But, above all things, he loved 'a story' and he could tell it—as
such an historical novel as Theodora Phranza, which tells the
fall of Christian Constantinople, evidences—with the best of
them.
such an historical novel as Theodora Phranza, which tells the
fall of Christian Constantinople, evidences—with the best of
them.
Cambridge History of English Literature - 1908 - v12
And all that he wrote was
balanced, proportionate, sensitive to distinctions, receptive of
truths new and old. The very character of all the tractarians was
sincerity, and most conspicuously of all did this belong to Pusey.
When others left their old moorings he remained firmly anchored to
the past of the church. He foresaw the dark future, but he stayed
himself on the things of old. When others looked only on England,
his view extended beyond, to the country whence he espied a
coming danger. He foresaw that what he had seen in Germany
would come to his own land. “This will all come upon us in
England, and how utterly unprepared we are ! But then, as he
said, he was in the English church by the providence of God; and
there he found all that he needed, though not all, perhaps, that he
could desire. And thus, to him, the Oxford movement was only
Entire Absolution of the Penitent: A Sermon, 1846, pp. 1, 2.
6
## p. 264 (#288) ############################################
264
[ch.
The Oxford Movement
a call upon the succours of the past. As he wrote more than forty
years after the first tract-
When we were awakened, the Revival was wholly from within. We did not
open a Roman book. We did not think of them. Rome was quiet at that
time in itself. It was only, for political ends, assimilating itself as much as
it could to us. “We must own,' Cardinal Wiseman said, 'that we have been
a little ashamed of our special doctrines. However, we had all which we
wanted within our Church. We had the whole range of Christian doctrine,
and did not look beyond, except to the Fathers, to whom our Church sent us.
One, of whom I thought far more than myself, said, 'We have range enough
in those before us, to whatever the pigmies may growl!
It was Keble, no doubt, whom Pusey thus quoted. And Keble,
like Pusey, and far more than Newman, had his roots in the past.
If Pusey's name was given to the followers of the movement, it
was, unquestionably, Keble who gave it its first popularity. His
sermon inaugurated it, and its principles were those of The
Christian Year. That book, said Newman once, laughingly, was
the fons et origo mali. And in it we see the nature of the influ-
ence which the movement exercised, not only upon theology, but
upon literature. Here, again, is the note of sincerity, first and
foremost: sincerity which means purity, also, and
The princely heart of innocence.
But sincerity, with Keble, does not mean narrowness. Dean Stanley
said of The Christian Year that it had a real openness of mind
for the whole large view of the Church and the world. ' It could
hardly be otherwise with the work of a writer who was steeped
in the ancient classic literatures and had a deep sympathy with
nature as well as human life. And the result is a poetic vision of
the sacredness of life, in town and country, in art and labour, in
literature as well as prayer. Nature, to the poet, is a sacrament of
God. And its appeal has no need to be heightened beyond what
the poet feels himself: the mark of his art is its veracity. He
writes exactly as he thinks. But he thinks in the manner of the
early nineteenth century, and the manner sometimes prevents the
thought from reaching in clear directness the generations of later
time. A simple thought is not always expressed in simple style.
Keble's poetry is eminently literary and reminiscent: it is the work
of a well-read-almost a too well-read-man. And the memory now
and again goes near to quench the inspiration. The Christian Year
is, eminently, a book of its own period, as that period was seen by
one who, most of all, was a scholar and a saint. And Keble was,
· Pusey's Spiritual Letters, p. 239.
## p. 265 (#289) ############################################
XII]
265
Isaac Williams
a
besides, a preacher and a critic. If his sermons cannot be placed in
that rank which Newman alone of the nineteenth century preachers
can claim to have reached, they have, at least, one conspicuous
merit-at least in his later volumes—their absolute directness and
simplicity. He spoke, first and foremost, so as to be understood
by everyone, and yet from such a height of personal experience that,
as one said who heard him, you seemed to be amidst the rustling
of angels' wings. The preaching of the tractarians, like that of the
Caroline divines, was eminently doctrinal, yet it did not abandon
the direct morality of the eighteenth century; it rather raised it, by
the conjunction, to a higher power. As a critic, Keble has sympathy
and depth, dictated by the central thoughts which ruled his life.
Poetry, in its essence, was, to him, simply religion; and the best
poets in every age and every country had been those who have
had the highest thoughts about God. It may be that the lectures
he delivered, written, as they were, in the choice Latin of which he
was a master, will never be read again; but there were thoughts in
them which have passed into the common stock of criticism; and
dean Church declared that they were the most original and
memorable course ever delivered from the Chair of Poetry in
Oxford. '
The influence which Keble exercised upon others is illustrated
most conspicuously in the life of Isaac Williams, who came to
Trinity as a bright Welsh lad interested in his books and his play,
but hardly at all in religion. Latin verse brought him to the
notice of the poetry professor, and he became his pupil in the
lovely village between Thames and Cotswold, where the most
distinguished academic of his day' ministered to a few country
folk with as much zeal as others would bestow on labours the
most anxious and exciting. He came into a new world of intense
reality and, no less, of engrossing charm. He saw-again to quote
the historian of the movement-
à
this man, who had made what the world would call so great a sacrifice,
apparently unconscious that he had made any sacrifice at all, gay, un-
ceremonious, bright, full of play as a boy, ready with his pupils for any
exertion, mental or muscular-for a hard ride, or a crabbed bit of Aeschylus,
or a logic fence with disputatious and paradoxical undergraduates, giving
and taking on even ground1.
And Keble made a man of him. Isaac Williams was a true poet,
who, it may be, has not yet come into his own. The fire of the
Celt burst forth in many a lament for the past, and prayer for the
1 Church, R. W. , The Oxford Movement, p. 60.
## p. 266 (#290) ############################################
266 The Oxford Movement [CH.
6
future, of the church, which it became his passion, in utter self-
effacement, to serve. The Cathedral (1838) contains verse, inspired,
no doubt, in form by Scott and, sometimes, by Wordsworth, which
has not a little of the romance and enthusiasm of the Wizard of the
North. The ancient church of Wales, the church which he came to
serve in England, the church which was that of Basil and Ambrose,
Gregory and Clement, Cyprian and Chrysostom, was, to him, the
centre of life: and he was content to abide with it in unostentatious
work, doing each day's duty without recognition or reward. That
is the note of his poetry and his prose: it lights the fire of the
one, it dictates the grey sedateness of the other. When he compared
English uses with the richer dress her southern sisters own,' he
was content with what might seem 'the homelier truth. ' He
turned back from the breviary to the prayer book :
The chorister
That sings the summer nights, so soft and strong,
To music modulating his sweet throat,
Labours with richness of his varied note,
Yet lifts not unto Heaven a holier song,
Than our home bird that, on some leafless thorn,
Hymns his plain chaunt each wintry eve and morn? .
His poetry knows little of the technical mastery which belonged to
that of Keble, but, in genuine feeling, it was surpassed by none of
his contemporaries. And it is this which makes his Autobiography,
next to Newman's Apologia, the most fascinating record of the time
which any of the leaders bequeathed to posterity. In it, every phase
of the movement as it appealed to one of the chief disciples is
recorded without a touch of exaggeration, with no arrière-pensée,
no attempt to justify, still less to conceal, any of his thoughts, or
aims, or experiences. It explains the attractiveness of Newman,
the devotion of his followers, the sincerity of their principles, the
tragedy of their separation. If it has not the art or the pathos of
Newman's Apologia, it is a picture even more truthful, though but a
picture in little, of the days of storm and stress in which the move-
ment was shaped which transformed the English church into a new
and living influence on men. When Williams became Newman's
curate at St Mary's, he was struck by the contrast to the school in
which the Kebles had trained him. He found Newman 'in the
habit of looking for effect, and for what was sensibly effective. ' This,
which is true, without any hint of censure, of Newman's work as a
religious teacher, left its impress on all that he wrote. With all
the genius of the poet and the preacher, with all the severity and
1 The Cathedral, 1841 edn, p. 21.
>
>
## p. 267 (#291) ############################################
X11]
267
Apologia Pro Vita Sua
simplicity of the Oxford school which he led, Newman was yet, to
the fingertips, and to the end of his life, an artist, and an incom-
parable master of his art. Hardly yet can his literary be severed
from his personal and religious influence; but already two, at least, of
his works have come to be ranked among the classics. His Apologia
pro vita sua was written in 1864 in answer to an offensive and un-
provoked slander from Charles Kingsley. An accusation that truth
for its own sake had never been a virtue with the Roman catholic
clergy was supplemented by a gratuitous mention of Newman,
and, for this, the only substantiation offered was a reference to a
sermon delivered when the preacher was still ministering in the
English church. Newman showed that the sermon contained no
words that could possibly express such a meaning. Kingsley, the
most honest and fearless of men, yet would not make an honest
withdrawal, and Newman, with just relentlessness, exposed him
to the derision of the world. The exposure was completed by
an intimate account of the mental history of the man who had
been maligned. Between April and June, Newman put out an
Apologia, in seven parts, which should vindicate himself and
show his countrymen what manner of man he was. False ideas
may be refuted by argument, but by true ideas alone are they
expelled. I will vanquish,' he said, 'not my accuser, but my
judges. ' And this he did in a wonderful way. He sat down and
wrote day and night—his fingers, as he said, walking nearly
twenty miles a day—just as he felt, thought and remembered,
often weeping as he wrote, but triumphantly achieving such a
record as few men have ever made, so sincere, so thorough, or
80 convincing. From the day when his Apologia was published,
Newman won a place in the heart of his countrymen of whatever
religion or whatever politics, which he never lost till he passed
away nearly fifty years later in an honoured old age. The supreme
merit of his Apologia, no doubt, is its directness. Every page
seems as if it were rather spoken than written. It has the merits
of a letter rather than of a book. It seems to represent without
omission or concealment the whole mind of the writer. And yet
it is a piece of finished art, not conscious but inevitable, because
the writer had become, half-perhaps altogether-unwittingly, a
supreme artist. He could not write in any other way than as an
artist: his art had become to him a second nature. Thus, then,
when the English of his Apologia is recommended as a model,
and as characteristic of its age and the tractarian movement, it
must be remembered that its simplicity is largely the result of a
that
## p. 268 (#292) ############################################
268
The Oxford Movement [CH.
long and strenuous mental discipline acting upon a singularly
brilliant and sensitive spirit. Newman writes as nature looks;
but it is not given to others, in untaught simplicity, to write as
he wrote. The training ground of his Apologia was the long
series of sermons, delivered week by week, saint's day by saint's
day, at St Mary's, Oxford. Their simplicity seems even more
certain than that of the personal vindication which followed them
after twenty years. Their English is simple, clear and refreshing
as pure water; answering to every changing thought of the
speaker's mind. The thought is as limpid as the language. There
had been nothing like them in the English pulpit: the nearest
approach was bishop Wilson, yet in him still lingered the savour
of the old divines who, undoubtedly, said what they meant, yet
relished it as it was said. Newman never seems to taste what
he is saying, nor to write with any look backward at himself :
he only speaks straight home. Yet all this would have been
impossible, his unique and wonderful style would not have been
created, if he had not been both a student and a musician and
had not, almost all his life long written thrice over everything
that he intended to preserve. The ancient classics, the fathers
in their solemn searching severity, the unearthly music of the
violin—these taught him the mastery of language and to know
when he had mastered it to express every vibration of his thought.
