366
THEOLOGY
IN GREAT BRITAIN SINCE 1825.
Pleiderer - Development of Theology in Germany since Kant
In this also we meet with a striking similarity to the early days of modern German theology.
The relation of J.
H.
Newman, the originator and early
leader of the Anglo-Catholic movement, to his liberal teacher and mentor, Whately, may be compared with Neander's relation to his teacher Planck ; and the parallel between the friendship of Thomas Arnold with Keble, the friend of
Hurrell Froude and Newman, and the friendship of the youthful Schleiermacher with Novalis and Friedrich Schlegel,
subsequently diverged.
? ? ? 35^ THEOLOGY IN GREAT BRITAIN SINCE 1825. [Bk. IV.
is still more obvious. We must begin with the movement of the High Church, or Tractarian, or Puseyite party, and then take up that of the Broad Church, led by Thomas Arnold and F. D. Maurice, which, from the first, existed by the side of the Tractarian movement, but did not obtain general influence until the latter had passed the zenith of its power. This movement of the Broad Church party has been more recently followed by a liberalism of a more decided type, which has been represented during this generation in the rise of Biblical criticism in Great Britain.
The Tractarian movement dates from the summer of 1833, though its roots extend a few years further back. In the
Year, a collection of religious lyrics on the principal festivals of the ecclesiastical
year 1827 appeared Keble's Christian
? year ; the poems clothe a tender and deep piety in the symbolic garb suggested by the seasons of the natural and Christian year, and are the production of a true poet. We might call Keble the English Novalis, the poet of religious idealism, to whose vision " two worlds " lie always open, the visible being but a type of the invisible, which always lay nearest his heart. Only Keble did not possess the philo sophical culture and learning of Novalis, and lacked con sequently his largeness of view : in Keble's mind, profound personal piety was so exclusively associated with the forms
of Anglican doctrines and ceremonies, that he could not con ceive Christianity or religion at all, apart from the Anglican system ; his religious intolerance went so far, that when the Queen selected a Lutheran prince to be godfather to one of her sons, he set on foot a protest against it from English
clergymen. The religious poems of the Christian Year gave such perfect and admirable expression to a wide-spread state of feeling amongst English people, that the little volume found everywhere the warmest reception, and probably ob tained more friends than all the subsequent theological tracts and learned books for the new movement in the Church. It produced a still deeper effect on the convictions and the subsequent life of John Henry Newman, who had hitherto
passed amongst Oxford men as a disciple of Whately's, though as early as 1826 his mind began to take another turn, chiefly through intercourse with his friend Hurrell Froude. This young man seems to have played a similar part amongst the allies of English Romanticism to that
? ? ? Ch. II] PARTIES AND MOVEMENTS IN THEOLOGY.
357
played by Friedrich Schlegel in the same movement in Germany. From Froude's Remains, which were published (1836-9) after his death by Newman and Keble, one gets the impression of a man not of great natural capacity, but of loose and neglected mind, which was greatly lacking both in moral strength and solid learning ; a man who loved to indulge in paradoxes, which aimed at being clear and pro found, but were often meaningless, and who, from his limited
aristocratic Anglican standpoint, passed sentence upon every thing outside and beyond it with the greater arrogance in proportion to his ignorance. " He hated the Reformation and the Reformers, especially Luther, Melanchthon and Co. ," because they denied the jus divinum of the Catholic Church, preferred preaching to the sacraments, and put an end to ecclesiastical discipline. He demanded the restoration of
monasticism, celibacy, fasting, ancient ritual and art, but especially the emancipation of the Church from the supre macy of the State. The fanatical thoroughness with which
Froude advocated his views made a deep impression on
Henry Newman, to whose nature submission to a stronger personal authority was a necessity, and who was just then passing through a mental crisis. When then at length, soon after the appearance of the Christian Year, a
friendship between Keble and Newman was brought about by Froude, the triumvirate was constituted, the object of which was nothing less than a second Reformation, or counter- Reformation, of the English Church.
The movement thus prepared for in this circle of Oxford friends was brought to a head through the political and ecclesiastico-political agitations at the beginning of the thirties. In order to allay the agitation in Ireland, Sir
Robert Peel had carried his Bill for Catholic Emancipation, to
the great alarm of the Oxford orthodox party. The French
Revolution of July, 1830, and the accession of William IV. ,
brought the Whigs into power, who, after a violent conflict
with the Tory lords and prelates of the Upper House,
passed in 1832 the Reform Bill, a measure which had been
long and loudly called for by the majority of the nation.
? John
The next followed a Bill to abuses in the Irish
year remedy
Church, by which the income of the Anglican Church Ireland was greatly reduced, and one-half of its (superfluous) sees were abolished. The unyielding opposition on the part
in v
? ? ? 358 THEOLOGY IN GREAT BRITAIN SINCE 1825. [Bk. IV.
of the nobility and clergy to all these absolutely necessary reforms had so much excited liberal feeling amongst the people generally, that the bishops were on several occasions insulted and attacked ; and the premier, Lord Grey, ad vised the bishops "to set their house in order. " In High Church circles the feeling prevailed, that the very existence of the Church was imperilled, and that what was required was to create a powerful counter-movement to the liberal tendencies of the day. The Assize Sermon of Keble's in the University pulpit at Oxford, on the " National Apostasy," formed the signal for its friends ; and in July, 1833, at a conference at Hadleigh, it was resolved to take immediate action. Under the conviction that " living movements do
(not come of committees," but depend on personal influence, Newman placed himself at the head of this, and began in 1833 the issue of the Tracts for the Times, as their editor
and principal author ; this being the origin of the name " Tractarian. " In the space of eight years (1833-41), ninety tracts were published, which are collected in six volumes.
? there appeared also, by various writers, extracts from the Church Fathers, under the title of Records ofthe Church. When in 1835, Pusey, Professor and Canon
of Christ Church, joined the movement, an English transla tion of the whole of the Fathers was projected, which began to appear in 1838, under the title of A Library of the Fathers of the Holy Catholic Church.
The design of this movement was certainly not purely religious by any means, but ecclesiastico- political, not to say political ; it was a general war against the Liberal tendencies of the age, and in defence of custom and tradition in the Church and society. As a means to this end, the revival and confirmation of the doctrines and usages of the Anglican Church was to be taken in hand. But while to all appearance the object was only to restore historical Anglicanism in its original purity, in reality the tendency to Catholicism was so decided that Anglicanism was from the very first left a long way behind, and the end of the movement, it could be fore seen, must be Romanism. This could be perceived in the first declarations of the Tractarians, the principal of which were the following: that salvation is based upon the objective efficacy of the sacraments, which again depends on their ad ministration by apostolically appointed priests, that on the
Contemporaneously
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? Ch. II. ]
PARTIES AND MOVEMENTS IN THEOEOtTT.
J59
apostolic succession of the bishops, who, as successors of the apostles, are the inheritors of the gifts of the Holy Ghost, and are thereby the highest authority, in complete inde pendence of the State, in matters of life and doctrine. The writings of the Tractarians were devoted to the exposition and the dogmatico-historical (rather than the Biblical) proof of these positions. A few special points may be here men tioned. A tract of Pusey's, which appeared in 1835, on
Baptism, attacked the evangelical doctrine of regeneration through faith, and its separation of the baptism of the spirit from the baptism of water ; Pusey taught that the real re- y generation is effected by the act of baptism, that the only condition presupposed is that no bar be placed in the way by unbelief; that since this cannot be the case with infants, the baptized child is regenerated. The Catholic doctrine of opus operatum is adopted as correct ; but as the grace of baptism may be lost again, for sins committed after baptism satisfac tion must be made by earnest penance, which has to be shown also in the old ecclesiastical form of ascetic observances.
? Hence the necessity of Church discipline as a means of grace. The mere preaching of the cross of Christ can lead to carnal security. It is not preaching, but ecclesiastical
that forms moral character. -- In the sacrament of the Lord's Supper, such is the doctrine, the body and blood of Christ is present, without transubstantiation, in reality in a mystical manner, and the sacrament is a sacrifice
discipline
(sacrificium, not merely sacramentum), that the mystical application of the sacrifice of Christ on the cross, in which Christ and the Church are together the subject and the
of the sacrifice. R. Wilberforce connected this theory with the doctrine of the Incarnation of Christ, holding that the Incarnation perpetuated the consecration and the sacrifice of the eucharist in spiritual but real manner. To confession also, sacramental significance ascribed fre quent private confession, in accordance with prescribed rules,
advocated. But as the sacraments owe all their saving efficacy to their administration at the hands of the Church, the whole stress falls ultimately, as the Catholic doctrine, upon the true doctrine of the Church. the actual visible saving institution founded by Christ through the agency of the apostles by the bishops, as the successors of the apostles,
the Holy Spirit descends through the means of grace are
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? 360 THEOLOGY IN GREAT BRITAIN SINCE 1825. [Bk. IV.
efficaciously administered and the truth infallibly taught. The invisible Church is composed solely of the living and perfected members of the visible Church, so that to the latter salvation is unconditionally confined. The " notes " of the true Church are apostolicity, catholicity, and autonomy. The most important condition is the apostolical succession of the bishops, which includes the other essential signs. The most perfect Church is the Anglican. The other episcopal Churches are branches of the one Catholic Church, but dis eased branches (especially the Romish Church), on account of their errors ; on the other hand, all communities of Dis senters, as well as the Protestant Churches of the Continent that have no bishops, are severed branches, sects, which do not possess the means of salvation. For it is only through the apostolic succession of the bishops that the gift of the Holy Spirit, and therewith the saving efficacy of the sacra ments, has been preserved to the Church. As Christ is the supreme Mediator, the bishop is his representative on earth, the mediator between the Church and Christ, the highest authority for the laity. The Scriptures cannot be taken as the final and sufficient norma fidei on account of their ambiguity ; they must be interpreted according to the rule of tradition, especially of the earlier centuries. Thus we have in the Nicene Creed the witness of the whole Church, affirming that the doctrine of the Trinity is the teaching of Scripture when properly understood. In the Preface to the translation of the Fathers, it is maintained that the New Testament is the source of doctrine, but that the Catholic Fathers are the channels through which it comes down to us, and that an earnest study of Catholic antiquity conducts those who are tired of modern questionings into the haven of security.
