
 judgment. Both used the same clear and direct lan- 
 guage. 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 attack- 
 ing 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 stern- 
 ness, the reality, the perseverance, almost unintelligible 
 in its methods to ordinary men, of their moral and 
 spiritual self-discipline. 
 
 SUPPLEMENTARY TO CHAPTER III 1 
 
 HURRELL FROUDE was, when I, as an undergraduate, 
 first knew him in 1828, tall and very thin, with some- 
 thing 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 
 
 1 I am indebted for these recollections to the late Lord Blachford. They 
 were written in Oct. 1884.
 
 in RICHARD HURRELL FROUDE 51 
 
 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 con- 
 sideration 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 superi- 
 ority, 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 famili- 
 arity 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 some- 
 times overdone, not to put himself above the level of 
 others. In a lecture on the Supplices of /Eschylus,
 
 52 THE OXFORD MOVEMENT CHAP. 
 
 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 ob- 
 jection 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 conversa- 
 tion 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,
 
 in RICHARD HURRELL FROUDE 53 
 
 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 aj 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
 
 54 THE OXFORD MOVEMENT CHAP. 
 
 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 oppro- 
 brious 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 griev- 
 ously 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 Arch- 
 deacons 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 unmis- 
 takable 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 dis- 
 solute, luscious, or decorated more than in proportion 
 to its animating idea wishy-washy or sentimental.
 
 ni RICHARD HURRELL FROUDE 55 
 
 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 Ill's time, 
 and setting up a little Catholic Church, like the
 
 56 THE OXFORD MOVEMENT CHAP. HI 
 
 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.
 
 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 con- 
 fidence, 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." 1 
 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. 
 N orris 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 
 
 1 Mozley, Reminiscences, i. 18.
 
 58 THE OXFORD MOVEMENT CHAP. 
 
 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" j 1 
 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 him- 
 self 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 con- 
 version. 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 never- 
 more 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 
 
 1 I. Williams, MS. Memoir.
 
 IS A A C WILLIAMS 59 
 
 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
 
 60 THE OXFORD MOVEMENT CHAP. 
 
 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 exer- 
 cise, mental or muscular for a hard ride, or a crabbed 
 bit of ^schylus, 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 con- 
 science and duty ; and a horror and hatred of every- 
 thing that seemed like display or the desire of 
 applause or of immediate effect. Intellectual deprecia-
 
 iv ISAAC WILLIAMS 61 
 
 tors 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 excite- 
 ment and display, their hunting after popularity. This 
 Church of England divinity was the theology of the 
 old Vicar of Coin 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
 
 62 THE OXFORD MOVEMENT CHAP. 
 
 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," sus- 
 picious 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
 
 ISAAC WILLIAMS 63 
 
 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 inter- 
 course 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 preponder- 
 ance 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
 
 64 THE OXFORD MOVEMENT CHAP. 
 
 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 agree- 
 ment ; 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 to- 
 gether with him from what I had been accustomed to : 
 
 o 
 
 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." l 
 
 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 
 
 1 I. Williams, MS. Memoir.
 
 iv ISAAC WILLIAMS 65 
 
 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 lar^e 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 
 
 F
 
 66 THE OXFORD MOVEMENT CHAP. 
 
 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, ist 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 move- 
 ment 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
 
 iv ISAAC WILLIAMS 67 
 
 has been the effect of the publication of the Plain 
 Sermons" 
 
 Isaac Williams, if any man, represented in the move- 
 ment 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 * 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 Tract- 
 arian 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 represent- 
 atives, 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 was 
 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 
 
 1 The history of this famous Tract, Religious Knowledge, belongs to a later 
 No. 80, on Reserve in communicating stage of the movement.
 
 68 THE OXFORD MOVEMENT CHA 
 
 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 cher- 
 ished 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 dis- 
 tressing 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 out- 
 pouring 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
 
 ISAAC WILLIAMS 69 
 
 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.
 
 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. 1 He had been 
 a student of S. T. Coleridge, whom the Oriel men dis- 
 liked 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 the head of the 
 University of Melbourne, 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 some- 
 times seems to make natural. His temper was 
 eminently sober, cautious and conciliatory in his way 
 
 1 " He told me," writes a relative, used to ponder how it could be right 
 "that questions about trade used to to sell things for more than they cost 
 occupy him very early in life. He you."
 
 CHAP, v CHARLES MARRIOTT 71 
 
 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 after- 
 wards 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
 
 72 THE OXFORD MOVEMENT CHAP. 
 
 awkward. He had a sturdy, penetrating, tenacious, 
 but embarrassed intellect embarrassed, at least, by 
 the crowd and range of jostling thoughts, in its out- 
 ward 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. 1 In matters of business 
 he seemed at first sight utterly unpractical. In dis- 
 cussing 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 
 
 1 " He had his own way of doing that he should do it in any other." 
 everything, and used most stoutly to MS. Memoir by his brother, John 
 protest that it was quite impossible Marriott.
 
 v CHARLES MARRIOTT 73 
 
 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 under- 
 graduate 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
 
 74 THE OXFORD MOVEMENT CHAP. 
 
 OuS' (XaBcv Ma/Homx, (^lAaiTarov ' 
 
 f-ya ypu>vu)v, Macrt^ois KCU Trcur' a 
 Kat oyAetAwv, Trpocre^rj Travras KeivSots eTre 
 
 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 mis- 
 takes 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 /za^r?)? is a 
 distinct character, and Charles Marriott was an ex- 
 ample of it at its best. He had its manly and 
 reasonable humility, its generous trustfulness, its 
 
 1 Uniomachia, 1833.
 
 v CHARLES MARRIOTT 75 
 
 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 per- 
 plexity ; 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 un- 
 swerving 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 unre- 
 servedly, with equal loyalty and self-sacrifice, to his 
 successor. But to the end, while his powers lasted,
 
 76 THE OXFORD MOVEMENT CHAP. 
 
 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 manu- 
 scripts, editing texts. 1 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 
 
 1 " This became the main task of and wherever he was on a journey, 
 
 his life as long as health was continued after dinner even in a boat, he would 
 
 to him. All who knew him well will pull out a sheet and go to write upon 
 
 remember how laboriously he worked it in haste to get it finished for the 
 
 at it, and how, in one shape or another, next post. The number of volumes 
 
 it was always on hand. Either he was in the Library of the Fathers which 
 
 translating, or correcting the transla- bear the signature C. M. attest his 
 
 tion of others; or he was collating diligence." John Marriott's Memoir 
 
 MSS., or correcting the press. This of him (MS.) 
 last work was carried on at all times
 
 v CHARLES MARRIOTT 77 
 
 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
 
 78 THE OXFORD MOVEMENT CHAP. 
 
 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." 1 
 
 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 intelli- 
 gence of Mark Pattison, to the originality and clever 
 
 1 J. M., MS. Memoir.
 
 v CHARLES MARRIOTT 79 
 
 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 in- 
 citement 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 sim- 
 plicity and the truth of a self-denying life of suffering 
 
 for he was never well of zealous hard work, un- 
 stinted, 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
 
 8o THE OXFORD MOVEMENT CHAP. 
 
 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. 1 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 some- 
 thing 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 con- 
 fess 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 
 
 1 Rent. i. 447.
 
 v CHARLES MARRIOTT 81 
 
 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, 2Qth 
 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.
 
 CHAPTER VI 
 
 THE OXFORD TRACTS 
 
 "ON I4th 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." ' 
 
 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 
 
 1 Apol. p. 100.
 
 CHAP, vi THE OXFORD TRACTS 83 
 
 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 excite- 
 ment 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
 
 84 THE OXFORD MOVEMENT CHAP. 
 
 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 2Qth 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. 1 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 
 
 1 Palmer, Narrative, 1843 (republished 1883), pp. 5, 18.
 
 vi THE OXFORD TRACTS 85 
 
 solitary musings in his Mediterranean orange -boat, 
 full of joyful vigour and ready for enterprise and 
 work. 1 In the result, Mr. Keble and Mr. Newman 
 were not present, but they were in active, corre- 
 spondence with the others. 2 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 in- 
 fluence, 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 dis- 
 tinguished 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 
 
 1 Palmer (1883), pp. 40, 43, "June 2 See Palmer's account (1883), pp. 
 J 833, when he joined us at Oxford." 45'47> and (1843), pp. 6, 7.
 
 86 THE OXFORD MOVEMENT CHAP. 
 
 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 mis- 
 chiefs 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 1 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 in- 
 direct influence were very important elements, both in 
 the stirring of thought which led to the Hadleigh resolu- 
 tions, and in giving its form to what was then decided 
 
 1 " Mr. Rose . . . was the one com- him without renewed tenderness " (Mr. 
 
 manding figure and very lovable man, T. Mozley, Reminiscences, i. 308). 
 that the frightened and discomfited In November 1838, shortly before 
 
 Church people were now rallying round. Mr. Rose's death, Mr. Newman had 
 
 Few people have left so distinct an im- dedicated a volume of sermons to him 
 
 pression of themselves as this gentle- " who, when hearts were failing, 
 
 nan. For many years after, when bade us stir up the gift that was in 
 
 he was no more, and Newman had us, and betake ourselves to our true 
 
 left Rose's standpoint far behind, he mother " (Parochial Sermons, vol. iv.) 
 could never speak of him or think of
 
 vi THE OXFORD TRACTS 87 
 
 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, argu- 
 ments, 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 com- 
 mand the distinctions necessary to discriminate between 
 things which popular views confused, and to protect
 
 THE OXFORD MOVEMENT 
 
 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 Liturgiccz, 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 2Qth 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 de- 
 pended 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 Fronde 
 called it so, and Mr. Palmer ; and Mr. Perceval wrote 
 a narrative to answer the charge. It was a "con- 
 spiracy," as any other meeting would be of men with 
 an object which other men dislike.
 
 THE OXFORD TRACTS 
 
 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 
 clearly beneath the surface of things their certain 
 and powerful tendencies. " We felt ourselves," writes 
 Mr. Palmer some years afterwards, 1 " 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 
 
 o 
 
 pamphlets on Church reform. Lord Henley, brother- 
 in-law of Sir Robert Peel, Dr. Burton, and others of 
 
 1 Narrative of Events connected with by W. Palmer (published 1843, repub- 
 the publication of Tracts for the Times, lished 1883), pp. 96-100 (abridged).
 
 90 THE OXFORD MOVEMENT CHAP. 
 
 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 ex- 
 pulsion 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 agi- 
 tators, 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,! "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 
 
 1 Collection of Papers connected with the Theological Movement of 1833, by 
 A. P. Perceval (1842), p. 25.
 
 vi THE OXFORD TRACTS 91 
 
 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 build- 
 ings 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 / should have little fear if I thought that we 
 could stand for ten or fifteen years as we are'' 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 dis- 
 traction 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 ortho- 
 doxy of the Church by the introduction of the Evan- 
 gelical body into places of influence and trust. He 
 had deeply offended men who agreed with myself by 
 
 1 Palmer's Narrative (1883), p. 101.
 
 92 THE OXFORD MOVEMENT CHAP. 
 
 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 / 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.
 
 vi THE OXFORD TRACTS 93 
 
 "That something must be done is certain. The only 
 thing is, that whatever is done ought to be q^lickly 
 done." Nothing can show more forcibly the immi- 
 nence 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 Asso- 
 ciation 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 "Associa- 
 tion" were drawn up and rejected. The endeavour 
 brought out differences of opinion differences as to 
 the Tightness 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 calcu- 
 lated 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
 
 94 THE OXFORD MOVEMENT CHAP. 
 
 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 assid- 
 uously 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 de- 
 manded 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
 
 vi THE OXFORD TRACTS 95 
 
 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 expres- 
 sions 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." 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 Conserva- 
 tive side ; and these addresses were partly helped 
 
 1 Collection of Papers, p. 12.
 
 96 THE OXFORD MOVEMENT CHAP. 
 
 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 keep- 
 ing 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 endeavour- 
 ing 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 spon- 
 taneously in the freedom of independent study ; they 
 had little faith in organisation ; " living movements," 
 they said, "do not come of committees." But at Had- 
 leigh 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 con- 
 dition 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 compro- 
 mises and half-measures, to be patient towards apathy,
 
 vi THE OXFORD TRACTS 97 
 
 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. 1 
 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 communica- 
 tions, in daring acts of self-devotion or violence, in 
 
 1 " That portentous birth of time, the Tracts for the Times.' 1 '' Mozley, 
 Remin. i. 311. 
 
 H
 
 98 THE OXFORD MOVEMENT CHAP. 
 
 the organisation of an institution, in the persistent dis- 
 play 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 per- 
 tinacity 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 religious 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 con- 
 science 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 re- 
 bound " 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
 
 vi THE OXFORD TRACTS 99 
 
 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 1 50 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, 1 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 recep- 
 tacles." The first three Tracts bear the date of Qth 
 September 1833. They were the first public utter- 
 ance 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 a 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. 
 
 1 Froude, Remains, i. 265.
 
 ioo THE OXFORD MOVEMENT CHAP. 
 
 Is not this so ? Do not we " look one upon another," yet per- 
 form nothing? Do we not all confess the peril into which the 
 Church is come, yet sit still each in his own retirement, as if mount- 
 ains 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 con- 
 dition 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 re- 
 sponsibilities 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 sup- 
 ported 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
 
 vi THE OXFORD TRACTS 101 
 
 " 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 excite- 
 ments 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 unsup- 
 ported 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 re- 
 presentatives. 
 
 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 suffi- 
 ciently, 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
 
 102 THE OXFORD MOVEMENT CHAP. 
 
 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 ordina- 
 tion 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 un- 
 seemly 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 ?
 
 vi THE OXFORD TRACTS 103 
 
 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 com- 
 pelled, 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 useful- 
 ness, produceable 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 circum- 
 stances, 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.
 
 104 THE OXFORD MOVEMENT CHAP. 
 
 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 govern- 
 ment, 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, Irenseus, 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
 
 vi THE OXFORD TRACTS 105 
 
 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 repre- 
 sentatives of soberness and self-control in religious 
 feeling and language, and whose usual style of writ- 
 ing 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. Un- 
 doubtedly 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 auda- 
 cious, 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 dis- 
 continued. The story went that one of the bishops, 
 on reading one of the Tracts on the Apostolical Sue-
 
 106 THE OXFORD MOVEMENT CHAP. 
 
 cession, 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 w r as 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 fumiga- 
 tions ; 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
 
 vi THE OXFORD TRACTS 107 
 
 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 authori- 
 tative 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 con- 
 tributing 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 with- 
 drawn 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 in- 
 fluential 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 ;
 
 io8 THE OXFORD MOVEMENT CHAP. 
 
 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 in- 
 efficacy 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 ex- 
 presses 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.
 
 vi THE OXFORD TRACTS 109 
 
 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 re- 
 vision 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, sub- 
 mitted it for revision and advice to a number of 
 representative Churchmen. The Scotch Bishops
 
 i io THE OXFORD MOVEMENT CHAP, vi 
 
 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 move- 
 ment. " 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 move- 
 ment 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 con- 
 siderable 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.
 
 CHAPTER VII 
 
 THE TRACTARIANS 
 
 THUS had been started hurriedly perhaps, yet not 
 without counting the cost a great enterprise, which 
 had for its object to rouse the Church from its lethargy, 
 and to strengthen and purify religion, by making it 
 deeper and more real ; and they who had put 
 their hands to the plough were not to look back any 
 more. It was not a popular appeal ; it addressed 
 itself not to the many but to the few ; it sought to 
 inspire and to teach the teachers. There was no 
 thought as yet of acting on the middle classes, or on 
 the ignorance and wretchedness of the great towns, 
 though Newman had laid down that the Church 
 must rest on the people, and Froude looked forward 
 to colleges of unmarried priests as the true way to 
 evangelise the crowds. There was no display about 
 this attempt, no eloquence, nothing attractive in the 
 way of original speculation or sentimental interest. It 
 was suspicious, perhaps too suspicious, of the excite- 
 ment and want of soberness, almost inevitable in 
 strong appeals to the masses of mankind. It brought 
 no new doctrine, but professed to go back to what 
 was obvious and old - fashioned and commonplace. 
 It taught people to think less of preaching than of
 
 112 THE OXFORD MOVEMENT CHAP. 
 
 what in an age of excitement were invidiously called 
 forms of the sacraments and services of the Church. 
 It discouraged, even to the verge of an intended dry ness, 
 all that was showy, all that in thought or expression 
 or manner it condemned under the name of " flash." 
 It laid stress on the exercise of an inner and unseen 
 self-discipline, and the cultivation of the less interest- 
 ing virtues of industry, humility, self- distrust, and 
 obedience. If from its writers proceeded works 
 which had impressed people a volume like the 
 Christian Year, poems original in their force and 
 their tenderness, like some of those in the Lyra 
 Apostolica, sermons which arrested the hearers by 
 their keenness and pathetic undertone the force of 
 all this was not the result of literary ambition and 
 effort, but the reflexion, unconscious, unsought, of 
 thought and feeling that could not otherwise express 
 itself, and that was thrown into moulds shaped by 
 habitual refinement and cultivated taste. It was from 
 the first a movement from which, as much by instinct 
 and temper as by deliberate intention, self-seeking in 
 all its forms was excluded. Those whom it influenced 
 looked not for great things for themselves, nor thought 
 of making a mark in the world. 
 
 The first year after the Hadleigh meeting (1834) 
 passed uneventfully. The various addresses in which 
 Mr. Palmer was interested, the election and installation 
 of the Duke of Wellington as Chancellor, the enthusiasm 
 and hopes called forth by the occasion, were public 
 and prominent matters. The Tracts were steadily 
 swelling in number ; the busy distribution of them had 
 ceased, and they had begun to excite interest and give 
 rise to questions. Mr. Palmer, who had never liked 
 the Tracts, became more uneasy ; yet he did not
 
 vii THE TRACTARIANS 113 
 
 altogether refuse to contribute to them. Others gave 
 their help, among them Mr. Perceval, Froude, the 
 two Kebles, and Mr. Newman's friend, a layman, Mr. 
 J. Bowden ; some of the younger scholars furnished 
 translations from the Fathers ; but the bulk and 
 most forcible of the Tracts were still the work of Mr. 
 Newman. But the Tracts were not the most powerful 
 instruments in drawing sympathy to the movement. 
 None but those who remember them can adequately 
 estimate the effect of Mr. Newman's four o'clock 
 sermons at St. Mary's. 1 The world knows them, has 
 heard a great deal about them, has passed its various 
 judgments on them. But it hardly realises that with- 
 out those sermons the movement might never have 
 gone on, certainly would never have been what it was. 
 Even people who heard them continually, and felt 
 them to be different from any other sermons, hardly 
 estimated their real power, or knew at the time the 
 influence which the sermons were having upon them. 
 Plain, direct, unornamented, clothed in English that 
 was only pure and lucid, free from any faults of taste, 
 strong in their flexibility and perfect command both 
 of language and thought, they were the expression 
 of a piercing and large insight into character and 
 conscience and motives, of a sympathy at once most 
 tender and most stern with the tempted and the 
 wavering, of an absolute and burning faith in God 
 and His counsels, in His love, in His judgments, in 
 the awful glory of His generosity and His magnificence. 
 They made men think of the things which the preacher 
 spoke of, and not of the sermon or the preacher. 
 Since 1828 this preaching had been going on at. St. 
 Mary's, growing in purpose and directness as the 
 
 1 See note at the end of this chapter. 
 
 I
 
 ii4 THE OXFORD MOVEMENT CHAP. 
 
 years went on, though it could hardly be more intense 
 than in some of its earliest examples. While men 
 were reading and talking about the Tracts, they were 
 hearing the sermons ; and in the sermons they heard 
 the living meaning, and reason, and bearing of the 
 Tracts, their ethical affinities, their moral standard. 
 The sermons created a moral atmosphere, in which 
 men judged the questions in debate. It was no dry 
 theological correctness and completeness which were 
 sought for. No love of privilege, no formal hier- 
 archical claims, urged on the writers. What they 
 thought in danger, what they aspired to revive and 
 save, was the very life of religion, the truth and 
 substance of all that makes it the hope of human 
 society. 
 
 But indeed, by this time, out of the little company 
 of friends which a common danger and a common 
 loyalty to the Church had brought together, one, Mr. 
 Newman, had drawn ahead, and was now in the front. 
 Unsought for, as the Apologia makes so clear un- 
 sought for, as the contemporary letters of observing 
 friends attest unsought for, as the whole tenor of his 
 life has proved the position of leader in a great crisis 
 came to him, because it must come. He was not 
 unconscious that in Sicily, as he had felt in his sick- 
 ness, he "had a work to do." But there was shyness 
 and self-distrust in his nature as well as energy ; and 
 it was the force of genius, and a lofty character, 
 and the statesman's eye, taking in and judging 
 accurately the whole of a complicated scene, which 
 conferred the gifts, and imposed inevitably and 
 without dispute the obligations and responsibilities of 
 leadership. Dr. Pusey of course was a friend of great 
 account, but he was as yet in the background, a
 
 vii THE TRACTARIANS 115 
 
 venerated and rather awful person, from his position 
 not mixing in the easy intercourse of common-room 
 life, but to be consulted on emergencies. Round Mr. 
 Newman gathered, with a curious mixture of freedom, 
 devotion, and awe for, with unlimited power of 
 sympathy, he was exacting and even austere in his 
 friendships the best men of his college, either Fellows 
 R. Wilberforce, Thomas Mozley, Frederic Rogers, 
 J. F. Christie; or old pupils Henry Wilberforce, 
 R. F. Wilson, William Froude, Robert Williams, 
 S. F. Wood, James Bliss, James Mozley ; and in addi- 
 tion some outsiders Woodgate of St. John's, Isaac 
 Williams and Copeland, of his old College, Trinity. 
 These, members of his intimate circle, were bound to 
 him not merely by enthusiastic admiration and confi- 
 dence, but by a tenderness of affection, a mixture of the 
 gratitude and reliance of discipleship with the warm 
 love of friendship, of which one has to go back far for 
 examples, and which has had nothing like it in our 
 days at Oxford. And Newman was making his mark 
 as a writer. The Arians, though an imperfect book, 
 was one which, for originality and subtlety of thought, 
 was something very unlike the usual theological writ- 
 ing of the day. There was no doubt of his power, 
 and his mind was brimming over with ideas on the 
 great questions which were rising into view. It was 
 clear to all who knew him that he could speak on 
 them as no one else could. 
 
 Towards the end of 1834, and in the course of 
 1835, an event happened which had a great and de- 
 cisive influence on the character and fortunes of the 
 movement. This was the accession to it of Dr. 
 Pusey. He had looked favourably on it from the 
 first, partly from his friendship with Mr. Newman,
 
 ii6 THE OXFORD MOVEMENT CHAP. 
 
 partly from the workings of his own mind. But he 
 had nothing to do with the starting of it, except that 
 he early contributed an elaborate paper on " Fasting." 
 The Oxford branch of the movement, as distinguished 
 from that which Mr. Palmer represented, consisted up 
 to 1834 almost exclusively of junior men, personal 
 friends of Mr. Newman, and most of them Oriel men. 
 Mr. Newman's deep convictions, his fiery enthusiasm, 
 had given the Tracts their first stamp and impress, 
 and had sent them flying over the country among the 
 clergy on his own responsibility. They answered 
 their purpose. They led to widespread and some- 
 times deep searchings of heart ; to some they seemed 
 to speak forth what had been long dormant within 
 them, what their minds had unconsciously and 
 vaguely thought and longed for ; to some they 
 seemed a challenge pregnant with danger. But still 
 they were but an outburst of individual feeling and 
 zeal, which, if nothing more came of its fragmentary 
 displays, might blaze and come to nothing. There 
 was nothing yet which spoke outwardly of the con- 
 sistency and weight of a serious attempt to influence 
 opinion and to produce a practical and lasting effect on 
 the generation which was passing. Cardinal Newman, 
 in the Apologia, has attributed to Dr. Pusey's un- 
 reserved adhesion to the cause which the Tracts 
 represented a great change in regard to the weight 
 and completeness of what was written and done. " Dr. 
 Pusey," he writes, "gave us at once a position and a 
 name. Without him we should have had no chance, 
 especially at the early date of 1834, of making any 
 serious resistance to the liberal aggression. But Dr. 
 Pusey was a Professor and Canon of Christ Church ; 
 he had a vast influence in consequence of his deep
 
 vii THE TRACTARIANS 117 
 
 religious seriousness, the munificence of his charities, 
 his Professorship, his family connexions, and his 
 easy relations with the University authorities. He 
 was to the movement all that Mr. Rose might have 
 been, with that indispensable addition, which was 
 wanting to Mr. Rose, the intimate friendship and the 
 familiar daily society of the persons who had com- 
 menced it. And he had that special claim on their 
 attachment which lies in the living presence of a 
 faithful and loyal affectionateness. There was hence- 
 forth a man who could be the head and centre of the 
 zealous people in every part of the country who were 
 adopting the new opinions ; and not only so, but there 
 was one who furnished the movement with a front to 
 the world, and gained for it a recognition from other 
 parties in the University." 1 
 
 This is not too much to say of the effect of Dr. 
 Pusey's adhesion. It gave the movement a second 
 head, in close sympathy with its original leader, but 
 in many ways very different from him. Dr. Pusey 
 became, as it were, its official chief in the eyes of the 
 world. He became also, in a remarkable degree, a 
 guarantee for its stability and steadiness : a guarantee 
 that its chiefs knew what they were about, and meant 
 nothing but what was for the benefit of the English 
 Church. "He was," we read in the Apologia, " a man 
 of large designs ; he had a hopeful, sanguine mind ; he 
 had no fear of others ; he was haunted by no intel- 
 lectual perplexities. ... If confidence in his position 
 is (as it is) a first essential in the leader of a party, Dr. 
 Pusey had it." An inflexible patience, a serene com- 
 posure, a meek, resolute self-possession, was the habit 
 of his mind, and never deserted him in the most trying 
 
 1 Apologia, p. 136.
 
 Ii8 THE OXFORD MOVEMENT CHAP. 
 
 days. He never for an instant, as the paragraph wit- 
 nesses, wavered or doubted about the position of the 
 English Church. 
 
 He was eminently, as his friend justly observes, " a 
 man of large designs." It is doubtless true, as the 
 Apologia goes on to say, that it was due to the place 
 which he now took in the movement that great changes 
 
 o O 
 
 were made in the form and character of the Tracts. 
 To Dr. Pusey's mind, accustomed to large and exhaust- 
 ive theological reading, they wanted fulness, complete- 
 ness, the importance given by careful arrangement and 
 abundant knowledge. It was not for nothing that he 
 had passed an apprenticeship among the divines of 
 Germany, and been the friend and correspondent of 
 Tholuck, Schleiermacher, Ewald, and Sack. He knew 
 the meaning of real learning. In controversy it was 
 his sledge-hammer and battle-mace, and he had the 
 strong and sinewy hand to use it with effect. He 
 observed that when attention had been roused to the 
 ancient doctrines of the Church by the startling and 
 peremptory language of the earlier Tracts, fairness and 
 justice demanded that these doctrines should be fully 
 and carefully explained and defended against misrepre- 
 sentation and mistake. Forgetfulness and ignorance 
 had thrown these doctrines so completely into the 
 shade that, identified as they were with the best English 
 divinity, they now wore the air of amazing novelties ; 
 and it was only due to honest inquirers to satisfy them 
 with solid and adequate proof. " Dr. Pusey's influence 
 was felt at once. He saw that there ought to be 
 more sobriety, more gravity, more careful pains, more 
 sense of responsibility in the Tracts and in the whole 
 movement." At the end of 1835 Dr. Pusey gave an 
 example of what he meant. In place of the " short and
 
 vii THE TRACTARIANS 119 
 
 incomplete papers," such as the earlier Tracts had 
 been, Nos. 67, 68, and 69 formed the three parts of 
 a closely-printed pamphlet of more than 300 pages. 1 
 It was a treatise on Baptism, perhaps the most elaborate 
 that has yet appeared in the English language. " It is 
 to be regarded," says the advertisement to the second 
 volume of the Tracts, " not as an inquiry into a single 
 or isolated doctrine, but as a delineation and serious 
 examination of a modern system of theology, of exten- 
 sive popularity and great speciousness, in its elementary 
 and characteristic principles." The Tract on Baptism 
 was like the advance of a battery of heavy artillery on 
 a field where the battle has been hitherto carried on by 
 skirmishing and musketry. It altered the look of things 
 and the condition of the fighting. After No. 67 the 
 earlier form of the Tracts appeared no more. Except 
 two or three reprints from writers like Bishop Wilson, 
 the Tracts from No. 70 to No. 90 were either grave and 
 carefully worked out essays on some question arising 
 out of the discussions of the time, or else those 
 ponderous catena of patristic or Anglican divinity, by 
 which the historical continuity and Church authority of 
 various points of doctrine were established. 
 
 Dr. Pusey was indeed a man of "large designs." 
 The vision rose before him of a revived and instructed 
 Church, earnest in purpose and strict in life, and of 
 a great Christian University roused and quickened to 
 a sense of its powers and responsibilities. He thought 
 of the enormous advantages offered by its magnificent 
 foundations for serious study and the production of 
 works for which time and deep learning and continuous 
 labour were essential. Such works, in the hands of 
 single-minded students, living lives of simplicity and 
 
 1 It swelled in the second edition to 400 pages.
 
 120 THE OXFORD MOVEMENT CHAP. 
 
 hard toil, had in the case of the Portroyalists, the 
 Oratorians, and above all, the Benedictines of St. 
 Maur, splendidly redeemed the Church of France, in 
 otherwise evil days, from the reproach of idleness and 
 self-indulgence. He found under his hand men who 
 had in them something of the making of students ; and 
 he hoped to see college fellowships filled more and 
 more by such men, and the life of a college fellow 
 more and more recognised as that of a man to whom 
 learning, and especially sacred learning, was his call 
 and sufficient object, as pastoral or educational work 
 might be the call of others. Where fellowships were 
 not to be had, he encouraged such men to stay up in 
 Oxford ; he took them into his own house ; later, he 
 tried a kind of hall to receive them. And by way of 
 beginning at once, and giving them something to do, 
 he planned on a large scale a series of translations and 
 also editions of the Fathers. It was announced, with 
 an elaborate prospectus, in 1836, under the title, in 
 conformity with the usage of the time, which had 
 Libraries of Useful Knowledge, etc., of a Library of 
 Fathers of the Holy Catholic Church anterior to the 
 Division of the East and West, under the editorship of 
 Dr. Pusey, Mr. Keble, and Mr. Newman. It was 
 dedicated to the Archbishop of Canterbury, and had 
 a considerable number of Bishops among its subscribers. 
 Down to a very late date, the Library of the Fathers, 
 in which Charles Marriott came to take a leading part, 
 was a matter of much concern to Dr. Pusey. And to 
 bring men together, and to interest them in theological 
 subjects, he had evening meetings at his own house, 
 where papers were read and discussed. "Some 
 persons," writes a gossiping chronicler of the time, 1 
 
 1 Recollections of Oxford, by G. V. Cox, p. 278.
 
 THE TRACTARIANS 
 
 " thought that these meetings were liable to the 
 statute, De conventiculis illicitis reprimendisT Some 
 important papers were the result of these meetings ; 
 but the meetings themselves were irresistibly sleepy, 
 and in time they were discontinued. But indefatigable 
 and powerful in all these beginnings Dr. Pusey stirred 
 men to activity and saw great ground of hope. He 
 was prepared for opposition, but he had boundless 
 reliance on his friends and his cause. His forecast of 
 the future, of great days in store for the Church of 
 England, was, not unreasonably, one of great promise. 
 Ten years might work wonders. The last fear that 
 occurred to him was that within ten years a hopeless 
 rift, not of affection but of conviction, would have run 
 through that company of friends, and parted irrevocably 
 their course and work in life. 
 
 NOTE (vide p. 113) 
 
 The subjoined extracts record the impression made by 
 Mr. Newman's preaching on contemporaries well qualified to 
 judge, and standing respectively in very different relations 
 to the movement. This is the judgment of a very close 
 observer, and very independent critic, James Mozley. In 
 an article in the Christian Remembrancer, January 1846 
 (p. 169), after speaking of the obvious reasons of Mr. 
 Newman's influence, he proceeds : 
 
 We inquire further, and we find that this influence has been of a 
 peculiarly ethical and inward kind ; that it has touched the deepest 
 part of our minds, and that the great work on which it has been 
 founded is a practical, religious one his Sermons. We speak not 
 from our own fixed impression, however deeply felt, but from what 
 we have heard and observed everywhere, from the natural, incidental, 
 unconscious remarks dropped from persons' mouths, and evidently 
 showing what they thought and felt. For ourselves, we must say,
 
 122 THE OXFORD MOVEMENT CHAP. 
 
 one of Mr. Newman's sermons is to us a marvellous production. 
 It has perfect power, and perfect nature ; but the latter it is which 
 makes it so great. A sermon of Mr. Newman's enters into all our 
 feelings, ideas, modes of viewing things. He wonderfully realises a 
 state of mind, enters into a difficulty, a temptation, a disappointment, 
 a grief; he goes into the different turns and incidental, unconscious 
 symptoms of a case, with notions which come into the head and go 
 out again, and are forgotten, till some chance recalls them. . . . To 
 take the first instance that happens to occur to us ... we have often 
 been struck by the keen way in which he enters into a regular 
 tradesman's vice avarice, fortune-getting, amassing capital, and so on. 
 This is not a temper to which we can imagine Mr. Newman ever 
 having felt in his own mind even the temptation ; but he under- 
 stands it, and the temptation to it, as perfectly as any merchant 
 could. No man of business could express it more naturally, more 
 pungently, more ex animo. ... So with the view that worldly men 
 take of religion, in a certain sense, he quite enters into it, and the 
 world's point of view : he sees, with a regular worldly man's eye, 
 religion vanishing into nothing, and becoming an unreality, while 
 the visible system of life and facts, politics and society, gets more 
 and more solid and grows upon him. The whole influence of the 
 world on the imagination ; the weight of example ; the force of 
 repetition ; the way in which maxims, rules, sentiments, by being 
 simply sounded in the ear from day to day, seem to prove themselves, 
 and make themselves believed by being often heard, every part of 
 the easy, natural, passive process by which a man becomes a man of 
 the world is entered into, as if the preacher were going to justify or 
 excuse him, rather than condemn him. Nay, he enters deeply into what 
 even scepticism has to say for itself; he puts himself into the infidel's 
 state of mind, in which the world, as a great fact, seems to give the 
 lie to all religions, converting them into phenomena which counter- 
 balance and negative each other, and he goes down into that lowest 
 abyss and bottom of things, at which the intellect undercuts spiritual 
 truth altogether. He enters into the ordinary common states of 
 mind just in the same way. He is most consoling, most sym- 
 pathetic. He sets before persons their own feelings with such truth 
 of detail, such natural expressive touches, that they seem not to 
 be ordinary states of mind which everybody has, but very peculiar 
 ones ; for he and the reader seem to be the only two persons in the 
 world that have them in common. Here is the point. Persons
 
 THE TRACTARIANS 123 
 
 look into Mr. Newman's sermons and see their own thoughts in 
 them. This is, after all, what as much as anything gives a book 
 hold upon minds. . . . Wonderful pathetic power, that can so 
 intimately, so subtilely and kindly, deal with the soul ! and wonder- 
 ful soul that can be so dealt with. 
 
 Compare with this the judgment pronounced by one of 
 quite a different school, the late Principal Shairp : 
 
 Both Dr. Pusey and Mr. Keble at that time were quite second 
 in importance to Mr. Newman. The centre from which his power 
 went forth was the pulpit of St. Mary's, with those wonderful after- 
 noon sermons. Sunday after Sunday, year by year, they went on, 
 each continuing and deepening the impression produced by the 
 last. As the hour interfered with the dinner-hour of the Colleges, 
 most men preferred a warm dinner without Newman's sermon to a 
 cold one with it ; so the audience was not crowded the large 
 church little more than half filled. The service was very simple, 
 no pomp, no ritualism ; for it was characteristic of the leading men 
 of the movement that they left these things to the weaker brethren. 
 Their thoughts, at all events, were set on great questions which 
 touched the heart of unseen things. About the service, the most 
 remarkable thing was the beauty, the silver intonation of Mr. 
 Newman's voice as he read the lessons. . . . When he began to 
 preach, a stranger was not likely to be much struck. Here was 
 no vehemence, no declamation, no show of elaborated argument, so 
 that one who came prepared to hear "a great intellectual effort" 
 was almost sure to go away disappointed. Indeed, we believe that 
 if he had preached one of his St. Mary's sermons before a Scotch 
 town congregation, they would have thought the preacher a " silly 
 body." . . . Those who never heard him might fancy that his ser- 
 mons would generally be about apostolical succession, or rights of 
 the Church, or against Dissenters. Nothing of the kind. You 
 might hear him preach for weeks without an allusion to these things. 
 What there was of High Church teaching was implied rather than 
 enforced. The local, the temporary, and the modern were ennobled 
 by the presence of the Catholic truth belonging to all ages that 
 pervaded the whole. His power showed itself chiefly in the new 
 and unlooked-for way in which he touched into life old truths,
 
 124 THE OXFORD MOVEMENT CHAP. 
 
 moral or spiritual, which all Christians acknowledge, but most have 
 ceased to feel when he spoke of " unreal words," of the " individu- 
 ality of the soul," of the " invisible world," of a " particular Pro- 
 vidence," or again, of the " ventures of faith," " warfare the condition 
 of victory," "the Cross of Christ the measure of the world," "the 
 Church a Home for the lonely." As he spoke, how the old truth 
 became new ; how it came home with a meaning never felt before ! 
 He laid his finger how gently, yet how powerfully, on some inner 
 place in the hearer's heart, and told him things about himself he 
 had never known till then. Subtlest truths, which it would have 
 taken philosophers pages of circumlocution and big words to state, 
 were dropt out by the way in a sentence or two of the most trans- 
 parent Saxon. What delicacy of style, yet what strength ! how simple, 
 yet how suggestive ! how homely, yet how refined ! how penetrating, 
 yet how tender-hearted ! If now and then there was a forlorn under- 
 tone which at the time seemed inexplicable, you might be perplexed 
 at the drift of what he said, but you felt all the more drawn to the 
 speaker. . . . After hearing these sermons you might come away still 
 not believing the tenets peculiar to the High Church system ; but 
 you would be harder than most men, if you did not feel more than 
 ever ashamed of coarseness, selfishness, worldliness, if you did not 
 feel the things of faith brought closer to the soul. -John Keble, by 
 J. C. Shairp, Professor of Humanity, St. Andrews (1866), pp. 12-17. 
 
 I venture to add the judgment of another contemporary, 
 on the effect of this preaching, from the Reminiscences of 
 Sir F. Doyle, p. 145 : 
 
 That great man's extraordinary genius drew all those within 
 his sphere, like a magnet, to attach themselves to him and his 
 doctrines. Nay, before he became a Romanist, what we may call 
 his mesmeric influence acted not only on his Tractarian adherents, 
 but even in some degree on outsiders like myself. Whenever I was 
 at Oxford, I used to go regularly on Sunday afternoons to listen to 
 his sermon at St. Mary's, and I have never heard such preaching 
 since. I do not know whether it is a mere fancy of mine, or 
 whether those who know him better will accept and endorse my 
 belief, that one element of his wonderful power showed itself after 
 this fashion. He always began as if he had determined to set forth
 
 vii THE TRACTARIANS 125 
 
 his idea of the truth in the plainest and simplest language language, 
 as men say, "intelligible to the meanest understanding." But his 
 ardent zeal and fine poetical imagination were not thus to be con- 
 trolled. As I hung upon his words, it seemed to me as if I could 
 trace behind his will, and pressing, so to speak, against it, a rush of 
 thoughts, of feelings which he kept struggling to hold back, but in 
 the end they were generally too strong for him, and poured themselves 
 out in a torrent of eloquence all the more impetuous from having 
 been so long repressed. The effect of these outbursts was irre- 
 sistible, and carried his hearers beyond themselves at once. Even 
 when his efforts of self-restraint were more successful, those very 
 efforts gave a life and colour to his style which riveted the attention 
 of all within the reach of his voice. Mr. Justin McCarthy, in his 
 History of Our Own Times, says of him : " In all the arts that 
 make a great preacher or orator, Cardinal Newman was deficient. 
 His manner was constrained and ungraceful, and even awkward ; his 
 voice was thin and weak, his bearing was not at first impressive in 
 any way a gaunt emaciated figure, a sharp eagle face, and a cold 
 meditative eye, rather repelled than attracted those who saw him 
 for the first time." I do not think Mr. McCarthy's phrases very 
 happily chosen to convey his meaning. Surely a gaunt emaciated 
 frame and a sharp eagle face are the very characteristics which we 
 should picture to ourselves as belonging to Peter the Hermit, or 
 Scott's Ephraim Macbriar in Old Mortality. However unimpressive 
 the look of an eagle may be in Mr. McCarthy's opinion, I do not 
 agree with him about Dr. Newman. When I knew him at Oxford, 
 these somewhat disparaging remarks would not have been applicable. 
 His manner, it is true, may have been self-repressed, constrained it 
 was not. His bearing was neither awkward nor ungraceful ; it was 
 simply quiet and calm, because under strict control ; but beneath 
 that calmness, intense feeling, I think, was obvious to those who 
 had any instinct of sympathy with him. But if Mr. McCarthy's 
 acquaintance with him only began when he took office in an Irish 
 Catholic university, I can quite understand that (flexibility not being 
 one of his special gifts) he may have failed now and again to bring 
 himself into perfect harmony with an Irish audience. He was prob- 
 ably too much of a typical Englishman for his place ; nevertheless 
 Mr. McCarthy, though he does not seem to have admired him in 
 the pulpit, is fully sensible of his intellectual powers and general 
 eminence.
 
 126 THE OXFORD MOVEMENT CHAP, vn 
 
 Dr. Pusey, who used every now and then to take Newman's 
 duties at St. Mary's, was to me a much less interesting person. [A 
 learned man, no doubt, but dull and tedious as a preacher.] Cer- 
 tainly, in spite of the name Puseyism having been given to the 
 Oxford attempt at a new Catholic departure, he was not the 
 Columbus of that voyage of discovery undertaken to find a safer 
 haven for the Church of England. I may, however, be more or 
 less unjust to him, as I owe him a sort of grudge. His discourses 
 were not only less attractive than those of Dr. Newman, but always 
 much longer, and the result of this was that the learned Canon of 
 Christ Church generally made me late for dinner at my College, a 
 calamity never inflicted on his All Souls' hearers by the terser and 
 swifter fellow of Oriel whom he was replacing.
 
 CHAPTER VIII 
 
 SUBSCRIPTION AT MATRICULATION AND ADMISSION 
 OF DISSENTERS 
 
 " DEPEND upon it," an earnest High Churchman of 
 the Joshua Watson type had said to one of Mr. 
 Newman's friends, who was a link between the old 
 Churchmanship and the new "depend upon it, the 
 day will come when those great doctrines " connected 
 with the Church, " now buried, will be brought out to > 
 the light of the day, and then the effect will be quite 
 fearful." l With the publication of the Tracts for the 
 Times, and the excitement caused by them, the day 
 had come. 
 
 Their unflinching and severe proclamation of 
 Church principles and Church doctrines coincided with 
 a state of feeling and opinion in the country, in which 
 two very different tendencies might be observed. 
 They fell on the public mind just when one of these 
 tendencies would help them, and the other be fiercely 
 hostile. On the one hand, the issue of the political 
 controversy with the Roman Catholics, their triumph 
 all along the line, and the now scarcely disguised 
 
 1 The conversation between Mr. Letter to the Archbishop of Canterbury 
 Sikes of Guilsborough and Mr. Cope- (1842), pp. 32-34. 
 land is given in full in Dr. Pusey's
 
 128 THE OXFORD MOVEMENT CHAP. 
 
 contempt shown by their political representatives for 
 the pledges and explanations on which their relief was 
 supposed to have been conceded, had left the public 
 mind sore, angry, and suspicious. Orthodox and 
 Evangelicals were alike alarmed and indignant ; and 
 the Evangelicals, always doctrinally jealous of Popery, 
 and of anything "unsound" in that direction, had been 
 roused to increased irritation by the proceedings of 
 the Reformation Society, which had made it its 
 business to hold meetings and discussions all over 
 the country, where fervid and sometimes eloquent and 
 able Irishmen, like Mr. E. Tottenham, afterwards of 
 Laura Chapel, Bath, had argued and declaimed, with 
 Roman text-books in hand, on such questions as the 
 Right of Private Judgment, the Rule of Faith, and the 
 articles of the Tridentine Creed not always with the 
 effect which they intended on those who heard them, 
 with whom their arguments, and those which they 
 elicited from their opponents, sometimes left behind 
 uncomfortable misgivings, and questions even more 
 serious than the controversy itself. On the other 
 hand, in quarters quite unconnected with the recog- 
 nised religious schools, interest had been inde- 
 pendently and strongly awakened in the minds of 
 theologians and philosophical thinkers, in regard to 
 the idea, history, and relations to society of the 
 Christian Church. In Ireland, a recluse, who was the 
 centre of a small knot of earnest friends, a man of deep 
 piety and great freedom and originality of mind, Mr. 
 Alexander Knox, had been led, partly, it may be, by 
 his intimacy with John Wesley, to think out for him- 
 self the character and true constitution of the Church, 
 and the nature of the doctrines which it was commis- 
 sioned to teach. In England, another recluse, of splendid
 
 vin SUBSCRIPTION A T MA TRICULA TION 1 29 
 
 genius and wayward humour, had dealt in his own 
 way, with far-reaching insight, with vast reading, and 
 often with impressive eloquence, with the same subject ; 
 and his profound sympathy and faith had been shared 
 and reflected by a great poet. What Coleridge and 
 Wordsworth had put in the forefront of their specula- 
 tions and poetry, as the object of their profoundest 
 interest, and of their highest hopes for mankind, might, 
 of course, fail to appear in the same light to others ; 
 but it could not fail, in those days at least, to attract 
 attention, as a matter of grave and well-founded im- 
 portance. Coleridge's theories of the Church were his 
 own, and were very wide of theories recognised by 
 any of those who had to deal practically with the 
 question, and who were influenced, in one way or 
 another, by the traditional doctrines of theologians. 
 But Coleridge had lifted the subject to a very high 
 level. He had taken the simple but all -important 
 step of viewing the Church in its spiritual character 
 as first and foremost and above all things essentially a 
 religious society of divine institution, not dependent 
 on the creation or will of man, or on the privileges 
 and honours which man might think fit to assign to 
 it ; and he had undoubtedly familiarised the minds of 
 many with this way of regarding it, however imperfect, 
 or cloudy, or unpractical they might find the develop- 
 ment of his ideas, and his deductions from them. 
 And in Oxford the questions which had stirred the 
 friends at Hadleigh had stirred others also, and had 
 waked up various responses. Whately's acute mind 
 had not missed these questions, and had given original 
 if insufficient answers to them. Blanco White knew 
 only too well their bearing and importance, and had 
 laboured, not without success, to leave behind him his 
 
 K
 
 130 THE OXFORD MOVEMENT CHAP. 
 
 own impress on the way in which they should be dealt 
 with. Dr. Hampden, the man in Oxford best ac- 
 quainted with Aristotle's works and with the scholastic 
 philosophy, had thrown Christian doctrines into a 
 philosophical calculus which seemed to leave them 
 little better than the inventions of men. On the other 
 hand, a brilliant scholar, whose after- career was 
 strangely full of great successes and deplorable disas- 
 ters, William Sewell of Exeter College, had opened, in 
 a way new to Oxford, the wealth and magnificence of 
 Plato ; and his thoughts had been dazzled by seeming 
 to find in the truths and facts of the Christian Church 
 the counterpart and realisation of the grandest of 
 Plato's imaginations. The subjects treated with such 
 dogmatic severity and such impetuous earnestness in 
 the Tracts were, in one shape or another, in all 
 men's minds, when these Tracts broke on the 
 University and English society with their peremptory 
 call to men " to take their side." 
 
 There was just a moment of surprise and uncer- 
 tainty uncertainty as to what the Tracts meant ; 
 whether they were to be a new weapon against the 
 enemies of the Church, or were simply extravagant 
 and preposterous novelties just a certain perplexity 
 and hesitation at their conflicting aspects ; on the one 
 hand, the known and high character of the writers, 
 their evident determination and confidence in their 
 cause, the attraction of their religious warmth and 
 unselfishness and nobleness, the dim consciousness 
 that much that they said was undeniable ; and on 
 the other hand, the apparent wildness and reckless- 
 ness of their words : and then public opinion 
 began steadily to take its " ply," and to be agreed 
 in condemning them. It soon went farther, and
 
 vni SUBSCRIPTION A T MA TRICULA TION 131 
 
 became vehement in reprobating them as scandalous 
 and dangerous publications. They incensed the 
 Evangelicals by their alleged Romanism, and their 
 unsound views about justification, good works, and the 
 sacraments ; they angered the " two-bottle orthodox " 
 by their asceticism the steady men, by their audacity 
 and strong words the liberals, by their dogmatic 
 severity ; their seriously practical bearing was early 
 disclosed in a tract on " Fasting." But while they 
 repelled strongly, they attracted strongly ; they touched 
 many consciences, they won many hearts, they opened 
 new thoughts and hopes to many minds. One of the 
 mischiefs of the Tracts, and of those sermons at St. 
 Mary's which were the commentaries on them, was 
 that so many people seemed to like them and to be 
 struck by them. The gathering storm muttered and 
 growled for some time at a distance, and men seemed 
 to be taking time to make up their minds ; but it began 
 to lour from early days, till after various threatenings 
 it broke in a furious article in the Edinburgh, by Dr. 
 Arnold, on the " Oxford Malignants " ; and the Tract- 
 writers and their friends became, what they long con- 
 tinued to be, the most unpopular and suspected body 
 of men in the Church, whom everybody was at liberty 
 to insult, both as dishonest and absurd, of whom 
 nothing was too cruel to say, nothing too ridiculous to 
 believe. It is only equitable to take into account the 
 unprepared state of the public mind, the surprise and 
 novelty of even the commonest things when put in a 
 new light, the prejudices which the Tract-writers were 
 thought wantonly to offend and defy, their militant and 
 uncompromising attitude, where principles were at 
 stake. But considering what these men were known 
 to be in character and life, what was the emergency
 
 132 THE OXFORD MOVEMENT CHAP. 
 
 and what were the pressing motives which called 
 for action, and what is thought of them now that 
 their course is run, it is strange indeed to re- 
 member who they were, to whom the courtesies 
 of controversy were denied, not only by the vulgar 
 herd of pamphleteers, but by men of ability and posi- 
 tion, some of whom had been their familiar friends. 
 Of course a nickname was soon found for them : the 
 word " Tractarian " was invented, and Archbishop 
 Whately thought it worth while, but not successfully, 
 to improve it into " Tractites." Archbishop Whately, 
 always ingenious, appears to have suspected that the 
 real but concealed object of the movement was to 
 propagate a secret infidelity ; they were " Children of 
 the Mist," or "Veiled Prophets"; 1 and he seriously 
 suggested to a friend who was writing against it, 
 "this rapidly spreading pestilence," to parallel it, in 
 its characteristics and modes of working, with Indian 
 Thuggee. 2 
 
 But these things were of gradual growth. To- 
 wards the end of 1834 a question appeared in Oxford 
 interesting to numbers besides Mr. Newman and his 
 friends, which was to lead to momentous consequences. 
 The old, crude ideas of change in the Church had come 
 to appear, even to their advocates, for the present im- 
 
 1 " Dr. Wilson was mightily pleased bring into your Bampton Lectures a 
 with my calling the traditionals the mention of the Thugs. . . . Observe 
 'Children of the Mist.' The title of their submissive piety, their faith in 
 'Veiled Prophets' he thought too severe" long-preserved tradition, their regular 
 (1838), Life, ed. 1875, p. 167. Com- succession of ordinations to their 
 pare " Hints to Transcendentalists for offices, their faith in the sacramental 
 Working Infidel Designs through virtue of the consecrated governor ; in 
 Tractarianism," a jeu d 1 esprit (1840), short, compare our religion with the 
 ib. p. 1 88. "As for the suspicion of Thuggee, putting (nit of account all 
 secret infidelity, I have said no more those considerations which the tradition- 
 than I sincerely feel," ib. p. 181. ists deprecate the discussion of, and 
 
 2 "It would be a curious thing if where is the difference?" (1840), ib. 
 you (the Provost of Oriel) were to p. 194.
 
 vni SUBSCRIPTION A T MA TRICULA TION 133 
 
 practicable, and there was no more talk for a long 
 time of schemes which had been in favour two years 
 before. The ground was changed, and a point was 
 now brought forward on the Liberal side, for which a 
 good deal might be plausibly said. This was the 
 requirement of subscription to the Thirty-nine Articles 
 from young men at matriculation ; and a strong 
 pamphlet advocating its abolition, with the express 
 purpose of admitting Dissenters, was published by 
 Dr. Hampden, the Bampton Lecturer of two years 
 before. 
 