Of his teachers in English literature, only two were prominent,
Southey, whom he 'worshipped,' and Crabbe, from whom he un--
consciously learnt more than any other master, in power to register,
remember and reproduce a single impression in single-minded
words. And, ever at the background, a spirit which dominates
but finds no complete expression which frail humanity can grasp,
is the majestic infinity which sounds in the symphonies of Beet-
hoven. In his later sermons, especially in Sermons for Mixed
Congregations (1850), his style was much more ornate, his
eloquence less restrained, with an extraordinary vividness of
description and appeal. He became more rhetorical, more
obviously aiming at effect, with less of English reticence and
with a vehemence more Italian or French.
Next to Newman's Sermons and his Apologia, no doubt
The Dream of Gerontius, the vision, half dream, half inspiration,
of the beginnings of a world beyond this life, is his most direct
appeal. Swinburne recognised 'the force, the fervour, the terse
energy' in its verse : and it has that mark of genius, like the
finest parts of Shakespeare, that poor and rich, learned and
## p. 269 (#293) ############################################
XII]
269
Newman's Later Works
ignorant, are alike carried away by its attraction. There are im-
mortal lines in it, and it is no temerity to predict that ‘Praise to
the Holiest,' like 'Lead kindly Light,' will never be forgotten, the
one a profound theology in words like classic marble, the other
a passionate cry of individual struggle and self-conquest.
In the rest of Newman's work there is an obvious division
drawn by his submission to the see of Rome. Yet there is little
apparent difference in his manner of writing. He never sur-
passed, in the way of pure exposition, the clarity and distinction
of his style in Lectures on the Prophetical Office of the Church
(1838). But, later books were, at least at the time of their publica-
tion, more generally influential, notably The Scope and Nature of
University Education (1859), The Grammar of Assent (1870) and
perhaps, also, the earlier Essay on the Development of Christian
Doctrine (1845). This last, begun while he was still in the English
church, became a justification of his secession. It explained how
modern Rome, widely different from the church of the Fathers,
could yet claim to represent the original Christianity, not as identical
but as consistent with it, as being in fact the full fruit of which
the seed only was seen at first. In his theory, Newman was not so
far away from the Darwinism which was to exert a far greater
influence on English thought, and he certainly expressed the heart
of the science of comparative religion. Something of the same
kind may be said of lectures on University Education. They
represent, if they do not indeed anticipate, some of the most
powerful ideas of the later nineteenth century in regard to the
true functions of a university and the motive force of university
reform. Knowledge for its own sake, as enlargement of the mind,
is the object of a university education; but such knowledge is
impossible apart from a theology. All knowledge is, ultimately, a
defence of the Christian faith. A university is, must be, impartial;
but it can only be impartial if it includes theology in the sciences
which it studies. The Grammar of Assent carried the argument of
probability, the corner-stone of his master Butler, on to new ground.
The argument was, to him, 'an accumulation of probabilities,' and
he reached these by a study of the mental processes which lead to
apprehension and assent. 'In any enquiry about things in the
concrete,' he wrote, 'men differ from each other not so much in the
soundness of their reasoning as in the principles which govern its
exercise,' and those principles were not general but personal. “The
validity of proof is determined not by any scientific test but by the
illative sense. ' It is easy to relate such thoughts as these to much
>
## p. 270 (#294) ############################################
270 The Oxford Movement [CH.
later philosophy, both English and German. And, in fact, what is
characteristic of all Newman's writing is that form of genius which
seizes upon the floating tendencies of nascent thought and points
the way towards unforeseen conclusions.
It is only within very narrow limits that Newman's thought
here or elsewhere can ever be called reactionary. No doubt he,
as one of the latest and clearest of his critics and admirers has
said, had, indeed, an 'abhorrence of doctrinal liberalism. ' In 1835,
he vigorously protested against 'the introduction of rationalistic
principles into revealed religion' in a tract which described
rationalism as 'a certain abuse of reason; that is, a use of it
for purposes for which it never was intended and is unfitted,' and
‘a rationalistic spirit' as 'the antagonist of Faith; for Faith is, in
its very nature, the acceptance of what our reason cannot reach,
simply and absolutely upon testimony. But it has of recent
years again and again been asserted that he was the intellectual
parent of a modernism which he would have abhorred. A partial
study of his writings might give some ground for such a view:
a complete one refutes it. It could, indeed, hardly be held by any
who did not, perhaps unconsciously, identify the wider catholicism
of orthodox Christianity with the narrower presentment of it in
modern Roman theology which Newman never set himself very
seriously to defend. His intellectual standpoint, however much
during his long life it may seem to have varied, never really
departed from the three bases on which it had been founded.
He was an Aristotelian. He distrusted much of modern metaphysic.
He regarded the actual facts of human life as the ultimate basis of
reason. He was, like many of the most earnest English thinkers
of his time, a convinced disciple of Butler. His reading of The
Analogy of Religion was, as he said, an era in his religious opinions.
Starting from probability as the guide of life, he never fancied
that the limitless area of things human and divine could be fully
mapped or the ultimate mystery more than 'imperfectly com-
prehended. ' But he found reality in the religious facts of the
world, as the philosophers of his time found them in the moral
facts, and the men of science in the physical ; and, herein, he may
be said to have anticipated modern psychology. Yet also, and with
at least as much strength, he was a historian: very often, not
an accurate historian in detail, but a historian of illumination
and genius. If much that he wrote as history has long been cast
aside, the interpretation that he gave of early-not the earliest-
Christian centuries remained as an inspiration to the students who
## p. 271 (#295) ############################################
XII]
271
Dean Church
TOT
LE
re
TI
made Oxford history famous, to Stubbs and Freeman, Creighton
and Bryce, and remains still. When he wrote his different studies
he was loyal to his principles, whether, at the time, he was an
English or a Roman churchman, but he never surrendered the
scholar's independence. No doubt, he loved narration more than
interpretation, character more than institutional life; but, what
he wanted to find, and believed he could find, in history was
truth: and in that he never deserted the fundamental principle of
the tractarian company. As a historian, his affinities were with
the French school which was coming into existence in his middle
age, never with the purely German, where vast collections of facts
were often used to support an unverifiable theory. But, if his
passion throughout was catholicism, his preconception was truth.
Newman must ever remain the central figure in the literature
of the movement of which he was the most conspicuous figure.
But Pusey, it would be true to say, represented far more entirely its
most prominent characteristics: its basis in history and tradition,
its via media, its determination stare super antiquas vias. And
it may well be that, if Newman appealed to the wider circle, Pusey
and Keble influenced more directly the general literature of
English religion. The Oxford movement certainly belongs to the
history of English religion more definitely than to the history
of English literature; but it had great influence, outside its own
definite members, on the literary taste of its age. It spoke from
the first for a certain purity, directness and severity of style:
later, the historical influences which attached themselves to it,
through the study of ancient legends, and liturgies, and hymns,
produced a richer vein of prose, a more florid touch in poetry.
No one can think that Tennyson was wholly unmoved by its
manner; but Dolben and Pater were the undoubted issue of its
later life. If one were to look for men of letters who were as
clearly such, and would have been in any age, as they were men
of religion, one would light instantly on the names of Richard
William Church and Richard Chenevix Trench. The former, a
fellow of Oriel with Newman, one of the proctors who vetoed
the new test proposed when Ward was condemned, died as
dean of St Paul's. Church lived to be the historian of the
movement itself, and perhaps that was his finest work. But his
deep thought and profound wisdom, which had remarkable
weight with the eminent statesmen of his day, were seen at
their best in his interpretation of past history as well as in
lectures and sermons which are models of clear writing and
Test
TK
the
tat
## p. 272 (#296) ############################################
272 The Oxford Movement
[CH.
clear thought. Something of the severity and unworldliness of
Dante, of whom he was a devoted student, seemed to have
descended upon him, with, also, the great Florentine's knowledge
of the ways and thoughts of common men. But, most clearly,
he was, in literature, the disciple of Newman, in the simplicity,
directness and absence of ornament which made his style powerful
in its effect on the writing of his generation. Church was a
preacher, a moralist, a historian; but, especially, he was a student
of human nature, who judged men equally yet with sympathy,
who weighed motives in scales which were never deflected by
prejudice or passion, and knew to a nicety the springs of human
action. He was a master of sympathetic literary criticism, too,
as his volume on Spenser proves. His historical sketches, such as
that of the early middle age, and his criticisms in literature, such
as those of Cassiodorus and Pascal, show a characteristic simplicity
which cannot veil the abundance of knowledge. Occasionally,
something is revealed of the fire within him, which breaks out
now and again in his classic memorial of the Oxford movement
and the men who began and led it, a record, as he wrote to
Lord Acton,
that one who lived with them, and lived long beyond most of em, believed
in the reality of their goodness and height of character, and still looks back
with deepest reverence to those forgotten men as the companions to whose
teaching and example he owes an infinite debt, and not he only but religious
society in England of all kinds 1.
Preeminently, Church was a man of letters; and this was as
obviously true of Richard Chenevix Trench. Church noted 'the
peculiar combination in him of the poet, the theologian and the
champion of primitive and catholic doctrine. ' Some of his lyrics
belong to the highest flight of English poetry. His religious
writings had a peculiar distinction and charm. Just as Church
owed inspiration to Greece, modern as well as ancient, and its
struggle for liberty, so Trench had nourished himself on the great
literature of Spain and was in harmony with the aspirations of her
liberal revival. He passed, in 1863, from the deanery of West-
minster to the archbishopric of Dublin, where he was primate at
the disestablishment and fought hard for the ancient symbols of
the Irish church under its new constitution. Like the dean of
St Paul's, he was not a militant tractarian, but he spoke of Hugh
James Rose as ‘my master,' and wrote, on the death of Pusey,
that ‘a prince in our Israel has indeed passed away. ' The names
1 Quoted in the Advertisement' to The Oxford Movement, p. vi.
6
6
## p. 273 (#297) ############################################
XII]
273
Neale and the Mozleys
of Church and Trench, which, even apart from their theological
writings, and at any time in our history, would have been pro-
minent in English letters, are examples of the influence which the
serious ideas of the Oxford movement exercised upon literature.
In historical study, the influence was no less conspicuous.
William Stubbs, the greatest English historian of the nineteenth
century, was a convinced tractarian and spoke of Pusey, whom
he assisted in literary work, as 'the master. ' Henry Parry
Liddon, the greatest preacher of the period, whose sermons at
St Paul's were, for twenty years, a conspicuous factor in the
life of London, was the disciple, the friend and the biographer
of Pusey. His Bampton lectures on the Divinity of Christ were
worthy to rank with the great dogmatic treatises of the older
divines. And their successors remain to the present day.
Not far apart from them, yet still somewhat in isolation, was
the striking figure of John Mason Neale, not an Oxford but a
Cambridge man. He was antiquary, historian, poet, novelist,
priest; and in none of these activities can he be forgotten.
He was as facile as he was learned. He poured forth book
after book of amazing erudition on almost every conceivable
subject of theological and historical interest. As a translator
of Latin and Greek hymns no Englishman has surpassed him.