This love of ecclesiastical antiquity sprang out of the his torical impulse of Romanticism as much as Sir Walter Scott's poetical revival of Scottish and English antiquity, or again, the sympathetic learned study of German antiquity by the brothers Grimm and the poet Uhland. But the mystical
realism of the above doctrine of the sacraments sprang like wise from the inclination of Romanticism towards a certain Helldunkel, something neither light nor darkness, neither sensible nor supersensible, a love of mysteries behind experi ence ; Novalis, for instance, liked to call himself a magischer Idealist. So, again, the emphasis laid on the supernatural
? ? ? ? Ch. II. ] PARTIES AND MOVEMENTS IN THEOLOGY. 36 1
authority of the bishops by virtue of their supposed succession from the apostles was equally acceptable to an age that had grown tired of disputation ; and it was at the same time adapted to confirm afresh the position of the bishops, which had been shaken by political events. It therefore, not surprising that Tractarian doctrines were received at first with great favour in the English Church, especially amongst the clergy. true that there was at the beginning no lack of opposition, particularly on the part of the Evangelicals, who at once perceived, and passed sentence on, the weak place in the new movement -- its drift towards Rome. New man, indeed, endeavoured to defend his Anglo-Catholic posi tion as the true " Via Media" between Romanism and Protes tantism. This he did by undertaking to show the complete agreement of the doctrines of the Church of England with
apostolic, that ancient patristic teaching, making use of very free and sometimes sophistic method of interpreting the language of the Thirty-Nine Articles (in Tract 90). But was precisely this daring attempt to set aside the distinctive points of the Anglican creed in relation to Roman doctrine by the aid of forced and spurious interpretation, which brought about the revulsion of public opinion. Tract 90 was censured by the University 84 and the Bishop of Oxford, and New man felt called upon to discontinue the series. Newman resigned the leadership of the movement, which passed into the hands of the more learned and cautious Pusey, who had previously cast round an academical nimbus, and at length
to his name also. Many who had been so far its friends now withdrew, or went over to the opposite party. But this, again, produced the effect on the more faithful ones of causing them to abandon all reserve in following out their principles their full consequences. In the course of his studies in Church History, which he carried on in the retire ment of his country parish, Newman himself arrived at the conviction by degrees that his Via Media was untenable more and more the catholicity of the Romish Church out weighed in his estimation the apostolicity of the Anglican and the more he felt the defects of the latter, the dark spots in the disk of the former tended to vanish. When at last the Church of England committed what was in the eyes of him self and his friends the unpardonable crime of associating itself with the Lutheran and Calvinistic sects of the
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Church of Prussia, with the view of founding a new bishopric in Jerusalem, it appeared to Newman, as it had appeared still earlier to some more zealous friends, that to continue in such a Church was no longer possible. In October, 1845, he was received into the communion of the Romish Church, and in the course of a year he was followed by 1 50 clergymen and laymen of position belonging to his party. The party itself survived the heavy blow, but has subsequently shunned cautiously the slippery region of dogmatics, and devoted itself with the greater zeal to the elaboration of a ritual as nearly like that of the Catholics as possible. This Ritualism, how ever, has very little in common with theology. 1
books, which are of interest as giving an insight into his own reli
After his conversion Newman published several
? gious character, and as throwing indirectly light upon the movement of which he was the author and at first the chief leader. This is especially the case with his Apologia pro Vita Sua: being a History of his Religious Opinions (1865, 1st ed. ). This autobiography owes its attractiveness, not only to the universally acknowledged beauty of its style, but also to the honest openness with which the author describes the various phases of his religious opinions. A sincerely religious char acter is unveiled, as it struggles to reach the certainty of con viction with deepest earnestness ; and if the appearance of ambiguity and want of sincerity sometimes arises, it is not from the slightest wish to conceal anything from others from external considerations, but because the writer is not clear in his own mind, and because he is trying to hold perforce what is untenable and to conceal from himself consequences that are inevitable. But honourable as such a character may be, its weak side cannot be overlooked. The weakness consists rather in a moral than an intellectual inability to distinguish between religion and a particular form of its transmission in doctrine and ritual ; 2 because the firm centre of religious and
1 In one of his letters to Emerson, Carlyle criticises this ritualistic Pusey- ism in his somewhat pessimistic strain, as a symbol of the speedy dissolution of the superannuated English Church. In Past and Present, and elsewhere in his writings, he gives vent to similar vaticinations.
s Coinp. Apologia, p. 49. " From the age of fifteen, dogma has been the
fundamental principle of my religion :
enter into the idea of any other sort of religion ; religion as a mere sentiment, is to me a dream and a mockery. "
I know no other religion ; I cannot
? ? ? Ch. II. ] PARTIES AND MOVEMENTS IN THEOLOGY.
363
<
moral certainty cannot be found in the man himself, he clings to external authorities, maintains vehemently their inviolability, and all the time is driven further and further by the inevitable feeling of their insufficiency, until, weary of searching and inquiring, the secure haven of Romish infallibility is at last resorted to. What a different picture is presented in the religious history of Francis Newman, the younger brother of
l
!
John Henry, as it is described in his Phases of Faith
both brothers we have the same deep religious nature and the same restless desire for real conviction ; but in the case of the younger brother there is also the moral courage to aban don traditional opinions about the truth and to search for the truth itself, to let the outward props of authority fall one after the other, to gain in the soul itself true certainty of the reve lation of God. John Henry Newman has also formulated a theory of religious certainty, with a view to justifying his dog
probability being converted into certainty by a voluntary
assent and believing reception. Although this principle is not
wholly devoid of truth, there is reason to object to it,s that a
rule of certainty which is based neither on the reason nor on
proofs from fact, but on the simple power of the will to hold
something to be true, possesses no value, and may easily be
come as fruitful a source of superstition as of faith. In fact,
the subjective character of this purely emotional certainty
is acknowledged by Newman himself in the very remarkable
"
words :
The from in the matter of argument probability,
religion, became an argument from personality, which, in fact, is one form of the argument from authority. " It will be diffi cult to avoid this conclusion, if it is once granted that religious certainty rests merely upon emotional motives without rational
grounds ; in that case it of course, only subjective cer
See ante,
Apologia,
See Tulloch, in the Edinburgh Review, Oct. , 1870, and his Movements
Religious Thought,
103.
317. 19.
In
? matism, and has expounded it in the two books, An Essay on the Development ofChristian Doctrine (1845), and An Essay
in Aid of a Grammar of Assent (1870). In the latter he works out a principle which he had learnt from Keble,2 namely, that religious conviction does not rest on intellectual but emotional grounds, which cannot be theoretically proved,
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? 364 THEOLOGY IN GREAT BRITAIN SINCE 1825. [Bk. IV.
tainty that cannot rest upon itself, but to render it secure stands in need of the support of the greatest possible number of other subjects, that of external authority.
Newman's work on the Development Christian Doctrine takes as its starting-point the incontestable principle, that Christianity, like every historical institution, has passed through process of development, of growth, in doctrine and custom, and was not given to the world at the beginning in perfect form. He offers number of instances going to show that orthodox Protestantism under delusion, when
sup poses that all its doctrines and practices are taught in Scrip
ture and are prescribed therein, or are to be directly deduced therefrom. impossible to remain in the mere letter of Scripture, because the necessities of interpretation, for in stance, of such a phrase as " the Word became flesh," lead at once to a series of further questions. Other questions, such as the Canon of Scripture, its inspiration and authority, can not be answered from Scripture itself, because the Apostles had not then given any decision on them. As within the Biblical religion itself there " development through the Prophets to Jesus, so, again, in the apostolic teaching no historical point can be fixed at which the growth of doctrine ceased, and the rule of faith was once for all settled. " Finally, in Scripture itself the necessity of such a progressive develop ment distinctly indicated, for instance, the parables of the Leaven and the Mustard Seed. If in all this the author displays undoubtedly degree of sound historical sense, the reader immediately surprised by a very unhistorical and
? of the true principle! In order to guide the process of the development of Christianity, to distinguish correct developments from false, and to sanction them, there -- required an infallible authority outside the
genuinely dogmatic application
development namely, the Church. If Christianity as a whole, revelation, the results of its development must share the guarantee of its credentials. Revealed religion distin guished from Natural by the very fact that substitutes the voice of Law-giver --an objective authority, Apostle, Pope, or Church --for the voice of conscience. In Protestantism this authority the Bible but as can be proved that this authority insufficient, we must conclude that this required living and present source of revelation can only be the infal lible arbiter of all true doctrines -- the Church. Nor
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? Ch. II. ] PARTIES AND MOVEMENTS IN THEOLOGY. 365
sonal judgment precluded by this infallible authority, but is only limited to its proper range and preserved from error. --We must allow that this defence (following in the footsteps of the German Catholic Theologian Mohler) of the principle of Catho
lic tradition and authority is conducted very cleverly. It rests,
all the same, upon a great fallacy. The fact is overlooked
that the alleged infallible authority is itself a product of the f general development, and that it participates in its changes,
and is therefore subject, like every historical phenomenon, to the law of relativity. Moreover, the false traditional idea of development is throughout taken for granted -- namely, that development consists solely in positive growth, in an extension and more complete definition of older truth ; we hear nothing of the great fact, that development has also a negative aspect, that new truth does not come merely as an addition to the old, but often abrogates the old, so that in reality there is accom plished in it the continuous criticism of mind in the process of its development. We readily grant that this process does not go on without obedience to an inner law of rationality ; but precisely because reason is realised in the process of historic development, it does not require a special infallible institution to guide which can only become an impediment to the living spirit.
