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 v -The intellectual movement in the Church of 
 England, to which the name of Puseyism is 
 ^ frequently applied, has strengthened and 
 widened itself sufficiently to attract the 
 notice of practical men. It is no longer 
 confined to theological schools or ecclesias- 
 tical circles, but has taken a place among those 
 mental phenomena of our time which de¬ 
 mand a stricter attention than the rude and 
 unsettled gaze of public opinion can bestow. 
 There are not wanting able expositions of 
 these principles, nor vigorous attacks, nor 
 energetic replies ; yet a fair criticism, presup¬ 
 posing no opinions, and implicating no doc¬ 
 trines, and simply inquiring into the true 
 meaning of the matter, its relations to the 
 
 A} 
 
 B 
 
2 
 
 THE NAME PUSEYISM. 
 
 past, its connexion with the present, and its 
 tendencies for the future, may not readily be 
 found, and it is the intention of the follow¬ 
 ing pages in some degree to supply this de¬ 
 ficiency. 
 
 The words “ Puseyism” and “ Puseyite?’ 
 must be used under protest, and would not 
 be used here at all, but for the anxious de¬ 
 sire of the writer to state the case as broadly 
 and clearly as possible, and to avoid even the 
 appearance of subtle definition. For, as it 
 is unwise, in general, to call any body of men 
 by a name which they themselves deprecate, 
 so, in this particular case, it has been a chief 
 effort of all the leading agents of this move¬ 
 ment to avert public attention from them¬ 
 selves to their system ; and therefore to 
 adopt seriously these personal designations is 
 to prejudge the whole question, and assume 
 that these views and principles are not those 
 of the Church Catholic, but the devices and 
 caprices of certain individual men, resident 
 at Oxford at this moment of time. 
 
 There are three very distinct aspects 
 
DIFFERENT VIEWS OF THE CHURCH. 3 
 
 under which the Church of England shows 
 itself to different minds:—the Evangelical, 
 or Low-Church; the Church and State, 
 or High-Church; the Puseyite, or Catholic; 
 and the distinction is no where more re¬ 
 markable than in the views of its History 
 and nature as an Institution which these 
 parties separately entertain. 
 
 The Evangelical section necessarily feels 
 a very subordinate interest in any part of 
 Church history, which is not of a purely spiri¬ 
 tual nature. Accustomed to study the sacred 
 records themselves in a passive mood, and 
 being far less anxious to realise the historical 
 events with critical care, than to discover 
 in each passage some secondary and sug¬ 
 gestive meaning applicable to some known 
 state of mind in themselves or others, the 
 Church of the Fathers, of the Middle Ages, 
 and even of the English Reformation, is little 
 more to them than any other social institu¬ 
 tion. If they do turn their attention that 
 way, it is to follow out certain doctrines, or 
 rather the single doctrine of Justification by 
 
4 
 
 EVANGELICAL VIEW. 
 
 Faith, according to the prominence or ob¬ 
 scurity of which the Church is held to be 
 pure or polluted. The ministerial Functions 
 and sacramental Ordinances of the Church 
 are hardly necessary for the completeness of 
 this religious system, which can with consis¬ 
 tency only receive them as designating or 
 exciting certain internal processes : neither 
 can the ties of Church-membership be very 
 strong where the chief sympathy is with 
 spiritual experiences, without relation to ex¬ 
 ternal communion. The English Church 
 appears, in truth, to such minds, but as a 
 happy accident, a wise dispensation of Pro¬ 
 vidence, showing forth, in a visible institu¬ 
 tion, the vital truth which is in the hearts of 
 men. Thus with them the interest of the 
 Reformation increases, the further it sepa¬ 
 rates itself from the hierarchy of Rome, until 
 it finds in Calvinism its complete exposition: 
 thus too the early Puritan divines share, if 
 they do not supersede, the attention given to 
 the writings of the fathers of the English 
 Reformation, and their favourite reading em- 
 
HIGH-CHURCH VIEW. 
 
 5 
 
 braces a large range of subsequent dissent, 
 from Nonconformity to Methodism. In this 
 point of view, therefore, the Church of 
 England is simply useful as a public recog¬ 
 nition of Christian faith, as ordering and 
 facilitating the public offices of Christianity, 
 and perhaps as preventing some other abso¬ 
 lutely injurious or dangerous shape of 
 hierarchical authority from occupying its 
 position in this country. 
 
 The High-Church party in England has 
 always comprised two very discrepant ele¬ 
 ments; the one secular and political, the 
 other philosophical and religious. The theory 
 of the former is what is usually called Eras- 
 tian : the Church is there the creature of the 
 State—a high police, established by autho¬ 
 rity, and organized by law. Accepting as a 
 fact the religious desires and wants of the 
 community, it is requisite that some power 
 should exist in every well-ordered society, 
 which should provide at once for their satis¬ 
 faction and discipline. In ancient Heathen¬ 
 ism the State was in one sense the Church, 
 
6 
 
 HIGH-CHURCH VIEW. 
 
 and the worship of Minerva of the Par¬ 
 thenon, and of Capitoline Jove, was the 
 most solemn act of citizenship, as the here¬ 
 ditary assumption of the Pontificate was the 
 principal form of the imperial usurpation 
 over the Roman world. Christianity, how¬ 
 ever, being from its very nature the religion 
 of baptized men of all nations, a national 
 Christianity seemed almost a contradiction 
 in terms, and the Church and State could 
 only be identified under such conditions of 
 universal empire as the Popes of the middle 
 ages attempted to carry into effect. If there 
 was to be a fusion of the temporal and spi¬ 
 ritual authorities, then, the spiritual autho¬ 
 rity being Catholic, the temporal authority 
 must be Catholic also, and kingdoms and 
 principalities must be held by the same 
 tenure as ecclesiastical dignities and trusts. 
 This experiment failed: the will and wit of 
 mankind were never directed to so mighty 
 an object, and the struggle continued through 
 a large tract of history with more or less 
 purity of motive, and more or less proba- 
 
HIGH-CHURCH VIEW. 
 
 7 
 
 bility of success; but the practical truth 
 seems gradually to have worked itself out, 
 that all union of Church and State implies 
 the subordination of the former to the latter. 
 The mere doctrine of the Papal supremacy 
 had no power to prevent this consequence, 
 although it has been the most clearly demon¬ 
 strated in countries formally separated from 
 the Roman see: the Spanish Inquisition 
 w^as a State-tribunal, directing its violence 
 towards political objects, such as the domi¬ 
 nation of the Spanish race over the Hebrew 
 and the Moor, or the exclusion of those 
 principles of individual freedom which the 
 Reformation had aroused in Europe, far more 
 than towards the preservation of doctrinal 
 orthodoxy: in France the interests of the 
 Church were generally but a veil for the 
 supposed advantages of the State; the per¬ 
 secution of the Albigenses was carried on 
 against the will of Innocent III., as the per¬ 
 secution of the Huguenots against the re¬ 
 monstrance of Innocent XI.; and the latter 
 circumstance may remind the reader of the 
 
8 
 
 HIGH-CHURCH VIEW. 
 
 Prince of Conde’s saying, that “if Louis XIV. 
 thought fit to go over to the Protestant 
 Church, the clergy would be the first to fol¬ 
 low him.” To a political high-churchman 
 there is nothing objectionable in this state 
 of things: regarding the State, whether re¬ 
 presented by a King or a Parliament, as the 
 only legitimate source of power, he looks on 
 all resistance to it on the part of the Church 
 as a priestly usurpation, on Dunstan and 
 Becket as ambitious agitators, on the Re¬ 
 formation as the epoch of the recognition of 
 the full and just rights of the State over the 
 Church, and of the consequent establishment 
 by it of the Church of England, its powers 
 and its privileges, according to the laws and 
 customs of the nation. In this system it 
 follows logically that the transmutation of the 
 Church by Queen Mary, and its destruction 
 later by the Parliament then supreme in 
 England, were acts of exactly the same 
 nature as its institution; and that any act of 
 the legislature which has taken or may take 
 place for altering, mutilating, or even anni- 
 
 I 
 
HIGH-CHURCH VIEW. 
 
 9 
 
 hilating the Church, is just as authoritative 
 as that which raised it into constitutional 
 existence : what the State can do, the State 
 can undo; where the State can bind, there 
 can she loosen. In this system the Church 
 of England stands in relation to other 
 Christian bodies, as the one decided by the 
 State to be the best and purest form of 
 Christianity, and the doctrines of the Articles 
 as selected to be the true exposition of Chris¬ 
 tian faith;—its origin is but little earlier than 
 the Zuinglian community (which among 
 other peculiarities rejected baptism as an 
 idolatry) settled by permission of the same 
 authority, in London, in the fourth year of 
 Edward the Sixth 1 ; its bishops are officials, 
 which the State, in the person of Queen 
 Elizabeth, might unfrock, or, in the person 
 of King William, might deprive at pleasure, 
 elected by a conge d’elire which makes 
 the non-election misprision of treason, and 
 
 consecrated at the absolute and undisguised 
 
 * 
 
 command of the crown. Queen Elizabeth 
 
 1 Under the ministry of John a Lasco. 
 
10 
 
 HIGH-CHURCH VIEW. 
 
 put to death the Roman Catholics who 
 refused to acknowledge her supremacy over 
 the Church, as the Roman emperors mar¬ 
 tyred the Christians who refused to burn 
 incense before their statues : in both cases, 
 it was a refusal to recognise religious, on the 
 part of those who acknowledged secular, 
 authority. It was too in this theory of the 
 Church of England, that the continental Pro¬ 
 testants nicknamed it Parliament-faith , and 
 that Melancthon mentions that the German 
 Lutherans named those that had suffered 
 for the reformed cause in England, the Devil’s 
 Martyrs . 
 
 Of what constitutes Church-membership 
 in this view no very distinct account can be 
 given. A Bishop in the last century went 
 the length of saying, that “ the Church of 
 England included every man who believed 
 in the divine mission of Christ —■“ a most 
 expansive definition,” remarks de Maistre, 
 “ seeing that it embraces the whole Maho- 
 metan world.” But these principles would 
 in strictness require some political conditions 
 
HIGH-CHURCH VIEW. 
 
 11 
 
 as terms of communion, something analo¬ 
 gous to the obligation of fealty to the Czar 
 which the act of admission into the Russo- 
 Greek Church imposes on all, whether 
 infant or adult, native or alien. The use of 
 the sacrament of the Eucharist as a test 
 of political capacity was of this kind; but, 
 now that that practice is relaxed, and that 
 even adherence to the Roman Church de¬ 
 bars any man from only two or three 
 offices of state, it is hardly clear what con¬ 
 stitutes a member of the Church of England. 
 Yet, although foreigners can join its com¬ 
 munion, without becoming naturalized (and it 
 is evident from Archbishop Wake’s Formula 
 for the reception of such persons, that such 
 cases were anticipated), the general feeling 
 among men of this way of thinking is, that 
 an Englishman is a member of the Church 
 as he is a member of the State; that he pays 
 his tithes and Church-rates as he pays his 
 other taxes; that he attends the public wor¬ 
 ship as a profession as much of civic morality 
 as religious duty; and that Church and State, 
 
12 
 
 STATE-CONSCIENCE THEORY. 
 
 or Church and King, have at least co-ordinate 
 claims on his devotional regard. 
 
