'
The starting point of all his theology was the love of God,
not the sinfulness of man.
The starting point of all his theology was the love of God,
not the sinfulness of man.
Cambridge History of English Literature - 1908 - v12
The professional
advocates of the Christian faith did not lack ability, but they had
been traversing the same arid ground of external evidences for
half a century. They continued to put the apostles into the witness
box and acquit them according to the rules of the Old Bailey.
They cross-examined the saints for their attestation of miracle
and prophecy, but omitted to discover the secret of their life.
A Paley or a Watson might display admirable commonsense, and
be accounted by the faithful a match for Tom Paine; and yet the
religious life remained starved. The methodist movement, with
its evangelical counterpart, had, indeed, given back to religious
feeling its rightful place and more, but had produced little or
no theology, except for the particularly acrid and unprofitable
Calvinist controversy.
The French revolution had set up a ferment of new ideas and
induced a critical attitude towards all established notions and
institutions. But the very extravagances of the movement, and
the desperate nature of the war in which England was engaged
against the propagandists of the revolution, made English people
more than usually suspicious of new ideas, and gave a new lease
of life to threatened institutions like the established church.
Sympathy with the ideas of the revolution was regarded as
dubiously patriotic and probably irreligious, as Priestley and
William Frend found to their cost. When the former took flight
to a more kindly clime, bishop Horsley could exult and sing, “The
orators and oracles of Birmingham and Essex Street are dumb. '
Traditional teaching, therefore, remained in almost undisputed
possession through the period of the great war, and beyond it,
when the new fears of social unrest excited corresponding fears
## p. 280 (#304) ############################################
280 The Growth of Liberal Theology [CH. .
for Christian faith. For the first twenty years of the new century,
English theology was at a standstill. The stars of the older day,
Paley and Horsley and Watson, were setting, and no new stars
had arisen. Theology could make no serious progress until it
should emancipate itself from the outworn conventions of the
previous century, and be free to face the urgent questions of the
new age. The fashionable utilitarianism of Paley could kindle no
warmth. Idealism already had its prophets in Germany; but it
needed a Coleridge to discover and interpret them for English
readers. There were also on the continent pioneers of a more
scientific literary criticism; but their work was still unknown in
this country. Herbert Marsh, fellow of St John's college, Cam-
bridge, who had studied at Leipzig under Michaelis, published in
four volumes (1793-1801) a translation of the latter's Introduction
to the New Testament, together with essays and a dissertation of
his own on the sources of the first three Gospels. He did not
escape reproof for his rashness; but neither was he debarred from
becoming a divinity professor and a bishop. The work had no
immediate sequel. English scholarship was not ready for such ques-
tions; but, twenty-four years later, another future bishop, Connop
Thirlwall, picked up the threads, in introducing to an English
public Schleiermacher’s A Critical Essay on the Gospel of St Lrike.
Still more necessary than critical learning was a freer view of
biblical inspiration. Theological scholars worked in shackles, if
not in blinkers, so long as à priori theories of the inerrancy of
Scripture were unchallenged. When the critical methods that
were already being applied to other literature should come to
be applied to the Bible, a revolution would follow. If, in his
Shakespearean studies, said Coleridge, he were to use the same
uncritical liberties as divines allowed themselves in harmonising
the inconsistencies of Scripture, ‘I would almost undertake to
harmonise Falstaff's account of the rogues in buckram into a
coherent and consistent narrative. The eighteenth century was
seriously lacking in the historic sense; but, so soon as Wolf set
himself to prove the plural authorship of the Iliad, and Niebuhr
began discussing the origin of the early legends of Roman history,
the day was not far distant when similar tests must be applied
to biblical literature. The growth of the scientific temper in the
new century, with its ruling idea of development, would also
create a more sympathetic interest in doctrine viewed historically
rather than as absolutely defined. The time was ripe for the
advent of Christian scholars who, with a more daring spirit,
## p. 281 (#305) ############################################
XIII]
281
The Evangelicals
would set their sails to catch the new breezes that were
stirring.
But in what direction was a truer theology to be looked for?
The spirit of religion burned brightest among the evangelical
churchmen and methodists. The new century witnessed a new
literary venture, The Christian Observer, which enlisted most
of the evangelical talent—Henry Thornton, Thomas Scott the
commentator and John Venn. The evangelicals were not wanting
in ability or energy, but, as a body, had little taste for literature,
except of a directly practical purpose. They showed their capacity
for meeting the religious needs of their less critical followers in
devotional and homiletic literature. Hannah More's Cheap
Repository Tracts had an enormous vogue, and a simple moral
tale by Legh Richmond, The Dairyman's Daughter, reached two
million copies. For more cultivated readers, there was a great
outpouring of pious biography. Charles Simeon, with all his
wider interests, published almost nothing except homiletic litera-
ture, skeletons' of sermons, as he frankly called them. Even a
professed work of learning like Joseph Milner's History of the
Church of Christ (1794–7) aimed chiefly at edification; 'genuine
piety is the only thing which I intend to celebrate. ' Neither
he nor his brother, dean Isaac Milner, who brought the history
down to Luther's reformation, thought it necessary to read
anything in Luther's language. Evangelical theology concentrated
itself upon a few favourite doctrines which formed the scheme of
salvation; its language was soon learnt, and it was all-sufficient.
The peculiarity of this language, together with its hackneyed
use, was enough to deter some minds, as the outspoken baptist
minister, John Foster, complained in his essay on the Aversion
of Men of Taste to Evangelical Religion (1805). Even biblical
interpretation commanded but a narrow field of interest; the
unfulfilled prophecies alone gave scope for speculation. The
rigid theory of inspiration, in general, foreclosed enquiry, and the
evangelicals retained that theory longest of all.
The true glory of the evangelicals lay in their pastoral zeal and
in their philanthropy. The Clapham sect, as Sydney Smith nick-
named them, maintained a long struggle against the slave trade,
and supported missionary societies and charitable enterprises with
princely generosity. William Wilberforce, member of parliament
for the county of York, raised a hitherto unpopular and mis-
judged party in the public esteem when, in 1797, he produced his
Practical View of Christianity. It found more readers than any
## p. 282 (#306) ############################################
282 The Growth of Liberal Theology [[
CH.
book by a clergyman; its effect is comparable with that of The
Serious Call. It had, however, none of William Law's wit,
though its writer was deemed by Madame de Staël the wittiest
talker she had met in England. “The present state of things in
France, where a brood of moral vipers, as it were, is now hatching,'
was the occasion for the serious self-examination proposed in it.
“We bear upon us but too plainly the marks of a declining empire. '
The author sees no hope of averting this ruin, except by a revival
of real Christianity, as contrasted with the decent selfishness'
which passed muster with most Christians. “The grand defect'
in these nominal Christians is that they forget
the peculiar doctrines of the Religion which they profess-the corruption of
human nature-the atonement of the Saviour-and the sanctifying influence
of the Holy Spirit.
But, apart from this sincere allegiance to the orthodox language,
Wilberforce, as Sir James Stephen has shown, 'was very much
a latitudinarian. His catholic spirit had no taste for polemical
divinity, and he gave himself, as he advised others to give them-
selves, to practical Christianity.
Among the evangelicals there was not enough of speculative
interest to revive and liberate theology. Emancipation would not
come from them. It came in part from an unexpected quarter,
from the poet-philosopher and amateur theologian, Samuel Taylor
Coleridge. From early days, he was in revolt against the utilitarian
fashion in philosophy and in theology, and it became his aim, as
Julius Hare said, to spiritualise both the one and the other. It
was high time that philosophy should again have a hearing in
English religion, as it had already had in Germany. English theo-
logy had been suffering, for at least a generation, from the poverty
of its intellectual interest; it was Coleridge's province to stimulate
that interest, as a long succession of religious thinkers have amply
testified.
Coleridge would himself have recognised the truth and the
pathos of Charles Lamb's description of him as 'an archangel a
little damaged. The contrast between his spiritual ideals and his
sordid failures was as painful to him as it could be to his friends.
He laboured under a deep conviction of sin which gave a personal
intensity to his Confessions, as, for instance, when he says that, in
the Bible, he has ‘found words for my inmost thoughts, songs for
my joy, utterances for my hidden griefs, and pleadings for my
shame and my feebleness. The theological reading of this
'
‘literary cormorant,' as he called himself, was discursive. He leapt
## p. 283 (#307) ############################################
X11] Erskine of Linlathen 283
contemptuously back over the aevum rationalisticum into the
seventeenth century, where he found poets and divines to his mind.
Archbishop Leighton, Jeremy Taylor and other writers of that age
furnished him with matter for comment in his Aids to Reflection
(1825). Some readers might feel themselves being led into a holy
jungle' by Coleridge's musings on the persons of the Trinity as
representing ipseity, altereity and communeity; but, at least, he
gave them more to think about than did the orthodox defenders
of the faith in their eminently lucid writings. It was time that some-
one called a halt to the prevailing mode in theological literature.
Evidences of Christianity! I am weary of the word. Make a man feel
the want of it; rouse him, if you can, to the self-knowledge of his need of it;
and you may safely trust it to its own evidence.
Confessions of an Enquiring Spirit was published by his
nephew, posthumously, in 1840. These seven letters on inspiration,
simpler in style and thought than most of Coleridge's writings,
are a remarkable anticipation of the attitude of modern Christians
towards the Bible. Coleridge exhibits a happy union of complete
freedom and of deep gratitude for the Scriptures. He combats
the contemporary view that the Bible was not to be reasoned
about in the way that other good books are. ' He maintains that
'the Bible and Christianity are their own sufficient evidence. '
In the Bible there is more that finds me than I have experienced in all
other books put together;. . . the words of the Bible find me at greater depths
of my being; and. . . whatever finds me brings with it an irresistible evidence
of its having proceeded from the Holy Spirit.
He rests secure on his own dear experience' and, regardless of
discrepancies and moral imperfections in the Scriptures, pursues
his study with free and unboding spirit. '
If Coleridge's theological influence depended less on his books
than on his conversation and friendship with religious thinkers,
the same is hardly less true of another contemporary layman,
Thomas Erskine of Linlathen. Erskine’s natural gift lay rather
in intimate spiritual converse and letters than in set writing. In
mid-life he ceased to publish books, as if himself questioning his
effectiveness as an author; but, for another thirty years, he talked
and wrote to those who would find more readers than he ever could.
Among his friends he counted Carlyle, Maurice, Stanley and McLeod
Campbell, besides an interesting group of Christians on the con-
tinent, with whom, also, he corresponded, Vinet, Gaussen, Adolphe
Monod and C. C. J. Bunsen. Erskine's writings, however, have
considerable importance, in spite of their amateurishness and lack
6
6
## p. 284 (#308) ############################################
ch6
a
284 The Growth of Liberal Theology [CH.
2
.
of method: 'your books,' wrote Maurice, in dedicating Prophets
and Kings to him, "seem to me to mark a crisis in the theological
movement of this time. While the orthodox Scottish divines of
'
Erskine's younger days grimly propounded the sovereign decrees'
of unbending Calvinism, there was room for his assertion in The
Unconditional Freeness of the Gospel (1828) that 'Christ died, not
for believers, but for the world. Forgiveness, he declared, “is a
permanent condition of the heart of God'; 'God's arms are open. '
Man must not claim even faith as the ground of his pardon; if he
does so claim, it is only an instance of his unextinguished pride;
'He must have self to lean on, and so when he is obliged to
surrender his own works, he betakes himself to his own faith as
his prop. But this is still self. ' The satiric humour, as well as
the strong mystical vein in his writings, recalls William Law, who
was one of Erskine's favourite authors. In the comparatively
few writers whom his defective eyesight allowed him to study,
he looked for 'light' rather than for theological learning : he
preferred Plato and the neo-Platonists, Leighton and Law, to
professional divines and their critical opponents. He dismisses
a polemical writer with the judgment: ‘he is a great reasoner:
but I do not find any light in him at all. The thing itself he does
not see, but he can give many powerful arguments for it. ' Any
reader will feel that Erskine saw the thing itself,' whether he
could rightly explain it or not; the inner witness of the heart was
to him a more compelling authority than Scripture or creed.