In the same year in which Newman set on foot the reac tionary High Church movement, Thomas Arnold, the Head Master at Rugby, published his pamphlet on The Principles\l of Church Reform, which, though provoked at first storm of indignation on all sides, presented in its fundamental thoughts the ferment of a new progressive movement in the English Church in the next decades. Arnold had, like New man, been a pupil of Whately's at Oxford, and a friend of Keble's. But while in the case of Newman the influence of
the devout friend soon overcame the cool intellectual acute-
ness of the tutor, with Arnold was the reverse.
out his life Arnold continued to combine profoundly earnest piety with clearness of intellect, manly love of truth, and a restless desire for practical work indeed, not easy to say which of these aspects of the noble man's character was most marked. Arnold was at the beginning of the thirties not less alarmed than Newman and his Oxford friends at the political troubles and threatening tempest which appeared to
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366 THEOLOGY IN GREAT BRITAIN SINCE 1825. [Bk. IV.
be gathering thick over the Church ; but while they sought salvation by the abandonment of the Reformation in a reform of dogma and the constitution and ritual of the Church, by which its boundaries would be narrowed and more sharply separated from the pulsating life of the nation, he demanded a reform in the opposite direction. In order to preserve to the nation the blessings of the State Church, he advocated the opening of its doors to the Dissenters, and the widening of its boundaries, so that all Englishmen who were, and wished to be Christians, should find a place in As the condition of membership, nothing more than an acceptance of the essential doctrines of the Christian faith, common to all parties both within and outside the Established Church, was to be required, differences in doctrine, constitution, and ritual being considered minor matters and permissible. The essential thing in Chris tianity practical godliness, based on the revelation of God in Scripture, and especially the person of Jesus, and mani festing itself in the moral purification and sanctification of personal and social life. the function of Church and
State equally, though from different point of view, to be in struments and organs of this ideal. There may not, therefore, be any separation between them, or jealousy and quarrel the State needs for its moral ends the religion of the Gospel, as the Church can exercise its educating influence over the nation only within the constituted forms and regulations of the Chris tian State. -- These are the main principles of Arnold's pam phlet on Church Reform, principles which have as their basis, not only an ideal view of the nature and ends of the State, but also broad view of the nature of Christianity a stand point exactly the same as that represented by Rothe his
? der Kirche and his Ethik} But this combination of Christian idealism and large-hearted humanity was then so new in England, that Arnold's proposed reforms were obnoxi ous to all parties alike to the High-churchmen they breathed heresy and revolution, and the Liberals considered them too conservative and narrow.
The storm of opposition from all sides did not shake Arnold's conviction of the truth and wisdom of his ideas. The force of his personal character the success of his work
Though Arnold differed from Rothe as to the source of the corruption of the true idea of the Church. See Arnold's Letter to Bunsen, Jan. 27, 1838.
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? Ch. II. ] PARTIES AND MOVEMENTS IN THEOLOGY. 367
in the school at Rugby, by which he initiated a reformation
in the entire system of public schools in England ; his power- . '/ ful sermons, in which he proclaimed the eternal truths of the Gospel with profound earnestness in simple undogmatic lan
and with constant reference to the various depart ments of moral life ; lastly, his work as a scholar in the field of classical literature and Roman history --all this combined in compelling his opponents even to respect the assailed and censured man, so that his sudden death (1842) was lamented on all sides as a national calamity.
It is Thomas Arnold, if any one, who must be regarded as the pioneer of free theology in England. It is true he wrote no considerable theological work--his vocation led him into the field of scholarship and history : and his views with regard to the interpretation of the Bible were neither quite new, nor do they meet completely the present require ments of historical criticism. But Arnold was the first to show to his countrymen the possibility and to make the demand, that the Bible should be read with honest human eyes without the spectacles of orthodox dogmatic presupposi tions, and that it can at the same time be revered with Christian piety and made truly productive in moral life. He was the first who dared to leave on one side the traditional phraseology of the High-Churchmen and the Evangelicals, and to look upon Christianity, not as a sacred treasure of the Churches and sects, but as a Divine beneficent power for every believer ; not as a dead heritage from the past, but as a living spiritual power for the moral advancement of indi viduals and nations in the present. If the universality of his interests and occupations was a hindrance to strictly scientific theological inquiry, it was really very favourable to his true
guage,
? mission : he showed how classical and general historical studies may be pursued in the light of the moral ideas of Christianity, and how, on the other hand, a free and clear way of looking at things may be obtained by means of wide historical knowledge, and then applied to the interpretation of the Bible and the solution of current ecclesiastical
ques tions. Thus he began to pull down the wall of separation
which had cut off the religious life of his fellow-countrymen,
with their sects and churches and rigid theological formulas
and usages, from the general life and pursuits of the nation.
It is also clear as day, that if longer life had been granted r
? ? ? 368 THEOLOGY IN GREAT BRITAIN SINCE 1825. [BIt IV.
to him, the result of the further prosecution of his historical studies, which had been made, in his last year, part of his vocation by his appointment to the chair of Modern History at Oxford, would have been further insight and courage to apply his historical and critical principles to the Bible. At all events, his work was subsequently further prosecuted in this direction by his friends and pupils.
Arnold was pre-eminently an independent character, both in his scientific and his political principles. For this reason he was prepared to learn from men of different schools.
him, and he confesses that he found in him what he had never
Samuel Taylor Coleridge exercised great influence upon
been able to find in any other English theologian : "
is at once rich and vigorous, and comprehensive and critical ; while the >>;0o? is so pure and so lively all the while. "1 From
Coleridge
His mind
? Arnold adopted the distinction between the reason and the understanding, and the determination of the relation of reason to faith as of two modes of perceiving religious truth, which are not antagonistic but supplementary. Of Coleridge's Letters on Inspiration? which he saw in manuscript, he expressed the opinion, 3 that they were " well fitted to break ground in the approaches to that momentous question which involves in it so great a shock to existing notions, . . . but which will end, in spite of the fears and clamours of the weak and bigoted, in the higher exalting and more sure establishing of Christian truth. " His friend ship with Bunsen, too, whose acquaintance he made in Rome in 1827, had an important influence on Arnold's mind ; it was through this scholar particularly that he kept himself in close relations with German literature, though principally only with its historical and Biblical exegetical works, but not with
German philosophy or systematic theology ; of Schleier- macher he read only his critical essay on 1 Timothy, the results of which appeared to him too bold.
The most direct and lasting influence on the mental development of Arnold was that of Whately, who had been in Oxford his tutor and adviser, and with whom, as Arch bishop of Dublin, he kept up a close friendship and constant
1 Letter No. 209, to Mr. Justice Coleridge, Sept. 25, 1839. 2 See ante, p. 311.
3 Letter No. 94, to Mr. Justice Coleridge, Jan. 24, 1835.
? ? ? Ch. II. ] PARTIES AND MOVEMENTS IN THEOLOGY. 369
intercourse. Whately was a man of clear intellect, humour, and benevolent heart, but not a learned theologian. His best known book is his Logic, constructed upon Aris totelian principles, which was once largely used in English
and universities. He carried his sound common sense into theological questions also, and found that not a few orthodox dogmas have no foundation in the Scriptures. Thus the orthodox doctrine of election is not in harmony with Paul's teaching, for in the latter what is dealt with is not the unconditional predestination of individuals to salva tion or destruction, but only the appointment of the whole Church to salvation in Christ, which is elected from the rest of the Heathen, as previously the people of Israel had been elected from the other nations. The final destiny of indi viduals depends solely on whether they personally do or do not make use of the advantages offered to them, by partici
colleges
faith, too, must not be understood of an imputation of the merits of Christ, but of the forgiveness
of sins on the fulfilment of the moral conditions. The death of Christ as a sacrifice must be received on the authority of
but it cannot be shown to be necessary. It is the same with the Deity of Christ : it must be believed on the
of Christ's own declarations in the Gospels, but interpreted essentially in the sense of Christ being the perfect moral example. The object of Christ's coming was the foundation of the kingdom of God as a moral common wealth. The claim of an apostolical episcopal succession, with power to impart the Holy Spirit, cannot be proved from Scripture, and is wrecked on the historical improbability of a chain of tradition being kept unbroken through eighteen cen turies; the true succession is holding fast to apostolic principles, that the moral character of Christianity. This violated by the Tractarian doctrine of the sacraments, which substi tutes the opus operatum for the heart. The rigorous obser vance of the Sabbath, too, not in harmony with the New Testament, the law of the Sabbath having been abrogated for Christians with the rest of the Mosaic legislation Sunday voluntary institution of the Church for the good of men. Generally, the Bible does not claim to be a law book for the regulation of faith and practice, but contains system of practical truths, motives, and principles in popular
Scripture,
ground
G. T.
happy
? pation justification by
in the revelation of the Church. The doctrine of
? ? is a
it
Ba is B
a;
is
is,
? 370 THEOLOGY IN GREAT BRITAIN SINCE 1825. [Bk. IV.
form. 1 The unwearied diligence with which Whately devoted himself to his ecclesiastical duties, to promoting- the education of the lower classes, and unostentatiously assisting the poor, both Protestant and Catholic, of his diocese in Ireland, reflects favourably on his practical and rational theology, which was not either in philosophy or in history and criticism pro found. In the latter respect there is much affinity between it and the Rationalistic (Kantian) supernaturalism, as it was represented in Germany in the first decades of the century by not a few theologians deserving of all respect.
As contemporaries and men of a kindred spirit with Arnold and Whately, we may mention the Oxford theolo gians Hampden and Milman, and the Cambridge theologians Thirlwall and Julius Hare. The name of Hampden is associated with an episode of considerable moment in the Tractarian movement. When he was nominated in 1836 to the Regius Professorship of Divinity at Oxford, the dominant party there, with Newman and Pusey at its head, got up a protest against his appointment, and charged the learned
? theologian with heresy on the ground of his Bampton Lec tures of the year 1832, on The Scholastic Philosophy in its
\
unimpugned.
which had till then remained In his lectures he had shown how orthodox theology, as having risen in its Patristic and Scholastic form under the influence of the philosophy in vogue at the time, is not identical with the doctrine of the Scriptures, but is in many respects an adulterated reflex of the simple Christian
belief. This indisputably correct account of the origin of
orthodox dogmas gave naturally great offence to High- churchmen, whose fundamental principle was the identifica
tion of Christianity with Scholastic theology. Pusey 2 main tained that this distinction between uncertain Scholastic doc trines and certain facts of Scripture was but the beginning of scepticism and rationalism, as the example of Semler had shown. The defence of Christianity then in vogue, which
threw the stress entirely upon the practical side of our religion, he declared tended directly to unbelief, since every
1 These are the leading principles of Whately's theological works, Essays on the Difficulties in the Writings of St. Paul (1828), The Kingdom of Christ
(1841).