 Oxford had always been one of the great schools 
 of the Church. Its traditions, its tone, its customs, its 
 rules, all expressed or presumed the closest attachment 
 to that way of religion which was specially identified 
 with the Church, in its doctrinal and historical aspect. 
 Oxford was emphatically definite, dogmatic, orthodox, 
 compared even with Cambridge, which had largely 
 favoured the Evangelical school, and had leanings to 
 Liberalism. Oxford, unlike Cambridge, gave notice of 
 its attitude by requiring every one who matriculated to 
 subscribe the Thirty-nine Articles : the theory of its 
 Tutorial system, of its lectures and examinations, im- 
 plied what of late years in the better colleges, though 
 certainly not everywhere, had been realised in fact a 
 considerable amount of religious and theological teach- 
 ing. And whatever might have been said originally of 
 the lay character of the University, the colleges, which 
 had become coextensive with the University, were for 
 the most part, in the intention of their founders, meant 
 to educate and support theological students on their 
 foundations for the service of the Church. It became 
 in time the fashion to call them lay institutions : legally 
 they may have been so, but judged by their statutes,
 
 134 THE OXFORD MOVEMENT CHAP. 
 
 they were nearly all of them as ecclesiastical as the 
 Chapter of a Cathedral. And Oxford was the fulcrum 
 from which the theological revival hoped to move the 
 Church. It was therefore a shock and a challenge of 
 no light kind, when not merely the proposal was made 
 to abolish the matriculation subscription with the 
 express object of attracting Dissenters, and to get 
 Parliament to force the change on the University if 
 the University resisted, but the proposal itself was 
 vindicated and enforced in a pamphlet by Dr. 
 Hampden by a definite and precise theory which 
 stopped not short of the position that all creeds 
 and formularies everything which represented the 
 authority of the teaching Church however inci- 
 dentally and temporarily useful, were in their own 
 nature the inventions of a mistaken and corrupt philo- 
 sophy, and invasions of Christian liberty. This was 
 cutting deep with a vengeance, though the author of 
 the theory seemed alone unable to see it. It went to 
 the root of the whole matter ; and if Dr. Hampden was 
 right, there was neither Church nor doctrine worth 
 contending for, except as men contend about the 
 Newtonian or the undulatory theory of light. 
 
 No one ought now to affect, as some people used 
 to affect at the time, that the question was of secondary 
 importance, and turned mainly on the special fitness 
 of the Thirty -nine Articles to be offered for the 
 proof of a young man's belief. It was a much more 
 critical question. It was really, however disguised, 
 the question, asked then for the first time, and since 
 finally decided, whether Oxford was to continue to be a 
 school of the Church of England ; and it also involved 
 the wider question, what part belief in definite religion 
 should have in higher education. It is speciously said
 
 vin SUBSCRIPTION AT MATRICULATION 135 
 
 that you have no right to forestall a young man's in- 
 quiries and convictions by imposing on him in his early 
 years opinions which to him become prejudices. And 
 if the world consisted simply of individuals, entirely 
 insulated and self-sufficing ; if men could be taught 
 anything whatever, without presuming what is believed 
 by those who teach them ; and if the attempt to exclude 
 religious prejudice did not necessarily, by the mere 
 force of the attempt, involve the creation of anti- 
 religious prejudice, these reasoners, who try in vain to 
 get out of the conditions which hem them in, might 
 have more to say for themselves. To the men who 
 had made such an effort to restore a living confidence 
 in the Church, the demand implied giving up all that 
 they had done and all that they hoped for. It 
 was not the time for yielding even a clumsy proof of 
 the religious character of the University. And the 
 beginning of a long and doubtful war was inevitable. 
 
 A war of pamphlets ensued. By the one side 
 the distinction was strongly insisted on between mere 
 instruction and education, the distinctly religious char- 
 acter of the University education was not perhaps 
 overstated in its theory, but portrayed in stronger 
 colours than was everywhere the fact ; and assertions 
 were made, which sound strange in their boldness 
 now, of the independent and constitutional right to 
 self-government in the great University corporations. 
 By the other side, the ordinary arguments were used, 
 about the injustice and mischief of exclusion, and the 
 hurtfulness of tests, especially such tests as the Articles 
 applied to young and ignorant men. Two pamphlets 
 had more than a passing interest : one, by a then 
 unknown writer who signed himself Rusticus, and 
 whose name was Mr. F. D. Maurice, defended sub-
 
 136 THE OXFORD MOVEMENT CHAP. 
 
 scription on the ground that the Articles were signed, 
 not as tests and confessions of faith, but as " conditions 
 of thought," the expressly stated conditions, such as 
 there must be in all teaching, under which the learners 
 are willing to learn and the teacher to teach : and he 
 developed his view at great length, with great wealth 
 of original thought and illustration and much eloquence, 
 but with that fatal want of clearness which, as so often 
 afterwards, came from his struggles to embrace in one 
 large view what appeared opposite aspects of a diffi- 
 cult subject. The other was the pamphlet, already 
 referred to, by Dr. Hampden : and of which the im- 
 portance arose, not from its conclusions, but from its 
 reasons. Its ground was the distinction which he had 
 argued out at great length in his Bampton Lectures 
 the distinction between the " Divine facts " of revela- 
 tion, and all human interpretations of them and infer- 
 ences from them. " Divine facts," he maintained, were 
 of course binding on all Christians, and in matter of 
 fact were accepted by all who called themselves Chris- 
 tians, including Unitarians. Human interpretations 
 and inferences and all Church formularies were such 
 were binding on no one but those who had reason 
 to think them true ; and therefore least of all on 
 undergraduates who could not have examined them. 
 The distinction, when first put forward, seemed 
 to mean much ; at a later time it was explained 
 to mean very little. But at present its value as a 
 ground of argument against the old system of the 
 University was thought much of by its author and his 
 friends. A warning note was at once given that its 
 significance was perceived and appreciated. Mr. 
 Newman, in acknowledging a presentation copy, added 
 words which foreshadowed much that was to follow.
 
 viii SUBSCRIPTION AT MATRICULATION 137 
 
 " While I respect," he wrote, "the tone of piety which 
 the pamphlet displays, I dare not trust myself to put 
 on paper my feelings about the principles contained in 
 it ; tending, as they do, in my opinion, to make ship- 
 wreck of Christian faith. I also lament that, by its 
 appearance, the first step has been taken towards 
 interrupting that peace and mutual good understanding 
 which has prevailed so long in this place, and which, if 
 once seriously disturbed, will be succeeded by discus- 
 sions the more intractable, because justified in the 
 minds of those who resist innovation by a feeling of 
 imperative duty." "Since that time," he goes on in 
 the Apologia, where he quotes this letter, " Phaeton 
 has got into the chariot of the sun." 1 But they were 
 early days then ; and when the Heads of Houses, who 
 the year before had joined with the great body of the 
 University in a declaration against the threatened 
 legislation, were persuaded to propose to the Oxford 
 Convocation the abolition of subscription at matricula- 
 tion in May 1835, this proposal was rejected by a 
 majority of five to one. 
 
 This large majority was a genuine expression of 
 the sense of the University. It was not specially a 
 " Tractarian " success, though most of the arguments 
 which contributed to it came from men who more or 
 less sympathised with the effort to make a vigorous 
 fight for the Church and its teaching ; and it showed that 
 they who had made the effort had touched springs of 
 thought and feeling, and awakened new hopes and 
 interest in those around them, in Oxford, and in the 
 country. But graver events were at hand. Towards 
 the end of the year (1835), Dr. Burton, the Regius 
 Professor of Divinity, suddenly died, still a young man. 
 
 1 Apologia, pp. 131, 132.
 
 138 THE OXFORD MOVEMENT CHAP, vm 
 
 And Lord Melbourne was induced to appoint as his 
 successor, and as the head of the theological teaching of 
 the University, the writer who had just a second time 
 seemed to lay the axe to the root of all theology ; who 
 had just reasserted that he looked upon creeds, and all 
 the documents which embodied the traditional doctrine 
 and collective thought of the Church, as invested by 
 ignorance and prejudice with an authority which was 
 without foundation, and which was misleading and 
 mischievous.
 
 CHAPTER IX 
 
 DR. HAMPDEN 
 
 THE stage on which what is called the Oxford move- 
 ment ran through its course had a special character 
 of its own, unlike the circumstances in which other 
 religious efforts had done their work. The scene of 
 Jansenism had been a great capital, a brilliant society, 
 the precincts of a court, the cells of a convent, the 
 studies and libraries of the doctors of the Sorbonne, 
 the council chambers of the Vatican. The scene 
 of Methodism had been English villages and country 
 towns, the moors of Cornwall, and the collieries of 
 Bristol, at length London fashionable chapels. The 
 scene of this new movement was as like as it 
 could be in our modern world to a Greek 7ro\is, 
 or an Italian self-centred city of the Middle Ages. 
 Oxford stood by itself in its meadows by the rivers, 
 having its relations with all England, but, like its sister 
 at Cambridge, living a life of its own, unlike that of 
 any other spot in England, with its privileged powers, 
 and exemptions from the general law, with its special 
 mode of government and police, its usages and tastes 
 and traditions, and even costume, which the rest of 
 England looked at from the outside, much interested 
 but much puzzled, or knew only by transient visits.
 
 140 THE OXFORD MOVEMENT CHAP. 
 
 And Oxford was as proud and jealous of its own ways 
 as Athens or Florence ; and like them it had its quaint 
 fashions of polity ; its democratic Convocation and its 
 oligarchy ; its social ranks ; its discipline, severe in 
 theory and usually lax in fact ; its self-governed bodies 
 and corporations within itself ; its faculties and colleges, 
 like the guilds and " arts " of Florence ; its internal 
 rivalries and discords ; its " sets " and factions. Like 
 these, too, it professed a special recognition of the 
 supremacy of religion ; it claimed to be a home of 
 worship and religious training, Dominus illuminatio 
 mea, a claim too often falsified in the habit and tempers 
 of life. It was a small sphere, but it was a conspicuous 
 one ; for there was much strong and energetic char- 
 acter, brought out by the aims and conditions of Uni- 
 versity life ; and though moving in a separate orbit, the 
 influence of the famous place over the outside England, 
 though imperfectly understood, was recognised and 
 great. These conditions affected the character of the 
 movement, and of the conflicts which it caused. Oxford 
 claimed to be eminently the guardian of " true religion 
 and sound learning " ; and therefore it was eminently 
 the place where religion should be recalled to its purity 
 and strength, and also the place where there ought to 
 be the most vigilant jealousy against the perversions 
 and corruptions of religion. Oxford was a place where 
 every one knew his neighbour, and measured him, and 
 was more or less friendly or repellent ; where the 
 customs of life brought men together every day and 
 all day, in converse or discussion ; and where every 
 fresh statement or every new step taken furnished end- 
 less material for speculation or debate, in common 
 rooms or in the afternoon walk. And for this reason, 
 too, feelings were apt to be more keen and intense
 
 DR. HAMPDEN 141 
 
 and personal than in the larger scenes of life ; the man 
 who was disliked or distrusted was so close to his 
 neighbours that he was more irritating than if he had 
 been obscured by a crowd ; the man who attracted 
 confidence and kindled enthusiasm, whose voice was 
 continually in men's ears, and whose private conversation 
 and life was something ever new in its sympathy and 
 charm, created in those about him not mere admiration, 
 but passionate friendship, or unreserved discipleship. 
 And these feelings passed from individuals into parties ; 
 the small factions of a limited area. Men struck 
 blows and loved and hated in those days in Oxford 
 as they hardly did on the wider stage of London 
 politics or general religious controversy. 
 
 The conflicts which for a time turned Oxford into 
 a kind of image of what Florence was in the days 
 of Savonarola, with its nicknames, Puseyites, and 
 Neomaniacs, and High and Dry, counterparts to the 
 Piagnoni and Arrabbiati, of the older strife, began 
 around a student of retired habits, interested more 
 than was usual at Oxford in abstruse philosophy, 
 and the last person who might be expected to be 
 the occasion of great dissensions in the University. 
 Dr. Hampden was a man who, with no definite 
 intentions of innovating on the received doctrines of 
 the Church indeed, as his sermons showed, with a 
 full acceptance of them had taken a very difficult 
 subject for a course of Barnpton Lectures, without 
 at all fathoming its depth and reach, and had got into 
 a serious scrape in consequence. Personally he was a 
 man of serious but cold religion, having little sympathy 
 with others, and consequently not able to attract 
 any. His isolation during the whole of his career 
 is remarkable ; he attached no one, as Whately
 
 1 42 THE OXFORD MOVEMENT CHAP. 
 
 or Arnold attached men. His mind, which was 
 a speculative one, was not one, in its own order, 
 of the first class. He had not the grasp nor the 
 subtlety necessary for his task. He had a certain 
 power of statement, but little of co-ordination ; he 
 seems not to have had the power of seeing when his 
 ideas were really irreconcilable, and he thought that 
 simply by insisting on his distinctly orthodox state- 
 ments he not only balanced, but neutralised, and did 
 away with his distinctly unorthodox ones. He had 
 read a good deal of Aristotle and something of the 
 Schoolmen, which probably no one else in Oxford had 
 done except Blanco White ; and the temptation of 
 having read what no one else knows anything about 
 sometimes leads men to make an unprofitable use of their 
 special knowledge, which they consider their monopoly. 
 The creed and dogmas of the Christian Church are, 
 at least in their broad features, not a speculation, but 
 a fact. That not only the Apostles' Creed, but the 
 Nicene and Constantinopolitan Creeds, are assumed 
 as facts by the whole of anything that can be 
 called the Church, is as certain as the reception by the 
 same body, and for the same time, of the Scriptures. 
 Not only the Creed, but, up to the sixteenth century, 
 the hierarchy, and not only Creed and hierarchy and 
 Scriptures, but the sacramental idea as expressed in 
 the liturgies, are equally in the same class of facts. Of 
 course it is open to any one to question the genuine 
 origin of any of these great portions of the constitu- 
 tion of the Church ; but the Church is so committed to 
 them that he cannot enter on his destructive criticism 
 without having to criticise, not one only, but all these 
 beliefs, and without soon having to face the question 
 whether the whole idea of the Church, as a real and
 
 DR. H AMP DEN 143 
 
 divinely ordained society, with a definite doctrine and 
 belief, is not a delusion, and whether Christianity, 
 whatever it is, is addressed solely to each individual, 
 one by one, to make what he can of it. It need 
 hardly be said that within the limits of what the 
 Church is committed to there is room for very wide 
 differences of opinion ; it is also true that these limits 
 have, in different times of the Church, been illegiti- 
 mately and mischievously narrowed by prevailing 
 opinions, and by documents and formularies respecting 
 it. But though we may claim not to be bound by the 
 Augsburg Confession, or by the Lambeth articles, or 
 the Synod of Dort, or the Bull Unigenitus, it does not 
 follow that, if there is a Church at all, there is no more 
 binding authority in the theology of the Nicene and 
 Athanasian Creeds. And it is the province of the 
 divine who believes in a Church at all, and in its office 
 to be the teacher and witness of religious truth, to 
 distinguish between the infinitely varying degrees of 
 authority with which professed representations of 
 portions of this truth are propounded for acceptance. 
 It may be difficult or impossible to agree on a theory 
 of inspiration ; but that the Church doctrine of some 
 kind of special inspiration of Scripture is part of Chris- 
 tianity is, unless Christianity be a dream, certain. No 
 one can reasonably doubt, with history before him, 
 that the answer of the Christian Church was, the first 
 time the question was asked, and has continued to be 
 through ages of controversy, against Arianism, against 
 Socinianism, against Pelagianism, against Zwinglian- 
 ism. It does not follow that the Church has settled 
 everything, or that there are not hundreds of questions 
 which it is vain and presumptuous to attempt to settle 
 by any alleged authority.
 
 144 THE OXFORD MOVEMENT CHAP. 
 
 Dr. Hampden was in fact unexceptionably, even 
 rigidly orthodox in his acceptance of Church doctrine 
 and Church creeds. He had published a volume of 
 sermons containing, among other things, an able 
 statement of the Scriptural argument for the doctrine 
 of the Trinity, and an equally able defence of the 
 Athanasian Creed. But he felt that there are formu- 
 laries which may be only the interpretations of doctrine 
 and inferences from Scripture of a particular time or 
 set of men ; and he was desirous of putting into their 
 proper place the authority of such formularies. His 
 object was to put an interval between them and the 
 Scriptures from which they professed to be derived, 
 and to prevent them from claiming the command 
 over faith and conscience which was due only to the 
 authentic evidences of God's revelation. He wished 
 to make room for a deeper sense of the weight of 
 Scripture. He proposed to himself the same thing 
 which was aimed at by the German divines, Arndt, 
 Calixtus, and Spener, when they rose up against the 
 grinding oppression which Lutheran dogmatism had 
 raised on its Symbolical Books? and which had come 
 to outdo the worst extravagances of scholasticism. 
 This seems to have been his object a fair and 
 legitimate one. But in arguing against investing 
 the Thirty-nine Articles with an authority which did 
 not belong to them, he unquestionably, without seeing 
 what he was doing, went much farther where he 
 never meant to go. In fact, he so stated his argu- 
 ment that he took in with the Thirty-nine Articles 
 every expression of collective belief, every document, 
 however venerable, which the Church had sanctioned 
 from the first. Strangely enough, without observing 
 
 1 See Pusey's Theology of Germany (1828), p. 18 sqq.
 
 ix DR. HAMPDEN 145 
 
 it, he took in what he meant to separate by a wide 
 interval from what he called dogma the doctrine of 
 the infallible authority and sufficiency of Scripture. 
 In denying the worth of the consensus and immemorial 
 judgment of the Church, he cut from under him the 
 claim to that which he accepted as the source and 
 witness of " divine facts." He did not mean to do 
 this, or to do many other things ; but from want of 
 clearness of head, he certainly, in these writings which 
 were complained of, did it. He was, in temper and 
 habit, too desirous to be "orthodox," as Whately feared, 
 to accept in its consequences his own theory. The 
 theory which he put forward in his Bampton Lectures, 
 and on which he founded his plan of comprehension 
 in his pamphlet on Dissent, left nothing standing but 
 the authority of the letter of Scripture. All else 
 right or wrong as it might be was "speculation," 
 "human inference," "dogma." With perfect consist- 
 ency, he did not pretend to take even the Creeds out 
 of this category. But the truth was, he did not con- 
 sciously mean all that he said ; and when keener 
 and more powerful and more theological minds 
 pointed out with relentless accuracy what he had said, 
 he was profuse and overflowing with explanations, 
 which showed how little he had perceived the drift 
 of his words. There is not the least reason to doubt 
 the sincerity of these explanations ; but at the same 
 time they showed the unfitness of a man who had so 
 to explain away his own speculations to be the 
 official guide and teacher of the clergy. The criti- 
 cisms on his language, and the objections to it, were 
 made before these explanations were given ; and 
 though he gave them, he was furious with those 
 who called for them, and he never for a moment 
 
 L
 
 146 THE OXFORD MOVEMENT CHAP. 
 
 admitted that there was anything seriously wrong 
 or mistaken in what he had said. To those who 
 pointed out the meaning and effect of his words 
 and theories, he replied by the assertion of his 
 personal belief. If words mean anything, he had said 
 that neither Unitarians nor any one else could get 
 behind the bare letter, and what he called "facts," of 
 Scripture, which all equally accepted in good faith ; 
 and that therefore there was no reason for excluding 
 Unitarians as long as they accepted the "facts." But 
 when it was pointed out that this reasoning reduced 
 all belief in the realities behind the bare letter to the 
 level of personal and private opinion, he answered 
 by saying that he valued supremely the Creeds and 
 Articles, and by giving a statement of the great Chris- 
 tian doctrines which he held, and which the Church 
 taught. But he never explained what their authority 
 could be with any one but himself. There might be 
 interpretations and inferences from Scripture, by the 
 hundred or the thousand, but no one certain and author- 
 itative one ; none that warranted an organised Church, 
 much more a Catholic and Apostolic Church, founded on 
 the assumption of this interpretation being the one true 
 faith, the one truth of the Bible. The point was brought 
 out forcibly in a famous pamphlet written by Mr. 
 Newman, though without his name, called " Elucida- 
 tions of Dr. Hampden's Theological Statements." 
 This pamphlet was a favourite object of attack on 
 the part of Dr. Hampden's supporters as a flagrant in- 
 stance of unfairness and garbled extracts. No one, they 
 said, ever read the Bampton Lectures, but took their 
 estimate of the work from Mr. Newman's quotations. 
 Extracts are often open to the charge of unfairness, 
 and always to suspicion. But in this case there was
 
 DR. HAMPDEN 147 
 
 no need of unfairness. Dr. Hampden's theory lay 
 on the very surface of his Bampton Lectures and 
 pamphlet ; and any unbiassed judge may be challenged 
 to read these works of his, and say whether the 
 extracts in the "Elucidations" do not adequately 
 represent Dr. Hampden's statements and arguments, 
 and whether the comments on them are forced or 
 strained. They do not represent his explanations, for 
 the explanations had not been given ; and when the 
 explanations came, though they said many things 
 which showed that Dr. Hampden did not mean to be 
 unorthodox and unevangelical, but only anti-scholastic 
 and anti- Roman, they did not unsay a word which he 
 had said. And what this was, what had been Dr. 
 Hampden's professed theological theory up to the 
 time when the University heard the news of his 
 appointment, the " Elucidations" represent as fairly as 
 any adverse statement can represent the subject of its 
 attack. 
 
 In quieter times such an appointment might have 
 passed with nothing more than a paper controversy 
 or protest, or more probably without more than con- 
 versational criticism. But these were not quiet and 
 unsuspicious times. There was reason for disquiet. 
 It was fresh in men's minds what language and 
 speculation like that of the Bampton Lectures had 
 come to in the case of Whately's intimate friend, Blanco 
 White. The unquestionable hostility of Whately's 
 school to the old ideas of the Church had roused 
 alarm and a strong spirit of resistance in Churchmen. 
 Each party was on the watch, and there certainly was 
 something at stake for both parties. Coupled with 
 some recent events, and with the part which Dr. 
 Hampden had taken on the subscription question, the
 
 148 THE OXFORD MOVEMENT CHAP. 
 
 appointment naturally seemed significant. Probably 
 it was not so significant as it seemed on the part at 
 least of Lord Melbourne, who had taken pains to find 
 a fit man. Dr. Hampden was said to have been 
 recommended by Bishop Copleston, and not disallowed 
 by Archbishop Howley. In the University, up to 
 this time,, there had been no authoritative protest 
 against Dr. Hampden's writings. And there were 
 not many Liberals to choose from. In the appoint- 
 ment there is hardly sufficient ground to blame Lord 
 Melbourne. But the outcry against it at Oxford, 
 when it came, was so instantaneous, so strong; and 
 so unusual, that it might have warned Lord Mel- 
 bourne that he had been led into a mistake, out of 
 which it would be wise to seek at least a way of 
 escape. Doubtless it was a strong measure for the 
 University to protest as it did ; but it was also a 
 strong measure, at least in those days, for a Minister 
 of the Crown to force so extremely unacceptable a 
 Regius Professor of Divinity on a great University. 
 Dr. Hampden offered to resign ; and there would have 
 been plenty of opportunities to compensate him for his 
 sacrifice of a post which could only be a painful one. 
 But the temper of both sides was up. The remon- 
 strances from Oxford were treated with something 
 like contempt, and the affair was hurried through till 
 there was no retreating ; and Dr. Hampden became 
 Regius Professor. 
 
 Mr. Palmer has recorded how various efforts were 
 made to neutralise the effect of the appointment. But 
 the Heads of Houses, though angry, were cautious. 
 They evaded the responsibility of stating Dr. Hamp- 
 den's unsound positions ; but to mark their distrust, 
 brought in a proposal to deprive him of his vote in the
 
 jx DR. H AMP DEN 149 
 
 choice of Select Preachers till the University should 
 otherwise determine. It was defeated in Convocation 
 by the veto of the two Proctors (March 1836), who exer- 
 cised their right with the full approval of Dr. Hamp- 
 den's friends, and the indignation of the large majority 
 of the University. But it was not unfairly used : it 
 could have only a suspending effect, of which no one 
 had a right to complain ; and when new Proctors came 
 into office, the proposal was introduced again, and 
 carried (May 1836) by 474 to 94. The Liberal 
 minority had increased since the vote on subscription, 
 and Dr. Hampden went on with his work as if nothing 
 had happened. The attempt was twice made to rescind 
 the vote : first, after the outcry about the Ninetieth 
 Tract and the contest about the Poetry Professorship, 
 by a simple repeal, which was rejected by 334 to 219 
 (June 1842) ; and next, indirectly by a statute enlarg- 
 ing the Professor's powers over Divinity degrees, 
 which was also rejected by 341 to 21 (May 1844). 
 From first to last, these things and others were the 
 unfortunate incidents of an unfortunate appointment. 
 
 The "persecution of Dr. Hampden" has been an 
 unfailing subject of reproach to the party of the Oxford 
 movement, since the days when the Edinburgh Review 
 held them up to public scorn and hatred in an article 
 of strange violence. They certainly had their full 
 share in the opposition to him, and in the measures by 
 which that opposition was carried out. But it would 
 be the greatest mistake to suppose that in this matter 
 they stood alone. All in the University at this time, 
 except a small minority, were of one mind, Heads of 
 Houses and country parsons, Evangelicals and High 
 Churchmen all who felt that the grounds of a definite 
 belief were seriously threatened by Dr. Hampden's
 
 150 THE OXFORD MOVEMENT CHAP. 
 
 speculations. All were angry at the appointment ; all 
 were agreed that something ought to be done to hinder 
 the mischief of it. In this matter Mr. Newman and 
 his friends were absolutely at one with everybody 
 round them, with those who were soon to be their 
 implacable opponents. Whatever deeper view they 
 might have of the evil which had been done by the 
 appointment, and however much graver and more per- 
 manent their objections to it, they were responsible 
 only as the whole University was responsible for what 
 was done against Dr. Hampden. It was convenient 
 afterwards to single them out, and to throw this re- 
 sponsibility and the odium of it on them alone ; and 
 when they came under the popular ban, it was for- 
 gotten that Dr. Gilbert, the Principal of Brasenose, 
 Dr. Symons, the Warden of Wadham, Dr. Faussett, 
 afterwards the denouncer of Dr. Pusey, Mr. Vaughan 
 Thomas, and Mr. Hill of St. Edmund Hall, were 
 quite as forward at the time as Dr. Pusey and 
 Mr. Newman in protesting against Dr. Hampden, 
 and in the steps to make their protest effective. 
 Mr. Palmer, in his Narrative? anxious to dissociate 
 himself from the movement under Mr. Newman's 
 influence, has perhaps underrated the part taken by 
 Mr. Newman and Dr. Pusey; for they, at any rate, 
 did most of the argumentative work. But as far as 
 personal action goes, it is true, as he says, that the 
 "movement against Dr. Hampden was not guided by 
 the Tract- writers." " The condemnation of Dr. Hamp- 
 den, then, was not carried by the Tract-writers ; it was 
 carried by the independent body of the University. 
 The fact is that, had those writers taken any leading 
 part, the measure would have been a failure, for the 
 
 1 Narrative, pp. 29, 30, ed. 1843 ; p. 131, eel. 1883.
 
 DR. HAMPDEN 151 
 
 number of their friends at that time was a very small 
 proportion to the University at large, and there was a 
 general feeling of distrust in the soundness of their 
 views." 
 
 We are a long way from those days in time, and 
 still more in habits and sentiment ; and a manifold and 
 varied experience has taught most of us some lessons 
 against impatience and violent measures. But if we 
 put ourselves back equitably into the ways of thinking 
 prevalent then, the excitement about Dr. Hampden 
 will not seem so unreasonable or so unjustifiable 
 as it is sometimes assumed to be. The University 
 legislation, indeed, to which it led was poor and 
 petty, doing small and annoying things, because 
 the University rulers dared not commit themselves 
 to definite charges. But, in the first place, the 
 provocation was great on the part of the Govern- 
 ment in putting into the chief theological chair an 
 unwelcome man who could only save his orthodoxy 
 by making his speculations mean next to nothing 
 whose ftrimd facie unguarded and startling statements 
 were resolved into truisms put in a grand and obscure 
 form. And in the next place, it was assumed in those 
 days to be the most natural and obvious thing in the 
 world to condemn unsound doctrine, and to exclude 
 unsound teachers. The principle was accepted as in- 
 disputable, however slack might have been in recent 
 times the application of it. That it was accepted, not 
 on one side only, but on all, was soon to be shown by 
 the subsequent course of events. No one suffered 
 more severely and more persistently from its applica- 
 tion than the Tractarians ; no one was more ready to 
 apply it to them than Dr. Hampden with his friends ; 
 no one approved and encouraged its vigorous enforce-
 
 152 THE OXFORD MOVEMENT CHAP. 
 
 ment against them more than Dr. Whately. The idle 
 distinction set up, that they were not merely unsound 
 but dishonest, was a mere insolent pretext to save 
 trouble in argument, and to heighten the charge 
 against them ; no one could seriously doubt that they 
 wrote in good faith as much as Dr. Whately or Dr. 
 Faussett. But unless acts like Dr. Pusey's suspen- 
 sion, and the long proscription that went on for years 
 after it, were mere instances of vindictive retaliation, 
 the reproach of persecution must be shared by all 
 parties then, and by none more than by the party 
 which in general terms most denounced it. Those 
 who think the Hampden agitation unique in its in- 
 justice ought to ask themselves what their party would 
 have done if at any time between 1836 and 1843 Mr. 
 Newman had been placed in Dr. Hampden's seat. 
 
 People in our days mean by religious persecution, 
 what happens when the same sort of repressive policy 
 is applied to a religious party as is applied to vaccin- 
 ation recusants, or to the " Peculiar People." All 
 religious persecution, from the days of Socrates, has 
 taken a legal form, and justified itself on legal 
 grounds. It is the action of authority, or of strong 
 social judgments backed by authority, against a set of 
 opinions, or the expression of them in word or act- 
 usually innovating opinions, but not by any means 
 necessarily such. The disciples of M. Monod, the 
 " Momiers " of Geneva, were persecuted by the 
 Liberals of Geneva, not because they broke away 
 from the creed of Calvin, but because they adhered 
 to it. The word is not properly applied to the inci- 
 dental effects in the way of disadvantage, resulting 
 from some broad constitutional settlement from the 
 government of the Church being Episcopal and not
 
 DR. H AMP DEN 153 
 
 Presbyterian, or its creed Nicene and not Arian any 
 more than it is persecution for a nation to change its 
 government, or for a legitimist to have to live under 
 a republic, or for a Christian to have to live in an 
 infidel state, though persecution may follow from these 
 conditions. But the privilegium passed against Dr. 
 Hampden was an act of persecution, though a mild 
 one compared with what afterwards fell on his op- 
 ponents with his full sanction. Persecution is the 
 natural impulse, in those who think a certain thing 
 right and important or worth guarding, to disable those 
 who, thinking it wrong, are trying to discredit and 
 upset it, and to substitute something different. It 
 implies a state of war, and the resort to the most 
 available weapons to inflict damage on those who are 
 regarded as rebellious and dangerous. These weapons 
 were formidable enough once : they are not without 
 force still. But in its mildest form personal dis- 
 qualification or proscription it is a disturbance which 
 only war justifies. It may, of course, make itself 
 odious by its modes of proceeding, by meanness and 
 shabbiness and violence, by underhand and ignoble 
 methods of misrepresentation and slander, or by cruelty 
 and plain injustice ; and then the odium of these things 
 fairly falls upon it. But it is very hard to draw the 
 line between conscientious repression, feeling itself 
 bound to do what is possible to prevent mischief, and 
 what those who are opposed, if they are the weaker 
 party, of course call persecution. 
 
 If persecution implies a state of war in which one 
 side is stronger, and the other weaker, it is hardly a 
 paradox to say that (i) no one has a right to complain 
 of persecution as such, apart from odious accompani- 
 ments, any more than of superior numbers or hard
 
 154 THE OXFORD MOVEMENT CHAP, ix 
 
 blows in battle; and (2) that every one has a right 
 to take advantage and make the most of being 
 persecuted, by appeals to sympathy and the principle 
 of doing as you would be done by. No one likes to 
 be accused of persecution, and few people like to give 
 up the claim to use it, if necessary. But no one can 
 help observing in the course of events the strange 
 way in which, in almost all cases, the "wheel comes 
 full circle." Apda-avri, TraOelv Chi la fa, /' aspetti? 
 are some of the expressions of Greek awe and 
 Italian shrewdness representing the experience of the 
 world on this subject, on a large scale and a small. 
 Protestants and Catholics, Churchmen and Noncon- 
 formists, have all in their turn made full proof of what 
 seems like a law of action and reaction. Except in cases 
 beyond debate, cases where no justification is possible, 
 the note of failure is upon this mode of repression. 
 Providence, by the visible Nemesis which it seems 
 always to bring round, by the regularity with which 
 it has enforced the rule that infliction and suffering are 
 bound together and in time duly change places, seems 
 certainly and clearly to have declared against it. It 
 may be that no innovating party has a right to com- 
 plain of persecution ; but the question is not for them. 
 It is for those who have the power, and who are 
 tempted to think that they have the call, to persecute. 
 It is for them to consider whether it is right, or wise, or 
 useful for their cause ; whether it is agreeable to what 
 seems the leading of Providence to have recourse 
 to it. 
 
 rdde <puvd 
 
 avTi iraOflv, Tpiytpuv /j.vdos Italian proverb, in Landucci, Diario 
 vd. yEsch. Choeph. 310. Florentine, 1513, p. 343.
 
 CHAPTER X 
 
 GROWTH OF THE MOVEMENT 
 1835-1840 
 
 BY the end of 1835, the band of friends, whom great 
 fears and great hopes for the Church had united, and 
 others who sympathised with them both within and 
 outside the University, had grown into what those 
 who disliked them naturally called a party. The 
 Hampden controversy, though but an episode in the 
 history of the movement, was an important one, and 
 undoubtedly gave a great impulse to it. Dr. H amp- 
 den's attitude and language seemed to be its justifica- 
 tion a palpable instance of what the Church had to 
 expect. And in this controversy, though the feeling 
 against Dr. Hampden's views was so widely shared, 
 and though the majority which voted against him was 
 a very mixed one, and contained some who hoped 
 that the next time they were called to vote it might 
 be against the Tractarians, yet the leaders of the 
 movement had undertaken the responsibility, conspic- 
 uously and almost alone, of pointing out definitely 
 and argumentatively the objections to Dr. Hampden's 
 teaching. The number of Mr. Newman's friends 
 might be, as Mr. Palmer says, insignificant, but it was
 
 i $6 THE OXFORD MOVEMENT CHAP. 
 
 they who had taken the trouble to understand and 
 give expression to the true reasons for alarm. 1 Even 
 in this hasty and imperfect way, the discussion revealed 
 to many how much deeper and more serious the treat- 
 ment of the subject was in the hands of Mr. Newman 
 and Dr. Pusey compared with the ordinary criticisms 
 on Dr. Hampden. He had learned in too subtle a 
 school to be much touched by the popular exceptions 
 to his theories, however loudly expressed. The mis- 
 chief was much deeper. It was that he had, uncon- 
 sciously, no doubt, undermined the foundation of 
 definite Christian belief, and had resolved it into a 
 philosophy, so-called scholastic, which was now ex- 
 ploded. It was the sense of the perilous issues to 
 which this diluted form of Blanco White's speculations, 
 so recklessly patronised by Whately, was leading 
 theological teaching in the University, which opened 
 the eyes of many to the meaning of the movement, 
 and brought some fresh friends to its side. 
 
 There was no attempt to form a party, or to prose- 
 lytise ; there was no organisation, no distinct and 
 recognised party marks. " I would not have it called 
 a party," writes Dr. Newman in the Apologia. But a 
 party it could not help being : quietly and spontane- 
 ously it had grown to be what community of ideas, 
 aims, and sympathies, naturally, and without blame, 
 leads men to become. And it had acquired a number 
 of recognised nicknames, to friends and enemies the 
 sign of growing concentration. For the questions 
 started in the Tracts and outside them became of 
 increasing interest to the more intelligent men who 
 had finished their University course and were pre- 
 
 1 " I answered, the person whom we in writing, and we ought to commit 
 were opposing had committed himself ourselves too." Apologia, p. 143.
 
 x GROWTH OF THE MOVEMENT 157 
 
 paring to enter into life, the Bachelors and younger 
 Masters of Arts. One by one they passed from 
 various states of mind alienation, suspicion, fear, 
 indifference, blank ignorance into a consciousness 
 that something beyond the mere commonplace of 
 religious novelty and eccentricity, of which there 
 had been a good deal recently, was before them ; 
 that doctrines and statements running counter to the 
 received religious language of the day, doctrines about 
 which, in confident prejudice, they had perhaps bandied 
 about off-hand judgments, had more to say for them- 
 selves than was thought at first ; that the questions 
 thus raised drove them in on themselves, and appealed 
 to their honesty and seriousness ; and that, at any rate, 
 in the men who were arresting so much attention, 
 however extravagant their teaching might be called, 
 there was a remarkable degree of sober and reserved 
 force, an earnestness of conviction which could not be 
 doubted, an undeniable and subtle power of touching 
 souls and attracting sympathies. One by one, and 
 in many different ways, these young men went through 
 various stages of curiosity, of surprise, of perplexity, of 
 doubt, of misgiving, of interest ; some were frightened, 
 and wavered, and drew back more or less reluctantly ; 
 others, in spite of themselves, in spite of opposing 
 influences, were led on step by step, hardly knowing 
 whither, by a spell which they could not resist, of 
 intellectual, or still more, moral pressure. Some found 
 their old home teaching completed, explained, lighted 
 up, by that of the new school. Others, shocked at 
 first at hearing the old watchwords and traditions of 
 their homes decried and put aside, found themselves, 
 when they least expected it, passing from the letter 
 to the spirit, from the technical and formal theory to
 
 158 THE OXFORD MOVEMENT CHAP. 
 
 the wide and living truth. And thus, though many 
 of course held aloof, and not a few became hostile, a 
 large number, one by one, some rapidly, others slowly, 
 some unreservedly, others with large and jealous re- 
 serves, more and more took in the leading idea of the 
 movement, accepted the influence of its chiefs, and 
 looked to them for instruction and guidance. As it 
 naturally happens, when a number of minds are drawn 
 together by a common and strong interest, some men, 
 by circumstances, or by strength of conviction, or by 
 the mutual affinities of tastes and character, came more 
 and more into direct personal and intimate relations 
 with the leaders, took service, as it were, under them, 
 and prepared to throw themselves into their plans 
 of work. Others, in various moods, but more in- 
 dependent, more critical, more disturbed about con- 
 sequences, or unpersuaded on special points, formed a 
 kind of fringe of friendly neutrality about the more 
 thoroughgoing portion of the party. And outside of 
 these were thoughtful and able men, to whom the 
 whole movement, with much that was utterly displeas- 
 ing and utterly perplexing, had the interest of being a 
 break-up of stagnation and dull indolence in a place 
 which ought to have the highest spiritual and intel- 
 lectual aims ; who, whatever repelled them, could not 
 help feeling that great ideas, great prospects, a new 
 outburst of bold thought, a new effort of moral 
 purpose and force, had disturbed the old routine ; 
 could not help being fascinated, if only as by a 
 spectacle, by the strange and unwonted teaching, 
 which partly made them smile, partly perhaps per- 
 manently disgusted them, but which also, they could 
 not deny, spoke in a language more fearless, more 
 pathetic, more subtle, and yet more human, than they
 
 x GROWTH OF THE MOVEMENT 159 
 
 had heard from the religious teachers of the day. 
 And thus the circle of persons interested in the Tracts, 
 of persons who sympathised with their views, of per- 
 sons who more and more gave a warm and earnest 
 adherence to them, was gradually extended in the 
 University and, in time, in the country also. The 
 truth was that the movement, in its many sides, had 
 almost monopolised for the time both the intelligence 
 and the highest religious earnestness of the University, 1 
 and either in curiosity or inquiry, in approval or in 
 condemnation, all that was deepest and most vigorous, 
 all that was most refined, most serious, most high- 
 toned, and most promising in Oxford was drawn to 
 the issues which it raised. It is hardly too much to 
 say that wherever men spoke seriously of the grounds 
 and prospects of religion, in Oxford, or in Vacation 
 reading-parties, in their walks and social meetings, in 
 their studies or in common-room, the " Tractarian " 
 doctrines, whether assented to or laughed at, de- 
 plored or fiercely denounced, were sure to come to 
 the front. All subjects in discussion seemed to lead 
 up to them art and poetry, Gothic architecture and 
 German romance and painting, the philosophy of 
 language, and the novels of Walter Scott and Miss 
 Austen, Coleridge's transcendentalism and Bishop 
 Butler's practical wisdom, Plato's ideas and Aristotle's 
 analysis. It was difficult to keep them out of lecture- 
 rooms and examinations for Fellowships. 
 
 But in addition to the intrinsic interest of the 
 questions and discussions which the movement opened, 
 
 1 " I very much doubt between Ox- Rabbinists, i.e. Puseyites." But this was 
 
 ford and Cambridge for my boy. Ox- probably an exaggeration. Whately's 
 
 ford, which I should otherwise prefer, Life ; letter of Oct. 1838, p. 163 (ed. 
 
 on many accounts, has at present two- 1875). 
 thirds of the steady - reading men,
 
 160 THE OXFORD MOVEMENT CHAP. 
 
 personal influence played a great and decisive part in 
 it. As it became a party, it had chiefs. It was not 
 merely as leaders of thought but as teachers with their 
 disciples, as friends with friends, as witnesses and 
 examples of high self- rule and refined purity and 
 goodness, that the chiefs whose names were in all 
 men's mouths won the hearts and trust of so many, 
 in the crowds that stood about them. Foremost, of 
 course, ever since he had thrown himself into it in 
 1835, was Dr. Pusey. His position, his dignified 
 office, his learning, his solidity and seriousness of 
 character, his high standard of religious life, the 
 charm of his charity, and the sweetness of his temper 
 naturally gave him the first place in the movement in 
 Oxford and the world. It came to be especially 
 associated with him. Its enemies fastened on it a 
 nickname from his name, and this nickname, partly 
 from a greater smoothness of sound, partly from an 
 odd suggestion of something funny in it, came more 
 into use than others ; and the terms Puseismus, 
 Pusdisme, Piiseista found their way into German 
 lecture -halls and Paris salons and remote convents 
 and police offices in Italy and Sicily ; indeed, in the 
 shape of nov^eicr/Ao? it might be lighted on in a Greek 
 newspaper. Dr. Pusey was a person who commanded 
 the utmost interest and reverence ; he was more in 
 communication with the great world outside than 
 Oxford people generally, and lived much in retirement 
 from Oxford society ; but to all interested in the 
 movement he was its representative and highest 
 authority. He and Mr. Newman had the fullest 
 confidence in one another, though conscious at times 
 of not perfect agreement ; yet each had a line of his 
 own, and each of them was apt to do things out of
 
 x GROWTH OF THE MOVEMENT 161 
 
 his own head. Dr. Pusey was accessible to all who 
 wished to see him ; but he did not encourage visits 
 which wasted time. And the person who was pre- 
 eminently, not only before their eyes, but within 
 their reach in the ordinary intercourse of man with 
 man, was Mr. Newman. Mr. Newman, who lived 
 in College in the ordinary way of a resident Fellow, 
 met other university men, older or younger, on 
 equal terms. As time went on, a certain wonder 
 and awe gathered round him. People were a little 
 afraid of him ; but the fear was in themselves, not 
 created by any intentional stiffness or coldness on 
 his part. He did not try to draw men to him, he was 
 no proselytiser ; he shrank with fear and repugnance 
 from the character it was an invasion of the privileges 
 of the heart. 1 But if men came to him, he was ac- 
 cessible ; he allowed his friends to bring their friends 
 to him, and met them more than half-way. He was 
 impatient of mere idle worldliness, of conceit and im- 
 pertinence, of men who gave themselves airs ; he was 
 very impatient of pompous and solemn emptiness. 
 But he was very patient with those whom he believed 
 to sympathise with what was nearest his heart ; no 
 one, probably, of his power and penetration and sense 
 of the absurd, was ever so ready to comply with the 
 two demands which a witty prelate proposed to put 
 into the examination in the Consecration Service of 
 Bishops: "Wilt thou answer thy letters?" " Wilt 
 thou suffer fools gladly ? " But courteous, affable, easy 
 as he was, he was a keen trier of character ; he 
 gauged, and men felt that he gauged, their motives, 
 
 1 "The sagacious and aspiring man leges and rights. " Prophetical Office of 
 of the world, the scrutiniser of the the Church, p. 132. 
 heart, the conspirator against its privi- 
 
 M
 
 162 THE OXFORD MOVEMENT CHAP. 
 
 their reality and soundness of purpose ; he let them 
 see, if they at all came into his intimacy, that if they 
 were not, he, at any rate, was in the deepest earnest. 
 And at an early period, in a memorable sermon, 1 the 
 vivid impression of which at the time still haunts the 
 recollection of some who heard it, he gave warning to 
 his friends and to those whom his influence touched, 
 that no child's play lay before them ; that they were 
 making, it might be without knowing it, the " Ventures 
 of Faith." But feeling that he had much to say, and 
 that a university was a place for the circulation and 
 discussion of ideas, he let himself be seen and known 
 and felt, both publicly and in private. He had his 
 breakfast parties and his evening gatherings. His con- 
 versation ranged widely, marked by its peculiar stamp 
 entire ease, unstudied perfection of apt and clean- 
 cut words, unexpected glimpses of a sure and piercing 
 judgment. At times, at more private meetings, the 
 violin, which he knew how to touch, came into play. 
 
 He had great gifts for leadership. But as a 
 party chief he was also deficient in some of the 
 qualities which make a successful one. His doctrine 
 of the Church had the disadvantage of an apparently 
 intermediate and ambiguous position, refusing the 
 broad, intelligible watchwords and reasonings of 
 popular religionism. It was not without clearness and 
 strength ; but such a position naturally often leads to 
 what seem over-subtle modes of argument, seemingly 
 over- subtle because deeper and more original than 
 the common ones ; and he seemed sometimes to want 
 sobriety in his use of dialectic weapons, which he 
 wielded with such force and effect. Over-subtlety in 
 the leader of a party tends to perplex friends and give 
 
 1 Parochial Sermons, iv. 20. Feb. 1836.
 
 x GROWTH OF THE MOVEMENT 163 
 
 a handle to opponents. And with all his confidence 
 in his cause, and also in his power and his call to use 
 it, he had a curious shyness and self-distrust as to his 
 own way of doing what he had to do ; he was afraid 
 of " wilfulness," of too great reliance on intellect. He 
 had long been accustomed to observe and judge 
 himself, and while conscious of his force, he was fully 
 alive to the drawbacks, moral and intellectual, which 
 wait on the highest powers. When attacks were made 
 on him by authorities, as in the case of the Tract No. 
 90, his more eager friends thought him too submissive ; 
 they would have liked a more combative temper and 
 would not accept his view that confidence in him was 
 lost, because it might be shaken. 1 But if he bent 
 before official authority the disapproval of friends was 
 a severer trouble. Most tender in his affections, most 
 trustful in his confidence, craving for sympathy, it 
 came like a shock and chill when things did not go 
 right between himself and his friends. He was too 
 sensitive under such disapproval for a successful party 
 chief. The true party leader takes these things as 
 part of that tiresome human stupidity and perverse- 
 ness with which he must make his account. Perhaps 
 they sting for the moment, but he brushes them away 
 and goes forward, soon forgetting them. But with 
 Mr. Newman, his cause was identified with his friend- 
 ships and even his family affections. And as a leader, 
 he was embarrassed by the keenness with which he 
 
 1 Vide J. B. Mozley, Letters, pp. 1 14, was irrelevant to the present occasion, 
 
 115. " Confidence in me was lost, but I the question being simply on a point 
 
 had already lost confidence in myself." of theological interpretation. I have 
 
 This, to a friend like J. B. Mozley, always had a prejudice against general 
 
 seemed exaggeration. " Though ad- confessions." Mozley plainly thought 
 
 miring the letter [to the Vice-Chan- Newman's attitude too meek : he 
 
 cellor] I confess, for my own part, I would have liked something more 
 
 think a general confession of humility spirited and pugnacious.
 
 164 ' THE OXFORD MO VEMENT CHAP. 
 
 sympathised with the doubts and fears of friends ; 
 want of sympathy and signs of distrust darkened the 
 prospect of the future ; they fell like a blight on his 
 stores of hope, never over -abundant ; they tempted 
 him, not to assert himself, but to throw up the game 
 as convicted of unfitness, and retire for good and all 
 to his books and silence. " Let them," he seemed to 
 say, "have their way, as they will not let me have 
 mine ; they have the right to take theirs, only not to 
 make me take it." In spite of his enthusiasm and 
 energy, his unceasing work, his occasional bursts of 
 severe punishment inflicted on those who provoked him, 
 there was always present this keen sensitiveness, the 
 source of so much joy and so much pain. He would 
 not have been himself without it. But he would have 
 been a much more powerful and much more formidable 
 combatant if he had cared less for what his friends 
 felt, and followed more unhesitatingly his own line 
 and judgment. This keen sensitiveness made him more 
 quickly alive than other people to all that lay round 
 him and before ; it made him quicker to discern 
 danger and disaster ; it led him to give up hope and 
 to retire from the contest long before he had a right 
 to do so. The experience of later years shows that 
 he had despaired too soon. Such delicate sensitive- 
 ness, leading to impatience, was not capable of coping 
 with the rough work involved in the task of reform, 
 which he had undertaken. 
 
 All this time the four o'clock sermons at St. 
 Mary's were always going on. But, besides these, 
 he anticipated a freedom familiar now, but unknown 
 then of public lecturing. In Advent and after Easter 
 a company, never very large, used to gather on a week- 
 day afternoon in Adam de Brome's Chapel the old
 
 x GROWTH OF THE MOVEMENT 163 
 
 Chapel of " Our Lady of Littlemore " to hear him 
 lecture on some theological subject. It is a dark, 
 dreary appendage to St. Mary's on the north side, in 
 which Adam de Brome, Edward II's almoner, and the 
 founder of Oriel College, is supposed to lie, beneath 
 an unshapely tomb, covered by a huge slab of Purbeck 
 marble, from which the brass has been stripped. The 
 place is called a chapel, but is more like a court or 
 place of business, for which, indeed, it was used in 
 the old days by one of the Faculties of the House of 
 Convocation, which held its assemblies there. At the 
 end is a high seat and desk for the person presiding, 
 and an enclosure and a table for officials below him ; 
 and round the rest of the dingy walls run benches 
 fixed to the wall, dingy as the walls themselves. But 
 it also had another use. On occasions of a university 
 sermon, a few minutes before it began, the Heads of 
 Houses assembled, as they still assemble, in the chapel, 
 ranging themselves on the benches round the walls. 
 The Vice -Chancellor has his seat on one side, the 
 preacher, with the two Proctors below him, sits 
 opposite ; and there all sit in their robes, more or 
 less grand, according to the day, till the beadle comes 
 to announce that it is time to form the procession into 
 church. This desolate place Mr. Newman turned into 
 his lecture-room ; in it he delivered the lectures which 
 afterwards became the volume on the Prophetical 
 Character of the Church, or Romanism and Popular 
 Protestantism ; the lectures which formed the volume 
 on Justification ; those on Antichrist, and on Ration- 
 alism and the Canon of Scripture, which afterwards 
 became Nos. 83 and 85 of the Tracts for the Times? 
 
 1 Romanism and Popular Protest- 1837, published March 1838; Canon 
 antism, from 183410 1836, published of Scripture, published May 1838; 
 March 1837 ; Justification, after Easter Antichrist, published June 1838.
 
 166 THE OXFORD MOVEMENT CHAP. 
 
 The force, the boldness, the freedom from the 
 trammels of commonplace, the breadth of view and 
 grasp of the subject which marked those lectures, may 
 be seen in them still. But it is difficult to realise now 
 the interest with which they were heard at the time 
 by the first listeners to that clear and perfectly 
 modulated voice, opening to them fresh and original 
 ways of regarding questions which seemed worn out 
 and exhausted. The volumes which grew out of the 
 Adam de Brome lectures were some of the most 
 characteristic portions of the theological literature of 
 the early movement. They certainly greatly influenced 
 the course of thought in it, and some of its most 
 serious issues. 
 
 The movement was not one of mere opinion. It 
 took two distinct though connected lines. It was, on 
 the one hand, theological ; on the other, resolutely 
 practical. Theologically, it dealt with great questions 
 of religious principle What is the Church ? Is it a 
 reality or a mode of speech ? On what grounds does 
 it rest ? How may it be known ? Is it among us ? 
 How is it to be discriminated from its rivals or counter- 
 feits ? What is its essential constitution ? What 
 does it teach ? What are its shortcomings ? Does it 
 need reform ? But, on the other hand, the movement 
 was marked by its deep earnestness on the practical 
 side of genuine Christian life. Very early in the 
 movement (1833) a series of sketches of primitive 
 Christian life appeared in the British Magazine 
 afterwards collected under the title of the Church 
 of the Fathers (1840) to remind people who were 
 becoming interested in ancient and patristic theology 
 that, besides the doctrines to be found in the vast 
 folios of the Fathers, there were to be sought in
 
 x GROWTH OF THE MOVEMENT 167 
 
 them and laid to heart the temptations and trials, the 
 aspirations and moral possibilities of actual life, " the 
 tone and modes of thought, the habits and manners of 
 the early times of the Church." The note struck in 
 the first of Mr. Newman's published sermons " Holi- 
 ness necessary for future blessedness" was never 
 allowed to be out of mind. The movement was, 
 above all, a moral one ; it was nothing, allowed to be 
 nothing, if it was not this. 1 Seriousness, reverence, 
 the fear of insincere words and unsound professions, 
 were essential in the character, which alone it would 
 tolerate in those who made common cause with it. 
 
 Its ethical tendency was shown in two things, 
 which were characteristic of it. One was the increased 
 care for the Gospels, and study of them, compared with 
 other parts of the Bible. Evangelical theology had 
 dwelt upon the work of Christ, and laid comparatively 
 little stress on His example, or the picture left us of 
 His Personality and Life. It regarded the Epistles 
 of St. Paul as the last word of the Gospel message. 
 People who can recall the popular teaching, which was 
 spoken of then as " sound " and " faithful," and " preach- 
 ing Christ," can remember how the Epistles were ran- 
 sacked for texts to prove the " sufficiency of Scripture " 
 or the ''right of private judgment," or the distinc- 
 tion between justification and sanctification, while the 
 Gospel narrative was imperfectly studied and was felt 
 to be much less interesting. The movement made 
 
 1 Cf. Lyra Apostolica, No. 65 : 
 Thou to wax fierce 
 In the cause of the Lord ! 
 
 Anger and zeal, 
 And the joy of the brave, 
 Who bade thee to feel, 
 Sin's slave ?
 
