book by a clergyman; its effect is
comparable
with that of The
Serious Call.
Serious Call.
Cambridge History of English Literature - 1908 - v12
A partial
study of his writings might give some ground for such a view:
a complete one refutes it. It could, indeed, hardly be held by any
who did not, perhaps unconsciously, identify the wider catholicism
of orthodox Christianity with the narrower presentment of it in
modern Roman theology which Newman never set himself very
seriously to defend. His intellectual standpoint, however much
during his long life it may seem to have varied, never really
departed from the three bases on which it had been founded.
He was an Aristotelian. He distrusted much of modern metaphysic.
He regarded the actual facts of human life as the ultimate basis of
reason. He was, like many of the most earnest English thinkers
of his time, a convinced disciple of Butler. His reading of The
Analogy of Religion was, as he said, an era in his religious opinions.
Starting from probability as the guide of life, he never fancied
that the limitless area of things human and divine could be fully
mapped or the ultimate mystery more than 'imperfectly com-
prehended. ' But he found reality in the religious facts of the
world, as the philosophers of his time found them in the moral
facts, and the men of science in the physical ; and, herein, he may
be said to have anticipated modern psychology. Yet also, and with
at least as much strength, he was a historian: very often, not
an accurate historian in detail, but a historian of illumination
and genius. If much that he wrote as history has long been cast
aside, the interpretation that he gave of early-not the earliest-
Christian centuries remained as an inspiration to the students who
## p. 271 (#295) ############################################
XII]
271
Dean Church
TOT
LE
re
TI
made Oxford history famous, to Stubbs and Freeman, Creighton
and Bryce, and remains still. When he wrote his different studies
he was loyal to his principles, whether, at the time, he was an
English or a Roman churchman, but he never surrendered the
scholar's independence. No doubt, he loved narration more than
interpretation, character more than institutional life; but, what
he wanted to find, and believed he could find, in history was
truth: and in that he never deserted the fundamental principle of
the tractarian company. As a historian, his affinities were with
the French school which was coming into existence in his middle
age, never with the purely German, where vast collections of facts
were often used to support an unverifiable theory. But, if his
passion throughout was catholicism, his preconception was truth.
Newman must ever remain the central figure in the literature
of the movement of which he was the most conspicuous figure.
But Pusey, it would be true to say, represented far more entirely its
most prominent characteristics: its basis in history and tradition,
its via media, its determination stare super antiquas vias. And
it may well be that, if Newman appealed to the wider circle, Pusey
and Keble influenced more directly the general literature of
English religion. The Oxford movement certainly belongs to the
history of English religion more definitely than to the history
of English literature; but it had great influence, outside its own
definite members, on the literary taste of its age. It spoke from
the first for a certain purity, directness and severity of style:
later, the historical influences which attached themselves to it,
through the study of ancient legends, and liturgies, and hymns,
produced a richer vein of prose, a more florid touch in poetry.
No one can think that Tennyson was wholly unmoved by its
manner; but Dolben and Pater were the undoubted issue of its
later life. If one were to look for men of letters who were as
clearly such, and would have been in any age, as they were men
of religion, one would light instantly on the names of Richard
William Church and Richard Chenevix Trench. The former, a
fellow of Oriel with Newman, one of the proctors who vetoed
the new test proposed when Ward was condemned, died as
dean of St Paul's. Church lived to be the historian of the
movement itself, and perhaps that was his finest work. But his
deep thought and profound wisdom, which had remarkable
weight with the eminent statesmen of his day, were seen at
their best in his interpretation of past history as well as in
lectures and sermons which are models of clear writing and
Test
TK
the
tat
## p. 272 (#296) ############################################
272 The Oxford Movement
[CH.
clear thought. Something of the severity and unworldliness of
Dante, of whom he was a devoted student, seemed to have
descended upon him, with, also, the great Florentine's knowledge
of the ways and thoughts of common men. But, most clearly,
he was, in literature, the disciple of Newman, in the simplicity,
directness and absence of ornament which made his style powerful
in its effect on the writing of his generation. Church was a
preacher, a moralist, a historian; but, especially, he was a student
of human nature, who judged men equally yet with sympathy,
who weighed motives in scales which were never deflected by
prejudice or passion, and knew to a nicety the springs of human
action. He was a master of sympathetic literary criticism, too,
as his volume on Spenser proves. His historical sketches, such as
that of the early middle age, and his criticisms in literature, such
as those of Cassiodorus and Pascal, show a characteristic simplicity
which cannot veil the abundance of knowledge. Occasionally,
something is revealed of the fire within him, which breaks out
now and again in his classic memorial of the Oxford movement
and the men who began and led it, a record, as he wrote to
Lord Acton,
that one who lived with them, and lived long beyond most of em, believed
in the reality of their goodness and height of character, and still looks back
with deepest reverence to those forgotten men as the companions to whose
teaching and example he owes an infinite debt, and not he only but religious
society in England of all kinds 1.
Preeminently, Church was a man of letters; and this was as
obviously true of Richard Chenevix Trench. Church noted 'the
peculiar combination in him of the poet, the theologian and the
champion of primitive and catholic doctrine. ' Some of his lyrics
belong to the highest flight of English poetry. His religious
writings had a peculiar distinction and charm. Just as Church
owed inspiration to Greece, modern as well as ancient, and its
struggle for liberty, so Trench had nourished himself on the great
literature of Spain and was in harmony with the aspirations of her
liberal revival. He passed, in 1863, from the deanery of West-
minster to the archbishopric of Dublin, where he was primate at
the disestablishment and fought hard for the ancient symbols of
the Irish church under its new constitution. Like the dean of
St Paul's, he was not a militant tractarian, but he spoke of Hugh
James Rose as ‘my master,' and wrote, on the death of Pusey,
that ‘a prince in our Israel has indeed passed away. ' The names
1 Quoted in the Advertisement' to The Oxford Movement, p. vi.
6
6
## p. 273 (#297) ############################################
XII]
273
Neale and the Mozleys
of Church and Trench, which, even apart from their theological
writings, and at any time in our history, would have been pro-
minent in English letters, are examples of the influence which the
serious ideas of the Oxford movement exercised upon literature.