2 Hampden's Past and Present Statements.
relation to Christian
Theology,
? ? ? Ch. II. ] PARTIES AND MOVEMENTS IN THEOLOGY. 37 1
thing that could not be brought under the rubric of practical applicability, would be forgotten, and in the end denied. Hampden himself, in his inaugural lecture, professed his full belief in all the doctrines of the orthodox faith in a way not
easy, it must be confessed, to reconcile with the expositions of his Bampton Lectures. Consistency seems rather to have been on the side of his assailants. But the manner of their attack upon him, their denunciation of detached propositions torn from their context, in order to convict him of heresy, aroused the fierce indignation not only of Whately and Arnold, but of wider circles, in which the reaction against the principles of the Oxford party began from this time to make itself felt. A pamphlet published at that time gives the following not complimentary picture of higher education at Oxford. In all higher branches of knowledge the aim is to put down free opinions. The endeavour is to give a safe direction to young minds, and to confine their movements within the narrowest limits possible. No inquiry which
might possibly lead to other results than those of the estab lished formularies is permitted. It is not easy to form any idea of the extent of moral terrorism with which this in tellectual tyranny is practised, with what jealousy the words, behaviour, reading of those is watched, who are under the suspicion of having diverged from the majority. This system is commended in and outside of Oxford as a thoroughly practical and wholesome method of training devoted servants of the Church, who shall be free from all doubt. But the evil fruits of it are a terrible distortion of sound intellect, widespread ignorance and hypocrisy. "The student who comes at every step upon the warning, Not too deep! " is discouraged and takes refuge in deliberate ignorance. He persuades himself that knowledge at best is a dangerous acquirement in his career. In the consciousness of his own inability to defend rationally a position he has taken, he regards all speculations that are foreign to his mode of thought with vague fear. The consequence is that theology is studied in Oxford to no purpose, however much is said about because studied apart from the simple object of discovering the truth, and merely with the object of finding proofs in support of dogmas which dispense with all further inquiry. Such was the view taken by an Englishman of the Oxford of those years. The less reason we have to
? ? ? it,
it is
? 372 THEOLOGY IN GREAT BRITAIN SINCE 1825. [Bk. IV.
doubt the truth of the picture, the more cheering is it to observe how great progress has been made there in the course of the last half century.
Even in those years bright exceptions were not wanting. Milman was connected with Whately, Arnold, and Hampden,
belonging like them to the pre-Puseyite generation. His History of the Jews, which appeared in 1829 (2nd ed. rewritten
1863), treated the narratives of the Old Testament in the same way as the historical traditions of any other ancient people, took up a critical attitude towards the chronological data of the Bible, explained not a few narratives as oriental poetry and allegory, and sought generally by its graphic style, catching the national and antique character of early
Hebrew times, to deliver Biblical history from the bonds of traditional sanctity, and bring it nearer to the mind and heart of the present day. It is the same freer attitude towards the
Bible which is seen in Arnold's method of interpretation, but Milman was as far as Arnold from holding the principles of scientific criticism now followed by Wellhausen or Robertson
Smith. He was rather an imaginative narrator than an acute investigator of history. Nevertheless, by his History of the Jews, and his later History of Latin Christianity,
Milman contributed his share towards making in the bulwarks of traditionalism breaches through which a freer spirit might enter when the time arrived.
The same is true of the Cambridge theologians Thirlwall and Julius Hare, who by their joint translation of Niebuhr's History of Rome, and by theological works, did good service
in spreading the knowledge of German historical science amongst their countrymen. Thirlwall published in 1825 a translation of Schleiermacher's book on the Gospel of Luke, with an introduction of some length, in which he accepted and defended the principles of Schleiermacher's Biblical criticism --a bold thing to do in those days, when the strict doctrine of inspiration was still in full force, and German theology was but little known in England, and on that very account was the more summarily condemned as heretical ! Next to Coleridge, whose way of thinking on philosophy he
? Hare was above all his English contempor aries the student best acquainted with German theological
science. As a youth he had felt on the Wartburg the breath of Luther's spirit, and subsequently wrote a thoroughly learned
adopted, Julius
? ? ? Ch. II. ] PARTIES AND MOVEMENTS IN THEOLOGY.
373
Vindication of the German Reformer, in reply to the charges of the historian Hallam and the Scottish philosopher Sir William Hamilton, and the Puseyites. Against the latter he wrote the important polemical essay, The Contest with Rome, 1842, which had the greater influence as Hare's Christian devotedness had been placed beyond doubt by his earnest and thoughtful sermons. Speaking generally, it appears that Hare made a deeper impression on his contemporaries by his noble and amiable character than by his writings, which were comparatively few, and of which the best known is his volume of sermons, The Mission of the Comforter, dedicated to the memory of Coleridge, 1846, in which he maintained the principle of development of Christian doctrine. Amongst his closest friends were Thomas Arnold and Frederick Maurice. Maurice was Hare's pupil at Cambridge, and later his brother-in-law, and to this intimate relation owed the most powerful stimulus in his mental development.
Freder1ck Den1son Maur1Ce was one of the most impor tant English theologians of this century, with great individu ality of mind. To describe his mode of thought in theology in a brief sketch, such as this necessarily not easy, for his theology more complicated than that of any other theo logian, and on many points extremely vague. In his biography, published by his son two large volumes, there
presented the picture of a man of deep religious feeling and of decided speculative and dialectical power, but at the same time of man who failed to reduce his convictions into a consistent logical whole such as could fully satisfy himself, or make a dominating and prevailing impression upon his con temporaries, because his own thought lacked clearness and
steadiness, and his knowledge concentration and thoroughness. In reading his biography, the comparison of F. D. Maurice with the German theologian Dorner has again and again
forced itself upon me. In both the same high moral and re
ligious character compelling profound respect, the same mul tiformity of learned and moral interests, the same combination
of speculative theological thought with vivid concern for practical Church life, the same restless endeavour to mediate both practically and theoretically between opposing parties and modes of thought but in both also the same incapacity for taking a clear and logically consistent position on questions of principle, the same indefiniteness in dogmatic speculation, the
? ? ? ;
a
is
a
is is
in
is, is
? 374 THEOLOGY IN GREAT BRITAIN SINCE 1S25. [Bk. IV.
same dislike of rational historical criticism, the same shrinking from the consequences of their own ideal principles, the same
hesitancy in estimating the real factors of life ; finally, as a result of all this, the same fatality of giving offence on all sides and the same waste of power on the endless frictions of the actual world.
Maurice's father was a Unitarian minister, but his mother and three sisters abandoned the faith of the father and joined various other religious communions. This division in the household made a profound impression upon the loving heart and thoughtful mind of the boy, and early led him to the conviction that every one's faith is true in what is positively asserted by and untrue what denies, in its negations, in charges against the opinions of others when they are not sufficiently understood. But this charitable view of religious differences did not prevent his own secession to the Estab lished Church, nor even his re-baptism, by which he accord ingly declared the Unitarian faith of his father un-Christian. At Oxford he became acquainted with the leaders of the Tractarian movement, which had just commenced and ap peared as zealous convert in his pamphlet, Subscription no
Bondage, in which he sought to prove that subscription to the Thirty-Nine Articles (though few years previously he had left Cambridge without taking his degree rather than sign
? no infringement of liberty, but rather help in the of the studies of University. The Tractarians believed that they had found in him a hopeful ally for their cause, but they were soon disappointed, for he quickly turned his back upon them on account of Dr. Pusey's tract on Baptism, which he considered most dangerous, although, as
he thought, contained very important doctrine which was denied by the Dissenters, and was adapted to unite all Churches. Soon after this he published his first book, The Kingdom of Christ (1838), in which he seeks to show that the English Church the true incorporation of the spiritual universal fellowship of the kingdom of Christ, because
them) pursuit
alone teaches the full truth as to baptism, the apostolical succession, Scripture and tradition, and establish
ment, whilst Quakers, Lutherans, Calvinists,
and Roman Catholics respectively hold but part of it. But the optimistic champion of Anglicanism was later on com pelled to find by bitter experience that for the dogmatist
eucharist,
Philosophers,
? ? it
is
a
it
is
a
in
it
is
a
a
a
a
;
it,
it
? Ch. II. ] PARTIES AND MOVEMENTS IN THEOLOGY.
375
but a short step from the position of the defensor fidei to that
of the condemned heretic. When Maurice taught in his
Theological Essays (1853) that the Biblical phrases "eternal life" and "eternal death" do not signify states of time of indefinitely long duration in the future, but spiritual states of communion and oneness with or separation from God, that divine punishments are instruments of God's love employed for our salvation, and that the Gospel of God's love for all men, and not the fear of eternal torments in hell, constitutes the object of faith, -- it was found that these doctrines are not by any means in harmony with the Creeds of the Anglican Church, and Maurice was removed from his theological pro fessorship at King's College, London. But though thus deprived, he continued to assert his attachment to the Thirty- Nine Articles, when properly understood, that according to his interpretation of them. And when Bishop Colenso, who had been on terms of intimate friendship with Maurice, and had defended him at the time of his removal from King's College, gave offence to the orthodox by his critic ism of the Pentateuch, our unaccountable theologian put himself on the side of the same denunciators against whom Colenso had been his advocate few years before in fact, he declared to his former friend that he expected from him
the resignation of his bishopric, to which he had no claim as an unbeliever, receiving from Colenso the cutting reply that there were many who were similarly of opinion, that the author of the " Theological Essays " had no right to retain his chaplaincy at Lincoln's Inn.
plain from all Maurice's letters to his friends and con nexions that through all these paradoxes he was absolutely sincere and in earnest that the various changes through which he passed were not owing to outward considerations that his want of consistency was due to the indefiniteness of the fundamental principles of his thinking, to the disharmony existing between his heart and his intellect, between the need he felt of adhering to an authoritative ecclesiastical
communion and his strong theological individualism. To his father (Feb. 12, 1832) he explains his secession to Anglicanism from the necessity of his heart to have God, the Invisible and Unsearchable, revealed in human form as a man such as can be understood, "a man conversing with us, living amongst us," who, order thus completely to reveal God, cannot be
? ? ? in
a
;
;
It is
a
;
is,
? 376 THEOLOGY IN GREAT BRITAIN SINCE 1825. [Bk. IV.
less than God. The greater simplicity of the Unitarian faith he considers is of no value if it does not satisfy wants which we feel, if it does not account for facts which we know. As regards the Athanasian Creed, his explanation to a friend of the supposed difficulties in the way of its accep tation is simply this : To know God is eternal life ; God is perfect Love, the Father dwelling with the Son in one Spirit is this perfect and eternal Love, which is the basis of all things, whereupon we base our hopes for ourselves and the world. (Certainly a very wide and free interpretation of this Creed, an interpretation which may be made to include both Arianism and Sabellianism as well as Athanasianism. ) Par ticularly characteristic of Maurice's theological thought is a letter to his mother (Dec. 9, 1833), in which he endeavours to comfort her in her doubts as to the evidences of her being in Christ. The truth is that every man is in Christ, created in him, who is the Head of every man ; the difference between the believer and the unbeliever is that the latter does not perceive or acknowledge the truth, that except he were joined to Christ he could not think, breathe, live a single hour.
leader of the Anglo-Catholic movement, to his liberal teacher and mentor, Whately, may be compared with Neander's relation to his teacher Planck ; and the parallel between the friendship of Thomas Arnold with Keble, the friend of
Hurrell Froude and Newman, and the friendship of the youthful Schleiermacher with Novalis and Friedrich Schlegel,
subsequently diverged.