But, above all things, he loved 'a story' and he could tell it—as
such an historical novel as Theodora Phranza, which tells the
fall of Christian Constantinople, evidences—with the best of
them. While his knowledge was diffused, that of James Bowling
Mozley was intense and concentrated. Master of a stern and
somewhat arid style, which still could rise into eloquence and
passion, he exercised a profound influence on the generation
which succeeded him. He was the foe of shallow thinking and
shallow writing. Many of the idols of the market-place, past
or present, from Martin Luther to Thomas Carlyle, suffered his
gwashing blows. His brother Thomas had abilities of a more
popular cast: he was, for a while, editor of The British Critic:
for many years he was a leader writer for The Times, and he
represented that paper at Rome during the time of the council
1869–70, when liis letters, unsympathetic though Roman catholics
have complained that they are, presented a most vivid and re-
markable picture of a great historical episode. In his old age,
he wrote Reminiscences of the days of struggle, which are
entertaining, but not always accurate. 'If a story cannot stand
on two legs,' said Newman, whose sister he had married, 'Tom
18
9
E. L. XII.
CH. XII.
## p. 274 (#298) ############################################
274
[CH.
The Oxford Movement
supplies a third. From him comes a touching tribute to the
self-effacing labours of Charles Marriott, like himself a fellow
of Oriel, who was the helper of every one, great and small, who
belonged to the movement, and its great stay in scholarship, as
editing with Keble and Pusey The Oxford Library of the Fathers.
Outside Oxford, the same interests which had awakened the
ecclesiastical learning and catholic orthodoxy of the university
were represented in many writers who were affected, in greater
or less degree, by the principles of the tractarians.
Walter Farquhar Hook was one of the most masterful figures
of his time, first as vicar of Leeds for twenty-two years and then
as dean of Chichester. He accepted nearly all the principles of the
tractarians, but frequently stood apart from their expression and
was often a vehement critic. He was an industrious compiler
of dictionaries and biographies, without sufficient research or
originality to give them permanent vitality. His successor at
Chichester, John William Burgon, held a similar position of in-
dependent judgment. He was a keen and biting controversialist
and the most conservative of biblical critics ; but he had an
intense love of 'good men,' among whom he placed some of the
authors of the tracts. His biographies are essential to a knowledge
of the movement.
Two sons of the famous statesman and philanthropist, and
brothers of that bishop of Oxford who revolutionised the ideal of
English episcopacy, Robert Isaac and Henry William Wilberforce,
both at Oriel, passed into the Roman church. The elder had
been an archdeacon and yet had written theological books of
real value, notably one on The Doctrine of The Incarnation,
which was on strictly tractarian lines and won great fame. The
younger after his secession gave important help to the Roman
catholic cause in the press.
Some of those who had abandoned their orders and left the
English church seemed eager to disclaim any connection with it.
Some vehemently attacked what they had before as vehemently
defended, but no one of them save Newman made any great mark
in literature. Some were content with a change of clothes, sub-
stituting for their customary suits of solemn black the vagaries of
'blue ties and ginger-coloured trousers. '
More formidable was the Anglo-Roman hierarchy created in
1850, whose head announced its creation by a letter from out the
Flaminian Gate. '
Nicholas Wiseman, Roman catholic controversialist and
1
## p. 275 (#299) ############################################
X1)
275
Converts to Rome
cardinal, whose education had not been English, was a capable
craftsman in letters. He was an orientalist, and a cultured student
of many subjects, who became the first archbishop of Westminster
in 1850, after devoting himself to confuting ‘High Church Claims'
(1841), and embodying his theories of church history in a pretty
story called Fabiola, or the Church of the Catacombs (1854).
Henry Edward, cardinal Manning, who had been an English
archdeacon and became Wiseman's successor, wrote, while he
was a member of the English church, volumes of sermons which
reached at least a fifth edition, and, as a controversial papalist,
many vehement criticisms of the Anglican position; but, though
his personal influence was great, his work is negligible as literature.
John Hungerford Pollen, as an English priest wrote the most
touching and tragic of all the records of struggle in parish
work for tractarian principles (A Narrative of Five Years at
St Saviour's, Leeds, 1851), and then, as a Romanist layman,
devoted himself to art, wrote some valuable lectures, was the
friend of Morris and Rossetti, Swinburne and Patmore, and
became in artistic literature, what his friend Baron von Hügel
said he was in life, 'the perfect type of l'homme du monde. '
Another convert, Frederick William Faber, endowed with high
gifts of imagination, deplored, as a Roman catholic, the position
of the Magi, with, perhaps, an undercurrent of reference to the
protestants' unhappy lot,
No Pope, no blessèd Pope had they
To guide them with his hand,-
and was generally sentimental and sugary, very unlike the
tractarians; but he wrote some devotional poetry of sincerity
and pathos. John Dobree Dalgairns was capable and solid
as a Roman controversialist on behalf of Christian belief; but
he was far surpassed by another of the later disciples of the
tractarians who became a power in the church of his adoption.
William George Ward, the crisis of whose stormy career was
critical also in the movement itself, has won immortality in the
verse of Tennyson and the prose of dean Church. The latter
finds it his chief distinction that as 'a profound metaphysical
thinker he was the equal antagonist on their own ground of John
Stuart Mill and Herbert Spencer. ' His work hardly belongs to
pure literature: its manner and method are, for the most part,
cumbrous, only occasionally vivid or comprehensive. His own
generation read what he wrote because he was famous for what
he said: it was meat and drink to him to argue and to chop logic,
5
18-2
## p. 276 (#300) ############################################
276 The Oxford Movement [CH.
and his swordplay was a delight to the onlookers. But, if his
Ideal, his intuitionist philosophy and his controversial treatises
are forgotten, he will ever be remembered by the poet's farewell
to him as one
Whose Faith and Work were bells of full accord,
My friend, the most unworldly of mankind,
Most generous of all Ultramontanes, Ward.
Ambrose Phillips de Lisle, another English convert to the Roman
obedience, followed the Tracts for the Times with keenest in-
terest from the first. He had been ten years a Roman catholic
when they began to appear and he set himself before long to
correspond with their writers in the hope of 'producing a good
understanding between the Catholic and Anglican churches, with
a view to the ultimate restoration of that happy and blessed unity,
which formerly existed between them for more than a thousand
years, and which,' he added, “I am perfectly certain will one day be
restored. ' The letters which passed between him and Mont-
alembert illustrate how close at some points was the connection
between the ecclesiastical revival in England and in France.
The French man of letters had no hope
that Catholicity will make any real progress in England, as long as the
fanatical spirit of Archbishop Manning, Mr Ward, and others of the same
stamp is prevalent among English Catholics;
and, on the other side, Newman was equally hopeless about reunion
or 'the conversion of that corporate body which we call the
Anglican Church. ' De Lisle's own work, sympathetic in aim,
trivial in result, is an example of the rift between the two bodies,
in literature as well as in religion. Only in Newman himself was
the influence of the Oxford movement to be discerned among
Romanist writers.
But the glamour of tractarian theology extended far beyond
those who were its first teachers or their direct heirs. It created
a religious literature effective if ephemeral: it ‘tuned the pulpits'
for some half a century to a gravity which strove, often success-
fully, after the majesty of classical sculpture. And, in the poetry
of Digby Mackworth Dolben, only recently given to the world, and
of Christina Rossetti, it formed a new life exuberant and aflame.
Dolben pursued its teaching till it yielded to him a certain medieval
richness of ecclesiastical imagery that touched at many points a
religious passion which was older than Christianity, and almost
1 Purcell, E. , Life of Ambrose Phillips de Lisle, vol. II, p. 360.
## p. 277 (#301) ############################################
XII]
Tractarian Novels
277
hostile to it. To Christina Rossetti, the catholic theology of the
English church was the very breath of life, and she accepted its
sternness without dispute. Yet, while the accent of severity
clings to all she wrote, we are, in her company, on the road to a
reaction which yet has its roots in the past: the splendour of
Jeremy Taylor is not forgotten and the exotic richness of Walter
Pater is in sight.
In humbler literature, 'tractarianism' may be thought to
have created an epoch by inaugurating the dreary succession
of religious novels. But they were not dreary in their beginnings.
J. M. Neale was a great writer of romance. Newman himself put
some very good polemical work into Loss and Gain (with an
immortal description of an Oxford tutor's breakfast) and Callista.
Wiseman's Fabiola was an effort of the same kind. Francis
Edward Paget, student of Christ Church and then rector of
Elford, published a series of most interesting tales, containing
quite delicious descriptions of country life and character which
no novelist of his time surpassed. But most prominent of all
was the long line of stories, exquisite in domestic portraiture,
strong in moral power, keen in understanding of character and
touched with a gracious humour, which issued from the parish of
Hursley-where Keble was to the authoress a true guide, phi-
losopher and friend-and were the work of Charlotte M. Yonge.
The Heir of Redclyffe and The Little Duke have their place
in English literature. They have had many imitators and suc-
cessors but few rivals, unless John Inglesant may claim to be of
their company.
A movement which had so many means of making itself felt
throughout the country had, naturally, an influence in many phases
of literature. It was primarily religious, with a religion, said one
of its lay disciples, an eminent public official, 'which was fervent
and reforming in essentials with a due reverence for existing
authorities and habits and traditions'; but it was not narrow
or cloistered, it was 'a religion which did not reject, but aspired
to embody in itself, any form of art and literature, poetry,
philosophy, and even science which could be pressed into the
service of Christianity? '
But its permanent effects may be seen most clearly in the fields
of history and dogma. During the eighteenth century, the constant
study of the Fathers of the early church which had been the
basis of the theological writings of the reformers and the Caroline
1 Letters of Lord Blachford, p. 15.
## p. 278 (#302) ############################################
278 The Oxford Movement [CH. XII
divines had passed into desuetude. In the seventeenth century,
no one would have dared to write theology without quoting long
passages of crabbed Latin and obscure Greek. In the eighteenth
century, the habit had gone entirely out of fashion, and Wesley,
scholar though he was, was the last man in the world to wish
for its revival. But, while the tractarians were in their cradles,
Routh of Magdalen had recalled to the church of England the
thought of the rock whence it was digged, by the publication of
the first part of his Reliquiae Sacrae (1814), in which he collected
the fragments of early Christian writings up to the first Nicene
council and edited them with a remarkable combination of affec-
tion, erudition and sagacity. He set the tone for the Oxford
writers. Theology and history were inseparable. Accuracy was
all important. 'Verify your quotations' was the first duty of a
‘
scholar. The real teaching of Christianity would be found, in
balanced emphasis, if you went back far enough for it. And that
was the motto of the tractarians. Christian dogma was inseparable
from true history. That was a far-reaching principle, fruitful long
after the tractarians had ceased to work.
## p. 279 (#303) ############################################
CHAPTER XIII
THE GROWTH OF LIBERAL THEOLOGY
RELIGIOUS thought has seldom been so stagnant in England
as at the opening of the nineteenth century. The professional
advocates of the Christian faith did not lack ability, but they had
been traversing the same arid ground of external evidences for
half a century. They continued to put the apostles into the witness
box and acquit them according to the rules of the Old Bailey.
They cross-examined the saints for their attestation of miracle
and prophecy, but omitted to discover the secret of their life.