 The practical atheism reconcileable with 
 this system, and in fact reconciled with it by 
 Hobbes, has naturally embarrassed many re¬ 
 ligious minds, who have taken refuge in the 
 speculation of a State-conscience, of some¬ 
 thing in the State itself of a religious nature, 
 and involving religious responsibilities. In 
 this view, the State has duties to the Church 
 which it must fulfil under penalty of national 
 sin, and will consequently assist and co-ope¬ 
 rate with the Church instead of oppressing or 
 hampering it. The idealization of the State 
 in the ancient world, as the great object of 
 patriotic devotion and personal sacrifice, con¬ 
 tained much of this principle, and in those 
 times we find the combination of Church 
 and State in the same authority very prac¬ 
 ticable and successful. But the Conscience 
 which Christianity deals with is of a cha¬ 
 racter so much higher and finer, that the 
 question becomes very complicated. The 
 Christian requirement is of virtuous motives 
 
STATE-CONSCIENCE THEORY. 
 
 13 
 
 as well as actions. Now a motive implies a 
 will, and the State must have one clear and 
 absolute will, before it can have a con¬ 
 science. An absolute king, reigning of divine 
 right, might, in some sense, represent the 
 conscience of the nation which merely fol¬ 
 lowed his bidding; for, if resistance to his 
 authority were a crime, he must take on 
 himself the responsibility of enforcing that 
 authority, and thus his individual conscience 
 would become the conscience of the State. 
 But if an act of the State be nothing more 
 than a result evolved from a number of 
 discordant wills, by certain constitutional 
 processes in which the wills of the minority 
 are by mutual consent submitted to those 
 of the majority, to regard the act as that 
 of one intelligent responsible Will, is surely 
 rather fanciful than philosophical. No pos¬ 
 sible process can give one pure and free Will 
 as the sum total of a series of discrepant 
 wills, or bring one simple Conscience out 
 of a confusion of discordant consciences. 
 In the present aspect of political affairs 
 
14 
 
 STATE-CONSCIENCE THEORY. 
 
 throughout the Christian world, perhaps 
 no doctrine could be started less practicable 
 for the resolution of difficulties, or more 
 beset with embarrassments, than this one 
 of a State-conscience. Now that, without any 
 recurrence to the foolish philanthropy of 
 the French Revolution, the thoughtful youth 
 of this generation are drawn together from 
 many lands by a sympathy of civilization 
 of which the old patriotism knew nothing; 
 when excessive and exclusive nationality is 
 no longer an object of admiration; when 
 governments are at issue with all churches 
 which they have not subdued, or from which 
 they have not detached themselves; when 
 men become daily more impatient of anoma¬ 
 lous offices, irreconcileable duties, and dead- 
 letter titles; when all political institutions, 
 high and low, are matters of discussion 
 and question; when the State has lost its 
 great treasure of firmness and permanence, 
 and no man can tell whether a State of 
 to-morrow may be the same as a State of 
 to-day;—to endow this State with a Con- 
 
CATHOLIC VIEW. 
 
 15 
 
 science is to vivify an abstraction with an 
 unnatural life, and to confound the great 
 problem of the just relations of spiritual and 
 temporal authorities, which our age is in 
 travail to resolve. 
 
 The Catholic, or, as it is now accidentally 
 denominated, the Puseyite doctrine of the 
 constitution and history of the Church of 
 England, differs essentially from those already 
 stated. It assumes that the Catholic Church 
 is a special institution established by Christ 
 and his Apostles, and transmitted by certain 
 ordinances from one generation of mankind 
 to another; that this institution is irrespec¬ 
 tive of all times and places, and can only 
 contingently be connected with any political 
 State or identified with any national interest; 
 that to this institution is divinely com¬ 
 mitted the preservation of religious truth, 
 and the care and regulation of the spiritual 
 concerns of all men baptized into the Church 
 of Christ, and any interference with this 
 jurisdiction on the part of the secular power 
 is a usurpation, which must be protested 
 
16 
 
 CATHOLIC VIEW. 
 
 against as unjust, and resisted by such 
 means as are not out of character with the 
 spiritual nature of the authority. The 
 Church of England, thus regarded, does not 
 date its origin from the lusts of Henry the 
 Eighth, and the scepticism of his minister 
 Cromwell, but becomes that portion of the 
 Church of Christ which was established in 
 England, whether under the authority of 
 the Roman patriarchate or with some earlier 
 independent constitution. The Reformation 
 here takes a due place as an event in its 
 history. Before that period, the encroach¬ 
 ments it had had to resist were not from 
 the Roman see, but from the secular power 
 at home, and the struggle for spiritual in¬ 
 dependence (a cause which was to those 
 times what political independence is to ours, 
 or, still more, the strife of mind against 
 matter), which paused, as it were for awe, 
 at the martyrdom of Becket, continued, till 
 the public attention was drawn away to, 
 and at last absolutely fixed on, the usurpa¬ 
 tions of the court of Rome. The earnestness 
 
CATHOLIC VIEW. 
 
 17 
 
 which still remained in Christendom re¬ 
 volted against the hollowness and untruth 
 that filled the professed throne of St. Peter, 
 and many were gradually alienated from a 
 power which extended its assumptions almost 
 in proportion as it became less worthy of 
 the love and honour of pious men. More¬ 
 over, the principle that the Episcopal autho¬ 
 rity was but a mere emanation from the 
 Papal, had never been fully admitted, and 
 was now more repugnant than ever to those 
 who saw that on a free action of the epis¬ 
 copal energies rested the hopes of a religious 
 revival in the Church ; and it is very signi¬ 
 ficant, that in the later sittings of the Council 
 of Trent, the Spanish delegates insisted that 
 episcopacy rested immediately on divine 
 appointment, and that Paul IV. strongly 
 censured the jealousy with which all sources 
 of power and profit had been concentrated in 
 Rome. These just motives, united to the desire 
 of Princes to throw off the single check which 
 the constitution of society laid on their un¬ 
 bridled wills, and to the rapacity of Nobili- 
 
 c 
 
18 
 
 CATHOLIC VIEW. 
 
 ties, who already scented the wealth of the 
 Church, and to the hope of the deluded Peo¬ 
 ple that that property would be so applied 
 that armies would be kept up without cost, 
 and taxation be no more, brought on the 
 separation from Rome, and that pillage from 
 which the fear of the protecting power of 
 the Holy See had so long kept off the hands 
 of the unscrupulous and strong. When 
 that separation was effected, it became the 
 duty of the heads of the English Church to 
 organize its new independence, and, at the 
 same time, to exercise the discriminating 
 authority which devolved upon them, after 
 that of Rome w r as disallowed, as to the ques¬ 
 tions of doctrine which vexed and divided 
 the Christian world. The difficulty was to 
 determine, not what seemed to them right or 
 wrong, politic or impolitic, in the matter, but 
 what was the true Catholic doctrine, as dis¬ 
 tinct, on the one side, from those adapta¬ 
 tions of it, and deductions from it, which the 
 Pontificate had partly sanctioned, and partly 
 overlooked, and, on the other, from all those 
 
CATHOLIC VIEW. 
 
 19 
 
 vagaries and caprices of interpretation of the 
 Christian records which followed the licence 
 of private judgment in continental Protest¬ 
 antism. No man’s opinion is worth having, 
 on this subject, who does not admit the 
 extent of this difficulty, and admire the skill 
 and prudence with which it was in part over¬ 
 come. The English divines fixed their eyes 
 firmly on the early fathers of the Church, 
 they probed the oldest liturgies and formu¬ 
 laries, they bent their hearts to discover 
 what was, in very truth, Catholic, what was 
 “ semper et ubique et ab omnibus.” If the 
 Church of Rome, with all the apparatus of 
 collateral learning, had drawn from the canon 
 of Scripture some erroneous conclusions, and 
 had not been prevented by possession of it 
 from actively or passively sanctioning abuses 
 repugnant to all holy feelings and moral 
 perceptions, how was it to be expected that 
 the comparatively ignorant people, excited 
 to the untutored study of those writings by 
 Luther, K the Bible-opener,” would not be 
 liable in their turn to fall into confusion and 
 
 c 2 
 
20 
 
 CATHOLIC VIEW. 
 
 error, unless provided with some authorized 
 canon of interpretation ? There was warning 
 enough in the distracted course of the Refor¬ 
 mation on the continent, in the indecent objur¬ 
 gations among its leaders, in the gross misap¬ 
 plication of the study of the Old Testament, 
 then gradually subduing the Christian spirit 
 to that Judaic element, more congenial to 
 violent tempers and vulgar minds, which 
 culminated so fatally in Puritanism. Calvin 
 was making a religion of the philosophy of 
 despair ; Zuinglius had set the Christian 
 mind on a course precipitately tending to 
 the prosaic paganism of Socinus; the Roman 
 Catholic world was looking on with a sneer 
 or a smile, satisfied that the Reformation 
 would soon fall to sleep upon the ruins it 
 had made; while, through all this storm of 
 passions and opinions, the reformers in Eng¬ 
 land led on the Church, and brought her out at 
 last safe in her Catholic doctrines, her special 
 ordinances, her ancient formularies, and her 
 legitimate claims. A Catholic Christian, 
 therefore, would not be likely to disparage 
 
CATHOLIC VIEW. 
 
 21 
 
 the merit of the reformers of the Church of 
 England; he could not indeed forget the 
 sad intertexture of good and bad motives 
 which historically accomplished the Refor¬ 
 mation here as elsewhere; as a lover of truth, 
 he would not hide from himself that there 
 were many stains for the fire of martyrdom 
 to purify, much unholy idolatry of the civil 
 power, much unmanly vacillation of purpose, 
 much intemperance in language and in action; 
 but, after an honest consideration, he will as¬ 
 sign to these men high places among the Fa¬ 
 thers and Defenders of the Catholic Church; 
 and although he may not feel himself so 
 strongly bound by their authority as by that 
 of other Fathers, who have delivered their 
 opinions more independently and consistently 
 than these were enabled to do, he will, never¬ 
 theless, be drawn to them by ties of natural 
 affection and sympathy, analogous to the 
 regard paid by countries in the communion 
 of the Roman Church to local and national 
 saints. The struggle between Catholic and 
 Puritan principles during the reigns of 
 
22 
 
 CATHOLIC VIEW. 
 
 James I. and his son, was close and bitter. 
 The superstition and intolerance which had 
 disgusted many religious persons with the 
 Church, seemed to have received a new birth 
 in Puritanism. The idolatry of lifeless forms 
 of holy men and things had never been more 
 gross in any part of the Catholic world, than 
 that of the dead letter of the Scripture was 
 becoming in England. All historical mean¬ 
 ing, all collateral information, was neglected, 
 and each text was taken as a series of caba- 
 listical words, capable of any separate mean¬ 
 ing, and referable to any separate object: 
 the material book was honoured as much as 
 ever had been the material crucifix 1 ; the very 
 tone of reading it became that of an incan¬ 
 tation. Neither were miracles wanting when 
 required: Prynne solemnly relates that when 
 Bastwick arrived at the Fort of Scilly, his ap¬ 
 pointed prison, thousands of redbreasts, birds 
 
 1 There is still a custom, in parts of the South of Eng¬ 
 land, for a peasant, on moving from one house to another, 
 to take with him, as a good charm, a black cat, a bag of salt, 
 and a Bible. 
 