? ? ? 35^ THEOLOGY IN GREAT BRITAIN SINCE 1825. [Bk. IV.
is still more obvious. We must begin with the movement of the High Church, or Tractarian, or Puseyite party, and then take up that of the Broad Church, led by Thomas Arnold and F. D. Maurice, which, from the first, existed by the side of the Tractarian movement, but did not obtain general influence until the latter had passed the zenith of its power. This movement of the Broad Church party has been more recently followed by a liberalism of a more decided type, which has been represented during this generation in the rise of Biblical criticism in Great Britain.
The Tractarian movement dates from the summer of 1833, though its roots extend a few years further back. In the
Year, a collection of religious lyrics on the principal festivals of the ecclesiastical
year 1827 appeared Keble's Christian
? year ; the poems clothe a tender and deep piety in the symbolic garb suggested by the seasons of the natural and Christian year, and are the production of a true poet. We might call Keble the English Novalis, the poet of religious idealism, to whose vision " two worlds " lie always open, the visible being but a type of the invisible, which always lay nearest his heart. Only Keble did not possess the philo sophical culture and learning of Novalis, and lacked con sequently his largeness of view : in Keble's mind, profound personal piety was so exclusively associated with the forms
of Anglican doctrines and ceremonies, that he could not con ceive Christianity or religion at all, apart from the Anglican system ; his religious intolerance went so far, that when the Queen selected a Lutheran prince to be godfather to one of her sons, he set on foot a protest against it from English
clergymen. The religious poems of the Christian Year gave such perfect and admirable expression to a wide-spread state of feeling amongst English people, that the little volume found everywhere the warmest reception, and probably ob tained more friends than all the subsequent theological tracts and learned books for the new movement in the Church. It produced a still deeper effect on the convictions and the subsequent life of John Henry Newman, who had hitherto
passed amongst Oxford men as a disciple of Whately's, though as early as 1826 his mind began to take another turn, chiefly through intercourse with his friend Hurrell Froude. This young man seems to have played a similar part amongst the allies of English Romanticism to that
? ? ? Ch. II] PARTIES AND MOVEMENTS IN THEOLOGY.
357
played by Friedrich Schlegel in the same movement in Germany. From Froude's Remains, which were published (1836-9) after his death by Newman and Keble, one gets the impression of a man not of great natural capacity, but of loose and neglected mind, which was greatly lacking both in moral strength and solid learning ; a man who loved to indulge in paradoxes, which aimed at being clear and pro found, but were often meaningless, and who, from his limited
aristocratic Anglican standpoint, passed sentence upon every thing outside and beyond it with the greater arrogance in proportion to his ignorance. " He hated the Reformation and the Reformers, especially Luther, Melanchthon and Co. ," because they denied the jus divinum of the Catholic Church, preferred preaching to the sacraments, and put an end to ecclesiastical discipline. He demanded the restoration of
monasticism, celibacy, fasting, ancient ritual and art, but especially the emancipation of the Church from the supre macy of the State. The fanatical thoroughness with which
Froude advocated his views made a deep impression on
Henry Newman, to whose nature submission to a stronger personal authority was a necessity, and who was just then passing through a mental crisis. When then at length, soon after the appearance of the Christian Year, a
friendship between Keble and Newman was brought about by Froude, the triumvirate was constituted, the object of which was nothing less than a second Reformation, or counter- Reformation, of the English Church.
The movement thus prepared for in this circle of Oxford friends was brought to a head through the political and ecclesiastico-political agitations at the beginning of the thirties. In order to allay the agitation in Ireland, Sir
Robert Peel had carried his Bill for Catholic Emancipation, to
the great alarm of the Oxford orthodox party. The French
Revolution of July, 1830, and the accession of William IV. ,
brought the Whigs into power, who, after a violent conflict
with the Tory lords and prelates of the Upper House,
passed in 1832 the Reform Bill, a measure which had been
long and loudly called for by the majority of the nation.
? John
The next followed a Bill to abuses in the Irish
year remedy
Church, by which the income of the Anglican Church Ireland was greatly reduced, and one-half of its (superfluous) sees were abolished. The unyielding opposition on the part
in v
? ? ? 358 THEOLOGY IN GREAT BRITAIN SINCE 1825. [Bk. IV.
of the nobility and clergy to all these absolutely necessary reforms had so much excited liberal feeling amongst the people generally, that the bishops were on several occasions insulted and attacked ; and the premier, Lord Grey, ad vised the bishops "to set their house in order. " In High Church circles the feeling prevailed, that the very existence of the Church was imperilled, and that what was required was to create a powerful counter-movement to the liberal tendencies of the day. The Assize Sermon of Keble's in the University pulpit at Oxford, on the " National Apostasy," formed the signal for its friends ; and in July, 1833, at a conference at Hadleigh, it was resolved to take immediate action. Under the conviction that " living movements do
(not come of committees," but depend on personal influence, Newman placed himself at the head of this, and began in 1833 the issue of the Tracts for the Times, as their editor
and principal author ; this being the origin of the name " Tractarian. " In the space of eight years (1833-41), ninety tracts were published, which are collected in six volumes.
? there appeared also, by various writers, extracts from the Church Fathers, under the title of Records ofthe Church. When in 1835, Pusey, Professor and Canon
of Christ Church, joined the movement, an English transla tion of the whole of the Fathers was projected, which began to appear in 1838, under the title of A Library of the Fathers of the Holy Catholic Church.
The design of this movement was certainly not purely religious by any means, but ecclesiastico- political, not to say political ; it was a general war against the Liberal tendencies of the age, and in defence of custom and tradition in the Church and society. As a means to this end, the revival and confirmation of the doctrines and usages of the Anglican Church was to be taken in hand. But while to all appearance the object was only to restore historical Anglicanism in its original purity, in reality the tendency to Catholicism was so decided that Anglicanism was from the very first left a long way behind, and the end of the movement, it could be fore seen, must be Romanism. This could be perceived in the first declarations of the Tractarians, the principal of which were the following: that salvation is based upon the objective efficacy of the sacraments, which again depends on their ad ministration by apostolically appointed priests, that on the
Contemporaneously
? ? *
1
is,
? Ch. II. ]
PARTIES AND MOVEMENTS IN THEOEOtTT.
J59
apostolic succession of the bishops, who, as successors of the apostles, are the inheritors of the gifts of the Holy Ghost, and are thereby the highest authority, in complete inde pendence of the State, in matters of life and doctrine. The writings of the Tractarians were devoted to the exposition and the dogmatico-historical (rather than the Biblical) proof of these positions. A few special points may be here men tioned. A tract of Pusey's, which appeared in 1835, on
Baptism, attacked the evangelical doctrine of regeneration through faith, and its separation of the baptism of the spirit from the baptism of water ; Pusey taught that the real re- y generation is effected by the act of baptism, that the only condition presupposed is that no bar be placed in the way by unbelief; that since this cannot be the case with infants, the baptized child is regenerated. The Catholic doctrine of opus operatum is adopted as correct ; but as the grace of baptism may be lost again, for sins committed after baptism satisfac tion must be made by earnest penance, which has to be shown also in the old ecclesiastical form of ascetic observances.
? Hence the necessity of Church discipline as a means of grace. The mere preaching of the cross of Christ can lead to carnal security. It is not preaching, but ecclesiastical
that forms moral character. -- In the sacrament of the Lord's Supper, such is the doctrine, the body and blood of Christ is present, without transubstantiation, in reality in a mystical manner, and the sacrament is a sacrifice
discipline
(sacrificium, not merely sacramentum), that the mystical application of the sacrifice of Christ on the cross, in which Christ and the Church are together the subject and the
of the sacrifice. R. Wilberforce connected this theory with the doctrine of the Incarnation of Christ, holding that the Incarnation perpetuated the consecration and the sacrifice of the eucharist in spiritual but real manner. To confession also, sacramental significance ascribed fre quent private confession, in accordance with prescribed rules,
advocated. But as the sacraments owe all their saving efficacy to their administration at the hands of the Church, the whole stress falls ultimately, as the Catholic doctrine, upon the true doctrine of the Church. the actual visible saving institution founded by Christ through the agency of the apostles by the bishops, as the successors of the apostles,
the Holy Spirit descends through the means of grace are
object
? ? it,
in
in
;
It is
is
is
is,
;
is
J. a
? 360 THEOLOGY IN GREAT BRITAIN SINCE 1825. [Bk. IV.
efficaciously administered and the truth infallibly taught. The invisible Church is composed solely of the living and perfected members of the visible Church, so that to the latter salvation is unconditionally confined. The " notes " of the true Church are apostolicity, catholicity, and autonomy. The most important condition is the apostolical succession of the bishops, which includes the other essential signs. The most perfect Church is the Anglican. The other episcopal Churches are branches of the one Catholic Church, but dis eased branches (especially the Romish Church), on account of their errors ; on the other hand, all communities of Dis senters, as well as the Protestant Churches of the Continent that have no bishops, are severed branches, sects, which do not possess the means of salvation. For it is only through the apostolic succession of the bishops that the gift of the Holy Spirit, and therewith the saving efficacy of the sacra ments, has been preserved to the Church. As Christ is the supreme Mediator, the bishop is his representative on earth, the mediator between the Church and Christ, the highest authority for the laity. The Scriptures cannot be taken as the final and sufficient norma fidei on account of their ambiguity ; they must be interpreted according to the rule of tradition, especially of the earlier centuries. Thus we have in the Nicene Creed the witness of the whole Church, affirming that the doctrine of the Trinity is the teaching of Scripture when properly understood. In the Preface to the translation of the Fathers, it is maintained that the New Testament is the source of doctrine, but that the Catholic Fathers are the channels through which it comes down to us, and that an earnest study of Catholic antiquity conducts those who are tired of modern questionings into the haven of security.