Before he could accept doctrinal statements, his conscience must
approve them as right and true. We may recognise Erskine's
influence in McLeod Campbell's attempts to moralise the doctrine
of atonement, and Maurice's insistence on the ethical meaning
of eternal life. But, if much of Erskine's characteristic teaching
came into circulation through the writers whom he inspired, his
Letters (1877) and occasional volumes will never lack readers who
prefer to go to the fountain-head, to draw their own immediate
inspiration from one for whom religion was not 'a mere set of
notions' but God within us. '
Meanwhile, new life began to stir in the universities. At
Oxford, Oriel college was reaping the advantages of its reforming
zeal. Ruled in succession by two energetic provosts, Eveleigh and
Copleston, who encouraged their pupils to reason freely, the college
became noted during Copleston's provostship (1814–28) for the
· The Nature of the Atonement, 1856.
2 Theological Essays, 1853.
## p. 285 (#309) ############################################
X11]
285
The Noetics
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unfettered criticism indulged in by its fellows. Oxford nicknamed
them the noetics or intellectuals, and had some reason to fear and
dislike the Oriel common-room. A society accustomed to defer to
authority and the voice of tradition was a little shocked by the
freedom with which the Oriel men submitted anything and every-
thing to criticism. They favoured reform alike in academic and
in ecclesiastical politics. They had no agreed programme, and
formed no party; yet their friendship and common aims were
likely to make them a considerable influence in the church, when
they should be called to the high office to which their gifts entitled
them. To form a party was never their wish; indeed, it would
have defeated their chief object, which was the creation of a habit
of intellectual independence. Richard Whately, the ablest and
the most typical of the group, consistently repudiated any such
ambition; in 1843, he wrote to Lady Osborne,
Is it getting up a faction for me you are after? No, I'll have no
Whatelyites. . . . Anyone who tries to imitate me, is sure to be unlike
me in the important circumstance of being an imitator; and no one can
think as I do who does not think for himself.
He showed a touch of his quality in his first literary venture,
published anonymously in 1819, Historic Doubts relative to
Napoleon Buonaparte, a reductio ad absurdum of the method
of Hume's Essay on Miracles. Whately, on his solitary walks,
chopping logic by himself, or in company disallowing any in-
exact use of terms (even on his death-bed he took his chaplain
to task for misquoting St Paul), is a rather formidable figure,
a little disdainful of lesser minds. But, if his reasoning powers
were alarming, he, too, had his limitations : "he was the least
equipped with books,' said J. S. Mill of him, among any of the
great thinkers of his times. ' There was no room for poetry or
mysticism, and little room for awe in his somewhat arid mind;
and he grievously failed to do justice to the tractites. '
Yet Whately's anonymous Letters on the Church, By an
Episcopalian (1826) had given his pupil, Newman, the latter's
first conception of the church as a spiritual society independent
of the state. Whately's ruling commonsense made him equally
dislike the extremes of what he called the doubting school,' and
he lived long enough to denounce Essays and Reviews in the House
of Lords. But, in his Oxford days, and even after he became
archbishop of Dublin in 1831, he brought into English theology a
wholesome breath of commonsense. Many cobwebs of speculative
divinity were blown away, when he insisted that the Bible ‘has no
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## p. 286 (#310) ############################################
286 The Growth of Liberal Theology [CH.
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technical vocabulary,' and that it is more important to get the
drift of a whole passage than to build upon isolated texts.
A similar service was rendered by Whately's Oriel contemporary,
| Richard Denn Hampden, when, in his Bampton lectures (1832), he
contrasted the simplicity of the New Testament language with the
elaborate superstructure of 'logical theology' There was a saying
of John Foster, a writer whom Hampden sometimes quotes, “I deem
it the wisest rule to use precisely the language of Scripture”;
similarly, Hampden preferred Scripture to scholastic definition.
The language of theology should be regarded as symbolical :
therefore, to deduce further from its terms 'is like making every
circumstance in an emblem or metaphor the ground of scientific
deduction. ' Moreover, the advocate's desire to defend these
scholastic propositions makes the interpretation of Scripture over-
solicitous and predetermined, rather than open and natural. The
interpreter is intent on a process rather than 'a mere follower
of Revelation'; the 'fact' will be accommodated to the theory.
We must note, however, as still characteristic even of liberal
divines at this time that, while Hampden will rigorously criticise
any inferences from Scripture, he asserts without qualification that
'whatever is recorded in those books is indisputably true. ' The
book has its inconsistencies and its limitations ; but it shows its
author, under the influence of the new scientific spirit, to be before
his time in his interest in the evolution of doctrine. His de-
.
preciation of church traditions and formulas, and, still more, his
advocacy, in 1834, of the admission of dissenters to the universities
(“tests are no part of religious education'), drew upon him the
open hostility of the tractarians, who were now strong enough to
try conclusions with the liberal 'apostasy. ' Hampden, the un-
willing protagonist in this scene, cut no very happy figure in
extricating himself from charges of heterodoxy. He had himself
to thank for some misunderstandings; but his enemies showed little
scruple in making all the mischief they could, both in 1836, when
he was appointed regius professor of divinity at Oxford, and,
again, eleven years later, when he was nominated to the bishopric
of Hereford. The judgment of principal Tulloch on Hampden
deserves to be weighed in the scales against the steady deprecia-
tion of his 'confused thinking' by the tractarians : There are
seeds of thought in Dr Hampden’s writings far more fertile and
enduring than any to be found in the writings of his chief
opponents.
The early Oriel liberals are, as a whole, disappointing. There
6
## p. 287 (#311) ############################################
X11]
287
Thomas Arnold
>
6
was in them more of dry light than of divine fire. But, if the
charge of coldness fairly lies against some of them, it has no
meaning in the case of the most attractive and most influential
of their number, Thomas Arnold. If 'tendencies to Socinianism'
could be detected in Hampden or Whately, Arnold might defy his
worst enemy to find them in his writings. Only Newman, in a
moment of scepticism, could question Arnold's right to be called
a Christian. His fervid devotion to Christ radiates through all
his sermons and letters, and gives them a glow of life, long after
the writings of his liberal contemporaries have ceased to live.
Of Arnold, at least, it could not be said that he hoped to 'heal
the hurt of his people lightly' with useful knowledge and facile
optimism. Though he valued knowledge, and was possessed of
'even cheerfulness,' he could speak naturally and effectively the
deeper language of the soul. If he was not himself a great thinker
or critic, he excelled as a teacher and preacher in cultivating the
habit of moral thoughtfulness. His sermons reflect at once his
robust good sense and his contagious earnestness; they are, above
all, alive and breathe the mountain air: 'I will not give my boys,'
he said, 'to drink out of stagnant waters. ' To older audiences and
to his readers he offered stronger meat, but still avoided the
technical language of theology and the jargon of the pulpit: 'into
that common language, in which we think and feel, all truth must
be translated, if we would think and feel respecting it at once
rightly, clearly, and vividly. ' He had learnt something of the
scientific method of history from Niebuhr, and was not afraid of
its application to Biblical study. On the historical and moral
difficulties of the Bible, he had much to say in his sermons, and,
though a modern reader would find his treatment of such difficulties
only mildly critical, yet it reveals a sense of proportion, which
augured well for the future of such studies.
If my faith in God and my hope of eternal life is to depend on the
accuracy of a date or of some minute historical particular, who can wonder
that I should listen to any sophistry that may be used in defence of them, or
that I should force my mind to do any sort of violence to itself, when life and
death seem to hang on the issue of its decision ?
Arnold's desire for unity amounted to a passion, which over-
rode even necessary distinctions: he was for fusing church and
state, clergy and laity, secular and religious, the human and the
divine. In his hands, this treatment was safe enough, because the
higher term prevailed in such union; but, for less noble natures, it
spelt confusion. His hatred of all division and party spirit made
## p. 288 (#312) ############################################
288 The Growth of Liberal Theology [CH.
a
him tolerant in principle, but a bitter opponent of what he believed
to be intolerance. When his friend Hampden was attacked in
1836, he struck out at the Oxford malignants' in The Edinburgh
Review with an invective which disturbed even his supporters.
But, already, before his premature death, on 12 June 1842, the
eve of his forty-eighth birthday, he had adopted a broader and
more tranquil outlook, especially after the kindly reception which
he obtained from former opponents at Oxford on his becoming, in
1841, regius professor of modern history.
Arnold's most celebrated Rugby pupil, Arthur Penrhyn Stanley,
has described a scene from his boyhood in 1834 which brings
together representatives of most of the types of liberal theology
mentioned in this chapter. As he sat in the library of Hurst-
monceaux rectory, where he noticed the preponderance of German
books, Julius Hare's curate, John Sterling, came in with the
current number of The Quarterly Review, noticing Coleridge's
death and containing an article on his poetry. On the same
occasion, the friends discussed the unpublished manuscript of
Confessions of an Enquiring Spirit, and agreed to submit it
to Arnold for his advice as to its publication. Julius Hare,
contemporary and friend of Connop Thirlwall at Charterhouse
and Trinity college, Cambridge, who, ten years later, became
the brother-in-law of his pupil, Frederick Denison Maurice, was
a link between many generations. His chief work, The Mission
of the Comforter (1846), he dedicated 'to the honoured memory
of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and he repeatedly mentioned his
profound obligation to the Cambridge philosopher, whom many
of the Oxford lights, like Whately, disparaged as a misty thinker.
As Maurice remarks,
Hare cannot be suspected, as many have been, of resorting to Coleridge
because, at his restaurant, German cookery was adapted to weak English
stomachs, not yet prepared to receive it in its genuine form; for Hare knew
the taste of German dishes and had partaken of them fearlessly.
Hare and Thirlwall were as well acquainted as any Englishmen of
their day with German literature, yet they retained a thoroughly
English outlook. They collaborated in the translation and editing
of Schleiermacher's St Luke (1825) and/ of Niebuhr's History
of Rome (1828–32). They both recognised the necessity of
applying the newer historical method to the study of the Scrip-
tures, and were upheld in that view by a belief in the progressive
unfolding of religious truth. If Christians accepted the dispensa-
tion of the Spirit, said Thirlwall, they must believe that 'His later
ii
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## p. 289 (#313) ############################################
XII]
289
Frederick Denison Maurice
lessons may well transcend His earlier. ' He did not expect his
English readers to accept all the conclusions of Schleiermacher,
but
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27
to diffuse the spirit of impartial criticism more extensively among ourselves
in the study of the sacred writings, when it has hitherto been either wholly
wanting or confined to very subordinate points, was also the translator's
principal object.
'I do not believe,' wrote Hare, 'that there is any other living
man who has done anything at all approaching to what Maurice
has effected in reconciling the reason and the conscience of the
thoughtful men of our age to the faith of our church. ' Maurice
was a religious teacher more than a critic: indeed, for biblical
criticism, he had no great liking or aptitude. Rather, he
was in the true succession to Coleridge and Erskine: the latter's
Brazen Serpent (1831) had helped him, as it helped McLeod
Campbell, to find his gospel. The son of a unitarian minister,
member of a family sharply divided in its religious allegiance,
Maurice believed himself called 'from my cradle' to the pursuit
of unity. He was persuaded, like J. S. Mill, that thinking people
were, for the most part, right in what they affirmed, wrong in what
they denied. He believed that each church party asserted some
great truth, and in The Religions of the World (1847), an early
example of the comparative study of religions in this country, he
showed the same anxiety to appreciate all positive excellence.