In historical study, the influence was no less conspicuous.
William Stubbs, the greatest English historian of the nineteenth
century, was a convinced tractarian and spoke of Pusey, whom
he assisted in literary work, as 'the master. ' Henry Parry
Liddon, the greatest preacher of the period, whose sermons at
St Paul's were, for twenty years, a conspicuous factor in the
life of London, was the disciple, the friend and the biographer
of Pusey. His Bampton lectures on the Divinity of Christ were
worthy to rank with the great dogmatic treatises of the older
divines. And their successors remain to the present day.
Not far apart from them, yet still somewhat in isolation, was
the striking figure of John Mason Neale, not an Oxford but a
Cambridge man. He was antiquary, historian, poet, novelist,
priest; and in none of these activities can he be forgotten.
He was as facile as he was learned. He poured forth book
after book of amazing erudition on almost every conceivable
subject of theological and historical interest. As a translator
of Latin and Greek hymns no Englishman has surpassed him.
But, above all things, he loved 'a story' and he could tell it—as
such an historical novel as Theodora Phranza, which tells the
fall of Christian Constantinople, evidences—with the best of
them. While his knowledge was diffused, that of James Bowling
Mozley was intense and concentrated. Master of a stern and
somewhat arid style, which still could rise into eloquence and
passion, he exercised a profound influence on the generation
which succeeded him. He was the foe of shallow thinking and
shallow writing. Many of the idols of the market-place, past
or present, from Martin Luther to Thomas Carlyle, suffered his
gwashing blows. His brother Thomas had abilities of a more
popular cast: he was, for a while, editor of The British Critic:
for many years he was a leader writer for The Times, and he
represented that paper at Rome during the time of the council
1869–70, when liis letters, unsympathetic though Roman catholics
have complained that they are, presented a most vivid and re-
markable picture of a great historical episode. In his old age,
he wrote Reminiscences of the days of struggle, which are
entertaining, but not always accurate. 'If a story cannot stand
on two legs,' said Newman, whose sister he had married, 'Tom
18
9
E. L. XII.
CH. XII.
## p. 274 (#298) ############################################
274
[CH.
The Oxford Movement
supplies a third. From him comes a touching tribute to the
self-effacing labours of Charles Marriott, like himself a fellow
of Oriel, who was the helper of every one, great and small, who
belonged to the movement, and its great stay in scholarship, as
editing with Keble and Pusey The Oxford Library of the Fathers.
Outside Oxford, the same interests which had awakened the
ecclesiastical learning and catholic orthodoxy of the university
were represented in many writers who were affected, in greater
or less degree, by the principles of the tractarians.
Walter Farquhar Hook was one of the most masterful figures
of his time, first as vicar of Leeds for twenty-two years and then
as dean of Chichester. He accepted nearly all the principles of the
tractarians, but frequently stood apart from their expression and
was often a vehement critic. He was an industrious compiler
of dictionaries and biographies, without sufficient research or
originality to give them permanent vitality. His successor at
Chichester, John William Burgon, held a similar position of in-
dependent judgment. He was a keen and biting controversialist
and the most conservative of biblical critics ; but he had an
intense love of 'good men,' among whom he placed some of the
authors of the tracts. His biographies are essential to a knowledge
of the movement.
Two sons of the famous statesman and philanthropist, and
brothers of that bishop of Oxford who revolutionised the ideal of
English episcopacy, Robert Isaac and Henry William Wilberforce,
both at Oriel, passed into the Roman church. The elder had
been an archdeacon and yet had written theological books of
real value, notably one on The Doctrine of The Incarnation,
which was on strictly tractarian lines and won great fame. The
younger after his secession gave important help to the Roman
catholic cause in the press.
Some of those who had abandoned their orders and left the
English church seemed eager to disclaim any connection with it.
Some vehemently attacked what they had before as vehemently
defended, but no one of them save Newman made any great mark
in literature. Some were content with a change of clothes, sub-
stituting for their customary suits of solemn black the vagaries of
'blue ties and ginger-coloured trousers. '
More formidable was the Anglo-Roman hierarchy created in
1850, whose head announced its creation by a letter from out the
Flaminian Gate. '
Nicholas Wiseman, Roman catholic controversialist and
1
## p. 275 (#299) ############################################
X1)
275
Converts to Rome
cardinal, whose education had not been English, was a capable
craftsman in letters. He was an orientalist, and a cultured student
of many subjects, who became the first archbishop of Westminster
in 1850, after devoting himself to confuting ‘High Church Claims'
(1841), and embodying his theories of church history in a pretty
story called Fabiola, or the Church of the Catacombs (1854).
Henry Edward, cardinal Manning, who had been an English
archdeacon and became Wiseman's successor, wrote, while he
was a member of the English church, volumes of sermons which
reached at least a fifth edition, and, as a controversial papalist,
many vehement criticisms of the Anglican position; but, though
his personal influence was great, his work is negligible as literature.
John Hungerford Pollen, as an English priest wrote the most
touching and tragic of all the records of struggle in parish
work for tractarian principles (A Narrative of Five Years at
St Saviour's, Leeds, 1851), and then, as a Romanist layman,
devoted himself to art, wrote some valuable lectures, was the
friend of Morris and Rossetti, Swinburne and Patmore, and
became in artistic literature, what his friend Baron von Hügel
said he was in life, 'the perfect type of l'homme du monde. '
Another convert, Frederick William Faber, endowed with high
gifts of imagination, deplored, as a Roman catholic, the position
of the Magi, with, perhaps, an undercurrent of reference to the
protestants' unhappy lot,
No Pope, no blessèd Pope had they
To guide them with his hand,-
and was generally sentimental and sugary, very unlike the
tractarians; but he wrote some devotional poetry of sincerity
and pathos. John Dobree Dalgairns was capable and solid
as a Roman controversialist on behalf of Christian belief; but
he was far surpassed by another of the later disciples of the
tractarians who became a power in the church of his adoption.