A Paley or a Watson might display admirable commonsense, and
be accounted by the faithful a match for Tom Paine; and yet the
religious life remained starved. The methodist movement, with
its evangelical counterpart, had, indeed, given back to religious
feeling its rightful place and more, but had produced little or
no theology, except for the particularly acrid and unprofitable
Calvinist controversy.
The French revolution had set up a ferment of new ideas and
induced a critical attitude towards all established notions and
institutions. But the very extravagances of the movement, and
the desperate nature of the war in which England was engaged
against the propagandists of the revolution, made English people
more than usually suspicious of new ideas, and gave a new lease
of life to threatened institutions like the established church.
Sympathy with the ideas of the revolution was regarded as
dubiously patriotic and probably irreligious, as Priestley and
William Frend found to their cost. When the former took flight
to a more kindly clime, bishop Horsley could exult and sing, “The
orators and oracles of Birmingham and Essex Street are dumb. '
Traditional teaching, therefore, remained in almost undisputed
possession through the period of the great war, and beyond it,
when the new fears of social unrest excited corresponding fears
## p. 280 (#304) ############################################
280 The Growth of Liberal Theology [CH. .
for Christian faith. For the first twenty years of the new century,
English theology was at a standstill. The stars of the older day,
Paley and Horsley and Watson, were setting, and no new stars
had arisen. Theology could make no serious progress until it
should emancipate itself from the outworn conventions of the
previous century, and be free to face the urgent questions of the
new age. The fashionable utilitarianism of Paley could kindle no
warmth. Idealism already had its prophets in Germany; but it
needed a Coleridge to discover and interpret them for English
readers. There were also on the continent pioneers of a more
scientific literary criticism; but their work was still unknown in
this country. Herbert Marsh, fellow of St John's college, Cam-
bridge, who had studied at Leipzig under Michaelis, published in
four volumes (1793-1801) a translation of the latter's Introduction
to the New Testament, together with essays and a dissertation of
his own on the sources of the first three Gospels. He did not
escape reproof for his rashness; but neither was he debarred from
becoming a divinity professor and a bishop. The work had no
immediate sequel. English scholarship was not ready for such ques-
tions; but, twenty-four years later, another future bishop, Connop
Thirlwall, picked up the threads, in introducing to an English
public Schleiermacher’s A Critical Essay on the Gospel of St Lrike.
Still more necessary than critical learning was a freer view of
biblical inspiration. Theological scholars worked in shackles, if
not in blinkers, so long as à priori theories of the inerrancy of
Scripture were unchallenged. When the critical methods that
were already being applied to other literature should come to
be applied to the Bible, a revolution would follow. If, in his
Shakespearean studies, said Coleridge, he were to use the same
uncritical liberties as divines allowed themselves in harmonising
the inconsistencies of Scripture, ‘I would almost undertake to
harmonise Falstaff's account of the rogues in buckram into a
coherent and consistent narrative. The eighteenth century was
seriously lacking in the historic sense; but, so soon as Wolf set
himself to prove the plural authorship of the Iliad, and Niebuhr
began discussing the origin of the early legends of Roman history,
the day was not far distant when similar tests must be applied
to biblical literature. The growth of the scientific temper in the
new century, with its ruling idea of development, would also
create a more sympathetic interest in doctrine viewed historically
rather than as absolutely defined. The time was ripe for the
advent of Christian scholars who, with a more daring spirit,
## p. 281 (#305) ############################################
XIII]
281
The Evangelicals
would set their sails to catch the new breezes that were
stirring.
But in what direction was a truer theology to be looked for?
The spirit of religion burned brightest among the evangelical
churchmen and methodists. The new century witnessed a new
literary venture, The Christian Observer, which enlisted most
of the evangelical talent—Henry Thornton, Thomas Scott the
commentator and John Venn. The evangelicals were not wanting
in ability or energy, but, as a body, had little taste for literature,
except of a directly practical purpose. They showed their capacity
for meeting the religious needs of their less critical followers in
devotional and homiletic literature. Hannah More's Cheap
Repository Tracts had an enormous vogue, and a simple moral
tale by Legh Richmond, The Dairyman's Daughter, reached two
million copies. For more cultivated readers, there was a great
outpouring of pious biography. Charles Simeon, with all his
wider interests, published almost nothing except homiletic litera-
ture, skeletons' of sermons, as he frankly called them. Even a
professed work of learning like Joseph Milner's History of the
Church of Christ (1794–7) aimed chiefly at edification; 'genuine
piety is the only thing which I intend to celebrate. ' Neither
he nor his brother, dean Isaac Milner, who brought the history
down to Luther's reformation, thought it necessary to read
anything in Luther's language. Evangelical theology concentrated
itself upon a few favourite doctrines which formed the scheme of
salvation; its language was soon learnt, and it was all-sufficient.
The peculiarity of this language, together with its hackneyed
use, was enough to deter some minds, as the outspoken baptist
minister, John Foster, complained in his essay on the Aversion
of Men of Taste to Evangelical Religion (1805). Even biblical
interpretation commanded but a narrow field of interest; the
unfulfilled prophecies alone gave scope for speculation. The
rigid theory of inspiration, in general, foreclosed enquiry, and the
evangelicals retained that theory longest of all.
The true glory of the evangelicals lay in their pastoral zeal and
in their philanthropy. The Clapham sect, as Sydney Smith nick-
named them, maintained a long struggle against the slave trade,
and supported missionary societies and charitable enterprises with
princely generosity. William Wilberforce, member of parliament
for the county of York, raised a hitherto unpopular and mis-
judged party in the public esteem when, in 1797, he produced his
Practical View of Christianity. It found more readers than any
## p. 282 (#306) ############################################
282 The Growth of Liberal Theology [[
CH.
book by a clergyman; its effect is comparable with that of The
Serious Call. It had, however, none of William Law's wit,
though its writer was deemed by Madame de Staël the wittiest
talker she had met in England. “The present state of things in
France, where a brood of moral vipers, as it were, is now hatching,'
was the occasion for the serious self-examination proposed in it.
“We bear upon us but too plainly the marks of a declining empire. '
The author sees no hope of averting this ruin, except by a revival
of real Christianity, as contrasted with the decent selfishness'
which passed muster with most Christians. “The grand defect'
in these nominal Christians is that they forget
the peculiar doctrines of the Religion which they profess-the corruption of
human nature-the atonement of the Saviour-and the sanctifying influence
of the Holy Spirit.
But, apart from this sincere allegiance to the orthodox language,
Wilberforce, as Sir James Stephen has shown, 'was very much
a latitudinarian. His catholic spirit had no taste for polemical
divinity, and he gave himself, as he advised others to give them-
selves, to practical Christianity.
Among the evangelicals there was not enough of speculative
interest to revive and liberate theology. Emancipation would not
come from them. It came in part from an unexpected quarter,
from the poet-philosopher and amateur theologian, Samuel Taylor
Coleridge. From early days, he was in revolt against the utilitarian
fashion in philosophy and in theology, and it became his aim, as
Julius Hare said, to spiritualise both the one and the other. It
was high time that philosophy should again have a hearing in
English religion, as it had already had in Germany. English theo-
logy had been suffering, for at least a generation, from the poverty
of its intellectual interest; it was Coleridge's province to stimulate
that interest, as a long succession of religious thinkers have amply
testified.
Coleridge would himself have recognised the truth and the
pathos of Charles Lamb's description of him as 'an archangel a
little damaged. The contrast between his spiritual ideals and his
sordid failures was as painful to him as it could be to his friends.
He laboured under a deep conviction of sin which gave a personal
intensity to his Confessions, as, for instance, when he says that, in
the Bible, he has ‘found words for my inmost thoughts, songs for
my joy, utterances for my hidden griefs, and pleadings for my
shame and my feebleness. The theological reading of this
'
‘literary cormorant,' as he called himself, was discursive. He leapt
## p. 283 (#307) ############################################
X11] Erskine of Linlathen 283
contemptuously back over the aevum rationalisticum into the
seventeenth century, where he found poets and divines to his mind.
Archbishop Leighton, Jeremy Taylor and other writers of that age
furnished him with matter for comment in his Aids to Reflection
(1825). Some readers might feel themselves being led into a holy
jungle' by Coleridge's musings on the persons of the Trinity as
representing ipseity, altereity and communeity; but, at least, he
gave them more to think about than did the orthodox defenders
of the faith in their eminently lucid writings. It was time that some-
one called a halt to the prevailing mode in theological literature.
Evidences of Christianity! I am weary of the word. Make a man feel
the want of it; rouse him, if you can, to the self-knowledge of his need of it;
and you may safely trust it to its own evidence.
Confessions of an Enquiring Spirit was published by his
nephew, posthumously, in 1840. These seven letters on inspiration,
simpler in style and thought than most of Coleridge's writings,
are a remarkable anticipation of the attitude of modern Christians
towards the Bible. Coleridge exhibits a happy union of complete
freedom and of deep gratitude for the Scriptures. He combats
the contemporary view that the Bible was not to be reasoned
about in the way that other good books are. ' He maintains that
'the Bible and Christianity are their own sufficient evidence. '
In the Bible there is more that finds me than I have experienced in all
other books put together;. . . the words of the Bible find me at greater depths
of my being; and. . . whatever finds me brings with it an irresistible evidence
of its having proceeded from the Holy Spirit.
He rests secure on his own dear experience' and, regardless of
discrepancies and moral imperfections in the Scriptures, pursues
his study with free and unboding spirit. '
If Coleridge's theological influence depended less on his books
than on his conversation and friendship with religious thinkers,
the same is hardly less true of another contemporary layman,
Thomas Erskine of Linlathen. Erskine’s natural gift lay rather
in intimate spiritual converse and letters than in set writing. In
mid-life he ceased to publish books, as if himself questioning his
effectiveness as an author; but, for another thirty years, he talked
and wrote to those who would find more readers than he ever could.
Among his friends he counted Carlyle, Maurice, Stanley and McLeod
Campbell, besides an interesting group of Christians on the con-
tinent, with whom, also, he corresponded, Vinet, Gaussen, Adolphe
Monod and C. C. J. Bunsen. Erskine's writings, however, have
considerable importance, in spite of their amateurishness and lack
6
6
## p. 284 (#308) ############################################
ch6
a
284 The Growth of Liberal Theology [CH.
2
.
of method: 'your books,' wrote Maurice, in dedicating Prophets
and Kings to him, "seem to me to mark a crisis in the theological
movement of this time. While the orthodox Scottish divines of
'
Erskine's younger days grimly propounded the sovereign decrees'
of unbending Calvinism, there was room for his assertion in The
Unconditional Freeness of the Gospel (1828) that 'Christ died, not
for believers, but for the world. Forgiveness, he declared, “is a
permanent condition of the heart of God'; 'God's arms are open. '
Man must not claim even faith as the ground of his pardon; if he
does so claim, it is only an instance of his unextinguished pride;
'He must have self to lean on, and so when he is obliged to
surrender his own works, he betakes himself to his own faith as
his prop. But this is still self. ' The satiric humour, as well as
the strong mystical vein in his writings, recalls William Law, who
was one of Erskine's favourite authors. In the comparatively
few writers whom his defective eyesight allowed him to study,
he looked for 'light' rather than for theological learning : he
preferred Plato and the neo-Platonists, Leighton and Law, to
professional divines and their critical opponents. He dismisses
a polemical writer with the judgment: ‘he is a great reasoner:
but I do not find any light in him at all.
balanced, proportionate, sensitive to distinctions, receptive of
truths new and old. The very character of all the tractarians was
sincerity, and most conspicuously of all did this belong to Pusey.