But his breadth of sympathy was not indifference or vagueness.
He had nothing in common with the ‘hang theology' air of some
broad churchmen, or with the contemporary shyness of dogmatic
statement. “Theology,' he declared, “is what our age is crying
out for, even when it thinks that it is crying to be rid of
theology. He saw the necessity of clearing current theology
of what he took to be erroneous and even immoral teaching.
He was deeply concerned so to state the doctrine of atone-
ment as not to offend the moral sense, and he resented, as
warmly as Mill, Mansel's suggestion that the justice of God
‘is not the kind of justice which would be expected of men.
'
The starting point of all his theology was the love of God,
not the sinfulness of man. This was his best inheritance from
his unitarian upbringing; he remained surer of the infinite
love of God than of any other doctrine, and he examined all
current religious belief in the light of this ruling idea. Here,
he believed, was a gospel for all mankind; any limitation
of it he attacked with an almost savage intensity. He gibbeted
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## p. 290 (#314) ############################################
290 The Growth of Liberal Theology [[
CH.
6
his opponents as giving, in effect, Christ's good news in these
reduced terms:
Your Father has created multitudes whom He means to perish for ever
and ever. By my agony and bloody sweat, by my cross and passion, I have
induced Him in the case of an inconceivably small minority to forego that
design.
A divine who could write and speak in this strain showed more
courage than discretion; he was bound to be misunderstood and
mistrusted. He knew himself what to expect; when I wrote
the sentence about eternal death, I was writing my own sentence
at King's College. '
It may be felt that Maurice forced upon the New Testament
language an interpretation of eternal punishment to square with
his belief in the 'infinite' love of God, rather than that he came
to his decision from an unimpassioned study of the text. But he
was a prophet of great ideas, which consumed and fired him, not
an exact student of philology and history. He had, also, that
mystical quality of mind which was lacking in the Oxford
liberals. He sought to read the eternal in the manifestations of
it in time: 'we must have the eternal, which our fathers nearly
forgot. ”
With the same disregard of popularity and the same risk
of misunderstanding, Maurice proclaimed himself a Christian
socialist; 'I seriously believe,' he wrote, that Christianity is the
only foundation of Socialism, and that a true Socialism is the
necessary result of a sound Christianity. But, though both
Christians and socialists hastened to disown him, the direction
which he gave to Christian thinking has been extensively followed,
so that much of what he taught, whether of a more universal
theology or of a truer Christian brotherhood, has become the
commonplace of the pulpit. As his friend Kingsley had hoped,
Christians came to accept the teaching of Theological Essays
(1853) ‘not as a code complete, but as a hint towards a new
method of thought. Maurice was more capable of giving hints
than precise directions, and even the hints were sometimes un-
necessarily indistinct. But he was not wilfully obscure; if he
was less lucid than the Oriel liberals, it was partly because he
was struggling to plumb greater depths of religious experience.
It is characteristic of the changing times to find Maurice
associated with Kingsley and Robertson, in 1851, in giving a course
of sermons in a London church on the message of the church
to rich and poor. Robertson's turn came first; Kingsley was
## p. 291 (#315) ############################################
XIII]
291
Robertson of Brighton
6
inhibited by the bishop of London after delivering the second; and
the third was consequently never delivered. If Maurice was out-
spoken, and Robertson impetuous, 'Parson Lot' was vehement;
when once fairly let loose upon the prey,' wrote W. R. Greg
of him, all the Red Indian within him comes to the surface,
and he wields the tomahawk with an unbaptized heartiness. '
Though Kingsley made no original contribution to theological
thinking, he was a successful populariser of Maurice's teaching,
and applied it to the social questions of the day with remarkable
directness. Nor was he a mere echo of Maurice; his romantic
love of nature and of all things that have breath and his fine
humanity were great gifts for a preacher.
Frederick Robertson's reputation was won in the face of
obstacles. He entered the Anglican ministry without any
academic fame, and, for some years, had neither success nor
happiness, owing to uncongenial surroundings and his own extreme
sensitiveness. For barely six years, he ministered in a small pro-
prietary chapel in Brighton. When death took him thence, in
1853, at the age of thirty-seven, he had published only a few
casual sermons, and yet, already, he was known as a unique
preacher. Five volumes of his sermons were posthumously
printed. Their form is unfinished; some of them are only his
extensive notes, others are the products of amateur reporting. Yet
no sermons of that period, not even Newman's, have found so wide
a range of readers. They are like no other sermons; they owe
almost nothing recognisable to works of theological learning ;
they do not reflect the theology of any master-mind or of any
party. Robertson preserves his independence till it becomes to
him an almost painful isolation. He thinks his own way through
the difficulties, and, though his exegesis may be unwarranted, it is
never uninteresting. He avoids the technical terms of the schools,
and yet his sermons are full of doctrinal teaching, conveyed by
suggestion rather than by dogmatic exposition. A typical example
of his habit of mind is afforded by his sermon 'On the Glory of
the Virgin Mother. He is not content to point out the dangers
of the cult of the Virgin ; its very prevalence establishes for him
the probability that it ‘has a root in truth. '
We assume it as a principle that no error has ever spread widely, that was
not the exaggeration or perversion of a truth. And be assured that the first
step towards dislodging error is to understand the truth at which it aims. It
matters little whether fierce Romanism or fierce Protestantism wins the day:
but it does matter whether or not in a conflict we lose some precious Christian
truth, as well as the very spirit of Christianity.
19-2
## p. 292 (#316) ############################################
292 The Growth of Liberal Theology ([
ch.
An enquiry begun in this spirit could not fail to be constructive
rather than destructive. A generation that felt its doubts acutely
was fortunate to have such men as Maurice and Robertson for its
preachers. While they criticised what they believed to be faulty
or obsolete modes of theological expression, their main concern
was to lose nothing which had spiritual value.
Their influence was more enduring than that of the Oxford
liberals, whose early promise had hardly justified itself. In spite
of their intellectual ability and vigorous self-assertion, the Oriel
men stirred little general enthusiasm, and were soon attracting
less attention in Oxford itself than the second movement which
emanated from the Oriel common-room. The tractarians were in
full reaction against the liberals ; in Newman's eyes 'the great
apostasy is Liberalism in religion. There was, for a while, a
serious set-back and discouragement of free enquiry. Moreover,
the liberal theologians of the next generation spoke with less
confidence than the Whatelys and Arnolds. The difficulties of
faith were increasing under the pressure of many convergent lines
of modern enquiry, and the concessions asked for were heavier and
nearer the heart of Christian teaching. Strauss's Life of Jesus
(1835), which George Eliot translated in 1846, opened anew for
English readers the whole question of the supernatural. The
problems suggested by physical science were hardly less urgent.
Scientific knowledge had been rapidly advancing all through the
century, though its bearing on the traditional theology was not at
first perceived. But queen Victoria's reign had not proceeded far
before there was a more general appreciation of the difficulties of
reconciling new and old ways of thinking. The spirit of doubt,
even if it were reluctant and ill at ease, obtruded itself in poet and
essayist and historian, as well as in philosopher and theologian,
Many who had started in the following of Newman, like Mark
Pattison and James Anthony Froude, instead of following him to
Rome, had recovered from their enthusiasm only to become coldly
distrustful of any authority.
But, while there were many who lost their faith and drifted
into a relation of indifference or positive antagonism to Chris-
tianity, there was also a fresh and vigorous attempt on the part of
those who sought to combine free thinking with a position inside
the Christian church. If the first wave of Oxford liberal thought
had long spent itself, it was followed at some interval by a larger
wave, which made more stir. The new movement bore a new
The label 'broad church' is said by Jowett to have been
name.
## p. 293 (#317) ############################################
XIII] The Broad Churchmen 293
o
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proposed in his hearing by A. H. Clough, and it came into familiar
use in Oxford some years before it received any literary expres-
sion? In The Edinburgh Review, in 1853, W. J. Conybeare spoke
of a third party in the church, which is called Moderate or
Catholic or Broad Church by its friends, Latitudinarian or In-
different by its enemies. ' He described its distinctive character
as the desire for comprehension, and its watchwords as charity
and toleration. An organised party they never designed to be-
come: individual independence was their most treasured right.
There were many, like Maurice, who unquestionably helped to
liberalise theological thought, and yet hated the very notion of
party. But there was a fairly coherent band of liberal clergymen,
linked by academic friendship or for self-defence, who stood
together, both consciously and in the public mind. They advo-
cated a bolder application of critical methods to the Bible than
their predecessors would have allowed, and yet their love for the
Bible was often conspicuous. As preachers or commentators,
many of them exhibited notable gifts for interpretation. The
concerted appearance on the same day in 1855 of Jowett's com-
mentary on certain epistles of St Paul and of Stanley's commentary
on the epistles to the Corinthians, indicated the freer spirit
which was beginning to animate English study of the New Testa-
ment. The freshness of Jowett's treatment, especially in the
dissertations, is still unexhausted. The Pauline terms, which had
become hard and unlovely in the hands of schoolmen and reforma-
tion doctors, are again alive, as Jowett submits them to the
scrutiny of modern psychology. There is, also, an unforgettable
picture of the apostle himself, not more remarkable for its delicate
intuition than for its emotional quality.
A poor aged man, worn by some bodily or mental disorder, who had been
often scourged, and bore on his face the traces of indignity and sorrow in
every form-such an one, led out of prison between Roman soldiers, probably
at times faltering in his utterance, the creature, as he seemed to spectators, of
nervous sensibility; yearning, almost with a sort of fondness, to save the souls
of those whom he saw around him-spoke a few eloquent words in the cause
of Christian truth, at which kings were awed, telling the tale of his own con-
version with such simple pathos, that after-ages have hardly heard the like.
The ungenerous treatment which Jowett received from his
theological opponents at Oxford was enough to discourage him
from further theological studies, and, in succeeding years, Plato
received from him more attention than St Paul. But he continued
to find expression for his thoughts on religion in regular preaching.
See New English Dictionary, 8. v. “Broad. '
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## p. 294 (#318) ############################################
294 The Growth of Liberal Theology [CH.
In his posthumous volumes of sermons, he shows more care for
simple truths and simple duties than for the controversies of the
hour; he encourages a sane and well-balanced outlook on life-
'that is a maimed soul which loves goodness and has no love
of truth, or which loves truth and has no love of goodness'-and
he expresses himself as thankful for his church-membership
in this ancient house of our fathers, with all its faults the best and most
tolerant of the Churches of Christendom, and the least opposed to the spirit
6
>
of the age.
6
Stanley's commentary was full of human interest, but de-
fective, like the rest of his writings, in critical power. He had
many gifts and much miscellaneous knowledge, but never gave
himself wholly to any one branch of exact learning. "What does
this remind you of? ' was Arnold's favourite question in school,
and Stanley was busy answering it the rest of his life. His
Lectures on the Jewish Church (1863–76), and most of his many
books, abound in historical parallels and similitudes, sometimes
felicitous, at other times forced. He had 'a grand curiosity' for
the historical and literary associations of place. He would sooner
describe an heresiarch's country and customs than unravel his
exploded opinions. When he was installed dean of Westminster,
he hailed as a happy omen the ancient admonition that he was set
there ‘for the enlargement of the Christian Church. ' He proved
faithful to his conception of his office in giving the abbey pulpit
a more national character ; the preachers whom he brought there
represented English religious thought of many types. His pub-
lished sermons reflect his own urbane, cultured and tolerant spirit,
his feeling for history and his dramatic sense, but they made no
contribution to the theology of the next generation.