 1 68 THE OXFORD MOVEMENT CHAP. 
 
 a great change. The great Name stood no longer for 
 an abstract symbol of doctrine, but for a living Master, 
 who could teach as well as save. And not forgetting 
 whither He had gone and what He was, the readers 
 of Scripture now sought Him eagerly in those sacred 
 records, where we can almost see and hear His going 
 in and out among men. It was a change in the look 
 and use of Scripture, which some can still look back 
 to as an epoch in their religious history. The other 
 feature was the increased and practical sense of the 
 necessity of self-discipline, of taking real trouble with 
 one's self to keep thoughts and wishes in order, to lay 
 the foundation of habits, to acquire the power of self- 
 control. Deeply fixed in the mind of the teachers, 
 this serious governance of life, this direction and puri- 
 fication of its aims, laid strong hold on the consciences 
 of those who accepted their teaching. This training 
 was not showy ; it was sometimes austere, even ex- 
 travagantly austere ; but it was true, and enduring, 
 and it issued often in a steady and unconscious eleva- 
 tion of the religious character. How this character 
 was fed and nurtured and encouraged how, too, it 
 was frankly warned of its dangers, may be seen in 
 those Parochial Sermons at St. Mary's, under whose 
 inspiration it was developed, and which will always be 
 the best commentary on the character thus formed. 
 Even among those who ultimately parted from the 
 movement, with judgment more or less unfavourable 
 to its theology and general line, it left, as if unefTace- 
 able, this moral stamp ; this value for sincerity and 
 simplicity of feeling and life, this keen sense of the 
 awfulness of things unseen. There was something 
 sui generis "in. the profoundly serious, profoundly 
 reverent tone, about everything that touched religion
 
 x GROWTH OF THE MOVEMENT 169 
 
 in all who had ever come strongly under its 
 influence. 
 
 Of course the party soon had the faults of a party, 
 real and imputed. 1 Is it conceivable that there should 
 ever have been a religious movement, which has not 
 provoked smiles from those outside of it, and which has 
 not lent itself to caricature ? There were weaker 
 members of it, and headstrong ones, and imitative 
 ones ; there were grotesque and absurd ones ; some 
 were deeper, some shallower ; some liked it for its 
 excitement, and some liked it for its cause ; there were 
 those who were for pushing on, and those who were 
 for holding back ; there were men of combat, and men 
 of peace ; there were those whom it made conceited 
 and self-important, and those whom it drove into 
 seriousness, anxiety, and retirement. But, whatever 
 faults it had, a pure and high spirit ruled in it ; there 
 were no disloyal members, and there were none who 
 sought their own in it, or thought of high things for 
 themselves in joining it. It was this whole-hearted- 
 ness, this supreme reverence for moral goodness, more 
 even than the great ability of the leaders, and in spite 
 of mistakes and failures, which gave its cohesion and 
 its momentum to the movement in its earlier stages. 
 
 The state of feeling and opinion among Church- 
 men towards the end of 1835, two years after the 
 Tracts had begun, is thus sketched by one who was 
 anxiously observing it, in the preface to the second 
 volume of the Tracts (November 1835). 
 
 In completing the second volume of a publication, to which the 
 circumstances of the day have given rise, it may be right to allude 
 to a change which has taken place in them since the date of its 
 
 1 This weak side was portrayed Mr. Newman in 1848, after he left the 
 with severity in a story published by English Church Loss and Gain.
 
 i;o THE OXFORD MOVEMENT CHAP. 
 
 commencement. At that time, in consequence of long security, 
 the attention of members of our Church had been but partially 
 engaged, in ascertaining the grounds of their adherence to it ; but 
 the imminent peril to all which is dear to them which has since been 
 confessed, has naturally turned their thoughts that way, and obliged 
 them to defend it on one or other of the principles which are usually 
 put forward in its behalf. Discussions have thus been renewed in 
 various quarters, on points which had long remained undisturbed ; 
 and though numbers continue undecided in opinion, or take up a 
 temporary position in some one of the hundred middle points which 
 may be assumed between the two main theories in which the ques- 
 tion issues ; and others, again, have deliberately entrenched them- 
 selves in the modern or ultra -Protestant alternative; yet, on the 
 whole, there has been much hearty and intelligent adoption, and 
 much respectful study, of those more primitive views maintained by 
 our great Divines. As the altered state of public information and 
 opinion has a necessary bearing on the efforts of those who desire 
 to excite attention to the subject (in which number the writers of 
 these Tracts are to be included), it will not be inappropriate briefly 
 to state in this place what it is conceived is the present position of 
 the great body of Churchmen with reference to it. 
 
 While we have cause to be thankful for the sounder and more 
 accurate language, which is now very generally adopted among well- 
 judging men on ecclesiastical subjects, we must beware of over- 
 estimating what has been done, and so becoming sanguine in our 
 hopes of success, or slackening our exertions to secure it. Many 
 more persons, doubtless, have taken up a profession of the main 
 doctrine in question, that, namely, of the one Catholic and Apostolic 
 Church, than fully enter into it. This was to be expected, it being the 
 peculiarity of all religious teaching, that words are imparted before 
 ideas. A child learns his Creed or Catechism before he understands 
 it ; and in beginning any deep subject we are all but children to the 
 end of our lives. The instinctive perception of a rightly instructed 
 mind, the / rima facie force of the argument, or the authority of our 
 celebrated writers, have all had their due and extensive influence in 
 furthering the reception of the doctrine, when once it was openly 
 maintained ; to which must be added the prospect of the loss of 
 State protection, which made it necessary to look out for other 
 reasons for adherence to the Church besides that of obedience to 
 the civil magistrate. Nothing which has spread quickly has been
 
 x GROWTH OF THE MOVEMENT 171 
 
 received thoroughly. Doubtless there are a number of seriously- 
 minded persons who think that they admit the doctrine in question 
 much more fully than they do, and who would be startled at seeing 
 that realised in particulars which they confess in an abstract form. 
 Many there are who do not at all feel that it is capable of a practical 
 application ; and while they bring it forward on special occasions, 
 in formal expositions of faith, or in answer to a direct interrogatory, 
 let it slip from their minds almost entirely in their daily conduct or 
 their religious teaching, from the long and inveterate habit of think- 
 ing and acting without it. We must not, then, at all be surprised 
 at finding that to modify the principles and motives on which men 
 act is not the work of a day ; nor at undergoing disappointments, 
 at witnessing relapses, misconceptions, sudden disgusts, and, on the 
 other hand, abuses and perversions of the true doctrine, in the case 
 of those who have taken it up with more warmth than discernment. 
 
 From the end of 1835, or tne beginning of 1836, 
 the world outside of Oxford began to be alive to the 
 force and the rapid growth of this new and, to the world 
 at large, not very intelligible movement. The ideas 
 which had laid hold so powerfully on a number of 
 leading minds in the University began to work with 
 a spell, which seemed to many inexplicable, on others 
 unconnected with them. This rapidity of expansion, 
 viewed as a feature of a party, was noticed on all 
 sides, by enemies no less than friends. In an article 
 in the British Critic of April 1839, by Mr. Newman, 
 on the State of Religious Parties, the fact is illustrated 
 from contemporary notices. 
 
 There is at the present moment a reaction in the Church, and a 
 growing reaction, towards the views which it has been the endeavours 
 [of the Tract writers] and, as it seemed at the commencement, almost 
 hopeless endeavours, to advocate. The fairness of the prospect at 
 present is proved by the attack made on them by the public journals, 
 and is confessed by the more candid and the more violent among 
 their opponents. Thus the amiable Mr. Bickersteth speaks of it as
 
 172 THE OXFORD MOVEMENT CHAP. 
 
 having manifested itself " with the most rapid growth of the hot-bed 
 of these evil days." The scoffing author of the Via Media says : 
 " At this moment the Via is crowded with young enthusiasts who 
 never presume to argue, except against the propriety of arguing at 
 all" The candid Mr. Baden-Powell, who sees more of the diffi- 
 culties of the controversy than the rest of their antagonists put 
 together, says that it is clear that "these views . . . have been 
 extensively adopted, and are daily gaining ground among a con- 
 siderable and influential portion of the members, as well as the 
 ministers of the Established Church." The author of the Natural 
 History of Enthusiasm says: "The spread of these doctrines is in 
 fact having the effect of rendering all other distinctions obsolete. 
 Soon there will be no middle ground left, and every man, especially 
 every clergyman, will be compelled to make his choice between the 
 two." . . . The Bishop of Chester speaks of the subject " daily 
 assuming a more serious and alarming aspect " : a gossiping writer 
 of the moment describes these doctrines as having insinuated them- 
 selves not only into popular churches and fashionable chapels, and 
 the columns of newspapers, but " into the House of Commons." 
 
 And the writer of the article goes on : 
 
 Now, if there be any truth in these remarks, it is plainly idle 
 and perverse to refer the change of opinions which is now going on 
 to the acts of two or three individuals, as is sometimes done. Of 
 course every event in human affairs has a beginning ; and a begin- 
 ning implies a when, and a where, and a by whom, and how. But 
 except in these necessary circumstances, the phenomenon in ques- 
 tion is in a manner quite independent of things visible and historical. 
 It is not here or there ; it has no progress, no causes, no fortunes : 
 it is not a movement, it is a spirit, it is a spirit afloat, neither " in 
 the secret chambers" nor "in the desert," but everywhere. It is 
 within us, rising up in the heart where it was least expected, and 
 working its way, though not in secret, yet so subtly and impalpably, 
 as hardly to admit of precaution or encounter on any ordinary 
 human rules of opposition. It is an adversary in the air, a some- 
 thing one and entire, a whole wherever it is, unapproachable and 
 incapable of being grasped, as being the result of causes far deeper 
 than political or other visible agencies, the spiritual awakening of 
 spiritual wants.
 
 x GROWTH OF THE MOVEMENT 173 
 
 Nothing can show more strikingly the truth of this representa- 
 tion than to refer to what may be called the theological history of 
 the individuals who, whatever be their differences from each other 
 on important or unimportant points, yet are associated together in 
 the advocacy of the doctrines in question. Dr. Hook and Mr. 
 Churton represent the High Church dignitaries of the last genera- 
 tion ; Mr. Perceval, the Tory aristocracy ; Mr. Keble is of the 
 country clergy, and comes from valleys and woods, far removed 
 both from notoriety and noise ; Mr. Palmer and Mr. Todd are of 
 Ireland ; Dr. Pusey became what he is from among the Universities 
 of Germany, and after a severe and tedious analysis of Arabic MSS. 
 Mr. Dodsworth is said to have begun in the study of Prophecy; 
 Mr. Newman to have been much indebted to the friendship of 
 Archbishop Whately ; Mr. Froude, if any one, gained his views from 
 his own mind. Others have passed over from Calvinism and 
 kindred religions. 
 
 Years afterwards, and in changed circumstances, the 
 same writer has left the following record of what came 
 before his experience in those years : x 
 
 From beginnings so small (I said), from elements of thought so 
 fortuitous, with prospects so unpromising, the Anglo-Catholic party 
 suddenly became a power in the National Church, and an object of 
 alarm to her rulers and friends. Its originators would have found 
 it difficult to say what they aimed at of a practical kind : rather, they 
 put forth views and principles, for their own sake, because they were 
 true, as if they were obliged to say them ; and, as they might be 
 themselves surprised at their earnestness in uttering them, they had 
 as great cause to be surprised at the success which attended their 
 propagation. And, in fact, they could only say that those doctrines 
 were in the air ; that to assert was to prove, and that to explain was 
 to persuade ; and that the movement in which they were taking part 
 was the birth of a crisis rather than of a place. In a very few years 
 a school of opinion was formed, fixed in its principles, indefinite 
 and progressive in their range; and it extended itself into every part 
 of the country. If we inquire what the world thought of it, we 
 have still more to raise our wonder ; for, not to mention the excite- 
 
 1 Apologia, p. 156.
 
 174 THE OXFORD MOVEMENT CHAP, x 
 
 ment it caused in England, the movement and its party-names were 
 known to the police of Italy and to the backwoodmen of America. 
 And so it proceeded, getting stronger and stronger every year, till it 
 came into collision with the Nation and that Church of the Nation, 
 which it began by professing especially to serve.
 
 CHAPTER XI 
 
 THE ROMAN QUESTION 
 
 THE Hampden controversy had contributed to bring 
 to the front a question, which from the first starting 
 of the Tracts had made itself felt, but which now 
 became a pressing one. If the Church of England 
 claimed to be part of the Catholic Church, what was 
 the answer of the Church of England to the claims 
 and charges of the Church of Rome ? What were the 
 true distinctions between the doctrines of the two 
 Churches on the great points on which they were 
 supposed to be at issue ? The vague outcry of 
 Popery had of course been raised both against the 
 general doctrine of the Church, enforced in the Tracts, 
 and against special doctrines and modes of speaking, 
 popularly identified with Romanism ; and the answer 
 had been an appeal to the authority of the most 
 learned and authoritative of our writers. But, of 
 course, to the general public this learning was new ; 
 and the cry went on with a dreary and stupid mono- 
 tony. But the charges against Dr. Hampden led his 
 defenders, to adopt as their best weapon an aggressive 
 policy. To the attack on his orthodoxy, the counter 
 buffet was the charge against his chief opponents of 
 secret or open Romanising. In its keenest and most
 
 176 THE OXFORD MOVEMENT CHAP. 
 
 popular form it was put forth in a mocking pamphlet 
 written probably under Whately's inspiration by his 
 most trusted confidant, Dr. Dickinson, in which, in 
 the form of a " Pastoral Epistle from his Holiness the 
 Pope to some Members of the University of Oxford," 
 the Tract-writers are made to appear as the emissaries 
 and secret tools of Rome, as in a jeu c esprit of 
 Whately's they are made to appear as the veiled 
 prophets of infidelity. 1 It was clever, but not clever 
 enough to stand, at least in Oxford, against Dr. 
 Pusey's dignified and gravely earnest Remonstrance 
 against its injustice and trifling. But the fire of all 
 Dr. Hampden's friends had been drawn on the leaders 
 of the movement. With them, and almost alone with 
 them, the opposition to him was made a personal 
 matter. As time went on, those who had been as 
 hot as they against Dr. Hampden managed to get 
 their part in the business forgotten. Old scores 
 between Orthodox, Evangelicals, and Liberals were 
 wiped out, and the Tractarians were left to bear 
 alone the odium of the " persecution " of Dr. Hamp- 
 den. It must be said that they showed no signs of 
 caring for it. 
 
 But the Roman controversy was looming in earnest, 
 and it was idle to expect to keep it long out of sight. 
 The Tracts had set forth with startling vehemence 
 the forgotten claims of the Church. One reason why 
 this had been done was the belief, as stated in the first 
 volume of them, " that nothing but these neglected 
 doctrines, faithfully preached, will repress the exten- 
 sion of Popery, for which the ever-multiplying divisions 
 of the -religious world are too clearly preparing the 
 way." 2 The question, What is the Church ? was one 
 
 1 Whately's Life, ed. 1875, pp. 187-190. - Advertisement to vol. i. 1st Nov. 1834.
 
 xi THE ROMAN QUESTION 177 
 
 which the conditions of the times would not permit 
 men any longer to leave alone. It had become 
 urgent to meet it clearly and decisively. " We could 
 not move a step in comfort till this was done." l " The 
 controversy with the Romanists," writes Mr. Newman 
 in No. 71 of the Tracts, about the end of 1835, "has 
 overtaken us ' like a summer's cloud.' We find our- 
 selves in various parts of the country preparing for it, 
 yet, when we look back, we cannot trace the steps by 
 which we arrived at our present position. We do not 
 recollect what our feelings were this time last year on 
 the subject ; what was the state of our apprehensions 
 and anticipations. All we know is, that here we are, 
 from long security ignorant why we are not Roman 
 Catholics, and they on the other side are said to 
 be spreading and strengthening on all sides of us, 
 vaunting of their success, real or apparent, and taunt- 
 ing us with our inability to argue with them." 
 
 The attitude taken by Mr. Newman at this time, 
 as regards the Roman Church, both in the Tracts and 
 in his book on Romanism and Popular Protestantism, 
 published in the early months of 1836, was a new one. 
 He had started, as he tells us, with the common belief 
 that the Pope was Antichrist, and that the case was so 
 clear against the whole system, doctrinal and practical, 
 of the Church of Rome, that it scarcely needed further 
 examination. His feeling against Rome had been 
 increased by the fierce struggle about Emancipation, 
 and by the political conduct of the Roman Catholic 
 party afterwards ; and his growing dissatisfaction with 
 the ordinary Protestantism had no visible effect in 
 softening this feeling. Hurrell Froude's daring ques- 
 tions had made his friends feel that there might be 
 
 1 Apologia, p. 139. 
 N
 
 178 THE OXFORD MOVEMENT CHAP. 
 
 more to be known about the subject than they yet 
 knew ; yet what the fellow-travellers saw of things 
 abroad in their visit to the South in 1832 did not 
 impress them favourably. " They are wretched Tri- 
 dentines everywhere," was Froude's comment. But 
 attention had been drawn to the subject, and its deep 
 interest and importance and difficulty recognised. Men 
 began to read with new eyes. Froude's keen and 
 deep sense of shortcomings at home disposed him to 
 claim equity and candour in judging of the alleged 
 faults and corruptions of the Church abroad. It 
 did more, it disposed him naturally enough, but 
 still unfairly, and certainly without adequate know- 
 ledge to treat Roman shortcomings with an indul- 
 gence which he refused to English. Mr. Newman, 
 knowing more, and more comprehensive in his view 
 of things, and therefore more cautious and guarded 
 than Froude, was much less ready to allow a favourable 
 interpretation of the obvious allegations against Rome. 
 But thought and reading, and the authority of our 
 own leading divines, had brought him to the conviction 
 that whatever was to be said against the modern 
 Roman Church and the charges against it were 
 very heavy it was still, amid serious corruption and 
 error, a teacher to the nations of the Christian creed 
 and hope ; it had not forfeited, any more than the 
 English Church, its title to be a part of that historic 
 body which connects us with the Apostles of our Lord. 
 It had a strong and consistent theory to oppose to its 
 assailants ; it had much more to say for itself than the 
 popular traditions supposed. This was no new idea 
 in Anglican divinity, however ill it might sort with the 
 current language of Protestant controversy. But our 
 old divines, more easily satisfied than we with the
 
 xi THE ROMAN QUESTION 179 
 
 course of things at home under the protection of the 
 Stuart kings, and stung to bitter recrimination by 
 the insults and the unscrupulous political intrigues of 
 Roman Catholic agents, had exhausted the language 
 of vituperation against a great aggressive rival, which 
 was threatening everything that they held dear. They 
 had damaged their own character for fairness, and 
 overlaid their substantial grounds of objection and 
 complaint, by this unbalanced exaggeration. Mr. 
 Newman, in his study of these matters, early saw both 
 the need and the difficulty of discrimination in the 
 Roman controversy. It had to be waged, not as of 
 old, with penal legislation behind, but against adver- 
 saries who could now make themselves listened to, 
 and before a public sufficiently robust in its Protestant- 
 ism, to look with amused interest on a dialectical 
 triumph of the Roman over the Anglican claims. 
 Romanism, he thought, was fatal both to his recent 
 hopes for the English Church, and to the honour and 
 welfare of Christianity at large. But in opposing it, 
 ground loosely taken of old must be carefully ex- 
 amined, and if untenable, abandoned. Arguments 
 which proved too much, which availed against any 
 Church at all, must be given up. Popular objections, 
 arising from ignorance or misconception, must be 
 reduced to their true limits or laid aside. The con- 
 troversy was sure to be a real one, and nothing but 
 what was real and would stand scrutiny was worth 
 anything in it. 
 
 Mr. Newman had always been impressed with 
 the greatness of the Roman Church. Of old it had 
 seemed to him great with the greatness of Antichrist. 
 Now it seemed great with the strange weird greatness 
 of a wonderful mixed system, commanding from its
 
 i8o THE OXFORD MOVEMENT CHAP. 
 
 extent of sway and its imperial authority, complicated 
 and mysterious in its organisation and influence, in its 
 devotion and its superstitions, and surpassing every 
 other form of religion both in its good and its evil. 1 
 What now presented itself to Mr. Newman's thoughts, 
 instead of the old notion of a pure Church on one 
 side, and a corrupt Church on the other, sharply 
 opposed to one another, was the more reasonable 
 supposition of two great portions of the divided 
 Church, each with its realities of history and fact and 
 character, each with its special claims and excellences, 
 each with its special sins and corruptions, and neither 
 realising in practice and fact all it professed to be on 
 paper ; each of which further, in the conflicts of past 
 days, had deeply, almost unpardonably, wronged the 
 other. The Church of England was in possession, 
 with its own call and its immense work to do, and 
 striving to do it. Whatever the Church of Rome was 
 abroad, it was here an intruder and a disturber. That 
 to his mind was the fact and the true position of 
 things ; and this ought to govern the character and 
 course of controversy. The true line was not to 
 denounce and abuse wholesale, not to attack with any 
 argument, good or bad, not to deny or ignore what 
 was solid in the Roman ground, and good and elevated 
 in the Roman system, but admitting all that fairly 
 ought to be admitted, to bring into prominence, not 
 for mere polemical denunciation, but for grave and 
 
 1 Vide Lyra Apostolica, Nos. 170, 172 : 
 
 How shall I name thee, Light of the wide West, 
 
 Or heinous error-seat ? . . . . 
 Oh, that thy creed were sound ! 
 
 For thou dost soothe the heart, thou Church of Rome, 
 By thy unwearied watch and varied round 
 Of service, in thy Saviour's holy home. 
 And comp. No. 171, The Cruel Church.
 
 xi THE ROMAN QUESTION 181 
 
 reasonable and judicial condemnation, all that was 
 extravagant and arrogant in Roman assumptions, and 
 all that was base, corrupt, and unchristian in the popular 
 religion, which, with all its claims to infallibility and 
 authority, Rome not only permitted but encouraged. 
 For us to condemn Rome wholesale, as was ordinarily 
 the fashion, even in respectable writers, was as wrong, 
 as unfair, as unprofitable to the cause of truth and 
 Christianity, as the Roman charges against us were 
 felt by us to be ignorant and unjust. Rome professes 
 like England to continue the constitution, doctrine, 
 traditions, and spirit of the ancient and undivided 
 Church : and so far as she does so and she does so 
 in a great degree we can have no quarrel with her. 
 But in a great degree also, she does this only in pro- 
 fession and as a theory : she claims the witness and 
 suffrage of antiquity, but she interprets it at her own 
 convenience and by her own authority. We cannot 
 claim exemption from mistakes, from deviations from 
 our own standard and principles, any more than Rome ; 
 but while she remains as she is, and makes the mon- 
 strous claims of infallibility and supremacy, there is 
 nothing for English Churchmen but to resist her. 
 Union is impossible. Submission is impossible. 
 What we have to beware of for our own sake, as well 
 as for our cause, are false arguments, unreal objections, 
 ignorant allegations. There is enough on the very 
 surface, in her audacious assertions and high-handed 
 changes, for popular arguments against her, without 
 having recourse to exaggeration and falsehood ; she 
 may be a very faulty Church, without being Babylon 
 and Antichrist. And in the higher forms of argument, 
 there is abundance in those provinces of ancient 
 theology and ecclesiastical history and law, which Pro-
 
 1 82 THE OXFORD MOVEMENT CHAP. 
 
 testant controversialists have commonly surrendered 
 and left open to their opponents, to supply a more 
 telling weapon than any which these controversialists 
 have used. 
 
 This line, though substantially involved in the 
 theory of our most learned divines, from Andrewes to 
 Wake, was new in its moderation and reasonable 
 caution ; in its abstention from insult and vague 
 abuse, in its recognition of the primd facie strength of 
 much of the Roman case, in its fearless attempt, in 
 defiance of the deepest prejudices, to face the facts 
 and conditions of the question. Mr. Newman dared 
 to know and to acknowledge much that our insular 
 self-satisfaction did not know, and did not care to 
 know, of real Christian life in the Church of Rome. 
 He dared to admit that much that was popularly held 
 to be Popish was ancient, Catholic, edifying ; he 
 dared to warn Churchmen that the loose unsifted 
 imputations, so securely hazarded against Rome, were 
 both discreditable and dangerous. All this, from one 
 whose condemnation of Rome was decisive and 
 severe, was novel. The attempt, both in its spirit 
 and its ability, was not unworthy of being part of the 
 general effort to raise the standard of thought and 
 teaching in the English Church. It recalled men 
 from slovenly prejudices to the study of the real facts 
 of the living world. It narrowed the front of battle, 
 but it strengthened it enormously. The volume on 
 Romanism and Popidar Protestantism is not an 
 exhaustive survey of the controversy with Rome or of 
 the theory of the Church. There are great portions 
 of the subject, both theological and historical, which it 
 did not fall within the scope of the book to touch. It 
 was unsystematic and incomplete. But so far as its
 
 xi THE ROMAN QUESTION 183 
 
 argument extended, it almost formed an epoch in this 
 kind of controversial writing. It showed the com- 
 mand of a man of learning over all the technical 
 points and minutiae of a question highly scholastical 
 in its conceptions and its customary treatment, and it 
 presented this question in its bearings and conse- 
 quences on life and practice with the freedom and 
 breadth of the most vigorous popular writing. The 
 indictment against Rome was no vague or general 
 one. It was one of those arguments which cut the 
 ground from under a great established structure of 
 reasonings and proofs. And its conclusions, clear and 
 measured, but stern, were the more impressive, be- 
 cause they came from one who did not disguise his 
 feeling that there was much in what was preserved in 
 the Roman system to admire and to learn from. 
 
 The point which he chose for his assault was 
 indeed the key of the Roman position the doctrine 
 of Infallibility. He was naturally led to this side of 
 the question by the stress which the movement had 
 laid on the idea of the Church as the witness and 
 teacher of revealed truth : and the immediate chal- 
 lenge given by the critics or opponents of the 
 movement was, how to distinguish this lofty idea of 
 the Church, with its claim to authority, if it was at all 
 substantial, from the imposing and consistent theory 
 of Romanism. He urged against the Roman claim 
 of Infallibility two leading objections. One was the 
 way in which the assumed infallibility of the present 
 Church was made to override and supersede, in fact, 
 what in words was so ostentatiously put forward, the 
 historical evidence of antiquity to doctrine, expressed 
 by the phrase, the " consent of the Fathers." The 
 other objection was the inherent contradiction of the
 
 1 84 THE OXFORD MOVEMENT CHAP. 
 
 notion of infallibility to the conditions of human recep- 
 tion of teaching and knowledge, and its practical 
 uselessness as an assurance of truth, its partly delu- 
 sive, partly mischievous, working. But he felt, as all 
 deep minds must feel, that it is easier to overthrow 
 the Roman theory of Church authority than to 
 replace it by another, equally complete and com- 
 manding, and more unassailable. He was quite alive 
 to the difficulties of the Anglican position ; but he was 
 a disciple in the school of Bishop Butler, and had 
 learned as a first principle to recognise the limitations 
 of human knowledge, and the unphilosophical folly 
 of trying to round off into finished and pretentious 
 schemes our fragmentary yet certain notices of our 
 own condition and of God's dealings with it. He 
 followed his teacher in insisting on the reality and 
 importance of moral evidence as opposed to demon- 
 strative proof; and he followed the great Anglican 
 divines in asserting that there was a true authority, 
 varying in its degrees, in the historic Church ; that on 
 the most fundamental points of religion this authority 
 was trustworthy and supreme ; that on many other 
 questions it was clear and weighty, though it could 
 not decide everything. This view of the " prophetical 
 office of the Church " had the dialectical disadvantage 
 of appearing to be a compromise, to many minds a 
 fatal disadvantage. It got the name of the Via 
 Media; a satisfactory one to practical men like Dr. 
 Hook, to whom it recommended itself for use in 
 popular teaching ; but to others, in aftertimes, an ill- 
 sounding phrase of dislike, which summed up the 
 weakness of the Anglican case. Yet it only answered 
 to the certain fact, that in the early and undivided 
 Church there was such a thing as authority, and there
 
 xi THE ROMAN QUESTION 185 
 
 was no such thing known as Infallibility. It was an 
 appeal to the facts of history and human nature 
 against the logical exigences of a theory. Men must 
 transcend the conditions of our experience if they 
 want the certainty which the theory of Infallibility 
 speaks of. 
 
 There were especially two weak points in this view 
 of Anglicanism. Mr. Newman felt and admitted 
 them, and of course they were forced on his attention 
 by controversialists on both sides ; by the Ultra- 
 Protestant school, whose modes of dealing with Scrip- 
 ture he had exposed with merciless logic, and by the 
 now eager Roman disputants, of whom Dr. Wiseman 
 was the able and not over -scrupulous chief. The 
 first of these points was that the authority of the 
 undivided Church, which Anglicanism invoked, though 
 it completely covered the great foundations of Chris- 
 tian doctrine, our faith as to the nature of God, did 
 not cover with equal completeness other important 
 points of controversy, such as those raised at the 
 Reformation as to the Sacraments, and the justifica- 
 tion of the sinner. The Anglican answer was that 
 though the formal and conciliar authority was not the 
 same in each case, the patristic literature of the time 
 of the great councils, all that it took for granted 
 and preserved as current belief and practice, all that 
 resulted from the questions and debates of the time, 
 formed a body of proof, which carried with it moral 
 evidence only short of authoritative definition, and 
 was so regarded in the Anglican formularies. These 
 formularies implied the authority of the Church to 
 speak ; and what was defined on this authority was 
 based on good evidence, though there were portions 
 of its teaching which had even better. The other
 
 1 86 THE OXFORD MOVEMENT CHAP. 
 
 point was more serious. " Your theory," was the 
 objection, "is nothing but a paper theory; it never 
 was a reality ; it never can be. There may be an 
 ideal halting-place, there is neither a logical nor an 
 actual one, between Romanism and the ordinary nega- 
 tions of Protestantism." The answer to the challenge 
 then was, " Let us see if it cannot be realised. It has 
 recognised foundations to build upon, and the impedi- 
 ments and interruptions which have hindered it are 
 well known. Let us see if it will not turn out some- 
 thing more than a paper theory." That was the 
 answer given at the time, abandoned ten years after- 
 wards. But this at least may be said, that the longer 
 experience of the last fifty years has shown that the 
 Church of England has been working more and more 
 on such a theory, and that the Church of England, 
 whatever its faults may be, is certainly not a Church 
 only on paper. 
 
 But on the principles laid down in this volume, the 
 Roman controversy, in its varying forms, was carried 
 on for the time by Mr. Newman, permanently by 
 the other leaders of the movement. In its main 
 outlines, the view has become the accepted Anglican 
 view. Many other most important matters have 
 come into the debate. The publicly altered at- 
 titude of the Papacy has indefinitely widened the 
 breach between England and Rome. But the funda- 
 mental idea of the relations and character of the two 
 Churches remains the same as it was shadowed forth 
 in 1836. 
 
 One very important volume on these questions 
 ought not to be passed by without notice. This was 
 the Treatise on the Church of Christ, 1838, by Mr. 
 W. Palmer, who had already by his Origines of the
 
 xi THE ROMAN QUESTION 187 
 
 English Ritual, 1832, done much to keep up that 
 interest of Churchmen in the early devotional language 
 of the Church, which had first been called forth by 
 Bishop Lloyd's lectures on the Prayer Book. The 
 Treatise on the Church was an honour to English 
 theology and learning ; in point of plan and structure 
 we have few books like it. 1 It is comprehensive, 
 methodical, well-compacted, and, from its own point of 
 view, exhaustive. It is written with full knowledge of 
 the state of the question at the time, both on the 
 Anglican side and on the Roman. Its author evades 
 no objection, and is aware of most. It is rigorous in 
 form, and has no place for anything but substantial 
 argument. It is a book which, as the Apologia 
 tells us, commanded the respect of such an accom- 
 plished controversialist as Perrone ; and, it may be 
 added, of a theologian of an opposite school, Dr. 
 Dollinger. It is alao one on which the highest value 
 has been set by Mr. Gladstone. It is remarkable that 
 it did not exercise more influence on religious thought 
 in Oxford at the critical time when it appeared. But 
 it had defects, and the moment was against it. It was 
 dry and formal inevitably so, from the scientific plan 
 deliberately adopted for it ; it treated as problems of 
 the theological schools, to be discussed by the rules of 
 severe and passionless disputation, questions which 
 were once more, after the interval of more than a 
 
 1 ' ' The most important theological ceived at his hands. It is indeed a 
 
 work which has lately appeared is Mr. work quite in character with the reli- 
 
 Palmer's Treatise on the Church. . . . gious movement which has commenced 
 
 Whatever judgment may be formed of in various parts of the Church, dis- 
 
 the conclusions to which he has come playing a magnificence of design similar 
 
 on the variety of points which he had to that of the Bishop of London's plan 
 
 to consider, we cannot contemplate of fifty new churches, and Dr. Pusey, 
 
 without admiration, and (if it were of Oxford's, projected translation of 
 
 right) without envy, the thorough the Fathers." Brit. Crit. July 1838. 
 
 treatment which his subject has re- Short Notices.
 
 1 88 THE OXFORD MOVEMENT CHAP. 
 
 century, beginning to touch hearts and consciences, 
 and were felt to be fraught with the gravest practical 
 issues. And Mr. Newman, in his mode of dealing with 
 them, unsystematic, incomplete, unsatisfactory in many 
 ways as it was, yet saw in them not abstract and 
 scholastic inquiries, however important, but matters in 
 which not only sound argument, but sympathy and 
 quick intelligence of the conditions and working of the 
 living minds around him, were needed to win their 
 attention and interest. To persons accustomed to 
 Mr. Newman's habit of mind and way of writing, his 
 ease, his frankness, his candour, his impatience of con- 
 ventionality, his piercing insight into the very centre 
 of questions, his ever-ready recognition of nature and 
 reality, his range of thought, his bright and clear and 
 fearless style of argument, his undisplayed but never 
 unfelt consciousness of the true awfulness of anything 
 connected with religion, any stiff and heavy way of 
 treating questions which he had treated would have 
 seemed unattractive and unpersuasive. He had 
 spoiled his friends for any mere technical handling, 
 however skilful, of great and critical subjects. He 
 himself pointed out in a review the unique merit and 
 the real value of Mr. Palmer's book, pointing out also, 
 significantly enough, where it fell short, both in sub- 
 stance and in manner. Observing that the " scientific " 
 system of the English Church is not yet " sufficiently 
 cleared and adjusted," and adding a variety of 
 instances of this deficiency, he lets us see what he 
 wanted done, where difficulties most pressed upon 
 himself, and where Mr. Palmer had missed the real 
 substance of such difficulties. Looking at it by the 
 light of after-events, we can see the contradiction 
 and reaction produced by Mr. Palmer's too optimist
 
 xi THE ROMAN QUESTION 189 
 
 statements. Still, Mr. Newman's praise was sin- 
 cere and discriminating. But Mr. Palmer's book, 
 though never forgotten, scarcely became, what it at 
 another time might well have become, an English 
 text-book.
 
 CHAPTER XII 
 
 CHANGES 
 
 THE first seven years of the movement, as it is said in 
 the Apologia, had been years of prosperity. There 
 had been mistakes ; there had been opposition ; there 
 had been distrust and uneasiness. There was in some 
 places a ban on the friends of Mr. Newman ; men 
 like Mr. James Mozley and Mr. Mark Pattison found 
 their connexion with him a difficulty in the way of 
 fellowships. But on the whole, things had gone 
 smoothly, without any great breakdown, or any open 
 collision with authority. But after 1840 another 
 period was to begin of trouble and disaster. The 
 seeds of this had been partially sown before in the 
 days of quiet, and the time was come for their de- 
 velopment. Differences in the party itself had been 
 growing sharper ; differences between the more 
 cautious and the more fearless, between the more 
 steady-going and the more subtle thinkers. The 
 contrast between the familiar and customary, and the 
 new between the unknown or forgotten, and a mass 
 of knowledge only recently realised became more 
 pronounced. Consequences of a practical kind, real 
 or supposed, began to show themselves, and to press. 
 And above all, a second generation, without the sober-
 
 CHAP, xii CHANGES 191 
 
 ing experience of the first, was starting from where 
 the first had reached to, and, in some instances, was 
 rising up against their teachers' caution and patience. 
 The usual dangers of all earnest and aggressive 
 assertions of great principles appeared : contempt for 
 everything in opinion and practice that was not ad- 
 vanced, men vying with each other in bold inferences, 
 in the pleasure of " talking strong." With this grew 
 fear and exasperation on the other side, misunder- 
 standings, misgivings, strainings of mutual confidence, 
 within. Dr. Hook alternated between violent bursts 
 of irritation and disgust, and equally strong returns 
 of sympathy, admiration, and gratitude ; and he re- 
 presented a large amount of feeling among Church- 
 men. It was but too clear that storms were at 
 hand. They came perhaps quicker than they were 
 anticipated. 
 
 Towards the end of 1838, a proposal was brought 
 forward, for which in its direct aspect much might 
 plausibly be said, but which was in intention and in- 
 directly a test question, meant to put the Tractarians 
 in a difficulty, and to obtain the weight of authority 
 in the University against them. It was proposed to 
 raise a subscription, and to erect a monument in 
 Oxford, to the martyrs of the Reformation, Cranmer, 
 Ridley, and Latimer. Considering that the current 
 and popular language dated the Church of England 
 from the Reformation of the sixteenth century, and 
 cited the Reformers as ultimate and paramount authori- 
 ties on its doctrine, there was nothing unreasonable in 
 such a proposal. Dr. Hook, strong Churchman as he 
 was, "called to union on the principles of the English 
 Reformation." But the criticism which had been set 
 afloat by the movement had discovered and realised,
 
 1 92 THE OXFORD MOVEMENT CHAP. 
 
 what defenders of the English Church had hitherto 
 felt it an act of piety to disbelieve, when put before 
 them by Romanists like Lingard, and radicals like 
 Cobbett, that the Reformers had been accomplices in 
 many indefensible acts, and had been inconsistent and 
 untrustworthy theologians. Providentially, it was felt, 
 the force of old convictions and tradition and the 
 historical events of the time had obliged them to 
 respect the essentials of Catholic truth and polity and 
 usage ; we owed to them much that was beautiful and 
 devotional in the Prayer Book ; and their Articles, 
 clear in all matters decided by the early theology, 
 avoided foreign extremes in dealing with later con- 
 troversies. But their own individual language was 
 often far in advance of the public and official language 
 of formularies, in the direction of the great Protestant 
 authorities of Geneva and Zurich. There were still, 
 even among the movement party, many who respected 
 the Reformers for the work which they had attempted, 
 and partly and imperfectly done, to be more wisely 
 and soberly carried on by their successors of the 
 seventeenth century. But the charges against their 
 Calvinistic and even Zwinglian language were hard to 
 parry ; even to those who respected them for their 
 connexion with our present order of things, their 
 learning, their soundness, their authority appeared to 
 be greatly exaggerated ; and the reaction from ex- 
 cessive veneration made others dislike and depreciate 
 them. This was the state of feeling when the 
 Martyrs' Memorial was started. It was eagerly 
 pressed with ingenious and persevering arguments by 
 Mr. Golightly, the indefatigable and long-labouring 
 opponent of all that savoured of Tractarianism. The 
 appeal seemed so specious that at first many even of
 
 xii CHANGES 193 
 
 the party gave in their adhesion. Even Dr. Pusey 
 was disposed to subscribe to it. But Mr. Newman, 
 as was natural, held aloof; and his friends for the 
 most part did the same. It was what was expected 
 and intended. They were either to commit themselves 
 to the Reformation as understood by the promoters of 
 the Memorial ; or they were to be marked as showing 
 their disloyalty to it. The subscription was successful. 
 The Memorial was set up, and stood, a decisive though 
 unofficial sign of the judgment of the University against 
 them. 
 
 But the " Memorial " made little difference to the 
 progress of the movement. It was an indication of 
 hostility in reserve, but this was all ; it formed an 
 ornament to the city, but failed as a religious and 
 effective protest. Up to the spring of 1839, Angli- 
 canism, placed on an intellectual basis by Mr. New- 
 man, developed practically in different ways by Dr. 
 Pusey and Dr. Hook, sanctioned in theory by divines 
 who represented the old divinity of the English 
 Church, like Bishop Phillpotts and Mr. H. J. Rose, 
 could speak with confident and hopeful voice. It 
 might well seem that it was on its way to win over the 
 coming generations of the English clergy. It had on 
 its side all that gives interest and power to a cause, 
 thought, force of character, unselfish earnestness ; it 
 had unity of idea and agreement in purpose, and was 
 cemented by the bonds of warm affection and common 
 sympathies. It had the promise of a nobler religion, 
 as energetic and as spiritual as Puritanism and Wes- 
 leyanism, while it drew its inspiration, its canons of 
 doctrine, its moral standards, from purer and more 
 venerable sources ; from communion, not with indi- 
 vidual teachers and partial traditions, but with the 
 
 o
 
 194 THE OXFORD MOVEMENT CHAP. 
 
 consenting teaching and authoritative documents of 
 the continuous Catholic Church. 
 
 Anglicanism was agreed, up to this time the sum- 
 mer of 1839 as to its general principles. Charges of 
 an inclination to Roman views had been promptly and 
 stoutly met ; nor was there really anything but the 
 ignorance or ill-feeling of the accusers to throw doubt 
 on the sincerity of these disavowals. The deepest 
 and strongest mind in the movement was satisfied ; 
 and his steadiness of conviction could be appealed to 
 if his followers talked wildly and rashly. He had 
 kept one unwavering path ; he had not shrunk from 
 facing with fearless honesty the real living array of 
 reasons which the most serious Roman advocates could 
 put forward. With a frankness new in controversy, 
 he had not been afraid to state them with a force 
 which few of his opponents could have put forth. 
 With an eye ever open to that supreme Judge of 
 all our controversies, who listens to them on His 
 throne on high, he had with conscientious fairness 
 admitted what he saw to be good and just on the 
 side of his adversaries, conceded what in the con- 
 fused wrangle of conflicting claims he judged ought 
 to be conceded. But after all admissions and all con- 
 cessions, the comparative strength of his own case 
 appeared all the more undeniable. He had stripped it 
 of its weaknesses, its incumbrances, its falsehoods ; and 
 it did not seem the weaker for being presented in its 
 real aspect and on its real grounds. People felt that 
 he had gone to the bottom of the question as no one 
 had yet dared to do. He was yet staunch in his 
 convictions ; and they could feel secure. 
 
 But a change was at hand. In the course of 1839, 
 the little cloud showed itself in the outlook of the
 
 xii CHANGES 195 
 
 future ; the little rift opened, small and hardly per- 
 ceptible, which was to widen into an impassable gulf. 
 Anglicanism started with undoubting confidence in its 
 own foundations and its own position, as much against 
 Romanism as against the more recent forms of religion. 
 In the consciousness of its strength, it could afford to 
 make admissions and to refrain from tempting but 
 unworthy arguments in controversy with Rome ; indeed 
 the necessity of such controversy had come upon it 
 unexpectedly and by surprise. With English frankness, 
 in its impatience of abuses and desire for improvement 
 within, it had dwelt strongly on the faults and short- 
 comings of the English Church which it desired to 
 remedy ; but while allowing what was undeniably 
 excellent in Rome, it had been equally outspoken 
 and emphatic in condemnation of the evils of Rome. 
 What is there to wonder at in such a position? It is 
 the position of every honest reforming movement, at 
 least in England. But Anglican self-reliance was 
 unshaken, and Anglican hope waxed stronger as the 
 years went on, and the impression made by Anglican 
 teaching became wider and deeper. Outside attacks, 
 outside persecution, could now do little harm ; the time 
 was past for that. What might have happened, had 
 things gone on as they began, it is idle to inquire. 
 But at the moment when all seemed to promise fair, 
 the one fatal influence, the presence of internal un- 
 certainty and doubt, showed itself. The body of men 
 who had so far acted together began to show a double 
 aspect. While one portion of it continued on the old 
 lines, holding the old ground, defending the old prin- 
 ciples, and attempting to apply them for the improve- 
 ment of the practical system of the English Church, 
 another portion had asked the question, and were
 
 196 THE OXFORD MOVEMENT CHAP. 
 
 pursuing the anxious inquiry, whether the English 
 Church was a true Church at all, a true portion of the 
 one uninterrupted Catholic Church of the Redeemer. 
 And the question had forced itself with importunate 
 persistence on the leading mind of the movement. 
 From this time the fate of Tractarianism, as a party, 
 was decided. 
 
 In this overthrow of confidence, two sets of in- 
 fluences may be traced. 
 
 i. One, which came from above, from the highest 
 leading authority in the movement, was the unsettle- 
 ment of Mr. Newman's mind. He has told the story, 
 the story as he believed of his enfranchisement and 
 deliverance ; and he has told the story, though the story 
 of a deliverance, with so keen a feeling of its pathetic and 
 tragic character, as it is indeed the most tragic story of 
 a conversion to peace and hope on record, that it will 
 never cease to be read where the English language is 
 spoken. Up to the summer of 1839, his view of the 
 English position had satisfied him satisfied him, that 
 is, as a tenable one in the anomalies of existing 
 Christendom. All seemed clear and hopeful, and the 
 one thing to be thought of was to raise the English 
 Church to the height of its own standard. But in the 
 autumn of that year (1839), as he has told us, a 
 change took place. In the summer of 1839, he had 
 set himself to study the history of the Monophysite 
 controversy. " I have no reason," he writes, " to 
 suppose that the thought of ' Rome came across my 
 mind at all. ... It was during this course of reading 
 that for the first time a doubt came across me of the 
 tenableness of Anglicanism. I had seen the shadow 
 of a hand on the wall. He who has seen a ghost 
 cannot be as if he had never seen it. The heavens
 
 xii CHANGES 197 
 
 had opened and closed again." To less imaginative 
 and slower minds this seems an overwrought descrip- 
 tion of a phenomenon, which must present itself 
 sometime or other to all who search the foundations 
 of conviction ; and by itself he was for the time proof 
 against its force. " The thought for the moment had 
 been, The Church of Rome will be found right after 
 all ; and then it had vanished. My old convictions 
 remained as before." But another blow came, and 
 then another. An article by Dr. Wiseman on the 
 Donatists greatly disturbed him. The words of St. 
 Augustine about the Donatists, securus judicat orbis 
 terrarum, rung continually in his ears, like words out of 
 the sky. He found the threatenings of the Monophy- 
 site controversy renewed in the Arian : " the ghost 
 had come a second time." It was a "most uncom- 
 fortable article," he writes in his letters ; " the first real 
 hit from Romanism which has happened to me" ; it gave 
 him, as he says, "a stomach-ache." But he still held 
 his ground, and returned his answer to the attack in an 
 article in the British Critic, on the " Catholicity of the 
 English Church." He did not mean to take the attack 
 for more than it was worth, an able bit of ex parte state- 
 ment. But it told on him, as nothing had yet told on 
 him. What it did, was to "open a vista which was 
 closed before, and of which he could not see the end" ; 
 " we are not at the bottom of things," was the sting 
 it left behind. From this time, the hope and exulta- 
 tion with which, in spite of checks and misgivings, he 
 had watched the movement, gave way to uneasiness 
 and distress. A new struggle was beginning, a long 
 struggle with himself, a long struggle between rival 
 claims which would not be denied, each equally im- 
 perious, and involving fatal consequences if by mistake
 
 198 THE OXFORD MOVEMENT CHAP. 
 
 the wrong one was admitted. And it was not only 
 the effect of these thoughts on his own mind which 
 filled him with grief and trouble. He always thought 
 much for others ; and now there was the misery of 
 perhaps unsettling others others who had trusted 
 him with their very souls others, to whom it was 
 impossible to explain the conflicts which were passing 
 in his own mind. It was so bitter to unsettle their 
 hope and confidence. All through this time, more 
 trying than his own difficulties, were the perplexities 
 and sorrows which he foresaw for those whom he 
 loved. Very illogical and inconsecutive, doubtless ; 
 if only he had had the hard heart of a proselytiser, he 
 would have seen that it was his duty to undermine 
 and shatter their old convictions. But he cared more 
 for the tempers and beliefs in which he was at one 
 with his Anglican friends, than for those in which they 
 could not follow him. But the struggle came on 
 gradually. What he feared at first was not the 
 triumph of Rome, but the break-up of the English 
 Church ; the apparent probability of a great schism in it. 
 " I fear I see more clearly that we are working up to 
 a schism in the English Church, that is, a split 
 between Peculiars and Apostolicals. ... I never 
 can be surprised at individuals going off to Rome, but 
 that is not my chief fear, but a schism ; that is, those 
 two parties, which have hitherto got on together as 
 they could, from the times of Puritanism downwards, 
 gathering up into clear, tangible, and direct forces, and 
 colliding. Our Church is not at one with itself, there 
 is no denying it." That was at first the disaster 
 before him. His thought for himself began to turn, 
 not to Rome, but to a new life without office and 
 authority, but still within the English Church. " You
 
 xii CHANGES 199 
 
 see, if things come to the worst, I should turn brother 
 of charity in London." And he began to prepare for 
 a move from Oxford, from St. Mary's, from his fellow- 
 ship. He bought land at Littlemore, and began to 
 plant. He asks his brother-in-law for plans for 
 building what he calls a ^ovrj. He looks forward to its 
 becoming a sort of Monastic school, but still connected 
 with the University. 
 
 In Mr. Newman's view of the debate between 
 England and Rome, he had all along dwelt on two 
 broad features, Apostolicity and Catholicity, likeness 
 to the Apostolic teaching, and likeness to the un- 
 interrupted unity and extent of the undivided Church ; 
 and of those two features he found the first signally 
 wanting in Rome, and the second signally wanting in 
 England. When he began to distrust his own reason- 
 ings, still the disturbing and repelling element in 
 Rome was the alleged defect of Apostolicity, the 
 contrast between primitive and Roman religion ; while 
 the attractive one was the apparent widely extended 
 Catholicity in all lands, East and West, continents 
 and isles, of the world-wide spiritual empire of the 
 Pope. It is these two great points which may be 
 traced in their action on his mind at this crisis. The 
 contrast between early and Roman doctrine and 
 practice, in a variety of ways, some of them most 
 grave and important, was long a great difficulty in the 
 way of attempting to identify the Roman Church, 
 absolutely and exclusively, with the Primitive Church. 
 The study of antiquity indisposed him, indeed, more 
 and more to the existing system of the English 
 Church ; its claims to model itself on the purity and 
 simplicity of the Early Church seemed to him, in the 
 light of its documents, and still more of the facts of
 
 200 THE OXFORD MOVEMENT CHAP. 
 
 history and life, more and more questionable. But 
 modern Rome was just as distant from the Early 
 Church though it preserved many ancient features, 
 lost or unvalued by England. Still, Rome was not 
 the same thing as the Early Church ; and Mr. New- 
 man ultimately sought a way out of his difficulty and 
 indeed there was no other in the famous doctrine of 
 Development. But when the difficulty about Aposto- 
 licity was thus provided for, then the force of the 
 great vision of the Catholic Church came upon him, 
 unchecked and irresistible. That was a thing present, 
 visible, undeniable as a fact of nature ; that was a 
 thing at once old and new ; it belonged as truly, as 
 manifestly, to the recent and modern world of 
 democracy and science, as it did to the Middle Ages 
 and the Fathers, to the world of Gregory and Innocent, 
 to the world of Athanasius and Augustine. The 
 majesty, the vastness of an imperial polity, outlasting 
 all states and kingdoms, all social changes and political 
 revolutions, answered at once to the promises of the 
 prophecies, and to the antecedent idea of the universal 
 kingdom of God. Before this great idea, embodied 
 in concrete form, and not a paper doctrine, partial 
 scandals and abuses seemed to sink into insignificance. 
 Objections seemed petty and ignoble ; the pretence of 
 rival systems impertinent and absurd. He resented 
 almost with impatience anything in the way of theory 
 or explanation which seemed to him narrow, technical, 
 dialectical. He would look at nothing but what had 
 on it the mark of greatness and largeness which be- 
 fitted the awful subject, and was worthy of arresting 
 the eye and attention of an ecclesiastical statesman, alive 
 to mighty interests, compared to which even the most 
 serious human affairs were dwarfed and obscured.
 
 xii CHANGES 201 
 
 But all this was gradual in coming. His recogni- 
 tion of the claims of the English Church, faulty and 
 imperfect as he thought it, did not give way suddenly 
 and at once. It survived the rude shock of 1839. 
 From first to almost the last she was owned as his 
 "mother" owned in passionate accents of disappoint- 
 ment and despair as a Church which knew not how 
 to use its gifts ; yet still, even though life seemed 
 failing her, and her power of teaching and ruling 
 seemed paralysed, his mother ; and as long as there 
 seemed to him a prospect of restoration to health, it 
 was his duty to stay by her. 1 This was his first atti- 
 tude for three or four years after 1839. He could 
 not speak of her with the enthusiasm and triumph of 
 the first years of the movement. When he fought 
 her battles, it was with the sense that her imper- 
 fections made his task the harder. Still he clung to 
 the belief that she held a higher standard than she 
 had yet acted up to, and discouraged and perplexed 
 he yet maintained her cause. But now two things 
 happened. The Roman claims, as was natural when 
 always before him, seemed to him more and more 
 indisputable. And in England his interpretation of 
 Anglican theology seemed to be more and more 
 contradicted, disavowed, condemned, by all that spoke 
 with any authority in the Church. The University 
 was not an ecclesiastical body, yet it had practically 
 much weight in matters of theology ; it informally, 
 but effectually, declared against him. The Bishops, 
 one by one, of course only spoke as individuals ; but 
 they were the official spokesmen of the Church, and 
 their consent, though not the act of a Synod, was 
 weighty they too had declared against him. And. 
 
 1 See Sermons on Siibjects of the Day, 1843.
 
 202 THE OXFORD MOVEMENT CHAP. 
 
 finally that vague but powerful voice of public opinion, 
 which claims to represent at once the cool judg- 
 ment of the unbiassed, and the passion of the zealous 
 it too declared against him. Could he claim to 
 understand the mind of the Church better than its own 
 organs ? 
 