When others left their old moorings he remained firmly anchored to
the past of the church. He foresaw the dark future, but he stayed
himself on the things of old. When others looked only on England,
his view extended beyond, to the country whence he espied a
coming danger. He foresaw that what he had seen in Germany
would come to his own land. “This will all come upon us in
England, and how utterly unprepared we are ! But then, as he
said, he was in the English church by the providence of God; and
there he found all that he needed, though not all, perhaps, that he
could desire. And thus, to him, the Oxford movement was only
Entire Absolution of the Penitent: A Sermon, 1846, pp. 1, 2.
6
## p. 264 (#288) ############################################
264
[ch.
The Oxford Movement
a call upon the succours of the past. As he wrote more than forty
years after the first tract-
When we were awakened, the Revival was wholly from within. We did not
open a Roman book. We did not think of them. Rome was quiet at that
time in itself. It was only, for political ends, assimilating itself as much as
it could to us. “We must own,' Cardinal Wiseman said, 'that we have been
a little ashamed of our special doctrines. However, we had all which we
wanted within our Church. We had the whole range of Christian doctrine,
and did not look beyond, except to the Fathers, to whom our Church sent us.
One, of whom I thought far more than myself, said, 'We have range enough
in those before us, to whatever the pigmies may growl!
It was Keble, no doubt, whom Pusey thus quoted. And Keble,
like Pusey, and far more than Newman, had his roots in the past.
If Pusey's name was given to the followers of the movement, it
was, unquestionably, Keble who gave it its first popularity. His
sermon inaugurated it, and its principles were those of The
Christian Year. That book, said Newman once, laughingly, was
the fons et origo mali. And in it we see the nature of the influ-
ence which the movement exercised, not only upon theology, but
upon literature. Here, again, is the note of sincerity, first and
foremost: sincerity which means purity, also, and
The princely heart of innocence.
But sincerity, with Keble, does not mean narrowness. Dean Stanley
said of The Christian Year that it had a real openness of mind
for the whole large view of the Church and the world. ' It could
hardly be otherwise with the work of a writer who was steeped
in the ancient classic literatures and had a deep sympathy with
nature as well as human life. And the result is a poetic vision of
the sacredness of life, in town and country, in art and labour, in
literature as well as prayer. Nature, to the poet, is a sacrament of
God. And its appeal has no need to be heightened beyond what
the poet feels himself: the mark of his art is its veracity. He
writes exactly as he thinks. But he thinks in the manner of the
early nineteenth century, and the manner sometimes prevents the
thought from reaching in clear directness the generations of later
time. A simple thought is not always expressed in simple style.
Keble's poetry is eminently literary and reminiscent: it is the work
of a well-read-almost a too well-read-man. And the memory now
and again goes near to quench the inspiration. The Christian Year
is, eminently, a book of its own period, as that period was seen by
one who, most of all, was a scholar and a saint. And Keble was,
· Pusey's Spiritual Letters, p. 239.
## p. 265 (#289) ############################################
XII]
265
Isaac Williams
a
besides, a preacher and a critic. If his sermons cannot be placed in
that rank which Newman alone of the nineteenth century preachers
can claim to have reached, they have, at least, one conspicuous
merit-at least in his later volumes—their absolute directness and
simplicity. He spoke, first and foremost, so as to be understood
by everyone, and yet from such a height of personal experience that,
as one said who heard him, you seemed to be amidst the rustling
of angels' wings. The preaching of the tractarians, like that of the
Caroline divines, was eminently doctrinal, yet it did not abandon
the direct morality of the eighteenth century; it rather raised it, by
the conjunction, to a higher power. As a critic, Keble has sympathy
and depth, dictated by the central thoughts which ruled his life.
Poetry, in its essence, was, to him, simply religion; and the best
poets in every age and every country had been those who have
had the highest thoughts about God. It may be that the lectures
he delivered, written, as they were, in the choice Latin of which he
was a master, will never be read again; but there were thoughts in
them which have passed into the common stock of criticism; and
dean Church declared that they were the most original and
memorable course ever delivered from the Chair of Poetry in
Oxford. '
The influence which Keble exercised upon others is illustrated
most conspicuously in the life of Isaac Williams, who came to
Trinity as a bright Welsh lad interested in his books and his play,
but hardly at all in religion. Latin verse brought him to the
notice of the poetry professor, and he became his pupil in the
lovely village between Thames and Cotswold, where the most
distinguished academic of his day' ministered to a few country
folk with as much zeal as others would bestow on labours the
most anxious and exciting. He came into a new world of intense
reality and, no less, of engrossing charm. He saw-again to quote
the historian of the movement-
à
this man, who had made what the world would call so great a sacrifice,
apparently unconscious that he had made any sacrifice at all, gay, un-
ceremonious, bright, full of play as a boy, ready with his pupils for any
exertion, mental or muscular-for a hard ride, or a crabbed bit of Aeschylus,
or a logic fence with disputatious and paradoxical undergraduates, giving
and taking on even ground1.
And Keble made a man of him. Isaac Williams was a true poet,
who, it may be, has not yet come into his own. The fire of the
Celt burst forth in many a lament for the past, and prayer for the
1 Church, R. W. , The Oxford Movement, p. 60.
## p. 266 (#290) ############################################
266 The Oxford Movement [CH.
6
future, of the church, which it became his passion, in utter self-
effacement, to serve. The Cathedral (1838) contains verse, inspired,
no doubt, in form by Scott and, sometimes, by Wordsworth, which
has not a little of the romance and enthusiasm of the Wizard of the
North. The ancient church of Wales, the church which he came to
serve in England, the church which was that of Basil and Ambrose,
Gregory and Clement, Cyprian and Chrysostom, was, to him, the
centre of life: and he was content to abide with it in unostentatious
work, doing each day's duty without recognition or reward. That
is the note of his poetry and his prose: it lights the fire of the
one, it dictates the grey sedateness of the other. When he compared
English uses with the richer dress her southern sisters own,' he
was content with what might seem 'the homelier truth. ' He
turned back from the breviary to the prayer book :
The chorister
That sings the summer nights, so soft and strong,
To music modulating his sweet throat,
Labours with richness of his varied note,
Yet lifts not unto Heaven a holier song,
Than our home bird that, on some leafless thorn,
Hymns his plain chaunt each wintry eve and morn? .
His poetry knows little of the technical mastery which belonged to
that of Keble, but, in genuine feeling, it was surpassed by none of
his contemporaries. And it is this which makes his Autobiography,
next to Newman's Apologia, the most fascinating record of the time
which any of the leaders bequeathed to posterity. In it, every phase
of the movement as it appealed to one of the chief disciples is
recorded without a touch of exaggeration, with no arrière-pensée,
no attempt to justify, still less to conceal, any of his thoughts, or
aims, or experiences. It explains the attractiveness of Newman,
the devotion of his followers, the sincerity of their principles, the
tragedy of their separation. If it has not the art or the pathos of
Newman's Apologia, it is a picture even more truthful, though but a
picture in little, of the days of storm and stress in which the move-
ment was shaped which transformed the English church into a new
and living influence on men. When Williams became Newman's
curate at St Mary's, he was struck by the contrast to the school in
which the Kebles had trained him. He found Newman 'in the
habit of looking for effect, and for what was sensibly effective. ' This,
which is true, without any hint of censure, of Newman's work as a
religious teacher, left its impress on all that he wrote. With all
the genius of the poet and the preacher, with all the severity and
1 The Cathedral, 1841 edn, p. 21.
>
>
## p. 267 (#291) ############################################
X11]
267
Apologia Pro Vita Sua
simplicity of the Oxford school which he led, Newman was yet, to
the fingertips, and to the end of his life, an artist, and an incom-
parable master of his art. Hardly yet can his literary be severed
from his personal and religious influence; but already two, at least, of
his works have come to be ranked among the classics. His Apologia
pro vita sua was written in 1864 in answer to an offensive and un-
provoked slander from Charles Kingsley. An accusation that truth
for its own sake had never been a virtue with the Roman catholic
clergy was supplemented by a gratuitous mention of Newman,
and, for this, the only substantiation offered was a reference to a
sermon delivered when the preacher was still ministering in the
English church. Newman showed that the sermon contained no
words that could possibly express such a meaning. Kingsley, the
most honest and fearless of men, yet would not make an honest
withdrawal, and Newman, with just relentlessness, exposed him
to the derision of the world. The exposure was completed by
an intimate account of the mental history of the man who had
been maligned. Between April and June, Newman put out an
Apologia, in seven parts, which should vindicate himself and
show his countrymen what manner of man he was. False ideas
may be refuted by argument, but by true ideas alone are they
expelled. I will vanquish,' he said, 'not my accuser, but my
judges. ' And this he did in a wonderful way. He sat down and
wrote day and night—his fingers, as he said, walking nearly
twenty miles a day—just as he felt, thought and remembered,
often weeping as he wrote, but triumphantly achieving such a
record as few men have ever made, so sincere, so thorough, or
80 convincing. From the day when his Apologia was published,
Newman won a place in the heart of his countrymen of whatever
religion or whatever politics, which he never lost till he passed
away nearly fifty years later in an honoured old age. The supreme
merit of his Apologia, no doubt, is its directness. Every page
seems as if it were rather spoken than written. It has the merits
of a letter rather than of a book. It seems to represent without
omission or concealment the whole mind of the writer. And yet
it is a piece of finished art, not conscious but inevitable, because
the writer had become, half-perhaps altogether-unwittingly, a
supreme artist. He could not write in any other way than as an
artist: his art had become to him a second nature. Thus, then,
when the English of his Apologia is recommended as a model,
and as characteristic of its age and the tractarian movement, it
must be remembered that its simplicity is largely the result of a
that
## p. 268 (#292) ############################################
268
The Oxford Movement [CH.
long and strenuous mental discipline acting upon a singularly
brilliant and sensitive spirit. Newman writes as nature looks;
but it is not given to others, in untaught simplicity, to write as
he wrote. The training ground of his Apologia was the long
series of sermons, delivered week by week, saint's day by saint's
day, at St Mary's, Oxford. Their simplicity seems even more
certain than that of the personal vindication which followed them
after twenty years. Their English is simple, clear and refreshing
as pure water; answering to every changing thought of the
speaker's mind. The thought is as limpid as the language. There
had been nothing like them in the English pulpit: the nearest
approach was bishop Wilson, yet in him still lingered the savour
of the old divines who, undoubtedly, said what they meant, yet
relished it as it was said. Newman never seems to taste what
he is saying, nor to write with any look backward at himself :
he only speaks straight home. Yet all this would have been
impossible, his unique and wonderful style would not have been
created, if he had not been both a student and a musician and
had not, almost all his life long written thrice over everything
that he intended to preserve. The ancient classics, the fathers
in their solemn searching severity, the unearthly music of the
violin—these taught him the mastery of language and to know
when he had mastered it to express every vibration of his thought.