I 
 
 CATHOLIC VIEW. 23 
 
 unknown to those islands, welcomed him with 
 their melody, and within a day or two after 
 took flight no man knew whither; and every 
 minister had his special interpositions of Pro¬ 
 vidence to display to his congregation. The 
 redundant forms and special services of the 
 unreformed Church were not got rid of, but, 
 diverted from every national purpose, and 
 emptied of all enjoyment, were concentrated 
 into the stiff and gloomy Sabbath, in which no 
 longer could be traced any sign of that day of 
 which Tertullian wrote, “ diem Solis laetitiae 
 indulgemus. . . die Solis laetitiam curamus 
 nor did the care with which Luther, Melanc- 
 thon, and Calvin most especially, had de¬ 
 livered their censure, avail to check, what the 
 last in his Institutes calls “ crassa carnalisque 
 Sabbathismi superstitio/’ which from the first 
 publication of the u Sabbath Doctrines” of Dr. 
 Bound (in 1595) spread like a spiritual plague 
 over the British mind. The means by which 
 these influences were resisted on the part of 
 the Church (though the rough temper of 
 the times must not be allowed to be pleaded 
 
24 
 
 CATHOLIC VIEW. 
 
 only by the partizans of its antagonists) 
 were clearly not blessed by Providence; and 
 the Established Churchy that had leant on 
 the secular arm, fell with the secular power. 
 The King, who pertinaciously refused that 
 adhesion to the Scottish Covenant; which 
 would probably have saved his throne, and 
 certainly his life, but which would have 
 amounted to a renunciation of his belief in 
 the Catholic Church, has justly earned for 
 himself the deep and lasting reverence of the 
 English portion of it, although the peculiar 
 notion of the royal character which obtained 
 at that period throughout Europe gave 
 what now seems an exaggerated colouring to 
 the commemoration of his sacrifice. 
 
 The real worth of the vigour displayed in 
 the Puritan republic is the most justly 
 measured by the religious and moral atony 
 which it left behind it. The recognized 
 Church establishment had little strength to 
 remedy the evil, and it is almost to be 
 wondered at, that by the time of the Revolu¬ 
 tion of 1688 and its consequences, it had 
 
CATHOLIC VIEW. 
 
 25 
 
 regained so much of its elder and better 
 nature, as to enable it to give the only evi¬ 
 dences of the higher virtues which distin¬ 
 guish those times. The Revolution, politically 
 brought about by the selfish energy of the 
 few and the selfish indifference of the many, 
 was preceded by the imprisonment of 
 bishops, for their refusal to make the Church 
 a party to the illegalities of one sovereign, 
 and followed by the deprivation of bishops 
 for their unwillingness to submit the Church 
 to the authority of another, whom they 
 regarded as a foreign Calvinist, violently 
 assuming the monarchy of Britain. In those 
 one-sided days the resistance to the wrong 
 application of a principle in those who were 
 ready to devote themselves in the cause of 
 the principle itself, is, to say the least, re¬ 
 markable, and not undeserving of the affec¬ 
 tionate admiration of Churchmen. They, at 
 least, will naturally dwell with especial 
 interest on such characters as Bishop Ken, 
 and consider imperfect any records of the 
 Church of England which do not keep 
 
26 
 
 CATHOLIC VIEW. 
 
 these men in public and constant remem¬ 
 brance. When the State had once cast out 
 the Non-jurors, it was not to be expected 
 but that, at any rate, the more energetic 
 part of them should take full advantage of 
 the independence of their position. Their 
 influence in the country and over the rest of 
 the Church, would probably have been 
 greater and more enduring had they not 
 gone so far as to designate (with Dodwell) 
 the supremacy of the crown as the Cran- 
 merian or Henrician heresy, and to proclaim 
 (with Hickes) the College of Bishops to be 
 the Church-regent, and all Christian people 
 to be bound to defend the Church against the 
 State. Persecution enabled the Non-jurors 
 to promulgate their principles with this vio¬ 
 lent distinctness, and a more moderate asser¬ 
 tion of them might have sooner aroused 
 public feeling against a Bishop of Bristol, 
 at once lord privy seal and ambassador to 
 Bavaria, or an Archbishop Blackburne, who 
 congratulated Queen Caroline on being a 
 wise woman, and not minding her hus- 
 
CATHOLIC VIEW. 
 
 27 
 
 band’s having a mistress, or any other of 
 those dignitaries, whose unclerical pursuits 
 and latitudinarian doctrines, and in some 
 cases indecent lives, at last provoked the 
 Evangelical reaction which declared and ex¬ 
 tended itself under the guidance of Wesley, 
 Whitfield, Lady Huntingdon, and Walker 
 of Truro. Some other ideal of a Chris¬ 
 tian minister than a Parson Adams was now 
 required, and altogether there was too much 
 need of this party in the Church for it not 
 to gain great weight and power: it soon col¬ 
 lected within itself so much of the slumber¬ 
 ing Puritanism that the Nonconformists had 
 bequeathed to their posterity as had not 
 taken an Unitarian bias, and thus was re¬ 
 garded with hostility by the Establishment, 
 both as leading to dissent and disloyalty, and 
 as an implied censure on their own defects 
 and offences. The accusation brought about 
 the crime, and Wesley, after the brave efforts 
 of a long life to keep together his Church- 
 manship and what he believed to be his 
 Evangelic mission, fell into an act of open 
 
28 
 
 CATHOLIC VIEW. 
 
 schism, which, notwithstanding his after¬ 
 regret, and his death-bed profession, opened 
 the door to his followers for their overt se¬ 
 cession from the Church, a secession the more 
 inexcusable, as ever since that time there 
 has existed, in the formal communion of the 
 Church, a body of men agreeing with them¬ 
 selves in all their principal views of doctrine 
 and modes of interpretation. Looking, how¬ 
 ever, at the spiritual condition of the Church 
 at that period—a condition far more revolting, 
 to a pious mind, than that which provoked 
 the early genius of Puritanism—a true 
 Churchman will never deny to these persons 
 the merit of a pure and generous zeal, or 
 feel anything more than a deep regret that 
 these new reformers did not take more 
 warning from the effects that ultra-Pro¬ 
 testantism had already produced on the 
 civilized world. But the state of learning 
 in the Church was not then such as to 
 authorize it to press hard on the partial 
 intelligence and neglect of knowledge shown 
 by the Methodists: it could not hold up to 
 
CATHOLIC VIEW. 
 
 29 
 
 view the excellence of a body of really 
 learned and devoted men, to contrast with 
 the dangers of an unordained and partially 
 self-chosen ministry; it could not call at¬ 
 tention to the effects of the continuous 
 solemnity, and profound associations, and 
 historical consistency of its services, to com¬ 
 pare with the spasmodic and uncertain 
 results of extemporaneous utterances ; it 
 could not dwell emphatically on the bless¬ 
 ings of its Eucharist, daily profaned as a 
 political test; or on the worth of its Bap¬ 
 tism, which seemed to involve no respon¬ 
 sibilities. The Church of England had lost 
 its own weapons, and had in fact to look 
 for them in the armoury of its opponents. 
 As the Roman Catholic Church derived 
 some aid from the Reformation that broke 
 it up, so did the Church of England gain 
 by this dissent; but the ground of Church- 
 principles was by degrees almost abandoned; 
 the very Churchmen, shamed by the Dissen¬ 
 ters, contented themselves with striving to 
 emulate their personal piety, and shrunk from 
 
30 
 
 CATHOLIC VIEW. 
 
 the great work which lay ready for their 
 hands, of energizing with this new life the 
 forms and offices of the Church, and of bring¬ 
 ing the internal exercise of strong religious 
 emotion into harmony with the outer world 
 of historical Christianity. Thus the Church 
 paid the fullest penalty for her neglect and 
 unbelief, both in the good men she lost, and 
 in those she still preserved : Churchmen 
 were almost ashamed of their profession; 
 —there was decidedly more religion in the 
 country than formerly, but the Church got 
 no credit for any of it;—due praise was 
 given to individual exertions, to Robert Hall, 
 or Rowland Hill, or Newton, or Simeon, or 
 Wilberforce ; but the Church was never 
 looked to as the fountain of religious truth, 
 -—it was well if it was allowed to be one of 
 many channels. 
 
 Out of this state of things has arisen 
 Puseyism. 
 
 Between the years 1820 and 1830, the 
 general use, at Oxford, of Whately’s works 
 on Logic and Rhetoric tended to sharpen 
 
PUSEYISM. 
 
 31 
 
 and excite the minds of men, whom the 
 assiduous study of Aristotle’s Ethics and 
 Butler’s Evidences and Sermons had left 
 dissatisfied with the religious teaching of 
 the day. Jebb’s Essay on the peculiar cha¬ 
 racter of the Church of England directed 
 this anxiety towards the divines of the six¬ 
 teenth century and their distinctive dog¬ 
 mas, while the theosophy of Coleridge led 
 it to search for truth in the depths of 
 religious metaphysics. Then came the 
 secular influences of the Reform agitation, 
 —tithes and church-rates were resisted, and 
 alterations in the Liturgy proposed. The 
 wildest statements of the wealth and 
 abuses of the Church were circulated; and 
 in 1832, Mr. Rose started the British 
 Magazine, to bring the truth of this matter 
 before the public, and to supply the clergy 
 with means of inter-communication. In 
 December of the following year appeared the 
 first number of the Tracts for the Times, 
 a series of papers of doctrinal exposition and 
 practical suggestions; and, soon after, Mr. 
 
 7 
 
3.2 
 
 PUSEYISM. 
 
 Newman’s first volume of Sermons, of an 
 entirely uncontroversial character, and ex¬ 
 planatory of the temper of Christianity. 
 The exercise of the authority of the State, 
 in the appointment of Dr. Hampden in de- 
 fiance of the opinion of the University, and 
 the attempt of a large political party to abolish 
 subscription to the Thirty-nine Articles, led 
 back men’s minds to the reasons of their 
 faith, the principles of the Catholic Church 
 in matters which could not be definitively 
 settled by reference to Scripture, and the 
 fair grounds on which the Church of Eng¬ 
 land could assert its superiority over any 
 other body of professing Christians in this 
 country. The first fruits of this train of 
 thought awakened at Oxford were Keble’s 
 Primitive Tradition and Pusey’s Scriptural 
 Views of Baptism, and to the opposition 
 which assailed the latter work, the appella¬ 
 tion of the principles of the party is probably 
 due. This scheme was followed up:—the 
 intellectual basis of an Anglican Theology, 
 such as the learning and criticism of this age 
 
newman’s lectures. 
 
 33 
 
 would accept^ was firmly laid; Mr. Newman 
 in his Lectures on Romanism and Ultra- 
 Protestantism; placed the landmarks of the 
 English Church; distinctly showing how it 
 was bounded on either frontier; and how it 
 could with justice claim to be the purest 
 fragment of the great Christianity. 
 
 A book was then boldly given to the world, 
 faithfully reflecting the action of Church Prin¬ 
 ciples on a young and vivid mind, amid all the 
 doubts and temptations and difficulties of the 
 present time,—the Remains of Mr. Froude. 
 These volumes, with a hundred points open 
 to misrepresentation and ridicule, and some 
 superficially offensive to sense and refinement, 
 yet won deep interest from all who read 
 them in a just spirit, testing them by Whit¬ 
 field’s Journal and similar revelations of 
 religious affections working on and with the 
 extravagancies of undisciplined talents and 
 a fresh imagination. The editors must have 
 been pretty sure of gaining by such a com¬ 
 parison, to venture on publishing this practi¬ 
 cal exposition of their principles : and it was 
 
 D 
 
34 
 
 froude 5 s remains. 
 
 perhaps an excess of candour on their part, 
 for certainly the book offended more than it 
 pleased, exactly in the proportion that its 
 readers appreciated the zealous simplicity 
 and hearty humour, or dwelt with disgust on 
 the violence of detached phrases and the in¬ 
 consistencies of divided feelings in a mind 
 struggling into open truth. A little judicious 
 tampering might have presented the life and 
 death of their friend as that of an immacu¬ 
 late and purely spiritual being, but they pre¬ 
 ferred to give him as he was, in his labour¬ 
 ing nature and pathetic humanity. 
 