The publication of Essays and Reviews in 1860 made the
broad churchmen a storm-centre as much as Tract XC had done
for the high churchmen. It was not intended, but was generally
taken to be, the manifesto of a party. The volume was, in fact,
the concluding number of a series of Oxford and Cambridge essays,
issued annually. The editor, Henry Bristow Wilson, was a country
clergyman whose Bampton lectures entitled The Communion of
Saints (1851) had already caused him to become suspect. The
seven writers consisted of six clergymen, and one layman, Charles
Wycliffe Goodwin, an Egyptologist who had resigned his Cambridge
fellowship on finding himself unable to take holy orders. They
were soon, by an outraged religious public, dubbed Septem
contra Christum. Replies, in the shape of books and pamphlets
## p. 295 (#319) ############################################
XII]
295
Essays and Reviews
and articles, continued for many months to be issued. Two of the
essayists, Rowland Williams and the editor, were tried and con-
demned for heresy in the court of arches; their acquittal, on
appeal to the judicial committee of the privy council, afforded
a valuable protection to liberty of thought within the church of
England. But it is not hard to account for the opposition to the
essayists. Though many of the essays were blameless and un-
aggressive, the general effect was negative, and some of the essays
were provocative. Maurice complained of the absence of theology
in the volume, and especially of the neglect of the full revelation
of God in Christ' which he believed to be all that was worth
preaching. Stanley, who must have symbolised closely with
some of the contributors, found fault with its negative character:
‘no book which treats of religious questions can hope to make its
way to the heart of the English nation unless it gives, at the same
time that it takes away. The editor gave just offence in his essay,
"The National Church' by betraying a greater anxiety to see the
church national than Christian. Baden Powell, Savilian professor
of geometry at Oxford from 1827, was a survivor from the early
Oriel school, and died directly after the issue of Essays and
Reviews He had already written much on the relations of
theology and science, and in his essay he pressed the uniformity
of nature against the argument for miracle. But for his opportune
death, he could hardly have escaped prosecution. His generation
would never have tolerated his attempt to free Christian theism
from a dependence on miracles. Mark Pattison's essay, The
Tendencies of Religious Thought, 1688—1750,' was, for the most
part, a purely historical survey, and would have avoided criticism
if it had not appeared in the incriminating volume. Jowett urged,
‘Interpret the Scripture like any other book,' and yet maintained
that it would remain unlike any other book.
Scripture has an inner life or soul; it has also an outward body or form.
That form is language, which imperfectly expresses our common notions,
much more those higher truths which religion teaches.
His essay, like Frederick Temple’s, “The Education of the World,
was pious and conciliatory, though both included (what, indeed,
gives unity to the whole collection of essays) a strong plea for free
criticism. 'He is guilty of high treason against the faith,' wrote
Temple, 'who fears the result of any investigation, whether philo-
sophical, or scientific, or historical. ' Yet, the future archbishop
may have had some qualms when he read Rowland Williams's essay
on Bunsen's Biblical Researches. The shock was not mediated by
6
## p. 296 (#320) ############################################
296
The Growth of Liberal Theology
[CH.
the English writer, but rendered liable to cause the maximum of
offence. Williams's Psalms and Litanies, published by his widow
in 1872, proves him to have had a true devotional feeling, and
a desire to enter into communion with the Eternal Spirit, but
it also shows how he consistently reduced ancient collects to a
unitarian standard. Maurice had, indeed, touched the chief defect
of Essays and Reviews, a defect which the lapse of time has
made even more apparent. The disparagement of doctrine, and,
especially, the neglect to contribute anything to the understanding
of the person and nature of Jesus Christ, render it of little service
to a later age, which, like other ages before it, sees that here is the
core of essentially Christian thinking. The true claim of the
essayists to grateful remembrance is that they asserted with one
voice the duty of the Christian church to welcome new truth,
and the right of her accredited sons to make it known. Not in
vain is one of the essayists commemorated on the walls of
his college chapel as a scholar qui libertatem cleri anglicani
feliciter vindicavit.
Public opinion was so far in favour of wider theological liberty
that the acquittal of the essayists in 1864 was followed next year
by the Clerical Subscription act, substituting a general assent to
the XXXIX Articles of religion for the ex animo subscription
'to all things therein contained,' which had been required for two
centuries. There were similar struggles for freedom in other
churches. Scottish theology, which had been eminently con-
servative, became less provincial as it grew bolder and more
critical. In the Free church of Scotland, the biblical con-
tributions of William Robertson Smith to the ninth edition of
the Encyclopaedia Britannica excited a growing hostility from
1875 till 1881, when he was removed from his professorial chair
at Aberdeen. But there was a larger public ready to form its
judgment when he published his popular lectures, The Old
Testament in the Jewish Church (1881) and The Prophets of
Israel (1882). Freed from ecclesiastical ties, he pursued at
Cambridge, till his death in 1894, his original researches into
the primitive religions of the Semitic peoples.
Prosecutions for heresy and indictments of heterodox pub-
lications brought theological questions into general discussion
throughout the 'sixties. The magazines, and especially the new
Fortnightly Review, often provided the arena. The excitement
,
over Essays and Reviews was not allayed before a new quarry
was started by bishop Colenso's free handling of the Pentateuch,
6
>
## p. 297 (#321) ############################################
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297
XII]
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which found few whole-hearted defenders in the Christian camp,
partly owing to the author's provocative and unfortunate
manner. It was more difficult for the contemporary orthodox
mind to decide whether the anonymous author of Ecce Homo
(1865) was friend or foe. Like Matthew Arnold's essays and
many other books of the period, Ecce Homo represents the
attempt to save religion in the shipwreck of orthodoxy, and,
above all, to save Christian ethics. Its author, who was soon
discovered to be John Robert Seeley, at that time professor
of Latin in University college, London, intentionally avoided
controversial theology. When he was reproached for 'concealing'
his theological opinions, he replied that he concealed them ‘only in
the sense in which the vast majority of the community have con-
cealed them; that is, he has not published them. ' Seeley took for
granted, as orthodox and heterodox writers commonly did in his
generation, that “almost all men 'could agree upon the Christian
ethical standard. With an engaging fervour and literary grace, he
set before his readers Christ's enthusiasm for humanity,' and
found in it a motive which could still be for Christians a stronger
passion than any other.
Christ raised the feeling of humanity from being a feeble restraining power
to be an inspiring passion. The Christian moral reformation may indeed be
summed up in this-humanity changed from a restraint to a motive.
Seeley regarded Christianity as natural fellow-feeling or
humanity raised to the point of enthusiasm. He did not think
that the world could do without Christ and his Church. Indeed,
he reckoned the person of Christ to be of more account than
anything which he said or did: 'Christ's discovery is himself. The
moral teaching of the New Testament, for instance, the law of
forgiveness, ‘Christ's most striking innovation in morality,' was
commended by Seeley to his generation with greater freshness
and charm than by any other writer. No one could miss his
meaning or ever forget his fine tribute to the distinctive note of
Christian morality.
There was much to discourage the Christian advocate in the
'seventies. Neither science nor culture was inclined to be docile.
Huxley made merry in the monthly reviews, and Matthew Arnold
subjected the defenders of traditional theology to successive
volleys of Gallic raillery. Confidence was restored to the
orthodox ranks, less by the concessions of broad churchmen or
the defence of orthodox apologists, than by the rise of a school
of historical criticism. If the appeal was to be to scholarship, ,
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## p. 298 (#322) ############################################
298 The Growth of Liberal Theology [CH.
6
6
even the general reader would soon see that sound learning and
candour were not all on one side. A notable part in the creation
of an improved theological scholarship was played by three
Cambridge contemporaries and friends, Brooke Foss Westcott,
Fenton John Anthony Hort, and Joseph Barber Lightfoot. The
tractarian scholars had been chiefly interested in the age of the
councils; the Cambridge scholars devoted themselves to the study of
Christian origins. Westcott and Hort's main work was the recension
of the Greek text of the New Testament; Lightfoot was concerned
with the Pauline epistles and the apostolic Fathers. Their work was
timely and valuable, but they would have been the last to regard
it as final. They shared the characteristic belief of the liberal
theologians in the progressive apprehension of Christian truth.
'Let us all thank God,' said bishop :Westcott to his clergy, at the
close of his long life of teaching, that He has called us to unfold
a growing message, and not to rehearse a stereotyped tradition. '
'Christianity,' wrote Hort, “is not an uniform and monotonous
tradition, but to be learned only by successive steps of life. '
Hort's passion for meticulous accuracy and his extreme caution
caused him to publish little, and his shyness stood in the way
of his influence as an oral teacher. Yet his posthumous Hulsean
lectures, The Way the Truth the Life, revealed him as a master
of pregnant phrase. Centuries of speculation on the doctrine
of atonement are arraigned by the terse judgment: “Theologies
which have sundered God's righteousness from His love have done
equal wrong to both. '
While Christian scholarship was thus holding its own, there
was also a welcome escape from the determinist and utilitarian
fashions in philosophy. At Oxford, Thomas Henry Green, tutor
of Balliol, exercised a strong spiritual influence over those
whom criticism was compelling to discard the fair humanities
of old religion. ' James Martineau, of an older generation than
Green, did not publish any of his more important books till his
eightieth year. In earlier life, Martineau had adopted the deter-
minist and utilitarian theories of morals, but he proved their
effective critic in his octogenarian volume, Types of Ethical
Theory (1885). Three years later, he vindicated theistic belief in
A Study of Religion.
The critical principles for which liberal theologians had had
to do battle were by this time no longer the badges of their
tribe, but were accepted by most educated Christians. For
instance, high churchmen had travelled more than half way from
Hill
## p. 299 (#323) ############################################
XIII]
George Tyrrell
299
the tractarian to the liberal position, when, in 1889, a group of
Oxford friends combined, in Lux Mundi, to make a re-statement
of Christian faith; "it needs disencumbering, re-interpreting,
explaining. ' 'It is the test of the Church's legitimate tenure
that she can encourage free inquiry into her title-deeds. '
Cross-currents of theological opinion have become in recent
years increasingly noticeable. If high churchmen have adopted
a freer biblical criticism, broad churchmen and free churchmen
have ceased to belittle the idea of the church. Theology becomes
more and more cosmopolitan, and oversteps denominational boun-
daries. Even that church which rates highest the principle of
authority has had its disciplinary difficulties with those sons who
seek to create a catholic atmosphere in which the modern mind
may breathe more freely. The modernist movement is yet too
near and unexhausted to find historical treatment, were it not
that its most brilliant English representative, George Tyrrell,
has already written his last word. The title of one of his earlier
books, Nova et Vetera, is a fit symbol of his lifelong attempt to
adjust new and old. His mind was delicately sensitive to every
modern pressure, yet he loved the past and would lose none of its
heritage: 'The new must be made out of the old, must retain and
transcend all its values. ' The very word catholic, said the Abbé
Brémond at his graveside, was music to his ears; he was more
securely catholic than Christian. Now he would be wondering
whether the Christianity of the future would consist of mysticism
and charity, and possibly the Eucharist in its primitive form as
the outward bond’; now he would look longingly back to the
church of his baptism; and yet again give a last loyalty to the
church of his adoption. He was still probing this way and that
for sure foothold when death interrupted his pilgrimage. 'Had
I been Moses I don't think I should have felt not entering the
Land of Promise one bit, so long as I knew that Israel would
do so one day. '
It is inevitable that Tyrrell's career should be compared with
Newman's; he made the comparison himself in one of the latest
6
of his essays.