Of his teachers in English literature, only two were prominent,
Southey, whom he 'worshipped,' and Crabbe, from whom he un--
consciously learnt more than any other master, in power to register,
remember and reproduce a single impression in single-minded
words. And, ever at the background, a spirit which dominates
but finds no complete expression which frail humanity can grasp,
is the majestic infinity which sounds in the symphonies of Beet-
hoven. In his later sermons, especially in Sermons for Mixed
Congregations (1850), his style was much more ornate, his
eloquence less restrained, with an extraordinary vividness of
description and appeal. He became more rhetorical, more
obviously aiming at effect, with less of English reticence and
with a vehemence more Italian or French.
Next to Newman's Sermons and his Apologia, no doubt
The Dream of Gerontius, the vision, half dream, half inspiration,
of the beginnings of a world beyond this life, is his most direct
appeal. Swinburne recognised 'the force, the fervour, the terse
energy' in its verse : and it has that mark of genius, like the
finest parts of Shakespeare, that poor and rich, learned and
## p. 269 (#293) ############################################
XII]
269
Newman's Later Works
ignorant, are alike carried away by its attraction. There are im-
mortal lines in it, and it is no temerity to predict that ‘Praise to
the Holiest,' like 'Lead kindly Light,' will never be forgotten, the
one a profound theology in words like classic marble, the other
a passionate cry of individual struggle and self-conquest.
In the rest of Newman's work there is an obvious division
drawn by his submission to the see of Rome. Yet there is little
apparent difference in his manner of writing. He never sur-
passed, in the way of pure exposition, the clarity and distinction
of his style in Lectures on the Prophetical Office of the Church
(1838). But, later books were, at least at the time of their publica-
tion, more generally influential, notably The Scope and Nature of
University Education (1859), The Grammar of Assent (1870) and
perhaps, also, the earlier Essay on the Development of Christian
Doctrine (1845). This last, begun while he was still in the English
church, became a justification of his secession. It explained how
modern Rome, widely different from the church of the Fathers,
could yet claim to represent the original Christianity, not as identical
but as consistent with it, as being in fact the full fruit of which
the seed only was seen at first. In his theory, Newman was not so
far away from the Darwinism which was to exert a far greater
influence on English thought, and he certainly expressed the heart
of the science of comparative religion. Something of the same
kind may be said of lectures on University Education. They
represent, if they do not indeed anticipate, some of the most
powerful ideas of the later nineteenth century in regard to the
true functions of a university and the motive force of university
reform. Knowledge for its own sake, as enlargement of the mind,
is the object of a university education; but such knowledge is
impossible apart from a theology. All knowledge is, ultimately, a
defence of the Christian faith. A university is, must be, impartial;
but it can only be impartial if it includes theology in the sciences
which it studies. The Grammar of Assent carried the argument of
probability, the corner-stone of his master Butler, on to new ground.
The argument was, to him, 'an accumulation of probabilities,' and
he reached these by a study of the mental processes which lead to
apprehension and assent. 'In any enquiry about things in the
concrete,' he wrote, 'men differ from each other not so much in the
soundness of their reasoning as in the principles which govern its
exercise,' and those principles were not general but personal. “The
validity of proof is determined not by any scientific test but by the
illative sense. ' It is easy to relate such thoughts as these to much
>
## p. 270 (#294) ############################################
270 The Oxford Movement [CH.
later philosophy, both English and German. And, in fact, what is
characteristic of all Newman's writing is that form of genius which
seizes upon the floating tendencies of nascent thought and points
the way towards unforeseen conclusions.
It is only within very narrow limits that Newman's thought
here or elsewhere can ever be called reactionary. No doubt he,
as one of the latest and clearest of his critics and admirers has
said, had, indeed, an 'abhorrence of doctrinal liberalism. ' In 1835,
he vigorously protested against 'the introduction of rationalistic
principles into revealed religion' in a tract which described
rationalism as 'a certain abuse of reason; that is, a use of it
for purposes for which it never was intended and is unfitted,' and
‘a rationalistic spirit' as 'the antagonist of Faith; for Faith is, in
its very nature, the acceptance of what our reason cannot reach,
simply and absolutely upon testimony. But it has of recent
years again and again been asserted that he was the intellectual
parent of a modernism which he would have abhorred. A partial
study of his writings might give some ground for such a view:
a complete one refutes it. It could, indeed, hardly be held by any
who did not, perhaps unconsciously, identify the wider catholicism
of orthodox Christianity with the narrower presentment of it in
modern Roman theology which Newman never set himself very
seriously to defend. His intellectual standpoint, however much
during his long life it may seem to have varied, never really
departed from the three bases on which it had been founded.
He was an Aristotelian. He distrusted much of modern metaphysic.
He regarded the actual facts of human life as the ultimate basis of
reason. He was, like many of the most earnest English thinkers
of his time, a convinced disciple of Butler. His reading of The
Analogy of Religion was, as he said, an era in his religious opinions.
Starting from probability as the guide of life, he never fancied
that the limitless area of things human and divine could be fully
mapped or the ultimate mystery more than 'imperfectly com-
prehended. ' But he found reality in the religious facts of the
world, as the philosophers of his time found them in the moral
facts, and the men of science in the physical ; and, herein, he may
be said to have anticipated modern psychology. Yet also, and with
at least as much strength, he was a historian: very often, not
an accurate historian in detail, but a historian of illumination
and genius. If much that he wrote as history has long been cast
aside, the interpretation that he gave of early-not the earliest-
Christian centuries remained as an inspiration to the students who
## p. 271 (#295) ############################################
XII]
271
Dean Church
TOT
LE
re
TI
made Oxford history famous, to Stubbs and Freeman, Creighton
and Bryce, and remains still. When he wrote his different studies
he was loyal to his principles, whether, at the time, he was an
English or a Roman churchman, but he never surrendered the
scholar's independence. No doubt, he loved narration more than
interpretation, character more than institutional life; but, what
he wanted to find, and believed he could find, in history was
truth: and in that he never deserted the fundamental principle of
the tractarian company. As a historian, his affinities were with
the French school which was coming into existence in his middle
age, never with the purely German, where vast collections of facts
were often used to support an unverifiable theory. But, if his
passion throughout was catholicism, his preconception was truth.
Newman must ever remain the central figure in the literature
of the movement of which he was the most conspicuous figure.
But Pusey, it would be true to say, represented far more entirely its
most prominent characteristics: its basis in history and tradition,
its via media, its determination stare super antiquas vias. And
it may well be that, if Newman appealed to the wider circle, Pusey
and Keble influenced more directly the general literature of
English religion. The Oxford movement certainly belongs to the
history of English religion more definitely than to the history
of English literature; but it had great influence, outside its own
definite members, on the literary taste of its age. It spoke from
the first for a certain purity, directness and severity of style:
later, the historical influences which attached themselves to it,
through the study of ancient legends, and liturgies, and hymns,
produced a richer vein of prose, a more florid touch in poetry.
No one can think that Tennyson was wholly unmoved by its
manner; but Dolben and Pater were the undoubted issue of its
later life. If one were to look for men of letters who were as
clearly such, and would have been in any age, as they were men
of religion, one would light instantly on the names of Richard
William Church and Richard Chenevix Trench. The former, a
fellow of Oriel with Newman, one of the proctors who vetoed
the new test proposed when Ward was condemned, died as
dean of St Paul's. Church lived to be the historian of the
movement itself, and perhaps that was his finest work. But his
deep thought and profound wisdom, which had remarkable
weight with the eminent statesmen of his day, were seen at
their best in his interpretation of past history as well as in
lectures and sermons which are models of clear writing and
Test
TK
the
tat
## p. 272 (#296) ############################################
272 The Oxford Movement
[CH.
clear thought. Something of the severity and unworldliness of
Dante, of whom he was a devoted student, seemed to have
descended upon him, with, also, the great Florentine's knowledge
of the ways and thoughts of common men. But, most clearly,
he was, in literature, the disciple of Newman, in the simplicity,
directness and absence of ornament which made his style powerful
in its effect on the writing of his generation. Church was a
preacher, a moralist, a historian; but, especially, he was a student
of human nature, who judged men equally yet with sympathy,
who weighed motives in scales which were never deflected by
prejudice or passion, and knew to a nicety the springs of human
action. He was a master of sympathetic literary criticism, too,
as his volume on Spenser proves. His historical sketches, such as
that of the early middle age, and his criticisms in literature, such
as those of Cassiodorus and Pascal, show a characteristic simplicity
which cannot veil the abundance of knowledge. Occasionally,
something is revealed of the fire within him, which breaks out
now and again in his classic memorial of the Oxford movement
and the men who began and led it, a record, as he wrote to
Lord Acton,
that one who lived with them, and lived long beyond most of em, believed
in the reality of their goodness and height of character, and still looks back
with deepest reverence to those forgotten men as the companions to whose
teaching and example he owes an infinite debt, and not he only but religious
society in England of all kinds 1.
Preeminently, Church was a man of letters; and this was as
obviously true of Richard Chenevix Trench. Church noted 'the
peculiar combination in him of the poet, the theologian and the
champion of primitive and catholic doctrine. ' Some of his lyrics
belong to the highest flight of English poetry. His religious
writings had a peculiar distinction and charm. Just as Church
owed inspiration to Greece, modern as well as ancient, and its
struggle for liberty, so Trench had nourished himself on the great
literature of Spain and was in harmony with the aspirations of her
liberal revival. He passed, in 1863, from the deanery of West-
minster to the archbishopric of Dublin, where he was primate at
the disestablishment and fought hard for the ancient symbols of
the Irish church under its new constitution. Like the dean of
St Paul's, he was not a militant tractarian, but he spoke of Hugh
James Rose as ‘my master,' and wrote, on the death of Pusey,
that ‘a prince in our Israel has indeed passed away. ' The names
1 Quoted in the Advertisement' to The Oxford Movement, p. vi.
6
6
## p. 273 (#297) ############################################
XII]
273
Neale and the Mozleys
of Church and Trench, which, even apart from their theological
writings, and at any time in our history, would have been pro-
minent in English letters, are examples of the influence which the
serious ideas of the Oxford movement exercised upon literature.
In historical study, the influence was no less conspicuous.
William Stubbs, the greatest English historian of the nineteenth
century, was a convinced tractarian and spoke of Pusey, whom
he assisted in literary work, as 'the master. ' Henry Parry
Liddon, the greatest preacher of the period, whose sermons at
St Paul's were, for twenty years, a conspicuous factor in the
life of London, was the disciple, the friend and the biographer
of Pusey. His Bampton lectures on the Divinity of Christ were
worthy to rank with the great dogmatic treatises of the older
divines. And their successors remain to the present day.
Not far apart from them, yet still somewhat in isolation, was
the striking figure of John Mason Neale, not an Oxford but a
Cambridge man. He was antiquary, historian, poet, novelist,
priest; and in none of these activities can he be forgotten.
He was as facile as he was learned. He poured forth book
after book of amazing erudition on almost every conceivable
subject of theological and historical interest. As a translator
of Latin and Greek hymns no Englishman has surpassed him.