 Then at length a change came ; and it was marked 
 outwardly by a curious retractation of his severe 
 language about Rome, published in a paper called the 
 Conservative Journal, in January 1843; and more 
 distinctly, by his resignation of St. Mary's in Septem- 
 ber 1843, a step contemplated for some time, and by 
 his announcement that he was preparing to resign his 
 fellowship. From this time he felt that he could no 
 longer hold office, or be a champion of the English 
 Church ; from this time, it was only a matter of 
 waiting, waiting to make quite certain that he was 
 right and was under no delusion, when he should leave 
 her for the Roman Communion. And to his intimate 
 friends, to his sisters, he gave notice that this was 
 now impending. To the world outside, all that was 
 known was that he was much unsettled and distressed 
 by difficulties. 
 
 It may be asked why this change was not at this 
 time communicated, not to a few intimates, but to the 
 world ? Why did he not at this time hoist his quaran- 
 tine flag and warn every one that he was dangerous to 
 come near ? So keen a mind must, it was said, have 
 by this time foreseen how things would end ; he ought 
 to have given earlier notice. His answer was that he 
 was sincerely desirous of avoiding, as far as possible, 
 what might prejudice the Church in which he had 
 ministered, even at the moment of leaving her. He 
 saw his own way becoming clearer and clearer ; but
 
 xii CHANGES 203 
 
 he saw it for himself alone. He was not one of those 
 who force the convictions of others ; he was not one of 
 those who think it a great thing to be followed in a 
 serious change by a crowd of disciples. Whatever 
 might be at the end, it was now an agonising wrench 
 to part from the English body, to part from the 
 numbers of friends whose loyalty was immovable, to 
 part from numbers who had trusted and learned from 
 him. Of course, if he was in the right way, he could 
 wish them nothing better than that they should follow 
 him. But they were in God's hands ; it was not his 
 business to unsettle them ; it was not his business to 
 ensnare and coerce their faith. And so he tried for this 
 time to steer his course alone. He wished to avoid 
 observation. He was silent on all that went on round 
 him, exciting as some of the incidents were. He 
 would not be hurried ; he would give himself full time ; 
 he would do what he could to make sure that he was 
 not acting under the influence of a delusion. 
 
 The final result of all this was long in coming ; 
 there was, we know, a bitter agony of five years, a 
 prolonged and obstinate and cruel struggle between 
 the deepest affections and ever-growing convictions. 
 But this struggle, as has been said, did not begin with 
 the conviction in which it ended. It began and long 
 continued with the belief that though England was 
 wrong, Rome was not right ; that though the Roman 
 argument seemed more and more unanswerable, there 
 were insuperable difficulties of certain fact which made 
 the Roman conclusion incredible ; that there was so 
 much good and truth in England, with all its defects 
 and faults, which was unaccountable and unintelligible 
 on the Roman hypothesis ; that the real upshot was 
 that the whole state of things in Christendom was
 
 204 THE OXFORD MOVEMENT CHAP. 
 
 abnormal ; that to English Churchmen the English 
 Church had immediate and direct claims which nothing 
 but the most irresistible counter-claims could overcome 
 or neutralise the claims of a shipwrecked body cut 
 off from country and home, yet as a shipwrecked body 
 still organised, and with much saved from the wreck, 
 and not to be deserted, as long as it held together, in 
 an uncertain attempt to rejoin its lost unity. Resig- 
 nation, retirement, silence, lay communion, the hope 
 of ultimate, though perhaps long-deferred reunion 
 these were his first thoughts. Misgivings could not 
 be helped, would not be denied, but need not be 
 paraded, were to be kept at arm's-length as long as 
 possible. This is the picture presented in the auto- 
 biography of these painful and dreary years ; and 
 there is every evidence that it is a faithful one. It is 
 conceivable, though not very probable, that such a 
 course might go on indefinitely. It is conceivable 
 that under different circumstances he might, like 
 other perplexed and doubting seekers after truth, have 
 worked round through doubt and perplexity to his 
 first conviction. But the actual result, as it came, was 
 natural enough ; and it was accelerated by provocation, 
 by opponents without, and by the pressure of advanced 
 and impatient followers and disciples in the party 
 itself. 
 
 2. This last was the second of the two influences 
 spoken of above. It worked from below, as the first 
 worked from above. 
 
 Discussions and agitations, such as accompanied 
 the movement, however much under the control of the 
 moral and intellectual ascendancy of the leaders, could 
 not of course be guaranteed from escaping from that 
 control. And as the time went on, men joined the
 
 CHANGES 205 
 
 movement who had but qualified sympathy with that 
 passionate love and zeal for the actual English Church, 
 that acquaintance with its historical theology, and that 
 temper of discipline, sobriety, and self-distrust, which 
 marked its first representatives. These younger dis- 
 ciples shared in the growing excitement of the society 
 round them. They were attracted by visible height 
 of character, and brilliant intellectual power. They 
 were alive to vast and original prospects, opening a 
 new world which should be a contrast to the worn-out 
 interest of the old. Some of these were men of wide 
 and abstruse learning ; quaint and eccentric scholars 
 both in habit and look, students of the ancient type, 
 who even fifty years ago seemed out of date to their 
 generation. Some were men of considerable force of 
 mind, destined afterwards to leave a mark on their age 
 as thinkers and writers. To the former class belonged 
 Charles Seager, and John Brande Morris, of Exeter 
 College, both learned Orientalists, steeped in recondite 
 knowledge of all kinds ; men who had worked their 
 way to knowledge through hardship and grinding 
 labour, and not to be outdone in Germany itself for 
 devouring love of learning and a scholar's plainness 
 of life. In the other class may be mentioned Frederic 
 Faber, J. D. Dalgairns, and W. G. Ward, men who 
 have all since risen to eminence in their different 
 spheres. Faber was a man with a high gift of imagin- 
 ation, remarkable powers of assimilating knowledge, 
 and a great richness and novelty and elegance of 
 thought, which with much melody of voice made him 
 ultimately a very attractive preacher. If the promise 
 of his powers has not been adequately fulfilled, it is 
 partly to be traced to a want of severity of taste and 
 self-restraint, but his name will live in some of his
 
 206 THE OXFORD MOVEMENT CHAP. 
 
 hymns, and in some very beautiful portions of his 
 devotional writings. Dalgairns's mind was of a dif- 
 ferent order. " That man has an eye for theology," 
 was the remark of a competent judge on some early 
 paper of Dalgairns's which came before him. He had 
 something of the Frenchman about him. There was 
 in him, in his Oxford days, a bright and frank brisk- 
 ness, a mixture of modesty and arch daring, which 
 gave him an almost boyish appearance ; but beneath 
 this boyish appearance there was a subtle and powerful 
 intellect, alive to the problems of religious philosophy, 
 and impatient of any but the most thorough solutions 
 of them ; while, on the other hand, the religious affec- 
 tions were part of his nature, and mind and will and 
 heart yielded an unreserved and absolute obedience to 
 the leading and guidance of faith. In his later days, 
 with his mind at ease, Father Dalgairns threw himself 
 into the great battle with unbelief; and few men have 
 commanded more the respect of opponents not much 
 given to think well of the arguments for religion, by 
 the freshness and the solidity of his reasoning. At 
 this time, enthusiastic in temper, and acute and exact- 
 ing as a thinker, he found the Church movement just, 
 as it were, on the turn of the wave. He was attracted 
 to it at first by its reaction against what was unreal 
 and shallow, by its affinities with what was deep in 
 idea and earnest in life ; then, and finally, he was 
 repelled from it, by its want of completeness, by its 
 English acquiescence in compromise, by its hesitations 
 and clinging to insular associations and sympathies, 
 which had little interest for him. 
 
 Another person, who was at this time even more 
 prominent in the advanced portion of the movement 
 party, and whose action had more decisive influence
 
 xii CHANGES 207 
 
 on its course, was Mr. W. G. Ward, Fellow of Balliol. 
 Mr. Ward, who was first at Christ Church, had dis- 
 tinguished himself greatly at the Oxford Union as a 
 vigorous speaker, at first on the Tory side ; he came 
 afterwards under the influence of Arthur Stanley, then 
 fresh from Rugby, and naturally learned to admire Dr. 
 Arnold ; but Dr. Arnold's religious doctrines did not 
 satisfy him ; the movement, with its boldness and 
 originality of idea and ethical character, had laid 
 strong hold on him, and he passed into one of the 
 most thoroughgoing adherents of Mr. Newman. 
 There was something to smile at in his person, and 
 in some of his ways his unbusiness-like habits, his 
 joyousness of manner, his racy stories ; but few more 
 powerful intellects passed through Oxford in his time, 
 and he has justified his University reputation by his 
 distinction since, both as a Roman Catholic theologian 
 and professor, and as a profound metaphysical thinker, 
 the equal antagonist on their own ground of J. Stuart 
 Mill and Herbert Spencer. But his intellect at that 
 time was as remarkable for its defects as for its 
 powers. He used to divide his friends, and thinking 
 people in general, into those who had facts and did 
 not know what to do with them, and those who had in 
 perfection the logical faculties, but wanted the facts to 
 reason upon. He belonged himself to the latter class. 
 He had, not unnaturally, boundless confidence in his 
 argumentative powers ; they were subtle, piercing, 
 nimble, never at a loss, and they included a power of 
 exposition which, if it was not always succinct and 
 lively, was always weighty and impressive. Premises 
 in his hands were not long in bringing forth their 
 conclusions ; and if abstractions always corresponded 
 exactly to their concrete embodiments, and ideals were
 
 2o8 THE OXFORD MOVEMENT CHAP. 
 
 fulfilled in realities, no one could point out more per- 
 spicuously and decisively the practical judgments on 
 them which reason must sanction. But that know- 
 ledge of things and of men which mere power of 
 reasoning will not give was not one of his special 
 endowments. The study of facts, often in their com- 
 plicated and perplexing reality, was not to his taste. 
 He was apt to accept them on what he considered 
 adequate authority, and his argumentation, formidable 
 as it always was, recalled, even when most unanswer- 
 able at the moment, the application of pure mathematics 
 without allowance for the actual forces, often difficult 
 to ascertain except by experiment, which would have 
 to be taken account of in practice. 
 
 The tendency of this section of able men was 
 unquestionably Romewards, almost from the beginning 
 of their connexion with the movement. Both the 
 theory and the actual system of Rome, so far as they 
 understood it, had attractions for them which nothing 
 else had. But with whatever perplexity and perhaps 
 impatience, Mr. Newman's power held them back. 
 He kept before their minds continually those difficul- 
 ties of fact which stood in the way of their absolute 
 and peremptory conclusions, and of which they were 
 not much inclined to take account. He insisted 
 on those features, neither few nor unimportant nor 
 hard to see, which proved the continuity of the Eng- 
 lish Church with the Church Universal. Sharing their 
 sense of anomaly in the Anglican theory and position, 
 he pointed out with his own force and insight that 
 anomaly was not in England only, but everywhere. 
 There was much to regret, there was much to im- 
 prove, there were many unwelcome and dangerous 
 truths, invidiosi veri, to be told and defended at any
 
 xii CHANGES 209 
 
 cost. But patience, as well as honesty and courage, 
 was a Christian virtue ; and they who had received 
 their Christianity at the hands of the English Church 
 had duties towards it from which neither dissatisfaction 
 nor the idea of something better could absolve them. 
 Spartam nactus es, hanc exorna is the motto for every 
 one whose lot is cast in any portion of Christ's 
 Church. And as long as he could speak with this 
 conviction, the strongest of them could not break 
 away from his restraint. It was when the tremendous 
 question took shape, Is the English Church a true 
 Church, a real part of the Church Catholic ? when the 
 question became to his mind more and more doubtful, 
 at length desperate that they, of course, became more 
 difficult to satisfy, more confident in their own allega- 
 tions, more unchecked in their sympathies, and, in 
 consequence, in their dislikes. And in the continued 
 effort for it did continue to make them pause and 
 wait and hope, they reacted on him ; they asked him 
 questions which he found it hard to answer ; they 
 pressed him with inferences which he might put by, 
 but of which he felt the sting ; they forced on him all 
 the indications, of which every day brought its contri- 
 bution, that the actual living system of the English 
 Church was against what he had taught to be Catholic, 
 that its energetic temper and spirit condemned and 
 rejected him. What was it that private men were 
 staunch and undismayed ? What was it that month 
 by month all over England hearts and minds were 
 attracted to his side, felt the spell of his teaching, 
 gave him their confidence ? Suspicion and disappro- 
 bation, which had only too much to ground itself upon, 
 had taken possession of the high places of the Church. 
 Authority in all its shapes had pronounced as decisively
 
 210 THE OXFORD MOVEMENT CHAP. 
 
 as his opponents could wish ; as decisively as they too 
 could wish, who desired no longer a barrier between 
 themselves and Rome. 
 
 Thus a great and momentous change had come 
 over the movement, over its action and prospects. 
 It had started in a heroic effort to save the English 
 Church. The claims, the blessings, the divinity of 
 the English Church, as a true branch of Catholic 
 Christendom, had been assumed as the foundation of 
 all that was felt and said and attempted. The English 
 Church was the one object to which English Chris- 
 tians were called upon to turn their thoughts. Its 
 spirit animated the Christian Year, and the teaching 
 of those whom the Christian Year represented. Its 
 interests were what called forth the zeal and the indig- 
 nation recorded in Froude's Remains. No one seri- 
 ously thought of Rome, except as a hopelessly corrupt 
 system, though it had some good and Catholic things, 
 which it was Christian and honest to recognise. The 
 movement of 1833 started out of the Anti- Roman 
 feelings of the Emancipation time. It was Anti- 
 Roman as much as it was Anti-Sectarian and Anti- 
 Erastian. It was to avert the danger of people 
 becoming Romanists from ignorance of Church prin- 
 ciples. This was all changed in one important sec- 
 tion of the party. The fundamental conceptions and 
 assumptions were reversed. It was not the Roman 
 Church, but the English Church, which was put on 
 its trial ; it was not the Roman Church, but the 
 English, which was to be, if possible, apologised for, 
 perhaps borne with for a time, but which was to be 
 regarded as deeply fallen, holding an untenable posi- 
 tion, and incomparably, unpardonably, below both the 
 standard and the practical system of the Roman Church.
 
 xii CHANGES 211 
 
 From this point of view the object of the movement 
 was no longer to elevate and improve an independent 
 English Church, but to approximate it as far as possible 
 to what was assumed to be undeniable the perfect 
 Catholicity of Rome. More almost than ideas and 
 assumptions, the tone of feeling changed. It had 
 been, towards the English Church, affectionate, enthu- 
 siastic, reverential, hopeful. It became contemptuous, 
 critical, intolerant, hostile with the hostility not merely 
 of alienation but disgust. This was not of course 
 the work of a moment, but it was of very rapid 
 growth. " How I hate these Anglicans ! " was the 
 expression of one of the younger men of this section, 
 an intemperate and insolent specimen of it. It did 
 not represent the tone or the language of the leader 
 to whom the advanced section deferred, vexed as he 
 often was with the course of his own thoughts, and 
 irritated and impatient at the course of things without. 
 But it expressed but too truly the difference between 
 1833 an d 1840.
 
 CHAPTER XIII 
 
 THE AUTHORITIES AND THE MOVEMENT 
 
 WHILE the movement was making itself felt as a moral 
 force, without a parallel in Oxford for more than two 
 centuries, and was impressing deeply and permanently 
 some of the most promising men in the rising genera- 
 tion in the University, what was the attitude of the 
 University authorities ? What was the attitude of the 
 Bishops ? 
 
 At Oxford it was that of contemptuous indifference, 
 passing into helpless and passionate hostility. There 
 is no sadder passage to be found in the history of 
 Oxford than the behaviour and policy of the heads 
 of this great Christian University towards the reli- 
 gious movement which was stirring the interest, the 
 hopes, the fears of Oxford. The movement was, for its 
 first years at least, a loyal and earnest effort to serve 
 the cause of the Church. Its objects were clear and 
 reasonable ; it aimed at creating a sincere and intelli- 
 gent zeal for the Church, and at making the Church 
 itself worthy of the great position which her friends 
 claimed for her. Its leaders were men well known in 
 the University, in the first rank in point of ability 
 and character ; men of learning, who knew what they 
 were talking about ; men of religious and pure, if also
 
 CH. xin THE AUTHORITIES AND THE MOVEMENT 213 
 
 severe lives. They were not men merely of specula- 
 tion and criticism, but men ready to forego anything, 
 to devote everything for the practical work of elevating 
 religious thought and life. All this did not necessarily 
 make their purposes and attempts wise and good ; but 
 it did entitle them to respectful attention. If they 
 spoke language new to the popular mind or the 
 " religious world," it was not new at least it ought 
 not to have been new to orthodox Churchmen, with 
 opportunities of study and acquainted with our best 
 divinity. If their temper was eager and enthusiastic, 
 they alleged the presence of a great and perilous crisis. 
 Their appeal was mainly not to the general public, but 
 to the sober and the learned ; to those to whom was 
 entrusted the formation of faith and character in the 
 future clergy of the Church ; to those who were respon- 
 sible for the discipline and moral tone of the first 
 University of Christendom, and who held their con- 
 spicuous position on the understanding of that respon- 
 sibility. It behoved the heads of the University to be 
 cautious, even to be suspicious ; movements might be 
 hollow or dangerous things. But it behoved them also 
 to become acquainted with so striking a phenomenon 
 as this ; to judge it by what it appealed to the learn- 
 ing of English divines, the standard of a high and 
 generous moral rule ; to recognise its aims at least, with 
 equity and sympathy, if some of its methods and argu- 
 ments seemed questionable. The men of the move- 
 ment were not mere hostile innovators ; they were 
 fighting for what the University and its chiefs held 
 dear and sacred, the privileges and safety of the Church. 
 It was the natural part of the heads of the University 
 to act as moderators ; at any rate, to have shown, with 
 whatever reserve, that they appreciated what they
 
 214 THE OXFORD MOVEMENT CHAP. 
 
 needed time to judge of. But while on the one side 
 there was burning and devouring earnestness, and that 
 power of conviction which doubles the strength of the 
 strong, there was on the other a serene ignoring of all 
 that was going on, worthy of a set of dignified French 
 abbts on the eve of the Revolution. This sublime or 
 imbecile security was occasionally interrupted by bursts 
 of irritation at some fresh piece of Tractarian oddness 
 or audacity, or at some strange story which made its 
 way from the gossip of common-rooms to the society 
 of the Heads of Houses. And there was always 
 ready a stick to beat the offenders ; everything 
 could be called Popish. But for the most part they 
 looked on, with smiles, with jokes, sometimes with 
 scolding. 1 Thus the men who by their place ought to 
 have been able to gauge and control the movement, 
 who might have been expected to meet half-way a 
 serious attempt to brace up the religious and moral 
 tone of the place, so incalculably important in days 
 
 1 Fifty years ago there was much Of good or ill report ; or those with 
 greater contrast than now between old whom 
 
 and young. There was more outward By frame of Academic discipline 
 
 respect for the authorities, and among We were perforce connected, men 
 the younger men, graduates and under- whose sway 
 
 graduates, more inward amusement at And known authority of office served 
 
 foibles and eccentricities. There still To set our minds on edge, and did no 
 lingered the survivals of a more old- more. 
 
 fashioned type of University life and Nor wanted we rich pastime of this 
 character, which, quite apart from the kind, 
 
 movements of religious opinion, pro- Found everywhere, but chiefly in the 
 voked those veai'tei^uaTa ISidir^v ds TOI)S ring 
 
 dpxovras, 1 impertinences of irresponsible Of the grave Elders, men unsecured, 
 uniors towards superiors, which Words- grotesque 
 
 worth, speaking of a yet earlier time, In character, tricked out like aged 
 remembered at Cambridge trees 
 
 "In serious mood, but oftener, I confess, Which through the lapse of their in- 
 With playful zest of fancy, did we note firmity 
 
 (How could we less?) the manners and Give ready place to any random seed 
 
 the ways That chooses to be reared upon their 
 Of those who lived distinguished by the trunks." 
 
 badge Prelude, bk. iii. 
 
 1 Plat. R. P. iii. 390.
 
 xin THE AUTHORITIES AND THE MOVEMENT 215 
 
 confessed to be anxious ones, simply set their faces 
 steadily to discountenance and discredit it. They were 
 good and respectable men, living comfortably in a cer- 
 tain state and ease. Their lives were mostly simple 
 compared with the standard of the outer world, though 
 Fellows of Colleges thought them luxurious. But they 
 were blind and dull as tea-table gossips as to what was 
 the meaning of the movement, as to what might come 
 of it, as to what use might be made of it by wise and 
 just and generous recognition, and, if need be, by wise 
 and just criticism and repression. There were points of 
 danger in it ; but they could only see what seemed to 
 be dangerous, whether it was so or not ; and they multi- 
 plied these points of danger by all that was good and 
 hopeful in it. It perplexed and annoyed them ; they 
 had not imagination nor moral elevation to take in what 
 it aimed at ; they were content with the routine which 
 they had inherited ; and, so that men read for honours 
 and took first classes, it did not seem to them strange 
 or a profanation that a whole mixed crowd of under- 
 graduates should be expected to go on a certain 
 Sunday in term, willing or unwilling, fit or unfit, to the 
 Sacrament, and be fined if they did not appear. 
 Doubtless we are all of us too prone to be content with 
 the customary, and to be prejudiced against the novel, 
 nor is this condition of things without advantage. But 
 we must bear our condemnation if we stick to the 
 customary too long, and so miss our signal oppor- 
 tunities. In their apathy, in their self-satisfied ignor- 
 ance, in their dulness of apprehension and forethought, 
 the authorities of the University let pass the great 
 opportunity of their time. As it usually happens, when 
 this posture of lofty ignoring what is palpable and 
 active, and the object of everybody's thought, goes on
 
 216 THE OXFORD MOVEMENT CHAP. 
 
 too long, it is apt to turn into impatient dislike and 
 bitter antipathy. The Heads of Houses drifted insen- 
 sibly into this position. They had not taken the 
 trouble to understand the movement, to discriminate 
 between its aspects, to put themselves frankly into 
 communication with its leading persons, to judge with 
 the knowledge and justice of scholars and clergymen 
 of its designs and ways. They let themselves be 
 diverted from this, their proper though troublesome 
 task, by distrust, by the jealousies of their position, by 
 the impossibility of conceiving that anything so strange 
 could really be true and sound. And at length they 
 found themselves going along with the outside current 
 of uninstructed and ignoble prejudice, in a settled and 
 pronounced dislike, which took for granted that all was 
 wrong in the movement, which admitted any ill-natured 
 surmise and foolish misrepresentation, and really 
 allowed itself to acquiesce in the belief that men so 
 well known in Oxford, once so admired and honoured, 
 had sunk down to deliberate corrupters of the truth, 
 and palterers with their own intellects and consciences. 
 It came in a few years to be understood on both sides, 
 that the authorities were in direct antagonism to the 
 movement ; and though their efforts in opposition to 
 it were feeble and petty, it went on under the dead 
 weight of official University disapproval. It would 
 have been a great thing for the English Church- 
 though it is hard to see how, things being as they were, 
 it could have come about if the movement had gone 
 on, at least with the friendly interest, if not with the 
 support, of the University rulers. Instead of that, 
 after the first two or three years there was one long 
 and bitter fight in Oxford, with the anger on one side 
 created by the belief of vague but growing dangers,
 
 xiii THE AUTHORITIES AND THE MOVEMENT 217 
 
 and a sense of incapacity in resisting them, and with 
 deep resentment at injustice and stupidity on the other. 
 The Bishops were farther from the immediate 
 scene of the movement, and besides, had other things 
 to think of. Three or four of them might be con- 
 sidered theologians Archbishop Howley, Phillpotts of 
 Exeter, Kaye of Lincoln, Marsh of Peterborough. 
 Two or three belonged to the Evangelical school, 
 Ryder of Lichfield, and the two Sumners at Winchester 
 and Chester. The most prominent among them, and 
 next to the Bishop of Exeter the ablest, alive to the 
 real dangers of the Church, anxious to infuse vigour 
 into its work, and busy with plans for extending 
 its influence, was Blomfield, Bishop of London. But 
 Blomfield was not at his best as a divine, and, for a 
 man of his unquestionable power, singularly unsure of 
 his own mind. He knew, in fact, that when the 
 questions raised by the Tracts came before him he was 
 unqualified to deal with them ; he was no better 
 furnished by thought or knowledge or habits to 
 judge of them than the average Bishop of the time, 
 appointed, as was so often the case, for political or 
 personal reasons. At the first start of the movement, 
 they not unnaturally waited to see what would come 
 of it. It was indeed an effort in favour of the Church, 
 but it was in irresponsible hands, begun by men 
 whose words were strong and vehement and of un- 
 usual sound, and who, while they called on the clergy 
 to rally round their fathers the Bishops, did not shrink 
 from wishing for the Bishops the fortunes of the early 
 days : " we could not wish them a more blessed ter- 
 mination of their course than the spoiling of their 
 goods and martyrdom." 1 It may reasonably be sup- 
 
 1 Tracts for the Times, No. I, 9th September 1833.
 
 2i8 THE OXFORD MOVEMENT CHAP. 
 
 posed that such good wishes were not to the taste of 
 all of them. As the movement developed, besides 
 that it would seem to them extravagant and violent, 
 they would be perplexed by its doctrine. It took strong 
 ground for the Church ; but it did so in the teeth of 
 religious opinions and prejudices, which were popular 
 and intolerant. For a moment the Bishops were in a 
 difficulty ; on the one hand, no one for generations had 
 so exalted the office of a Bishop as the Tractarians ; no 
 one had claimed for it so high and sacred an origin ; 
 no one had urged with such practical earnestness the 
 duty of Churchmen to recognise and maintain the 
 unique authority of the Episcopate against its despisers 
 or oppressors. On the other hand, this was just the 
 time when the Evangelical party, after long disfavour, 
 was beginning to gain recognition, for the sake of its 
 past earnestness and good works, with men in power, 
 and with ecclesiastical authorities of a different and 
 hitherto hostile school ; and in the Tractarian move- 
 ment the Evangelical party saw from the first its 
 natural enemy. The Bishops could not have anything 
 to do with the Tractarians without deeply offending 
 the Evangelicals. The result was that, for the present, 
 the Bishops held aloof. They let the movement 
 run on by itself. Sharp sarcasms, worldly-wise pre- 
 dictions, kind messages of approval, kind cautions, 
 passed from mouth to mouth, or in private corre- 
 spondence from high quarters, which showed that the 
 movement was watched. But for some time the 
 authorities spoke neither good nor bad of it publicly. 
 In his Charge at the close of 1836, Bishop Phillpotts 
 spoke in clear and unfaltering language language 
 remarkable for its bold decision of the necessity of 
 setting forth the true idea of the Church and the sacra-
 
 xin THE AUTHORITIES AND THE MOVEMENT 219 
 
 ments ; but he was silent about the call of the same 
 kind which had come from Oxford. It would have 
 been well if the other Bishops later on, in their 
 charges, had followed his example. The Bishop of 
 Oxford, in his Charge of 1838, referred to the move- 
 ment in balanced terms of praise and warning. The 
 first who condemned the movement was the Bishop 
 of Chester, J. Bird Sumner ; in a later Charge he 
 came to describe it as the work of Satan ; in 1838 
 he only denounced the "undermining of the found- 
 ations of our Protestant Church by men who dwell 
 within her walls," and the bad faith of those 
 " who sit in the Reformers' seat, and traduced the 
 Reformation." 
 
 These were grave mistakes on the part of those 
 who were responsible for the government of the 
 University and the Church. They treated as absurd, 
 mischievous, and at length traitorous, an effort, than 
 which nothing could be more sincere, to serve the 
 Church, to place its claims on adequate grounds, to 
 elevate the standard of duty in its clergy, and in 
 all its members. To have missed the aim of the 
 movement and to have been occupied and irritated 
 by obnoxious details and vulgar suspicions was a 
 blunder which gave the measure of those who made 
 it, and led to great evils. They alienated those who 
 wished for nothing better than to help them in their 
 true work. Their "unkindness" was felt to be, in 
 Bacon's phrase, 1 injurice potentiorum. But on the 
 side of the party of the movement there were mistakes 
 also. 
 
 i. The rapidity with which the movement had 
 grown, showing that some deep need had long been 
 
 1 Discourse on " Church Controversies" ; Spedding's Bacon> vol. i.
 
 220 THE OXFORD MO VEMENT CHAP. 
 
 obscurely felt, which the movement promised to meet, 1 
 had been too great to be altogether wholesome. When 
 we compare what was commonly received before 1833, 
 in teaching, in habits of life, in the ordinary assumptions 
 of history, in the ideas and modes of worship, public 
 and private the almost sacramental conception of 
 preaching, the neglect of the common prayer of the 
 Prayer Book, the slight regard to the sacraments with 
 what the teaching of the Tracts and their writers had 
 impressed for good and all, five years later, on numbers 
 of earnest people, the change seems astonishing. The 
 change was a beneficial one and it was a permanent 
 one. The minds which it affected, it affected pro- 
 foundly. Still it was but a short time, for young 
 minds especially, to have come to a decision on great 
 and debated questions. There was the possibility, 
 the danger, of men having been captivated and carried 
 away by the excitement and interest of the time ; of 
 not having looked all round and thought out the diffi- 
 culties before them ; of having embraced opinions 
 without sufficiently knowing their grounds or counting 
 the cost or considering the consequences. There was 
 the danger of precipitate judgment, of ill -balanced 
 and disproportionate views of what was true and all- 
 important. There was an inevitable feverishness in 
 the way in which the movement was begun, in the way 
 in which it went on. Those affected by it were them- 
 selves surprised at the swiftness of the pace. When 
 a cause so great and so sacred seemed thus to be 
 flourishing, and carrying along with it men's assent 
 and sympathies, it was hardly wonderful that there 
 
 1 See Mr. Newman's article, " The in his Essays Historical and Critical, 
 State of Religious Parties," in the 1871, Vol. I., essay vi. 
 British Critic, April 1839, reprinted
 
 xni THE AUTHORITIES AND THE MOVEMENT 221 
 
 should often be exaggeration, impatience at resistance, 
 scant consideration for the slowness or the scruples or 
 the alarms of others. Eager and sanguine men talked 
 as if their work was accomplished, when in truth it 
 was but beginning. No one gave more serious 
 warnings against this and other dangers than the 
 leaders ; and their warnings were needed. 1 
 
 2. Another mistake, akin to the last, was the 
 frequent forgetfulness of the apostolic maxim, " All 
 things are lawful for me, but all things are not ex- 
 pedient." In what almost amounted to a revolution 
 in many of the religious ideas of the time, it was 
 especially important to keep distinct the great central 
 truths, the restoration of which to their proper place 
 justified and made it necessary, and the many sub- 
 ordinate points allied with them and naturally follow- 
 ing from them, which yet were not necessary to their 
 establishment or acceptance. But it was on these 
 subordinate points that the interest of a certain number 
 of followers of the movement was fastened. Con- 
 clusions which they had a perfect right to come to, 
 practices innocent and edifying to themselves, but of 
 secondary account, began to be thrust forward into 
 prominence, whether or not these instances of self- 
 
 - 1 " It would not be at all surprising, opinions of a movement party, who 
 though, in spite of the earnestness of talk loudly and strangely, do odd and 
 the principal advocates of the views fierce things, display themselves un- 
 in question, for which every one seems necessarily, and disgust other people ; 
 to give them credit, there should be there will ever be those who are too 
 among their followers much that is young to be wise, too generous to be 
 enthusiastic, extravagant, or excessive. cautious, too warm to be sober, or too 
 All these aberrations will be and are intellectual to be humble ; of whom 
 imputed to the doctrines from which human sagacity cannot determine, only 
 they proceed ; nor unnaturally, but the event, and perhaps not even that, 
 hardly fairly, for aberrations there must whether they feel what they say, or 
 be, whatever the doctrine is, while the how far ; whether they are to be en- 
 human heart is sensitive, capricious, couraged or discountenanced." British 
 and wayward. . . . There will ever be Critic, April 1839, " State of Religious 
 a number of persons professing the Parties," p. 405.
 
 222 THE OXFORD MOVEMENT CHAP. 
 
 will really helped the common cause, whether or not 
 they gave a handle to ill-nature and ill-will. Suspicion 
 must always have attached to such a movement as 
 this ; but a great deal of it was provoked by indis- 
 creet defiance, which was rather glad to provoke it. 
 
 3. Apart from these incidents common wherever 
 a number of men are animated with zeal for an in- 
 spiring cause there were what to us now seem 
 mistakes made in the conduct itself of the movement. 
 Considering the difficulties of the work, it is wonderful 
 that there were not more ; and none of them were 
 discreditable, none but what arose from the limitation 
 of human powers matched against confused and baffling 
 circumstances. 
 
 In the position claimed for the Church of England, 
 confessedly unique and anomalous in the history of 
 Christendom, between Roman authority and infalli- 
 bility on one side, and Protestant freedom of private 
 judgment on the other, the question would at once 
 arise as to the grounds of belief. What, if any, are 
 the foundations of conviction and certitude, apart from 
 personal inquiry, and examination of opposing argu- 
 ments on different sides of the case, and satisfactory 
 logical conclusions ? The old antithesis between 
 Faith and Reason, and the various problems con- 
 nected with it, could not but come to the front, and 
 require to be dealt with. It is a question which faces 
 us from a hundred sides, and, subtly and insensibly 
 transforming itself, looks different from them all. It 
 was among the earliest attempted to be solved by the 
 chief intellectual leader of the movement, and it has 
 occupied his mind to the last. 1 However near the 
 human mind seems to come to a solution, it only, if so 
 
 1 Cardinal Newman, Grammar of Assent,
 
 xiii THE A UTHORITIES AND THE MO VEMENT 223 
 
 be, comes near; it never arrives. In the early days 
 of the movement it found prevailing the specious but 
 shallow view that everything in the search for truth 
 was to be done by mere producible and explicit argu- 
 mentation ; and yet it was obvious that of this two- 
 thirds of the world are absolutely incapable. Against 
 this Mr. Newman and his followers pressed, what was 
 as manifestly certain in fact as it accorded with any 
 deep and comprehensive philosophy of the formation 
 and growth of human belief, that not arguments only, 
 but the whole condition of the mind to which they 
 were addressed and not the reasonings only which 
 could be stated, but those which went on darkly in 
 the mind, and which " there was not at the moment 
 strength to bring forth," real and weighty reasons 
 which acted like the obscure rays of the spectrum, 
 with their proper force, yet eluding distinct observa- 
 tion had their necessary and inevitable and legiti- 
 mate place in determining belief. All this was per- 
 fectly true ; but it is obvious how easily it might be 
 taken hold of, on very opposite sides, as a ground for 
 saying that Tractarian or Church views did not care 
 about argument, or, indeed, rather preferred weak 
 arguments to strong ones in the practical work of life. 
 It was ludicrous to say it in a field of controversy, 
 which, on the " Tractarian " side, was absolutely 
 bristling with argument, keen, subtle, deep, living 
 argument, and in which the victory in argument was 
 certainly not always with those who ventured to 
 measure swords with Mr. Newman or Dr. Pusey. 
 Still, the scoff could be plausibly pointed at the " young 
 enthusiasts who crowded the Via Media, and who 
 never presumed to argue, except against the propriety 
 of arguing at all." There was a good deal of foolish
 
 224 THE OXFORD MOVEMENT CHAP. 
 
 sneering at reason ; there was a good deal of silly 
 bravado about not caring whether the avowed grounds 
 of opinions taken up were strong or feeble. It was not 
 merely the assent of a learner to his teacher, of a mind 
 without means of instruction to the belief which it has 
 inherited, or of one new to the ways and conditions of 
 life to the unproved assertions and opinions of one to 
 whom experience had given an open and sure eye. 
 It was a positive carelessness, almost accounted merit- 
 orious, to inquire and think, when their leaders called 
 them to do so. " The Gospel of Christ is not a 
 matter of mere argument." It is not, indeed, when it 
 comes in its full reality, in half a hundred different 
 ways, known and unsearchable, felt and unfelt, moral 
 and intellectual, on the awakened and quickened soul. 
 But the wildest fanatic can take the same words into 
 his mouth. Their true meaning was variously and 
 abundantly illustrated, especially in Mr. Newman's 
 sermons. Still, the adequate, the emphatic warning 
 against their early abuse was hardly pressed on the 
 public opinion and sentiment of the party of the 
 movement with the force which really was requisite. 
 To the end there were men who took up their belief 
 avowedly on insufficient and precarious grounds, glory- 
 ing in the venturesomeness of their faith and courage, 
 and justifying their temper of mind and their intel- 
 lectual attitude by alleging misinterpreted language 
 of their wiser and deeper teachers. A recoil from 
 Whately's hard and barren dialectics, a sympathy with 
 many tender and refined natures which the movement 
 had touched, made the leaders patient with intellectual 
 feebleness when it was joined with real goodness 
 and Christian temper ; but this also sometimes made 
 them less impatient than they might well have been
 
 xni THE AUTHORITIES AND THE MOVEMENT 225 
 
 with that curious form of conceit and affectation which 
 veils itself under an intended and supposed humility, 
 a supposed distrust of self and its own powers. 
 
 Another difficult matter, not altogether successfully 
 managed at least from the original point of view of 
 the movement, and of those who saw in it a great 
 effort for the good of the English Church was the 
 treatment of the Roman controversy. The general 
 line which the leaders proposed to take was the 
 one which was worthy of Christian and truth-loving 
 teachers. They took a new departure ; and it was not 
 less just than it was brave, when, recognising to the 
 full the overwhelming reasons why "we should not 
 be Romanists," they refused to take up the popular 
 and easy method of regarding the Roman Church as 
 apostate and antichristian ; and declined to commit 
 themselves to the vulgar and indiscriminate abuse of 
 it which was the discreditable legacy of the old days 
 of controversy. They did what all the world was 
 loudly professing to do, they looked facts in the face ; 
 they found, as any one would find who looked for 
 himself into the realities of the Roman Church, that 
 though the bad was often as bad as could be, there was 
 still, and there had been all along, goodness of the 
 highest type, excellence both of system and of per- 
 sonal life which it was monstrous to deny, and which 
 we might well admire and envy. To ignore all this 
 was to fail in the first duty, not merely of Christians, 
 but of honest men ; and we at home were not so 
 blameless that we could safely take this lofty tone of 
 contemptuous superiority. If Rome would only leave 
 us alone, there would be estrangement, lamentable 
 enough among Christians, but there need be no bitter- 
 ness. But Rome would not leave us alone. The 
 
 Q
 
 226 THE OXFORD MOVEMENT CHAP. 
 
 moment that there were signs of awakening energy in 
 England, that moment was chosen by its agents, for 
 now it could be done safely, to assail and thwart the 
 English Church. Doubtless they were within their 
 rights, but this made controversy inevitable, and for 
 controversy the leaders of the movement prepared 
 themselves. It was an obstacle which they seemed 
 hardly to have expected, but which the nature of 
 things placed in their way. But the old style of con- 
 troversy was impossible ; impossible because it was so 
 coarse, impossible because it was so hollow. 
 
 If the argument (says the writer of Tract 71, in words which are 
 applicable to every controversy) is radically unreal, or (what may be 
 called) rhetorical or sophistical, it may serve the purpose of en- 
 couraging those who are really convinced, though scarcely without 
 doing mischief to them, but certainly it will offend and alienate the 
 more acute and sensible ; while those who are in doubt, and who 
 desire some real and substantial ground for their faith, will not bear 
 to be put off with such shadows. The arguments (he continues) 
 which we use must be such as are likely to convince serious and 
 earnest minds, which are really seeking for the truth, not amusing 
 themselves with intellectual combats, or desiring to support an 
 existing opinion anyhow. However popular these latter methods 
 may be, of however long standing, however easy both to find and 
 to use, they are a scandal; and while they lower our religious 
 standard from the first, they are sure of hurting our cause in the 
 end. 
 
 And on this principle the line of argument in The 
 Prophetical Office of the Church was taken by Mr. 
 Newman. It was certainly no make-believe, or unreal 
 argument. It was a forcible and original way of 
 putting part of the case against Rome. It was part 
 of the case, a very important part ; but it was not the 
 whole case, and it ought to have been evident from
 
 xiii THE AUTHORITIES AND THE MOVEMENT 227 
 
 the first that in this controversy we could not afford to 
 do without the whole case. The argument from the 
 claim of infallibility said nothing of what are equally 
 real parts of the case the practical working of the 
 Roman Church, its system of government, the part 
 which it and its rulers have played in the history of 
 the world. Rome has not such a clean record of 
 history, it has not such a clean account of what is done 
 and permitted in its dominions under an authority 
 supposed to be irresistible, that it can claim to be the 
 one pure and perfect Church, entitled to judge and 
 correct and govern all other Churches. And if the 
 claim is made, there is no help for it, we must not 
 shrink from the task of giving the answer. 1 And, as 
 experience has shown, the more that rigid good faith 
 is kept to in giving the answer, the more that strict- 
 ness and severity of even understatement are observed, 
 the more convincing will be the result that the Roman 
 Church cannot be that which it is alleged to be in its 
 necessary theory and ideal. 
 
 But this task was never adequately undertaken. It 
 was one of no easy execution. 2 Other things, apparently 
 more immediately pressing, intervened. There was no 
 question for the present of perfect and unfeigned con- 
 fidence in the English Church, with whatever regrets 
 for its shortcomings, and desires for its improvement. 
 But to the outside world it seemed as if there were a 
 reluctance to face seriously the whole of the Roman 
 
 1 The argument from history is advocate. Yet the supreme duty in 
 sketched fairly, but only sketched in religious controversy is justice. But 
 The Prophetic Office, Lect. xiv. for the very reason that these contro- 
 
 2 In the Roman controversy it is versialists wished to be just to Rome, 
 sometimes hard to be just without they were bound to be just against her. 
 appearing to mean more than is said ; They meant to be so ; but events 
 for the obligation of justice sometimes passed quickly, and leisure never came 
 forces one who wishes to be a fair for a work which involved a serious 
 judge to be apparently an apologist or appeal to history.
 
 228 THE OXFORD MOVEMENT CHAP. 
 
 controversy ; a disposition to be indulgent to Roman 
 defects, and unfairly hard on English faults. How 
 mischievously this told in the course of opinion outside 
 and inside of the movement ; how it was misinterpreted 
 and misrepresented ; how these misinterpretations and 
 misrepresentations, with the bitterness and injustice 
 which they engendered, helped to realise themselves, 
 was seen but too clearly at a later stage. 
 
 4. Lastly, looking back on the publications, re- 
 garded as characteristic of the party, it is difficult not 
 to feel that some of them gave an unfortunate and 
 unnecessary turn to things. 
 
 The book which made most stir and caused the 
 greatest outcry was Froude's Remains. It was 
 undoubtedly a bold experiment ; but it was not 
 merely boldness. Except that it might be perverted 
 into an excuse by the shallow and thoughtless for 
 merely "strong talk," it may fairly be said that it was 
 right and wise to let the world know the full measure 
 and depth of conviction which gave birth to the 
 movement ; and Froude's Remains did that in an 
 unsuspiciously genuine way that nothing else could 
 have done. And, besides, it was worth while for its own 
 sake to exhibit with fearless honesty such a character, 
 so high, so true, so refined, so heroic. So again, Dr. 
 Pusey's Tract on Baptism was a bold book, and one 
 which brought heavy imputations and misconstructions 
 on the party. In the teaching of his long life, Dr. 
 Pusey has abundantly dispelled the charges of harsh- 
 ness and over-severity which were urged, not always 
 very scrupulously, against the doctrine of the Tract on 
 Post-baptismal Sin. But it was written to redress the 
 balance against the fatally easy doctrines then in 
 fashion ; it was like the Portroyalist protest against
 
 xin THE AUTHORITIES AND THE MOVEMENT 229 
 
 the fashionable Jesuits ; it was one-sided, and some- 
 times, in his earnestness, unguarded ; and it wanted 
 as yet the complement of encouragement, consolation, 
 and tenderness which his future teaching was to supply 
 so amply. But it was a blow struck, not before it 
 was necessary, by a strong hand ; and it may safely be 
 said that it settled the place of the sacrament of 
 baptism in the living system of the English Church, 
 which the negations and vagueness of the Evangelical 
 party had gravely endangered. But two other essays 
 appeared in the Tracts, most innocent in themselves, 
 which ten or twenty years later would have been 
 judged simply on their merits, but which at the time 
 became potent weapons against Tractarianism. They 
 were the productions of two poets of two of the most 
 beautiful and religious minds of their time ; but in that 
 stage of the movement it is hardly too much to say 
 that they were out of place. The cause of the move- 
 ment needed clear explanations ; definite statements of 
 doctrines which were popularly misunderstood ; plain, 
 convincing reasoning on the issues which were raised 
 by it ; a careful laying out of the ground on which 
 English theology was to be strengthened and enriched. 
 Such were Mr. Newman's Lectures on Justification, 
 a work which made its lasting mark on English theo- 
 logical thought ; Mr. Keble's masterly exposition of 
 the meaning of Tradition ; and not least, the important 
 collections which were documentary and historical 
 evidence of the character of English theology, the 
 so-called laborious Catenas. These were the real 
 tasks of the hour, and they needed all that labour and 
 industry could give. But the first of these inoppor- 
 tune Tracts was an elaborate essay, by Mr. Keble, 
 on the " Mysticism of the Fathers in the use and
 
 230 THE OXFORD MOVEMENT CHAP. 
 
 interpretation of Scripture." It was hardly what the 
 practical needs of the time required, and it took away 
 men's thoughts from them ; the prospect was hopeless 
 that in that state of men's minds it should be under- 
 stood, except by a very few ; it merely helped to add 
 another charge, the vague but mischievous charge of 
 mysticism, to the list of accusations against the Tracts. 
 The other, to the astonishment of every one, was like 
 the explosion of a mine. That it should be criticised 
 and objected to was natural ; but the extraordinary 
 irritation caused by it could hardly have been anti- 
 cipated. Written in the most devout and reverent 
 spirit by one of the gentlest and most refined of 
 scholars, and full of deep Scriptural knowledge, it 
 furnished for some years the material for the most 
 savage attacks and the bitterest sneers to the oppo- 
 nents of the movement. It was called " On Reserve 
 in communicating Religious Knowledge"; and it was 
 a protest against the coarseness and shallowness which 
 threw the most sacred words about at random in loud 
 and declamatory appeals, and which especially dragged 
 in the awful mystery of the Atonement, under the 
 crudest and most vulgar conception of it, as a ready 
 topic of excitement in otherwise commonplace and help- 
 less preaching. The word " Reserve " was enough. 
 It meant that the Tract-writers avowed the principle 
 of keeping back part of the counsel of God. It meant, 
 further, that the real spirit of the party was disclosed ; 
 its love of secret and crooked methods, its indifference 
 to knowledge, its disingenuous professions, its deliberate 
 concealments, its holding doctrines and its pursuit of 
 aims which it dared not avow, its disciplina arcani, 
 its conspiracies, its Jesuitical spirit. All this kind of 
 abuse was flung plentifully on the party as the con-
 
 xiii THE AUTHORITIES AND THE MOVEMENT 231 
 
 troversy became warm ; and it mainly justified itself 
 by the Tract on " Reserve." The Tract was in many 
 ways a beautiful and suggestive essay, full of deep and 
 original thoughts, though composed in that spirit of 
 the recluse which was characteristic of the writer, and 
 which is in strong contrast with the energetic temper 
 of to-day. 1 But it could well have been spared at the 
 moment, and it certainly offered itself to an unfortunate 
 use. The suspiciousness which so innocently it helped 
 to awaken and confirm was never again allayed. 
 
 1 Vide a striking review in the reeling and guarding the view given in 
 British Critic, April 1839, partly cor- the Tract.
 
 CHAPTER XIV 
 
 No. 90 
 
 THE formation of a strong Romanising section in the 
 Tractarian party was obviously damaging to the party 
 and dangerous to the Church. It was pro tanto a 
 verification of the fundamental charge against the 
 party, a charge which on paper they had met success- 
 fully, but which acquired double force when this paper 
 defence was traversed by facts. And a great blow 
 was impending over the Church, if the zeal and ability 
 which the movement had called forth and animated 
 were to be sucked away from the Church, and not only 
 lost to it, but educated into a special instrument against 
 it. But the divergence became clear only gradually, 
 and the hope that after all it was only temporary and 
 would ultimately disappear was long kept up by the 
 tenacity with which Mr. Newman, in spite of mis- 
 givings and disturbing thoughts, still recognised the 
 gifts and claims of the English Church. And on the 
 other hand, the bulk of the party, and its other Oxford 
 leaders, Dr. Pusey, Mr. Keble, Mr. Isaac Williams, 
 Mr. Marriott, were quite unaffected by the disquieting 
 apprehensions which were beginning to beset Mr. 
 Newman. With a humbling consciousness of the 
 practical shortcomings of the English Church, with a
 
 CHAP. XIV NO. 90 233 
 
 ready disposition to be honest and just towards Rome, 
 and even to minimise our differences with it, they had 
 not admitted for a moment any doubt of the reality of 
 the English Church. The class of arguments which 
 specially laid hold of Mr. Newman's mind did not 
 tell upon them the peculiar aspect of early precedents, 
 about which, moreover, a good deal of criticism was 
 possible ; or the large and sweeping conception of a 
 vast, ever-growing, imperial Church, great enough to 
 make flaws and imperfections of no account, which 
 appealed so strongly to his statesmanlike imagination. 
 Their content with the Church in which they had been 
 brought up, in which they had been taught religion, 
 and in which they had taken service, their deep and 
 affectionate loyalty and piety to it, in spite of all its 
 faults, remained unimpaired ; and unimpaired, also, was 
 their sense of vast masses of practical evil in the 
 Roman Church, evils from which they shrank both as 
 Englishmen and as Christians, and which seemed as 
 incurable as they were undeniable. Beyond the hope 
 which they vaguely cherished that some day or other, 
 by some great act of Divine mercy, these evils might 
 disappear, and the whole Church become once more 
 united, there was nothing to draw them towards Rome ; 
 submission was out of the question, and they could 
 only see in its attitude in England the hostility of a 
 jealous and unscrupulous disturber of their Master's 
 work. The movement still went on, with its original 
 purpose, and on its original lines, in spite of the 
 presence in it, and even the co-operation, of men who 
 might one day have other views, and serious and fatal 
 differences with their old friends. 
 
 The change of religion when it comes on a man 
 gradually, when it is not welcomed from the first,
 
 234 THE OXFORD MOVEMENT CHAP. 
 
 but, on the contrary, long resisted, must always be a 
 mysterious and perplexing process, hard to realise and 
 follow by the person most deeply interested, veiled 
 and clouded to lookers-on, because naturally belonging 
 to the deepest depths of the human conscience, and 
 inevitably, and without much fault on either side, liable 
 to be misinterpreted and misunderstood. And this 
 process is all the more tangled when it goes on, not in 
 an individual mind, travelling in its own way on its 
 own path, little affected by others, and little affecting 
 them, but in a representative person, with the responsi- 
 bilities of a great cause upon him, bound by closest 
 ties of every kind to friends, colleagues, and disciples, 
 thinking, feeling, leading, pointing out the way for 
 hundreds who love and depend on him. Views and 
 feelings vary from day to day, according to the events 
 and conditions of the day. How shall he speak, and 
 how shall he be silent ? How shall he let doubts and 
 difficulties appear, yet how shall he suppress them ? 
 Doubts which may grow and become hopeless, but 
 which, on the other hand, may be solved and disappear. 
 How shall he go on as if nothing had happened, when 
 all the foundations of the world seem to have sunk 
 from under him ? Yet how shall he disclose the 
 dreadful secret, when he is not yet quite sure whether 
 his mind will not still rally from its terror and despair? 
 He must in honesty, in kindness, give some warning, 
 yet how much ? and how to prevent it being taken for 
 more than it means? There are counter- considera- 
 tions, to which he cannot shut his eyes. There are 
 friends who will not believe his warnings. There are 
 watchful enemies who are on the look-out for proofs of 
 disingenuousness and bad faith. He could cut through 
 his difficulties at once by making the plunge in obedi-
 
 xiv No. 90 235 
 
 ence to this or that plausible sign or train of reasoning, 
 but his conscience and good faith will not let him take 
 things so easily ; and yet he knows that if he hangs 
 on, he will be accused by and by, perhaps speciously, 
 of having been dishonest and deceiving. So subtle, 
 so shifting, so impalpable are the steps by which a 
 faith is disintegrated ; so evanescent, and impossible 
 to follow, the shades by which one set of convictions 
 pass into others wholly opposite ; for it is not know- 
 ledge and intellect alone which come into play, but 
 all the moral tastes and habits of the character, its 
 likings and dislikings, its weakness and its strength, its 
 triumphs and its vexations, its keenness and its insen- 
 sibilities, which are in full action, while the intellect 
 alone seems to be busy with its problems. A picture 
 has been given us, belonging to this time, of the 
 process, by a great master of human nature, and a 
 great sufferer under the process ; it is, perhaps, the 
 greatest attempt ever made to describe it ; but it is not 
 wholly successful. It tells us much, for it is written 
 with touching good faith, but the complete effect as an 
 intelligible whole is wanting. 
 