William George Ward, the crisis of whose stormy career was
critical also in the movement itself, has won immortality in the
verse of Tennyson and the prose of dean Church. The latter
finds it his chief distinction that as 'a profound metaphysical
thinker he was the equal antagonist on their own ground of John
Stuart Mill and Herbert Spencer. ' His work hardly belongs to
pure literature: its manner and method are, for the most part,
cumbrous, only occasionally vivid or comprehensive. His own
generation read what he wrote because he was famous for what
he said: it was meat and drink to him to argue and to chop logic,
5
18-2
## p. 276 (#300) ############################################
276 The Oxford Movement [CH.
and his swordplay was a delight to the onlookers. But, if his
Ideal, his intuitionist philosophy and his controversial treatises
are forgotten, he will ever be remembered by the poet's farewell
to him as one
Whose Faith and Work were bells of full accord,
My friend, the most unworldly of mankind,
Most generous of all Ultramontanes, Ward.
Ambrose Phillips de Lisle, another English convert to the Roman
obedience, followed the Tracts for the Times with keenest in-
terest from the first. He had been ten years a Roman catholic
when they began to appear and he set himself before long to
correspond with their writers in the hope of 'producing a good
understanding between the Catholic and Anglican churches, with
a view to the ultimate restoration of that happy and blessed unity,
which formerly existed between them for more than a thousand
years, and which,' he added, “I am perfectly certain will one day be
restored. ' The letters which passed between him and Mont-
alembert illustrate how close at some points was the connection
between the ecclesiastical revival in England and in France.
The French man of letters had no hope
that Catholicity will make any real progress in England, as long as the
fanatical spirit of Archbishop Manning, Mr Ward, and others of the same
stamp is prevalent among English Catholics;
and, on the other side, Newman was equally hopeless about reunion
or 'the conversion of that corporate body which we call the
Anglican Church. ' De Lisle's own work, sympathetic in aim,
trivial in result, is an example of the rift between the two bodies,
in literature as well as in religion. Only in Newman himself was
the influence of the Oxford movement to be discerned among
Romanist writers.
But the glamour of tractarian theology extended far beyond
those who were its first teachers or their direct heirs. It created
a religious literature effective if ephemeral: it ‘tuned the pulpits'
for some half a century to a gravity which strove, often success-
fully, after the majesty of classical sculpture. And, in the poetry
of Digby Mackworth Dolben, only recently given to the world, and
of Christina Rossetti, it formed a new life exuberant and aflame.
Dolben pursued its teaching till it yielded to him a certain medieval
richness of ecclesiastical imagery that touched at many points a
religious passion which was older than Christianity, and almost
1 Purcell, E. , Life of Ambrose Phillips de Lisle, vol. II, p. 360.
## p. 277 (#301) ############################################
XII]
Tractarian Novels
277
hostile to it. To Christina Rossetti, the catholic theology of the
English church was the very breath of life, and she accepted its
sternness without dispute. Yet, while the accent of severity
clings to all she wrote, we are, in her company, on the road to a
reaction which yet has its roots in the past: the splendour of
Jeremy Taylor is not forgotten and the exotic richness of Walter
Pater is in sight.
In humbler literature, 'tractarianism' may be thought to
have created an epoch by inaugurating the dreary succession
of religious novels. But they were not dreary in their beginnings.
J. M. Neale was a great writer of romance. Newman himself put
some very good polemical work into Loss and Gain (with an
immortal description of an Oxford tutor's breakfast) and Callista.
Wiseman's Fabiola was an effort of the same kind. Francis
Edward Paget, student of Christ Church and then rector of
Elford, published a series of most interesting tales, containing
quite delicious descriptions of country life and character which
no novelist of his time surpassed. But most prominent of all
was the long line of stories, exquisite in domestic portraiture,
strong in moral power, keen in understanding of character and
touched with a gracious humour, which issued from the parish of
Hursley-where Keble was to the authoress a true guide, phi-
losopher and friend-and were the work of Charlotte M. Yonge.
The Heir of Redclyffe and The Little Duke have their place
in English literature. They have had many imitators and suc-
cessors but few rivals, unless John Inglesant may claim to be of
their company.
A movement which had so many means of making itself felt
throughout the country had, naturally, an influence in many phases
of literature. It was primarily religious, with a religion, said one
of its lay disciples, an eminent public official, 'which was fervent
and reforming in essentials with a due reverence for existing
authorities and habits and traditions'; but it was not narrow
or cloistered, it was 'a religion which did not reject, but aspired
to embody in itself, any form of art and literature, poetry,
philosophy, and even science which could be pressed into the
service of Christianity? '
But its permanent effects may be seen most clearly in the fields
of history and dogma. During the eighteenth century, the constant
study of the Fathers of the early church which had been the
basis of the theological writings of the reformers and the Caroline
1 Letters of Lord Blachford, p. 15.
## p. 278 (#302) ############################################
278 The Oxford Movement [CH. XII
divines had passed into desuetude. In the seventeenth century,
no one would have dared to write theology without quoting long
passages of crabbed Latin and obscure Greek. In the eighteenth
century, the habit had gone entirely out of fashion, and Wesley,
scholar though he was, was the last man in the world to wish
for its revival. But, while the tractarians were in their cradles,
Routh of Magdalen had recalled to the church of England the
thought of the rock whence it was digged, by the publication of
the first part of his Reliquiae Sacrae (1814), in which he collected
the fragments of early Christian writings up to the first Nicene
council and edited them with a remarkable combination of affec-
tion, erudition and sagacity. He set the tone for the Oxford
writers. Theology and history were inseparable. Accuracy was
all important. 'Verify your quotations' was the first duty of a
‘
scholar. The real teaching of Christianity would be found, in
balanced emphasis, if you went back far enough for it. And that
was the motto of the tractarians. Christian dogma was inseparable
from true history. That was a far-reaching principle, fruitful long
after the tractarians had ceased to work.