This love of ecclesiastical antiquity sprang out of the his torical impulse of Romanticism as much as Sir Walter Scott's poetical revival of Scottish and English antiquity, or again, the sympathetic learned study of German antiquity by the brothers Grimm and the poet Uhland. But the mystical
realism of the above doctrine of the sacraments sprang like wise from the inclination of Romanticism towards a certain Helldunkel, something neither light nor darkness, neither sensible nor supersensible, a love of mysteries behind experi ence ; Novalis, for instance, liked to call himself a magischer Idealist. So, again, the emphasis laid on the supernatural
? ? ? ? Ch. II. ] PARTIES AND MOVEMENTS IN THEOLOGY. 36 1
authority of the bishops by virtue of their supposed succession from the apostles was equally acceptable to an age that had grown tired of disputation ; and it was at the same time adapted to confirm afresh the position of the bishops, which had been shaken by political events. It therefore, not surprising that Tractarian doctrines were received at first with great favour in the English Church, especially amongst the clergy. true that there was at the beginning no lack of opposition, particularly on the part of the Evangelicals, who at once perceived, and passed sentence on, the weak place in the new movement -- its drift towards Rome. New man, indeed, endeavoured to defend his Anglo-Catholic posi tion as the true " Via Media" between Romanism and Protes tantism. This he did by undertaking to show the complete agreement of the doctrines of the Church of England with
apostolic, that ancient patristic teaching, making use of very free and sometimes sophistic method of interpreting the language of the Thirty-Nine Articles (in Tract 90). But was precisely this daring attempt to set aside the distinctive points of the Anglican creed in relation to Roman doctrine by the aid of forced and spurious interpretation, which brought about the revulsion of public opinion. Tract 90 was censured by the University 84 and the Bishop of Oxford, and New man felt called upon to discontinue the series. Newman resigned the leadership of the movement, which passed into the hands of the more learned and cautious Pusey, who had previously cast round an academical nimbus, and at length
to his name also. Many who had been so far its friends now withdrew, or went over to the opposite party. But this, again, produced the effect on the more faithful ones of causing them to abandon all reserve in following out their principles their full consequences. In the course of his studies in Church History, which he carried on in the retire ment of his country parish, Newman himself arrived at the conviction by degrees that his Via Media was untenable more and more the catholicity of the Romish Church out weighed in his estimation the apostolicity of the Anglican and the more he felt the defects of the latter, the dark spots in the disk of the former tended to vanish. When at last the Church of England committed what was in the eyes of him self and his friends the unpardonable crime of associating itself with the Lutheran and Calvinistic sects of the
? gave
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in
it
It is
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)1
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is,
is,
? 2 62 THEOLOGY IN GREAT BRITAIN SINCE 1 825. [Bt IV.
Church of Prussia, with the view of founding a new bishopric in Jerusalem, it appeared to Newman, as it had appeared still earlier to some more zealous friends, that to continue in such a Church was no longer possible. In October, 1845, he was received into the communion of the Romish Church, and in the course of a year he was followed by 1 50 clergymen and laymen of position belonging to his party. The party itself survived the heavy blow, but has subsequently shunned cautiously the slippery region of dogmatics, and devoted itself with the greater zeal to the elaboration of a ritual as nearly like that of the Catholics as possible. This Ritualism, how ever, has very little in common with theology. 1
books, which are of interest as giving an insight into his own reli
After his conversion Newman published several
? gious character, and as throwing indirectly light upon the movement of which he was the author and at first the chief leader. This is especially the case with his Apologia pro Vita Sua: being a History of his Religious Opinions (1865, 1st ed. ). This autobiography owes its attractiveness, not only to the universally acknowledged beauty of its style, but also to the honest openness with which the author describes the various phases of his religious opinions. A sincerely religious char acter is unveiled, as it struggles to reach the certainty of con viction with deepest earnestness ; and if the appearance of ambiguity and want of sincerity sometimes arises, it is not from the slightest wish to conceal anything from others from external considerations, but because the writer is not clear in his own mind, and because he is trying to hold perforce what is untenable and to conceal from himself consequences that are inevitable. But honourable as such a character may be, its weak side cannot be overlooked. The weakness consists rather in a moral than an intellectual inability to distinguish between religion and a particular form of its transmission in doctrine and ritual ; 2 because the firm centre of religious and
1 In one of his letters to Emerson, Carlyle criticises this ritualistic Pusey- ism in his somewhat pessimistic strain, as a symbol of the speedy dissolution of the superannuated English Church. In Past and Present, and elsewhere in his writings, he gives vent to similar vaticinations.
s Coinp. Apologia, p. 49. " From the age of fifteen, dogma has been the
fundamental principle of my religion :
enter into the idea of any other sort of religion ; religion as a mere sentiment, is to me a dream and a mockery. "
I know no other religion ; I cannot
? ? ? Ch. II. ] PARTIES AND MOVEMENTS IN THEOLOGY.
363
<
moral certainty cannot be found in the man himself, he clings to external authorities, maintains vehemently their inviolability, and all the time is driven further and further by the inevitable feeling of their insufficiency, until, weary of searching and inquiring, the secure haven of Romish infallibility is at last resorted to. What a different picture is presented in the religious history of Francis Newman, the younger brother of
l
!
John Henry, as it is described in his Phases of Faith
both brothers we have the same deep religious nature and the same restless desire for real conviction ; but in the case of the younger brother there is also the moral courage to aban don traditional opinions about the truth and to search for the truth itself, to let the outward props of authority fall one after the other, to gain in the soul itself true certainty of the reve lation of God. John Henry Newman has also formulated a theory of religious certainty, with a view to justifying his dog
probability being converted into certainty by a voluntary
assent and believing reception. Although this principle is not
wholly devoid of truth, there is reason to object to it,s that a
rule of certainty which is based neither on the reason nor on
proofs from fact, but on the simple power of the will to hold
something to be true, possesses no value, and may easily be
come as fruitful a source of superstition as of faith. In fact,
the subjective character of this purely emotional certainty
is acknowledged by Newman himself in the very remarkable
"
words :
The from in the matter of argument probability,
religion, became an argument from personality, which, in fact, is one form of the argument from authority. " It will be diffi cult to avoid this conclusion, if it is once granted that religious certainty rests merely upon emotional motives without rational
grounds ; in that case it of course, only subjective cer
See ante,
Apologia,
See Tulloch, in the Edinburgh Review, Oct. , 1870, and his Movements
Religious Thought,
103.
317. 19.
In
? matism, and has expounded it in the two books, An Essay on the Development ofChristian Doctrine (1845), and An Essay
in Aid of a Grammar of Assent (1870). In the latter he works out a principle which he had learnt from Keble,2 namely, that religious conviction does not rest on intellectual but emotional grounds, which cannot be theoretically proved,
? ? 821
p. p. p.
of
is,
a
? 364 THEOLOGY IN GREAT BRITAIN SINCE 1825. [Bk. IV.
tainty that cannot rest upon itself, but to render it secure stands in need of the support of the greatest possible number of other subjects, that of external authority.
Newman's work on the Development Christian Doctrine takes as its starting-point the incontestable principle, that Christianity, like every historical institution, has passed through process of development, of growth, in doctrine and custom, and was not given to the world at the beginning in perfect form. He offers number of instances going to show that orthodox Protestantism under delusion, when
sup poses that all its doctrines and practices are taught in Scrip
ture and are prescribed therein, or are to be directly deduced therefrom. impossible to remain in the mere letter of Scripture, because the necessities of interpretation, for in stance, of such a phrase as " the Word became flesh," lead at once to a series of further questions. Other questions, such as the Canon of Scripture, its inspiration and authority, can not be answered from Scripture itself, because the Apostles had not then given any decision on them. As within the Biblical religion itself there " development through the Prophets to Jesus, so, again, in the apostolic teaching no historical point can be fixed at which the growth of doctrine ceased, and the rule of faith was once for all settled. " Finally, in Scripture itself the necessity of such a progressive develop ment distinctly indicated, for instance, the parables of the Leaven and the Mustard Seed. If in all this the author displays undoubtedly degree of sound historical sense, the reader immediately surprised by a very unhistorical and
? of the true principle! In order to guide the process of the development of Christianity, to distinguish correct developments from false, and to sanction them, there -- required an infallible authority outside the
genuinely dogmatic application
development namely, the Church. If Christianity as a whole, revelation, the results of its development must share the guarantee of its credentials. Revealed religion distin guished from Natural by the very fact that substitutes the voice of Law-giver --an objective authority, Apostle, Pope, or Church --for the voice of conscience. In Protestantism this authority the Bible but as can be proved that this authority insufficient, we must conclude that this required living and present source of revelation can only be the infal lible arbiter of all true doctrines -- the Church. Nor
per
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? Ch. II. ] PARTIES AND MOVEMENTS IN THEOLOGY. 365
sonal judgment precluded by this infallible authority, but is only limited to its proper range and preserved from error. --We must allow that this defence (following in the footsteps of the German Catholic Theologian Mohler) of the principle of Catho
lic tradition and authority is conducted very cleverly. It rests,
all the same, upon a great fallacy. The fact is overlooked
that the alleged infallible authority is itself a product of the f general development, and that it participates in its changes,
and is therefore subject, like every historical phenomenon, to the law of relativity. Moreover, the false traditional idea of development is throughout taken for granted -- namely, that development consists solely in positive growth, in an extension and more complete definition of older truth ; we hear nothing of the great fact, that development has also a negative aspect, that new truth does not come merely as an addition to the old, but often abrogates the old, so that in reality there is accom plished in it the continuous criticism of mind in the process of its development. We readily grant that this process does not go on without obedience to an inner law of rationality ; but precisely because reason is realised in the process of historic development, it does not require a special infallible institution to guide which can only become an impediment to the living spirit.
In the same year in which Newman set on foot the reac tionary High Church movement, Thomas Arnold, the Head Master at Rugby, published his pamphlet on The Principles\l of Church Reform, which, though provoked at first storm of indignation on all sides, presented in its fundamental thoughts the ferment of a new progressive movement in the English Church in the next decades. Arnold had, like New man, been a pupil of Whately's at Oxford, and a friend of Keble's. But while in the case of Newman the influence of
the devout friend soon overcame the cool intellectual acute-
ness of the tutor, with Arnold was the reverse.
out his life Arnold continued to combine profoundly earnest piety with clearness of intellect, manly love of truth, and a restless desire for practical work indeed, not easy to say which of these aspects of the noble man's character was most marked. Arnold was at the beginning of the thirties not less alarmed than Newman and his Oxford friends at the political troubles and threatening tempest which appeared to
<<.