 " In the spring of 1839," we read in the Apologia, 
 " my position in the Anglican Church was at its height. 
 I had a supreme confidence in my controversial status, 
 and I had a great and still growing success in recom- 
 mending it to others." 1 This, then, may be taken as 
 the point from which, in the writer's own estimate, the 
 change is to be traced. He refers for illustration of 
 his state of mind to the remarkable article on the 
 " State of Religious Parties," in the April number of the 
 British Critic for 1839, which he has since republished 
 under the title of " Prospects of the Anglican Church." 2 
 
 1 Apologia, p. 1 80. 2 Essays Critical and Historical, 1871.
 
 236 THE OXFORD MOVEMENT CHAP. 
 
 " I have looked over it now," he writes in 1864, " for 
 the first time since it was published ; and have been 
 struck by it for this reason : it contains the last words 
 which I ever spoke as an Anglican to Anglicans. . . . 
 It may now be read as my parting address and vale- 
 diction, made to my friends. I little knew it at the 
 time." He thus describes the position which he took 
 in the article referred to : 
 
 Conscious as I was that my opinions in religious matters were 
 not gained, as the world said, from Roman sources, but were, on the 
 contrary, the birth of my own mind and of the circumstances in 
 which I had been placed, I had a scorn of the imputations which 
 were heaped upon me. It was true that I held a large, bold 
 system of religion, very unlike the Protestantism of the day, but it 
 was the concentration and adjustment of the statements of great 
 Anglican authorities, and I had as much right to do so as the 
 Evangelical Party had, and more right than the Liberal, to hold 
 their own respective doctrines. As I spoke on occasion of Tract 
 90, I claimed, on behalf of the writer, that he might hold in the 
 Anglican Church a comprecation of the Saints with Bramhall ; and 
 the Mass, all but Transubstantiation, with Andrewes ; or with 
 Hooker that Transubstantiation itself is not a point for Churches 
 to part communion upon ; or with Hammond that a General 
 Council, truly such, never did, never shall err in a matter of faith ; 
 or with Bull that man lost inward grace by the Fall ; or with 
 Thorndike that penance is a propitiation for post-baptismal sin ; or 
 with Pearson that the all-powerful name of Jesus is no otherwise 
 given than in the Catholic Church. "Two can play at that game" 
 was often in my mouth, when men of Protestant sentiments appealed 
 to the Articles, Homilies, and Reformers, in the sense that if they 
 had a right to speak loud I had both the liberty and the means of 
 giving them tit for tat. I thought that the Anglican Church had 
 been tyrannised over by a Party, and I aimed at bringing into effect 
 the promise contained in the motto to the Lyra : " They shall know 
 the difference now." I only asked to be allowed to show them the 
 difference. 
 
 I have said already (he goes on) that though the object of the 
 movement was to withstand the Liberalism of the day, I found and
 
 xiv No. go 237 
 
 felt that this could not be done by negatives. It was necessary for 
 me to have a positive Church theory erected on a definite basis. 
 This took me to the great Anglican divines ; and then, of course, I 
 found at once that it was impossible to form any such theory 
 without cutting across the teaching of the Church of Rome. Thus 
 came in the Roman controversy. When I first turned myself to it 
 I had neither doubt on the subject, nor suspicion that doubt 
 would ever come on me. It was in this state of mind that I began 
 to read up Bellarmine on the one hand, and numberless Anglican 
 writers on the other. 1 
 
 And he quotes from the article the language which 
 he used, to show the necessity of providing some clear 
 and strong basis for religious thought in view of the 
 impending conflict of principles, religious and anti- 
 religious, "Catholic and Rationalist," which to far- 
 seeing men, even at that comparatively early time, 
 seemed inevitable : 
 
 Then indeed will be the stern encounter, when two real and 
 living principles, simple, entire, and consistent, one in the Church, 
 the other out of it, at length rush upon each other, contending not 
 for names and words, a half-view, but for elementary notions and 
 distinctive moral characters. Men will not keep standing in that 
 very attitude which you call sound Church- of -Englandism or 
 orthodox Protestantism. They will take one view or another, but 
 it will be a consistent one ... it will be real. ... Is it sensible, 
 sober, judicious, to be so very angry with the writers of the day who 
 point to the fact, that our divines of the seventeenth century have 
 occupied a ground which is the true and intelligible mean between 
 extremes ? . . . Would you rather have your sons and your 
 daughters members of the Church of England or of the Church 
 of Rome ? z 
 
 " The last words that I spoke as an Anglican to 
 Anglicans," so he describes this statement of his 
 
 1 Apologia, pp. 1 8 1, 182. Comp. 426. Condensed in the Apologia, pp. 
 Letter to Jelf, p. 18. 192-194. 
 
 2 British Critic, April 1839, pp. 419-
 
 238 THE OXFORD MO VEMENT CHAP. 
 
 position and its reasons ; so it seems to him, as he 
 looks back. And yet in the intimate and frank dis- 
 closures which he makes, he has shown us much that 
 indicates both that his Anglicanism lasted much longer 
 and that his Roman sympathies began to stir much 
 earlier. This only shows the enormous difficulties of 
 measuring accurately the steps of a transition state. 
 The mind, in such a strain of buffeting, is never in one 
 stay. The old seems impregnable, yet it has been 
 undermined ; the new is indignantly and honestly 
 repelled, and yet leaves behind it its never-to-be- 
 forgotten and unaccountable spell. The story, as he 
 tells it, goes on, how, in the full swing and confidence 
 of his Anglicanism, and in the course of his secure 
 and fearless study of antiquity, appearance after 
 appearance presented itself, unexpected, threatening, 
 obstinate, in the history of the Early Church, by 
 which this confidence was first shaken and then utterly 
 broken down in the summer of 1839. And two years 
 from that summer of 1839 he speaks as if all was 
 over : " From the end of 1841 I was on my death-bed, 
 as regards my membership with the Anglican Church, 
 though at the time I became aware of it only by 
 degrees." In truth, it was only the end which showed 
 that it was a "death-bed." He had not yet died to 
 allegiance or "to hope, then or for some time after- 
 wards." He speaks in later years of the result, and 
 reads what was then in the light of what followed. 
 But after all that had happened, and much, of course, 
 disturbing happened in 1841, he was a long way off 
 from what then could have been spoken of as "a 
 death-bed." Deep and painful misgivings may assail 
 the sincerest faith ; they are not fatal signs till faith 
 has finally given way.
 
 xiv No. go 239 
 
 What is true is, that the whole state of religion, 
 and the whole aspect of Christianity in the world, 
 had come to seem to him portentously strange and 
 anomalous. No theory would take in and suit all the 
 facts, which the certainties of history and experience 
 presented. Neither in England, nor in Rome, and 
 much less anywhere else, did the old, to which all 
 appealed, agree with the new ; it might agree variously 
 in this point or in that, in others there were con- 
 trarieties which it was vain to reconcile. Facts were 
 against the English claim to be a Catholic Church 
 how could Catholicity be shut up in one island ? How 
 could England assert its continuity of doctrine ? Facts 
 were against the Roman claim to be an infallible, and 
 a perfect, and the whole Church how could that be 
 perfect which was marked in the face of day with 
 enormous and undeniable corruptions ? How could 
 that be infallible which was irreconcilable with ancient 
 teaching ? How could that be the whole Church, which, 
 to say nothing of the break up in the West, ignored, 
 as if it had no existence, the ancient and uninterrupted 
 Eastern Church ? Theory after theory came up, and 
 was tried, and was found wanting. Each had much to 
 say for itself, its strong points, its superiority over its 
 rivals in dealing with the difficulties of the case, its 
 plausibilities and its imaginative attractions. But all 
 had their tender spot, and flinched when they were 
 touched in earnest. In the confusions and sins and 
 divisions of the last fifteen centuries, profound dis- 
 organisation had fastened on the Western Church. 
 Christendom was not, could not be pretended to be, 
 what it had been in the fourth century ; and which- 
 ever way men looked the reasons were not hard to 
 see. The first and characteristic feeling of the
 
 240 THE OXFORD MO VEMENT CHAP. 
 
 movement, one which Mr. Newman had done so 
 much to deepen, was that of shame and humiliation 
 at the disorder at home, as well as in every part of the 
 Church. It was not in Rome only, or in England 
 only ; it was everywhere. What had been peculiar 
 to Anglicanism among all its rivals, was that it had 
 emphatically and without reserve confessed it. 
 
 With this view of the dislocation and the sins of 
 the Church, he could at once with perfect consistency 
 recognise the shortcomings of the English branch of 
 the Church, and yet believe and maintain that it was a 
 true and living branch. The English fragment was 
 not what it should be, was indeed much that it should 
 not be ; the same could be said of the Roman, though 
 in different respects. This, as he himself reminds us, 
 was no new thing to his mind when the unsettlement 
 of 1839 began. " At the end of 1835, or the beginning 
 of 1836, I had the whole state of the question before 
 me, on which, to my mind, the decision between the 
 Churches depended." It did not, he says, depend on 
 the claims of the Pope, as centre of unity ; "it turned 
 on the Faith of the Church " ; " there was a contrariety 
 of claims between the Roman and Anglican religions" ; 
 and up to 1839, with the full weight of Roman argu- 
 ments recognised, with the full consciousness of 
 Anglican disadvantages, he yet spoke clearly for 
 Anglicanism. Even when misgivings became serious, 
 the balance still inclined without question the old way. 
 He hardly spoke stronger in 1834 than he did in 1841, 
 after No. 90. 
 
 And now (he writes, in his Letter to the Bishop of Oxford x ) 
 
 1 Letter to the Bishop of Oxford (2g\\\ March 1841), pp. 33-40. Comp. Letter 
 tojelf, pp. 7, 8.
 
 xiv No. 90 241 
 
 having said, I trust, as much as your Lordship requires on the subject 
 of Romanism, I will add a few words, to complete my explanation, 
 in acknowledgment of the inestimable privilege I feel in being a 
 member of that Church over which your Lordship, with others, pre- 
 sides. Indeed, did I not feel it to be a privilege which I am able 
 to seek nowhere else on earth, why should I be at this moment 
 writing to your Lordship ? What motive have I for an unreserved 
 and joyful submission to your authority, but the feeling that the 
 Church in which your Lordship rules is a divinely-ordained channel 
 of supernatural grace to the souls of her members ? Why should I 
 not prefer my own opinion, and my own way of acting, to that of 
 the Bishop's, except that I know full well that in matters indifferent 
 I should be acting lightly towards the Spouse of Christ and the 
 awful Presence which dwells in her, if I hesitated a moment to put 
 your Lordship's will before my own ? I know full well that your 
 Lordship's kindness to me personally would be in itself quite enough 
 to win any but the most insensible heart, and, did a clear matter of 
 conscience occur in which I felt bound to act for myself, my feelings 
 towards your Lordship would be a most severe trial to me, inde- 
 pendently of the higher considerations to which I have alluded ; but 
 I trust I have shown my dutifulness to you prior to the influence of 
 personal motives ; and this I have done because I think that to 
 belong to the Catholic Church is the first of all privileges here 
 below, as involving in it heavenly privileges, and because I consider 
 the Church over which your Lordship presides to be the Catholic 
 Church in this country. Surely then I have no need to profess in 
 words, I will not say my attachment, but my deep reverence towards 
 the Mother of Saints, when I am showing it in action ; yet that 
 words may not be altogether wanting, I beg to lay before your Lord- 
 ship the following extract from a defence of the English Church, 
 which I wrote against a Roman controversialist in the course of the 
 last year. 
 
 " The Church is emphatically a living body, and there can be no 
 greater proof of a particular communion being part of the Church 
 than the appearance in it of a continued and abiding energy, nor a 
 more melancholy proof of its being a corpse than torpidity. We 
 say an energy continued and abiding, for accident will cause the 
 activity of a moment, and an external principle give the semblance 
 of self motion. On the other hand, even a living body may for a 
 while be asleep. 
 
 R
 
 242 THE OXFORD MOVEMENT 
 
 " It concerns, then, those who deny that we are the true Church 
 because we have not at present this special note, intercommunion 
 with other Christians, to show cause why the Roman Church in the 
 tenth century should be so accounted, with profligates, or rather the 
 profligate mothers of profligate sons for her supreme rulers. And 
 still notwithstanding life is a note of the Church ; she alone revives, 
 even if she declines ; heretical and schismatical bodies cannot keep 
 life ; they gradually became cold, stiff, and insensible. 
 
 " Now if there ever were a Church on whom the experiment has 
 been tried, whether it had life in it or not, the English is that one. 
 For three centuries it has endured all vicissitudes of fortune. It 
 has endured in trouble and prosperity, under seduction and under 
 oppression. It has been practised upon by theorists, browbeaten 
 by sophists, intimidated by princes, betrayed by false sons, laid 
 waste by tyranny, corrupted by wealth, torn by schism, and perse- 
 cuted by fanaticism. Revolutions have come upon it sharply and 
 suddenly, to and fro, hot and cold, as if to try what it was made of. 
 It has been a sort of battlefield on which opposite principles have 
 been tried. No opinion, however extreme any way, but may be 
 found, as the Romanists are not slow to reproach us, among its 
 Bishops and Divines. Yet what has been its career upon the 
 whole? Which way has it been moving through 300 years? 
 Where does it find itself at the end? Lutherans have tended to 
 Rationalism ; Calvinists have become Socinians ; but what has it 
 become? As far as its Formularies are concerned, it may be said 
 all along to have grown towards a more perfect Catholicism than 
 that with which it started at the time of its estrangement ; every act, 
 every crisis which marks its course, has been upward. 
 
 "What a note of the Church is the mere production of a man 
 like Butler, a pregnant fact much to be meditated on ! and how 
 strange it is, if it be as it seems to be, that the real influence of his 
 work is only just now beginning ! and who can prophesy in what it 
 will end ? Thus our Divines grow with centuries, expanding after 
 their death in the minds of their readers into more and more exact 
 Catholicism as years roll on.
 
 xiv No. 90 243 
 
 " Look across the Atlantic to the daughter Churches of England 
 in the States : ' Shall one that is barren bear a child in her old age ? ' 
 yet 'the barren hath borne seven.' Schismatic branches put out 
 their leaves at once, in an expiring effort ; our Church has waited 
 three centuries, and then blossoms like Aaron's rod, budding and 
 blooming and yielding fruit, while the rest are dry. And lastly, look 
 at the present position of the Church at home ; there, too, we shall 
 find a note of the true City of God, the Holy Jerusalem. She is in 
 warfare with the world, as the Church Militant should be ; she is 
 rebuking the world, she is hated, she is pillaged by the world. 
 
 " Much might be said on this subject At all times, since Chris- 
 tianity came into the world, an open contest has been going on 
 between religion and irreligion ; and the true Church, of course, has 
 ever been on the religious side. This, then, is a sure test in every 
 age where the Christian should stand. . . . Now, applying this 
 simple criterion to the public Parties of this DAY, it is very plain that 
 the English Church is at present on God's side, and therefore, so far, 
 God's Church ; we are sorry to be obliged to add that there is as 
 little doubt on which side English Romanism is. 
 
 
 
 " As for the English Church, surely she has notes enough, ' the 
 signs of an Apostle in all patience, and signs and wonders and 
 mighty deeds.' She has the note of possession, the note of freedom 
 from party-titles ; the note of life, a tough life and a vigorous ; she 
 has ancient descent, unbroken continuance, agreement in doctrine 
 with the ancient Church. Those of Bellarmine's Notes, which she 
 certainly has not, are intercommunion with Christendom, the glory 
 of miracles, and the prophetical light, but the question is, whether 
 she has not enough of Divinity about her to satisfy her sister 
 Churches on their own principles, that she is one body with them." 
 
 This may be sufficient to show my feelings towards my Church, 
 as far as Statements on paper can show them. 
 
 How earnestly, how sincerely he clung to the 
 English Church, even after he describes himself on 
 his "death-bed," no one can doubt. The charm of the 
 Apologia is the perfect candour with which he records 
 fluctuations which to many are inconceivable and un-
 
 244 THE OXFORD MOVEMENT CHAP. 
 
 intelligible, the different and sometimes opposite and 
 irreconcilable states of mind through which he passed, 
 with no attempt to make one fit into another. It is 
 clear, from what he tells us, that his words in 1839 
 were not his last words as an Anglican to Anglicans. 
 With whatever troubles of mind, he strove to be a 
 loyal and faithful Anglican long after that. He spoke 
 as an Anglican. He fought for Anglicanism. The 
 theory, as he says, may have gone by the board, in the 
 intellectual storms raised by the histories of the Mono- 
 physites and Donatists. " By these great words of the 
 ancient father Securus judicat or bis terr arum" -fat 
 theory of the Via Media was " absolutely pulverised." 
 He was "sore," as he says in 1840, "about the great 
 Anglican divines, as if they had taken me in, and made 
 me say strong things against Rome, which facts did not 
 justify." 1 Yes, he felt, as other men do not feel, the 
 weak points of even a strong argument, the exaggera- 
 tions and unfairness of controversialists on his own 
 side, the consciousness that you cannot have things in 
 fact, or in theory, or in reasoning, smoothly and exactly 
 as it would be convenient, and as you would like to 
 have them. But his conclusion, on the whole, was 
 unshaken. There was enough, and amply enough, in 
 the English Church to bind him to its allegiance, to 
 satisfy him of its truth and its life, enough in the 
 Roman to warn him away. In the confusions of 
 Christendom, in the strong and obstinate differences 
 of schools and parties in the English Church, he, 
 living in days of inquiry and criticism, claimed to take 
 and recommend a theological position on many con- 
 troverted questions, which many might think a new 
 one, and which might not be exactly that occupied by 
 
 1 Apologia, pp. 212, 221.
 
 xiv No. 90 245 
 
 any existing school or party. 1 " We are all," he 
 writes to an intimate friend on 22d April 1842, a year 
 after No. 90, " much quieter and more resigned than 
 we were, and are remarkably desirous of building up 
 a position, and proving that the English theory is 
 tenable, or rather the English state of things. If the 
 Bishops would leave us alone, the fever would subside." 
 
 He wanted, when all other parties were claiming room 
 for their speculations, to claim room for his own prefer- 
 ence for ancient doctrine. He wished to make out that 
 no branch of the Church had authoritatively committed 
 itself to language which was hopelessly and fatally irre- 
 concilable with Christian truth. But he claimed nothing 
 but what he could maintain to be fairly within the 
 authorised formularies of the English Church. He 
 courted inquiry, he courted argument. If his claim 
 seemed a new one, if his avowed leaning to ancient 
 and Catholic views seemed to make him more tolerant 
 than had been customary, not to Roman abuses, but 
 to Roman authoritative language, it was part of the 
 more accurate and the more temperate and charitable 
 thought of our day compared with past times. It was 
 part of the same change which has brought Church 
 opinions from the unmitigated Calvinism of the 
 Lambeth Articles to what the authorities of those 
 days would have denounced, without a doubt, as 
 Arminianism. Hooker was gravely and seriously 
 accused to the Council for saying that a papist could 
 be saved, and had some difficulty to clear himself; it 
 was as natural then as it is amazing now. 2 
 
 But with this sincere loyalty to the English Church, 
 as he believed it to be, there was, no doubt, in the back- 
 ground the haunting and disquieting misgiving that 
 
 1 Letter to Jelf. 2 Walton's Life, i. 59 (Oxford : 1845).
 
 246 THE OXFORD MOVEMENT CHAP. 
 
 the attempt to connect more closely the modern 
 Church with the ancient, and this widened theology in 
 a direction which had been hitherto specially and 
 jealously barred, was putting the English Church on 
 its trial. Would it bear it ? Would it respond to the 
 call to rise to a higher and wider type of doctrine, to a 
 higher standard of life ? Would it justify what Mr. 
 Newman had placed in the forefront among the notes 
 of the true Church, the note of Sanctity ? Would the 
 Via Media make up for its incompleteness as a theory 
 by developing into reality and fruitfulness of actual 
 results ? Would the Church bear to be told of its 
 defaults ? Would it allow to the maintainers of 
 Catholic and Anglican principles the liberty which 
 others claimed, and which by large and powerful bodies 
 of opinion was denied to Anglicans ? Or would it turn 
 out on trial, that the Via Media was an idea without 
 substance, a dialectical fiction, a mere theological 
 expedient for getting out of difficulties, unrecognised, 
 and when put forward, disowned ? Would it turn out 
 that the line of thought and teaching which connected 
 the modern with the ancient Church was but the 
 private and accidental opinion of Hooker and Andrewes 
 and Bull and Wilson, unauthorised in the English 
 Church, uncongenial to its spirit, if not contradictory 
 to its formularies? It is only just to Mr. Newman to 
 say, that even after some of his friends were frightened, 
 he long continued to hope for the best ; but undoubtedly, 
 more and more, his belief in the reality of the English 
 Church was undergoing a very severe, and as time 
 went on, discouraging testing. 
 
 In this state of things he published the Tract 
 No. 90. It was occasioned by the common allegation, 
 on the side of some of the advanced section of the
 
 xiv No. go 247 
 
 Tractarians, as well as on the side of their opponents, 
 that the Thirty-nine Articles were hopelessly irrecon- 
 cilable with that Catholic teaching which Mr. Newman 
 had defended on the authority of our great divines, but 
 which both the parties above mentioned were ready to 
 identify with the teaching of the Roman Church. The 
 Tract was intended, by a rigorous examination of the 
 language of the Articles, to traverse this allegation. 
 It sought to show that all that was clearly and un- 
 doubtedly Catholic, this language left untouched : l 
 that it was doubtful whether even the formal definitions 
 of the Council of Trent were directly and intentionally 
 contradicted ; and that what were really aimed at were 
 the abuses and perversions of a great popular and 
 authorised system, tyrannical by the force of custom 
 and the obstinate refusal of any real reformation. 
 
 It is often urged (says the writer), and sometimes felt and 
 granted, that there are in the Articles propositions or terms incon- 
 sistent with the Catholic faith ; or, at least, if persons do not go 
 so far as to feel the objection as of force, they are perplexed how 
 best to answer it, or how most simply to explain the passages on 
 which it is made to rest. The following Tract is drawn up with the 
 view of showing how groundless the objection is, and further, of 
 approximating towards the argumentative answer to it, of which 
 most men have an implicit apprehension, though they may have 
 nothing more. That there are real difficulties to a Catholic Christian 
 in the ecclesiastical position of our Church at this day, no one can 
 deny; but the statements of the Articles are not in the number, and 
 it may be right at the present moment to insist upon this. 
 
 When met by the objection that the ideas of the 
 framers of the Articles were well known, and that it 
 was notorious that they had meant to put an insuper- 
 able barrier between the English Church and every- 
 
 1 No. 90, p. 24.
 
 248 THE OXFORD MOVEMENT CHAP. 
 
 thing that savoured of Rome, the writer replied that 
 the actual English Church received the Articles not 
 from them but from a much later authority, that we 
 are bound by their words not by- their private senti- 
 ments either as theologians or ecclesiastical politicians, 
 and that in fact they had intended the Articles to 
 comprehend a great body of their countrymen, who 
 would have been driven away by any extreme and 
 and -Catholic declarations even against Rome. The 
 temper of compromise is characteristic of the English 
 as contrasted with the foreign Reformation. It is 
 visible, not only in the Articles, but in the polity of 
 the English Church, which clung so obstinately to 
 the continuity and forms of the ancient hierarchical 
 system. It is visible in the sacramental offices of 
 the Prayer Book, which left so much out to satisfy 
 the Protestants, and left so much in to satisfy the 
 Catholics. 
 
 The Tract went through the Articles in detail, 
 which were commonly looked upon as either anti- 
 Catholic or anti-Roman. It went through them with 
 a dry logical way of interpretation, such as a pro- 
 fessed theologian might use, who was accustomed to 
 all the niceties of language and the distinctions of the 
 science. It was the way in which they would be 
 likely to be examined and construed by a purely legal 
 court. The effect of it, doubtless, was like that 
 produced on ordinary minds by the refinements of a 
 subtle advocate, or by the judicial interpretation of an 
 Act of Parliament which the judges do not like ; and 
 some of the interpretations undoubtedly seemed far- 
 fetched and artificial. Yet some of those which were 
 pointed to at the time as flagrant instances of extra- 
 vagant misinterpretation have now come to look
 
 xiv No. 90 249 
 
 different. Nothing could exceed the scorn poured on 
 the interpretation of the Twenty-second Article, that 
 it condemns the "Roman" doctrine of Purgatory, but 
 not all doctrine of purgatory as a place of gradual 
 purification beyond death. But in our days a school 
 very far removed from Mr. Newman's would require 
 and would claim to make the same distinction. And 
 so with the interpretation of the " Sacrifices of 
 Masses" in the same article. It was the fashion in 
 1841 to see in this the condemnation of all doctrine 
 of a sacrifice in the Eucharist ; and when Mr. New- 
 man confined the phrase to the gross abuses connected 
 with the Mass, this was treated as an affront to 
 common sense and honesty. Since then we have 
 become better acquainted with the language of the 
 ancient liturgies ; and no instructed theologian could 
 now venture to treat Mr. Newman's distinction as 
 idle. There was in fact nothing new in his distinc- 
 tions on these two points. They had already been 
 made in two of the preceding Tracts, the reprint of 
 Archbishop Ussher on Prayers for the Dead, and the 
 Catena on the Eucharistic Sacrifice ; and in both cases 
 the distinctions were supported by a great mass of 
 Anglican authority. 1 
 
 1 The following letter of Mr. were quite new. And they have been 
 
 James Mozley (8th March 1841) gives so accustomed for a long time to look 
 
 the first impression of the Tract : " A at the Articles as on a par with the 
 
 new Tract has come out this week, and Creed, that they think, I suppose, that 
 
 is beginning to make a sensation. It if they subscribe to them they are 
 
 is on the Articles, and shows that they bound to hold whatever doctrines (not 
 
 bear a highly Catholic meaning ; and positively stated in them) are merely 
 
 that many doctrines, of which the not condemned. So if they will have 
 
 Romanist are corruptions, may be held a Tractarian sense, they are thereby 
 
 consistently with them. This is no all Tractarians. ... It is, of course, 
 
 more than what we know as a matter highly complimentary to the whole set 
 
 of history, for the Articles were ex- of us to be so very much surprised that 
 
 pressly worded to bring in Roman we should think what we held to be 
 
 Catholics. But people are astonished consistent with the Articles which we 
 
 and confused at the idea now, as if it have subscribed." See also a clever
 
 250 THE OXFORD MOVEMENT CHAP. 
 
 But the Tract had sufficient novelty about it to 
 account for most of the excitement which it caused. 
 Its dryness and negative curtness were provoking. 
 It was not a positive argument, it was not an appeal 
 to authorities ; it was a paring down of language, 
 alleged in certain portions of the Articles to be some- 
 what loose, to its barest meaning ; and to those to 
 whom that language had always seemed to speak with 
 fulness and decision, it seemed like sapping and under- 
 mining a cherished bulwark. Then it seemed to ask 
 for more liberty than the writer in his position at that 
 time needed ; and the object of such an indefinite 
 claim, in order to remove, if possible, misunderstand- 
 ings between two long -alienated branches of the 
 Western Church, was one to excite in many minds 
 profound horror and dismay. That it maintained 
 without flinching and as strongly as ever the position 
 and the claim of the English Church was nothing to 
 the purpose ; the admission, both that Rome, though 
 wrong, might not be as wrong as we thought her, and 
 that the language of the Articles, though unquestion- 
 ably condemnatory of much, was not condemnatory of 
 as much as people thought, and might possibly be 
 even harmonised with Roman authoritative language, 
 was looked upon as incompatible with loyalty to the 
 English Church. 
 
 The question which the Tract had opened, what 
 the Articles meant and to what men were bound by 
 accepting them, was a most legitimate one for discus- 
 sion ; and it was most natural also that any one 
 should hesitate to answer it as the Tract answered it. 
 But it was distinctly a question for discussion. It was 
 
 Whateleian pamphlet, "The Contro- Oxford Tutors." (How and Parsons, 
 versy between Tract No. 90 and the 1841.)
 
 xiv No. 90 251 
 
 not so easy for any of the parties in the Church to 
 give a clear and consistent answer, as that the matter 
 ought at once to have been carried out of the region 
 of discussion. The Articles were the Articles of a 
 Church which had seen as great differences as those 
 between the Church of Edward VI and the Church 
 of the Restoration. Take them broadly as the con- 
 demnation strong but loose in expression, as, for 
 instance, in the language on the " five, commonly 
 called Sacraments" of a powerful and well-known 
 antagonist system, and there was no difficulty about 
 them. But take them as scientific and accurate and 
 precise enunciations of a systematic theology, and 
 difficulties begin at once, with every one who does not 
 hold the special and well-marked doctrines of the age 
 when the German and Swiss authorities ruled supreme. 
 The course of events from that day to this has shown 
 more than once, in surprising and even startling 
 examples, how much those who at the time least 
 thought that they needed such strict construing of the 
 language of the Articles, and were fierce in denouncing 
 the " kind of interpretation " said to be claimed in 
 No. 90, have since found that they require a good deal 
 more elasticity of reading than even it asked for. The 
 " whirligig of time " was thought to have brought " its 
 revenges," when Mr. Newman, who had called for the 
 exercise of authority against Dr. Hampden, found him- 
 self, five years afterwards, under the ban of the same 
 authority. The difference between Mr. Newman's 
 case and Dr. Hampden's, both as to the alleged offence 
 and the position of the men, was considerable. But 
 the " whirligig of time " brought about even stranger 
 "revenges," when not only Mr. Gorham and Mr. 
 H. B. Wilson in their own defence, but the tribunals
 
 THE OXFORD MOVEMENT 
 
 which had to decide on their cases, carried the 
 strictness of reading and the latitude of interpreta- 
 tion, quite as far, to say the least, as anything in 
 No. 90. 
 
 Unhappily Tract 90 was met at Oxford, not with 
 argument, but with panic and wrath. 1 There is always 
 a sting in every charge, to which other parts of it 
 seem subordinate. No. 90 was charged of course 
 with false doctrine, with false history, and with false 
 reasoning ; but the emphatic part of the charge, the 
 short and easy method which dispensed from the 
 necessity of theological examination and argument, 
 was that it was dishonest and immoral. Professors of 
 Divinity, and accomplished scholars, such as there 
 were in Oxford, might very well have considered it 
 an occasion to dispute both the general principle 
 of the Tract, if it was so dangerous, and the illus- 
 trations, in the abundance of which the writer had 
 so frankly thrown open his position to searching 
 criticism. It was a crisis in which much might have 
 been usefully said, if there had been any one to say 
 it ; much too, to make any one feel, if he was com- 
 petent to feel, that he had a good deal to think about 
 in his own position, and that it would be well to 
 ascertain what was tenable and what untenable in it. 
 But it seemed as if the opportunity must not be lost 
 for striking a blow. The Tract was published on 
 27th February. On the 8th of March four Senior 
 Tutors, one of whom was Mr. H. B. Wilson, of St. 
 John's, and another Mr. Tait, of Balliol, addressed 
 the Editor of the Tract, charging No. 90 with sug- 
 gesting and opening a way, by which men might, at 
 least in the case of Roman views, violate their solemn 
 
 1 See J. B. Mozley's Letters, I3th March 1841.
 
 xiv No. 90 253 
 
 engagements to their University. On the I5th of 
 March, the Board of Heads of Houses, refusing to 
 wait for Mr. Newman's defence, which was known to 
 be coming, and which bears date I3th March, pub- 
 lished their judgment. They declared that in No. 90 
 "modes of interpretation were suggested, and have 
 since been advocated in other publications purporting 
 to be written by members of the University, by which 
 subscription to the Articles might be reconciled with 
 the adoption of Roman Catholic error." And they 
 announced their resolution, " That modes of interpre- 
 tation, such as are suggested in the said Tract, 
 evading rather than explaining the sense of the 
 Thirty -nine Articles, and reconciling subscription to 
 them with the adoption of errors which they are 
 designed to counteract, defeat the object, and are 
 inconsistent with the due observance of the above- 
 mentioned statutes." 
 
 It was an ungenerous and stupid blunder, such as 
 men make, when they think or are told that " some- 
 thing must be done," and do not know what. It gave 
 the writer an opportunity, of which he took full advan- 
 tage, of showing his superiority in temper, in courtesy, 
 and in reason, to those who had not so much con- 
 demned as insulted him. He was immediately ready 
 with his personal expression of apology and regret, 
 and also with his reassertion in more developed argu- 
 ment of the principle of the Tract ; and this was 
 followed up by further explanations in a letter to the 
 Bishop. And in spite of the invidious position in 
 which the Board had tried to place him, not merely as 
 an unsound divine, but as a dishonest man teaching 
 others to palter with their engagements, the crisis 
 drew forth strong support and sympathy where they
 
 254 THE OXFORD MOVEMENT CHAP. 
 
 were not perhaps to be expected. It rallied to him, at 
 least for the time, some of the friends who had begun 
 to hold aloof. Mr. Palmer, of Worcester, Mr. Per- 
 ceval, Dr. Hook, with reserves according to each 
 man's point of view, yet came forward in his defence. 
 The Board was made to feel that they had been 
 driven by violent and partisan instigations to commit 
 themselves to a very foolish as well as a very pas- 
 sionate and impotent step ;' that they had by very 
 questionable authority simply thrown an ill-sounding 
 and ill-mannered word at an argument on a very 
 difficult question, to which they themselves certainly 
 were not prepared with a clear and satisfactory 
 answer ; that they had made the double mistake of 
 declaring war against a formidable antagonist, and of 
 beginning it by creating the impression that they had 
 treated him shabbily, and were really afraid to come 
 to close quarters with him. As the excitement of 
 hasty counsels subsided, the sense of this began to 
 awake in some of them ; they tried to represent the 
 off-hand and ambiguous words of the condemnation as 
 not meaning all that they had been taken to mean. 
 But the seed of bitterness had been sown. Very little 
 light was thrown, in the strife of pamphlets which 
 ensued, on the main subject dealt with in No. 90, the 
 authority and interpretation of such formularies as our 
 Articles. The easier and more tempting and very 
 fertile topic of debate was the honesty and good faith 
 of the various disputants. Of the four Tutors, only 
 one, Mr. H. B. Wilson, published an explanation of 
 their part in the matter ; it was a clumsy, ill-written 
 and laboured pamphlet, which hardly gave promise of 
 the intellectual vigour subsequently displayed by Mr. 
 Wilson, when he appeared, not as the defender, but
 
 xiv No. 90 255 
 
 the assailant of received opinions. The more distin- 
 guished of the combatants were Mr. Ward and Mr. R. 
 Lowe. Mr. Ward, with his usual dialectical skill, not 
 only defended the Tract, but pushed its argument yet 
 further, in claiming tolerance for doctrines alleged to 
 be Roman. Mr. Lowe, not troubling himself either 
 with theological history or the relation of other parties 
 in the Church to the formularies, threw his strength 
 into the popular and plausible topic of dishonesty, and 
 into a bitter and unqualified invective against the bad 
 faith and immorality manifested in the teaching of 
 which No. 90 was the outcome. Dr. Faussett, as 
 was to be expected, threw himself into the fray with 
 his accustomed zest and violence, and caused some 
 amusement at Oxford, first by exposing himself to the 
 merciless wit of a reviewer in the British Critic, and 
 then by the fright into which he was thrown by a 
 rumour that his re-election to his professorship would 
 be endangered by Tractarian votes. 1 But the storm, 
 at Oxford at least, seemed to die out. The difficulty 
 which at one moment threatened of a strike among 
 some of the college Tutors passed ; and things went 
 back to their ordinary course. But an epoch and a 
 new point of departure had come into the movement. 
 Things after No. 90 were never the same as to lan- 
 guage and hopes and prospects as they had been 
 before ; it was the date from which a new set of con- 
 ditions in men's thoughts and attitude had to be 
 reckoned. Each side felt that a certain liberty had 
 been claimed and had been peremptorily denied. 
 And this was more than confirmed by the public 
 language of the greater part of the Bishops. The 
 charges against the Tractarian party of Romanising, 
 
 1 J. B. Mozley's Letters, 1 3th July 1841.
 
 256 THE OXFORD MOVEMENT CHAP, xiv 
 
 and of flagrant dishonesty, long urged by irresponsible 
 opponents, were now formally adopted by the Univer- 
 sity authorities, and specially directed against the 
 foremost man of the party. From that time the fate 
 of the party at Oxford was determined. It must break 
 up. Sooner or later, there must be a secession more 
 or less discrediting and disabling those who remained. 
 And so the break up came, and yet, so well grounded 
 and so congenial to the English Church were the 
 leading principles of the movement, that not even that 
 disastrous and apparently hopeless wreck prevented 
 them from again asserting their claim and becoming 
 once more active and powerful. The Via Media, 
 whether or not logically consistent, was a thing of 
 genuine English growth, and was at least a working 
 theory.
 
 CHAPTER XV 
 
 AFTER NO. QO 
 
 THE proceedings about No. 90 were a declaration of 
 war on the part of the Oxford authorities against the 
 Tractarian party. The suspicions, alarms, antipathies, 
 jealousies, which had long been smouldering among 
 those in power, had at last taken shape in a definite 
 act. And it was a turning-point in the history of the 
 movement. After this it never was exactly what it 
 had been hitherto. It had been so far a movement 
 within the English Church, for its elevation and reform 
 indeed, but at every step invoking its authority with 
 deep respect, acknowledging allegiance to its rulers 
 in unqualified and even excessive terms, and aiming 
 loyally to make it in reality all that it was in its 
 devotional language and its classical literature. But 
 after what passed about No. 90 a change came. The 
 party came under an official ban and stigma. The 
 common consequences of harsh treatment on the 
 tendencies and thought of a party, which considers 
 itself unjustly proscribed, showed themselves more and 
 more. Its mind was divided ; its temper was exas- 
 perated ; while the attitude of the governing authorities 
 hardened more into determined hostility. From the 
 time of the censure, and especially after the events 
 
 s
 
 258 THE OXFORD MOVEMENT CHAP. 
 
 connected with it, the contest for the Poetry Pro- 
 fessorship and the renewed Hampden question, it 
 may be said that the characteristic tempers of the 
 Corcyrean sedition were reproduced on a small scale 
 in Oxford. 1 The scare of Popery, not without founda- 
 tion the reaction against it, also not without founda- 
 tion had thrown the wisest off their balance ; and 
 what of those who were not wise ? In the heat 
 of those days there were few Tractarians who did 
 not think Dr. Wynter, Dr. Faussett, and Dr. Symons 
 heretics in theology and persecutors in temper, despisers 
 of Christian devotion and self-denial. There were few 
 of the party of the Heads who did not think every 
 Tractarian a dishonest and perjured traitor, equivo- 
 cating about his most solemn engagements, the 
 ignorant slave of childish superstitions which he was 
 conspiring to bring back. It was the day of the 
 violent on both sides : the courtesies of life were 
 forgotten ; men were afraid of being weak in their 
 censures, their dislike, and their opposition ; old 
 friendships were broken up, and men believed the 
 worst of those whom a few years back they had loved 
 and honoured. 
 
 It is not agreeable to recall these long extinct 
 animosities, but they are part of the history of that 
 time, and affected the course in which things ran. 
 And it is easy to blame, it is hard to do justice to, the 
 various persons and parties who contributed to the 
 
 1 T6X/MI ctXifytffTos dvdpla 0tX^rcupos age ; moderation was the disguise of 
 
 tvofjdffOrj . . . -rb 8t aCxppov rou &vdv- unmanly weakness ; to know every- 
 
 Spov Trp6ffx^a, xal rb irpbs &TTO.V ^vverbv thing was to do nothing ; frantic energy 
 
 eVt irav apybv T& 8t t/trX^crtH 6& was t h e true character of a man ; the 
 
 dyftpfe pofw rponrMj . . . nt * J*> ]over of vio i e nce was always trusted, 
 
 XaXfro^v ru ,rto ae^o Si wriMyw and h|s nt suspe cted."-Jowett's 
 
 a, ^oTTTos.-Thuc. m. 82 "Reck- 
 less daring was held to be loyal cour-
 
 xv AFTER No. 90 259 
 
 events of that strange and confused time. All was 
 new, and unusual, and without precedent in Oxford ; 
 a powerful and enthusiastic school reviving old doc- 
 trines in a way to make them seem novelties, and 
 creating a wild panic from a quarter where it was the 
 least expected ; the terror of this panic acting on 
 authorities not in the least prepared for such a trial 
 of their sagacity, patience, and skill, driving them 
 to unexampled seventy, and to a desperate effort 
 to expel the disturbing innovators among them 
 some of the first men in Oxford in character and 
 ability from their places in the University. 1 In 
 order to do justice on each side at this distance of 
 time, we are bound to make allowance both for the 
 alarm and the mistaken violence of the authorities, 
 and for the disaffection, the irritation, the strange 
 methods which grew up in the worried and sus- 
 pected party for the difficulties which beset both 
 sides in the conflict, and the counter-influences which 
 drew them hither and thither. But the facts are as they 
 are ; and even then a calmer temper was possible to 
 those who willed it ; and in the heat of the strife there 
 were men among the authorities, as well as in the 
 
 1 One of the strangest features in inducement to join Rome and break 
 
 the conflict was the entire misconcep- the ties of a lifetime. And so of his 
 
 tion shown of what Mr. Newman was moral qualities. A prominent Evan- 
 
 the blindness to his real character gelical leader, Dr. Close of Chelten- 
 
 and objects the imputation to him ham, afterwards Dean of Carlisle, at a 
 
 not merely of grave faults, but of small complimentary dinner, in which he him - 
 
 and mean ones. His critics could not self gloried in the "foul, personal abuse 
 
 rise above the poorest measure of his to which he had been subjected in his 
 
 intellect and motives. One of the zeal for truth," proceeded to give his 
 
 ablest of them, who had once been his judgment on Mr. Newman : "When 
 
 friend, in a farewell letter of kindly I first read No. 90, I did not then 
 
 remonstrance, specifies certain Roman know the author ; but I said then, and 
 
 errors, which he hopes that Mr. New- I repeat here, not -with any personal 
 
 man will not fall into adoring images reference to the author, that I should be 
 
 and worshipping saints as if the plea- sorry to trust the author of that Tract 
 
 sure and privilege of worshipping images with my purse." Report of Speech in 
 
 and saints were to Mr. Newman the Cheltenham Examiner, ist March 1843.
 
 260 THE OXFORD MOVEMENT CHAP. 
 
 unpopular party, who kept their balance, while others 
 lost it. 
 
 Undoubtedly the publication of No. 90 was the 
 occasion of the aggravated form which dissension took, 
 and not unnaturally. Yet it was anything but what 
 it was taken to mean by the authorities, an intentional 
 move in favour of Rome. It was intended to recon- 
 cile a large and growing class of minds, penetrated 
 and disgusted with the ignorance and injustice of much 
 of the current controversial assumptions against Rome, 
 to a larger and more defensible view of the position 
 of the English Church. And this was done by calling 
 attention to that which was not now for the first time 
 observed to the loose and unguarded mode of 
 speaking visible in the later controversial Articles, 
 and to the contrast between them and the technical 
 and precise theology of the first five Articles. 
 The Articles need not mean all which they were 
 supposed popularly to mean against what was Catholic 
 in Roman doctrine. This was urged in simple 
 good faith ; it was but the necessary assumption of 
 all who held with the Catholic theology, which the 
 Tractarians all along maintained that they had a 
 right to teach ; it left plenty of ground of difference 
 with unreformed and usurping Rome. And we know 
 that the storm which No. 90 raised took the writer by 
 surprise. He did not expect that he should give such 
 deep offence. But if he thought of the effect on one 
 set of minds, he forgot the probable effect on another ; 
 and he forgot, or under-estimated, the effect not only 
 of the things said, but of the way in which they were 
 said. 1 No. 90 was a surprise, in the state of ordinary 
 
 1 ov yap a.Tr6xpri rb fyfiv & Set \tyeiv, d\\' dvdyKt) KO.I Tatsra wj Set 
 Arist. Rhet. iii. I.
 
 xv AFTER No. go 261 
 
 theological knowledge at the time. It was a strong 
 thing to say that the Articles left a great deal of formal 
 Roman language untouched ; but to work this out in 
 dry, bald, technical logic, on the face of it narrow in 
 scope, often merely ingenious, was even a greater 
 stumbling-block. It was, undoubtedly, a great mis- 
 calculation, such as men of keen and far-reaching 
 genius sometimes make. They mistake the strength 
 and set of the tide ; they imagine that minds round 
 them are going as fast as their own. We can see, 
 looking back, that such an interpretation of the 
 Articles, with the view then taken of them in Oxford 
 as the theological text-book, and in the condition of 
 men's minds, could not but be a great shock. 
 
 And what seemed to give a sinister significance to 
 No. 90 was that, as has been said, a strong current 
 was beginning to set in the direction of Rome. It 
 was not yet of the nature, nor of the force, which 
 was imagined. The authorities suspected it where 
 it was not. They accepted any contemptible bit of 
 gossip collected by ignorance or ill-nature as a proof 
 of it. The constitutional frankness of Englishmen 
 in finding fault with what is their own disgust at 
 pompous glorification scepticism as to our insular 
 claims against all the rest of Christendom to be exactly 
 right, to be alone "pure and apostolic" ; real increase 
 and enlargement of knowledge, theological and histori- 
 cal ; criticism on portions of our Reformation history ; 
 admiration for characters in mediaeval times ; eager- 
 ness, over-generous it might be, to admit and repair 
 wrong to an opponent unjustly accused ; all were 
 set down together with other more unequivocal signs 
 as " leanings to Rome." It was clear that there was 
 a current setting towards Rome ; but it was as clear
 
 262 THE OXFORD MOVEMENT CHAP. 
 
 that there was a much stronger current in the party 
 as a whole, setting in the opposite direction. To 
 those who chose to see and to distinguish, the love, 
 the passionate loyalty of the bulk of the Tractarians 
 to the English Church was as evident and unquestion- 
 able as any public fact could be. At this time there 
 was no reason to call in question the strong assurances 
 given by the writer of No. 90 himself of his yet un- 
 shaken faith in the English Church. But all these 
 important features of the movement witnessing, in- 
 deed, to deep searchings of heart, but to a genuine 
 desire to serve the English Church were overlooked 
 in the one overwhelming fear which had taken 
 possession of the authorities. Alarming symptoms of 
 a disposition to acknowledge and even exaggerate the 
 claims and the attractions of the Roman system were 
 indeed apparent. No doubt there were reasons for 
 disquiet and anxiety. But the test of manliness and 
 wisdom, in the face of such reasons, is how men measure 
 their proportion and how they meet the danger. 
 
 The Heads saw a real danger before them ; but 
 they met it in a wrong and unworthy way. They 
 committed two great errors. In the first place, like 
 the Jesuits in their quarrel with Portroyal and the 
 Jansenists, they entirely failed to recognise the moral 
 elevation and religious purpose of the men whom 
 they opposed. There was that before them which it 
 was to their deep discredit that they did not see. 
 The movement, whatever else it was, or whatever 
 else it became, was in its first stages a movement 
 for deeper religion, for a more real and earnest self- 
 discipline, for a loftier morality, for more genuine self- 
 devotion to a serious life, than had ever been seen 
 in Oxford. It was an honest attempt to raise Oxford
 
 xv AFTER No. go 263 
 
 life, which by all evidence needed raising, to something 
 more laborious and something more religious, to some- 
 thing more worthy of the great Christian foundations 
 of Oxford than the rivalry of colleges and of the 
 schools, the mere literary atmosphere of the tutor's 
 lecture -room, and the easy and gentlemanly and 
 somewhat idle fellowship of the common-rooms. It 
 was the effort of men who had all the love of scholar- 
 ship, and the feeling for it of the Oxford of their day, 
 to add to this the habits of Christian students and the 
 pursuit of Christian learning. If all this was danger- 
 ous and uncongenial to Oxford, so much the worse for 
 Oxford, with its great opportunities and great pro- 
 fessions Dominus illuminatio mea. But certainly this 
 mark of moral purpose and moral force was so plain in 
 the movement that the rulers of Oxford had no right 
 to mistake it. When the names come back to our minds 
 of those who led and most represented the Tractarians, 
 it must be a matter of surprise to any man who has 
 not almost parted with the idea of Christian goodness, 
 that this feature of the movement could escape or 
 fail to impress those who had known well all their 
 lives long what these leaders were. But amid the 
 clamour and the tell-tale gossip, and, it must be ad- 
 mitted, the folly round them, they missed it. Perhaps 
 they were bewildered. But they must have the blame, 
 the heavy blame, which belongs to all those who, when 
 good is before them, do not recognise it according to 
 its due measure. 
 
 In the next place, the authorities attacked and 
 condemned the Tractarian teaching at once violently 
 and ignorantly ; and in them ignorance of the ground 
 on which the battle was fought was hardly pardon- 
 able. Doubtless the Tractarian language was in many
 
 264 THE OXFORD MOVEMENT CHAP. 
 
 respects novel and strange. But Oxford was not only 
 a city of libraries, it was the home of what was especi- 
 ally accounted Church theology ; and the Tractarian 
 teaching, in its foundation and main outlines, had 
 little but what ought to have been perfectly familiar 
 to any one who chose to take the trouble to study the 
 great Church of England writers. To one who, like 
 Dr. Routh of Magdalen, had gone below the surface and 
 was acquainted with the questions debated by those 
 divines, there was nothing startling in what so alarmed 
 his brethren, whether he agreed with it or not ; and to 
 him the indiscriminate charge of Popery meant nothing. 
 But Dr. Routh stood alone among his brother Heads 
 in his knowledge of what English theology was. To 
 most of them it was an unexplored and misty region ; 
 some of the ablest, under the influence of Dr. Whately's 
 vigorous and scornful discipline, had learned to slight 
 it. But there it was. Whether it was read or not, its 
 great names were pronounced with honour, and quoted 
 on occasion. From Hooker to Van Mildert, there was 
 an unbroken thread of common principles giving con- 
 tinuity to a line of Church teachers. The Puritan line 
 of doctrine, though it could claim much sanction among 
 the divines of the Reformation the Latitudinarian 
 idea, though it had the countenance of famous names 
 and powerful intellects never could aspire to the 
 special title of Church theology. And the teaching 
 which had that name, both in praise, and often in 
 dispraise, as technical, scholastic, unspiritual, transcend- 
 ental, nay, even Popish, countenanced the Tractarians. 
 They were sneered at for their ponderous Catena of 
 authorities ; but on the ground on which this debate 
 raged, the appeal was a pertinent and solid one. Yet 
 to High Church Oxford and its rulers, all this was
 
 xv AFTER No. 90 265 
 
 strange doctrine. Proof and quotation might lie 
 before their eyes, but their minds still ran in one 
 groove and they could not realise what they saw. 
 The words meant no harm in the venerable folio ; they 
 meant perilous heresy in the modern Tract. When 
 the authorities had to judge of the questions raised by 
 the movement, they were unprovided with the adequate 
 knowledge ; and this was knowledge which they ought 
 to have possessed for its own sake, as doctors of the 
 Theological Faculty of the University. 
 
 And it was not only for their want of learning, 
 manifest all through the controversy, that they were 
 to blame. Their most telling charge against the 
 Tractarians, which was embodied in the censure of 
 No. 90, was the charge of dishonesty. The charge 
 is a very handy one against opponents, and it may 
 rest on good grounds ; but those who think right to 
 make it ought, both as a matter of policy and as a 
 matter of conscience, to be quite assured of their own 
 position. The Articles are a public, common docu- 
 ment. It is the differing interpretations of a common 
 document which create political and religious parties ; 
 and only shallowness and prejudice will impute to an 
 opponent dishonesty without strong and clear reason. 
 Mr. Newman's interpretation in No. 90, new, not in 
 claiming for the Articles a Catholic meaning, but in 
 limiting, though it does not deny, their Anti- Roman 
 scope, was fairly open to criticism. It might be taken 
 as a challenge, and as a challenge might have to be 
 met. But it would have been both fair and wise in 
 the Heads, before proceeding to unusual extremities, 
 to have shown that they had fully considered their 
 own theological doctrines in relation to the Church 
 formularies. They all had obvious difficulties, and in
 
 266 THE OXFORD MOVEMENT CHAP. 
 
 some cases formidable ones. The majority of them 
 were what would have been called in older contro- 
 versial days frank Arminians, shutting their eyes by 
 force of custom to the look of some of the Articles, 
 which, if of Lutheran origin, had been claimed from the 
 first by Calvinists. The Evangelicals had long con- 
 fessed difficulties, at least, in the Baptismal Service 
 and the Visitation Office ; while the men most loud 
 in denunciation of dishonesty were the divines of 
 Whately's school, who had been undermining the 
 authority of all creeds and articles, and had never 
 been tired of proclaiming their dislike of that solemn 
 Athanasian Creed to which Prayer Book and Articles 
 alike bound them. Men with these difficulties daily 
 before them had no right to ignore them. Doubtless 
 they all had their explanations which they bona fide 
 believed in. But what was there that excluded Mr. 
 Newman from the claim to bona fides ? He had 
 attacked no foundation of Christianity ; he had denied 
 or doubted no article of the Creed. He gave his 
 explanations, certainly not more far-fetched than those 
 of some of his judges. In a Church divided by many 
 conflicting views, and therefore bound to all possible 
 tolerance, he had adopted one view which certainly was 
 unpopular and perhaps was dangerous. He might be 
 confuted, he might be accused, or, if so be, convicted 
 of error, perhaps of heresy. But nothing of this kind 
 was attempted. The incompatibility of his view, not 
 merely with the Articles, but with morality in signing 
 what all, of whatever party, had signed, was asserted 
 in a censure, which evaded the responsibility of speci- 
 fying the point which it condemned. The alarm of 
 treachery and conspiracy is one of the most maddening 
 of human impulses. The Heads of Houses, instead
 
 xv AFTER No. 90 267 
 
 of moderating and sobering it, with the authority of 
 instructed and sagacious rulers, blew it into a flame. 
 And they acted in such a hurry that all sense of 
 proportion and dignity was lost. They peremptorily 
 refused to wait even a few days, as the writer 
 requested, and as was due to his character, for 
 explanation. They dared not risk an appeal to the 
 University at large. They dared not abide the effect 
 of discussion on the blow which they were urged to 
 strike. They chose, that they might strike without 
 delay, the inexpressibly childish step of sticking up at 
 the Schools' gates, and at College butteries, without 
 trial, or conviction, or sentence, a notice declaring that 
 certain modes of signing the Articles suggested in a 
 certain Tract were dishonest. It was, they said, to 
 protect undergraduates ; as if undergraduates would 
 be affected by a vague assertion on a difficult sub- 
 ject, about which nothing was more certain than that 
 those who issued the notice were not agreed among 
 themselves. 
 