But, above all things, he loved 'a story' and he could tell it—as
such an historical novel as Theodora Phranza, which tells the
fall of Christian Constantinople, evidences—with the best of
them. While his knowledge was diffused, that of James Bowling
Mozley was intense and concentrated. Master of a stern and
somewhat arid style, which still could rise into eloquence and
passion, he exercised a profound influence on the generation
which succeeded him. He was the foe of shallow thinking and
shallow writing. Many of the idols of the market-place, past
or present, from Martin Luther to Thomas Carlyle, suffered his
gwashing blows. His brother Thomas had abilities of a more
popular cast: he was, for a while, editor of The British Critic:
for many years he was a leader writer for The Times, and he
represented that paper at Rome during the time of the council
1869–70, when liis letters, unsympathetic though Roman catholics
have complained that they are, presented a most vivid and re-
markable picture of a great historical episode. In his old age,
he wrote Reminiscences of the days of struggle, which are
entertaining, but not always accurate. 'If a story cannot stand
on two legs,' said Newman, whose sister he had married, 'Tom
18
9
E. L. XII.
CH. XII.
## p. 274 (#298) ############################################
274
[CH.
The Oxford Movement
supplies a third. From him comes a touching tribute to the
self-effacing labours of Charles Marriott, like himself a fellow
of Oriel, who was the helper of every one, great and small, who
belonged to the movement, and its great stay in scholarship, as
editing with Keble and Pusey The Oxford Library of the Fathers.
Outside Oxford, the same interests which had awakened the
ecclesiastical learning and catholic orthodoxy of the university
were represented in many writers who were affected, in greater
or less degree, by the principles of the tractarians.
Walter Farquhar Hook was one of the most masterful figures
of his time, first as vicar of Leeds for twenty-two years and then
as dean of Chichester. He accepted nearly all the principles of the
tractarians, but frequently stood apart from their expression and
was often a vehement critic. He was an industrious compiler
of dictionaries and biographies, without sufficient research or
originality to give them permanent vitality. His successor at
Chichester, John William Burgon, held a similar position of in-
dependent judgment. He was a keen and biting controversialist
and the most conservative of biblical critics ; but he had an
intense love of 'good men,' among whom he placed some of the
authors of the tracts. His biographies are essential to a knowledge
of the movement.
Two sons of the famous statesman and philanthropist, and
brothers of that bishop of Oxford who revolutionised the ideal of
English episcopacy, Robert Isaac and Henry William Wilberforce,
both at Oriel, passed into the Roman church. The elder had
been an archdeacon and yet had written theological books of
real value, notably one on The Doctrine of The Incarnation,
which was on strictly tractarian lines and won great fame. The
younger after his secession gave important help to the Roman
catholic cause in the press.
Some of those who had abandoned their orders and left the
English church seemed eager to disclaim any connection with it.
Some vehemently attacked what they had before as vehemently
defended, but no one of them save Newman made any great mark
in literature. Some were content with a change of clothes, sub-
stituting for their customary suits of solemn black the vagaries of
'blue ties and ginger-coloured trousers. '
More formidable was the Anglo-Roman hierarchy created in
1850, whose head announced its creation by a letter from out the
Flaminian Gate. '
Nicholas Wiseman, Roman catholic controversialist and
1
## p. 275 (#299) ############################################
X1)
275
Converts to Rome
cardinal, whose education had not been English, was a capable
craftsman in letters. He was an orientalist, and a cultured student
of many subjects, who became the first archbishop of Westminster
in 1850, after devoting himself to confuting ‘High Church Claims'
(1841), and embodying his theories of church history in a pretty
story called Fabiola, or the Church of the Catacombs (1854).
Henry Edward, cardinal Manning, who had been an English
archdeacon and became Wiseman's successor, wrote, while he
was a member of the English church, volumes of sermons which
reached at least a fifth edition, and, as a controversial papalist,
many vehement criticisms of the Anglican position; but, though
his personal influence was great, his work is negligible as literature.
John Hungerford Pollen, as an English priest wrote the most
touching and tragic of all the records of struggle in parish
work for tractarian principles (A Narrative of Five Years at
St Saviour's, Leeds, 1851), and then, as a Romanist layman,
devoted himself to art, wrote some valuable lectures, was the
friend of Morris and Rossetti, Swinburne and Patmore, and
became in artistic literature, what his friend Baron von Hügel
said he was in life, 'the perfect type of l'homme du monde. '
Another convert, Frederick William Faber, endowed with high
gifts of imagination, deplored, as a Roman catholic, the position
of the Magi, with, perhaps, an undercurrent of reference to the
protestants' unhappy lot,
No Pope, no blessèd Pope had they
To guide them with his hand,-
and was generally sentimental and sugary, very unlike the
tractarians; but he wrote some devotional poetry of sincerity
and pathos. John Dobree Dalgairns was capable and solid
as a Roman controversialist on behalf of Christian belief; but
he was far surpassed by another of the later disciples of the
tractarians who became a power in the church of his adoption.
William George Ward, the crisis of whose stormy career was
critical also in the movement itself, has won immortality in the
verse of Tennyson and the prose of dean Church. The latter
finds it his chief distinction that as 'a profound metaphysical
thinker he was the equal antagonist on their own ground of John
Stuart Mill and Herbert Spencer. ' His work hardly belongs to
pure literature: its manner and method are, for the most part,
cumbrous, only occasionally vivid or comprehensive. His own
generation read what he wrote because he was famous for what
he said: it was meat and drink to him to argue and to chop logic,
5
18-2
## p. 276 (#300) ############################################
276 The Oxford Movement [CH.
and his swordplay was a delight to the onlookers. But, if his
Ideal, his intuitionist philosophy and his controversial treatises
are forgotten, he will ever be remembered by the poet's farewell
to him as one
Whose Faith and Work were bells of full accord,
My friend, the most unworldly of mankind,
Most generous of all Ultramontanes, Ward.
Ambrose Phillips de Lisle, another English convert to the Roman
obedience, followed the Tracts for the Times with keenest in-
terest from the first. He had been ten years a Roman catholic
when they began to appear and he set himself before long to
correspond with their writers in the hope of 'producing a good
understanding between the Catholic and Anglican churches, with
a view to the ultimate restoration of that happy and blessed unity,
which formerly existed between them for more than a thousand
years, and which,' he added, “I am perfectly certain will one day be
restored. ' The letters which passed between him and Mont-
alembert illustrate how close at some points was the connection
between the ecclesiastical revival in England and in France.
The French man of letters had no hope
that Catholicity will make any real progress in England, as long as the
fanatical spirit of Archbishop Manning, Mr Ward, and others of the same
stamp is prevalent among English Catholics;
and, on the other side, Newman was equally hopeless about reunion
or 'the conversion of that corporate body which we call the
Anglican Church. ' De Lisle's own work, sympathetic in aim,
trivial in result, is an example of the rift between the two bodies,
in literature as well as in religion. Only in Newman himself was
the influence of the Oxford movement to be discerned among
Romanist writers.
But the glamour of tractarian theology extended far beyond
those who were its first teachers or their direct heirs. It created
a religious literature effective if ephemeral: it ‘tuned the pulpits'
for some half a century to a gravity which strove, often success-
fully, after the majesty of classical sculpture. And, in the poetry
of Digby Mackworth Dolben, only recently given to the world, and
of Christina Rossetti, it formed a new life exuberant and aflame.
Dolben pursued its teaching till it yielded to him a certain medieval
richness of ecclesiastical imagery that touched at many points a
religious passion which was older than Christianity, and almost
1 Purcell, E. , Life of Ambrose Phillips de Lisle, vol. II, p. 360.
## p. 277 (#301) ############################################
XII]
Tractarian Novels
277
hostile to it. To Christina Rossetti, the catholic theology of the
English church was the very breath of life, and she accepted its
sternness without dispute. Yet, while the accent of severity
clings to all she wrote, we are, in her company, on the road to a
reaction which yet has its roots in the past: the splendour of
Jeremy Taylor is not forgotten and the exotic richness of Walter
Pater is in sight.
In humbler literature, 'tractarianism' may be thought to
have created an epoch by inaugurating the dreary succession
of religious novels. But they were not dreary in their beginnings.
J. M. Neale was a great writer of romance. Newman himself put
some very good polemical work into Loss and Gain (with an
immortal description of an Oxford tutor's breakfast) and Callista.
Wiseman's Fabiola was an effort of the same kind. Francis
Edward Paget, student of Christ Church and then rector of
Elford, published a series of most interesting tales, containing
quite delicious descriptions of country life and character which
no novelist of his time surpassed. But most prominent of all
was the long line of stories, exquisite in domestic portraiture,
strong in moral power, keen in understanding of character and
touched with a gracious humour, which issued from the parish of
Hursley-where Keble was to the authoress a true guide, phi-
losopher and friend-and were the work of Charlotte M. Yonge.
The Heir of Redclyffe and The Little Duke have their place
in English literature. They have had many imitators and suc-
cessors but few rivals, unless John Inglesant may claim to be of
their company.
A movement which had so many means of making itself felt
throughout the country had, naturally, an influence in many phases
of literature. It was primarily religious, with a religion, said one
of its lay disciples, an eminent public official, 'which was fervent
and reforming in essentials with a due reverence for existing
authorities and habits and traditions'; but it was not narrow
or cloistered, it was 'a religion which did not reject, but aspired
to embody in itself, any form of art and literature, poetry,
philosophy, and even science which could be pressed into the
service of Christianity? '
But its permanent effects may be seen most clearly in the fields
of history and dogma. During the eighteenth century, the constant
study of the Fathers of the early church which had been the
basis of the theological writings of the reformers and the Caroline
1 Letters of Lord Blachford, p. 15.
## p. 278 (#302) ############################################
278 The Oxford Movement [CH. XII
divines had passed into desuetude. In the seventeenth century,
no one would have dared to write theology without quoting long
passages of crabbed Latin and obscure Greek. In the eighteenth
century, the habit had gone entirely out of fashion, and Wesley,
scholar though he was, was the last man in the world to wish
for its revival. But, while the tractarians were in their cradles,
Routh of Magdalen had recalled to the church of England the
thought of the rock whence it was digged, by the publication of
the first part of his Reliquiae Sacrae (1814), in which he collected
the fragments of early Christian writings up to the first Nicene
council and edited them with a remarkable combination of affec-
tion, erudition and sagacity. He set the tone for the Oxford
writers. Theology and history were inseparable. Accuracy was
all important. 'Verify your quotations' was the first duty of a
‘
scholar. The real teaching of Christianity would be found, in
balanced emphasis, if you went back far enough for it. And that
was the motto of the tractarians. Christian dogma was inseparable
from true history. That was a far-reaching principle, fruitful long
after the tractarians had ceased to work.
## p. 279 (#303) ############################################
CHAPTER XIII
THE GROWTH OF LIBERAL THEOLOGY
RELIGIOUS thought has seldom been so stagnant in England
as at the opening of the nineteenth century. The professional
advocates of the Christian faith did not lack ability, but they had
been traversing the same arid ground of external evidences for
half a century. They continued to put the apostles into the witness
box and acquit them according to the rules of the Old Bailey.
They cross-examined the saints for their attestation of miracle
and prophecy, but omitted to discover the secret of their life.
A Paley or a Watson might display admirable commonsense, and
be accounted by the faithful a match for Tom Paine; and yet the
religious life remained starved. The methodist movement, with
its evangelical counterpart, had, indeed, given back to religious
feeling its rightful place and more, but had produced little or
no theology, except for the particularly acrid and unprofitable
Calvinist controversy.