'Be my soul with the Saints! ' says Newman, looking away from
Anglicanism towards the altars of Rome. But is there not a wider
Communion of Saints, whereof the canonised are but a fraction, and whose
claims are founded, not in miracles or prodigies, but in that sincerity to
truth and righteousness, without which even orthodoxy were nothing worth?
advocates of the Christian faith did not lack ability, but they had
been traversing the same arid ground of external evidences for
half a century. They continued to put the apostles into the witness
box and acquit them according to the rules of the Old Bailey.
They cross-examined the saints for their attestation of miracle
and prophecy, but omitted to discover the secret of their life.
A Paley or a Watson might display admirable commonsense, and
be accounted by the faithful a match for Tom Paine; and yet the
religious life remained starved. The methodist movement, with
its evangelical counterpart, had, indeed, given back to religious
feeling its rightful place and more, but had produced little or
no theology, except for the particularly acrid and unprofitable
Calvinist controversy.
The French revolution had set up a ferment of new ideas and
induced a critical attitude towards all established notions and
institutions. But the very extravagances of the movement, and
the desperate nature of the war in which England was engaged
against the propagandists of the revolution, made English people
more than usually suspicious of new ideas, and gave a new lease
of life to threatened institutions like the established church.
Sympathy with the ideas of the revolution was regarded as
dubiously patriotic and probably irreligious, as Priestley and
William Frend found to their cost. When the former took flight
to a more kindly clime, bishop Horsley could exult and sing, “The
orators and oracles of Birmingham and Essex Street are dumb. '
Traditional teaching, therefore, remained in almost undisputed
possession through the period of the great war, and beyond it,
when the new fears of social unrest excited corresponding fears
## p. 280 (#304) ############################################
280 The Growth of Liberal Theology [CH. .
for Christian faith. For the first twenty years of the new century,
English theology was at a standstill. The stars of the older day,
Paley and Horsley and Watson, were setting, and no new stars
had arisen. Theology could make no serious progress until it
should emancipate itself from the outworn conventions of the
previous century, and be free to face the urgent questions of the
new age. The fashionable utilitarianism of Paley could kindle no
warmth. Idealism already had its prophets in Germany; but it
needed a Coleridge to discover and interpret them for English
readers. There were also on the continent pioneers of a more
scientific literary criticism; but their work was still unknown in
this country. Herbert Marsh, fellow of St John's college, Cam-
bridge, who had studied at Leipzig under Michaelis, published in
four volumes (1793-1801) a translation of the latter's Introduction
to the New Testament, together with essays and a dissertation of
his own on the sources of the first three Gospels. He did not
escape reproof for his rashness; but neither was he debarred from
becoming a divinity professor and a bishop. The work had no
immediate sequel. English scholarship was not ready for such ques-
tions; but, twenty-four years later, another future bishop, Connop
Thirlwall, picked up the threads, in introducing to an English
public Schleiermacher’s A Critical Essay on the Gospel of St Lrike.
Still more necessary than critical learning was a freer view of
biblical inspiration. Theological scholars worked in shackles, if
not in blinkers, so long as à priori theories of the inerrancy of
Scripture were unchallenged. When the critical methods that
were already being applied to other literature should come to
be applied to the Bible, a revolution would follow. If, in his
Shakespearean studies, said Coleridge, he were to use the same
uncritical liberties as divines allowed themselves in harmonising
the inconsistencies of Scripture, ‘I would almost undertake to
harmonise Falstaff's account of the rogues in buckram into a
coherent and consistent narrative. The eighteenth century was
seriously lacking in the historic sense; but, so soon as Wolf set
himself to prove the plural authorship of the Iliad, and Niebuhr
began discussing the origin of the early legends of Roman history,
the day was not far distant when similar tests must be applied
to biblical literature. The growth of the scientific temper in the
new century, with its ruling idea of development, would also
create a more sympathetic interest in doctrine viewed historically
rather than as absolutely defined. The time was ripe for the
advent of Christian scholars who, with a more daring spirit,
## p. 281 (#305) ############################################
XIII]
281
The Evangelicals
would set their sails to catch the new breezes that were
stirring.
But in what direction was a truer theology to be looked for?
The spirit of religion burned brightest among the evangelical
churchmen and methodists. The new century witnessed a new
literary venture, The Christian Observer, which enlisted most
of the evangelical talent—Henry Thornton, Thomas Scott the
commentator and John Venn. The evangelicals were not wanting
in ability or energy, but, as a body, had little taste for literature,
except of a directly practical purpose. They showed their capacity
for meeting the religious needs of their less critical followers in
devotional and homiletic literature. Hannah More's Cheap
Repository Tracts had an enormous vogue, and a simple moral
tale by Legh Richmond, The Dairyman's Daughter, reached two
million copies. For more cultivated readers, there was a great
outpouring of pious biography. Charles Simeon, with all his
wider interests, published almost nothing except homiletic litera-
ture, skeletons' of sermons, as he frankly called them. Even a
professed work of learning like Joseph Milner's History of the
Church of Christ (1794–7) aimed chiefly at edification; 'genuine
piety is the only thing which I intend to celebrate. ' Neither
he nor his brother, dean Isaac Milner, who brought the history
down to Luther's reformation, thought it necessary to read
anything in Luther's language. Evangelical theology concentrated
itself upon a few favourite doctrines which formed the scheme of
salvation; its language was soon learnt, and it was all-sufficient.
The peculiarity of this language, together with its hackneyed
use, was enough to deter some minds, as the outspoken baptist
minister, John Foster, complained in his essay on the Aversion
of Men of Taste to Evangelical Religion (1805). Even biblical
interpretation commanded but a narrow field of interest; the
unfulfilled prophecies alone gave scope for speculation. The
rigid theory of inspiration, in general, foreclosed enquiry, and the
evangelicals retained that theory longest of all.
The true glory of the evangelicals lay in their pastoral zeal and
in their philanthropy. The Clapham sect, as Sydney Smith nick-
named them, maintained a long struggle against the slave trade,
and supported missionary societies and charitable enterprises with
princely generosity. William Wilberforce, member of parliament
for the county of York, raised a hitherto unpopular and mis-
judged party in the public esteem when, in 1797, he produced his
Practical View of Christianity. It found more readers than any
## p. 282 (#306) ############################################
282 The Growth of Liberal Theology [[
CH.
book by a clergyman; its effect is comparable with that of The
Serious Call. It had, however, none of William Law's wit,
though its writer was deemed by Madame de Staël the wittiest
talker she had met in England. “The present state of things in
France, where a brood of moral vipers, as it were, is now hatching,'
was the occasion for the serious self-examination proposed in it.
“We bear upon us but too plainly the marks of a declining empire. '
The author sees no hope of averting this ruin, except by a revival
of real Christianity, as contrasted with the decent selfishness'
which passed muster with most Christians. “The grand defect'
in these nominal Christians is that they forget
the peculiar doctrines of the Religion which they profess-the corruption of
human nature-the atonement of the Saviour-and the sanctifying influence
of the Holy Spirit.
But, apart from this sincere allegiance to the orthodox language,
Wilberforce, as Sir James Stephen has shown, 'was very much
a latitudinarian. His catholic spirit had no taste for polemical
divinity, and he gave himself, as he advised others to give them-
selves, to practical Christianity.
Among the evangelicals there was not enough of speculative
interest to revive and liberate theology. Emancipation would not
come from them. It came in part from an unexpected quarter,
from the poet-philosopher and amateur theologian, Samuel Taylor
Coleridge. From early days, he was in revolt against the utilitarian
fashion in philosophy and in theology, and it became his aim, as
Julius Hare said, to spiritualise both the one and the other. It
was high time that philosophy should again have a hearing in
English religion, as it had already had in Germany. English theo-
logy had been suffering, for at least a generation, from the poverty
of its intellectual interest; it was Coleridge's province to stimulate
that interest, as a long succession of religious thinkers have amply
testified.
Coleridge would himself have recognised the truth and the
pathos of Charles Lamb's description of him as 'an archangel a
little damaged. The contrast between his spiritual ideals and his
sordid failures was as painful to him as it could be to his friends.
He laboured under a deep conviction of sin which gave a personal
intensity to his Confessions, as, for instance, when he says that, in
the Bible, he has ‘found words for my inmost thoughts, songs for
my joy, utterances for my hidden griefs, and pleadings for my
shame and my feebleness. The theological reading of this
'
‘literary cormorant,' as he called himself, was discursive. He leapt
## p. 283 (#307) ############################################
X11] Erskine of Linlathen 283
contemptuously back over the aevum rationalisticum into the
seventeenth century, where he found poets and divines to his mind.
Archbishop Leighton, Jeremy Taylor and other writers of that age
furnished him with matter for comment in his Aids to Reflection
(1825). Some readers might feel themselves being led into a holy
jungle' by Coleridge's musings on the persons of the Trinity as
representing ipseity, altereity and communeity; but, at least, he
gave them more to think about than did the orthodox defenders
of the faith in their eminently lucid writings. It was time that some-
one called a halt to the prevailing mode in theological literature.
Evidences of Christianity! I am weary of the word. Make a man feel
the want of it; rouse him, if you can, to the self-knowledge of his need of it;
and you may safely trust it to its own evidence.
Confessions of an Enquiring Spirit was published by his
nephew, posthumously, in 1840. These seven letters on inspiration,
simpler in style and thought than most of Coleridge's writings,
are a remarkable anticipation of the attitude of modern Christians
towards the Bible. Coleridge exhibits a happy union of complete
freedom and of deep gratitude for the Scriptures. He combats
the contemporary view that the Bible was not to be reasoned
about in the way that other good books are. ' He maintains that
'the Bible and Christianity are their own sufficient evidence. '
In the Bible there is more that finds me than I have experienced in all
other books put together;. . . the words of the Bible find me at greater depths
of my being; and. . . whatever finds me brings with it an irresistible evidence
of its having proceeded from the Holy Spirit.
He rests secure on his own dear experience' and, regardless of
discrepancies and moral imperfections in the Scriptures, pursues
his study with free and unboding spirit. '
If Coleridge's theological influence depended less on his books
than on his conversation and friendship with religious thinkers,
the same is hardly less true of another contemporary layman,
Thomas Erskine of Linlathen. Erskine’s natural gift lay rather
in intimate spiritual converse and letters than in set writing. In
mid-life he ceased to publish books, as if himself questioning his
effectiveness as an author; but, for another thirty years, he talked
and wrote to those who would find more readers than he ever could.
Among his friends he counted Carlyle, Maurice, Stanley and McLeod
Campbell, besides an interesting group of Christians on the con-
tinent, with whom, also, he corresponded, Vinet, Gaussen, Adolphe
Monod and C. C. J. Bunsen. Erskine's writings, however, have
considerable importance, in spite of their amateurishness and lack
6
6
## p. 284 (#308) ############################################
ch6
a
284 The Growth of Liberal Theology [CH.
2
.
of method: 'your books,' wrote Maurice, in dedicating Prophets
and Kings to him, "seem to me to mark a crisis in the theological
movement of this time. While the orthodox Scottish divines of
'
Erskine's younger days grimly propounded the sovereign decrees'
of unbending Calvinism, there was room for his assertion in The
Unconditional Freeness of the Gospel (1828) that 'Christ died, not
for believers, but for the world. Forgiveness, he declared, “is a
permanent condition of the heart of God'; 'God's arms are open. '
Man must not claim even faith as the ground of his pardon; if he
does so claim, it is only an instance of his unextinguished pride;
'He must have self to lean on, and so when he is obliged to
surrender his own works, he betakes himself to his own faith as
his prop. But this is still self. ' The satiric humour, as well as
the strong mystical vein in his writings, recalls William Law, who
was one of Erskine's favourite authors. In the comparatively
few writers whom his defective eyesight allowed him to study,
he looked for 'light' rather than for theological learning : he
preferred Plato and the neo-Platonists, Leighton and Law, to
professional divines and their critical opponents. He dismisses
a polemical writer with the judgment: ‘he is a great reasoner:
but I do not find any light in him at all. The thing itself he does
not see, but he can give many powerful arguments for it. ' Any
reader will feel that Erskine saw the thing itself,' whether he
could rightly explain it or not; the inner witness of the heart was
to him a more compelling authority than Scripture or creed.