 The men who acted thus were good and conscien- 
 tious men, who thought themselves in the presence of 
 a great danger. It is only fair to remember this. But 
 it is also impossible to be fair to the party of the move- 
 ment without remembering this deplorable failure in 
 consistency, in justice, in temper, in charity, on the 
 part of those in power in the University. The drift 
 towards Rome had not yet become an unmanageable 
 rush ; and though there were cases in which nothing 
 could have stopped its course, there is no reason to 
 doubt that generous and equitable dealing, a more con- 
 siderate reasonableness, a larger and more comprehen- 
 sive judgment of facts, and a more patient waiting for 
 strong first impressions to justify and verify themselves,
 
 268 THE OXFORD MOVEMENT CHAP. 
 
 would have averted much mischief. There was 
 much that was to be regretted from this time forward 
 in the temper and spirit of the movement party. But 
 that which nourished and strengthened impatience, 
 exaggeration of language and views, scorn of things as 
 they were, intolerance of everything moderate, both in 
 men and in words, was the consciousness with which 
 every man got up in the morning and passed the day, 
 of the bitter hostility of those foremost in place in 
 Oxford of their incompetence to judge fairly of their 
 incapacity to apprehend what was high and earnest in 
 those whom they condemned of the impossibility of 
 getting them to imagine that Tractarians could be any- 
 thing but fools or traitors of their hopeless blindness 
 to any fact or any teaching to which they were not 
 accustomed. If the authorities could only have stopped 
 to consider whether after all they were not dealing with 
 real thought and real wish to do right, they might after 
 all have disliked the movement, but they would have 
 seen that which would have kept them from violence. 
 They would not listen, they would not inquire, they 
 would not consider. Could such ignorance, could such 
 wrong possibly be without mischievous influence on 
 those who were the victims of it, much more on friends 
 and disciples who knew and loved them ? The Tract- 
 arians had been preaching that the Church of England, 
 with all its Protestant feeling and all its Protestant acts 
 and history, was yet, as it professed to be, part and 
 parcel of the great historic Catholic Church, which had 
 framed the Creeds, which had continued the Sacraments, 
 which had preached and taught out of the Bible, which 
 had given us our immemorial prayers. They had 
 spared no pains to make out this great commonplace 
 from history and theology : nor had they spared
 
 xv AFTER No. go 269 
 
 pains, while insisting on this dominant feature in 
 the English Church, to draw strongly and broadly the 
 lines which distinguished it from Rome. Was it 
 wonderful, when all guarding and explanatory limita- 
 tions were contemptuously tossed aside by "all-daring 
 ignorance," and all was lumped together in the indis- 
 criminate charge of " Romanising," that there should 
 have been some to take the authorities at their word ? 
 Was it wonderful when men were told that the Church 
 of England was no place for them, that they were 
 breaking their vows and violating solemn engagements 
 by acting as its ministers, and that in order to preserve 
 the respect of honest men they should leave it that 
 the question of change, far off as it had once seemed, 
 came within "measurable distance." The generation 
 to which they belonged had been brought up with 
 strong exhortations to be real, and to hate shams ; and 
 now the question was forced on them whether it was 
 not a sham for the English Church to call itself 
 Catholic ; whether a body of teaching which was de- 
 nounced by its authorities, however it might look on 
 paper and be defended by learning, could be more than 
 a plausible literary hypothesis in contrast to the great 
 working system of which the head was Rome. When 
 we consider the singular and anomalous position 
 on any theory, including the Roman, of the English 
 Church ; with what great differences its various features 
 and elements have been prominent at different times ; 
 how largely its history has been marked by contra- 
 dictory facts and appearances ; and how hard it is for 
 any one to keep all, according to their real importance, 
 simultaneously in view ; when we remember also what 
 are the temptations of human nature in great collisions 
 of religious belief, the excitement and passion of the
 
 270 THE OXFORD MOVEMENT CHAP, xv 
 
 time, the mixed character of all religious zeal, the 
 natural inevitable anger which accompanies it when 
 resisted, the fervour which welcomes self-sacrifice for 
 the truth ; and when we think of all this kept aglow 
 by the continuous provocation of unfair and harsh 
 dealing from persons who were scarcely entitled to be 
 severe judges ; the wonder is, human nature being 
 what it is, not that so many went, but that so many 
 stayed.
 
 CHAPTER XVI 
 
 THE THREE DEFEATS I 
 ISAAC WILLIAMS, MACMULLEN, PUSEY 
 
 THE year 1841, though it* had begun in storm, and 
 though signs were not wanting of further disturbance, 
 was at Oxford, outwardly at least, a peaceable one. 
 A great change had happened ; but, when the first 
 burst of excitement was over, men settled down to 
 their usual work, their lectures, or their reading, or 
 their parishes, and by Easter things seemed to go on 
 as before. The ordinary habits of University life re- 
 sumed their course with a curious quietness. There 
 was, no doubt, much trouble brooding underneath. 
 Mr. Ward and others continued a war of pamphlets ; 
 and in June Mr. Ward was dismissed from his Mathe- 
 matical Lectureship at Balliol. But faith in the great 
 leader was still strong. No. 90, if it had shocked or 
 disquieted some, had elicited equally remarkable ex- 
 pressions of confidence and sympathy from others who 
 might have been, at least, silent. The events of the 
 spring had made men conscious of what their leader 
 was, and called forth warm and enthusiastic affection. 
 It was not in vain that, whatever might be thought of 
 the wisdom or the reasonings of No. 90, he had shown 
 the height of his character and the purity and greatness
 
 272 THE OXFORD MOVEMENT CHAP. 
 
 of his religious purpose ; and that being what he was, 
 in the eyes of all Oxford, he had been treated with 
 contumely, and had borne it with patience and loyal 
 submission. There were keen observers, to whom 
 that patience told of future dangers ; they would have 
 liked him to show more fight. But he gave no signs 
 of defeat, nor, outwardly, of disquiet ; he forbore to 
 retaliate at Oxford : and the sermons at St. Mary's 
 continued, penetrating and searching as ever, perhaps 
 with something more pathetic and anxious in their 
 undertone than before. 
 
 But if he forbore at Oxford, he did not let things 
 pass outside. Sir Robert 'Peel, in opening a reading- 
 room at Tamworth, had spoken loosely, in the con- 
 ventional and pompous way then fashionable, of the 
 all -sufficing and exclusive blessings of knowledge. 
 While Mr. Newman was correcting the proofs of No. 
 90, he was also writing to the Times the famous 
 letters of Catholicus ; a warning to eminent public 
 men of the danger of declaiming on popular common- 
 places without due examination of their worth. But 
 all seemed quiet. "In the summer of 1841," we read 
 in the Apologia, " I found myself at Littlemore without 
 any harass or anxiety on my mind. I had determined 
 to put aside all controversy, and set myself down to 
 my translation of St. Athanasius." Outside of Oxford 
 there was a gathering of friends in the summer at the 
 consecration of one of Mr. Keble's district churches, 
 Ampfield an occasion less common and more notice- 
 able then than now. Again, what was a new thought 
 then, a little band of young Oxford men, ten or twelve, 
 taxed themselves to build a new church, which was 
 ultimately placed at Bussage, in Mr. Thomas Keble's 
 parish. One of Mr. Keble's curates, Mr. Peter Young,
 
 xvi THE THREE DEFEATS 273 
 
 had been refused Priest's orders by the Bishop of 
 Winchester, for alleged unsoimdness on the doctrine 
 of the Eucharist. Mr. Selwyn, not without misgivings 
 on the part of the Whig powers, had been appointed 
 Bishop of New Zealand. Dr. Arnold had been ap- 
 pointed to the Chair of Modern History at Oxford. 
 In the course of the year there passed away one who 
 had had a very real though unacknowledged influence 
 on much that had happened Mr. Blanco White. 
 And at the end of the year, 29th October, Mr. Keble 
 gave his last lecture on Poetry, and finished a course 
 the most original and memorable ever delivered from 
 his chair. 
 
 Towards the end of the year two incidents, besides 
 some roughly -worded Episcopal charges, disturbed 
 this quiet. They were only indirectly connected with 
 theological controversy at Oxford ; but they had great 
 ultimate influence on it, and they helped to marshal 
 parties and consolidate animosities. One was the 
 beginning of the contest for the Poetry Professorship 
 which Mr. Keble had vacated. There was no one of 
 equal eminence to succeed him ; but there was in 
 Oxford a man of undoubted poetical genius, of refined 
 taste and subtle thought, though of unequal power, 
 who had devoted his gifts to the same great purpose 
 for which Mr. Keble had written the Christian Year. 
 No one who has looked into the Baptistery, whatever 
 his feeling towards the writer, can doubt whether Mr. 
 Isaac Williams was a poet and knew what poetry 
 meant. He was an intimate friend of Mr. Keble and 
 Mr. Newman, and so he was styled a Tractarian ; but 
 no name offered itself so obviously to the electors 
 as his, and in due time his friends announced their 
 intention of bringing him forward. His competitor 
 
 T
 
 274 THE OXFORD MOVEMENT CHAP. 
 
 was Mr. (afterwards Archdeacon) Garbett of Brase- 
 nose, the college of Heber and Milman, an accom- 
 plished gentleman of high culture, believed to have 
 an acquaintance, not common then in Oxford, with 
 foreign literature, whose qualifications stood high in 
 the opinion of his University friends, but who had 
 given no evidence to the public of his claims to the 
 office. It was inevitable, it was no one's special fault, 
 that the question of theological opinions should intrude 
 itself; but at first it was only in private that objections 
 were raised or candidatures recommended on theo- 
 logical grounds. But rumours were abroad that the 
 authorities of Brasenose were canvassing their college 
 on these grounds : and in an unlucky moment for 
 Mr. Williams, Dr. Pusey, not without the knowledge, 
 but without the assenting judgment of Mr. Newman, 
 thought it well to send forth a circular in Christ 
 Church first, but soon with wider publicity, asking 
 support for Mr. Williams as a person whose known 
 religious views would ensure his making his office 
 minister to religious truth. Nothing could be more 
 innocently meant. It was the highest purpose to 
 which that office could be devoted. But the mistake 
 was seen on all sides as soon as made. The Principal 
 of Mr. Garbett 's college, Dr. Gilbert, like a general 
 jumping on his antagonist whom he has caught in the 
 act of a false move, put forth a dignified counter-appeal, 
 alleging that he had not raised this issue, but adding 
 that as it had been raised and avowed on the other 
 side, he was quite willing that it should be taken into 
 account, and the dangers duly considered of that 
 teaching with which Dr. Pusey 's letter had identified 
 Mr. Williams. No one from that moment could 
 prevent the contest from becoming almost entirely a
 
 xvi THE THREE DEFEATS 275 
 
 theological one, which was to try the strength of the 
 party of the movement. Attempts were made, but in 
 vain, to divest it of this character. The war of 
 pamphlets and leaflets dispersed in the common-rooms, 
 which usually accompanied these contests, began, and 
 the year closed with preparations for a severe struggle 
 when the University met in the following January. 
 
 The other matter was the establishment of the 
 Anglo- Prussian bishopric at Jerusalem. It was the 
 object of the ambition of M. Bunsen to pave the 
 way for a recognition, by the English Church, of the 
 new State Church of Prussia, and ultimately for some 
 closer alliance between the two bodies ; and the 
 plan of a Protestant Bishop of Jerusalem, nominated 
 alternately by England and Prussia, consecrated by 
 English Bishops, and exercising jurisdiction over 
 English and German Protestants in Palestine, was 
 proposed by him to Archbishop Howley and Bishop 
 Blomfield, and somewhat hastily and incautiously 
 accepted by them. To Mr. Newman, fighting a hard 
 battle, as he felt it, for the historical and constitutional 
 catholicity of the English Church, this step on their 
 part came as a practical and even ostentatious con- 
 tradiction of his arguments. England, it seemed, 
 which was out of communion with the East and 
 with Rome, could lightly enter into close communion 
 with Lutherans and Calvinists against them both. 
 He recorded an indignant and even bitter protest ; 
 and though the scheme had its warm apologists, such 
 as Dr. Hook and Mr. F. Maurice, it had its keen- 
 sighted critics, and it was never received with favour 
 by the Church at large. And, indeed, it was only 
 active for mischief. It created irritation, suspicion, 
 discord in England, while no German cared a straw
 
 276 THE OXFORD MOVEMENT CHAP. 
 
 about it. Never was an ambitious scheme so marked 
 by impotence and failure from its first steps to its last. 
 But it was one, as the Apologia informs us, 1 in the 
 chain of events which destroyed Mr. Newman's belief 
 in the English Church. " It was one of the blows," he 
 writes, "which broke me." 
 
 The next year, 1842, opened with war; war be- 
 tween the University authorities and the party of 
 the movement, which was to continue in various forms 
 and with little intermission till the strange and pathetic 
 events of 1845 suspended the fighting and stunned the 
 fighters, and for a time hushed even anger in feelings 
 of amazement, sorrow, and fear. Those events im- 
 posed stillness on all who had taken part in the strife, 
 like the blowing up of the Orient at the battle of the 
 Nile. 
 
 As soon as the University met in January 1842, 
 the contest for the Poetry Professorship was settled. 
 There was no meeting of Convocation, but a com- 
 parison of votes gave a majority of three to two 
 to Mr. Garbett, 2 and Mr. Williams withdrew. The 
 Tractarians had been distinctly beaten ; it was their 
 first defeat as a party. It seems as if this encouraged 
 the Hebdomadal Board to a move, which would be 
 felt as a blow against the Tractarians, and which, 
 as an act of reparation to Dr. Hampden, would give 
 satisfaction to the ablest section of their own supporters, 
 the theological Liberals. They proposed to repeal 
 the disqualification which had been imposed on Dr. 
 Hampden in 1836. But they had miscalculated. 
 It was too evidently a move to take advantage 
 of the recent Tractarian discomfiture to whitewash 
 Dr. Hampden's Liberalism. The proposal, and the way 
 
 1 Pp. 243, 253. 2 Garbett, 921. Williams, 623.
 
 xvi THE THREE DEFEATS 277 
 
 in which it was made, roused a strong feeling among 
 the residents ; a request to withdraw it received the 
 signatures not only of moderate Anglicans and in- 
 dependent men, like Mr. Francis Faber of Magdalen, 
 Mr. Sewell, the Greswells, and Mr. W. Palmer of 
 Worcester, but of Mr. Tait of Balliol, and Mr. 
 Golightly. Dr. Hampden's own attitude did not help 
 it. There was great want of dignity in his ostenta- 
 tious profession of orthodoxy and attachment to the 
 Articles, in his emphatic adoption of Evangelical 
 phraseology, and in his unmeasured denunciation of 
 his opponents, and especially of those whom he viewed 
 as most responsible for the censure of 1836 the 
 " Tractarians " or " Romanisers." And the difficulty 
 with those who had passed and who now proposed 
 to withdraw the censure, was that Dr. Hampden 
 persistently and loudly declared that he had nothing 
 to retract, and retracted nothing ; and if it was right 
 to pass it in 1836, it would not be right to withdraw 
 it in 1842. At the last moment, Mr. Tait and Mr. 
 Piers Claughton of University made an attempt to get 
 something from Dr. Hampden which might pass as a 
 withdrawal of what was supposed to be dangerous 
 in his Bampton Lectures ; and there were some even 
 among Mr. Newman's friends, who, disliking from 
 the first the form of the censure, might have found in 
 such a withdrawal a reason for voting for its repeal. 
 But Dr. Hampden was obdurate. The measure was 
 pressed, and in June it was thrown out in Convocation 
 by a majority of three to two x the same proportion, 
 though in smaller numbers, as in the vote against Mr. 
 Williams. The measure was not an honest one on the 
 part of the Hebdomadal Board, and deserved to be 
 
 1 The numbers were 334 to 219.
 
 278 THE OXFORD MOVEMENT CHAP. 
 
 defeated. Among the pamphlets which the discussion 
 produced, two by Mr. James Mozley gave early 
 evidence, by their force of statement and their 
 trenchant logic, of the power with which he was to 
 take part in the questions which agitated the Uni- 
 versity. 
 
 Dr. Hampden took his revenge, and it was not 
 a noble one. The fellows of certain colleges were 
 obliged to proceed to the B.D. degree on pain of 
 forfeiting their fellowships. The exercises for the 
 degree, which, by the Statutes, took the old-fashioned 
 shape of formal Latin disputations between Opponents 
 and Respondents on given theses in the Divinity 
 School, had by an arrangement introduced by Dr. 
 Burton, with no authority from the Statutes, come 
 to consist of two English essays on subjects chosen by 
 the candidate and approved by the Divinity Professor. 
 The exercises for the degree had long ceased to 
 be looked upon as very serious matters, and certainly 
 were never regarded as tests of the soundness of 
 the candidate's faith. They were usually on well- 
 worn commonplaces, of which the Regius Professor 
 kept a stock, and about which no one troubled himself 
 but the person who wanted the degree. It was not 
 a creditable system, but it was of a piece with the 
 prevalent absence of any serious examination for the 
 superior degrees. It would have been quite befitting 
 his position, if Dr. Hampden had called the attention 
 of the authorities to the evil of sham exercises for 
 degrees in his own important Faculty. It would have 
 been quite right to make a vigorous effort on public 
 grounds to turn these sham trials into realities ; to use 
 them, like the examination for the B.A. degree, as 
 tests of knowledge and competent ability. Such a
 
 xvi THE THREE DEFEATS 279 
 
 move on his part would have been in harmony with 
 the legislation which had recently added two theo- 
 logical Professors to the Faculty, and had sketched 
 out, however imperfectly, the outlines of a revived 
 theological school. 
 
 This is what, with good reason, Dr. Hampden 
 might have attempted on general grounds, and had he 
 been successful (though this in the suspicious state of 
 University feeling was not very likely) he would have 
 gained in a regular and lawful way that power of em- 
 barrassing his opponents which he was resolved to use 
 in defiance of all existing custom. But such was not 
 the course which he chose. Mr. Macmullen of Corpus, 
 who, in pursuance of the College Statutes, had to pro- 
 ceed to the B.D. degree, applied, as the custom was, 
 for theses to the Professor. Mr. Macmullen was known 
 to hold the opinions of the movement school ; of course 
 he was called a Tractarian ; he had put his name to 
 some of the many papers which expressed the senti- 
 ments of his friends on current events. Dr. Hampden 
 sent him two propositions, which the candidate was to 
 support, framed so as to commit him to assertions 
 which Mr. Macmullen, whose high Anglican opinions 
 were well known, could not consistently make. It was 
 a novel and unexampled act on the part of the Pro- 
 fessor, to turn what had been a mere formal exercise 
 into a sharp and sweeping test of doctrine, which 
 would place all future Divinity degrees in the Univer- 
 sity at his mercy; and the case was made more serious, 
 when the very form of exercise which the Professor 
 used as an instrument of such formidable power was 
 itself without question unstatutable and illegal, and 
 had been simply connived at by the authorities. To 
 introduce by his own authority a new feature into a
 
 28o THE OXFORD MOVEMENT CHAP. 
 
 system which he had no business to use at all, and to 
 do this for the first time with the manifest purpose of 
 annoying an obnoxious individual, was, on Dr. Hamp- 
 den's part, to do more to discredit his chair and him- 
 self, than the censure of the University could do ; and 
 it was as unwise as it was unworthy. The strength of 
 his own case before the public was that he could be 
 made to appear as the victim of a personal and partisan 
 attack ; yet on the first opportunity he acts in the 
 spirit of an inquisitor, and that not in fair conflict with 
 some one worthy of his hostility, but to wreak an 
 injury, in a matter of private interest, on an individual, 
 in no way known to him or opposed to him, except as 
 holding certain unpopular opinions. 
 
 Mr. Macmullen was not the person to take such 
 treatment quietly. The right was substantially on 
 his side, and the Professor, and the University 
 authorities who more or less played into the hands 
 of the Professor, in defence of his illegal and 
 ultimately untenable claims, appeared before the 
 University, the one as a persecutor, the others as 
 rulers who were afraid to do justice on behalf of an 
 ill-used man because he was a Tractarian. The 
 right course was perfectly clear. It was to put an end 
 to these unauthorised exercises, and to recall both can- 
 didates and Professor to the statutable system which 
 imposed disputations conducted under the moderator- 
 ship of the Professor, but which gave him no veto, at 
 the time, on the theological sufficiency of the disputa- 
 tions, leaving him to state his objections, if he was not 
 satisfied, when the candidate's degree was asked for in 
 the House of Congregation. This course, after some 
 hesitation, was followed, but only partially ; and with- 
 out allowing or disallowing the Professor's claim to a
 
 xvi THE THREE DEFEATS 281 
 
 veto, the Vice-Chancellor on his own responsibility 
 stopped the degree. A vexatious dispute lingered on 
 for two or three years, with actions in the Vice- 
 Chancellor's Court, and distinguished lawyers to plead 
 for each side, and appeals to the University Court of 
 Delegates, who reversed the decision of the Vice- 
 Chancellor's assessor. Somehow or other, Mr. Mac- 
 mullen at last got his degree, but at the cost of a great 
 deal of ill-blood in Oxford, for which Dr. Hampden, 
 by his unwarranted interference, and the University 
 authorities, by their questionable devices to save the 
 credit and claims of one of their own body, must be 
 held mainly responsible. 
 
 Before the matter was ended, they were made to 
 feel, in rather a startling way, how greatly they had 
 lost the confidence of the University. One of the 
 attempts to find a way out of the tangle of the dispute 
 was the introduction, in February 1844, of a Statute 
 which should give to the Professor the power which 
 was now contested, and practically place all the 
 Divinity degrees under the control of a Board in con- 
 junction with the Vice-Chancellor. 1 The proposed 
 legislation raised such indignation in the University, 
 that the Hebdomadal Board took back their scheme 
 for further revision, and introduced it again in a 
 modified shape, which still however gave new powers 
 to the Professor and the Vice-Chancellor. But the 
 University would have none of it. No one could say 
 that the defeat of the altered Statute by 341 to 21 was 
 the work merely of a party. 2 It was the most decisive 
 vote given in the course of these conflicts. And it was 
 observed that on the same day Mr. Macmullen's degree 
 was vetoed by the Vice-Chancellor at the instance of 
 
 1 Christian Remembrancer, vol. ix. p. 175. 2 Ibid. pp. 177-179.
 
 282 THE OXFORD MOVEMENT CHAP. 
 
 Dr. Hampden at ten o'clock in Congregation, and the 
 Hebdomadal Board, which had supported him, received 
 the vote of want of confidence at noon in Convocation. 
 Nothing could show more decisively that the 
 authorities in the Hebdomadal Board were out of 
 touch with the feeling of the University, or, at all 
 events, of that part of it which was resident. The 
 residents were not, as a body, identified with the Tract- 
 arians ; it would be more true to say that the residents, 
 as a body, looked on this marked school with misgiving 
 and apprehension ; but they saw what manner of men 
 these Tractarians were ; they lived with them in college 
 and common-room ; their behaviour was before their 
 brethren as a whole, with its strength and its weakness, 
 its moral elevation and its hazardous excitement, its 
 sincerity of purpose and its one-sidedness of judgment 
 and sympathy, its unfairness to what was English, its 
 over-value for what was foreign. Types of those who 
 looked at things more or less independently were Mr. 
 Hussey of Christ Church, Mr. C. P. Eden of Oriel, 
 Mr. Sewell of Exeter, Mr. Francis Faber of Mag- 
 dalen, Dr. Greenhill of Trinity, Mr. Wall of Balliol, 
 Mr. Hobhouse of Merton, with some of the more 
 consistent Liberals, like Mr. Stanley of University, 
 and latterly Mr. Tait. Men of this kind, men of high 
 character and weight in Oxford, found much to dislike 
 and regret in the Tractarians. But they could also 
 see that the leaders of the Hebdomadal Board laboured 
 under a fatal incapacity to recognise what these un- 
 popular Tractarians were doing for the cause of true 
 and deep religion ; they could see that the judgment 
 of the Heads of Houses, living as they did apart, in a 
 kind of superior state, was narrow, ill-informed, and 
 harsh, and that the warfare which they waged was
 
 xvi THE THREE DEFEATS 283 
 
 petty, irritating, and profitless ; while they also saw 
 with great clearness that under cover of suppressing 
 " Puseyism," the policy of the Board was, in fact, tend- 
 ing to increase and strengthen the power of an irre- 
 sponsible and incompetent oligarchy, not only over 
 a troublesome party, but over the whole body of 
 residents. To the great honour of Oxford it must be 
 said, that throughout these trying times, on to the very 
 end, there was in the body of Masters a spirit of fair- 
 ness, a recognition of the force both of argument and 
 character, a dislike of high-handedness and shabbiness, 
 which was in strong and painful contrast to the short- 
 sighted violence in which the Hebdomadal Board was 
 unhappily induced to put their trust, and which proved 
 at last the main cause of the overthrow of their power. 
 When changes began to threaten Oxford, there was no 
 one to say a word for them. 
 
 But, for the moment, in spite of this defeat in Con- 
 vocation, they had no misgivings as to the wisdom of 
 their course or the force of their authority. There 
 was, no doubt, much urging from outside, both on 
 political and theological grounds, to make them use 
 their power to stay the plague of Tractarianism ; and 
 they were led by three able and resolute men, unfortun- 
 ately unable to understand the moral or the intellectual 
 character of the movement, and having the highest 
 dislike and disdain for it in both aspects Dr. Haw- 
 kins, Provost of Oriel, the last remaining disciple of 
 Whately's school, a man of rigid conscientiousness, and 
 very genuine though undemonstrative piety, of great 
 kindliness in private life, of keen and alert intellect, 
 but not of breadth and knowledge proportionate to 
 his intellectual power ; Dr. Symons, Warden of 
 Wadham, a courageous witness for Evangelical
 
 284 THE OXFORD MOVEMENT CHAP. 
 
 divinity in the days when Evangelicals were not 
 in fashion in Oxford, a man of ponderous and 
 pedantic learning and considerable practical acute- 
 ness ; and Dr. Card well, Principal of St. Alban's Hall, 
 more a man of the world than his colleagues, with 
 considerable knowledge of portions of English Church 
 history. Under the inspiration of these chiefs, the 
 authorities had adopted, as far as they could, the 
 policy of combat; and the Vice -Chancellor of the 
 time, Dr. Wynter of St. John's, a kind-hearted man, 
 but quite unfit to moderate among the strong wills 
 and fierce tempers round him, was induced to single 
 out for the severest blow yet struck, the most dis- 
 tinguished person in the ranks of the movement, 
 Dr. Pusey himself. 
 
 Dr. Pusey was a person with whom it was not wise 
 to meddle, unless his assailants could make out a case 
 without a flaw. He was without question the most 
 venerated person in Oxford. Without an equal, in 
 Oxford at least, in the depth and range of his learn- 
 ing, he stood out yet more impressively among his 
 fellows in the lofty moral elevation and simplicity of 
 his life, the blamelessness of his youth, and the pro- 
 found devotion of his manhood, to which the family 
 sorrows of his later years, and the habits which grew 
 out of them, added a kind of pathetic and solemn 
 interest. Stern and severe in his teaching at one 
 time, at least as he was understood, beyond even the 
 severity of Puritanism, he was yet overflowing with 
 affection, tender and sympathetic to all who came near 
 him, and, in the midst of continual controversy, he 
 endeavoured, with deep conscientiousness, to avoid 
 the bitternesses of controversy. He was the last man 
 to attack ; much more the last man to be unfair to.
 
 xvi THE THREE DEFEATS 285 
 
 The men who ruled in Oxford contrived, in attacking 
 him, to make almost every mistake which it was pos- 
 sible to make. 
 
 On the 24th of May 1843 Dr. Pusey, intending to 
 balance and complement the severer, and, to many, the 
 disquieting aspects of doctrine in his work on Baptism, 
 preached on the Holy Eucharist as a comfort to the 
 penitent. He spoke of it as a disciple of Andrewes 
 and Bramhall would speak of it ; it was a high Angli- 
 can sermon, full, after the example of the Homilies, 
 Jeremy Taylor, and devotional writers like George 
 Herbert and Bishop Ken, of the fervid language of 
 the Fathers ; and that was all. Beyond this it did 
 not go ; its phraseology was strictly within Anglican 
 limits. In the course of the week that followed, 
 the University was surprised by the announcement 
 that Dr. Faussett, the Margaret Professor of Divinity, 
 had "delated" the sermon to the Vice-Chancellor as 
 teaching heresy ; and even more surprised at the 
 news that the Vice-Chancellor had commenced pro- 
 ceedings. The Statutes provided that when a sermon 
 was complained of, or delated to the Vice-Chancellor, 
 the Vice -Chancellor should demand a copy of the 
 sermon, and summoning to him as his assessors Six 
 Doctors of Divinity, should examine the language 
 complained of, and, if necessary, condemn and punish 
 the preacher. The Statute is thus drawn up in 
 general terms, and prescribes nothing as to the mode 
 in which the examination into the alleged offence is 
 to be carried on ; that is, it leaves it to the Vice- 
 Chancellor's discretion. What happened was this. 
 The sermon was asked for, but the name of the 
 accuser was not given ; the Statute did not enjoin it. 
 The sermon was sent, with a request from Dr. Pusey
 
 286 THE OXFORD MOVEMENT CHAP. 
 
 that he might have a hearing. The Six Doctors 
 were appointed, five of them being Dr. Hawkins, 
 Dr. Symons, Dr. Jenkyns, Dr. Ogilvie, Dr. Jelf ; the 
 Statute said the Regius Professor was, if possible, to 
 be one of the number ; as he was under the ban of a 
 special Statute, he was spared the task, and his place 
 was taken by the next Divinity Professor, Dr. Faus- 
 sett, the person who had preferred the charge, and 
 who was thus, from having been accuser, promoted to 
 be a judge. To Dr. Pusey's request for a hearing, 
 no answer was returned ; the Statute, no doubt, said 
 nothing of a hearing. But after the deliberations of 
 the judges were concluded, and after the decision to 
 condemn the sermon had been reached, one of them, 
 Dr. Pusey's old friend, Dr. Jelf, was privately charged 
 with certain communications from the Vice-Chancellor, 
 on which the seal of absolute secrecy was imposed, and 
 which in fact, we believe, have never been divulged 
 from that day to this. Whatever passed between the 
 Vice-Chancellor, Dr. Jelf, and Dr. Pusey, it had no 
 effect in arresting the sentence ; and it came out, in 
 informal ways, and through Dr. Pusey himself, that on 
 the 2d of June Dr. Pusey had been accused and con- 
 demned for having taught doctrine contrary to that of 
 the Church of England, and that by the authority of 
 the Vice-Chancellor he was suspended from preaching 
 within the University for two years. But no formal 
 notification of the transaction was ever made to the 
 University. 
 
 The summary suppression of erroneous and dan- 
 gerous teaching had long been a recognised part of 
 the University discipline ; and with the ideas then 
 accepted of the religious character of the University, 
 it was natural that some such power as that given in
 
 xvi THE THREE DEFEATS 287 
 
 the Statutes should be provided. The power, even* 
 after all the changes in Oxford, exists still, and has 
 been recently appealed to. Dr. Pusey, as a member 
 of the University, had no more right than any other 
 preacher to complain of his doctrine being thus solemnly 
 called in question. But it is strange that it should not 
 have occurred to the authorities that, under the con- 
 ditions of modern times, and against a man like 
 Dr. Pusey, such power should be warily used. For 
 it was not only arbitrary power, such as was exerted 
 in the condemnation of No. 90, but it was arbitrary 
 power acting under the semblance of a judicial inquiry, 
 with accusers, examination, trial, judges, and a heavy 
 penalty. The act of a court of justice which sets at 
 defiance the rules of justice is a very different thing 
 from a straightforward act of arbitrary power, because 
 it pretends to be what it is not. The information 
 against Dr. Pusey, if accepted, involved a trial that 
 was- the fixed condition and point of departure from 
 which there was no escaping and if a trial be held, 
 then, if it be not a fair trial, the proceeding becomes, 
 according to English notions, a flagrant and cowardly 
 wrong. All this, all the intrinsic injustice, all the 
 scandal and discredit in the eyes of honest men, 
 was forgotten in the obstinate and blind confidence in 
 the letter of a vague Statute. The accused was not 
 allowed to defend or explain himself; he was refused 
 the knowledge of the definite charges against him ; he 
 was refused, in spite of his earnest entreaties, a hearing, 
 even an appearance in the presence of his judges. The 
 Statute, it was said, enjoined none of these things. 
 The name of his accuser was not told him ; he was 
 left to learn it by report. To the end of the business 
 all was wrought in secrecy ; no one knows to this day
 
 288 THE OXFORD MOVEMENT CHAP. 
 
 how the examination of the sermon was conducted, or 
 what were the opinions of the judges. The Statute, it 
 was said, neither enjoined nor implied publicity. To 
 this day no one knows what were the definite passages, 
 what was the express or necessarily involved heresy or 
 contradiction of the formularies, on which the condem- 
 nation was based ; nor except on the supposition of 
 gross ignorance of English divinity on the part of the 
 judges is it easy for a reader to put his finger on the 
 probably incriminated passages. To make the proceed- 
 ings still more unlike ordinary public justice, informal 
 and private communications were carried on between 
 the judge and the accused, in which the accused was 
 bound to absolute silence, and forbidden to consult his 
 nearest friends. 
 
 And of the judges what can be said but that they 
 were, with one exception, the foremost and sternest 
 opponents of all that was identified with Dr. Pusey's 
 name ; and that one of them was the colleague who 
 had volunteered to accuse him ? Dr. Faussett's 
 share in the matter is intelligible ; hating the move- 
 ment in all its parts, he struck with the vehemence of 
 a mediaeval zealot. But that men like Dr. Hawkins and 
 Dr. Ogilvie, one of them reputed to be a theologian, 
 the other one of the shrewdest and most cautious of 
 men, and in ordinary matters one of the most conscien- 
 tious and fairest, should not have seen what justice, or 
 at least the show of justice, demanded, and what the 
 refusal of that demand would look like, and that they 
 should have persuaded the Vice-Chancellor to accept 
 the entire responsibility of haughtily refusing it, is, 
 even to those who remember the excitement of those 
 days, a subject of wonder. The plea was actually put 
 forth that such opportunities of defence of his language
 
 xvi THE THREE DEFEATS 289 
 
 and teaching' as Dr. Pusev asked for would have led to 
 
 O j 
 
 the " inconvenience " of an interminable debate and 
 confronting of texts and authorities. 1 The fact, with 
 Dr. Pusey as the accused person, is likely enough ; but 
 in a criminal charge with a heavy penalty, it would 
 have been better for the reputation of the judges to 
 have submitted to the inconvenience. 
 
 It was a great injustice and a great blunder a 
 blunder, because the gratuitous defiance of accepted 
 rules of fairness neutralised whatever there might seem 
 to be of boldness and strength in the blow. They 
 were afraid to meet Dr. Pusey face to face. They 
 were afraid to publish the reasons of their condem- 
 nation. The effect on the University, both on resident 
 and non-resident members, was not to be misunder- 
 stood. The Protestantism of the Vice-Chancellor and 
 the Six Doctors was, of course, extolled by partisans 
 in the press with reckless ignorance and reckless con=- 
 tempt at once for common justice and their own 
 consistency. One person of some distinction at 
 Oxford ventured to make himself the mouthpiece of 
 those who were bold enough to defend the proceeding 
 the recently-elected Professor of Poetry, Mr. Garbett. 
 But deep offence was given among the wiser and more 
 reasonable men who had a regard for the character of 
 the University. A request to know the grounds of the 
 sentence from men who were certainly of no party was 
 curtly refused by the Vice-Chancellor, with a suggestion 
 that it did not concern them. A more important 
 memorial was sent from London, showing how persons 
 at a distance were shocked by the unaccountable indif- 
 ference to the appearance of justice in the proceeding. 
 It was signed among others by Mr. Gladstone and 
 
 1 Cf. British Critic, No. xlvii. pp. 221-223. 
 U
 
 290 THE OXFORD MOVEMENT CHAP. 
 
 Mr. Justice Coleridge. The Vice-Chancellor lost his 
 temper. He sent back the memorial to London "by 
 the hands of his bedel," as if that in some way stamped 
 his official disapprobation more than if it had been 
 returned through the post. And he proceeded, in 
 language wonderful even for that moment, as " Resi- 
 dent Governor" of the University, to reprimand states- 
 men and lawyers of eminence and high character, not 
 merely for presuming to interfere with his own duties, 
 but for forgetting the oaths on the strength of which 
 they had received their degrees, and for coming very 
 near to that high, almost highest, academical crime, 
 the crime of being perturbatores pads breaking the 
 peace of the University. 
 
 Such foolishness, affecting dignity, only made more 
 to talk of. If the men who ruled the University had 
 wished to disgust and alienate the Masters of Arts, and 
 especially the younger ones who were coming forward 
 into power and influence, they could not have done 
 better. The chronic jealousy and distrust of the time 
 were deepened. And all this was aggravated by what 
 went on in private. A system of espionage, whisper- 
 ings, backbitings, and miserable tittle-tattle, sometimes 
 of the most slanderous or the most ridiculous kind, 
 was set going all over Oxford. Never in Oxford, 
 before or since, were busybodies more truculent or 
 more unscrupulous. Difficulties arose between Heads 
 of Colleges and their tutors. Candidates for fellow- 
 ships were closely examined as to their opinions and 
 their associates. Men applying for testimonials were 
 cross-questioned on No. 90, as to the infallibility of 
 general councils, purgatory, the worship of images, the 
 Ora pro nobis, and the intercession of the saints : the 
 real critical questions upon which men's minds were
 
 xvi THE THREE DEFEATS 291 
 
 working being absolutely uncomprehended and ignored. 
 It was a miserable state of misunderstanding and dis- 
 trust, and none of the University leaders had the 
 temper and the manliness to endeavour with justice 
 and knowledge to get to the bottom of it. It was 
 enough to suppose that a Popish Conspiracy was being 
 carried on.
 
 CHAPTER XVII 
 
 W. G. WARD 
 
 IF only the Oxford authorities could have had patience 
 if only they could have known more largely and 
 more truly the deep changes that were at work every- 
 where, and how things were beginning to look in the 
 eyes of the generation that was coming, perhaps many 
 things might have been different. Yes, it was true 
 that there was a strong current setting towards Rome. 
 It was acting on some of the most vigorous of the 
 younger men. It was acting powerfully on the fore- 
 most mind in Oxford. Whither, if not arrested, it 
 was carrying them was clear, but as yet it was by no 
 means clear at what rate ; and time, and thought, and 
 being left alone and dealt with justly, have a great 
 effect on men's minds. Extravagance, disproportion, 
 mischievous, dangerous exaggeration, in much that 
 was said and taught all this might have settled 
 down, as so many things are in the habit of settling 
 down, into reasonable and practical shapes, after a 
 first burst of crudeness and strain as, in fact, it did 
 settle down at last. For Anglicanism itself was not 
 Roman ; friends and foes said it was not, to reproach 
 as well as to defend it. It was not Roman in Dr. 
 Pusey, though he was not afraid to acknowledge what
 
 CHAP, xvn W. G. WARD 293 
 
 was good in Rome. It was not Roman in Mr. Keble 
 and his friends, in Dr. Moberly of Winchester, and the 
 Barters. It was not Roman in Mr. Isaac Williams, 
 Mr. Copeland, and Mr. Woodgate, each of them a 
 centre of influence in Oxford and the country. It was 
 not Roman in the devoted Charles Marriott, or in 
 Isaac Williams's able and learned pupil, Mr. Arthur 
 Haddan. It was not Roman in Mr. James Mozley, 
 after Mr. Newman, the most forcible and impressive 
 of the Oxford writers. A distinctively English party 
 grew up, both in Oxford and away from it, strong in 
 eminent names, in proportion as Roman sympathies 
 showed themselves. These men were, in any fair 
 judgment, as free from Romanising as any of their 
 accusers ; but they made their appeal for patience 
 and fair judgment in vain. If only the rulers could 
 have had patience : but patience is a difficult virtue in 
 the presence of what seem pressing dangers. Their 
 policy was wrong, stupid, unjust, pernicious. It was a 
 deplorable mistake, and all will wish now that the 
 discredit of it did not rest on the history of Oxford. 
 And yet it was the mistake of upright and conscien- 
 tious men. 
 
 Doubtless there was danger ; the danger was that 
 a number of men would certainly not acquiesce much 
 longer in Anglicanism, while the Heads continued 
 absolutely blind to what was really in these men's 
 thoughts. For the Heads could not conceive the attrac- 
 tion which the Roman Church had for a religious man ; 
 they talked in the old-fashioned way about the absurdity 
 of the Roman system. They could not understand 
 how reasonable men could turn Roman Catholics. 
 They accounted for it by supposing a silly hankering 
 after the pomp or the frippery of Roman Catholic
 
 294 THE OXFORD MOVEMENT CHAP. 
 
 worship, and at best a craving after the romantic and 
 sentimental. Their thoughts dwelt continually on 
 image worship and the adoration of saints. But what 
 really was astir was something much deeper some- 
 thing much more akin to the new and strong forces 
 which were beginning to act in very different direc- 
 tions from this in English society forces which were 
 not only leading minds to Rome, but making men 
 Utilitarians, Rationalists, Positivists, and, though the 
 word had not yet been coined, Agnostics. The men 
 who doubted about the English Church saw in Rome 
 a strong, logical, consistent theory of religion, not of 
 yesterday nor to-day not only comprehensive and 
 profound, but actually in full work, and fruitful in 
 great results ; and this, in contrast to the alleged and 
 undeniable anomalies and shortcomings of Protestant- 
 ism and Anglicanism. And next, there was the 
 immense amount which they saw in Rome of self- 
 denial and self-devotion ; the surrender of home and 
 family in the clergy ; the great organised ministry of 
 women in works of mercy ; the resolute abandonment 
 of the world and its attractions in the religious life. 
 If in England there flourished the homely and modest 
 types of goodness, it was in Rome that, at that day at 
 least, men must look for the heroic. They were not 
 indisposed to the idea that a true Church which had lost 
 all this might yet regain it, and they were willing to wait 
 and see what the English Church would do to recover 
 what it had lost ; but there was obviously a long way 
 to make up, and they came to think that there was no 
 chance of its overtaking its true position. Of course 
 they knew all that was so loudly urged about the 
 abuses and mischiefs growing out of the professed 
 severity of Rome. They knew that in spite of it
 
 IV. G. WARD 295 
 
 foreign society was lax ; that the discipline of the 
 confessional was often exercised with a light rein. 
 But if the good side of it was real, they easily ac- 
 counted for the bad : the bad did not destroy, it was 
 a tacit witness to the good. And they knew the Latin 
 Church mainly from France, where it was more in 
 earnest, and exhibited more moral life and intellectual 
 activity, than, as far as Englishmen knew, in Italy or 
 Spain. There was a strong rebound from insular 
 ignorance and unfairness, when English travellers 
 came on the poorly paid but often intelligent and hard- 
 working French clergy ; on the great works of mercy 
 in the towns ; on the originality and eloquence of De 
 Maistre, La Mennais, Lacordaire, Montalembert. 
 
 These ideas took possession of a remarkable mind, 
 the index and organ of a remarkable character. Mr. 
 W. G. Ward had learned the interest of earnest reli- 
 gion from Dr. Arnold, in part through his close friend 
 Arthur Stanley. But if there was ever any tendency 
 in him to combine with the peculiar elements of the 
 Rugby School, it was interrupted in its nascent state, 
 as chemists speak, by the intervention of a still- more 
 potent affinity, the personality of Mr. Newman. Mr. 
 Ward had developed in the Oxford Union, and in a 
 wide social circle of the most rising men of the time 
 including Tait, Cardwell, Lowe, Roundell Palmer a 
 very unusual dialectical skill and power of argumenta- 
 tive statement : qualities which seemed to point to the 
 House of Commons. But Mr. Newman's ideas gave 
 him material, not only for argument but for thought. 
 The lectures and sermons at St. Mary's subdued and 
 led him captive. The impression produced on him 
 was expressed in the formula that primitive Christianity 
 might have been corrupted into Popery, but that Pro-
 
 296 THE OXFORD MOVEMENT CHAP. 
 
 testantism never could. 1 For a moment he hung in 
 the wind. He might have been one of the earliest of 
 Broad Churchmen. He might have been a Utilitarian 
 and Necessitarian follower of Mr. J. S. Mill. But 
 moral influences of a higher kind prevailed. And he 
 became, in the most thoroughgoing yet independent 
 fashion, a disciple of Mr. Newman. He brought to 
 his new side a fresh power of controversial writing ; 
 but his chief influence was a social one, from his bright 
 and attractive conversation, his bold and startling 
 candour, his frank, not to say reckless, fearlessness of 
 consequences, his unrivalled skill in logical fence, his 
 unfailing good-humour and love of fun, in which his 
 personal clumsiness set off the vivacity and nimbleness 
 of his joyous moods. " He was," says Mr. Mozley, " a 
 great musical critic, knew all the operas, and was an 
 admirable buffo singer." No one could doubt that, 
 having started, Mr. Ward would go far and probably 
 go fast. 
 
 Mr. Ward was well known in Oxford, and his 
 language might have warned the Heads that if there 
 was a drift towards Rome, it came from something 
 much more serious than a hankering after a senti- 
 mental ritual or mediaeval legends. In Mr. Ward's 
 writings in the British Critic, as in his conversation 
 and he wrote much and at great length three ideas 
 were manifestly at the bottom of his attraction to 
 Rome. One was that Rome did, and, he believed, 
 nothing else did, keep up the continuous recognition 
 of the supernatural element in religion, that conscious- 
 ness of an ever-present power not of this world which 
 is so prominent a feature in the New Testament, and 
 which is spoken of there as a permanent and character- 
 
 1 Cf. T. Mozley, Reminiscences, vol. ii. p. 5.
 
 W. G. WARD 297 
 
 istic element in the Gospel dispensation. The Roman 
 view of the nature and offices of the Church, of man's 
 relations to the unseen world, of devotion, of the 
 Eucharist and of the Sacraments in general, assumed 
 and put forward this supernatural aspect ; other 
 systems ignored it or made it mean nothing, unless 
 in secret to the individual and converted soul. In 
 the next place he revolted no weaker word can be 
 used from the popular exhibition in England, 
 more or less Lutheran and Calvinistic, of the doctrine 
 of justification. The ostentatious separation of justi- 
 fication from morality, with all its theological refine- 
 ments and fictions, seemed to him profoundly un- 
 scriptural, profoundly unreal and hollow, or else 
 profoundly immoral. In conscience and moral honesty 
 and strict obedience he saw the only safe and trust- 
 worthy guidance in regard to the choice and formation 
 of religious opinions ; it was a principle on which all 
 his philosophy was built, that "careful and individual 
 moral discipline is the only possible basis on which 
 Christian faith and practice can be reared." In the 
 third place he was greatly affected, not merely by the 
 paramount place of sanctity in the Roman theology 
 and the professed Roman system, but by the standard 
 of saintliness which he found there, involving complete 
 and heroic self-sacrifice for great religious ends, com- 
 plete abandonment of the world, painful and continuous 
 self-discipline, purified and exalted religious affections, 
 beside which English piety and goodness at its best, 
 in such examples as George Herbert and Ken and 
 Bishop Wilson, seemed unambitious and pale and tame, 
 of a different order from the Roman, and less closely 
 resembling what we read of in the first ages and in the 
 New Testament. Whether such views were right
 
 298 THE OXFORD MOVEMENT CHAP. 
 
 or wrong, exaggerated or unbalanced, accurate or 
 superficial, they were matters fit to interest grave 
 men ; but there is no reason to think that they made 
 the slightest impression on the authorities of the 
 University. 
 
 On the other hand, Mr. Ward, with the greatest 
 good humour, was unreservedly defiant and aggressive. 
 There was something intolerably provoking in his 
 mixture of jauntiness and seriousness, his avowal of 
 utter personal unworthiness and his undoubting cer- 
 tainty of being in the right, his downright charges 
 of heresy and his ungrudging readiness to make 
 allowance for the heretics and give them credit for 
 special virtues greater than those of the orthodox. 
 He was not a person to hide his own views or to 
 let others hide theirs. He lived in an atmosphere of 
 discussion with all around him, friends or opponents, 
 fellows and tutors in common-rooms, undergraduates 
 after lecture or out walking. The most amusing, 
 the most tolerant man in Oxford, he had round him 
 perpetually some of the cleverest and brightest scholars 
 and thinkers of the place ; and where he was, there 
 was debate, cross - questioning, pushing inferences, 
 starting alarming problems, beating out ideas, trying 
 the stuff and mettle of mental capacity. Not always 
 with real knowledge, or a real sense of fact, but always 
 rapid and impetuous, taking in the whole dialectical 
 chess-board at a glance, he gave no quarter, and a 
 man found himself in a perilous corner before he 
 perceived the drift of the game ; but it was to clear his 
 own thought, not for he was much too good-natured 
 to embarrass another. If the old scholastic dis- 
 putations had been still in use at Oxford, his triumphs 
 would have been signal and memorable. His success,
 
 xvii W. G. WARD 299 
 
 compared with that of other leaders of the movement, 
 in influencing life and judgment, was a pre-eminently 
 intellectual success ; and it cut two ways. The stress 
 which he laid on the moral side of questions, his own 
 generosity, his earnestness on behalf of fair play and 
 good faith, elevated and purified intercourse. But he 
 did not always win assent in proportion to his power of 
 argument. Abstract reasoning, in matters with which 
 human action is concerned, may be too absolute to be 
 convincing. It may not leave sufficient margin for the 
 play and interference of actual experience. And Mr. 
 Ward, having perfect confidence in his conclusions, 
 rather liked to leave them in a startling form, which 
 he innocently declared to be manifest and inevitable. 
 And so stories of Ward's audacity and paradoxes flew 
 all over Oxford, shocking and perplexing grave heads 
 with fear of they knew not what. Dr. Jenkyns, the 
 Master of Balliol, one of those curious mixtures of 
 pompous absurdity with genuine shrewdness which 
 used to pass across the University stage, not clever 
 himself but an unfailing judge of a clever man, as 
 a jockey might be of a horse, liking Ward and proud 
 of him for his cleverness, was aghast at his monstrous 
 and unintelligible language, and driven half wild with 
 it. Mr. Tait, a fellow-tutor, though living on terms of 
 hearty friendship with Ward, prevailed on the Master 
 after No. 90 to dismiss Ward from the office of 
 teaching mathematics. It seemed a petty step thus 
 to mix up theology with mathematics, though it was 
 not so absurd as it looked, for Ward brought in 
 theology everywhere, and discussed it when his 
 mathematics were done. But Ward accepted it 
 frankly and defended it. It was natural, he said, that 
 Tait, thinking his principles mischievous, should wish
 
 300 THE OXFORD MOVEMENT CHAP. 
 
 to silence him as a teacher ; and their friendship 
 remained unbroken. 
 
 Mr. Ward's theological position was really a pro- 
 visional one, though, at starting at least, he would not 
 have allowed it. He had no early or traditional 
 attachment to the English Church, such as that which 
 acted so strongly on the leaders of the movement : 
 but he found himself a member of it, and Mr. Newman 
 had interpreted it to him. He so accepted it, quite 
 loyally and in earnest, as a point of departure. But he 
 proceeded at once to put "our Church" (as he called 
 it) on its trial, in comparison with its own professions, 
 and with the ideal standard of a Church which he had 
 thought out for himself; and this rapidly led to grave 
 consequences. He accepted from authority which 
 satisfied him both intellectually and morally the main 
 scheme of Catholic theology, as the deepest and truest 
 philosophy of religion, satisfying at once conscience 
 and intellect. The Catholic theology gave him, among 
 other things, the idea and the notes of the Church ; 
 with these, in part at least, the English Church agreed ; 
 but in other respects, and these very serious ones, it 
 differed widely ; it seemed inconsistent and anomalous. 
 The English Church was separate and isolated from 
 Christendom. It was supposed to differ widely from 
 other Churches in doctrine. It admitted variety of 
 opinion and teaching, even to the point of tolerating 
 alleged heresy. With such data as these, he entered 
 on an investigation which ultimately came to the ques- 
 tion whether the English Church could claim to be a 
 part of the Church Catholic. He postulated from the 
 first, what he afterwards developed in the book in 
 which his Anglican position culminated, the famous 
 Ideal, the existence at some time or another of a
 
 W. G. WARD 301 
 
 Catholic Church which not only aimed at, but fulfilled 
 all the conditions of a perfect Church in creed, com- 
 munion, discipline, and life. Of course the English 
 and, as at starting he held, the Roman Church, fell far 
 short of this perfection. But at starting, the moral 
 which he drew was, not to leave the English Church, 
 but to do his best to raise it up to what it ought to be. 
 Whether he took in all the conditions of the problem, 
 whether it was not far more complicated and difficult 
 than he supposed, whether his knowledge of the facts 
 of the case was accurate and adequate, whether he was 
 always fair in his comparisons and judgments, and 
 whether he did not overlook elements of the gravest 
 importance in the inquiry ; whether, in fact, save for 
 certain strong and broad lines common to the whole 
 historic Church, the reign of anomaly, inconsistency, 
 difficulty did not extend much farther over the whole 
 field of debate than he chose to admit : all this is fairly 
 open to question. But within the limits which he laid 
 down, and within which he confined his reasonings, he 
 used his materials with skill and force ; and even those 
 who least agreed with him and were most sensible of 
 the strong and hardly disguised bias which so greatly 
 affected the value of his judgments, could not deny the 
 frankness and the desire to be fair and candid, with 
 which, as far as intention went, he conducted his argu- 
 ment. His first appearance as a writer was in the 
 controversy, as has been said before, on the subject of 
 No. 90. That tract had made the well-worn distinc- 
 tion between what was Catholic and what was distinct- 
 ively Roman, and had urged what had been urged 
 over and over again by English divines that the 
 Articles, in their condemnation of what was Roman, 
 were drawn in such a way as to leave untouched what
 
 302 THE OXFORD MOVEMENT CHAP. 
 
 was unquestionably Catholic. They were drawn indeed 
 by Protestants, but by men who also earnestly pro- 
 fessed to hold with the old Catholic doctors and dis- 
 avowed any purpose to depart from their teaching, and 
 who further had to meet the views and gain the assent 
 of men who were much less Protestant than them- 
 selves men who were willing to break with the Pope 
 and condemn the abuses associated with his name, but 
 by no means willing to break with the old theology. 
 The Articles were the natural result of a compromise 
 between two strong parties the Catholics agreeing 
 that the abuses should be condemned, so that the 
 Catholic doctrine was not touched ; the Protestants 
 insisting that, so that the Catholic doctrine was not 
 touched, the abuses of it should be denounced with 
 great severity : that there should be no question about 
 the condemnation of the abuses, and of the system 
 which had maintained them. The Articles were un- 
 doubtedly anti- Roman; that was obvious from the 
 historical position of the English Church, which in a 
 very real sense was anti -Roman; but were they so 
 anti- Roman as to exclude doctrines which English 
 divines had over and over again maintained as Catholic 
 and distinguished from Romanism, but which the 
 popular opinion, at this time or that, identified there- 
 with? 1 With flagrant ignorance ignorance of the 
 
 1 In dealing with the Articles either cise and clear, on others they were 
 
 as a test or as a text-book, this ques- vague and imperfect. The first five 
 
 tion was manifestly both an honest and Articles left no room for doubt. When 
 
 a reasonable one. As a test, and there- the compilers came to the controversies 
 
 fore penal, they must be construed of their day, for all their strong lan- 
 
 strictly ; like judicial decisions, they guage, they left all kinds of questions 
 
 only ruled as much as was necessary, unanswered. For instance, they actu- 
 
 and in the wide field of theology con- ally left unnoticed the primacy, and 
 
 fined themselves to the points at issue much more the infallibility of the Pope, 
 
 at the moment. And as a text-book They condemned the "sacrifices of 
 
 for instruction, it was obvious that Masses" did they condemn the ancient 
 
 while on some points they were pre- and universal doctrine of a Eucharistic
 
 W. G. WARD 303 
 
 history of thought and teaching in the English Church, 
 ignorance far more inexcusable of the state of parties 
 and their several notorious difficulties in relation to the 
 various formularies of the Church, it was maintained 
 on the other side that the "Articles construed by them- 
 selves " left no doubt that they were not only anti- 
 Roman but anti-Catholic, and that nothing but the 
 grossest dishonesty and immorality could allow any 
 doubt on the subject. 
 