The French revolution had set up a ferment of new ideas and
induced a critical attitude towards all established notions and
institutions. But the very extravagances of the movement, and
the desperate nature of the war in which England was engaged
against the propagandists of the revolution, made English people
more than usually suspicious of new ideas, and gave a new lease
of life to threatened institutions like the established church.
Sympathy with the ideas of the revolution was regarded as
dubiously patriotic and probably irreligious, as Priestley and
William Frend found to their cost. When the former took flight
to a more kindly clime, bishop Horsley could exult and sing, “The
orators and oracles of Birmingham and Essex Street are dumb. '
Traditional teaching, therefore, remained in almost undisputed
possession through the period of the great war, and beyond it,
when the new fears of social unrest excited corresponding fears
## p. 280 (#304) ############################################
280 The Growth of Liberal Theology [CH. .
for Christian faith. For the first twenty years of the new century,
English theology was at a standstill. The stars of the older day,
Paley and Horsley and Watson, were setting, and no new stars
had arisen. Theology could make no serious progress until it
should emancipate itself from the outworn conventions of the
previous century, and be free to face the urgent questions of the
new age. The fashionable utilitarianism of Paley could kindle no
warmth. Idealism already had its prophets in Germany; but it
needed a Coleridge to discover and interpret them for English
readers. There were also on the continent pioneers of a more
scientific literary criticism; but their work was still unknown in
this country. Herbert Marsh, fellow of St John's college, Cam-
bridge, who had studied at Leipzig under Michaelis, published in
four volumes (1793-1801) a translation of the latter's Introduction
to the New Testament, together with essays and a dissertation of
his own on the sources of the first three Gospels. He did not
escape reproof for his rashness; but neither was he debarred from
becoming a divinity professor and a bishop. The work had no
immediate sequel. English scholarship was not ready for such ques-
tions; but, twenty-four years later, another future bishop, Connop
Thirlwall, picked up the threads, in introducing to an English
public Schleiermacher’s A Critical Essay on the Gospel of St Lrike.
Still more necessary than critical learning was a freer view of
biblical inspiration. Theological scholars worked in shackles, if
not in blinkers, so long as à priori theories of the inerrancy of
Scripture were unchallenged. When the critical methods that
were already being applied to other literature should come to
be applied to the Bible, a revolution would follow. If, in his
Shakespearean studies, said Coleridge, he were to use the same
uncritical liberties as divines allowed themselves in harmonising
the inconsistencies of Scripture, ‘I would almost undertake to
harmonise Falstaff's account of the rogues in buckram into a
coherent and consistent narrative. The eighteenth century was
seriously lacking in the historic sense; but, so soon as Wolf set
himself to prove the plural authorship of the Iliad, and Niebuhr
began discussing the origin of the early legends of Roman history,
the day was not far distant when similar tests must be applied
to biblical literature. The growth of the scientific temper in the
new century, with its ruling idea of development, would also
create a more sympathetic interest in doctrine viewed historically
rather than as absolutely defined. The time was ripe for the
advent of Christian scholars who, with a more daring spirit,
## p. 281 (#305) ############################################
XIII]
281
The Evangelicals
would set their sails to catch the new breezes that were
stirring.
But in what direction was a truer theology to be looked for?
The spirit of religion burned brightest among the evangelical
churchmen and methodists. The new century witnessed a new
literary venture, The Christian Observer, which enlisted most
of the evangelical talent—Henry Thornton, Thomas Scott the
commentator and John Venn. The evangelicals were not wanting
in ability or energy, but, as a body, had little taste for literature,
except of a directly practical purpose. They showed their capacity
for meeting the religious needs of their less critical followers in
devotional and homiletic literature. Hannah More's Cheap
Repository Tracts had an enormous vogue, and a simple moral
tale by Legh Richmond, The Dairyman's Daughter, reached two
million copies. For more cultivated readers, there was a great
outpouring of pious biography. Charles Simeon, with all his
wider interests, published almost nothing except homiletic litera-
ture, skeletons' of sermons, as he frankly called them. Even a
professed work of learning like Joseph Milner's History of the
Church of Christ (1794–7) aimed chiefly at edification; 'genuine
piety is the only thing which I intend to celebrate. ' Neither
he nor his brother, dean Isaac Milner, who brought the history
down to Luther's reformation, thought it necessary to read
anything in Luther's language. Evangelical theology concentrated
itself upon a few favourite doctrines which formed the scheme of
salvation; its language was soon learnt, and it was all-sufficient.
The peculiarity of this language, together with its hackneyed
use, was enough to deter some minds, as the outspoken baptist
minister, John Foster, complained in his essay on the Aversion
of Men of Taste to Evangelical Religion (1805). Even biblical
interpretation commanded but a narrow field of interest; the
unfulfilled prophecies alone gave scope for speculation. The
rigid theory of inspiration, in general, foreclosed enquiry, and the
evangelicals retained that theory longest of all.
The true glory of the evangelicals lay in their pastoral zeal and
in their philanthropy. The Clapham sect, as Sydney Smith nick-
named them, maintained a long struggle against the slave trade,
and supported missionary societies and charitable enterprises with
princely generosity. William Wilberforce, member of parliament
for the county of York, raised a hitherto unpopular and mis-
judged party in the public esteem when, in 1797, he produced his
Practical View of Christianity. It found more readers than any
## p. 282 (#306) ############################################
282 The Growth of Liberal Theology [[
CH.
book by a clergyman; its effect is comparable with that of The
Serious Call. It had, however, none of William Law's wit,
though its writer was deemed by Madame de Staël the wittiest
talker she had met in England. “The present state of things in
France, where a brood of moral vipers, as it were, is now hatching,'
was the occasion for the serious self-examination proposed in it.
“We bear upon us but too plainly the marks of a declining empire. '
The author sees no hope of averting this ruin, except by a revival
of real Christianity, as contrasted with the decent selfishness'
which passed muster with most Christians. “The grand defect'
in these nominal Christians is that they forget
the peculiar doctrines of the Religion which they profess-the corruption of
human nature-the atonement of the Saviour-and the sanctifying influence
of the Holy Spirit.
But, apart from this sincere allegiance to the orthodox language,
Wilberforce, as Sir James Stephen has shown, 'was very much
a latitudinarian. His catholic spirit had no taste for polemical
divinity, and he gave himself, as he advised others to give them-
selves, to practical Christianity.
Among the evangelicals there was not enough of speculative
interest to revive and liberate theology. Emancipation would not
come from them. It came in part from an unexpected quarter,
from the poet-philosopher and amateur theologian, Samuel Taylor
Coleridge. From early days, he was in revolt against the utilitarian
fashion in philosophy and in theology, and it became his aim, as
Julius Hare said, to spiritualise both the one and the other. It
was high time that philosophy should again have a hearing in
English religion, as it had already had in Germany. English theo-
logy had been suffering, for at least a generation, from the poverty
of its intellectual interest; it was Coleridge's province to stimulate
that interest, as a long succession of religious thinkers have amply
testified.
Coleridge would himself have recognised the truth and the
pathos of Charles Lamb's description of him as 'an archangel a
little damaged. The contrast between his spiritual ideals and his
sordid failures was as painful to him as it could be to his friends.
He laboured under a deep conviction of sin which gave a personal
intensity to his Confessions, as, for instance, when he says that, in
the Bible, he has ‘found words for my inmost thoughts, songs for
my joy, utterances for my hidden griefs, and pleadings for my
shame and my feebleness. The theological reading of this
'
‘literary cormorant,' as he called himself, was discursive. He leapt
## p. 283 (#307) ############################################
X11] Erskine of Linlathen 283
contemptuously back over the aevum rationalisticum into the
seventeenth century, where he found poets and divines to his mind.
Archbishop Leighton, Jeremy Taylor and other writers of that age
furnished him with matter for comment in his Aids to Reflection
(1825). Some readers might feel themselves being led into a holy
jungle' by Coleridge's musings on the persons of the Trinity as
representing ipseity, altereity and communeity; but, at least, he
gave them more to think about than did the orthodox defenders
of the faith in their eminently lucid writings. It was time that some-
one called a halt to the prevailing mode in theological literature.
Evidences of Christianity! I am weary of the word. Make a man feel
the want of it; rouse him, if you can, to the self-knowledge of his need of it;
and you may safely trust it to its own evidence.
Confessions of an Enquiring Spirit was published by his
nephew, posthumously, in 1840. These seven letters on inspiration,
simpler in style and thought than most of Coleridge's writings,
are a remarkable anticipation of the attitude of modern Christians
towards the Bible. Coleridge exhibits a happy union of complete
freedom and of deep gratitude for the Scriptures. He combats
the contemporary view that the Bible was not to be reasoned
about in the way that other good books are. ' He maintains that
'the Bible and Christianity are their own sufficient evidence. '
In the Bible there is more that finds me than I have experienced in all
other books put together;. . . the words of the Bible find me at greater depths
of my being; and. . . whatever finds me brings with it an irresistible evidence
of its having proceeded from the Holy Spirit.
He rests secure on his own dear experience' and, regardless of
discrepancies and moral imperfections in the Scriptures, pursues
his study with free and unboding spirit. '
If Coleridge's theological influence depended less on his books
than on his conversation and friendship with religious thinkers,
the same is hardly less true of another contemporary layman,
Thomas Erskine of Linlathen. Erskine’s natural gift lay rather
in intimate spiritual converse and letters than in set writing. In
mid-life he ceased to publish books, as if himself questioning his
effectiveness as an author; but, for another thirty years, he talked
and wrote to those who would find more readers than he ever could.
Among his friends he counted Carlyle, Maurice, Stanley and McLeod
Campbell, besides an interesting group of Christians on the con-
tinent, with whom, also, he corresponded, Vinet, Gaussen, Adolphe
Monod and C. C. J. Bunsen. Erskine's writings, however, have
considerable importance, in spite of their amateurishness and lack
6
6
## p. 284 (#308) ############################################
ch6
a
284 The Growth of Liberal Theology [CH.
2
.
of method: 'your books,' wrote Maurice, in dedicating Prophets
and Kings to him, "seem to me to mark a crisis in the theological
movement of this time. While the orthodox Scottish divines of
'
Erskine's younger days grimly propounded the sovereign decrees'
of unbending Calvinism, there was room for his assertion in The
Unconditional Freeness of the Gospel (1828) that 'Christ died, not
for believers, but for the world. Forgiveness, he declared, “is a
permanent condition of the heart of God'; 'God's arms are open. '
Man must not claim even faith as the ground of his pardon; if he
does so claim, it is only an instance of his unextinguished pride;
'He must have self to lean on, and so when he is obliged to
surrender his own works, he betakes himself to his own faith as
his prop. But this is still self. ' The satiric humour, as well as
the strong mystical vein in his writings, recalls William Law, who
was one of Erskine's favourite authors. In the comparatively
few writers whom his defective eyesight allowed him to study,
he looked for 'light' rather than for theological learning : he
preferred Plato and the neo-Platonists, Leighton and Law, to
professional divines and their critical opponents. He dismisses
a polemical writer with the judgment: ‘he is a great reasoner:
but I do not find any light in him at all.