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it
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366 THEOLOGY IN GREAT BRITAIN SINCE 1825. [Bk. IV.
be gathering thick over the Church ; but while they sought salvation by the abandonment of the Reformation in a reform of dogma and the constitution and ritual of the Church, by which its boundaries would be narrowed and more sharply separated from the pulsating life of the nation, he demanded a reform in the opposite direction. In order to preserve to the nation the blessings of the State Church, he advocated the opening of its doors to the Dissenters, and the widening of its boundaries, so that all Englishmen who were, and wished to be Christians, should find a place in As the condition of membership, nothing more than an acceptance of the essential doctrines of the Christian faith, common to all parties both within and outside the Established Church, was to be required, differences in doctrine, constitution, and ritual being considered minor matters and permissible. The essential thing in Chris tianity practical godliness, based on the revelation of God in Scripture, and especially the person of Jesus, and mani festing itself in the moral purification and sanctification of personal and social life. the function of Church and
State equally, though from different point of view, to be in struments and organs of this ideal. There may not, therefore, be any separation between them, or jealousy and quarrel the State needs for its moral ends the religion of the Gospel, as the Church can exercise its educating influence over the nation only within the constituted forms and regulations of the Chris tian State. -- These are the main principles of Arnold's pam phlet on Church Reform, principles which have as their basis, not only an ideal view of the nature and ends of the State, but also broad view of the nature of Christianity a stand point exactly the same as that represented by Rothe his
? der Kirche and his Ethik} But this combination of Christian idealism and large-hearted humanity was then so new in England, that Arnold's proposed reforms were obnoxi ous to all parties alike to the High-churchmen they breathed heresy and revolution, and the Liberals considered them too conservative and narrow.
The storm of opposition from all sides did not shake Arnold's conviction of the truth and wisdom of his ideas. The force of his personal character the success of his work
Though Arnold differed from Rothe as to the source of the corruption of the true idea of the Church. See Arnold's Letter to Bunsen, Jan. 27, 1838.
Anfdngc
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;
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;
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;
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? Ch. II. ] PARTIES AND MOVEMENTS IN THEOLOGY. 367
in the school at Rugby, by which he initiated a reformation
in the entire system of public schools in England ; his power- . '/ ful sermons, in which he proclaimed the eternal truths of the Gospel with profound earnestness in simple undogmatic lan
and with constant reference to the various depart ments of moral life ; lastly, his work as a scholar in the field of classical literature and Roman history --all this combined in compelling his opponents even to respect the assailed and censured man, so that his sudden death (1842) was lamented on all sides as a national calamity.
It is Thomas Arnold, if any one, who must be regarded as the pioneer of free theology in England. It is true he wrote no considerable theological work--his vocation led him into the field of scholarship and history : and his views with regard to the interpretation of the Bible were neither quite new, nor do they meet completely the present require ments of historical criticism. But Arnold was the first to show to his countrymen the possibility and to make the demand, that the Bible should be read with honest human eyes without the spectacles of orthodox dogmatic presupposi tions, and that it can at the same time be revered with Christian piety and made truly productive in moral life. He was the first who dared to leave on one side the traditional phraseology of the High-Churchmen and the Evangelicals, and to look upon Christianity, not as a sacred treasure of the Churches and sects, but as a Divine beneficent power for every believer ; not as a dead heritage from the past, but as a living spiritual power for the moral advancement of indi viduals and nations in the present. If the universality of his interests and occupations was a hindrance to strictly scientific theological inquiry, it was really very favourable to his true
guage,
? mission : he showed how classical and general historical studies may be pursued in the light of the moral ideas of Christianity, and how, on the other hand, a free and clear way of looking at things may be obtained by means of wide historical knowledge, and then applied to the interpretation of the Bible and the solution of current ecclesiastical
ques tions. Thus he began to pull down the wall of separation
which had cut off the religious life of his fellow-countrymen,
with their sects and churches and rigid theological formulas
and usages, from the general life and pursuits of the nation.
It is also clear as day, that if longer life had been granted r
? ? ? 368 THEOLOGY IN GREAT BRITAIN SINCE 1825. [BIt IV.
to him, the result of the further prosecution of his historical studies, which had been made, in his last year, part of his vocation by his appointment to the chair of Modern History at Oxford, would have been further insight and courage to apply his historical and critical principles to the Bible. At all events, his work was subsequently further prosecuted in this direction by his friends and pupils.
Arnold was pre-eminently an independent character, both in his scientific and his political principles. For this reason he was prepared to learn from men of different schools.
him, and he confesses that he found in him what he had never
Samuel Taylor Coleridge exercised great influence upon
been able to find in any other English theologian : "
is at once rich and vigorous, and comprehensive and critical ; while the >>;0o? is so pure and so lively all the while. "1 From
Coleridge
His mind
? Arnold adopted the distinction between the reason and the understanding, and the determination of the relation of reason to faith as of two modes of perceiving religious truth, which are not antagonistic but supplementary. Of Coleridge's Letters on Inspiration? which he saw in manuscript, he expressed the opinion, 3 that they were " well fitted to break ground in the approaches to that momentous question which involves in it so great a shock to existing notions, . . . but which will end, in spite of the fears and clamours of the weak and bigoted, in the higher exalting and more sure establishing of Christian truth. " His friend ship with Bunsen, too, whose acquaintance he made in Rome in 1827, had an important influence on Arnold's mind ; it was through this scholar particularly that he kept himself in close relations with German literature, though principally only with its historical and Biblical exegetical works, but not with
German philosophy or systematic theology ; of Schleier- macher he read only his critical essay on 1 Timothy, the results of which appeared to him too bold.
The most direct and lasting influence on the mental development of Arnold was that of Whately, who had been in Oxford his tutor and adviser, and with whom, as Arch bishop of Dublin, he kept up a close friendship and constant
1 Letter No. 209, to Mr. Justice Coleridge, Sept. 25, 1839. 2 See ante, p. 311.
3 Letter No. 94, to Mr. Justice Coleridge, Jan. 24, 1835.
? ? ? Ch. II. ] PARTIES AND MOVEMENTS IN THEOLOGY. 369
intercourse. Whately was a man of clear intellect, humour, and benevolent heart, but not a learned theologian. His best known book is his Logic, constructed upon Aris totelian principles, which was once largely used in English
and universities. He carried his sound common sense into theological questions also, and found that not a few orthodox dogmas have no foundation in the Scriptures. Thus the orthodox doctrine of election is not in harmony with Paul's teaching, for in the latter what is dealt with is not the unconditional predestination of individuals to salva tion or destruction, but only the appointment of the whole Church to salvation in Christ, which is elected from the rest of the Heathen, as previously the people of Israel had been elected from the other nations. The final destiny of indi viduals depends solely on whether they personally do or do not make use of the advantages offered to them, by partici
colleges
faith, too, must not be understood of an imputation of the merits of Christ, but of the forgiveness
of sins on the fulfilment of the moral conditions. The death of Christ as a sacrifice must be received on the authority of
but it cannot be shown to be necessary. It is the same with the Deity of Christ : it must be believed on the
of Christ's own declarations in the Gospels, but interpreted essentially in the sense of Christ being the perfect moral example. The object of Christ's coming was the foundation of the kingdom of God as a moral common wealth. The claim of an apostolical episcopal succession, with power to impart the Holy Spirit, cannot be proved from Scripture, and is wrecked on the historical improbability of a chain of tradition being kept unbroken through eighteen cen turies; the true succession is holding fast to apostolic principles, that the moral character of Christianity. This violated by the Tractarian doctrine of the sacraments, which substi tutes the opus operatum for the heart. The rigorous obser vance of the Sabbath, too, not in harmony with the New Testament, the law of the Sabbath having been abrogated for Christians with the rest of the Mosaic legislation Sunday voluntary institution of the Church for the good of men. Generally, the Bible does not claim to be a law book for the regulation of faith and practice, but contains system of practical truths, motives, and principles in popular
Scripture,
ground
G. T.
happy
? pation justification by
in the revelation of the Church. The doctrine of
? ? is a
it
Ba is B
a;
is
is,
? 370 THEOLOGY IN GREAT BRITAIN SINCE 1825. [Bk. IV.
form. 1 The unwearied diligence with which Whately devoted himself to his ecclesiastical duties, to promoting- the education of the lower classes, and unostentatiously assisting the poor, both Protestant and Catholic, of his diocese in Ireland, reflects favourably on his practical and rational theology, which was not either in philosophy or in history and criticism pro found. In the latter respect there is much affinity between it and the Rationalistic (Kantian) supernaturalism, as it was represented in Germany in the first decades of the century by not a few theologians deserving of all respect.
As contemporaries and men of a kindred spirit with Arnold and Whately, we may mention the Oxford theolo gians Hampden and Milman, and the Cambridge theologians Thirlwall and Julius Hare. The name of Hampden is associated with an episode of considerable moment in the Tractarian movement. When he was nominated in 1836 to the Regius Professorship of Divinity at Oxford, the dominant party there, with Newman and Pusey at its head, got up a protest against his appointment, and charged the learned
? theologian with heresy on the ground of his Bampton Lec tures of the year 1832, on The Scholastic Philosophy in its
\
unimpugned.
which had till then remained In his lectures he had shown how orthodox theology, as having risen in its Patristic and Scholastic form under the influence of the philosophy in vogue at the time, is not identical with the doctrine of the Scriptures, but is in many respects an adulterated reflex of the simple Christian
belief. This indisputably correct account of the origin of
orthodox dogmas gave naturally great offence to High- churchmen, whose fundamental principle was the identifica
tion of Christianity with Scholastic theology. Pusey 2 main tained that this distinction between uncertain Scholastic doc trines and certain facts of Scripture was but the beginning of scepticism and rationalism, as the example of Semler had shown. The defence of Christianity then in vogue, which
threw the stress entirely upon the practical side of our religion, he declared tended directly to unbelief, since every
1 These are the leading principles of Whately's theological works, Essays on the Difficulties in the Writings of St. Paul (1828), The Kingdom of Christ
(1841).