 About this time Mr. Newman undertook 
 the editorship of the British Critic, and its 
 numbers have since contained a variety of 
 articles on Ecclesiastical History, Religious 
 Psychology, Christian Art, systematic Theo¬ 
 logy, and the applications of Religion to social 
 and political affairs, combining more learning, 
 sound sense, grace, and humour, than any 
 other periodical of our day devoted to an 
 especial purpose. Mr. Maitland’s researches 
 into the mediaeval history of the Church in 
 
PUSEYITE CLERGY. 
 
 35 
 
 the British Magazine have indicated how 
 much lies there beneath a rugged surface, 
 to delight and interest any student of the 
 workings of Christianity in the hearts and 
 minds of mankind, and “ The Church of the 
 Fathers” is a popular sacred history, from 
 which most adult Churchmen may, it is to 
 be feared, learn a great deal. 
 
 But the extension of these principles was 
 not more remarkable in books than in men. 
 Oxford now sent forth a body of young Clergy 
 of a different stamp from any that the last 
 generation had witnessed,—men of serious 
 and cheerful temper, undistinguished from 
 other well educated gentlemen by any pecu¬ 
 liarities of manner or phraseology, yet com¬ 
 manding respect and regard,—learned and 
 valuing learning as the necessary equipment 
 of all who professed to teach, without mak¬ 
 ing any pedantic demands on humble and 
 simple minds,—sharing readily in moderate 
 amusements, and at the same time striving 
 to elevate the moral and intellectual tone of 
 society,—judicious in the introduction and 
 
 d 2 
 
36 
 
 PUSEYITE CLERGY. 
 
 application of sacred subjects, yet never 
 shrinking from their discussion,—offensive to 
 no good taste, repulsive to no good sense, 
 but rather with a strong feeling for Art, and 
 a sound reverence for Reason,—men, in fine, 
 who were undeniably energetic and efficient 
 ministers of the Gospel, although not what is 
 usually termed Evangelical. These men 
 preached, that the Church had of late times 
 let fall unheeded some of its most precious 
 privileges; that Church-membership had lost 
 its value as a tie and bond among men,andthat 
 its place was sought to be filled by the coteries 
 of the Religious World, and among more 
 imaginative tempers, by such associations as 
 the Irvingites and Plymouth-brethren ; that 
 the Christianity, which met with the greatest 
 acceptance now-a-days, was a series of mental 
 operations, all which would have the same 
 effects on the soul of the believer, whether the 
 facts on which he grounded his belief, were 
 or were not historically true, leaving the 
 Church, the enduring witness of those facts, 
 disesteemed and uncherished ; that, as the 
 
PUSEYITE CLERGY. 
 
 37 
 
 ancient giant reinvigorated himself by touch¬ 
 ing the earth, so the Church might derive 
 new life from every fresh contact with 
 Heaven, and, while she is making use of all 
 new weapons required for her daily contest 
 with evil, ought ever and anon to fall hack 
 on the divine past of Catholic Christianity; 
 that it might now be the business of the 
 State to choose whether it would or would not 
 sustain the Church as the best moral police, 
 but it was not the duty of the Church to re¬ 
 gard as surrendered those liberties which for 
 meekness or peace* sake had been suspended; 
 that, if the Church Establishment were 
 swept away to-morrow, the Church of Eng¬ 
 land would lose nothing more than certain 
 means of usefulness and appliances of good, 
 retaining all its characteristics as a Hierarchy, 
 all its functions as a sacred Corporation; that, 
 in the coming crisis of our political and 
 social relations, it became every man dis¬ 
 tinctly to understand and express in what 
 light he considered Christianity, whether as 
 part and parcel of the law of the land, or 
 
38 
 
 PUSEYITE CLERGY. 
 
 as an interesting series of spiritual opera¬ 
 tions, or as the especial system of the sal¬ 
 vation of the souls of mankind, practically 
 developed in the Society of which he is a 
 member, a Society which has extended un¬ 
 broken from Christ to himself through a 
 succession of circumstances, that are to him 
 like those of his own family, a Society to 
 which he is bound by individual interest 
 and the obligations of a communion extrinsic 
 to rank or nation or race, a Society outside 
 of which Christianity ceases to be a fact and 
 becomes a speculation—the Society of the 
 Catholic Church. 
 
 The controversies which this school of 
 Theology has encountered have been violent 
 and various: in the great point at issue be¬ 
 tween it and the evangelical party, the truth 
 of the doctrines reciprocally maintained, these 
 pages being professedly critical, can do no 
 more than state the case on each side, and this 
 has been implicitly done already. Two other 
 charges fall more properly within their scope, 
 —‘the one of intolerance and illiberally in- 
 
CHARGES AGAINST PUSEYISM. 39 
 
 congruous with the public opinion of these 
 days, and unworthy of our state of civiliza¬ 
 tion; the other of Popery, or at least of a 
 tendency to revive the tyranny of Roman au¬ 
 thority and the errors of Roman superstition. 
 
 Intolerance is rather a temper than a neces¬ 
 sary consequence of any doctrinal system: as 
 the forbearance of any individual depends 
 far more on his own disposition than on the 
 amount of provocation offered him, so the 
 spirit in which members of any religious com¬ 
 munion act towards others, is a much better 
 test of tolerance than the looseness or strict¬ 
 ness of their formula and practice. The Puri¬ 
 tan with his Bible in hand, was surely no bet¬ 
 ter in this respect than the Papist with his 
 crucifix: Laud mutilated the Puritans, and 
 the Puritans beheaded Laud. A little ob¬ 
 servation must show, that every thing that 
 is a creed at all must contain something 
 which any man earnestly believing himself, 
 through the common sympathies of his na¬ 
 ture, must wish others to believe too. The 
 best and worst motives, pride and charity. 
 
40 
 
 CHARGE OF INTOLERANCE. 
 
 hatred and love, are here intertangled; and 
 persecution was formerly considered just 
 as justifiable as war, or any other alliance 
 of right and force. Persecution defined 
 the limits of orthodoxy; choice of opinion, 
 that is, individual Opinion and Heresy are 
 the same word: a Christian man was a 
 citizen of the Church, and thus subject to 
 its laws and penalties; and, if the proposi¬ 
 tion had ended here, every heretic would have 
 had the option of submitting to the institu¬ 
 tion or being cast out of it; for, in the most 
 tyrannous days, the Church never claimed 
 jurisdiction over any but baptized persons, 
 and excommunication was its extreme pun¬ 
 ishment. But here the State stepped in, 
 declared heresy a crime, and punishable as 
 treason,—pronounced excommunication to 
 be equivalent to outlawry, and a man as in¬ 
 capable of abandoning his allegiance to the 
 Church as to his country; the two facts of 
 birth in the one, and baptism into the other, 
 being regarded as involving just the same re¬ 
 sponsibilities as if they had been voluntary 
 
CHARGE OF INTOLERANCE. 
 
 41 
 
 actions. It is untrue to say that the Church 
 made the State do its foul work for it; much 
 rather did the Church submit to be the in¬ 
 strument of the oppressions and jealousies 
 and passions and interests of the State, and 
 paid the penalty by passing from servility to 
 servitude. On this confusion of functions may 
 be charged most of the persecution brought 
 against the Roman Catholic Church, although 
 much is generally attributed to the Papal 
 claim of Infallibility. There has been much 
 quibbling about this word, but a clear con¬ 
 ception of the subject will show us that in¬ 
 fallibility is nothing more or less than an 
 attribute of absolute power, exercised in spi¬ 
 ritual things. There is in every society some 
 transcendant authority which holds the whole 
 together, something which commands, and 
 is not commanded, and without which it 
 would not be a society at all: this power, 
 quoad those who are submitted to it, is in¬ 
 disputable,—or, if you dispute it, you suffer 
 whatever penalties it chooses to inflict; thus, 
 in Russia, a ukase of the Czar,—in England, 
 
42 PRETENSION TO INFALLIBILITY. 
 
 an act of Parliament,—in America, an act of 
 Congress,—is absolute and final. Apply this 
 authority to doctrines and opinions instead 
 of to overt actions, and you at once arrive at 
 Infallibility. Thus the Infallibility of the 
 Church of Rome necessarily followed from 
 the doctrine of the absolute Papal supre¬ 
 macy over the minds of men; and when this 
 jurisdiction was held to include all matters 
 of Literature, Art, Science, and Philosophy, 
 this tribunal not only condemned as errone¬ 
 ous whatever appeared to it irreconcileable 
 with the Catholic faith, but punished the 
 authors of the errors as guilty of a breach of 
 those eternal laws of God and nature, of which 
 it assumed to be the organ and interpreter. 
 And here, as in the other case, the injustice 
 arose, not from the authority itself, but from 
 its exercise of heterogeneous functions. Let 
 the Church only keep to its own province, 
 to the preservation of Catholic doctrine and 
 discipline, and, although it profess itself 
 infallible, there is no fear of its persecu¬ 
 tions. • 
 
TRUE TOLERATION. 
 
 43 
 
 Toleration, as distinguished from selfish 
 indifference and cold infidelity, is the noblest 
 produce of reason and civilization: it arises, 
 not from a disregard of truth possessed, but 
 from an enlarged consciousness of truth 
 everywhere struggling with error; not from 
 a carelessness of the souls of other men, but 
 from an increased sympathy with man as 
 man, with his weakness and his strength, 
 with his temptations and resistances, with 
 his lights and his darkness: it grows with 
 the advancement of our knowledge of our¬ 
 selves and others, with the improvement of 
 our insight into different motives of action, 
 different systems of thought, different grounds 
 of judgment, different processes of imagina¬ 
 tion ; it spreads with our distrust of the good 
 in ourselves, and of the evil in others; it is 
 the child of Hope, and Hope is the good 
 Genius of our time. 
 
 There is nothing, be assured, in Catholic 
 Christianity inconsistent with this high qua¬ 
 lity ; there is no history that requires it more 
 than that of the Church—so much admirable 
 
44 
 
 TOLERANCE OF PUSEYISM. 
 
 in the worst parts of it, so much imperfect 
 in the best! it is the history of all that is 
 deepest in humanity, and therefore of all 
 that is most vulnerable. Will not the man 
 who has studied Christianity in its different 
 influences on the men and nations, who have 
 composed the world-wide Catholic Church, 
 make more allowances for the difficulties of 
 others in receiving it than he who only 
 knows it in relation to his own mind, and 
 those of others of his own way of thinking? 
 Will not the man who has definite notions 
 of the functions and privileges of Church- 
 membership, be more likely to act freely in 
 other matters with men that differ from him 
 in this, than one who is thirsting for reli¬ 
 gious communion with all men on all occa¬ 
 sions? Does not the sober comfort which 
 characterises the spirit of the good Church¬ 
 man, incline him to mingle more familiarly 
 in the usual pursuits of others, and appre¬ 
 ciate their merits more fairly than can a man 
 who is always striving to infect others with 
 his own disquietude, and measuring their 
 
TOLERANCE OF PUSEYISM. 
 