## p. 279 (#303) ############################################
CHAPTER XIII
THE GROWTH OF LIBERAL THEOLOGY
RELIGIOUS thought has seldom been so stagnant in England
as at the opening of the nineteenth century. The professional
advocates of the Christian faith did not lack ability, but they had
been traversing the same arid ground of external evidences for
half a century. They continued to put the apostles into the witness
box and acquit them according to the rules of the Old Bailey.
They cross-examined the saints for their attestation of miracle
and prophecy, but omitted to discover the secret of their life.
A Paley or a Watson might display admirable commonsense, and
be accounted by the faithful a match for Tom Paine; and yet the
religious life remained starved. The methodist movement, with
its evangelical counterpart, had, indeed, given back to religious
feeling its rightful place and more, but had produced little or
no theology, except for the particularly acrid and unprofitable
Calvinist controversy.
The French revolution had set up a ferment of new ideas and
induced a critical attitude towards all established notions and
institutions. But the very extravagances of the movement, and
the desperate nature of the war in which England was engaged
against the propagandists of the revolution, made English people
more than usually suspicious of new ideas, and gave a new lease
of life to threatened institutions like the established church.
Sympathy with the ideas of the revolution was regarded as
dubiously patriotic and probably irreligious, as Priestley and
William Frend found to their cost. When the former took flight
to a more kindly clime, bishop Horsley could exult and sing, “The
orators and oracles of Birmingham and Essex Street are dumb. '
Traditional teaching, therefore, remained in almost undisputed
possession through the period of the great war, and beyond it,
when the new fears of social unrest excited corresponding fears
## p. 280 (#304) ############################################
280 The Growth of Liberal Theology [CH. .
for Christian faith. For the first twenty years of the new century,
English theology was at a standstill. The stars of the older day,
Paley and Horsley and Watson, were setting, and no new stars
had arisen. Theology could make no serious progress until it
should emancipate itself from the outworn conventions of the
previous century, and be free to face the urgent questions of the
new age. The fashionable utilitarianism of Paley could kindle no
warmth. Idealism already had its prophets in Germany; but it
needed a Coleridge to discover and interpret them for English
readers. There were also on the continent pioneers of a more
scientific literary criticism; but their work was still unknown in
this country. Herbert Marsh, fellow of St John's college, Cam-
bridge, who had studied at Leipzig under Michaelis, published in
four volumes (1793-1801) a translation of the latter's Introduction
to the New Testament, together with essays and a dissertation of
his own on the sources of the first three Gospels. He did not
escape reproof for his rashness; but neither was he debarred from
becoming a divinity professor and a bishop. The work had no
immediate sequel. English scholarship was not ready for such ques-
tions; but, twenty-four years later, another future bishop, Connop
Thirlwall, picked up the threads, in introducing to an English
public Schleiermacher’s A Critical Essay on the Gospel of St Lrike.
Still more necessary than critical learning was a freer view of
biblical inspiration. Theological scholars worked in shackles, if
not in blinkers, so long as à priori theories of the inerrancy of
Scripture were unchallenged. When the critical methods that
were already being applied to other literature should come to
be applied to the Bible, a revolution would follow. If, in his
Shakespearean studies, said Coleridge, he were to use the same
uncritical liberties as divines allowed themselves in harmonising
the inconsistencies of Scripture, ‘I would almost undertake to
harmonise Falstaff's account of the rogues in buckram into a
coherent and consistent narrative. The eighteenth century was
seriously lacking in the historic sense; but, so soon as Wolf set
himself to prove the plural authorship of the Iliad, and Niebuhr
began discussing the origin of the early legends of Roman history,
the day was not far distant when similar tests must be applied
to biblical literature. The growth of the scientific temper in the
new century, with its ruling idea of development, would also
create a more sympathetic interest in doctrine viewed historically
rather than as absolutely defined. The time was ripe for the
advent of Christian scholars who, with a more daring spirit,
## p. 281 (#305) ############################################
XIII]
281
The Evangelicals
would set their sails to catch the new breezes that were
stirring.
But in what direction was a truer theology to be looked for?
The spirit of religion burned brightest among the evangelical
churchmen and methodists. The new century witnessed a new
literary venture, The Christian Observer, which enlisted most
of the evangelical talent—Henry Thornton, Thomas Scott the
commentator and John Venn. The evangelicals were not wanting
in ability or energy, but, as a body, had little taste for literature,
except of a directly practical purpose. They showed their capacity
for meeting the religious needs of their less critical followers in
devotional and homiletic literature. Hannah More's Cheap
Repository Tracts had an enormous vogue, and a simple moral
tale by Legh Richmond, The Dairyman's Daughter, reached two
million copies. For more cultivated readers, there was a great
outpouring of pious biography. Charles Simeon, with all his
wider interests, published almost nothing except homiletic litera-
ture, skeletons' of sermons, as he frankly called them. Even a
professed work of learning like Joseph Milner's History of the
Church of Christ (1794–7) aimed chiefly at edification; 'genuine
piety is the only thing which I intend to celebrate. ' Neither
he nor his brother, dean Isaac Milner, who brought the history
down to Luther's reformation, thought it necessary to read
anything in Luther's language. Evangelical theology concentrated
itself upon a few favourite doctrines which formed the scheme of
salvation; its language was soon learnt, and it was all-sufficient.
The peculiarity of this language, together with its hackneyed
use, was enough to deter some minds, as the outspoken baptist
minister, John Foster, complained in his essay on the Aversion
of Men of Taste to Evangelical Religion (1805). Even biblical
interpretation commanded but a narrow field of interest; the
unfulfilled prophecies alone gave scope for speculation. The
rigid theory of inspiration, in general, foreclosed enquiry, and the
evangelicals retained that theory longest of all.
The true glory of the evangelicals lay in their pastoral zeal and
in their philanthropy. The Clapham sect, as Sydney Smith nick-
named them, maintained a long struggle against the slave trade,
and supported missionary societies and charitable enterprises with
princely generosity. William Wilberforce, member of parliament
for the county of York, raised a hitherto unpopular and mis-
judged party in the public esteem when, in 1797, he produced his
Practical View of Christianity. It found more readers than any
## p. 282 (#306) ############################################
282 The Growth of Liberal Theology [[
CH.
book by a clergyman; its effect is comparable with that of The
Serious Call. It had, however, none of William Law's wit,
though its writer was deemed by Madame de Staël the wittiest
talker she had met in England. “The present state of things in
France, where a brood of moral vipers, as it were, is now hatching,'
was the occasion for the serious self-examination proposed in it.