2 Hampden's Past and Present Statements.
relation to Christian
Theology,
? ? ? Ch. II. ] PARTIES AND MOVEMENTS IN THEOLOGY. 37 1
thing that could not be brought under the rubric of practical applicability, would be forgotten, and in the end denied. Hampden himself, in his inaugural lecture, professed his full belief in all the doctrines of the orthodox faith in a way not
easy, it must be confessed, to reconcile with the expositions of his Bampton Lectures. Consistency seems rather to have been on the side of his assailants. But the manner of their attack upon him, their denunciation of detached propositions torn from their context, in order to convict him of heresy, aroused the fierce indignation not only of Whately and Arnold, but of wider circles, in which the reaction against the principles of the Oxford party began from this time to make itself felt. A pamphlet published at that time gives the following not complimentary picture of higher education at Oxford. In all higher branches of knowledge the aim is to put down free opinions. The endeavour is to give a safe direction to young minds, and to confine their movements within the narrowest limits possible. No inquiry which
might possibly lead to other results than those of the estab lished formularies is permitted. It is not easy to form any idea of the extent of moral terrorism with which this in tellectual tyranny is practised, with what jealousy the words, behaviour, reading of those is watched, who are under the suspicion of having diverged from the majority. This system is commended in and outside of Oxford as a thoroughly practical and wholesome method of training devoted servants of the Church, who shall be free from all doubt. But the evil fruits of it are a terrible distortion of sound intellect, widespread ignorance and hypocrisy. "The student who comes at every step upon the warning, Not too deep! " is discouraged and takes refuge in deliberate ignorance. He persuades himself that knowledge at best is a dangerous acquirement in his career. In the consciousness of his own inability to defend rationally a position he has taken, he regards all speculations that are foreign to his mode of thought with vague fear. The consequence is that theology is studied in Oxford to no purpose, however much is said about because studied apart from the simple object of discovering the truth, and merely with the object of finding proofs in support of dogmas which dispense with all further inquiry. Such was the view taken by an Englishman of the Oxford of those years. The less reason we have to
? ? ? it,
it is
? 372 THEOLOGY IN GREAT BRITAIN SINCE 1825. [Bk. IV.
doubt the truth of the picture, the more cheering is it to observe how great progress has been made there in the course of the last half century.
Even in those years bright exceptions were not wanting. Milman was connected with Whately, Arnold, and Hampden,
belonging like them to the pre-Puseyite generation. His History of the Jews, which appeared in 1829 (2nd ed. rewritten
1863), treated the narratives of the Old Testament in the same way as the historical traditions of any other ancient people, took up a critical attitude towards the chronological data of the Bible, explained not a few narratives as oriental poetry and allegory, and sought generally by its graphic style, catching the national and antique character of early
Hebrew times, to deliver Biblical history from the bonds of traditional sanctity, and bring it nearer to the mind and heart of the present day. It is the same freer attitude towards the
Bible which is seen in Arnold's method of interpretation, but Milman was as far as Arnold from holding the principles of scientific criticism now followed by Wellhausen or Robertson
Smith. He was rather an imaginative narrator than an acute investigator of history. Nevertheless, by his History of the Jews, and his later History of Latin Christianity,
Milman contributed his share towards making in the bulwarks of traditionalism breaches through which a freer spirit might enter when the time arrived.
The same is true of the Cambridge theologians Thirlwall and Julius Hare, who by their joint translation of Niebuhr's History of Rome, and by theological works, did good service
in spreading the knowledge of German historical science amongst their countrymen. Thirlwall published in 1825 a translation of Schleiermacher's book on the Gospel of Luke, with an introduction of some length, in which he accepted and defended the principles of Schleiermacher's Biblical criticism --a bold thing to do in those days, when the strict doctrine of inspiration was still in full force, and German theology was but little known in England, and on that very account was the more summarily condemned as heretical ! Next to Coleridge, whose way of thinking on philosophy he
? Hare was above all his English contempor aries the student best acquainted with German theological
science. As a youth he had felt on the Wartburg the breath of Luther's spirit, and subsequently wrote a thoroughly learned
adopted, Julius
? ? ? Ch. II. ] PARTIES AND MOVEMENTS IN THEOLOGY.
373
Vindication of the German Reformer, in reply to the charges of the historian Hallam and the Scottish philosopher Sir William Hamilton, and the Puseyites. Against the latter he wrote the important polemical essay, The Contest with Rome, 1842, which had the greater influence as Hare's Christian devotedness had been placed beyond doubt by his earnest and thoughtful sermons. Speaking generally, it appears that Hare made a deeper impression on his contemporaries by his noble and amiable character than by his writings, which were comparatively few, and of which the best known is his volume of sermons, The Mission of the Comforter, dedicated to the memory of Coleridge, 1846, in which he maintained the principle of development of Christian doctrine. Amongst his closest friends were Thomas Arnold and Frederick Maurice. Maurice was Hare's pupil at Cambridge, and later his brother-in-law, and to this intimate relation owed the most powerful stimulus in his mental development.
Freder1ck Den1son Maur1Ce was one of the most impor tant English theologians of this century, with great individu ality of mind. To describe his mode of thought in theology in a brief sketch, such as this necessarily not easy, for his theology more complicated than that of any other theo logian, and on many points extremely vague. In his biography, published by his son two large volumes, there
presented the picture of a man of deep religious feeling and of decided speculative and dialectical power, but at the same time of man who failed to reduce his convictions into a consistent logical whole such as could fully satisfy himself, or make a dominating and prevailing impression upon his con temporaries, because his own thought lacked clearness and
steadiness, and his knowledge concentration and thoroughness. In reading his biography, the comparison of F. D. Maurice with the German theologian Dorner has again and again
forced itself upon me. In both the same high moral and re
ligious character compelling profound respect, the same mul tiformity of learned and moral interests, the same combination
of speculative theological thought with vivid concern for practical Church life, the same restless endeavour to mediate both practically and theoretically between opposing parties and modes of thought but in both also the same incapacity for taking a clear and logically consistent position on questions of principle, the same indefiniteness in dogmatic speculation, the
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is
a
is is
in
is, is
? 374 THEOLOGY IN GREAT BRITAIN SINCE 1S25. [Bk. IV.
same dislike of rational historical criticism, the same shrinking from the consequences of their own ideal principles, the same
hesitancy in estimating the real factors of life ; finally, as a result of all this, the same fatality of giving offence on all sides and the same waste of power on the endless frictions of the actual world.
Maurice's father was a Unitarian minister, but his mother and three sisters abandoned the faith of the father and joined various other religious communions. This division in the household made a profound impression upon the loving heart and thoughtful mind of the boy, and early led him to the conviction that every one's faith is true in what is positively asserted by and untrue what denies, in its negations, in charges against the opinions of others when they are not sufficiently understood. But this charitable view of religious differences did not prevent his own secession to the Estab lished Church, nor even his re-baptism, by which he accord ingly declared the Unitarian faith of his father un-Christian. At Oxford he became acquainted with the leaders of the Tractarian movement, which had just commenced and ap peared as zealous convert in his pamphlet, Subscription no
Bondage, in which he sought to prove that subscription to the Thirty-Nine Articles (though few years previously he had left Cambridge without taking his degree rather than sign
? no infringement of liberty, but rather help in the of the studies of University. The Tractarians believed that they had found in him a hopeful ally for their cause, but they were soon disappointed, for he quickly turned his back upon them on account of Dr. Pusey's tract on Baptism, which he considered most dangerous, although, as
he thought, contained very important doctrine which was denied by the Dissenters, and was adapted to unite all Churches. Soon after this he published his first book, The Kingdom of Christ (1838), in which he seeks to show that the English Church the true incorporation of the spiritual universal fellowship of the kingdom of Christ, because
them) pursuit
alone teaches the full truth as to baptism, the apostolical succession, Scripture and tradition, and establish
ment, whilst Quakers, Lutherans, Calvinists,
and Roman Catholics respectively hold but part of it. But the optimistic champion of Anglicanism was later on com pelled to find by bitter experience that for the dogmatist
eucharist,
Philosophers,
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? Ch. II. ] PARTIES AND MOVEMENTS IN THEOLOGY.
375
but a short step from the position of the defensor fidei to that
of the condemned heretic. When Maurice taught in his
Theological Essays (1853) that the Biblical phrases "eternal life" and "eternal death" do not signify states of time of indefinitely long duration in the future, but spiritual states of communion and oneness with or separation from God, that divine punishments are instruments of God's love employed for our salvation, and that the Gospel of God's love for all men, and not the fear of eternal torments in hell, constitutes the object of faith, -- it was found that these doctrines are not by any means in harmony with the Creeds of the Anglican Church, and Maurice was removed from his theological pro fessorship at King's College, London. But though thus deprived, he continued to assert his attachment to the Thirty- Nine Articles, when properly understood, that according to his interpretation of them. And when Bishop Colenso, who had been on terms of intimate friendship with Maurice, and had defended him at the time of his removal from King's College, gave offence to the orthodox by his critic ism of the Pentateuch, our unaccountable theologian put himself on the side of the same denunciators against whom Colenso had been his advocate few years before in fact, he declared to his former friend that he expected from him
the resignation of his bishopric, to which he had no claim as an unbeliever, receiving from Colenso the cutting reply that there were many who were similarly of opinion, that the author of the " Theological Essays " had no right to retain his chaplaincy at Lincoln's Inn.
plain from all Maurice's letters to his friends and con nexions that through all these paradoxes he was absolutely sincere and in earnest that the various changes through which he passed were not owing to outward considerations that his want of consistency was due to the indefiniteness of the fundamental principles of his thinking, to the disharmony existing between his heart and his intellect, between the need he felt of adhering to an authoritative ecclesiastical
communion and his strong theological individualism. To his father (Feb. 12, 1832) he explains his secession to Anglicanism from the necessity of his heart to have God, the Invisible and Unsearchable, revealed in human form as a man such as can be understood, "a man conversing with us, living amongst us," who, order thus completely to reveal God, cannot be
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a
;
;
It is
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;
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? 376 THEOLOGY IN GREAT BRITAIN SINCE 1825. [Bk. IV.
less than God. The greater simplicity of the Unitarian faith he considers is of no value if it does not satisfy wants which we feel, if it does not account for facts which we know. As regards the Athanasian Creed, his explanation to a friend of the supposed difficulties in the way of its accep tation is simply this : To know God is eternal life ; God is perfect Love, the Father dwelling with the Son in one Spirit is this perfect and eternal Love, which is the basis of all things, whereupon we base our hopes for ourselves and the world. (Certainly a very wide and free interpretation of this Creed, an interpretation which may be made to include both Arianism and Sabellianism as well as Athanasianism. ) Par ticularly characteristic of Maurice's theological thought is a letter to his mother (Dec. 9, 1833), in which he endeavours to comfort her in her doubts as to the evidences of her being in Christ. The truth is that every man is in Christ, created in him, who is the Head of every man ; the difference between the believer and the unbeliever is that the latter does not perceive or acknowledge the truth, that except he were joined to Christ he could not think, breathe, live a single hour.