 45 
 
 mental state and spiritual welfare by a 
 standard of his own ? Is it not a fact that 
 Catholic Churchmen are more tolerant than 
 Erastians, or Evangelicals, or Dissenters, in¬ 
 asmuch as the past of the Church has taught 
 them that persecution defeats its own ob¬ 
 jects, and that the best chance of getting 
 others into a fit temper to receive the truth 
 is to show them how well it enables you to 
 sympathize with them in all the wants and 
 feelings of your common mortality ? Perhaps 
 too one other cause of the superior tolerance 
 of Churchmen is the feeling that the truth 
 they hold is not of their own finding, that 
 the attainment of it has not been an act of 
 the reason or the will, or of any of those 
 mental elements in which pride delights to 
 dwell, but that they must possess it in grati¬ 
 tude and humility, like any other good gift 
 of Providence: it would thus be just as 
 absurd to reproach any man with wanting 
 this blessing, as with a deficiency of health 
 or wealth: all you can do in such a case is 
 to offer the sufferer the means of improve- 
 
46 
 
 TOLERANCE OF PUSEYISM. 
 
 ment, and press them heartily upon him, 
 and in case of his refusal, of his determina¬ 
 tion to remain idle or self-indulgent, to leave 
 him to himself, in the hope that some other 
 sources of good may be given him. The 
 Churchman need not look upon other Chris¬ 
 tians, nor even upon Heathens, as in a state 
 of perdition (as has often been imputed to 
 those doctrines), but as being persons with 
 whose spiritual state he has nothing what¬ 
 ever to do : the covenant of Christianity 
 must, in some sense or other, be a special 
 one ; it must include some, and exclude 
 others, and he believes that it embraces only 
 the members of the visible and historical 
 Church; and, therefore, that however infi¬ 
 nite are the mercies of God, besides those 
 specially covenanted to the Church of Christ, 
 he cannot take upon himself to declare the 
 certain salvation of any one out of the pale 
 of that Church, at least in the sense which 
 the Church attaches to that word. But, 
 while he depreciates the assumption of reli¬ 
 gious communion, he will, if he be worthy 
 
TOLERANCE OF PUSEYISM. 
 
 47 
 
 of his name, only be more strongly conscious 
 of the obligations of human fraternity; and, 
 remembering what the union of varied ability 
 and knowledge with religious enthusiasm in 
 the Church has done for the education of 
 the poor, the promotion of learning, and the 
 mitigation of suffering, in the annals of the 
 past, reflect how much her character has 
 suffered, and her usefulness been impaired, 
 from a partial ministration of those offices 
 which, from their very nature, admit of no 
 other limitation than that of possibility. 
 
 The charge of Popery, brought against the 
 Oxford Catholic writers, may be very dif¬ 
 ferently understood. It is probably seldom 
 
 p /v 
 
 meant to infer that those persons are, in 
 point of fact, disguised members of the 
 Church of Rome professing to be members 
 of the Church of England, although this 
 supposition would be hardly less extraor¬ 
 dinary than some that have been lately ven¬ 
 tured on the machinations of the Jesuits in 
 Ireland. The act of communion with the 
 Roman Church is as distinct and peculiar 
 
48 
 
 CHARGE OF POPERY. 
 
 as that of membership of any secular cor¬ 
 poration; and no man can; in strictness of 
 language; be called a Romanist before he has 
 been formally admitted into that part of the 
 Churchy which is subordinated to the Roman 
 see, any more than he can be called a member 
 of Parliament before the returning officer 
 pronounces him duly elected. The accusa¬ 
 tion; however; may loosely mean that these 
 doctrines are likely to lead men away from 
 the Church of England to the Church of 
 Rome; and to induce them to renounce one 
 allegiance; and accept another. An exami¬ 
 nation of the history of opinions would 
 rather lead to a contrary conclusion. Not¬ 
 withstanding the enormous counter-pressure 
 of Puritanism on the Church; and the pro¬ 
 bability of any refuge being acceptable from 
 its growing violence; it will not be found 
 that any body of men took; what seems to 
 some; the small step that separated the 
 Catholicism of Laud from the Roman sys¬ 
 tem : again; notwithstanding the expulsion 
 of the Nonjurors from their national 
 
CONVERSION TO ROMANISM. 
 
 49 
 
 Churchy they were contented to remain un¬ 
 connected Catholics, and did not seek any 
 compensation for the loss of what they be¬ 
 lieved a communion of perfect truth, in what 
 they had been accustomed to consider as a 
 communion of partial error: how much less 
 then should an English Catholic, in these 
 days, be inclined to the Church of Rome, 
 when he has not only his own Church, safe 
 and strong, to adhere to, but the prospect 
 of helping, by his preaching and practice, to 
 remedy what seem to him its defects and short¬ 
 comings, when an apostacy could only give 
 him what he believes to have got already, and 
 must injure the cause he has most at heart ? 
 
 An Englishman becoming a Roman Ca¬ 
 tholic, either knows nothing about or de¬ 
 spairs of the Church of England. The 
 former is the more common alternative; a 
 man joins the Roman Catholic Church, be¬ 
 cause he does not know that he may be a 
 good Catholic in the Church of England: 
 Catholic principles, Catholic practices, Ca¬ 
 tholic uses of the imagination and affections, 
 
 E 
 
50 CONVERSION TO ROMANISM. 
 
 are matters of spiritual necessity for his well¬ 
 being ; show him only that he can hold those 
 principles and enjoy those practices, and 
 exercise his imagination and affections in 
 religious matters, in the Church of England, 
 and it is very unlikely that he will adopt the 
 resolution (which at any time must be most 
 painful to his feelings as a citizen) of for¬ 
 mally abjuring the national religion, and 
 attaching himself to a communion which 
 must always wear for him a foreign aspect 
 and uncongenial colouring. And the fact 
 is here as elsewhere in history; there have 
 not been conversions from Puseyism to Ro¬ 
 manism, while there have been conversions, 
 and numerous ones, to Romanism from ultra- 
 Protestantism : there are noted instances 
 of men of excitable temper, who, after the 
 intemperate assertions and unchristian bear¬ 
 ing of no-popery zealots, have, from sheer 
 disgust at the unfairness with which the 
 Church of Rome was treated, thrown them¬ 
 selves passionately on her bosom and clung 
 to her as their own: and there are still 
 
CONVERSION TO ROMANISM. 
 
 51 
 
 more frequent examples of minds all but 
 absorbed by the magnificence of the Roman 
 system, by the nobility of that theocratic 
 idea before which princes trembled and the 
 wild passion of multitudes became still, by 
 the comprehension of that theology, which 
 has ranged through every tract of intel¬ 
 lect, imagination, and affection, and given to 
 each its province and employment, and by 
 the infinite variety of those symbols, in which 
 the Church has complied with the conditions 
 of our shaded nature, and attempted to give 
 to spiritual truth an external world of its own, 
 
 —but they have caught in time the solemn 
 voices of those who warned them, that all of 
 this which was in truth religious dwelt in 
 the Church of England, if they would only 
 look for it there, and that they had no more 
 right to renounce their obligations to her, for 
 the sake of the accessorial luxuries which 
 Romanism offered to their fancy and thought, 
 than to violate any other duty for the grati¬ 
 fication of the senses. 
 
 As a mere nickname, the word Papist or 
 
 e 2 
 
 UUKaki 
 
 UNIVttfSITY OF II U*m 
 
52 
 
 PAPIST AND PROTESTANT. 
 
 Romanist is neither better nor worse than that 
 of Protestant: the former epithet indeed im¬ 
 plies that the object of it believes in some- 
 thing,at least in so much of Christianity as the 
 circumstance of the existence of the Roman 
 authority requires; but the term Protestant is 
 absolutely negative, and supposes necessarily 
 no belief at all: a Jew or an infidel protests 
 not only against the abuses of a certain sys¬ 
 tem of Christianity, but against Christianity 
 itself. That name is surely defective which 
 predicates nothing of an opinion maintained, 
 but simply of the rejection of some other opi¬ 
 nion. In serious speech or writing, the word 
 can have no other legitimate meaning than 
 what refers to the Protestation of the Ger¬ 
 man princes, against the decree of the diet at 
 Spier in 1529, and the Augsbourg Confes¬ 
 sion which followed it. 
 
 But the Catholic party in the Church of 
 England have never for one moment dis¬ 
 avowed their belief that the light in which 
 Romanism is popularly regarded in England 
 is both historically and theologically untrue. 
 
NO-POPERY IN ENGLAND. 
 
 53 
 
 Perhaps all strong popular impressions on 
 religious subjects carry much alloy along with 
 them, and thus the fanaticism of a Church is 
 never half so dangerous as the fanaticism of a 
 People. Yet would no wise and good man pur¬ 
 posely affront the no-popery feeling in this 
 country. It is one of those traditionary sen¬ 
 timents which has deeply seated itself, and 
 twisted its roots into the crevices of many 
 wrongs. To judge from the facility with which 
 the rough hand of the Reformation in England 
 did its work, it seems unlikely that Roman¬ 
 ism, in its distinctive peculiarities, had ever 
 heartily engaged the popular heart and ima¬ 
 gination. Heylin can only give the instance 
 of one man killed by the peasants in Corn¬ 
 wall in attempting to despoil a church: and 
 the successful resistance offered by parish¬ 
 ioners in arms to Somerset’s scheme of de¬ 
 molishing the parish church of Westminster, 
 to build his palace (after he had been dis¬ 
 appointed of his design on the Abbey) was 
 unfortunately a singular case. It is intel¬ 
 ligible too that the Puritanism of the first 
 
54 
 
 ITS MEANING. 
 
 Revolution should have had something in 
 the form of it attractive to the popular 
 mind: it had at least a theoretic connexion 
 with civil liberty : it professed to break 
 the chains of Prelacy, as the Reformation 
 had done those of Popery; and it is no new 
 spectacle to see a people rejoicing in their 
 freedom from one set of fetters, unconscious 
 that the liberating hand has riveted on them 
 the pledges of a still sharper bondage. 
 Henceforth too in English history, Dissent 
 has always claimed to itself an alliance with 
 the principles of civil freedom: Prelacy and 
 Popery have never indeed since that time 
 been identified in public opinion, but it is 
 not difficult to trace the Puritan principle 
 as the foundation of that terror of Romanism 
 which is still to be found intertwined with 
 a great deal of what is deepest and truest in 
 the piety of the nation. The only mode in 
 which a just perception of the relations of 
 the case can be substituted for this inde¬ 
 finite sense of repulsion, is, not abstract¬ 
 edly to defend, or show that there is any- 
 
ITS REMEDY. 
 
 55 
 
 thing defensible in, the peculiarities of Ro¬ 
 manism, but to force upon the conviction 
 that there is truth common to the two 
 Churches, that there are associations of 
 common interest between them, that there 
 is a common ground from which they must 
 both start to come to any satisfactory conclu¬ 
 sion, that it is a source of humble gratitude, 
 not of pride, that we have retrieved the true 
 principles of the Church without the abuses 
 to which Romanism has been subject, and 
 that, in these days of doubt and difficulty, to 
 separate ourselves utterly from the sympa¬ 
 thies of those other Churches which consti¬ 
 tute the integral mass of the Christian world, 
 is to perpetuate instead of counteract the 
 accidental evils of the Reformation, and re¬ 
 duce the Church of England to the position 
 of one sect among many. When the violence 
 of the French revolution had thrown on our 
 hospitable shores so many exiles of the Gal- 
 lican clergy, the feeling of Christian frater¬ 
 nity broke through the national prejudice; 
 and, although the especial Church, of which 
 
56 
 
 FRENCH REVOLUTION. 
 
 they were ministers, had sunk to a low depth 
 of dishonour and dependence, yet the public 
 voice, audible in the sermons of Horsley and 
 other leading divines, and in the general 
 expressions of sympathy, showed that every 
 thing was forgotten in the consciousness that 
 those men were our brothers-in-arms against 
 the insanity of Atheism, which was loose for 
 destruction in their native land. When 
 again, by the chief agency of English power, 
 the struggle was terminated, and the Pope 
 restored to his ancient home, the satisfaction 
 at the prospect of general peace does not 
 seem to have been diminished in England 
 by any scruples of conscience or prognosti¬ 
 cations of evil at having re-established an 
 authority which was considered conducive to 
 the interest of social order in Europe. But, 
 notwithstanding these occasional repressions, 
 there is no denying that the no-popery sen¬ 
 timent remained, and is still vivid and active 
 in a large portion of the English community 
 (to say nothing of the stronger case of Scot¬ 
 land) ; and if Great Britain had been polled 
 
REFORMATION IN IRELAND. 
 