Before he could accept doctrinal statements, his conscience must
approve them as right and true. We may recognise Erskine's
influence in McLeod Campbell's attempts to moralise the doctrine
of atonement, and Maurice's insistence on the ethical meaning
of eternal life. But, if much of Erskine's characteristic teaching
came into circulation through the writers whom he inspired, his
Letters (1877) and occasional volumes will never lack readers who
prefer to go to the fountain-head, to draw their own immediate
inspiration from one for whom religion was not 'a mere set of
notions' but God within us. '
Meanwhile, new life began to stir in the universities. At
Oxford, Oriel college was reaping the advantages of its reforming
zeal. Ruled in succession by two energetic provosts, Eveleigh and
Copleston, who encouraged their pupils to reason freely, the college
became noted during Copleston's provostship (1814–28) for the
· The Nature of the Atonement, 1856.
2 Theological Essays, 1853.
## p. 285 (#309) ############################################
X11]
285
The Noetics
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unfettered criticism indulged in by its fellows. Oxford nicknamed
them the noetics or intellectuals, and had some reason to fear and
dislike the Oriel common-room. A society accustomed to defer to
authority and the voice of tradition was a little shocked by the
freedom with which the Oriel men submitted anything and every-
thing to criticism. They favoured reform alike in academic and
in ecclesiastical politics. They had no agreed programme, and
formed no party; yet their friendship and common aims were
likely to make them a considerable influence in the church, when
they should be called to the high office to which their gifts entitled
them. To form a party was never their wish; indeed, it would
have defeated their chief object, which was the creation of a habit
of intellectual independence. Richard Whately, the ablest and
the most typical of the group, consistently repudiated any such
ambition; in 1843, he wrote to Lady Osborne,
Is it getting up a faction for me you are after? No, I'll have no
Whatelyites. . . . Anyone who tries to imitate me, is sure to be unlike
me in the important circumstance of being an imitator; and no one can
think as I do who does not think for himself.
He showed a touch of his quality in his first literary venture,
published anonymously in 1819, Historic Doubts relative to
Napoleon Buonaparte, a reductio ad absurdum of the method
of Hume's Essay on Miracles. Whately, on his solitary walks,
chopping logic by himself, or in company disallowing any in-
exact use of terms (even on his death-bed he took his chaplain
to task for misquoting St Paul), is a rather formidable figure,
a little disdainful of lesser minds. But, if his reasoning powers
were alarming, he, too, had his limitations : "he was the least
equipped with books,' said J. S. Mill of him, among any of the
great thinkers of his times. ' There was no room for poetry or
mysticism, and little room for awe in his somewhat arid mind;
and he grievously failed to do justice to the tractites. '
Yet Whately's anonymous Letters on the Church, By an
Episcopalian (1826) had given his pupil, Newman, the latter's
first conception of the church as a spiritual society independent
of the state. Whately's ruling commonsense made him equally
dislike the extremes of what he called the doubting school,' and
he lived long enough to denounce Essays and Reviews in the House
of Lords. But, in his Oxford days, and even after he became
archbishop of Dublin in 1831, he brought into English theology a
wholesome breath of commonsense. Many cobwebs of speculative
divinity were blown away, when he insisted that the Bible ‘has no
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## p. 286 (#310) ############################################
286 The Growth of Liberal Theology [CH.
F
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6
technical vocabulary,' and that it is more important to get the
drift of a whole passage than to build upon isolated texts.
A similar service was rendered by Whately's Oriel contemporary,
| Richard Denn Hampden, when, in his Bampton lectures (1832), he
contrasted the simplicity of the New Testament language with the
elaborate superstructure of 'logical theology' There was a saying
of John Foster, a writer whom Hampden sometimes quotes, “I deem
it the wisest rule to use precisely the language of Scripture”;
similarly, Hampden preferred Scripture to scholastic definition.
The language of theology should be regarded as symbolical :
therefore, to deduce further from its terms 'is like making every
circumstance in an emblem or metaphor the ground of scientific
deduction. ' Moreover, the advocate's desire to defend these
scholastic propositions makes the interpretation of Scripture over-
solicitous and predetermined, rather than open and natural. The
interpreter is intent on a process rather than 'a mere follower
of Revelation'; the 'fact' will be accommodated to the theory.
We must note, however, as still characteristic even of liberal
divines at this time that, while Hampden will rigorously criticise
any inferences from Scripture, he asserts without qualification that
'whatever is recorded in those books is indisputably true. ' The
book has its inconsistencies and its limitations ; but it shows its
author, under the influence of the new scientific spirit, to be before
his time in his interest in the evolution of doctrine. His de-
.
preciation of church traditions and formulas, and, still more, his
advocacy, in 1834, of the admission of dissenters to the universities
(“tests are no part of religious education'), drew upon him the
open hostility of the tractarians, who were now strong enough to
try conclusions with the liberal 'apostasy. ' Hampden, the un-
willing protagonist in this scene, cut no very happy figure in
extricating himself from charges of heterodoxy. He had himself
to thank for some misunderstandings; but his enemies showed little
scruple in making all the mischief they could, both in 1836, when
he was appointed regius professor of divinity at Oxford, and,
again, eleven years later, when he was nominated to the bishopric
of Hereford. The judgment of principal Tulloch on Hampden
deserves to be weighed in the scales against the steady deprecia-
tion of his 'confused thinking' by the tractarians : There are
seeds of thought in Dr Hampden’s writings far more fertile and
enduring than any to be found in the writings of his chief
opponents.
The early Oriel liberals are, as a whole, disappointing. There
6
## p. 287 (#311) ############################################
X11]
287
Thomas Arnold
>
6
was in them more of dry light than of divine fire. But, if the
charge of coldness fairly lies against some of them, it has no
meaning in the case of the most attractive and most influential
of their number, Thomas Arnold. If 'tendencies to Socinianism'
could be detected in Hampden or Whately, Arnold might defy his
worst enemy to find them in his writings. Only Newman, in a
moment of scepticism, could question Arnold's right to be called
a Christian. His fervid devotion to Christ radiates through all
his sermons and letters, and gives them a glow of life, long after
the writings of his liberal contemporaries have ceased to live.
Of Arnold, at least, it could not be said that he hoped to 'heal
the hurt of his people lightly' with useful knowledge and facile
optimism. Though he valued knowledge, and was possessed of
'even cheerfulness,' he could speak naturally and effectively the
deeper language of the soul. If he was not himself a great thinker
or critic, he excelled as a teacher and preacher in cultivating the
habit of moral thoughtfulness. His sermons reflect at once his
robust good sense and his contagious earnestness; they are, above
all, alive and breathe the mountain air: 'I will not give my boys,'
he said, 'to drink out of stagnant waters. ' To older audiences and
to his readers he offered stronger meat, but still avoided the
technical language of theology and the jargon of the pulpit: 'into
that common language, in which we think and feel, all truth must
be translated, if we would think and feel respecting it at once
rightly, clearly, and vividly. ' He had learnt something of the
scientific method of history from Niebuhr, and was not afraid of
its application to Biblical study. On the historical and moral
difficulties of the Bible, he had much to say in his sermons, and,
though a modern reader would find his treatment of such difficulties
only mildly critical, yet it reveals a sense of proportion, which
augured well for the future of such studies.
If my faith in God and my hope of eternal life is to depend on the
accuracy of a date or of some minute historical particular, who can wonder
that I should listen to any sophistry that may be used in defence of them, or
that I should force my mind to do any sort of violence to itself, when life and
death seem to hang on the issue of its decision ?
Arnold's desire for unity amounted to a passion, which over-
rode even necessary distinctions: he was for fusing church and
state, clergy and laity, secular and religious, the human and the
divine. In his hands, this treatment was safe enough, because the
higher term prevailed in such union; but, for less noble natures, it
spelt confusion. His hatred of all division and party spirit made
## p. 288 (#312) ############################################
288 The Growth of Liberal Theology [CH.
a
him tolerant in principle, but a bitter opponent of what he believed
to be intolerance. When his friend Hampden was attacked in
1836, he struck out at the Oxford malignants' in The Edinburgh
Review with an invective which disturbed even his supporters.
But, already, before his premature death, on 12 June 1842, the
eve of his forty-eighth birthday, he had adopted a broader and
more tranquil outlook, especially after the kindly reception which
he obtained from former opponents at Oxford on his becoming, in
1841, regius professor of modern history.
Arnold's most celebrated Rugby pupil, Arthur Penrhyn Stanley,
has described a scene from his boyhood in 1834 which brings
together representatives of most of the types of liberal theology
mentioned in this chapter. As he sat in the library of Hurst-
monceaux rectory, where he noticed the preponderance of German
books, Julius Hare's curate, John Sterling, came in with the
current number of The Quarterly Review, noticing Coleridge's
death and containing an article on his poetry. On the same
occasion, the friends discussed the unpublished manuscript of
Confessions of an Enquiring Spirit, and agreed to submit it
to Arnold for his advice as to its publication. Julius Hare,
contemporary and friend of Connop Thirlwall at Charterhouse
and Trinity college, Cambridge, who, ten years later, became
the brother-in-law of his pupil, Frederick Denison Maurice, was
a link between many generations. His chief work, The Mission
of the Comforter (1846), he dedicated 'to the honoured memory
of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and he repeatedly mentioned his
profound obligation to the Cambridge philosopher, whom many
of the Oxford lights, like Whately, disparaged as a misty thinker.
As Maurice remarks,
Hare cannot be suspected, as many have been, of resorting to Coleridge
because, at his restaurant, German cookery was adapted to weak English
stomachs, not yet prepared to receive it in its genuine form; for Hare knew
the taste of German dishes and had partaken of them fearlessly.
Hare and Thirlwall were as well acquainted as any Englishmen of
their day with German literature, yet they retained a thoroughly
English outlook. They collaborated in the translation and editing
of Schleiermacher's St Luke (1825) and/ of Niebuhr's History
of Rome (1828–32). They both recognised the necessity of
applying the newer historical method to the study of the Scrip-
tures, and were upheld in that view by a belief in the progressive
unfolding of religious truth. If Christians accepted the dispensa-
tion of the Spirit, said Thirlwall, they must believe that 'His later
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## p. 289 (#313) ############################################
XII]
289
Frederick Denison Maurice
lessons may well transcend His earlier. ' He did not expect his
English readers to accept all the conclusions of Schleiermacher,
but
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to diffuse the spirit of impartial criticism more extensively among ourselves
in the study of the sacred writings, when it has hitherto been either wholly
wanting or confined to very subordinate points, was also the translator's
principal object.
'I do not believe,' wrote Hare, 'that there is any other living
man who has done anything at all approaching to what Maurice
has effected in reconciling the reason and the conscience of the
thoughtful men of our age to the faith of our church. ' Maurice
was a religious teacher more than a critic: indeed, for biblical
criticism, he had no great liking or aptitude. Rather, he
was in the true succession to Coleridge and Erskine: the latter's
Brazen Serpent (1831) had helped him, as it helped McLeod
Campbell, to find his gospel. The son of a unitarian minister,
member of a family sharply divided in its religious allegiance,
Maurice believed himself called 'from my cradle' to the pursuit
of unity. He was persuaded, like J. S. Mill, that thinking people
were, for the most part, right in what they affirmed, wrong in what
they denied. He believed that each church party asserted some
great truth, and in The Religions of the World (1847), an early
example of the comparative study of religions in this country, he
showed the same anxiety to appreciate all positive excellence.