 Neither estimate was logical enough to satisfy Mr. 
 Ward. The charge of insincerity, he retorted with 
 great effect on those who made it : if words meant 
 anything, the Ordination Service, the Visitation Ser- 
 vice, and the Baptismal Service were far greater diffi- 
 culties to Evangelicals, and to Latitudinarians like 
 Whately and Hampden, than the words of any Article 
 could be to Catholics ; and there was besides the tone 
 of the whole Prayer Book, intelligible, congenial, on 
 Catholic assumptions, and on no other. But as to the 
 Articles themselves, he was indisposed to accept the 
 defence made for them. He criticised indeed with 
 acuteness and severity the attempt to make the loose 
 language of many of them intolerant of primitive doc- 
 trine ; but he frankly accepted the allegation that apart 
 from this or that explanation, their general look, as 
 regards later controversies, was visibly against, not 
 only Roman doctrines or Roman abuses, but that 
 whole system of principles and mode of viewing 
 
 sacrifice? They condemned the Romish questions could not be foreclosed, unless 
 
 doctrine of Purgatory, with its popular on the assumption that there was no 
 
 tenet of material fire did that exclude doctrine on such points which could be 
 
 every doctrine of purgation after death? called Catholic except the Roman. The 
 
 They condemned Transubstantiation inquiry was not new ; and divines so 
 
 did they condemn the Real Presence ? stoutly anti-Roman as Dr. Hook and 
 
 They condemned a great popular sys- Mr. W. Palmer of Worcester had 
 
 tern did they condemn that of which answered it substantially in the same 
 
 it was a corruption and travesty? These sense as Mr. Newman in No. 90.
 
 304 THE OXFORD MOVEMENT CHAP. 
 
 religion which he called Catholic. They were, he 
 said, patient of a Catholic meaning, but ambitious of 
 a Protestant meaning ; whatever their logic was, their 
 rhetoric was Protestant. It was just possible, but not 
 more, for a Catholic to subscribe to them. But they 
 were the creation and the legacy of a bad age, and 
 though they had not extinguished Catholic teaching and 
 Catholic belief in the English Church, they had been a 
 serious hindrance to it, and a support to its opponents. 
 This was going beyond the position of No. 90. 
 No. 90 had made light of the difficulties of the Articles. 
 
 That there are real difficulties to a Catholic Christian in the 
 ecclesiastical position of our Church at this day, no one can deny ; 
 but the statements of the Articles are not in the number. Our 
 present scope is merely to show that, while our Prayer Book is 
 acknowledged on all hands to be of Catholic origin, our Articles 
 also the offspring of an uncatholic age are, through God's good 
 providence, to say the least, not uncatholic, and may be subscribed 
 by those who aim at being Catholic in heart and doctrine. 
 
 Mr. Ward not only went .beyond this position, but 
 in the teeth of these statements ; and he gave a new 
 aspect and new issues to the whole controversy. The 
 Articles, to him, were a difficulty, which they were 
 not to the writer of No. oo, or to Dr. Pusey, or to 
 Mr. Keble. To him they were not only the "off- 
 spring of an uncatholic age," but in themselves 
 uncatholic ; and his answer to the charge of dishonest 
 subscription was, not that the Articles "in their 
 natural meaning are Catholic," 1 but that the system 
 of the English Church is a compromise between what 
 is Catholic and what is Protestant, and that the 
 Protestant parties in it are involved in even greater 
 difficulties, in relation to subscription and use of its 
 
 1 W. G. Ward, The Ideal of a Christian Church, p. 478.
 
 xvii IV. G. WARD 305 
 
 formularies, than the Catholic. He admitted that he 
 did evade the spirit, but accepted the "statements of 
 the Articles," maintaining that this was the intention 
 of their original sanctioners. With characteristic bold- 
 ness, inventing a phrase which has become famous, he 
 wrote : "Our twelfth Article is as plain as words can 
 make it on the Evangelical side ; of course I think its 
 natural meaning may be explained away, for I subscribe 
 it myself in a non-natural sense " : J but he showed that 
 Evangelicals, high church Anglicans, and Latitudinarians 
 were equally obliged to have recourse to explanations, 
 which to all but themselves were unsatisfactory. 
 
 But he went a step beyond this. Hitherto the 
 distinction had been uniformly insisted upon between 
 what was Catholic and what was Roman ; between 
 what was witnessed to by the primitive and the un- 
 divided Church, and what had been developed beyond 
 that in the Schools, and by the definitions and decisions 
 of Rome, and in the enormous mass of its post- Reforma- 
 tion theology, at once so comprehensive, and so minute 
 in application. This distinction was the foundation 
 of what was, characteristically, Anglican theology, from 
 Hooker downwards. This distinction, at least for all 
 important purposes, Mr. Ward gradually gave up. It 
 was to a certain degree recognised in his early con- 
 troversy about No. 90 ; but it gradually grew fainter 
 till at last it avowedly disappeared. The Anglican 
 writers had drawn their ideas and their inspiration 
 from the Fathers ; the Fathers lived long ago, and 
 the teaching drawn from them, however spiritual and 
 lofty, wanted the modern look, and seemed to recognise 
 insufficiently modern needs. The Roman applications 
 of the same principles were definite and practical, and 
 
 1 The Ideal, etc., p. 479. 
 X
 
 306 THE OXFORD MOVEMENT CHAP. 
 
 Mr. Ward's mind, essentially one of his own century, 
 and little alive to what touched more imaginative 
 and sensitive minds, turned at once to Roman sources 
 for the interpretation of what was Catholic. In the 
 British Critic, and still more in the remarkable volume 
 in which his Oxford controversies culminated, the 
 substitution of Roman for the old conception of 
 Catholic appears, and the absolute identification of 
 Roman with Catholic. Roman authorities become 
 more and more the measure and rule of what is 
 Catholic. They belong to the present in a way in 
 which the older fountains of teaching do not ; in the 
 recognised teaching of the Latin Church, they have 
 taken their place and superseded them. 
 
 It was characteristic of Mr. Ward that his chief 
 quarrel with the Articles was not about the Sacraments, 
 not about their language on alleged Roman errors, but 
 about the doctrine of grace, the relation of the soul of 
 man to the law, the forgiveness, the holiness of God, 
 the doctrine, that is, in all its bearings, of justifica- 
 tion. Mr. Newman had examined this doctrine and 
 the various language held about it with great care, 
 very firmly but very temperately, and had attempted 
 to reconcile with each other all but the extreme 
 Lutheran statements. It was, he said, among really 
 religious men, a question of words. He had recog- 
 nised the faulty state of things in the pre- Reformation 
 Church, the faulty ideas about forgiveness, merit, 
 grace, and works, from which the Protestant language 
 was a reaction, natural, if often excessive ; and in the 
 English authoritative form of this language, he had 
 found nothing but what was perfectly capable of a 
 sound and true meaning. From the first, Mr. Ward's 
 judgment was far more severe than this. To him,
 
 xvn W. G. WARD 307 
 
 the whole structure of the Articles on Justification and 
 the doctrines connected with it seemed based on the 
 Lutheran theory, and for this theory, as fundamentally 
 and hopelessly immoral, he could not find words suffi- 
 ciently expressive of detestation and loathing. For the 
 basis of his own theory of religious knowledge was a 
 moral basis ; men came to the knowledge of religious 
 truth primarily not by the intellect, but by absolute 
 and unfailing loyalty to conscience and moral light ; 
 and a doctrine which separated faith from morality 
 and holiness, which made man's highest good and his 
 acceptance with God independent of what he was as 
 a moral agent, which relegated the realities of moral 
 discipline and goodness to a secondary and subordinate 
 place, as a mere sequel to follow, almost mechanically 
 and of course, on an act or feeling which had nothing 
 moral in it, which substituted a fictitious and imputed 
 righteousness for an inherent and infused and real 
 one, seemed to him to confound the eternal founda- 
 tions of right and wrong, and to be a blasphemy 
 against all that was true and sacred in religion. 
 
 Of the Lutheran doctrine l of justification, and the principle of 
 private judgment, I have argued that, in their abstract nature and 
 necessary tendency, they sink below atheism itself. ... A religious 
 
 1 It is curious, and characteristic of was to Calvin as Carlyle to J. S. Mill 
 the unhistorical quality of Mr. Ward's or Herbert Spencer ; he defied system, 
 mind, that his whole hostility should But Luther had burst into outrageous 
 have been concentrated on Luther and paradoxes, which fastened on Mr. 
 Lutheranism on Luther, the en- Ward's imagination. Yet outrageous 
 thusiastic, declamatory, unsystematic language is not always the most 
 denouncer of practical abuses, with dangerous. Nobody would really find 
 his strong attachments to portions of a provocation to sin, or an excuse for 
 orthodoxy, rather than on Calvin, with it, in Luther's Pecca fortiter any more 
 his cold love of power, and the iron than in Escobar's ridiculous casuistry, 
 consistency and strength of his logical There may be much more mischief 
 anti-Catholic system, which has really in the delicate unrealities of a fashion- 
 lived and moulded Protestantism, while able preacher, or in many a smooth 
 Lutheranism as a religion has passed sentimental treatise on the religious 
 into 'countless different forms. Luther affections.
 
 3o8 THE OXFORD MOVEMENT CHAP. 
 
 person who shall be sufficiently clear-headed to understand the 
 meaning of words, is warranted in rejecting Lutheranism on the 
 very same grounds which would induce him to reject atheism, viz. 
 as being the contradiction of truths which he feels on most certain 
 grounds to be first principles. l 
 
 There is nothing which he looks back on with so 
 much satisfaction in his writings as on this, that he has 
 "ventured to characterise that hateful and fearful type 
 of Antichrist in terms not wholly inadequate to its 
 prodigious demerits. " : 
 
 Mr. Ward had started with a very definite idea of 
 the Church and of its notes and tests. It was obvious 
 that the Anglican Church and so, it was thought, 
 the Roman failed to satisfy these notes in their 
 completeness ; but it seemed, at least at first, to satisfy 
 some of them, and to do this so remarkably, and in 
 such strong contrast to other religious bodies, that in 
 England at all events it seemed the true representa- 
 tive and branch of the Church Catholic ; and the duty 
 of adhering to it and serving it was fully recognised, 
 even by those who most felt its apparent departure from 
 the more Catholic principles and temper preserved 
 in many points by the Roman Church. From this 
 point of view Mr. Ward avowedly began. But, the 
 position gradually gave way before his relentless and 
 dissolving logic. The whole course of his writing in 
 the British Critic may be said to have consisted in a 
 prolonged and disparaging comparison of the English 
 Church, in theory, in doctrine, in moral and devotional 
 temper, in discipline of character, in education, in its 
 public and authoritative tone in regard to social, 
 political, and moral questions, and in the type and 
 standard of its clergy, with those of the Catholic 
 
 1 The 'ideal, etc., pp. 587, 305. 2 Ibid. p. 305.
 
 W. G. WARD 309 
 
 Church, which to him was represented by the mediaeval 
 and later Roman Church. And in the general result, 
 and in all important matters, the comparison became 
 more and more fatally disadvantageous to the English 
 Church. In the perplexing condition of Christendom, 
 it had just enough good and promise to justify those 
 who had been brought up in it remaining where they 
 were, as long as they saw any prospect of improving 
 it, and till they were driven out. That was a duty 
 uncomfortable and thankless as it was, and open to any 
 amount of misconstruction and misrepresentation 
 which they owed to their brethren, and to the Lord of 
 the Church. But it involved plain speaking and its 
 consequences; and Mr. Ward never shrank from either. 
 Most people, looking back, would probably agree, 
 whatever their general judgment on these matters, 
 and whatever they may think of Mr. Ward's case, that 
 he was, at the time at least, the most unpersuasive 
 of writers. Considering his great acuteness, and the 
 frequent originality of his remarks considering, further, 
 his moral earnestness, and the place which the moral 
 aspects of things occupy in his thoughts, this is re- 
 markable ; but so it is. In the first place, in dealing 
 with these eventful questions, which came home with 
 such awful force to thousands of awakened minds and 
 consciences, full of hope and full of fear, there was an 
 entire and ostentatious want of sympathy with all that 
 was characteristically English in matters of religion. 
 This arose partly from his deep dislike to habits, very 
 marked in Englishmen, but not peculiar to them, of 
 self-satisfaction and national self-glorification ; but it 
 drove him into a welcoming of opposite foreign ways, 
 of which he really knew little, except superficially. 
 Next, his boundless confidence in the accuracy of his
 
 3io THE OXFORD MOVEMENT CHAP. 
 
 logical processes led him to habits of extreme and 
 absolute statement, which to those who did not agree 
 with him, and also to some who did, bore on their face 
 the character of over-statement, exaggeration, extrava- 
 gance, not redeemed by an occasional and somewhat 
 ostentatious candour, often at the expense of his own 
 side and in favour of opponents to whom he could afford 
 to be frank. And further, while to the English Church 
 he was merciless in the searching severity of his 
 judgment, he seemed to be blind to the whole condi- 
 tion of things to which she, as well as her rival, had 
 for the last three centuries been subjected, and in 
 which she had played a part at least as important for 
 Christian faith as that sustained by any portion of 
 Christendom ; blind to all her special and characteristic 
 excellences, where these did not fit the pattern of the 
 continental types (obviously, in countless instances, 
 matters of national and local character and habits) ; 
 blind to the enormous difficulties in which the political 
 game of her Roman opponents had placed her ; blind 
 to the fact that, judged with the same adverse bias and 
 prepossessions, the same unsparing rigour, the same 
 refusal to give real weight to what was good, on the 
 ground that it was mixed with something lower, the 
 Roman Church would show just as much deflection 
 from the ideal as the English. Indeed, he would have 
 done a great service people would have been far 
 more disposed to attend to his really interesting, and, 
 to English readers, novel, proofs of the moral and de- 
 votional character of the Roman popular discipline, if 
 he had not been so unfair on the English : if he had 
 not ignored the plain fact that just such a picture as 
 he gave of the English Church, as failing in required 
 notes, might be found of the Roman before the Re-
 
 W. G. WARD 311 
 
 formation, say in the writings of Gerson, and in our 
 own days in those of Rosmini. Mr. Ward, if any one, 
 appealed to fair judgment ; and to this fair judgment 
 he presented allegations on the face of them violent 
 and monstrous. The English Church, according to 
 him, was in the anomalous position of being "gifted 
 with the power of dispensing sacramental grace," l and 
 yet, at the same time, " wholly destitute of external 
 notes, and wholly indefensible, as to her position, by 
 external, historical, ecclesiastical arguments " : and, he 
 for his part declares, correcting Mr. Newman, who 
 speaks of " outward notes as partly gone and partly 
 going," that he is "wholly unable to discern the out- 
 ward notes of which Mr. Newman speaks, during any 
 part of the last three hundred years." He might as 
 well have said at once that she did not exist, if the 
 outward aspects of a Church orders, creeds, sacra- 
 ments, and, in some degree at any rate, preaching and 
 witnessing for righteousness are not some of the "out- 
 ward notes " of a Church. " Should the pure light of 
 the Gospel be ever restored to this benighted land"~ 
 he writes, at the beginning, as the last extract was 
 written at the end, of his controversial career at Oxford. 
 Is not such writing as if he wished to emulate in a 
 reverse sense the folly and falsehood of those who 
 spoke of English Protestants having a monopoly of 
 the Gospel ? He was unpersuasive, he irritated and 
 repelled, in spite of his wish to be fair and candid, in 
 spite of having so much to teach, in spite of such 
 vigour of statement and argument, because on the face 
 of all his writings he was so extravagantly one-sided, 
 so incapable of an equitable view, so much a slave to 
 the unreality of extremes. 
 
 1 Ideal, p. 286. 2 British Critic, October 1841, p. 340.
 
 CHAPTER XVIII 
 
 THE IDEAL OF A CHRISTIAN CHURCH 
 
 No. 90, with the explanations of it given by Mr. New- 
 man and the other leaders of the movement, might have 
 raised an important and not very easy question, but 
 one in no way different from the general character of 
 the matters in debate in the theological controversy of 
 the time. But No. 90, with the comments on it of 
 Mr. Ward, was quite another matter, and finally broke 
 up the party of the movement. It was one thing to 
 show how much there is in common between England 
 and Rome, and quite another to argue that there is no 
 difference. Mr. Ward's refusal to allow a reasonable 
 and a Catholic interpretation to the doctrine of the 
 Articles on Justification, though such an understanding 
 of it had not only been maintained by Bishop Bull and 
 the later orthodox divines, but was impressed on all 
 the popular books of devotion, such as the Whole 
 Duty of Man and Bishop Wilson's Sacra Privata ; 
 and along with this, the extreme claim to hold com- 
 patible with the Articles the "whole cycle of Roman 
 doctrine," introduced entirely new conditions into the 
 whole question. Non hcec in fcedera was the natural 
 reflection of numbers of those who most sympathised 
 with the Tractarian school. The English Church
 
 CHAP, xvin THE IDEAL OF A CHRISTIAN CHURCH 313 
 
 might have many shortcomings and want many im- 
 provements ; but after all she had something to say 
 for herself in her quarrel with Rome ; and the witness 
 of experience for fifteen hundred years must be not 
 merely qualified and corrected, but absolutely wiped 
 out, if the allegation were to be accepted that Rome 
 was blameless in all that quarrel, and had no part in 
 bringing about the confusions of Christendom. And 
 this contention was more and more enforced in Mr. 
 Ward's articles in the British Critic enforced, more 
 effectively than by direct statement, by continual 
 and passing assumption and implication. They were 
 papers of considerable power and acuteness, and of 
 great earnestness in their constant appeal to the moral 
 criteria of truth ; though Mr. Ward was not then at 
 his best as a writer, and they were in composition 
 heavy, diffuse, monotonous, and wearisome. But the 
 attitude of deep depreciation, steady, systematic, un- 
 relieved, in regard to that which ought, if acknowledged 
 at all, to deserve the highest reverence among all 
 things on earth, in regard to an institution which, with 
 whatever faults, he himself in words still recognised as 
 the Church of God, was an indefensible and an un- 
 wholesome paradox. The analogy is a commonly 
 accepted one between the Church and the family. 
 How could any household go on in which there was at 
 work an animus of unceasing and relentless, though 
 possibly too just criticism, on its characteristic and 
 perhaps serious faults ; and of comparisons, also pos- 
 sibly most just, with the better ways of other families ? 
 It might be the honest desire of reform and improve- 
 ment ; but charity, patience, equitableness are virtues 
 of men in society, as well as strict justice and the 
 desire of improvement. In the case of the family,
 
 314 THE OXFORD MOVEMENT CHAP. 
 
 such action could only lead to daily misery and the 
 wasting and dying out of home affections. In the 
 case of a Church, it must come to the sundering of 
 ties which ought no longer to bind. Mr. Ward all 
 along insisted that there was no necessity for looking 
 forward to such an event. He wished to raise, purify, 
 reform the Church in which Providence had placed 
 him ; utterly dissatisfied as he was with it, intellectually 
 and morally, convinced more and more that it was 
 wrong, dismally, fearfully wrong, it was his duty, he 
 thought, to abide in it without looking to consequences ; 
 but it was also his duty to shake the faith of any one 
 he could in its present claims and working, and to 
 hold up an incomparably purer model of truth and 
 holiness. That his purpose was what he considered 
 real reform, there is no reason to doubt, though he 
 chose to shut his eyes to what must come of it. The 
 position was an unnatural one, but he had great faith 
 in his own well-fenced logical creations, and defied the 
 objections of a homelier common sense. He was not 
 content to wait in silence the slow and sad changes of 
 old convictions, the painful decay and disappearance of 
 long-cherished ties. His mind was too active, restless, 
 unreserved. To the last he persisted in forcing on the 
 world, professedly to influence it, really to defy it, the 
 most violent assertions which he could formulate of the 
 most paradoxical claims on friends and opponents which 
 had ever been made. 
 
 Mr. Ward's influence was felt also in another way ; 
 though here it is not easy to measure the degree of its 
 force. He was in the habit of appealing to Mr. New- 
 man to pronounce on the soundness of his principles 
 and inferences, with the view of getting Mr. Newman's 
 sanction for them against more timid or more dissatis-
 
 xvni THE IDEAL OF A CHRISTIAN CHURCH 315 
 
 fied friends ; and he would come down with great glee 
 on objectors to some new and startling position, with 
 the reply, " Newman says so." Every one knows from 
 the Apologia what was Mr. Newman's state of mind 
 after 1841 a state of perplexity, distress, anxiety ; he 
 was moving undoubtedly in one direction, but moving 
 slowly, painfully, reluctantly, intermittently, with views 
 sometimes clear, sometimes clouded, of that terribly 
 complicated problem the answer to which was full of 
 such consequences to himself and to others. No one 
 ever felt more keenly that it was no mere affair of 
 dexterous or brilliant logic ; if logic could have settled 
 it, the question would never have arisen. But in this 
 fevered state, with mind, soul, heart all torn and dis- 
 tracted by the tremendous responsibilities pressing on 
 him, wishing above everything to be quiet, to be silent, 
 at least not to speak except at his own times and when 
 he saw the occasion, he had, besides bearing his own 
 difficulties, to return off-hand and at the moment some 
 response to questions which he had not framed, which 
 he did not care for, on which he felt no call to pro- 
 nounce, which he was not perhaps yet ready to face, 
 and to answer which he must commit himself irrevoc- 
 ably and publicly to more than he was prepared for. 
 Every one is familiar with the proverbial distribution 
 of parts in the asking and the answering of questions ; 
 but when the asker is no fool, but one of the sharpest- 
 witted of mankind, asking with little consideration for 
 the condition or the wishes of the answerer, with great 
 power to force the answer he wants, and with no great 
 tenderness in the use he makes of it, the situation 
 becomes a trying one. Mr. Ward was continually 
 forcing on Mr. Newman so-called irresistible infer- 
 ences : "If you say so and so, surely you must also
 
 316 THE OXFORD MOVEMENT CHAP. 
 
 say something more?" Avowedly ignorant of facts 
 and depending for them on others, he was only con- 
 cerned with logical consistency. And accordingly Mr. 
 Newman, with whom producible logical consistency 
 was indeed a great thing, but with whom it was very 
 far from being everything, had continually to accept 
 conclusions which he would rather have kept in abey- 
 ance, to make admissions which were used without 
 their qualifications, to push on and sanction extreme 
 ideas which he himself shrank from because they were 
 extreme. But it was all over with his command of 
 time, his liberty to make up his mind slowly on the 
 great decision. He had to go at Mr. Ward's pace, 
 and not his own. He had to take Mr. Ward's ques- 
 tions, not when he wanted to have them and at his 
 own time, but at Mr. Ward's. No one can tell how 
 much this state of things affected the working of Mr. 
 Newman's mind in that pause of hesitation before the 
 final step ; how far it accelerated the view which he 
 ultimately took of his position. No one can tell, for 
 many other influences were mixed up with this one. 
 But there is no doubt that Mr. Newman felt the annoy- 
 ance and the unfairness of this perpetual questioning 
 for the benefit of Mr. Ward's theories, and there can 
 be little doubt that, in effect, it drove him onwards 
 and cut short his time of waiting. Engineers tell us 
 that, in the case of a ship rolling in a sea-way, when 
 the periodic times of the ship's roll coincide with those 
 of the undulations of the waves, a condition of things 
 arises highly dangerous to the ship's stability. So the 
 agitations of Mr. Newman's mind were reinforced by 
 
 o * 
 
 the impulses of Mr. Ward's. 1 
 
 1 A pencilled note indicates that this illustration was suggested by experiments 
 in naval engineering carried on at one time by Mr. W. Froude.
 
 xviii THE IDEAL OF A CHRISTIAN CHURCH 317 
 
 But the great question between England and Rome 
 was not the only matter which engaged Mr. Ward's 
 active mind. In the course of his articles in the 
 British Critic he endeavoured to develop in large 
 outlines a philosophy of religious belief. Restless on 
 all matters without a theory, he felt the need of a 
 theory of the true method of reaching, verifying, and 
 judging of religious truth : it seemed to him necessary 
 especially to a popular religion, such as Christianity 
 claimed to be ; and it was not the least of the points 
 on which he congratulated himself that he had worked 
 out a view which extended greatly the province and 
 office of conscience, and of fidelity to it, and greatly 
 narrowed the province and office of the mere intellect 
 in the case of the great mass of mankind. The Oxford 
 writers had all along laid stress on the paramount 
 necessity of the single eye and disciplined heart in 
 accepting or judging religion ; moral subjects could 
 be only appreciated by moral experience ; purity, 
 reverence, humility were as essential in such questions 
 as zeal, industry, truthfulness, honesty ; religious truth 
 is a gift as well as a conquest ; and they dwelt on the 
 great maxims of the New Testament : " To him that 
 hath shall be given "; " If any man will do the will of 
 the Father, he shall know of the doctrine." But though 
 Mr. Newman especially had thrown out deep and 
 illuminating thoughts on this difficult question, it had 
 not been treated systematically ; and this treatment 
 Mr. Ward attempted to give to it. It was a striking 
 and powerful effort, full of keen insight into human 
 experience and acute observations on its real laws and 
 conditions ; but on the face of it, it was laboured and 
 strained ; it chose its own ground, and passed un- 
 noticed neighbouring regions under different condi-
 
 318 THE OXFORD MOVEMENT CHAP. 
 
 tions ; it left undealt with the infinite variety of cir- 
 cumstances, history, capacities, natural temperament, 
 and those unexplored depths of will and character, 
 affecting choice and judgment, the realities of which 
 have been brought home to us by our later ethical 
 literature. Up to a certain point his task was easy. 
 It is easy to say that a bad life, a rebellious temper, 
 a selfish spirit are hopeless disqualifications for judg- 
 ing spiritual things ; that we must take something for 
 granted in learning any truths whatever ; that men 
 must act as moral creatures to attain insight into 
 moral truths, to realise and grasp them as things, and 
 not abstractions and words. But then came the 
 questions What is that moral training, which, in the 
 case of the good heart, will be practically infallible in 
 leading into truth ? And what is that type of character, 
 of saintliness, which gives authority which we cannot 
 do wrong in following ; where, if question and con- 
 troversy arise, is the common measure binding on 
 both sides ; and can even the saints, with their im- 
 mense variations and apparent mixtures and failings, 
 furnish that type ? And next, where, in the investiga- 
 tions which may be endlessly diversified, does intellect 
 properly come in and give its help ? For come in 
 somewhere, of course it must ; and the conspicuous 
 dominance of the intellectual element in Mr. Ward's 
 treatment of the subject is palpable on the face of it. 
 His attempt is to make out a theory of the reasonable- 
 ness of unproducible, because unanalysed, reasons ; 
 reasons which, though the individual cannot state 
 them, may be as real and as legitimately active as 
 the obscure rays of the spectrum. But though the 
 discussion in Mr. Ward's hands was suggestive of 
 much, though he might expose the superciliousness of
 
 xvin THE IDEAL OF A CHRISTIAN CHURCH 319 
 
 Whately or the shallowness of Mr. Goode, and show 
 himself no unequal antagonist to Mr. J. S. Mill, it left 
 great difficulties unanswered, and it had too much the 
 appearance of being directed to a particular end, that 
 of guarding the Catholic view of a popular religion 
 from formidable objections. 
 
 The moral side of religion had been from the first 
 a prominent subject in the teaching of the movement. 
 Its protests had been earnest and constant against 
 intellectual self-sufficiency, and the notion that mere 
 shrewdness and cleverness were competent judges of 
 Christian truth, or that soundness of judgment in 
 religious matters was compatible with arrogance or 
 an imperfect moral standard ; and it revolted against 
 the conventional and inconsistent severity of Puritan- 
 ism, which was shocked at dancing but indulged freely 
 in good dinners, and was ostentatious in using the 
 phrases of spiritual life and in marking a separation 
 from the world, while it surrounded itself with all the 
 luxuries of modern inventiveness. But this moral 
 teaching was confined to the statement of principles, 
 and it was carried out in actual life with the utmost 
 dislike of display and with a shrinking from strong 
 professions. The motto of Froude's Remains, which 
 embodied his characteristic temper, was an expression 
 of the feeling of the school : 
 
 Se sub serenis vultibus 
 Austera virtus occulit : 
 Timet videri, ne suum, 
 Dum prodit, amittat decus. 1 
 
 The heroic strictness and self-denial of the early 
 Church were the objects of admiration, as what ought 
 
 1 Hymn in Paris Breviary, Commune Sanctarum Mulierum.
 
 320 THE OXFORD MOVEMENT CHAP. 
 
 to be the standard of Christians ; but people did not 
 yet like to talk much about attempts to copy them. 
 Such a book as the Church of the Fathers brought 
 out with great force and great sympathy the ascetic 
 temper and the value put on celibacy in the early 
 days, and it made a deep impression ; but nothing 
 was yet formulated as characteristic and accepted 
 doctrine. 
 
 It was not unnatural that this should change. 
 The principles exemplified in the high Christian 
 lives of antiquity became concrete in definite rules 
 and doctrines, and these rules and doctrines were 
 most readily found in the forms in which the Roman 
 schools and teachers had embodied them. The dis- 
 tinction between the secular life and the life of 
 "religion," with all its consequences, became an accepted 
 one. Celibacy came to be regarded as an obvious 
 part of the self-sacrifice of a clergyman's life, and the 
 belief and the profession of it formed a test, under- 
 stood if not avowed, by which the more advanced or 
 resolute members of the party were distinguished from 
 the rest. This came home to men on the threshold 
 of life with a keener and closer touch than questions 
 about doctrine. It was the subject of many a bitter, 
 agonising struggle which no one knew anything of; 
 it was with many the act of a supreme self- oblation. 
 The idea of the single life may be a utilitarian one as 
 well as a religious one. It may be chosen with no 
 thought of renunciation or self-denial, for the greater 
 convenience and freedom of the student or the philo- 
 sopher, the soldier or the man of affairs. It may also 
 be chosen without any special feeling of a sacrifice by 
 the clergyman, as most helpful for his work. But the 
 idea of celibacy, in those whom it affected at Oxford,
 
 xvin THE IDEAL OF A CHRISTIAN CHURCH 321 
 
 was in the highest degree a religious and romantic 
 one. The hold which it had on the leader of the 
 movement made itself felt, though little was directly 
 said. To shrink from it was a mark of want of 
 strength or intelligence, of an unmanly preference 
 for English home life, of insensibility to the generous 
 devotion and purity of the saints. It cannot be 
 doubted that at this period of the movement the 
 power of this idea over imagination and conscience 
 was one of the strongest forces in the direction of 
 Rome. 
 
 Of all these ideas Mr. Ward's articles in the 
 British Critic were the vigorous and unintermittent 
 exposition. He spoke out, and without hesitation. 
 There was a perpetual contrast implied, when it was 
 not forcibly insisted on, between all that had usually 
 been esteemed highest in the moral temper of the 
 English Church, always closely connected with home 
 life and much variety of character, and the loftier and 
 bolder but narrower standard of Roman piety. And Mr. 
 Ward was seconded in ti\z.British Critic by other writers, 
 all fervid in the same cause, some able and eloquent. 
 The most distinguished of his allies was Mr. Oakeley, 
 Fellow of Balliol and minister of Margaret Chapel in 
 London. Mr. Oakeley was, perhaps, the first to realise 
 the capacities of the Anglican ritual for impressive 
 devotional use, and his services, in spite of the dis- 
 advantages of the time, and also of his chapel, are still 
 remembered by some as having realised for them, in a 
 way never since surpassed, the secrets and the con- 
 solations of the worship of the Church. Mr. Oakeley, 
 without much learning, was master of a facile and 
 elegant pen. He was a man who followed a trusted 
 leader with chivalrous boldness, and was not afraid of 
 
 Y
 
 322 THE OXFORD MOVEMENT CHAP. 
 
 strengthening his statements. Without Mr. Ward's 
 force and originality, his articles were more attractive 
 reading. His article on "Jewel" was more than 
 anything else a landmark in the progress of Roman 
 ideas. 1 
 
 From the time of Mr. Ward's connexion with the 
 British Critic, its anti-Anglican articles had given rise 
 to complaints which did not become less loud as time 
 went on. He was a troublesome contributor to his 
 editor, Mr. T. Mozley, and he made the hair of many 
 of his readers stand on end with his denunciations of 
 things English and eulogies of things Roman. 
 
 My first troubles (writes Mr. Mozley) were with Oakeley and 
 Ward. I will not say that I hesitated much as to the truth of what 
 they wrote, for in that matter I was inclined to go very far, at least 
 in the way of toleration. Yet it appeared to me quite impossible 
 either that any great number of English Churchmen would ever go 
 so far, or that the persons possessing authority in the Church would 
 fail to protest, not to say more. ... As to Ward I did but touch 
 a filament or two in one of his monstrous cobwebs, and off he ran 
 instantly to Newman to complain of my gratuitous impertinence. 
 Many years after I was forcibly reminded of him by a pretty group 
 of a little Cupid flying to his mother to show a wasp -sting he 
 had just received. Newman was then in this difficulty. He did 
 not disagree with what Ward had written ; but, on the other hand, 
 he had given neither me nor Ward to understand that he was likely 
 to step in between us. In fact, he wished to be entirely clear of the 
 editorship. This, however, was a thing that Ward could not or 
 would not understand. 2 
 
 The discontent of readers of the British Critic 
 was great. It was expressed in various ways, and 
 was represented by a pamphlet of Mr. W. Palmer's 
 of Worcester, in which he contrasted, with words of 
 
 1 Reminiscences, ii. 243, 244. Cf. British Critic, July 1841. 
 Reminiscences, ii. 225.
 
 xvin THE IDEAL OF A CHRISTIAN CHURCH 323 
 
 severe condemnation, the later writers in the Review 
 with the teaching of the earlier Tracts for the Times, 
 and denounced the " Romanising " tendency shown in 
 its articles. In the autumn of 1843 the Review came 
 to an end. A field of work was thus cut off from Mr. 
 Ward. Full of the interest of the ideas which pos- 
 sessed him, always equipped and cheerfully ready for 
 the argumentative encounter, and keenly relishing the 
 certaminis gaudia, he at once seized the occasion of 
 Mr. Palmer's pamphlet to state what he considered 
 his position, and to set himself right in the eyes of all 
 fair and intelligent readers. He intended a long 
 pamphlet. It gradually grew under his hands he 
 was not yet gifted with the power of compression and 
 arrangement into a volume of 600 pages : the famous 
 Ideal of a Christian Church, considered in Comparison 
 with Existing Practice, published in the summer of 
 1844. 
 
 The Ideal is a ponderous and unattractive volume, 
 ill arranged and rambling, which its style and other 
 circumstances have caused to be almost forgotten. 
 But there are interesting discussions in it which may 
 still repay perusal for their own sakes. The object of 
 the book was twofold. Starting with an "ideal" of 
 what the Christian Church may be expected to be in 
 its various relations to men, it assumes that the Roman 
 Church, and only the Roman Church, satisfies the con- 
 ditions of what a Church ought to be, and it argues in 
 detail that the English Church, in spite of its profes- 
 sions, utterly and absolutely fails to fulfil them. It is 
 ^.plaidoirie against everything English, on the ground 
 that it cannot be Catholic because it is not Roman. 
 It was not consistent, for while the writer alleged that 
 "our Church totally neglected her duties both as
 
 324 THE OXFORD MOVEMENT CHAP. 
 
 guardian of and witness to morality, and as witness 
 and teacher of orthodoxy," yet he saw no difficulty in 
 attributing the revival of Catholic truth to " the in- 
 herent vitality and powers of our own Church." 1 But 
 this was not the sting and provocation of the book. 
 That lay in the developed claim, put forward by im- 
 plication in Mr. Ward's previous writings, and now 
 repeated in the broadest and most unqualified form, to 
 hold his position in the English Church, avowing and 
 teaching all Roman doctrine. 
 
 We find (he exclaims), oh, most joyful, most wonderful, most 
 unexpected sight ! we find the whole cycle of Roman doctrine 
 gradually possessing numbers of English Churchmen. . . . Three 
 years have passed since I said plainly that in subscribing the Articles 
 I renounce no Roman doctrine ; yet I retain my fellowship which 
 I hold on the tenure of subscription, and have received no ecclesi- 
 astical censure in any shape. 2 
 
 There was much to learn from the book ; much 
 that might bring home to the most loyal Churchman a 
 sense of shortcomings, a burning desire for improve- 
 ment ; much that might give every one a great deal to 
 think about, on some of the deepest problems of the 
 intellectual and religious life. But it could not be ex- 
 pected that such a challenge, in such sentences as 
 these, should remain unnoticed. 
 
 The book came out in the Long Vacation, and it 
 was not till the University met in October that signs 
 of storm began to appear. But before it broke an 
 incident occurred which inflamed men's tempers. Dr. 
 Wynter's reign as Vice-Chancellor had come to a close, 
 and the next person, according to the usual custom 
 of succession, was Dr. Symons, Warden of Wadham. 
 Dr. Symons had never concealed his strong hostility 
 
 1 Ideal, p. 566. 2 Ibid. pp. 565-567.
 
 xvin THE IDEAL OF A CHRISTIAN CHURCH 325 
 
 to the movement, and he had been one of Dr. Pusey's 
 judges. The prospect of a partisan Vice -Chancellor, 
 certainly very determined, and supposed not to be 
 over - scrupulous, was alarming. The consent of 
 Convocation to the Chancellor's nomination of his 
 substitute had always been given in words, though 
 no instance of its having been refused was known, 
 at least in recent times. But a great jealousy about 
 the rights of Convocation had been growing up under 
 the late autocratic policy of the Heads, and there was 
 a disposition to assert, and even to stretch these rights, 
 a disposition not confined to the party of the move- 
 ment. It was proposed to challenge Dr. Symons's 
 nomination. Great doubts were felt and expressed 
 about the wisdom of the proposal ; but at length 
 opposition was resolved upon. The step was a 
 warning to the Heads, who had been provoking 
 enough ; but there was not enough to warrant such 
 a violent departure from usage, and it was the act 
 of exasperation rather than of wisdom. The blame 
 for it must be shared between the few who fiercely 
 urged it, and the many who disapproved and ac- 
 quiesced. On the day of nomination, the scrutiny 
 was allowed, salvd audoritate Cancellarii ; but Dr. 
 Symons's opponents were completely defeated by 883 
 to 183. It counted, not unreasonably, as a " Puseyite 
 defeat." 
 
 The attempt and its result made it certain that in 
 the attack that was sure to come on Mr. Ward's book, 
 he would meet with no mercy. As soon as term 
 began the Board of Heads of Houses took up the 
 matter; they were earnestly exhorted to it by a letter 
 of Archbishop Whately's, which was read at the 
 Board. But they wanted no pressing, nor is it
 
 326 THE OXFORD MOVEMENT CHAP. 
 
 astonishing that they could not understand the claim 
 to hold the " whole cycle " of Roman doctrine in the 
 English Church. Mr. Ward's view was that he was 
 loyally doing the best he could for " our Church," not 
 only in showing up its heresies and faults, but in 
 urging that the only remedy was wholesale submission 
 to Rome. To the University authorities this was 
 taking advantage of his position in the Church to 
 assail and if possible destroy it. And to numbers of 
 much more sober and moderate Churchmen, sym- 
 pathisers with the general spirit of the movement, 
 it was evident that Mr. Ward had long passed the 
 point when tolerance could be fairly asked, consistently 
 with any respect for the English Church, for such 
 sweeping and paradoxical contradictions, by her own 
 servants, of her claims and title. Mr. Ward's manner 
 also, which, while it was serious enough in his writings, 
 was easy and even jocular in social intercourse, left 
 the impression, in reality a most unfair impression, 
 that he was playing and amusing himself with these 
 momentous questions. 
 
 A Committee of the Board examined the book ; a 
 number of startling propositions were with ease picked 
 out, some preliminary skirmishing as to matters of form 
 took place, and in December 1844 the Board announced 
 that they proposed to submit to Convocation without 
 delay three measures: (i) to condemn Mr. Ward's 
 book ; (2) to degrade Mr. Ward by depriving him of 
 all his University degrees ; and (3) whereas the exist- 
 ing Statutes gave the Vice-Chancellor power of calling 
 on any member of the University at any time to prove 
 his orthodoxy by subscribing the Articles, to add to 
 this a declaration, to be henceforth made by the sub- 
 scriber, that he took them in the sense in which " they
 
 xvin THE IDEAL OF A CHRISTIAN CHURCH 327 
 
 were both first published and were now imposed by 
 the University," with the penalty of expulsion against 
 any one, lay or clerical, who thrice refused subscription 
 with this declaration. 
 
 As usual, the Board entirely mistook the temper of 
 the University, and by their violence and want of 
 judgment turned the best chance they ever had, of 
 carrying the University with them, into what their 
 blunders really made an ignominious defeat. If they 
 had contented themselves with the condemnation, in 
 almost any terms, of Mr. Ward's book, and even of its 
 author, the condemnation would have been overwhelm- 
 ing. A certain number of men would have still stood 
 by Mr. Ward, either from friendship or sympathy, or 
 from independence of judgment, or from dislike of the 
 policy of the Board ; but they would have been greatly 
 outnumbered. The degradation the Board did not 
 venture on the logical consequence, expulsion was a 
 poor and even ridiculous measure of punishment ; to 
 reduce Mr. Ward to an undergraduate in statu pupil- 
 lari, and a commoner's short gown, was a thing to 
 amuse rather than terrify. The personal punishment 
 seemed unworthy when they dared not go farther, 
 while to many the condemnation of the book seemed 
 penalty enough ; and the condemnation of the book 
 by these voters was weakened by their refusal to carry 
 it into personal disgrace and disadvantage. Still, if 
 these two measures had stood by themselves, they 
 could not have been resisted, and the triumph of the 
 Board would have been a signal one. But they could 
 not rest. They must needs attempt to put upon subscrip- 
 tion, just when its difficulties were beginning to be felt, 
 not by one party, but by all, an interpretation which 
 set the University and Church in a flame. The cry,
 
 328 THE OXFORD MOVEMENT CHAP. 
 
 almost the shriek, arose that it was a new test, and 
 a test which took for granted what certainly needed 
 proof, that the sense in which the Articles were first 
 understood and published was exactly the same as that 
 in which the University now received and imposed 
 them. It was in vain that explanations, assurances, 
 protests, were proffered ; no new test, it was said, was 
 thought of the Board would never think of such a 
 thing ; it was only something to ensure good faith and 
 honesty. But it was utterly useless to contend against 
 the storm. A test it was, and a new test no one would 
 have. It was clear that, if the third proposal was 
 pushed, it would endanger the votes about Mr. Ward. 
 After some fruitless attempts at justification the Board 
 had, in the course of a month, to recognise that it had 
 made a great mistake. The condemnation of Mr. Ward 
 was to come on, on the i3th of February; and on the 
 23d of January the Vice-Chancellor, in giving notice 
 of it, announced that the third proposal was with- 
 drawn. 
 
 It might have been thought that this was lesson 
 enough to leave well alone. The Heads were sure of 
 votes against Mr. Ward, more or less numerous ; they 
 were sure of a victory which would be a severe blow, 
 not only to Mr. Ward and his special followers, but to 
 the Tractarian party with which he had been so closely 
 connected. But those bitter and intemperate spirits 
 which had so long led them wrong were not to be 
 taught prudence even by their last experience. The 
 mischief-makers were at work, flitting about the official 
 lodgings at Wadham and Oriel. Could not something 
 be done, even at this late hour, to make up for the loss 
 of the test? Could not something be done to disgrace 
 a greater name than Mr. Ward's ? Could not the
 
 xviii THE IDEAL OF A CHRISTIAN CHURCH 329 
 
 opportunity which was coming of rousing the feeling 
 of the University against the disciple be turned to 
 account to drag forth his supposed master from his 
 retirement and impunity, and brand the author of 
 No. 90 with the public stigma no longer this time 
 of a Hebdomadal censure, but of a University con- 
 demnation ? The temptation was irresistible to a 
 number of disappointed partisans kindly, generous, 
 good-natured men in private life, but implacable in 
 their fierce fanaticism. In their impetuous vehemence 
 they would not even stop to think what would be said 
 of the conditions and circumstances under which they 
 pressed their point. On the 23d of January the Vice- 
 Chancellor had withdrawn the test. On the 25th of 
 January those curious in coincidences may observe 
 that it was the date of No. 90 in 1841 a circular was 
 issued inviting signatures for a requisition to the Board, 
 asking them to propose, in the approaching Convoca- 
 tion of the 1 3th of February, a formal censure of the 
 principles of No. 90. The invitation to sign was issued 
 in the names of Dr. Faussett and Dr. Ellerton of 
 Magdalen. It received between four and five hundred 
 signatures, as far as was known ; but it was withheld 
 by the Vice-Chancellor from the inspection of those 
 who officially had a right to have it before them. On 
 the 4th of February its prayer came before the 
 Hebdomadal Board. The objection of haste that 
 not ten days intervened between this new and 
 momentous proposal and the day of voting was 
 brushed aside. The members of the Board were 
 mad enough not to see, not merely the odiousness 
 of the course, but the aggravated odiousness of hurry. 
 The proposal was voted by the majority, sans phrase. 
 And they ventured, amid all the excitement and
 
 330 THE OXFORD MOVEMENT CHAP. 
 
 irritation of the moment, to offer for the sanction of 
 the University a decree framed in the words of their 
 own censure. 
 
 The interval before the Convocation was short, 
 but it was long enough for decisive opinions on the 
 proposal of the Board to be formed and expressed. 
 Leading men in London, Mr. Gladstone among them, 
 were clear that it was an occasion for the exercise of 
 the joint veto with which the Proctors were invested. 
 The veto was intended, if for anything, to save the 
 University from inconsiderate and hasty measures ; 
 and seldom, except in revolutionary times, had so 
 momentous and so unexpected a measure been urged 
 on with such unseemly haste. The feeling of the 
 younger Liberals, Mr. Stanley, Mr. Donkin, Mr. 
 Jowett, Dr. Greenhill, was in the same direction. On 
 the loth of February the Proctors announced to the 
 Board their intention to veto the third proposal. But 
 of course the thing went forward. The Proctors were 
 friends of Mr. Newman, and the Heads believed that 
 this would counterbalance any effect from their act of 
 authority. It is possible that the announcement may 
 have been regarded as a mere menace, too audacious 
 to be fulfilled. On the i3th of February, amid slush 
 and snow, Convocation met in the Theatre. Mr. Ward 
 asked leave to defend himself in English, and occupied 
 one of the rostra, usually devoted to the recital of prize 
 poems and essays. He spoke with vigour and ability, 
 dividing his speech, and resting in the interval 
 between the two portions in the rostrum. 1 There was 
 no other address, and the voting began. The first 
 
 1 It is part of the history of the of his friends, to their great astonish - 
 
 time, that during those anxious days, ment and amusement, very soon after 
 
 Mr. Ward was engaged to be married. the events in the Theatre. 
 The engagement came to the knowledge
 
 xviu THE IDEAL OF A CHRISTIAN CHURCH 331 
 
 vote, the condemnation of the book, was carried by 
 777 to 386. The second, by a more evenly balanced 
 division, 569 to 511. When the Vice-Chancellor put 
 the third, the Proctors rose, and the senior Proctor, Mr. 
 Guillemard of Trinity, stopped it in the words, Nobis 
 procuratoribus non placet. Such a step, of course, 
 only suspended the vote, and the year of office of these 
 Proctors was nearly run. But they had expressed the 
 feeling of those whom they represented. It was shown 
 not only in a largely-signed address of thanks. All 
 attempts to revive the decree at the expiration of their 
 year of office failed. The wiser heads in the Heb- 
 domadal Board recognised at last that they had better 
 hold their hand. Mistakes men may commit, and de- 
 feats they may undergo, and yet lose nothing that 
 concerns their character for acting as men of a high 
 standard ought to act. But in this case, mistakes and 
 defeat were the least of what the Board brought on 
 themselves. This was the last act of a long and de- 
 liberately pursued course of conduct ; and if it was the 
 last, it was because it was the upshot and climax, and 
 neither the University nor any one else would endure 
 that it should go on any longer. The proposed attack 
 on Mr. Newman betrayed how helpless they were, 
 and to what paltry acts of worrying it was, in their 
 judgment, right and judicious to condescend. It gave 
 a measure of their statesmanship, wisdom, and good 
 feeling in defending the interests of the Church ; and 
 it made a very deep and lasting impression on all who 
 were interested in the honour and welfare of Oxford. 
 Men must have blinded themselves to the plainest 
 effects of their own actions who could have laid them- 
 selves open to such a description of their conduct as is 
 contained in the following extract from a paper of the
 
 332 THE OXFORD MOVEMENT CHAP, xvm 
 
 time a passage of which the indignant and pathetic 
 undertone reflected the indignation and the sympathy 
 of hundreds of men of widely differing opinions. 
 
 The vote is an answer to a cry that cry is one of dishonesty, 
 and this dishonesty the proposed resolution, as plainly as it dares to 
 say anything, insinuates. On this part of the question, those who 
 have ever been honoured by Mr. Newman's friendship must feel it 
 dangerous to allow themselves thus to speak. And yet they must 
 speak ; for no one else can appreciate it as truly as they do. When 
 they see the person whom they have been accustomed to revere as 
 few men are revered, whose labours, whose greatness, whose tender- 
 ness, whose singleness and holiness of purpose, they have been 
 permitted to know intimately not allowed even the poor privilege 
 of satisfying, by silence and retirement by the relinquishment of 
 preferment, position, and influence the persevering hostility of 
 persons whom they cannot help comparing with him not permitted 
 even to submit in peace to those irregular censures, to which he 
 seems to have been even morbidly alive, but dragged forth to suffer 
 an oblique and tardy condemnation ; called again to account for 
 matters now long ago accounted for ; on which a judgment has 
 been pronounced, which, whatever others may think of it, he at 
 least has accepted as conclusive when they contrast his merits, his 
 submission, his treatment, which they see and know, with the merits, 
 the bearing, the fortunes of those who are doggedly pursuing him, 
 it does become very difficult to speak without sullying what it is a 
 kind of pleasure to feel is his cause by using hard words, or betray- 
 ing it by not using them. It is too difficult to speak, as ought to 
 be spoken, of this ungenerous and gratuitous afterthought too 
 difficult to keep clear of what, at least, will be thought exaggeration ; 
 too difficult to do justice to what they feel to be undoubtedly true ; 
 and I will not attempt to say more than enough to mark an opinion 
 which ought to be plainly avowed, as to the nature of this pro- 
 cedure. 1 
 
 1 From a Short Appeal to Members Fellow of Oriel. (Dated Saturday, 
 of Convocation on the proposed Censfire 8th of February 1845.) 
 on No. 90. By Frederic Rogers,
 
 CHAPTER XIX 
 
 THE CATASTROPHE 
 
 THE events of February were a great shock. The 
 routine of Oxford had been broken as it had never 
 been broken by the fiercest strifes before. Condemna- 
 tions had been before passed on opinions, and even on 
 persons. But to see an eminent man, of blameless life, 
 a fellow of one of the first among the Colleges, 
 solemnly deprived of his degree and all that the 
 degree carried with it, and that on a charge in which 
 bad faith and treachery were combined with alleged 
 heresy, was a novel experience, where the kindnesses 
 of daily companionship and social intercourse still 
 asserted themselves as paramount to official ideas 
 of position. And when, besides this, people realised 
 what more had been attempted, and by how narrow a 
 chance a still heavier blow had been averted from one 
 towards whom so many hearts warmed, how narrowly 
 a yoke had been escaped which would have seemed to 
 subject all religious thought in the University to the 
 caprice or the blind zeal of a partisan official, the sense 
 of relief was mixed with the still present memory of a 
 desperate peril. And then came the question as to 
 what was to come next. That the old policy of the 
 Board would be revived and pursued when the end of
 
 334 THE OXFORD MOVEMENT CHAP. 
 
 the Proctors' year delivered it from their inconvenient 
 presence, was soon understood to be out of the 
 question. The very violence of the measures at- 
 tempted had its reaction, which stopped anything 
 further. The opponents of Tractarianism, Orthodox 
 and Liberal, were for the moment gorged with their 
 success. What men waited to see was the effect on 
 the party of the movement ; how it would influence the 
 advanced portion of it ; how it would influence the 
 little company who had looked on in silence from their 
 retirement at Littlemore. The more serious aspect of 
 recent events was succeeded for the moment by a 
 certain comic contrast, created by Mr. Ward's engage- 
 ment to be married, which was announced within a 
 week of his degradation, and which gave the common- 
 rooms something to smile at after the strain and ex- 
 citement of the scene in the Theatre. But that passed, 
 and the graver outlook of the situation occupied men's 
 thoughts. 
 