 57 
 
 on the question of Catholic Emancipation, 
 it is all but certain that those claims would 
 not have been acknowledged. The only rea¬ 
 sonable hope, as has been before stated, of 
 restricting this feeling within the bounds of 
 historical truth and theological justice, lies 
 in the assertion and expansion of Church 
 principles, in the substitution of a large and 
 clear view for a vague and narrow one, in the 
 application of improving popular intelligence 
 to Catholic history, Catholic spirit, and Ca¬ 
 tholic aspirations. 
 
 It is needless to state with what additional 
 force all these remarks apply to the present 
 state of Ireland. The attempt at the Reforma¬ 
 tion of the Roman Catholic Church in that 
 country has indisputably failed. The endow¬ 
 ments of the state and the labours of zealous 
 men have been alike fruitless in this work, 
 and the English Church remains, as it began, 
 the Church of the Irish proprietors, not of the 
 Irish people. Now that the payment of the 
 Church falls on the landowner alone, who is 
 very rarely Roman-Catholic, the political 
 
58 
 
 REFORMATION IN IRELAND. 
 
 grievance is altogether removed; but there 
 still remains the phenomenon of the unpro¬ 
 gressive character of the purer faith, for which 
 the historical relations of England and Ireland 
 are hardly satisfactory reasons. If the means 
 that have been employed had been the right 
 means, it is hardly conjecturable that the 
 Roman Church in Ireland would not at least 
 have been affected by the influence of the Eng¬ 
 lish, or could have remained so little uninflu¬ 
 enced by the intellectual and moral progress 
 of the world. Dean Swift, who saw as far as 
 most men, always speaks of Popery as all but 
 extinguished in Ireland; the present priests he 
 represents as dying off, states that of course no 
 fresh ones will be licensed, and that, for want 
 of open ministrations, the faith itself must 
 rapidly perish :—the event is somewhat dif¬ 
 ferent from his expectations, and the Roman 
 Catholic clergy of Ireland remain, in their 
 tone of mind and measure of intelligence, a 
 huge fragment, as it were, which the stream 
 of the Middle Ages has there left behind it, 
 and which no machinery of ours can get out 
 
REFORMATION IN IRELAND. 
 
 59 
 
 of the way. Alexander Knox (in a letter to 
 Wilberforce on the Roman-Catholic Church 
 in Ireland) says, “ having before us a per- 
 “ fectly organized Church, whose formation 
 “ at the first, and, still more, its sustenance 
 “ to this hour, never could be the result of 
 ctf human will, and whose dissolution we, at 
 “ least, have no means of achieving, why 
 “ should we not set ourselves as much as 
 “ possible to meliorate what in fact we can- 
 not destroy?” This is the method of re¬ 
 formation consistent with Catholic princi¬ 
 ples, and hence arises the intense interest to 
 us of the question, what are those distinctive 
 points in the Church of England which ex¬ 
 clude members of the Church of Rome, and 
 what prospect of the possible union of the 
 Churches a faithful son of the Church of 
 England can admit. Since the first ener¬ 
 gies of the Reformation were spent, the pro¬ 
 gress of Protestantism has been slow indeed: 
 not by their own strength, but by a schism 
 in the bosom of Catholicism itself, were the 
 continental Protestants saved from reabsorp- 
 
60 REFORMATION OF ROMANISM. 
 
 tion into the Roman Catholic Church in the 
 17th century; and, terrible as has been the 
 trial to which Romanism has been subjected 
 by the French Revolution and its conse¬ 
 quences, it has shown a vitality which mere 
 Protestantism can never expect to destroy. 
 If the Roman Church is to be reformed 
 in Ireland or elsewhere, it must be by 
 some process different from what has been 
 hitherto tried. Even without this expe¬ 
 rience we might have suspected that the 
 conditions of the question would be so 
 changed by the progress of three centuries, 
 as to require some other treatment than what 
 was then effectual: the abuses to be rectified 
 are, in themselves, not the same as what were 
 then prominent; and even if they were so, 
 it would not follow that what were then 
 sufficient remedies are so now. Points which, 
 then taken in a literal signification, were in¬ 
 jurious and immoral, may now be so explained 
 as to seem satisfactory, or at least innocent. 
 The scholastic philosophy, the storehouse of 
 Roman error, no longer forces on the mind 
 
PRESENT ROMANISM. 
 
 61 
 
 the pitiless deductions of its universal logic, 
 while theology is every day opening out new 
 interpretations and confirmations of Ca¬ 
 tholic truth : a Roman-Catholic philoso¬ 
 pher of southern Germany finds his ortho¬ 
 doxy no barrier to his widest metaphysical 
 speculations, and partiality in the treat¬ 
 ment of ecclesiastical history is no longer a 
 peculiarity of Roman-Catholic historians. The 
 temporal power of the Papacy, reduced to 
 a very modest principality, itself too large 
 in the eyes of those pious Romanists, who 
 feel that its retention implicates their spiri¬ 
 tual Head in mean diplomatic intrigues and 
 hampers the free moral developement of 
 his authority, can no longer be declaimed 
 against as dangerous to human liberality: 
 as a conservative power, as a check to the 
 revolutionary movement, the influence of 
 Rome is still perceived throughout the con¬ 
 tinent,—but this is rather the necessary effect 
 of the principles of social order and self- 
 restraint implied in Church-government, 
 than any exercise of especial power. It has 
 
62 
 
 ROMANISM IN THE 
 
 required a long and sad series of political 
 incongruities to drive the Roman Catholics 
 of the British empire into an alliance with 
 the desires of change and the intentions of 
 resistance. 
 
 It is also now understood that the evils 
 which the Reformation had at heart to 
 remedy lie far deeper in human nature than 
 was contemplated by the spiritual physicians 
 of the time : the English Church detects 
 in itself, and labours to correct many of the 
 very errors which the reformers protested 
 against in the Roman. The practice of 
 habitual Confession is discontinued; but, 
 the worst part of it, the morbid habit of 
 mind superinduced by continual introspec¬ 
 tion, the restless comparison of one’s own 
 spiritual state with that of others, the dwel¬ 
 ling upon and realizing, as it were, bad 
 thoughts and evil imaginations, those de¬ 
 moniac shadows which may flit across the 
 brightest spirit, and the consequent absence 
 of the cheerful and trustful faith which 
 should distinguish a child of the Church,—all 
 
 7 
 
CHURCH OF ENGLAND. 
 
 63 
 
 this is still amongst us, to be reproved and 
 relieved. Pictures and Statues are no longer 
 objects of religious reverence, but Words, 
 which also are images of thought and sensi¬ 
 ble representations of ideas, are our common 
 and unsuspected idols;—the dead letter of the 
 Scripture receives the same unintelligent 
 regard that was paid to the dead wood and 
 stone; prayers are uttered without a cor¬ 
 responding internal consciousness, just as 
 crucifixes or scapulae were unmeaningly 
 worn: and the Liturgy of the Church of Eng¬ 
 land is listened to by the majority of every 
 congregation with as little appreciation of 
 its connection of parts, of the mutual bearing 
 of its selections, of the separation or inter¬ 
 fusion of Christian doctrine and Judaic his¬ 
 tory, with as little knowledge of and insight 
 into the real thought expressed, and as little 
 intellectual sympathy, as ever was the Latin 
 mass by the Romanist people. The sacerdotal 
 influence no longer authoritatively interferes 
 with the sacred relations of private life ; but 
 the favourite Minister is frequently as care- 
 
64 
 
 ROMANISM IN THE 
 
 less of the high and separate functions of 
 his office, as ready to be the flatterer, or 
 class-leader, or spoiled child, or anything 
 but the Pastor of the individuals composing 
 his congregation, as ever could be the in¬ 
 triguing Confessor or sensual Priest. In 
 these and other points we too want our 
 Reformation. These weaknesses of our own 
 should facilitate the right understanding of 
 the difficulties of others; contemplation of 
 them should lead to that spirit of humility 
 and forbearance by which alone we can hope 
 to give effect to any attempt at reforming 
 other Churches : it is not by filching a mem¬ 
 ber from them here and there, it is not by dis¬ 
 turbing the faith in one view of the Church, 
 where we cannot be sure of substituting 
 another which we believe to be better, it is 
 not by appeals to past abuses, which it only 
 requires a certain amount of information 
 and cleverness for others to recriminate on 
 ourselves, that we can in any way better the 
 condition of the Church of Rome and its 
 members: the hopes of this work rest on 
 
THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND. 
 
 65 
 
 the true application of Catholic principles, 
 admitting freely all that is historically true 
 and theologically fair, refusing earnestly 
 all that is partial, local, and accidental, when 
 it claims to be universal, and showing that 
 we value aright their great, though we think 
 unsuccessful, care, in preserving purity of 
 doctrine, inasmuch as we, for the sake of 
 that purity, have sacrificed the advantages 
 and comforts of the visible Catholic unity. 
 “ Religious changes,” writes Mr. Newman, 
 “to be beneficial, should be the act of the 
 whole bpdy; they are worth little if they are 
 the mere act of a majority. No good can 
 come of any change which is not heartfelt; 
 a development of feelings springing up freely 
 and calmly within the bosom of the whole 
 body itself.” 
 
 This passage occurs in the introduction 
 to No. 90 of the “ Tracts for the Times,” 
 an essay which has attracted more attention 
 and excited more hostility than could have 
 been the case, had the questions of which 
 it treats been better understood by reli- 
 
 F 
 
66 
 
 THE ARTICLES. 
 
 gious communities in England. There are 
 indeed some who, knowing or suspecting 
 that the subject of the legitimate interpreta¬ 
 tion of the Articles admits of a good deal of 
 dispute, dislike to see it mooted at all, and 
 would be very glad that the subscription 
 should go on in as quiet and latitudinarian a 
 way as possible. But the great objection to 
 this is, that the liberty here is all on one side; 
 —a man may believe less than the framers of 
 the Articles did, but he must take care not 
 to believe more, for in that case he must not 
 subscribe them: Calvinist and Arminian may 
 find room and range enough within them, 
 but any one feeling with Laud on Ceremo¬ 
 nies, or with Hooker on Transubstantiation, 
 or with Hammond on the Infallibility of 
 Councils, must look elsewhere for a religious 
 communion and home. Now it is a plain in¬ 
 disputable truth, that a Catholic tone of feel¬ 
 ing has arisen very generally in England, 
 especially among younger men : whether the 
 opportunities they have had of witnessing the 
 developments of Catholic feeling on the Con- 
 
CATHOLIC FEELINGS. 
 