“We bear upon us but too plainly the marks of a declining empire. '
The author sees no hope of averting this ruin, except by a revival
of real Christianity, as contrasted with the decent selfishness'
which passed muster with most Christians. “The grand defect'
in these nominal Christians is that they forget
the peculiar doctrines of the Religion which they profess-the corruption of
human nature-the atonement of the Saviour-and the sanctifying influence
of the Holy Spirit.
But, apart from this sincere allegiance to the orthodox language,
Wilberforce, as Sir James Stephen has shown, 'was very much
a latitudinarian. His catholic spirit had no taste for polemical
divinity, and he gave himself, as he advised others to give them-
selves, to practical Christianity.
Among the evangelicals there was not enough of speculative
interest to revive and liberate theology. Emancipation would not
come from them. It came in part from an unexpected quarter,
from the poet-philosopher and amateur theologian, Samuel Taylor
Coleridge. From early days, he was in revolt against the utilitarian
fashion in philosophy and in theology, and it became his aim, as
Julius Hare said, to spiritualise both the one and the other. It
was high time that philosophy should again have a hearing in
English religion, as it had already had in Germany. English theo-
logy had been suffering, for at least a generation, from the poverty
of its intellectual interest; it was Coleridge's province to stimulate
that interest, as a long succession of religious thinkers have amply
testified.
Coleridge would himself have recognised the truth and the
pathos of Charles Lamb's description of him as 'an archangel a
little damaged. The contrast between his spiritual ideals and his
sordid failures was as painful to him as it could be to his friends.
He laboured under a deep conviction of sin which gave a personal
intensity to his Confessions, as, for instance, when he says that, in
the Bible, he has ‘found words for my inmost thoughts, songs for
my joy, utterances for my hidden griefs, and pleadings for my
shame and my feebleness. The theological reading of this
'
‘literary cormorant,' as he called himself, was discursive. He leapt
## p. 283 (#307) ############################################
X11] Erskine of Linlathen 283
contemptuously back over the aevum rationalisticum into the
seventeenth century, where he found poets and divines to his mind.
Archbishop Leighton, Jeremy Taylor and other writers of that age
furnished him with matter for comment in his Aids to Reflection
(1825). Some readers might feel themselves being led into a holy
jungle' by Coleridge's musings on the persons of the Trinity as
representing ipseity, altereity and communeity; but, at least, he
gave them more to think about than did the orthodox defenders
of the faith in their eminently lucid writings. It was time that some-
one called a halt to the prevailing mode in theological literature.
Evidences of Christianity! I am weary of the word. Make a man feel
the want of it; rouse him, if you can, to the self-knowledge of his need of it;
and you may safely trust it to its own evidence.
Confessions of an Enquiring Spirit was published by his
nephew, posthumously, in 1840. These seven letters on inspiration,
simpler in style and thought than most of Coleridge's writings,
are a remarkable anticipation of the attitude of modern Christians
towards the Bible. Coleridge exhibits a happy union of complete
freedom and of deep gratitude for the Scriptures. He combats
the contemporary view that the Bible was not to be reasoned
about in the way that other good books are. ' He maintains that
'the Bible and Christianity are their own sufficient evidence. '
In the Bible there is more that finds me than I have experienced in all
other books put together;. . . the words of the Bible find me at greater depths
of my being; and. . . whatever finds me brings with it an irresistible evidence
of its having proceeded from the Holy Spirit.
He rests secure on his own dear experience' and, regardless of
discrepancies and moral imperfections in the Scriptures, pursues
his study with free and unboding spirit. '
If Coleridge's theological influence depended less on his books
than on his conversation and friendship with religious thinkers,
the same is hardly less true of another contemporary layman,
Thomas Erskine of Linlathen. Erskine’s natural gift lay rather
in intimate spiritual converse and letters than in set writing. In
mid-life he ceased to publish books, as if himself questioning his
effectiveness as an author; but, for another thirty years, he talked
and wrote to those who would find more readers than he ever could.
Among his friends he counted Carlyle, Maurice, Stanley and McLeod
Campbell, besides an interesting group of Christians on the con-
tinent, with whom, also, he corresponded, Vinet, Gaussen, Adolphe
Monod and C. C. J. Bunsen. Erskine's writings, however, have
considerable importance, in spite of their amateurishness and lack
6
6
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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
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.
study of his writings might give some ground for such a view:
a complete one refutes it. It could, indeed, hardly be held by any
who did not, perhaps unconsciously, identify the wider catholicism
of orthodox Christianity with the narrower presentment of it in
modern Roman theology which Newman never set himself very
seriously to defend. His intellectual standpoint, however much
during his long life it may seem to have varied, never really
departed from the three bases on which it had been founded.
He was an Aristotelian. He distrusted much of modern metaphysic.
He regarded the actual facts of human life as the ultimate basis of
reason. He was, like many of the most earnest English thinkers
of his time, a convinced disciple of Butler. His reading of The
Analogy of Religion was, as he said, an era in his religious opinions.
Starting from probability as the guide of life, he never fancied
that the limitless area of things human and divine could be fully
mapped or the ultimate mystery more than 'imperfectly com-
prehended. ' But he found reality in the religious facts of the
world, as the philosophers of his time found them in the moral
facts, and the men of science in the physical ; and, herein, he may
be said to have anticipated modern psychology. Yet also, and with
at least as much strength, he was a historian: very often, not
an accurate historian in detail, but a historian of illumination
and genius. If much that he wrote as history has long been cast
aside, the interpretation that he gave of early-not the earliest-
Christian centuries remained as an inspiration to the students who
## p. 271 (#295) ############################################
XII]
271
Dean Church
TOT
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TI
made Oxford history famous, to Stubbs and Freeman, Creighton
and Bryce, and remains still. When he wrote his different studies
he was loyal to his principles, whether, at the time, he was an
English or a Roman churchman, but he never surrendered the
scholar's independence. No doubt, he loved narration more than
interpretation, character more than institutional life; but, what
he wanted to find, and believed he could find, in history was
truth: and in that he never deserted the fundamental principle of
the tractarian company. As a historian, his affinities were with
the French school which was coming into existence in his middle
age, never with the purely German, where vast collections of facts
were often used to support an unverifiable theory. But, if his
passion throughout was catholicism, his preconception was truth.