 There was a widespread feeling of insecurity. 
 Friends did not know of friends, how their minds were 
 working, how they might go. Anxious letters passed, 
 the writers not daring to say too much, or reveal too 
 much alarm. And yet there was still some hope that 
 at least with the great leader matters were not des- 
 perate. To his own friends he gave warning ; he had 
 already done so in a way to leave little to expect but 
 at last to lose him ; he spoke of resigning his fellow- 
 ship in October, though he wished to defer this till the 
 following June ; but nothing final had been said pub- 
 licly. Even at the last it was only anticipated by some 
 that he would retire into lay communion. But that 
 silence was awful and ominous. He showed no signs 
 of being affected by what had passed in Oxford. He
 
 xix THE CATASTROPHE 335 
 
 privately thanked the Proctors for saving him from 
 what would have distressed him ; but he made no 
 comments on the measures themselves. Still it could 
 not but be a climax of everything- as far as Oxford was 
 concerned. And he was a man who saw signs in such 
 events. 
 
 It was inevitable that the events of the end of 1844 
 and the beginning of 1845 should bring with them 
 a great crisis in the development of religious opinion, 
 in the relations of its different forms to one another, 
 and further, in the thoughts of many minds as to their 
 personal position, their duty, and their prospects. 
 There had been such a crisis in 1841 at the publication 
 of No. 90. After the discussions which followed that 
 tract, Anglican theology could never be quite the same 
 that it had been before. It was made to feel the 
 sense of some grave wants, which, however they might 
 be supplied in the future, could no longer be unnoticed 
 or uncared for. And individuals, amid the strife of 
 tongues, had felt, some strongly and practically, but a 
 much larger number dimly and reluctantly, the possi- 
 bility, unwelcome to most, but not without interest to 
 others, of having to face the strange and at one time 
 inconceivable task of revising the very foundations of 
 their religion. And such a revision had since that 
 time been going on more or less actively in many 
 minds ; in some cases with very decisive results. But 
 after the explosion caused by Mr. Ward's book, a 
 crisis of a much more grave and wide-reaching sort 
 had arrived. To ordinary lookers-on it naturally 
 seemed that a shattering and decisive blow had been 
 struck at the Tractarian party and their cause ; struck, 
 indeed, formally and officially, only at its extrava- 
 gances, but struck, none the less, virtually, at the
 
 336 THE OXFORD MOVEMENT CHAP. 
 
 premisses which led to these extravagances, and at the 
 party, which, while disapproving them, shrank, with 
 whatever motives, policy, generosity, or secret sym- 
 pathy, from joining in the condemnation of them. 
 It was more than a defeat, it was a rout, in which 
 they were driven and chased headlong from the field ; 
 a wreck in which their boasts and hopes of the last 
 few years met the fate which wise men had always 
 anticipated. Oxford repudiated them. Their theories, 
 their controversial successes, their learned arguments, 
 their appeals to the imagination, all seemed to go 
 down, and to be swept away like chaff, before the 
 breath of straightforward common sense and honesty. 
 Henceforth there was a badge affixed to them and all 
 who belonged to them, a badge of suspicion and dis- 
 credit, and even shame, which bade men beware of 
 them, an overthrow under which it seemed wonderful 
 that they could raise their heads or expect a hearing. 
 It is true, that to those who looked below the surface, 
 the overthrow might have seemed almost too showy 
 and theatrical to be quite all that it was generally 
 thought to be. There had been too much passion, 
 and too little looking forward to the next steps, in the 
 proceedings of the victors. There was too much 
 blindness to weak points of their own position, too 
 much forgetfulness of the wise generosity of cautious 
 warfare. The victory was easy to win ; the next 
 moment it was quite obvious that they did not know 
 what to do with it, and were at their wits' end to 
 understand what it meant. And the defeated party, 
 though defeated signally and conspicuously in the 
 sight of the Church and the country, had in it too 
 large a proportion of the serious and able men of the 
 University, with too clear and high a purpose, and
 
 xix THE CATASTROPHE 337 
 
 too distinct a sense of the strength and reality of their 
 ground, to be in as disadvantageous a condition as 
 from a distance might be imagined. A closer view 
 would have discovered how much sympathy there was 
 for their objects and for their main principles in many 
 who greatly disapproved of much in the recent course 
 and tendency of the movement. It might have been 
 seen how the unwise measures of the Heads had 
 awakened convictions among many who were not 
 naturally on their side, that it was necessary both 
 on the ground of justice and policy to arrest all 
 extreme measures, and to give a breathing time to 
 the minority. Confidence in their prospects as a 
 party might have been impaired in the Tractarians ; 
 but confidence in their principles, confidence that they 
 had rightly interpreted the spirit, the claims, and the 
 duties of the English Church, confidence that devotion 
 to its cause was the call of God, whatever might 
 happen to their own fortunes, this confidence was 
 unshaken by the catastrophe of February. 
 
 But that crisis had another important result, not 
 much noticed then, but one which made itself abund- 
 antly evident in the times that followed. The decisive 
 breach between the old parties in the Church, both 
 Orthodox and Evangelical, and the new party of the 
 movement, with the violent and apparently irretriev- 
 able discomfiture of the latter as the rising force in 
 Oxford, opened the way and cleared the ground for the 
 formation and the power of a third school of opinion, 
 which was to be the most formidable rival of the Tract- 
 arians, and whose leaders were eventually to succeed 
 where the Tractarians had failed, in becoming the 
 masters and the reformers of the University. Liberal- 
 ism had hitherto been represented in Oxford in forms
 
 338 THE OXFORD MOVEMENT CHAP. 
 
 which though respectable from intellectual vigour were 
 unattractive, sometimes even repulsive. They were 
 dry, cold, supercilious, critical ; they wanted enthusi- 
 asm ; they were out of sympathy with religion and the 
 religious temper and aims. They played, without 
 knowing it, on the edge of the most dangerous ques- 
 tions. The older Oxford Liberals were either intellect- 
 ually aristocratic, dissecting the inaccuracies or showing 
 up the paralogisms of the current orthodoxy, or they 
 were poor in character, Liberals from the zest of 
 sneering and mocking at what was received and 
 established, or from the convenience of getting rid of 
 strict and troublesome rules of life. They patronised 
 Dissenters ; they gave Whig votes ; they made free, 
 in a mild way, with the pet conventions and prejudices 
 of Tories and High Churchmen. There was nothing 
 inspiring in them, however much men might respect 
 their correct and sincere lives. But a younger set of 
 men brought, mainly from Rugby and Arnold's teach- 
 ing, a new kind of Liberalism. It was much bolder 
 and more independent than the older forms, less in- 
 clined to put up with the traditional, more searching 
 and inquisitive in its methods, more suspicious and 
 daring in its criticism ; but it was much larger in its 
 views and its sympathies, and, above all, it was imagin- 
 ative, it was enthusiastic, and, without much of the 
 devotional temper, it was penetrated by a sense of the 
 reality and seriousness of religion. It saw greater 
 hopes in the present and the future than the Tract- 
 arians. It disliked their reverence for the past and 
 the received as inconsistent with what seemed evidence 
 of the providential order of great and fruitful change. 
 It could not enter into their discipline of character, and 
 shrank from it as antiquated, unnatural, and narrow.
 
 xix THE CATASTROPHE 339 
 
 But these younger Liberals were interested in the 
 Tractarian innovators, and, in a degree, sympathised 
 with them as a party of movement who had had the 
 courage to risk and sacrifice much for an unworldly 
 end. And they felt that their own opportunity was 
 come when all the parties which claimed to represent 
 the orthodoxy of the English Church appeared to have 
 broken for good with one another, and when their differ- 
 ences had thrown so much doubt and disparagement 
 on so important and revered a symbol of orthodoxy 
 as the Thirty-nine Articles. They looked on partly with 
 amusement, partly with serious anxiety, at the dispute ; 
 they discriminated with impartiality between the strong 
 and the weak points in the arguments on both sides : 
 and they enforced with the same impartiality on both 
 of them the reasons, arising out of the difficulties in 
 which each party was involved, for new and large 
 measures, for a policy of forbearance and toleration. 
 They inflicted on the beaten side, sometimes with more 
 ingenuity than fairness, the lesson that the " wheel had 
 come round full circle " with them ; that they were but 
 reaping as they themselves had sown : but now that 
 there seemed little more to fear from the Tractarians, 
 the victorious authorities were the power which the 
 Liberals had to keep in check. They used their 
 influence, such as it was (and it was not then what 
 it was afterwards), to protect the weaker party. It was 
 a favourite boast of Dean Stanley's in after-times, that 
 the intervention of the Liberals had saved the Tract- 
 arians from complete disaster. It is quite true that 
 the younger Liberals disapproved the continuance of 
 harsh measures, and some of them exerted themselves 
 against such measures. They did so in many ways 
 and for various reasons ; from consistency, from feel-
 
 340 THE OXFORD MOVEMENT CHAP. 
 
 ings of personal kindness, from a sense of justice, from 
 a sense of interest some in a frank and generous 
 spirit, others with contemptuous indifference. But 
 the debt of the Tractarians to their Liberal friends in 
 1845 was not so great as Dean Stanley, thinking of 
 the Liberal party as what it had ultimately grown to 
 be, supposed to be the case. The Liberals of his 
 school were then still a little flock : a very distinguished 
 and a very earnest set of men, but too young and too 
 few as yet to hold the balance in such a contest. The 
 Tractarians were saved by what they were and what 
 they had done, and could do, themselves. But it is 
 also true, that out of these feuds and discords, the 
 Liberal party which was to be dominant in Oxford 
 took its rise, soon to astonish old-fashioned Heads of 
 Houses with new and deep forms of doubt more auda- 
 cious than Tractarianism, and ultimately to overthrow 
 not only the victorious authorities, but the ancient 
 position of the Church, and to recast from top to 
 bottom the institutions of the University. The i3th 
 of February was not only the final defeat and conclu- 
 sion of the first stage of the movement. It was the 
 birthday of the modern Liberalism of Oxford. 
 
 But it was also a crisis in the history of many lives. 
 From that moment, the decision of a number of good 
 and able men, who had once promised to be among 
 the most valuable servants of the English Church, 
 became clear. If it were doubtful before, in many 
 cases, whether they would stay with her, the doubt 
 existed no longer. It was now only a question of 
 time when they would break the tie and renounce their 
 old allegiance. In the bitter, and in many cases 
 agonising struggle which they had gone through as to 
 their duty to God and conscience, a sign seemed now
 
 xix THE CATASTROPHE . 341 
 
 to be given them which they could not mistake. They 
 were invited, on one side, to come ; they were told, 
 sternly and scornfully, on the other, to go. They could 
 no longer be accused of impatience if they brought 
 their doubts to an end, and made up their minds that 
 their call was to submit to the claims of Rome, that 
 their place was in its communion. 
 
 Yet there was a pause. It was no secret what 
 was coming. But men lingered. It was not till the 
 summer that the first drops of the storm began to fall. 
 Then through the autumn and the next year, friends, 
 whose names and forms were familiar in Oxford, one 
 by one disappeared and were lost to it. Fellowships, 
 livings, curacies, intended careers, were given up. 
 Mr. Ward went. Mr. Capes, who had long followed 
 Mr. Ward's line, and had spent his private means to 
 build a church near Bridgewater, went also. Mr. 
 Oakeley resigned Margaret Chapel and went. Mr. 
 Ambrose St. John, Mr. Coffin, Mr. Dalgairns, Mr. 
 Faber, Mr. T. Meyrick, Mr. Albany Christie, Mr. R. 
 Simpson of Oriel, were received in various places and 
 various ways, and in the next year, Mr. J. S. North- 
 cote, Mr. J. B. Morris, Mr. G. Ryder, Mr. David 
 Lewis. On the 3d of October 1845 Mr- Newman 
 requested the Provost of Oriel to remove his name 
 from the books of the College and University, but 
 without giving any reason. The 6th of October is 
 the date of the "Advertisement" to the work which 
 had occupied Mr. Newman through the year the 
 Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine. On 
 the 8th he was, as he has told us in the Apologia, 
 received by Father Dominic, the Passionist. To 
 the "Advertisement" are subjoined the following 
 words :
 
 342 . THE OXFORD MOVEMENT CHAP. 
 
 Postscript. Since the above was written the Author has joined 
 the Catholic Church. It was his intention and wish to have carried 
 his volume through the press before deciding finally on this step. 
 But when he got some way in the printing, he recognised in himself 
 a conviction of the truth of the conclusion, to which the discussion 
 leads, so clear as to preclude further deliberation. Shortly after- 
 wards circumstances gave him the opportunity of acting on it, and 
 he felt that he had no warrant for refusing to act on it. 
 
 So the reality of what had been so long and often 
 so lightly talked about by those who dared it, provoked 
 it, or hoped for it, had come indeed ; and a consider- 
 able portion of English society learned what it was to 
 be novices in a religious system, hitherto not only alien 
 and unknown, but dreaded, or else to have lost friends 
 and relatives, who were suddenly transformed into severe 
 and uncompromising opponents, speaking in unfamiliar 
 terms, and sharply estranged in sympathies and rules 
 of life. Some of them, especially those who had 
 caught the spirit of their leader, began life anew, 
 took their position as humble learners in the Roman 
 Schools, and made the most absolute sacrifice of a 
 whole lifetime that man can make. To others the 
 change came and was accepted as an emancipation, 
 not only from the bonds of Anglicanism, but from the 
 obligations of orders and priestly vows and devotion. 
 In some cases, where they were married, there was no 
 help for it. But in almost all cases there was a great 
 surrender of what English life has to offer to those 
 brought up in it. Of the defeated party, those who 
 remained had much to think about, between grief at 
 the breaking of old ties, and the loss of dear friends, 
 and perplexities about their own position. The 
 anxiety, the sorrow at differing and parting, seem now 
 almost extravagant and unintelligible. There are those 
 who sneer at the "distress" of that time. There had
 
 xix THE CATASTROPHE 343 
 
 not been the same suffering, the same estrangement, 
 when Churchmen turned dissenters, like Bulteel and 
 Baptist Noel. But the movement had raised the 
 whole scale of feeling about religious matters so high, 
 the questions were felt to be so momentous, the stake 
 and the issue so precious, the "Loss and Gain" so 
 immense, that to differ on such subjects was the 
 differing on the greatest things which men could 
 differ about. But in a time of distress, of which few 
 analogous situations in our days can give the measure, 
 the leaders stood firm. Dr. Pusey, Mr. Keble, Mr. 
 Marriott accepted, with unshaken faith in the cause of 
 the English Church, the terrible separation. They 
 submitted to the blow submitted to the reproach of 
 having been associates of those who had betrayed 
 hopes and done so much mischief; submitted to the 
 charge of inconsistency, insincerity, cowardice ; but 
 they did not flinch. Their unshrinking attitude was 
 a new point of departure for those who believed in the 
 Catholic foundation of the English Church. 
 
 Among those deeply affected by these changes, 
 there were many who had been absolutely uninfluenced 
 by the strong Roman current. They had recognised 
 many good things in the Roman Church ; they were 
 fully alive to many shortcomings in the English 
 Church ; but the possibility of submission to the 
 Roman claims had never been a question with them. 
 A typical example of such minds was Mr. Isaac 
 Williams, a pupil of Mr. Keble, an intimate friend of 
 Mr. Newman, a man of simple and saintly life, with 
 heart and soul steeped in the ancient theology of 
 undivided Christendom, and for that very reason 
 untempted by the newer principles and fashions of 
 Rome. There were numbers who thought like him ;
 
 344 THE OXFORD MOVEMENT CHAP. 
 
 but there were others also, who were forced in afresh 
 upon themselves, and who had to ask themselves why 
 they stayed, when a teacher, to whom they had looked 
 up as they had to Mr. Newman, and into whose 
 confidence they had been admitted, thought it his duty 
 to go. With some the ultimate, though delayed, de- 
 cision was to follow him. With others, the old and fair 
 prayudiciutii against the claims of Rome, which had 
 always asserted itself even against the stringent logic of 
 Mr. Ward and the deep and subtle ideas of Mr. New- 
 man, became, when closed with, and tested face to face 
 in the light of fact and history, the settled conviction 
 of life. Some extracts from contemporary papers, real 
 records of the private perplexities and troubles actually 
 felt at the time, may illustrate what was passing in the 
 minds of some whom knowledge and love of Mr. New- 
 man failed to make his followers in his ultimate step. 
 The first extract belongs to some years before, but it 
 is part of the same train of thinking. 1 
 
 As to myself, I am getting into a very unsettled state as to aims 
 and prospects. I mean that as things are going on, a man does not 
 know where he is going to ; one cannot imagine what state of things 
 to look forward to ; in what way, and under what circumstances, 
 one's coming life if it does come is to be spent ; what is to 
 become of one. I cannot at all imagine myself a convert ; but how 
 am I likely, in the probable state of things, to be able to serve as 
 an English clergyman ? Shall I ever get Priest's orders ? Shall I 
 be able to continue always serving ? What is one's line to be ; 
 what ought to be one's aims ; or can one have any ? 
 
 The storm is not yet come : how it may come, and how soon it 
 may blow over, and what it may leave behind, is doubtful ; but 
 some sort of crisis, I think, must come before things settle. With 
 the Bishops against us, and Puritanism aggressive, we may see 
 strange things before the end. 
 
 1 Compare Mozley's Reminiscences^ ii. 1-3.
 
 xix THE CATASTROPHE 345 
 
 When the "storm" had at length come, though 
 before its final violence, the same writer continues : 
 
 The present hopeless check and weight to our party what has 
 for the time absolutely crushed us is the total loss of confidence 
 arising from the strong tendency, no longer to be dissembled or 
 explained away, among many of us to Rome. I see no chance of 
 our recovery, or getting our heads above water from this, at least in 
 England, for years to come. And it is a check which will one day 
 be far greater than it is now. Under the circumstances having 
 not the most distant thought of leaving the English Church myself, 
 and yet having no means of escaping the very natural suspicion of 
 Romanising without giving up my best friends and the most saint- 
 like men in England how am I to view my position ? What am 
 I witnessing to ? What, if need be, is one to suffer for ? A man 
 has no leaning towards Rome, does not feel, as others do, the 
 strength of her exclusive claims to allegiance, the perfection of her 
 system, its right so to overbalance all the good found in ours as to 
 make ours absolutely untrustworthy for a Christian to rest in, not- 
 withstanding all circumstances, of habit, position, and national 
 character ; has such doubts on the Roman theory of the Church, 
 the Ultramontane, and such instincts not only against many of their 
 popular religious customs and practical ways of going on, but against 
 their principles of belief (e.g. divine faith relics), as to repel him 
 from any wish to sacrifice his own communion for theirs ; yet withal, 
 and without any great right on his part to complain, is set down as 
 a man who may any day, and certainly will some day, go over ; and 
 he has no lawful means of removing the suspicion : why is it tanti 
 to submit to this ? 
 
 However little sympathy we Englishmen have with Rome, the 
 Western Churches under Rome are really living and holy branches 
 of the Church Catholic ; corruptions they may have, so may we ; 
 but putting these aside, they are Catholic Christians, or Catholic 
 Christianity has failed out of the world : we are no more [Catholic] 
 than they. But this, public opinion has not for centuries, and does 
 not nozv, realise or allow. So no one can express in reality and detail 
 a practical belief in their Catholicity, in their equality (setting one 
 thing against another) with us as Christians, without being suspected 
 of what such belief continually leads to disloyalty to the English 
 Church. Yet such belief is nevertheless well-grounded and right,
 
 346 THE OXFORD MOVEMENT CHAP. 
 
 and there is no great hope for the Church till it gains ground, 
 soberly, powerfully, and apart from all low views of proselytising, or 
 fear of danger. What therefore the disadvantage of those among 
 us who do not really deserve the imputation of Romanising may be 
 meant for, is to break this practical belief to the English Church. 
 We may be silenced, but, without any wish to leave the English 
 Church, we cannot give up the belief, that the Western Church 
 under Rome is a true, living, venerable branch of the Christian 
 Church. There are dangers in such a belief, but they must be pro- 
 vided against, they do not affect the truth of the belief. 
 
 Such searchings of heart were necessarily rendered 
 more severe and acute by Mr. Newman's act. There 
 was no longer any respite ; his dearest friends must 
 choose between him and the English Church. And the 
 choice was made, by those who did not follow him, on a 
 principle little honoured or believed in at the time on 
 either side, Roman or Protestant ; but a principle which 
 in the long-run restored hope and energy to a cause 
 which was supposed to be lost. It was not the revival 
 of the old Via Media; it was not the assertion of 
 the superiority of the English Church ; it was not a 
 return to the old-fashioned and ungenerous methods 
 of controversy with Rome one-sided in all cases, 
 ignorant, coarse, unchristian in many. It was not 
 the proposal of a new theory of the Church its func- 
 tions, authority, and teaching, a counter-ideal to Mr. 
 Ward's imposing Ideal. It was the resolute and 
 serious appeal from brilliant logic, and keen sarcasm, 
 and pathetic and impressive eloquence, to reality 
 and experience, as well as to history, as to the positive 
 and substantial characteristics of the traditional and 
 actually existing English Church, shown not on paper 
 but in work, and in spite of contradictory appearances 
 and inconsistent elements ; and along with this, an 
 attempt to put in a fair and just light the comparative
 
 xix THE CATASTROPHE 347 
 
 excellences and defects of other parts of Christendom, 
 excellences to be ungrudgingly admitted, but not to 
 be allowed to bar the recognition of defects. The feel- 
 ing which had often stirred, even when things looked 
 at the worst, that Mr. Newman had dealt unequally 
 and hardly with the English Church, returned with 
 gathered strength. The English Church was after all 
 as well worth living in and fighting for as any other ; 
 it was not only in England that light and dark, in 
 teaching and in life, were largely intermingled, and the 
 mixture had to be largely allowed for. We had our 
 Sparta, a noble, if a rough and an incomplete one ; 
 patiently to do our best for it was better than leaving 
 it to its fate, in obedience to signs and reasonings 
 which the heat of strife might well make delusive. It 
 was one hopeful token, that boasting had to be put 
 away from us for a long time to come. In these days 
 of stress and sorrow were laid the beginnings of a 
 school, whose main purpose was to see things as they 
 are ; which had learned by experience to distrust un- 
 qualified admiration and unqualified disparagement ; 
 determined not to be blinded even by genius to plain 
 certainties ; not afraid to honour all that is great and 
 beneficent in Rome, not afraid with English frankness 
 to criticise freely at home ; but not to be won over, in 
 one case, by the good things, to condone and accept 
 the bad things ; and not deterred, in the other, from 
 service, from love, from self-sacrifice, by the presence 
 of much to regret and to resist. 
 
 All this new sense of independence, arising from 
 the sense of having been left almost desolate by the 
 disappearance of a great stay and light in men's daily 
 life, led to various and different results. In some 
 minds, after a certain trial, it actually led men back to
 
 348 THE OXFORD MOVEMENT CHAP. 
 
 that Romeward tendency from which they had at first 
 recoiled. In others, the break-up of the movement 
 under such a chief led them on, more or less, and some 
 very far, into a career of speculative Liberalism like 
 that of Mr. Blanco White, the publication of whose 
 biography coincided with Mr. Newman's change. In 
 many others, especially in London and the towns, it led 
 to new and increasing efforts to popularise in various 
 ways through preaching, organisation, greater atten- 
 tion to the meaning, the solemnities, and the fitnesses 
 of worship the ideas of the Church movement. Dr. 
 Pusey and Mr. Keble were still the recognised chiefs 
 of the continued yet remodelled movement. It had its 
 quarterly organ, the Christian Remembrancer, which 
 had taken the place of the old British Critic in the 
 autumn of 1844. A number of able Cambridge men 
 had thrown their knowledge and thoroughness of work 
 into the Ecclesiologist. There were newspapers the 
 English Churchman, and, starting in 1846 from small 
 and difficult beginnings, in the face of long discourage- 
 ment and at times despair, the Giiardian. One mind 
 of great and rare power, though only recognised for 
 what he was much later in his life, one undaunted 
 heart, undismayed, almost undepressed, so that those 
 who knew not its inner fires thought him cold and 
 stoical, had lifted itself above the wreck at Oxford. 
 The shock which had cowed and almost crushed 
 some of Mr. Newman's friends roused and fired Mr. 
 James Mozley. 
 
 To take leave of Mr. Newman (he writes on the morrow of the 
 event), is a heavy task. His step was not unforeseen ; but when it 
 is come those who knew him feel the fact as a real change within 
 them feel as if they were entering upon a fresh stage of their own 
 life. May that very change turn to their profit, and discipline them
 
 THE CATASTROPHE 349 
 
 - 
 
 its hardness ! It may do so if they will use it so. Let nobody 
 complain ; a time must come, sooner or later, in every one's life, when 
 he has to part with advantages, connexions, supports, consolations, that 
 he has had hitherto, and face a new state of things. Every one knows 
 that he is not always to have all that he has now : he says to himself, 
 " What shall I do when this or that stay, or connexion, is gone ? " and 
 the answer is, " That he will do without it." . . . The time comes when 
 this is taken away ; and then the mind is left alone, and is thrown 
 back upon itself, as the expression is. But no religious mind 
 tolerates the notion of being really thrown upon itself; this is only 
 to say in other words, that it is thrown back upon God. . . . Secret 
 mental consolations, whether of innocent self-flattery or reposing 
 confidence, are over ; a more real and graver life begins a firmer, 
 harder disinterestedness, able to go on its course by itself. Let them 
 see in the change a call to greater earnestness, sincerer simplicity, and 
 more solid manliness. What were weaknesses before will be sins now. 1 
 
 "A new stage has begun. Let no one complain": 
 this, the expression of individual feeling, represents 
 pretty accurately the temper into which the Church 
 party settled when the first shock was over. They 
 knew that henceforward they had difficult times before 
 them. They knew that they must work under sus- 
 picion, even under proscription. They knew that they 
 must expect to see men among themselves perplexed, 
 unsettled, swept away by the influences which had 
 affected Mr. Newman, and still more by the precedent 
 of his example. They knew that they must be pre- 
 pared to lose friends and fellow-helpers, and to lose* 
 them sometimes unexpectedly and suddenly, as the 
 wont was so often at this time. Above all, they knew 
 that they had a new form of antagonism to reckon 
 with, harder than any they had yet encountered. It 
 had the peculiar sad bitterness which belongs to civil 
 war, when men's foes are they of their own households 
 
 1 Christian Remembrancer, January 1846, pp. 167, 168.
 
 350 THE OXFORD MOVEMENT CHAP. 
 
 the bitterness arising out of interrupted intimacy 
 and affection. Neither side could be held blameless ; 
 the charge from the one of betrayal and desertion was 
 answered by the charge from the other of insincerity 
 and faithlessness to conscience, and by natural but 
 not always very fair attempts to proselytise ; and un- 
 doubtedly, the English Church, and those who adhered 
 to it, had, for some years after 1845, to near from the 
 lips of old friends the most cruel and merciless in- 
 vectives which knowledge of her weak points, wit, 
 argumentative power, eloquence, and the triumphant 
 exultation at once of deliverance and superiority could 
 frame. It was such writing and such preaching as had 
 certainly never been seen on the Roman side before, 
 at least in England. Whether it was adapted to its 
 professed purpose may perhaps be doubted ; but the 
 men who went certainly lost none of their vigour as 
 controversialists or their culture as scholars. Not to 
 speak of Mr. Newman, such men as Mr. Oakeley, 
 Mr. Ward, Mr. Faber, and Mr. Dalgairns more than 
 fulfilled in the great world of London their reputation 
 at Oxford. This was all in prospect before the eyes 
 of those who had elected to cast in their lot with the 
 English Church. It was not an encouraging position. 
 The old enthusiastic sanguineness had been effectually 
 quenched. Their Liberal critics and their Liberal 
 friends have hardly yet ceased to remind them how 
 sorry a figure they cut in the eyes of men of the world, 
 and in the eyes of men of bold and effective thinking. 1 
 
 1 E.g. the Warden of Merlon's and the University soon resumed its 
 
 History of the University of Oxford, \>. wonted tranquillity." " Lifeless con- 
 
 212. " The first panic was succeeded formity" sounds odd connected with 
 
 by a reaction ; some devoted adherents Dr. Pusey or Mr. J. B. Mozley, and the 
 
 followed him (Mr. Newman) to Rome ; London men who were the founders of 
 
 others relapsed into lifeless conformity ; the so-called Ritualist schools.
 
 xix THE CATASTROPHE 351 
 
 The "poor Puseyites " are spoken of in tones half of 
 pity and half of sneer. Their part seemed played out. 
 There seemed nothing more to make them of import- 
 ance. They had not succeeded in Catholicising the 
 English Church ; they had not even shaken it by a 
 wide secession. Henceforth they were only marked 
 men. All that could be said for them was, that at the 
 worst, they did not lose heart. They had not forgotten 
 the lessons of their earlier time. 
 
 It is not my purpose to pursue farther the course of 
 the movement. All the world knows that it was not, 
 in fact, killed or even much arrested by the shock of 
 1845. But after 1845, ^ ts ne ^ was at least as much 
 out of Oxford as in it. As long as Mr. Newman re-, 
 mained, Oxford was necessarily its centre, necessarily, 
 even after he had seemed to withdraw from it. When 
 he left his place vacant, the direction of it was not re- 
 moved from Oxford, but it was largely shared by men 
 in London and the country. It ceased to be strongly 
 and prominently Academical. No one indeed held 
 such a position as Dr. Pusey's and Mr. Keble's ; but 
 though Dr. Pusey continued to be a great power at 
 Oxford, he now became every day a much greater 
 power outside of it ; while Mr. Keble was now less 
 than ever an Academic, and became more and more 
 closely connected with men out of Oxford, his friends 
 in London and his neighbours at Hursley and Win- 
 chester. The cause which Mr. Newman had given up 
 in despair was found to be deeply interesting in ever 
 new parts of the country : and it passed gradually into 
 the hands of new leaders more widely acquainted with 
 English society. It passed into the hands of the 
 Wilberforces, and Archdeacon Manning ; of Mr. 
 Bennett, Mr. Dodsworth, Mr. W. Scott, Dr. Irons,
 
 352 THE OXFORD MOVEMENT CHAP, xix 
 
 Mr. E. Hawkins, and Mr. Upton Richards in London. 
 It had the sympathy and counsels of men of weight, or 
 men who were rising into eminence and importance 
 some of the Judges, Mr. Gladstone, Mr. Roundell 
 Palmer, Mr. Frederic Rogers, Mr. Mountague Bernard, 
 Mr. Hope Scott (as he afterwards was), Mr. Badeley, 
 and a brilliant recruit from Cambridge, Mr. Beresford 
 Hope. It attracted the sympathy of another boast of 
 Cambridge, the great Bishop of New Zealand, and his 
 friend Mr. Whytehead. Those times were the link 
 between what we are now, so changed in many ways, 
 and the original impulse given at Oxford ; but to 
 those times I am as much of an outsider as most of 
 the foremost in them were outsiders to Oxford in the 
 earlier days. Those times are almost more important 
 than the history of the movement ; for, besides vin- 
 dicating it, they carried on its work to achievements 
 and successes which, even in the most sanguine days 
 of " Tractarianism," had not presented themselves to 
 men's minds, much less to their hopes. But that story 
 must be told by others. 
 
 " Show thy servants thy work, and their children 
 thy glory."
 
 INDEX 
 
 ADDRESSES to Archbishop of Canter- 
 bury, by clergy and laity, 95 
 Anglicanism, its features in 1830, 8 
 
 Newman's views on, 185, 194, 
 
 196, 233, 238 
 
 Newman's interpretation of, 2OI 
 Apologia, quotations from, 104, 114, 
 "7, 156, 173, 177, 180, 235, 236, 244 
 Apostolic Succession, 29, 108 
 
 Newman's insistence on, 29, 99, 
 
 108 
 its foundation on Prayer Book, 
 
 101 
 
 Apostolicity of English Church, 199 
 Archbishop of Canterbury. See Ad- 
 dresses, and Howley 
 Arians, the, 115, 197 
 Arnold, Dr., theories on the Church, 
 
 5. 6, 45 
 his proposal to unite all sects by 
 
 law, 90 
 
 attack on Tractarians, 131 
 Professorship at Oxford, 273 
 his influence shown in rise of third 
 
 school, 338 
 
 Articles, the, and Dissenters, 127-138 
 subscription of. See Dr. Hampden, 
 and Thirty-nine Articles 
 
 BAPTISM, Tract on, 119, 228 
 Baptistery, the, 273 
 Bennett, Mr., 352 
 Bentham. See Utilitarianism 
 Bernard, Mr. Mountague, 352 
 Bishoprics, suppression of ten Irish, 82 
 
 Bishops' attitude to movement, 201, 
 
 217, 245 
 
 the first Tract on, 100 
 Blachford, Lord, reminiscences of 
 
 Froude, 30, 50 
 Bliss, James, 115 
 Blomfield, Bishop, 217, 275 
 British Association, a sign of the times, 
 
 17 
 British Critic on the movement, 171, 
 
 197, 220, 221, 231, 235, 255, 289 
 
 British Magazine, 28, 84, 166 
 Brougham, Lord, 16 
 Bunsen, M. , and the Bishopric of Jeru- 
 salem, 275 
 Burton, Dr., 89, 137 
 
 CAMBRIDGE, critical school of theology, 
 
 14 
 
 Capes, Mr., 341 
 Cardwell, Dr., 284 
 Catastrophe, the, 333-352 
 Catholicity of English Church, 199, 
 
 209, 239, 247, 304 
 Catholicus's letters to the Times, 272 
 Celibacy, observations on, 320 
 Celibate clergy scheme, 47, 1 1 1 
 Changes in movement, 190-211 
 Christian Remembrancer, 121, 348 
 Christian Year, 18, 22 
 Christianity, Church of England, two 
 
 schools of, 8 
 Christie, Albany, 341 
 Christie, J. F., 115 
 Church, the, in eighteenth century, 3 
 
 2 A
 
 354 
 
 INDEX 
 
 Church, Dr. Whately's theories on, 4, 
 
 5, 45 129 
 
 Dr. Arnold's theories, 5 
 Coleridge's theories, 129 
 Apostolic origin of, 8, 29, 83, 
 
 101, 199, 200 
 various conceptions of, 44 
 political attacks on, 83, 91 
 public mind indifferent to, 90 
 Dr. Pusey's theories on, 119 
 theological aspect of, 166 
 practical aspect of, 166 
 and the Roman question, 175*189 
 Catholicity of, 197, 199, 209, 239 
 and the doctrine of Development, 
 
 200, 341 
 
 Church of the Fathers, 166, 320 
 "Churchman's Manual," 109 
 Scotch Bishops on, no 
 Churton, Mr. (of Crayke), no 
 Claughton, Mr. Piers, 277 
 Clergy of eighteenth century, character 
 
 of, 3 
 
 Close, Dr. (of Cheltenham), 259 
 Coffin, Mr., 341 
 Coleridge, Mr. Justice, 290 
 Coleridge, S. T., influence on Charles 
 
 Marriott, 70 
 Church theories, 129 
 Conservative Journal, Newman's lan- 
 guage towards Rome, 202 
 Copeland, William John, 57, 115, 127, 
 
 293 
 
 Cornish, C. L., 66 
 Creeds, the, pamphlets on, 90 
 authority of, 142 
 
 DALGAIRNS, Mr., 205, 206, 341 
 Defeats, the Three, 271 - 291. See 
 
 also Isaac Williams, Macmullen, and 
 
 Pusey 
 Dickinson, Dr., "Pastoral Epistle 
 
 from his Holiness the Pope," 176 
 Diffusion of Useful Knowledge Society, 
 
 16 
 Dissenters and the Articles, 127-138. 
 
 See also Thirty-nine Articles 
 Dodsworth, Mr., 352 
 Dominic, Father, receives Newman 
 
 into Church of Rome, 341 
 Donkin, Mr., 330 
 
 Doyle, Sir F., on Newman's sermons, 
 124 
 
 Ecclesiologist founded, 348 
 
 Eden, C. P., 282 
 
 Edinburgh Review, article by Dr. 
 Arnold on Tractarians, 131, 149 
 
 " Elucidations of Dr. Ham pd en's Theo- 
 logical Statements," 146 
 
 English Chiirchman founded, 348 
 
 Evangelicism in 1830, character of, n, 
 13 
 
 FABER, Francis, 277, 282, 341 
 
 Faber, Frederic, 205 
 
 Fasting, Tract on, 131 
 
 Faussett, Dr., 255, 258 
 
 attack on Dr. Pusey, 285 
 
 Froude, Richard Hurrell, 23, 30-56 
 pupil of Keble, 23, 36 
 Fellow of Oriel, 25, 31 
 first meeting with Newman, 25 
 early estimate of Newman, 26 
 travels with Newman, 28 
 influence on the movement, 31 
 his severe self-discipline, 32-35 
 character, 33 
 
 Mozley's remarks on, 34, 43 
 correspondence, 34, 42 
 his Remains published, 37 
 effect of publication, 37, 228 
 a modern estimate of the Remains, 
 
 38 
 
 events of 1830, 43 
 theory of the Church, 45 
 sermons and writings, 48 
 Lord Blachford's reminiscences 
 of, 50 
 
 Froude, William, 115 
 
 GARBETT, Mr., elected Professor of 
 
 Poetry, 274, 276 
 Gilbert, Dr., 150, 274 
 Gladstone, Mr., 187, 289, 330, 352 
 Golightly, Mr., 192, 277 
 Gorham, Mr., 251 
 Grammar of Assent on Faith and 
 
 Reason, 222 
 
 Greenhill, Dr., 282, 330 
 Guardian founded, 348 
 Guillemard, Mr., 331
 
 INDEX 
 
 355 
 
 HADDAN, A., 293 
 
 Haclleigh, Conference of leaders at, 
 
 28, 31, 84, 85 
 
 policy adopted, 88, 89, 93, 96 
 Hampden, Dr., 70, 139-154 
 
 advocates abolition of subscription 
 
 of Articles, 133 
 
 his election as Professor of Divin- 
 ity, 138 
 
 outcry against election of, 147, 148 
 Bampton Lectures, 141 
 so-called " persecution " of, 147 
 modern estimate of the " persecu- 
 tion," 151 
 deprived of vote for Select 
 
 Preachers, 149, 276 
 his action in the B.D. degree 
 
 contest, 278 
 Hare, Julius, 14 
 Hawkins, Dr., 283, 286 
 Hawkins, E., 352 
 Hill, Mr., 150 
 Hobhouse, Mr., 282 
 Holland House, 16 
 " Home Thoughts Abroad," 28 
 Hook, Dr., 10, 184, 191, 254, 275 
 Hope, Mr. Beresford, 352 
 Howley, Archbishop, 217, 275 
 Hussey, Mr., 282 
 
 Ideal of a Christian Church. See 
 
 W. G. Ward 
 
 Infallibility, views on, 183, 239 
 Irons, Dr., 352 
 
 JEBB, Bishop, 29 
 Jelf, Dr., 286 
 Jenkyns, Dr., 286 
 Jerusalem, Bishopric of, 275 
 
 Newman's protest against, 275 
 Jolly, Bishop, no 
 Jowett, Mr., 330 
 
 KAYE, Bishop, 10, 217 
 
 Keble, John, 18, 20-29, 2 93, 343 
 
 brilliant Oxford career, 20 
 
 suspicions of Evangelicism, 21 
 
 a strong Tory, 21 
 
 his poetic nature, 22 
 
 influence on Froude, 23, 24, 27, 36 
 
 his pupils, 23 
 
 Keble, John, sermon on National 
 
 Apostasy, 82, 107 
 tract on " Mysticism of the 
 
 Fathers," 229 
 
 resigns Poetry Professorship, 273 
 Keble, Thomas, 62 
 Knox, Alexander, 28, 128 
 
 LAW'S Serious Call, Keble's remark 
 on, 25 
 
 Le Bas, Mr., 10 
 
 Lectures on Justification, Newman's, 
 influence of, 229 
 
 Letter to the Bishop of Oxford, New- 
 man's, 240, 253 
 
 Letters of an Episcopalian, 5 
 
 Lewis, D., 341 
 
 Library of the Fathers, 76, 120 
 
 Lloyd's, Bishop, Lectures, influence of, 
 41, 187 
 
 Lowe, R., 255 
 
 Lyall, Mr., 10 
 
 Lyra Apostolica, 28 
 
 MACMULLEN, Mr., 271 
 
 his contest on B. D. degree, 279 
 Manning, Archdeacon, 352 
 Marriott, Charles, 30, 70-81, 343 
 
 influenced by Coleridge and Dr. 
 Hampden, 70 
 
 aversion to party action, 70 
 
 Scholar of Balliol, 71 
 
 Fellow of Oriel, 71 
 
 Newman's influence on, 75 
 
 Moberly's influence on, 75 
 
 Principal of Chichester Theolo- 
 gical College, 76 
 
 scheme of poor students' hall, 76 
 
 Tutor of Oriel, 76 
 
 Vicar of St. Mary's, 76 
 
 his sermons, 76 
 
 rooms and parties, 77 
 
 share in Library of the Fathers, 
 76, 120 
 
 Mozley's estimate of, 80 
 
 death, 8 1 
 
 Marsh, Bishop, 217 
 "Martyrs' Memorial," connexion with 
 
 the movement, 191, 192 
 Maurice, F. D., views of, 14, 135, 275 
 Melbourne, Lord, 138
 
 356 
 
 INDEX 
 
 Meyrick, T., 341 
 
 Miller, John (of Worcester), Bampton 
 
 Lectures, influence of, 10 
 Moberly, Dr. (of Winchester), 75, 293 
 Monophysite Controversy, 196, 197 
 Morris, John Brande, 205, 341 
 Mozley, James, 34, 115, 278, 293, 348 
 
 on Newman's sermons, 121 
 
 on "No. 90," 249 
 Mozley, Thomas, 115, 322 
 
 on Charles Marriott, 80 
 
 on Froude, 34, 43 
 
 " Mysticism of the Fathers in the use 
 and interpretation of Scripture," 
 Keble's Tract on, 229 
 
 NATIONAL Apostasy, Keble's sermon on, 
 
 82, 107 
 Newman, John Henry 
 
 his early preaching, 19 
 meeting with Froude, 25 
 Froude's early estimate of, 26 
 on Apostolic Succession, q.v. 
 on Infallibility, 183, 239 
 attitude at different times to 
 
 Rome, 40, 48, 177, 179, 183, 
 
 202, 241, 344 
 early friends, 57 
 first Tract, written by, 98 
 his four o'clock sermons, 113, 121, 
 
 164, 1 68 
 
 chief coadjutors of, 115 
 views on subscription of Articles, 
 
 137 
 
 on Dr. Hampden's theology, 146 
 
 character, 164 
 
 Lectures, 165 
 
 Lectures on Justification, 229 
 
 Anglicanism, views on, 185, 194, 
 
 201 
 
 resigns St. Mary's, 202 
 not a proselytiser, 203 
 Letter to Bishop of Oxford, 240, 
 
 253 
 
 interpretation of Church formu- 
 laries, 245 
 
 on the Articles. See "No. 90" 
 Essay on the Development of 
 
 Christian Doctrine, 200, 341 
 joins Church of Rome, 341 
 Nicknames, 141, 160 
 
 " No. 90," 232-256 
 
 Newman's attitude on, 163 
 object to defend Catholicity of the 
 
 Articles, 247 
 its reception, 252 
 charge of dishonesty against, 252 
 condemned by Board of Heads, 253 
 pamphlet war on, 254 
 the crisis of the movement, 255, 
 
 312 
 events after, 257-270 
 
 OAKELEY, Mr., 321, 341 
 
 article on "Jewel," 322 
 Ogilvie, Dr., 286 
 Ordination, validity of, 102 
 Origines Liturgiccc, 88 
 Oxford, Liberal School of Theology, 1 5 
 Orthodoxy, 6l 
 as a Church School, 133 
 Oxford Movement 
 
 political conditions of, I, 91 
 
 beginnings of, 20 
 
 Keble the primary author of, 27 
 
 early writings towards, 28 
 
 the leaders, 30 
 
 forced on the originators, 92 
 
 object of, in 
 
 accession of Dr. Pusey and his 
 
 influence, 115, 116, 117 
 gradual growth of, 155-174 
 attitude to Romanism, 175-189, 
 
 194, 225 
 
 changes in, 190-211 
 tendency to Romanism, 208, 232, 
 
 261, 292 
 
 in origin anti-Roman, 210 
 attitude of University authorities 
 towards, 212, 215, 219,262-270, 
 282, 327, 337 
 
 attitude of Bishops towards, 217 
 mistakes in conduct of, 219 
 rise of third school, 337 
 secessions to Rome, 341 
 
 PALMER, William, share in movement, 
 
 30, 79, 84, 103, 254, 277, 322 
 Origines Liturgica, 88 
 Narrative, 150 
 
 Treatise on the Church of Christ, 
 1 86
 
 INDEX 
 
 357 
 
 Palmer, Mr. Roundell, 352 
 
 Park, Judge Allan, no 
 
 Parochial Sermons, 168 
 
 Pattison, Mark, 190 
 
 Peel, Sir Robert, 272 
 
 Perceval, A., share in movement, 84, 
 
 90, 95, 109, 254 
 Phillpotts, Bishop, 217 
 Plain Sermons, 66 
 Poetry Professorship, contest for, made 
 
 a theological one, 273 
 Prophetical Office of the Church, 226 
 " Prospects of the Anglican Church," 
 
 235 
 
 Newman's after-thoughts on, 236 
 Pusey, Dr., 10, 30, 160, 271, 343 
 joins the movement, 115 
 effect of his adhesion, 116, 117 
 his Remonstrance, 176 
 tract on Baptism, 119, 228 
 attack on him, 284 
 sermon on the Holy Eucharist 
 
 "delated" to Vice-Chancellor, 
 
 285 
 unfairness of proceedings against, 
 
 287 
 memorial to Vice-Chancellor, on 
 
 his case, 289 
 
 " RECORDS of the Church," 104 
 Reform days, state of Church, 1-19 
 Reformers, early, views of, 192 
 Remonstrance, 176 
 ' ' Reserve in communicating Religious 
 
 Knowledge," Isaac Williams' tract 
 
 on, 230 
 
 Richards, Mr. Upton, 352 
 Rogers, Frederic, 115, 332, 352 
 Romanism and Popular Protestantism, 
 
 177-182 
 
 Romanism, 175-189, 194, 225 
 misconceptions of, 178, 179 
 Newman's attitude towards, 40, 
 48, 177, 179, l8l, 185, 202, 
 
 241, 344 
 tendency in party of movement 
 
 towards, 208, 232, 261, 292 
 Rose, Hugh James, 10, 28, 30, 84, 92 
 an estimate of, 85 
 lectures on German speculation, 86 
 controversy with Dr. Pusey, 86 
 
 Rose, Hugh James, early death, 87 
 Routh, Dr., 10, no, 264 
 Rusticus, pamphlets by, 135 
 Ryder, G., 341 
 
 ST. JOHN, Mr. Ambrose, 341 
 Scott, Mr. Hope, 352 
 Scott, W., 352 
 Seager, Charles, 205 
 Selwyn, Bishop, 273, 352 
 Sewell, William, 130, 277, 282 
 Shairp, Principal, on Newman's ser- 
 mons, 123 
 
 Sikes, Mr. (of Guilsborough), no, 127 
 Simpson, Mr., 341 
 Stanley, Mr. Arthur, 207, 282, 295, 330, 
 
 339 
 
 Sterling, John, 14 
 
 Subscription. See Thirty-nine Articles 
 Sumner, J. Bird, Bishop, 217, 219 
 Symons, Dr., 150, 258, 283, 286 
 
 opposition to, as Vice-Chancellor, 
 325 
 
 TAIT, Mr. (of Balliol), 252, 277, 282 
 
 Theologians of 1830, 9, 10 
 
 Third party in Church 
 rise of, 337 
 influence, 348 et seq. 
 
 Thirl wall, Connop, 14 
 
 Thirty -nine Articles, subscription of, 
 
 127-138 
 
 Dr. Hampden and subscription, 1 33 
 pamphlet war on subscription, 135 
 Newman on subscription, 137 
 their Catholicity, 247, 302. And 
 
 see W. G. Ward 
 "No. 90" on, 247 
 
 Thomas, Vaughan, 150 
 
 Times, letters of Catholicus to, 272 
 
 Tottenham, E., 128 
 
 Tractarian doctrines, discussion of, 159 
 Movement. See Oxford 
 
 Tractarians, excitement against, 131 
 
 Tract, text of the first, 99 
 
 Tracts, the 
 
 topics of, 104 
 mode of circulating, 104 
 reception of, 105, 106, 175 
 accused of Romanism, 106 
 first volume of, 107
 
 358 
 
 INDEX 
 
 Tracts, the 
 
 later numbers, character of, 119 
 
 public opinion against, 1 30 
 
 " No. 90," q.v. 
 
 contributors to, 113 
 
 on " Reserve," q.v. 
 
 on "Mysticism," q.v. 
 Treatise on the Church of Christ, 1 86, 
 187 
 
 UTILITARIANISM, influence on religious 
 belief, 15, 1 6 
 
 Via Media, 184, 246 
 
 WALL, Mr., 282 
 
 Ward, W. G., 205, 255, 292-311, 341 
 dismissed from Balliol Lecture- 
 ship, 271, 299 
 writings on Romanism, 296 
 his criticisms of English Church, 
 
 308 
 Ideal of a Christian Church, 300, 
 
 312-332 
 
 on "No. 90," 301 
 on the Articles, 302 
 hostility to Lutheranism, 307 
 his philosophy of religion, 317 
 his book condemned, 319, 331 
 himself "degraded," 331 
 joins Church of Rome, 341 
 
 Watson, Joshua, 61, no 
 Wellington, Duke of, 112 
 Whately, Dr. 
 
 theories on Church, 4, 5, 45, 129 
 
 opposed to Tractarians, 132 
 
 Letters of an Episcopalian, 5 
 White, Blanco, 15, 129, 273, 348 
 Whytehead, Mr., 352 
 Wilberforce, Henry, 115, 352 
 Wilberforce, Robert, 23, 31, 59, 115, 352 
 Williams, Isaac, 23, 30, 57-69, 115, 
 271, 293, 343 
 
 Keble's influence on, 59 
 
 Fellow of Trinity, 62 
 
 connexion with Newman, 63 
 
 divergences from Newman, 64, 67, 
 68 
 
 contributions to Plain Sermons, 66 
 
 aversion to Rome, 67 
 
 his poetry, 68 
 
 defeated for Poetry Professorship, 
 273, 276 
 
 Tract on " Reserve," 67, 230 
 Wilson, H. B., 251, 252, 254 
 Wilson, R. F., 115 
 Wiseman, Dr., 185 
 
 article on Donatists, 197 
 Wood,J. F., 115 
 Woodgate, Mr., 293 
 Wordsworth, Dr., no 
 Wynter, Dr., 258, 284 
 
 THE END 
 
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 BY K. W. CHURCH, D.C.L., late Dean of St. Paul's. 
 
 COLLECTED EDITION IN FIVE VOLUMES. 
 Globe 8vo. Cloth. 5s. each. 
 
 VOL. I MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYS. 
 
 TIMES. "He makes us realise more clearly the men and the scenes he 
 depicts than the standard historians and biographers who have dealt with the 
 subjects more exhaustively." 
 
 SPECTATOR." The first charm of Dean Church's writing is this : he leaves 
 an impression of saying so much less than he could say, of knowing subjects 
 thoroughly to which he only alludes in passing, of habitually refraining from pouring 
 out the wealth, which, nevertheless, is in his possession." 
 
 CAMBRIDGE REVIEW. "The Essay on the Early Ottomans is, on the 
 whole, the best example, in these volumes, of Dean Church's historical powers ; it is 
 clear, vivid, luminous, a masterpiece of historical narrative. . . . There is a perman- 
 ence about Dean Church's writing ; the thoroughness of treatment, the loftiness of 
 tone, the freedom from whims and affectations, make these essays sound and 
 wholesome reading." 
 
 VOL. II. DANTE AND OTHER ESSAYS. 
 
 SPECTATOR. "A noble and scholarlike essay on the great Florentine poet." 
 
 DAILY NEWS. "In the whole Dante literature few if any more masterly 
 contributions to the study of the ' Divine Comedy ' and of the age which gave it birth 
 are to be found than this well-remembered essay." 
 
 VOL. III. ST. ANSELM. 
 
 TIMES. " What we find most original and interesting in the work is the 
 vigorous painting of the celebrities of the time of the Conqueror and his three 
 sons : of some of the most powerful barons, of the state of society when it escaped 
 from the Conqueror's iron grasp, and especially of the peaceful monastic life in the 
 Convent of Bee, where Laufranc and Anselm served their novitiates to their exalted 
 functions." 
 
 VOL. IV. -SPENSER. 
 
 SATURDAY REVIEW. "This volume, which contains the most mature 
 work of a really eminent writer, is, without any display of critical apparatus, by 
 far the most complete study we yet possess of the second founder of our poetry." 
 
 VOL. V. BACON. 
 
 TIMES. " A vivid and comprehensive sketch of an extraordinary career. It 
 admirably preserves the relative proportions in depicting the statesman, the lawyer, 
 the courtier, the philosopher, and the man of letters." 
 
 MACMILLAN AND CO., LONDON.
 
 UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA LIBRARY 
 
 Los Angeles 
 This book is DUE on the last date stamped below.