But his breadth of sympathy was not indifference or vagueness.
He had nothing in common with the ‘hang theology' air of some
broad churchmen, or with the contemporary shyness of dogmatic
statement. “Theology,' he declared, “is what our age is crying
out for, even when it thinks that it is crying to be rid of
theology. He saw the necessity of clearing current theology
of what he took to be erroneous and even immoral teaching.
He was deeply concerned so to state the doctrine of atone-
ment as not to offend the moral sense, and he resented, as
warmly as Mill, Mansel's suggestion that the justice of God
‘is not the kind of justice which would be expected of men.
'
The starting point of all his theology was the love of God,
not the sinfulness of man. This was his best inheritance from
his unitarian upbringing; he remained surer of the infinite
love of God than of any other doctrine, and he examined all
current religious belief in the light of this ruling idea. Here,
he believed, was a gospel for all mankind; any limitation
of it he attacked with an almost savage intensity. He gibbeted
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## p. 290 (#314) ############################################
290 The Growth of Liberal Theology [[
CH.
6
his opponents as giving, in effect, Christ's good news in these
reduced terms:
Your Father has created multitudes whom He means to perish for ever
and ever. By my agony and bloody sweat, by my cross and passion, I have
induced Him in the case of an inconceivably small minority to forego that
design.
A divine who could write and speak in this strain showed more
courage than discretion; he was bound to be misunderstood and
mistrusted. He knew himself what to expect; when I wrote
the sentence about eternal death, I was writing my own sentence
at King's College. '
It may be felt that Maurice forced upon the New Testament
language an interpretation of eternal punishment to square with
his belief in the 'infinite' love of God, rather than that he came
to his decision from an unimpassioned study of the text. But he
was a prophet of great ideas, which consumed and fired him, not
an exact student of philology and history. He had, also, that
mystical quality of mind which was lacking in the Oxford
liberals. He sought to read the eternal in the manifestations of
it in time: 'we must have the eternal, which our fathers nearly
forgot. ”
With the same disregard of popularity and the same risk
of misunderstanding, Maurice proclaimed himself a Christian
socialist; 'I seriously believe,' he wrote, that Christianity is the
only foundation of Socialism, and that a true Socialism is the
necessary result of a sound Christianity. But, though both
Christians and socialists hastened to disown him, the direction
which he gave to Christian thinking has been extensively followed,
so that much of what he taught, whether of a more universal
theology or of a truer Christian brotherhood, has become the
commonplace of the pulpit. As his friend Kingsley had hoped,
Christians came to accept the teaching of Theological Essays
(1853) ‘not as a code complete, but as a hint towards a new
method of thought. Maurice was more capable of giving hints
than precise directions, and even the hints were sometimes un-
necessarily indistinct. But he was not wilfully obscure; if he
was less lucid than the Oriel liberals, it was partly because he
was struggling to plumb greater depths of religious experience.
It is characteristic of the changing times to find Maurice
associated with Kingsley and Robertson, in 1851, in giving a course
of sermons in a London church on the message of the church
to rich and poor. Robertson's turn came first; Kingsley was
## p. 291 (#315) ############################################
XIII]
291
Robertson of Brighton
6
inhibited by the bishop of London after delivering the second; and
the third was consequently never delivered. If Maurice was out-
spoken, and Robertson impetuous, 'Parson Lot' was vehement;
when once fairly let loose upon the prey,' wrote W. R. Greg
of him, all the Red Indian within him comes to the surface,
and he wields the tomahawk with an unbaptized heartiness. '
Though Kingsley made no original contribution to theological
thinking, he was a successful populariser of Maurice's teaching,
and applied it to the social questions of the day with remarkable
directness. Nor was he a mere echo of Maurice; his romantic
love of nature and of all things that have breath and his fine
humanity were great gifts for a preacher.
Frederick Robertson's reputation was won in the face of
obstacles. He entered the Anglican ministry without any
academic fame, and, for some years, had neither success nor
happiness, owing to uncongenial surroundings and his own extreme
sensitiveness. For barely six years, he ministered in a small pro-
prietary chapel in Brighton. When death took him thence, in
1853, at the age of thirty-seven, he had published only a few
casual sermons, and yet, already, he was known as a unique
preacher. Five volumes of his sermons were posthumously
printed. Their form is unfinished; some of them are only his
extensive notes, others are the products of amateur reporting. Yet
no sermons of that period, not even Newman's, have found so wide
a range of readers. They are like no other sermons; they owe
almost nothing recognisable to works of theological learning ;
they do not reflect the theology of any master-mind or of any
party. Robertson preserves his independence till it becomes to
him an almost painful isolation. He thinks his own way through
the difficulties, and, though his exegesis may be unwarranted, it is
never uninteresting. He avoids the technical terms of the schools,
and yet his sermons are full of doctrinal teaching, conveyed by
suggestion rather than by dogmatic exposition. A typical example
of his habit of mind is afforded by his sermon 'On the Glory of
the Virgin Mother. He is not content to point out the dangers
of the cult of the Virgin ; its very prevalence establishes for him
the probability that it ‘has a root in truth. '
We assume it as a principle that no error has ever spread widely, that was
not the exaggeration or perversion of a truth. And be assured that the first
step towards dislodging error is to understand the truth at which it aims. It
matters little whether fierce Romanism or fierce Protestantism wins the day:
but it does matter whether or not in a conflict we lose some precious Christian
truth, as well as the very spirit of Christianity.
19-2
## p. 292 (#316) ############################################
292 The Growth of Liberal Theology ([
ch.
An enquiry begun in this spirit could not fail to be constructive
rather than destructive. A generation that felt its doubts acutely
was fortunate to have such men as Maurice and Robertson for its
preachers. While they criticised what they believed to be faulty
or obsolete modes of theological expression, their main concern
was to lose nothing which had spiritual value.
Their influence was more enduring than that of the Oxford
liberals, whose early promise had hardly justified itself. In spite
of their intellectual ability and vigorous self-assertion, the Oriel
men stirred little general enthusiasm, and were soon attracting
less attention in Oxford itself than the second movement which
emanated from the Oriel common-room. The tractarians were in
full reaction against the liberals ; in Newman's eyes 'the great
apostasy is Liberalism in religion. There was, for a while, a
serious set-back and discouragement of free enquiry. Moreover,
the liberal theologians of the next generation spoke with less
confidence than the Whatelys and Arnolds. The difficulties of
faith were increasing under the pressure of many convergent lines
of modern enquiry, and the concessions asked for were heavier and
nearer the heart of Christian teaching. Strauss's Life of Jesus
(1835), which George Eliot translated in 1846, opened anew for
English readers the whole question of the supernatural. The
problems suggested by physical science were hardly less urgent.
Scientific knowledge had been rapidly advancing all through the
century, though its bearing on the traditional theology was not at
first perceived. But queen Victoria's reign had not proceeded far
before there was a more general appreciation of the difficulties of
reconciling new and old ways of thinking. The spirit of doubt,
even if it were reluctant and ill at ease, obtruded itself in poet and
essayist and historian, as well as in philosopher and theologian,
Many who had started in the following of Newman, like Mark
Pattison and James Anthony Froude, instead of following him to
Rome, had recovered from their enthusiasm only to become coldly
distrustful of any authority.
But, while there were many who lost their faith and drifted
into a relation of indifference or positive antagonism to Chris-
tianity, there was also a fresh and vigorous attempt on the part of
those who sought to combine free thinking with a position inside
the Christian church. If the first wave of Oxford liberal thought
had long spent itself, it was followed at some interval by a larger
wave, which made more stir. The new movement bore a new
The label 'broad church' is said by Jowett to have been
name.
## p. 293 (#317) ############################################
XIII] The Broad Churchmen 293
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proposed in his hearing by A. H. Clough, and it came into familiar
use in Oxford some years before it received any literary expres-
sion? In The Edinburgh Review, in 1853, W. J. Conybeare spoke
of a third party in the church, which is called Moderate or
Catholic or Broad Church by its friends, Latitudinarian or In-
different by its enemies. ' He described its distinctive character
as the desire for comprehension, and its watchwords as charity
and toleration. An organised party they never designed to be-
come: individual independence was their most treasured right.
There were many, like Maurice, who unquestionably helped to
liberalise theological thought, and yet hated the very notion of
party. But there was a fairly coherent band of liberal clergymen,
linked by academic friendship or for self-defence, who stood
together, both consciously and in the public mind. They advo-
cated a bolder application of critical methods to the Bible than
their predecessors would have allowed, and yet their love for the
Bible was often conspicuous. As preachers or commentators,
many of them exhibited notable gifts for interpretation. The
concerted appearance on the same day in 1855 of Jowett's com-
mentary on certain epistles of St Paul and of Stanley's commentary
on the epistles to the Corinthians, indicated the freer spirit
which was beginning to animate English study of the New Testa-
ment. The freshness of Jowett's treatment, especially in the
dissertations, is still unexhausted. The Pauline terms, which had
become hard and unlovely in the hands of schoolmen and reforma-
tion doctors, are again alive, as Jowett submits them to the
scrutiny of modern psychology. There is, also, an unforgettable
picture of the apostle himself, not more remarkable for its delicate
intuition than for its emotional quality.
A poor aged man, worn by some bodily or mental disorder, who had been
often scourged, and bore on his face the traces of indignity and sorrow in
every form-such an one, led out of prison between Roman soldiers, probably
at times faltering in his utterance, the creature, as he seemed to spectators, of
nervous sensibility; yearning, almost with a sort of fondness, to save the souls
of those whom he saw around him-spoke a few eloquent words in the cause
of Christian truth, at which kings were awed, telling the tale of his own con-
version with such simple pathos, that after-ages have hardly heard the like.
The ungenerous treatment which Jowett received from his
theological opponents at Oxford was enough to discourage him
from further theological studies, and, in succeeding years, Plato
received from him more attention than St Paul. But he continued
to find expression for his thoughts on religion in regular preaching.
See New English Dictionary, 8. v. “Broad. '
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## p. 294 (#318) ############################################
294 The Growth of Liberal Theology [CH.
In his posthumous volumes of sermons, he shows more care for
simple truths and simple duties than for the controversies of the
hour; he encourages a sane and well-balanced outlook on life-
'that is a maimed soul which loves goodness and has no love
of truth, or which loves truth and has no love of goodness'-and
he expresses himself as thankful for his church-membership
in this ancient house of our fathers, with all its faults the best and most
tolerant of the Churches of Christendom, and the least opposed to the spirit
6
>
of the age.
6
Stanley's commentary was full of human interest, but de-
fective, like the rest of his writings, in critical power. He had
many gifts and much miscellaneous knowledge, but never gave
himself wholly to any one branch of exact learning. "What does
this remind you of? ' was Arnold's favourite question in school,
and Stanley was busy answering it the rest of his life. His
Lectures on the Jewish Church (1863–76), and most of his many
books, abound in historical parallels and similitudes, sometimes
felicitous, at other times forced. He had 'a grand curiosity' for
the historical and literary associations of place. He would sooner
describe an heresiarch's country and customs than unravel his
exploded opinions. When he was installed dean of Westminster,
he hailed as a happy omen the ancient admonition that he was set
there ‘for the enlargement of the Christian Church. ' He proved
faithful to his conception of his office in giving the abbey pulpit
a more national character ; the preachers whom he brought there
represented English religious thought of many types. His pub-
lished sermons reflect his own urbane, cultured and tolerant spirit,
his feeling for history and his dramatic sense, but they made no
contribution to the theology of the next generation.