Newman must ever remain the central figure in the literature
of the movement of which he was the most conspicuous figure.
But Pusey, it would be true to say, represented far more entirely its
most prominent characteristics: its basis in history and tradition,
its via media, its determination stare super antiquas vias. And
it may well be that, if Newman appealed to the wider circle, Pusey
and Keble influenced more directly the general literature of
English religion. The Oxford movement certainly belongs to the
history of English religion more definitely than to the history
of English literature; but it had great influence, outside its own
definite members, on the literary taste of its age. It spoke from
the first for a certain purity, directness and severity of style:
later, the historical influences which attached themselves to it,
through the study of ancient legends, and liturgies, and hymns,
produced a richer vein of prose, a more florid touch in poetry.
No one can think that Tennyson was wholly unmoved by its
manner; but Dolben and Pater were the undoubted issue of its
later life. If one were to look for men of letters who were as
clearly such, and would have been in any age, as they were men
of religion, one would light instantly on the names of Richard
William Church and Richard Chenevix Trench. The former, a
fellow of Oriel with Newman, one of the proctors who vetoed
the new test proposed when Ward was condemned, died as
dean of St Paul's. Church lived to be the historian of the
movement itself, and perhaps that was his finest work. But his
deep thought and profound wisdom, which had remarkable
weight with the eminent statesmen of his day, were seen at
their best in his interpretation of past history as well as in
lectures and sermons which are models of clear writing and
Test
TK
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## p. 272 (#296) ############################################
272 The Oxford Movement
[CH.
clear thought. Something of the severity and unworldliness of
Dante, of whom he was a devoted student, seemed to have
descended upon him, with, also, the great Florentine's knowledge
of the ways and thoughts of common men. But, most clearly,
he was, in literature, the disciple of Newman, in the simplicity,
directness and absence of ornament which made his style powerful
in its effect on the writing of his generation. Church was a
preacher, a moralist, a historian; but, especially, he was a student
of human nature, who judged men equally yet with sympathy,
who weighed motives in scales which were never deflected by
prejudice or passion, and knew to a nicety the springs of human
action. He was a master of sympathetic literary criticism, too,
as his volume on Spenser proves. His historical sketches, such as
that of the early middle age, and his criticisms in literature, such
as those of Cassiodorus and Pascal, show a characteristic simplicity
which cannot veil the abundance of knowledge. Occasionally,
something is revealed of the fire within him, which breaks out
now and again in his classic memorial of the Oxford movement
and the men who began and led it, a record, as he wrote to
Lord Acton,
that one who lived with them, and lived long beyond most of em, believed
in the reality of their goodness and height of character, and still looks back
with deepest reverence to those forgotten men as the companions to whose
teaching and example he owes an infinite debt, and not he only but religious
society in England of all kinds 1.
Preeminently, Church was a man of letters; and this was as
obviously true of Richard Chenevix Trench. Church noted 'the
peculiar combination in him of the poet, the theologian and the
champion of primitive and catholic doctrine. ' Some of his lyrics
belong to the highest flight of English poetry. His religious
writings had a peculiar distinction and charm. Just as Church
owed inspiration to Greece, modern as well as ancient, and its
struggle for liberty, so Trench had nourished himself on the great
literature of Spain and was in harmony with the aspirations of her
liberal revival. He passed, in 1863, from the deanery of West-
minster to the archbishopric of Dublin, where he was primate at
the disestablishment and fought hard for the ancient symbols of
the Irish church under its new constitution. Like the dean of
St Paul's, he was not a militant tractarian, but he spoke of Hugh
James Rose as ‘my master,' and wrote, on the death of Pusey,
that ‘a prince in our Israel has indeed passed away. ' The names
1 Quoted in the Advertisement' to The Oxford Movement, p. vi.
6
6
## p. 273 (#297) ############################################
XII]
273
Neale and the Mozleys
of Church and Trench, which, even apart from their theological
writings, and at any time in our history, would have been pro-
minent in English letters, are examples of the influence which the
serious ideas of the Oxford movement exercised upon literature.
In historical study, the influence was no less conspicuous.
William Stubbs, the greatest English historian of the nineteenth
century, was a convinced tractarian and spoke of Pusey, whom
he assisted in literary work, as 'the master. ' Henry Parry
Liddon, the greatest preacher of the period, whose sermons at
St Paul's were, for twenty years, a conspicuous factor in the
life of London, was the disciple, the friend and the biographer
of Pusey. His Bampton lectures on the Divinity of Christ were
worthy to rank with the great dogmatic treatises of the older
divines. And their successors remain to the present day.
Not far apart from them, yet still somewhat in isolation, was
the striking figure of John Mason Neale, not an Oxford but a
Cambridge man. He was antiquary, historian, poet, novelist,
priest; and in none of these activities can he be forgotten.
He was as facile as he was learned. He poured forth book
after book of amazing erudition on almost every conceivable
subject of theological and historical interest. As a translator
of Latin and Greek hymns no Englishman has surpassed him.
But, above all things, he loved 'a story' and he could tell it—as
such an historical novel as Theodora Phranza, which tells the
fall of Christian Constantinople, evidences—with the best of
them. While his knowledge was diffused, that of James Bowling
Mozley was intense and concentrated. Master of a stern and
somewhat arid style, which still could rise into eloquence and
passion, he exercised a profound influence on the generation
which succeeded him. He was the foe of shallow thinking and
shallow writing. Many of the idols of the market-place, past
or present, from Martin Luther to Thomas Carlyle, suffered his
gwashing blows. His brother Thomas had abilities of a more
popular cast: he was, for a while, editor of The British Critic:
for many years he was a leader writer for The Times, and he
represented that paper at Rome during the time of the council
1869–70, when liis letters, unsympathetic though Roman catholics
have complained that they are, presented a most vivid and re-
markable picture of a great historical episode. In his old age,
he wrote Reminiscences of the days of struggle, which are
entertaining, but not always accurate. 'If a story cannot stand
on two legs,' said Newman, whose sister he had married, 'Tom
18
9
E. L. XII.
CH. XII.