 67 
 
 tinent, in art and literature, in public institu¬ 
 tions, and historical associations, have had this 
 effect, or whether it arises from some subtle 
 and interior action of the spirit of the time, is 
 of no importance : the fact is before us, and 
 shows itself in a thousand ways : it appears 
 in the enjoyment of mediaeval literature, the 
 appreciation of the early painters and musical 
 composers T ,the interest in ecclesiastical archi¬ 
 tecture, the anxiety about questions of Church 
 government and discipline, and, above all, in 
 the yearning for something which their own 
 hands have not made, nor their own hearts 
 imagined, for something which comprehends 
 the memories of the past, the energies of the 
 present, and the aspirations of the future, 
 for something which shall be indeed binding 
 upon them—a Religion, not a Philosophy,— 
 for something which shall give to the mind 
 that full area of freedom which cannot co¬ 
 exist with the restrictions of continual doubt 
 
 1 The establishment of the Motett Society for the culti¬ 
 vation of the music of Palestrina and his contemporaries 
 is certainly in this spirit. 
 
 F 2 
 
68 
 
 CATHOLIC FEELINGS. 
 
 and danger, for some certain and palpable 
 barrier, on which to lean and rest, when, sick 
 and weary, they reach the frontier of possible 
 speculation. This train of feeling will pro¬ 
 bably lead any man to the consideration of 
 the Catholic Church: he will regard with 
 deep individual interest that historical miracle 
 of permanence and power, sustaining itself 
 through all the tempests of time, with king¬ 
 doms and empires, and even nations, in ruin 
 about it, and bearing much the same rela¬ 
 tion to other institutions that the spiritual 
 does to the natural world: he will see the 
 principle of succession therein developed, if 
 not in literal completeness, at least so much 
 more perfectly than history can show else¬ 
 where, and calling into play all the reverential 
 sentiments of legitimacy, right, and property, 
 by which the present becomes the solemn 
 point of confluence between the past and 
 future; and thus he will be compelled to 
 dwell more on the series of events as a whole 
 than on any particular or local portion of 
 them. Such a condition of mind implies a 
 
CATHOLIC FEELINGS. 
 
 69 
 
 desire to embrace within its Christian scheme 
 as much as it can of the universal action of 
 Christianity on mankind, and will with pain 
 altogether eliminate all or any of the media, 
 through which this principle has passed, in its 
 long course of operations. If ancient Rome 
 be a due object of regard as the mother of 
 civility and law, surely the influences of 
 modern Rome are not less valuable and 
 important, nor can the violences of the one 
 nor the corruptions of the other annul the 
 justice of their claims. If the effects of the 
 love and contemplation of Art be ennobling 
 and purifying, is it likely that they will be less 
 so, when the subjects to which Art is applied 
 are of the most sacred and affecting character; 
 and should not one of Raphael’s Madonnas 
 deserve better of a Christian man than a 
 Venus by Titian, or a Village-dance by 
 Teniers ? If all men are allowed to entertain 
 a retrospective sympathy for those who have 
 given proof of their earnest conviction of 
 the truths which they themselves hold, if 
 young minds are directed to what are called 
 
70 
 
 CASES OF CONSCIENCE. 
 
 classical examples of virtue, if the blankest 
 and bleakest philosophy has its heroes, and 
 even atheism its saints, a Christian may as¬ 
 suredly be very unwilling to break off from 
 that chain of association with the martyrs and 
 confessors and men of signal holiness, which 
 has been kept extended, link by link, through 
 ecclesiastical history, and may desire to 
 realise that idea of communion which super¬ 
 sedes the conditions of time and space, and 
 gives to the local habitation and name of 
 the Church something of the inexpressible 
 nature of eternity. 
 
 These samples of feeling are sufficient for 
 the purpose of showing, that, from the fre¬ 
 quent reaction against the sceptical character 
 of this period of thought, there will arise 
 cases of conscience with regard to the prin¬ 
 ciples of the Church of England, which, ac¬ 
 cording to the rubric, any “ discreet and 
 learned minister of God’s word” may be 
 called on to decide, and on the decision 
 of which will depend the continuance in, 
 or exclusion from, the communion of the 
 
CASES OF CONSCIENCE. 
 
 71 
 
 Church of England of the persons inter¬ 
 ested. The relaxation of the practice of 
 excommunication does not at all change the 
 conditions of the question : every Church 
 is bound to resolve difficulties of conscience, 
 as to whether the holding certain doctrines 
 and certain opinions does or does not exclude 
 the holder from its terms of communion, just 
 as much as any magistrate is bound to in¬ 
 form any person asking of him whether a 
 certain act be or be not contrary to law. 
 It cannot be said that casuistry is a dead 
 science: as long as men have scruples of con¬ 
 science, and as long as there is a Church 
 which takes cognizance of any matters of con¬ 
 science, so long must casuistry be studied and 
 required. The extent to which it was carried 
 in the Roman Church, an extent which went 
 to coarsen, if not to destroy, that divine tact 
 of right and wrong which is the very spirit of 
 holiness and purity, “ the light that lighteth 
 every man that cometh into the world,” and 
 to divert mental attention from motives to 
 actions, was owing rather to the fatal passion 
 
72 
 
 ROMAN CASUISTRY. 
 
 of system and the morbid anatomy of the 
 scholastic morality, than to the mere exercise 
 of Confession, though it was there that the 
 evil was especially displayed. Men, chilled 
 and hardened against sensual impressions by 
 an education which began with infancy and 
 lasted through life, placed above or apart 
 from others by the omnipotence of un¬ 
 broken habits, analysed passions and appe¬ 
 tites as closely and impartially as if they 
 were dealing with chemical properties, pro¬ 
 bably quite unconscious that they were thus 
 bringing out into distinct and formal life 
 those baser portions of humanity which gain 
 strength by their very utterance, and which 
 should be left to moulder away in silence 
 and shame. On the danger of these refine¬ 
 ments in doctrinal matters Pascal has said 
 all that is just, and perhaps something more; 
 but the case with which the Church of 
 England has here to deal requires rather 
 accuracy of knowledge than subtlety of dis¬ 
 tinction. In deciding whether or not men 
 of these Catholic feelings and inclinations 
 
THE ARTICLES. 
 
 73 
 
 can conscientiously remain in her commu¬ 
 nion, the sense and authority of the Articles 
 will be the first point of inquiry. Now it is 
 equally certain that the framers of the Arti¬ 
 cles had no decidedly anti-Catholic intentions 
 in drawing up the Articles, and that during 
 the first years of Elizabeths reign, a large 
 body of Catholics outwardly conformed to the 
 Church of England without any formal sepa¬ 
 ration from that of Rome. It is also clear that 
 there are in the Articles statements of fact 
 at variance with indisputable historical truth, 
 and enunciations of opinion difficult to re¬ 
 concile with the Prayer-book and Homilies. 
 If then the increased knowledge and purified 
 reasoning of this intellectual period should 
 bring men to the conviction that certain pro¬ 
 positions of the Articles are absolutely anti- 
 Catholic, and attributable to and explicable 
 by the accidental circumstances under which 
 they were drawn up,—to compel the renun¬ 
 ciation of such a conviction, in the absence 
 of Convocation, or any competent tribunal, 
 to pronounce ex cathedra on the question, is 
 
74 
 
 AUTHORITY OF ROME. 
 
 just the same thing as the Church of Romeos 
 insisting on adherence to the palpable errors 
 of the Vulgate. 
 
 If, for instance, a man believes that he 
 can trace all through the history of the 
 Church a certain deference, less or greater, 
 to the Roman See,—if he finds faithful 
 members of the Church of England, and 
 even such a one as King James the First, 
 who assuredly had sufficient regard for his 
 royal independence, offering to recognize 
 the Roman Patriarchate,—if he thinks 
 that some central authority, without being 
 absolute, would be conducive to good 
 discipline and unity in the Church, and 
 if a recognition of this power appears to 
 him to give an integrity and full meaning 
 to the history of the world, making the 
 brute forces of ancient Rome a necessary 
 preface to the spiritual influences of the 
 modern empire,—is, or is not, this speculative 
 opinion sufficient to exclude a conscientious 
 man from the Church of England, because 
 the Article states the single fact, “ that the 
 
IMAGES AND RELICS. 
 
 75 
 
 Bishop of Rome hath no jurisdiction in 
 this realm of England,” a fact which he 
 has no intention whatever of denying, and 
 which he well knows cannot fairly be de¬ 
 nied? 
 
 To take another case:—the twenty-second 
 Article declares the futility and inanity and 
 unscripturalness of the Romish doctrine con¬ 
 cerning purgatory, pardons, worshipping of 
 images and relics, and invocation of saints: 
 does this forbid an Anglo-Catholic to have 
 any opinions whatever on these subjects? 
 The phrase in the original Article of 1552, 
 was “the doctrine of the Scholastics,” and 
 Hey, Norrisian professor at Cambridge, in 
 his Lectures published 1798, writes, that 
 “if the old expression had continued, the 
 Romanists might have said, we do not 
 defend the doctrines of the school-men in 
 every particular; the present expression 
 confines all dispute to the doctrines which 
 the Romanists professed, whatever those 
 were, and it denotes the degree of each 
 actually existing: so that it would not avail 
 
76 
 
 IMAGES AND RELICS. 
 
 for the Romanists to defend some regard 
 for sacred painting or sculpture, some re¬ 
 spect for real relics, except they could defend 
 what actually appeared in Popish countries 
 relating to one or the other, when the Article 
 was made 1 P It would not therefore appear 
 that the Church of England has pronounced 
 its opinion dogmatically in denial of an In¬ 
 termediate state, but has merely declared that 
 particular notion of Purgatory, “ which had 
 become the Indies to the Pope,” to be a vain 
 belief and untrue. On the subject of Images 
 and Relics, a sound reasoner will feel the great 
 importance of keeping distinct the two propo¬ 
 sitions, the thing represented, and the mode 
 in which the representation is regarded. The 
 unlawfulness of any sensible representation 
 at all of sacred things, and even of the human 
 form, as being in part divine, has ever been a 
 strong religious feeling in the eastern part of 
 the world: among the stricter Jews, and after¬ 
 wards among the larger part of the disciples 
 
 1 Book TV. art. xxii. sec. 8. 
 
IMAGES AND RELICS. 
 
 77 
 
 of Mahomet^ it was a point of faith, and its 
 operation has been successful in suppressing 
 all Art, wherever it has obtained. Early Chris¬ 
 tianity would naturally partake of this im¬ 
 pression, although there must have been a 
 great division of feeling on the subject be¬ 
 tween the Jewish and Grecian or Roman 
 converts. The imagination of the latter 
 must have sought for those sensible repre¬ 
 sentations, in which invisible things had 
 always been figured forth to them ; and the 
 attempt to realize, by Symbols and Art, the 
 person and events of the life of Christ, must 
 have been early made 1 . A western Christian, 
 about to die for his refusal to worship the 
 national gods, would have pressed to his 
 lips and heart in thankful energy any image 
 or sensible remembrance of that Lord for 
 whom he was suffering, in the same way as 
 one, who had seen and heard Him upon 
 earth, would recal every such circumstance to 
 sustain him through his trial. The differ- 
 
 1 As, for example, in the Roman Catacombs. 
 
78 
 
 IMAGES AND RELICS. 
 
 ence of sentiment on this subject, however, 
 burst out into open strife under the rule of 
 Leo the Isaurian, who, educated by a Jewish 
 mother, and stimulated by the example of 
 the Caliph Jezid, who had just destroyed 
 all the images in Syria, determined to con¬ 
 form the usages of the Christian world to his 
 Hebrew model. It is not surprising that this 
 man should have seen no distinction between 
 the Idols or fanciful representations of false 
 gods, and the Images or Symbols of the Per¬ 
 son and Life of the true, when, in a period 
 of history so much further advanced, the 
 iconoclast spirit of the Reformation applied 
 all the denunciations of the Old Testament 
 against the idol-gods of the heathen, to every 
 visible or audible medium by which the wor¬ 
 ship of Christ was facilitated and promoted. 
 If Leo had succeeded in his object, Chris¬ 
 tian Art, with its gracious and civilizing in¬ 
 fluences, would never have existed: and when 
 w r e look at the religious, social, and political 
 state of that part of Christendom which 
 yielded to this notion, it is impossible to say 
 
IMAGES AND RELICS. 
 