The publication of Essays and Reviews in 1860 made the
broad churchmen a storm-centre as much as Tract XC had done
for the high churchmen. It was not intended, but was generally
taken to be, the manifesto of a party. The volume was, in fact,
the concluding number of a series of Oxford and Cambridge essays,
issued annually. The editor, Henry Bristow Wilson, was a country
clergyman whose Bampton lectures entitled The Communion of
Saints (1851) had already caused him to become suspect. The
seven writers consisted of six clergymen, and one layman, Charles
Wycliffe Goodwin, an Egyptologist who had resigned his Cambridge
fellowship on finding himself unable to take holy orders. They
were soon, by an outraged religious public, dubbed Septem
contra Christum. Replies, in the shape of books and pamphlets
## p. 295 (#319) ############################################
XII]
295
Essays and Reviews
and articles, continued for many months to be issued. Two of the
essayists, Rowland Williams and the editor, were tried and con-
demned for heresy in the court of arches; their acquittal, on
appeal to the judicial committee of the privy council, afforded
a valuable protection to liberty of thought within the church of
England. But it is not hard to account for the opposition to the
essayists. Though many of the essays were blameless and un-
aggressive, the general effect was negative, and some of the essays
were provocative. Maurice complained of the absence of theology
in the volume, and especially of the neglect of the full revelation
of God in Christ' which he believed to be all that was worth
preaching. Stanley, who must have symbolised closely with
some of the contributors, found fault with its negative character:
‘no book which treats of religious questions can hope to make its
way to the heart of the English nation unless it gives, at the same
time that it takes away. The editor gave just offence in his essay,
"The National Church' by betraying a greater anxiety to see the
church national than Christian. Baden Powell, Savilian professor
of geometry at Oxford from 1827, was a survivor from the early
Oriel school, and died directly after the issue of Essays and
Reviews He had already written much on the relations of
theology and science, and in his essay he pressed the uniformity
of nature against the argument for miracle. But for his opportune
death, he could hardly have escaped prosecution. His generation
would never have tolerated his attempt to free Christian theism
from a dependence on miracles. Mark Pattison's essay, The
Tendencies of Religious Thought, 1688—1750,' was, for the most
part, a purely historical survey, and would have avoided criticism
if it had not appeared in the incriminating volume. Jowett urged,
‘Interpret the Scripture like any other book,' and yet maintained
that it would remain unlike any other book.
Scripture has an inner life or soul; it has also an outward body or form.
That form is language, which imperfectly expresses our common notions,
much more those higher truths which religion teaches.
His essay, like Frederick Temple’s, “The Education of the World,
was pious and conciliatory, though both included (what, indeed,
gives unity to the whole collection of essays) a strong plea for free
criticism. 'He is guilty of high treason against the faith,' wrote
Temple, 'who fears the result of any investigation, whether philo-
sophical, or scientific, or historical. ' Yet, the future archbishop
may have had some qualms when he read Rowland Williams's essay
on Bunsen's Biblical Researches. The shock was not mediated by
6
## p. 296 (#320) ############################################
296
The Growth of Liberal Theology
[CH.
the English writer, but rendered liable to cause the maximum of
offence. Williams's Psalms and Litanies, published by his widow
in 1872, proves him to have had a true devotional feeling, and
a desire to enter into communion with the Eternal Spirit, but
it also shows how he consistently reduced ancient collects to a
unitarian standard. Maurice had, indeed, touched the chief defect
of Essays and Reviews, a defect which the lapse of time has
made even more apparent. The disparagement of doctrine, and,
especially, the neglect to contribute anything to the understanding
of the person and nature of Jesus Christ, render it of little service
to a later age, which, like other ages before it, sees that here is the
core of essentially Christian thinking. The true claim of the
essayists to grateful remembrance is that they asserted with one
voice the duty of the Christian church to welcome new truth,
and the right of her accredited sons to make it known. Not in
vain is one of the essayists commemorated on the walls of
his college chapel as a scholar qui libertatem cleri anglicani
feliciter vindicavit.
Public opinion was so far in favour of wider theological liberty
that the acquittal of the essayists in 1864 was followed next year
by the Clerical Subscription act, substituting a general assent to
the XXXIX Articles of religion for the ex animo subscription
'to all things therein contained,' which had been required for two
centuries. There were similar struggles for freedom in other
churches. Scottish theology, which had been eminently con-
servative, became less provincial as it grew bolder and more
critical. In the Free church of Scotland, the biblical con-
tributions of William Robertson Smith to the ninth edition of
the Encyclopaedia Britannica excited a growing hostility from
1875 till 1881, when he was removed from his professorial chair
at Aberdeen. But there was a larger public ready to form its
judgment when he published his popular lectures, The Old
Testament in the Jewish Church (1881) and The Prophets of
Israel (1882). Freed from ecclesiastical ties, he pursued at
Cambridge, till his death in 1894, his original researches into
the primitive religions of the Semitic peoples.
Prosecutions for heresy and indictments of heterodox pub-
lications brought theological questions into general discussion
throughout the 'sixties. The magazines, and especially the new
Fortnightly Review, often provided the arena. The excitement
,
over Essays and Reviews was not allayed before a new quarry
was started by bishop Colenso's free handling of the Pentateuch,
6
>
## p. 297 (#321) ############################################
,! !
297
XII]
Ecce Homo
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which found few whole-hearted defenders in the Christian camp,
partly owing to the author's provocative and unfortunate
manner. It was more difficult for the contemporary orthodox
mind to decide whether the anonymous author of Ecce Homo
(1865) was friend or foe. Like Matthew Arnold's essays and
many other books of the period, Ecce Homo represents the
attempt to save religion in the shipwreck of orthodoxy, and,
above all, to save Christian ethics. Its author, who was soon
discovered to be John Robert Seeley, at that time professor
of Latin in University college, London, intentionally avoided
controversial theology. When he was reproached for 'concealing'
his theological opinions, he replied that he concealed them ‘only in
the sense in which the vast majority of the community have con-
cealed them; that is, he has not published them. ' Seeley took for
granted, as orthodox and heterodox writers commonly did in his
generation, that “almost all men 'could agree upon the Christian
ethical standard. With an engaging fervour and literary grace, he
set before his readers Christ's enthusiasm for humanity,' and
found in it a motive which could still be for Christians a stronger
passion than any other.
Christ raised the feeling of humanity from being a feeble restraining power
to be an inspiring passion. The Christian moral reformation may indeed be
summed up in this-humanity changed from a restraint to a motive.
Seeley regarded Christianity as natural fellow-feeling or
humanity raised to the point of enthusiasm. He did not think
that the world could do without Christ and his Church. Indeed,
he reckoned the person of Christ to be of more account than
anything which he said or did: 'Christ's discovery is himself. The
moral teaching of the New Testament, for instance, the law of
forgiveness, ‘Christ's most striking innovation in morality,' was
commended by Seeley to his generation with greater freshness
and charm than by any other writer. No one could miss his
meaning or ever forget his fine tribute to the distinctive note of
Christian morality.
There was much to discourage the Christian advocate in the
'seventies. Neither science nor culture was inclined to be docile.
Huxley made merry in the monthly reviews, and Matthew Arnold
subjected the defenders of traditional theology to successive
volleys of Gallic raillery. Confidence was restored to the
orthodox ranks, less by the concessions of broad churchmen or
the defence of orthodox apologists, than by the rise of a school
of historical criticism. If the appeal was to be to scholarship, ,
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## p. 298 (#322) ############################################
298 The Growth of Liberal Theology [CH.
6
6
even the general reader would soon see that sound learning and
candour were not all on one side. A notable part in the creation
of an improved theological scholarship was played by three
Cambridge contemporaries and friends, Brooke Foss Westcott,
Fenton John Anthony Hort, and Joseph Barber Lightfoot. The
tractarian scholars had been chiefly interested in the age of the
councils; the Cambridge scholars devoted themselves to the study of
Christian origins. Westcott and Hort's main work was the recension
of the Greek text of the New Testament; Lightfoot was concerned
with the Pauline epistles and the apostolic Fathers. Their work was
timely and valuable, but they would have been the last to regard
it as final. They shared the characteristic belief of the liberal
theologians in the progressive apprehension of Christian truth.
'Let us all thank God,' said bishop :Westcott to his clergy, at the
close of his long life of teaching, that He has called us to unfold
a growing message, and not to rehearse a stereotyped tradition. '
'Christianity,' wrote Hort, “is not an uniform and monotonous
tradition, but to be learned only by successive steps of life. '
Hort's passion for meticulous accuracy and his extreme caution
caused him to publish little, and his shyness stood in the way
of his influence as an oral teacher. Yet his posthumous Hulsean
lectures, The Way the Truth the Life, revealed him as a master
of pregnant phrase. Centuries of speculation on the doctrine
of atonement are arraigned by the terse judgment: “Theologies
which have sundered God's righteousness from His love have done
equal wrong to both. '
While Christian scholarship was thus holding its own, there
was also a welcome escape from the determinist and utilitarian
fashions in philosophy. At Oxford, Thomas Henry Green, tutor
of Balliol, exercised a strong spiritual influence over those
whom criticism was compelling to discard the fair humanities
of old religion. ' James Martineau, of an older generation than
Green, did not publish any of his more important books till his
eightieth year. In earlier life, Martineau had adopted the deter-
minist and utilitarian theories of morals, but he proved their
effective critic in his octogenarian volume, Types of Ethical
Theory (1885). Three years later, he vindicated theistic belief in
A Study of Religion.
The critical principles for which liberal theologians had had
to do battle were by this time no longer the badges of their
tribe, but were accepted by most educated Christians. For
instance, high churchmen had travelled more than half way from
Hill
## p. 299 (#323) ############################################
XIII]
George Tyrrell
299
the tractarian to the liberal position, when, in 1889, a group of
Oxford friends combined, in Lux Mundi, to make a re-statement
of Christian faith; "it needs disencumbering, re-interpreting,
explaining. ' 'It is the test of the Church's legitimate tenure
that she can encourage free inquiry into her title-deeds. '
Cross-currents of theological opinion have become in recent
years increasingly noticeable. If high churchmen have adopted
a freer biblical criticism, broad churchmen and free churchmen
have ceased to belittle the idea of the church. Theology becomes
more and more cosmopolitan, and oversteps denominational boun-
daries. Even that church which rates highest the principle of
authority has had its disciplinary difficulties with those sons who
seek to create a catholic atmosphere in which the modern mind
may breathe more freely. The modernist movement is yet too
near and unexhausted to find historical treatment, were it not
that its most brilliant English representative, George Tyrrell,
has already written his last word. The title of one of his earlier
books, Nova et Vetera, is a fit symbol of his lifelong attempt to
adjust new and old. His mind was delicately sensitive to every
modern pressure, yet he loved the past and would lose none of its
heritage: 'The new must be made out of the old, must retain and
transcend all its values. ' The very word catholic, said the Abbé
Brémond at his graveside, was music to his ears; he was more
securely catholic than Christian. Now he would be wondering
whether the Christianity of the future would consist of mysticism
and charity, and possibly the Eucharist in its primitive form as
the outward bond’; now he would look longingly back to the
church of his baptism; and yet again give a last loyalty to the
church of his adoption. He was still probing this way and that
for sure foothold when death interrupted his pilgrimage. 'Had
I been Moses I don't think I should have felt not entering the
Land of Promise one bit, so long as I knew that Israel would
do so one day. '
It is inevitable that Tyrrell's career should be compared with
Newman's; he made the comparison himself in one of the latest
6
of his essays.
'Be my soul with the Saints! ' says Newman, looking away from
Anglicanism towards the altars of Rome. But is there not a wider
Communion of Saints, whereof the canonised are but a fraction, and whose
claims are founded, not in miracles or prodigies, but in that sincerity to
truth and righteousness, without which even orthodoxy were nothing worth?