## p. 274 (#298) ############################################
274
[CH.
The Oxford Movement
supplies a third. From him comes a touching tribute to the
self-effacing labours of Charles Marriott, like himself a fellow
of Oriel, who was the helper of every one, great and small, who
belonged to the movement, and its great stay in scholarship, as
editing with Keble and Pusey The Oxford Library of the Fathers.
Outside Oxford, the same interests which had awakened the
ecclesiastical learning and catholic orthodoxy of the university
were represented in many writers who were affected, in greater
or less degree, by the principles of the tractarians.
Walter Farquhar Hook was one of the most masterful figures
of his time, first as vicar of Leeds for twenty-two years and then
as dean of Chichester. He accepted nearly all the principles of the
tractarians, but frequently stood apart from their expression and
was often a vehement critic. He was an industrious compiler
of dictionaries and biographies, without sufficient research or
originality to give them permanent vitality. His successor at
Chichester, John William Burgon, held a similar position of in-
dependent judgment. He was a keen and biting controversialist
and the most conservative of biblical critics ; but he had an
intense love of 'good men,' among whom he placed some of the
authors of the tracts. His biographies are essential to a knowledge
of the movement.
Two sons of the famous statesman and philanthropist, and
brothers of that bishop of Oxford who revolutionised the ideal of
English episcopacy, Robert Isaac and Henry William Wilberforce,
both at Oriel, passed into the Roman church. The elder had
been an archdeacon and yet had written theological books of
real value, notably one on The Doctrine of The Incarnation,
which was on strictly tractarian lines and won great fame. The
younger after his secession gave important help to the Roman
catholic cause in the press.
Some of those who had abandoned their orders and left the
English church seemed eager to disclaim any connection with it.
Some vehemently attacked what they had before as vehemently
defended, but no one of them save Newman made any great mark
in literature. Some were content with a change of clothes, sub-
stituting for their customary suits of solemn black the vagaries of
'blue ties and ginger-coloured trousers. '
More formidable was the Anglo-Roman hierarchy created in
1850, whose head announced its creation by a letter from out the
Flaminian Gate. '
Nicholas Wiseman, Roman catholic controversialist and
1
## p. 275 (#299) ############################################
X1)
275
Converts to Rome
cardinal, whose education had not been English, was a capable
craftsman in letters. He was an orientalist, and a cultured student
of many subjects, who became the first archbishop of Westminster
in 1850, after devoting himself to confuting ‘High Church Claims'
(1841), and embodying his theories of church history in a pretty
story called Fabiola, or the Church of the Catacombs (1854).
Henry Edward, cardinal Manning, who had been an English
archdeacon and became Wiseman's successor, wrote, while he
was a member of the English church, volumes of sermons which
reached at least a fifth edition, and, as a controversial papalist,
many vehement criticisms of the Anglican position; but, though
his personal influence was great, his work is negligible as literature.
John Hungerford Pollen, as an English priest wrote the most
touching and tragic of all the records of struggle in parish
work for tractarian principles (A Narrative of Five Years at
St Saviour's, Leeds, 1851), and then, as a Romanist layman,
devoted himself to art, wrote some valuable lectures, was the
friend of Morris and Rossetti, Swinburne and Patmore, and
became in artistic literature, what his friend Baron von Hügel
said he was in life, 'the perfect type of l'homme du monde. '
Another convert, Frederick William Faber, endowed with high
gifts of imagination, deplored, as a Roman catholic, the position
of the Magi, with, perhaps, an undercurrent of reference to the
protestants' unhappy lot,
No Pope, no blessèd Pope had they
To guide them with his hand,-
and was generally sentimental and sugary, very unlike the
tractarians; but he wrote some devotional poetry of sincerity
and pathos. John Dobree Dalgairns was capable and solid
as a Roman controversialist on behalf of Christian belief; but
he was far surpassed by another of the later disciples of the
tractarians who became a power in the church of his adoption.
William George Ward, the crisis of whose stormy career was
critical also in the movement itself, has won immortality in the
verse of Tennyson and the prose of dean Church. The latter
finds it his chief distinction that as 'a profound metaphysical
thinker he was the equal antagonist on their own ground of John
Stuart Mill and Herbert Spencer. ' His work hardly belongs to
pure literature: its manner and method are, for the most part,
cumbrous, only occasionally vivid or comprehensive. His own
generation read what he wrote because he was famous for what
he said: it was meat and drink to him to argue and to chop logic,
5
18-2
## p. 276 (#300) ############################################
276 The Oxford Movement [CH.
and his swordplay was a delight to the onlookers. But, if his
Ideal, his intuitionist philosophy and his controversial treatises
are forgotten, he will ever be remembered by the poet's farewell
to him as one
Whose Faith and Work were bells of full accord,
My friend, the most unworldly of mankind,
Most generous of all Ultramontanes, Ward.
Ambrose Phillips de Lisle, another English convert to the Roman
obedience, followed the Tracts for the Times with keenest in-
terest from the first. He had been ten years a Roman catholic
when they began to appear and he set himself before long to
correspond with their writers in the hope of 'producing a good
understanding between the Catholic and Anglican churches, with
a view to the ultimate restoration of that happy and blessed unity,
which formerly existed between them for more than a thousand
years, and which,' he added, “I am perfectly certain will one day be
restored. ' The letters which passed between him and Mont-
alembert illustrate how close at some points was the connection
between the ecclesiastical revival in England and in France.