 79 
 
 how much of their backwardness and degra¬ 
 dation the Greek and Russo-Greek Churches, 
 and the countries under their spiritual au¬ 
 thority, owe to their contempt for the sense 
 of the Beautiful; and it must not be here 
 forgotten, that the blindest adoration of 
 outward form is to be found in those very 
 Churches which have most condemned the 
 appliances of Art to Religion. It may be 
 said, with much truth, that the English 
 mind is unapt for the reception of strong 
 impressions from outward objects, that our 
 thoughtful nature cannot derive the same 
 benefit from the suggestions of sense that 
 is felt by the livelier spirit of the South. 
 And this peculiarity, whatever be its loss, 
 has this advantage,—that there can be no 
 fear of the English people attaching too 
 much value to external form. Such igno¬ 
 rant brutality, as threw down statues and 
 demolished shrines, and broke painted win¬ 
 dows, and made stables of cathedrals in 
 the Puritan Revolution,—or such inde¬ 
 cent legislation, as that Act of the third 
 
80 
 
 IMAGES AND RELICS. 
 
 year of James I., by which any Crucifix or 
 other Relic was to be defaced in open court 
 at the sessions and then restored to its 
 owner, can therefore be freely and candidly 
 condemned by an Anglo-Catholic, with¬ 
 out any fear of bad consequences on the 
 minds of the ignorant; yet, were it not for 
 the historical explanation of the Article above 
 alluded to, it might seem that a member of 
 the Church of England was unauthorized 
 to show any respect whatever to, or feel 
 any interest whatever in, the outward repre¬ 
 sentation or symbol of any person or thing, 
 however fit and orthodox an object of pious 
 veneration or holy sympathy. The legiti¬ 
 mate action and discipline of these feelings 
 will of course depend much more on the 
 power of imagination in the individual and 
 its regulation, than on any precise doctrinal 
 position, and their due subordination to more 
 purely spiritual principles is well provided 
 for in the character as well of the age as of 
 the nation: there is no fear of the strong 
 realities, among which we now live, giving 
 
EFFECTS OF PUSEYISM. 
 
 81 
 
 way before any imaginative or sentimental 
 delusions: regard to these sensible media 
 of devotion will, at the most, do no more 
 than revive the taste of Christian Art among 
 us, as has been done in the schools of Munich 
 and Dusseldorf,—prevent our Cathedrals 
 from falling into decay, or, what is as bad, 
 from being closed on the people and left 
 powerless for all those indirect influences 
 of good, which Art in architecture, as in other 
 provinces, exercises over the common mind, 
 —encourage our upper classes in the rea¬ 
 sonable ambition of leaving behind them 
 some such great artistic memorials as attest 
 the dignity of their ancestors, instead of 
 frittering away their wealth in unsystematic 
 liberality,—and preserve our new ecclesiasti¬ 
 cal edifices from a shapeless and offensive 
 nakedness, or, what is still worse, from in¬ 
 appropriate and unseemly decoration \ 
 
 The Catholic direction given by Puseyism 
 
 1 The only edifice raised in England of late years, that 
 can at all claim the name of a Cathedral, is that lately 
 erected in Leeds by the exertions of Dr. Hook. 
 
 G 
 
82 
 
 EFFECTS OF PUSEYISM. 
 
 to historical study, will produce effects of 
 much the same nature and extent: the original 
 languages of the Holy Writings will be more 
 largely and critically understood,—Germany 
 will no more be permitted to reign absolute 
 over ecclesiastical as over other literature, 
 and there will be a true, as there is a false, 
 neology,—the great treasures of continental 
 Biblical criticism will be no longer held 
 contraband in a system of divinity which, 
 accepting the Scriptures as the gift of the 
 Church, is averse to no inquiry into their true 
 interpretation and natural meaning, and does 
 not permit the truth or falsehood of a doc¬ 
 trine to depend on the veracity or tenor of any 
 single one or more particular paragraphs. 
 
 A few more observations, of a similar 
 tenor, on the tendencies of Puseyism will 
 fitly conclude this essay. A fear has been 
 expressed that the direction of the reli¬ 
 gious mind to historical and external circum¬ 
 stances will generate a spirit of formalism, 
 and check the free flow of inner earnest¬ 
 ness, which is the life-blood of piety. What- 
 
EFFECTS OF PUSEYISM. 
 
 83 
 
 ever danger there may be on this score, it is 
 hardly greater than that already incurred in 
 the Evangelical system, which is surely not 
 
 without its strict formalism, and that one 
 
 \ 
 
 not of those forms which experience and the 
 wisdom of ages have pronounced to be fit 
 moulds for the Christian feeling to be cast in, 
 but of any which are invented and insisted 
 on by the fashion or fancy of the serious 
 world. If the peril has been escaped in the 
 one case, it will in the other, and perhaps in 
 neither is it so great as might at first sight 
 appear. 
 
 Our age has been frequently accused of 
 IndifFerentism, and if this were true, a pe¬ 
 dantry of forms would be its natural ac¬ 
 companiment ; but this charge will not bear 
 examination. Compare this our generation 
 with that on which the French Revolution 
 fell, compare the whole tone of thought, the 
 whole temper of inquiry: words have so 
 grown in meaning, that they are hardly recog¬ 
 nised by those who knew them of old; some 
 indeed have utterly changed their sense with 
 
 g2 
 
84 
 
 EFFECTS OF PUSEYISM. 
 
 that of the idea they represented, and others 
 which served for the vaguest generalities are 
 tied down to a precision unattainable before. 
 We rather run the risk of being over-earnest, 
 of treading down the graces of civilisation, 
 of treating as hollow all things we have not 
 weighed in our own balance, of plucking 
 away too rudely the mask of folly and false¬ 
 hood, and affrightening more susceptible na¬ 
 tures by the strange physiognomies revealed. 
 We are born despisers of the past, sons of 
 the future, and it is only by influences similar 
 to Puseyism that we can poise ourselves on 
 the present, as becomes reasoning men, look¬ 
 ing before and after, and this not in Religion 
 alone, but also in Science and Literature, in 
 Politics and Philosophy. 
 
 There are too many countervailing forces 
 at work to make Puseyism ever dangerous 
 to the intellectual liberty of the people of . 
 England. One of its first demonstrations 
 will be the removal of religious interference 
 from matters of a purely secular nature, such 
 as elementary education, and the distribution 
 
 7 
 
EFFECTS OF PUSEYISM. 
 
 85 
 
 of charity. No Churchman of these days 
 will ever pretend to exclude others, not 
 Churchmen, from the advantage of reading 
 or writing, or to make any selection of them 
 in his charitable donations; yet he will not 
 assent to any other religious teaching but 
 that which he believes to be true, and thus 
 that confused and indeterminate intrusion of 
 religious matters into circumstances, where 
 they only derange and embitter, will, as far 
 as he is able, be discouraged and avoided. 
 
 The use of these clear distinctions in 
 questions of the relations of Church and 
 State is undeniable: a high-Churchman will 
 protest to his utmost against the interference 
 of the State in ecclesiastical rights and 
 arrangements, but will readily admit of 
 State-authority in the disposition and dis¬ 
 tribution of such temporalities as the State 
 has conferred, as far as the State has a legiti¬ 
 mate hold over any corporate property. In 
 arguing these subjects he will constantly 
 keep in mind that the Church, of which he 
 is politically speaking, is a political institu- 
 
86 
 
 EFFECTS OF PUSEYISM. 
 
 tion, liable to political vicissitudes, and 
 amenable to political authority; but that the 
 Catholic Church of Christ, of which this 
 Church is but an outward and visible sign, 
 remains unaffected by such changes and 
 chances, and preserves through all of them 
 its apostolic power and its universal tradi¬ 
 tion. Keeping these things separate, he will 
 in Parliament advocate the claims of the Es¬ 
 tablished Church on grounds rather moral 
 than 0 religious; he will dwell on the supe¬ 
 riority of her organization, on the advantages 
 of her discipline, on the dignity of her social 
 position, on the intellectual claims of her 
 ministers, and the reasonable character of 
 her ministrations. But to a religious au¬ 
 dience he will put forth the real pretensions 
 of the Church of England to be what she is, 
 the sole just grounds of her predominance 
 over other Christian bodies, the only tenable 
 foundation on which she can really meet 
 and grapple with Dissent, the assertion that 
 she has something which they have not and 
 cannot have, that she can confer on her 
 
ANGLICAN THEOLOGY. 
 
 87 
 
 members spiritual benefits which they can¬ 
 not on theirs; that there is a plain positive 
 difference of fact between her and them, 
 namely, that they are voluntary and acci¬ 
 dental societies, and she the Apostolic and 
 Catholic Church. 
 
 They who hesitate to declare themselves 
 partakers of these views, would do well to 
 consider whether the Church of England 
 can go on any longer without some system 
 of theology that rests on a scientific basis, 
 and maintains itself by at least probable 
 arguments. Are our formularies to be con¬ 
 sistently understood ? Are we to be left to 
 schools of doctrine, clearly heterogeneous and 
 arbitrary, without rule of faith to guide, or 
 method of interpretation to follow, content to 
 adopt one dogma, and to reject its necessary 
 consequent ? Are we not required to give 
 logical and clear-headed men reasons why 
 they should rather be Churchmen than Dis¬ 
 senters? Are we to attempt to systematize 
 and complete the Anglican theology as we 
 have received it from the Fathers of our 
 
88 
 
 PRINCIPLE OF SUBMISSION. 
 
 Church, or to give up the task altogether 
 as hopeless, and confining ourselves to 
 pressing practical duties, leave all articles 
 of doctrine and speculation to the hazards 
 of public opinion and the general dispen¬ 
 sation of Providence ? The sea of discus¬ 
 sion on which we are afloat is certainly wide, 
 but is that a reason why we should throw 
 ourselves overboard ? 
 
 Without doubt the revival of Catholic 
 principles in England will be abused by 
 weak or evil minds; there are those who 
 will distil from them only violence and hate, 
 ignorance and restriction; there are those 
 who will find in them only sources of gratifi¬ 
 cation to puerile vanity or personal caprice; 
 there are those who will pervert sacred 
 authority into an unholy domination, by 
 accepting the powers they confer without 
 feeling the responsibilities they impose : and 
 therefore it is well that these principles con¬ 
 tain an element of unconditional submission 
 to ecclesiastical rule which will effectually 
 check any extravagant excursions of indi- 
 
PRINCIPLE OF SUBMISSION. 89 
 
 vidual fancy and any illegitimate assumptions 
 of individual will. How safe are they from 
 these perils, how secure of a sane and prac¬ 
 tical course, when the expression of the 
 desire of a single Bishop is sufficient to arrest 
 at once that series of “Tracts for the Times/ 5 
 which has been the chief literary agent in 
 the Catholic movement, because a single 
 number has somewhat affronted the preju¬ 
 dices and passions of the hour, and when it 
 is left to an undistinguished and uncon¬ 
 nected layman to offer apologetically to 
 public notice this one Tract more! 
 
 THE END. 
 
 Gilbert & Rivington Printers, St. John’s Square, London, 
 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
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