The French man of letters had no hope
that Catholicity will make any real progress in England, as long as the
fanatical spirit of Archbishop Manning, Mr Ward, and others of the same
stamp is prevalent among English Catholics;
and, on the other side, Newman was equally hopeless about reunion
or 'the conversion of that corporate body which we call the
Anglican Church. ' De Lisle's own work, sympathetic in aim,
trivial in result, is an example of the rift between the two bodies,
in literature as well as in religion. Only in Newman himself was
the influence of the Oxford movement to be discerned among
Romanist writers.
But the glamour of tractarian theology extended far beyond
those who were its first teachers or their direct heirs. It created
a religious literature effective if ephemeral: it ‘tuned the pulpits'
for some half a century to a gravity which strove, often success-
fully, after the majesty of classical sculpture. And, in the poetry
of Digby Mackworth Dolben, only recently given to the world, and
of Christina Rossetti, it formed a new life exuberant and aflame.
Dolben pursued its teaching till it yielded to him a certain medieval
richness of ecclesiastical imagery that touched at many points a
religious passion which was older than Christianity, and almost
1 Purcell, E. , Life of Ambrose Phillips de Lisle, vol. II, p. 360.
## p. 277 (#301) ############################################
XII]
Tractarian Novels
277
hostile to it. To Christina Rossetti, the catholic theology of the
English church was the very breath of life, and she accepted its
sternness without dispute. Yet, while the accent of severity
clings to all she wrote, we are, in her company, on the road to a
reaction which yet has its roots in the past: the splendour of
Jeremy Taylor is not forgotten and the exotic richness of Walter
Pater is in sight.
In humbler literature, 'tractarianism' may be thought to
have created an epoch by inaugurating the dreary succession
of religious novels. But they were not dreary in their beginnings.
J. M. Neale was a great writer of romance. Newman himself put
some very good polemical work into Loss and Gain (with an
immortal description of an Oxford tutor's breakfast) and Callista.
Wiseman's Fabiola was an effort of the same kind. Francis
Edward Paget, student of Christ Church and then rector of
Elford, published a series of most interesting tales, containing
quite delicious descriptions of country life and character which
no novelist of his time surpassed. But most prominent of all
was the long line of stories, exquisite in domestic portraiture,
strong in moral power, keen in understanding of character and
touched with a gracious humour, which issued from the parish of
Hursley-where Keble was to the authoress a true guide, phi-
losopher and friend-and were the work of Charlotte M. Yonge.
The Heir of Redclyffe and The Little Duke have their place
in English literature. They have had many imitators and suc-
cessors but few rivals, unless John Inglesant may claim to be of
their company.
A movement which had so many means of making itself felt
throughout the country had, naturally, an influence in many phases
of literature. It was primarily religious, with a religion, said one
of its lay disciples, an eminent public official, 'which was fervent
and reforming in essentials with a due reverence for existing
authorities and habits and traditions'; but it was not narrow
or cloistered, it was 'a religion which did not reject, but aspired
to embody in itself, any form of art and literature, poetry,
philosophy, and even science which could be pressed into the
service of Christianity? '
But its permanent effects may be seen most clearly in the fields
of history and dogma. During the eighteenth century, the constant
study of the Fathers of the early church which had been the
basis of the theological writings of the reformers and the Caroline
1 Letters of Lord Blachford, p. 15.
## p. 278 (#302) ############################################
278 The Oxford Movement [CH. XII
divines had passed into desuetude. In the seventeenth century,
no one would have dared to write theology without quoting long
passages of crabbed Latin and obscure Greek. In the eighteenth
century, the habit had gone entirely out of fashion, and Wesley,
scholar though he was, was the last man in the world to wish
for its revival. But, while the tractarians were in their cradles,
Routh of Magdalen had recalled to the church of England the
thought of the rock whence it was digged, by the publication of
the first part of his Reliquiae Sacrae (1814), in which he collected
the fragments of early Christian writings up to the first Nicene
council and edited them with a remarkable combination of affec-
tion, erudition and sagacity. He set the tone for the Oxford
writers. Theology and history were inseparable. Accuracy was
all important. 'Verify your quotations' was the first duty of a
‘
scholar. The real teaching of Christianity would be found, in
balanced emphasis, if you went back far enough for it. And that
was the motto of the tractarians. Christian dogma was inseparable
from true history. That was a far-reaching principle, fruitful long
after the tractarians had ceased to work.
## p. 279 (#303) ############################################
CHAPTER XIII
THE GROWTH OF LIBERAL THEOLOGY
RELIGIOUS thought has seldom been so stagnant in England
as at the opening of the nineteenth century. The professional
advocates of the Christian faith did not lack ability, but they had
been traversing the same arid ground of external evidences for
half a century. They continued to put the apostles into the witness
box and acquit them according to the rules of the Old Bailey.
They cross-examined the saints for their attestation of miracle
and prophecy, but omitted to discover the secret of their life.
A Paley or a Watson might display admirable commonsense, and
be accounted by the faithful a match for Tom Paine; and yet the
religious life remained starved. The methodist movement, with
its evangelical counterpart, had, indeed, given back to religious
feeling its rightful place and more, but had produced little or
no theology, except for the particularly acrid and unprofitable
Calvinist controversy.
The French revolution had set up a ferment of new ideas and
induced a critical attitude towards all established notions and
institutions. But the very extravagances of the movement, and
the desperate nature of the war in which England was engaged
against the propagandists of the revolution, made English people
more than usually suspicious of new ideas, and gave a new lease
of life to threatened institutions like the established church.
Sympathy with the ideas of the revolution was regarded as
dubiously patriotic and probably irreligious, as Priestley and
William Frend found to their cost. When the former took flight
to a more kindly clime, bishop Horsley could exult and sing, “The
orators and oracles of Birmingham and Essex Street are dumb. '
Traditional teaching, therefore, remained in almost undisputed
possession through the period of the great war, and beyond it,
when the new fears of social unrest excited corresponding fears
## p. 280 (#304) ############################################
280 The Growth of Liberal Theology [CH. .
for Christian faith. For the first twenty years of the new century,
English theology was at a standstill. The stars of the older day,
Paley and Horsley and Watson, were setting, and no new stars
had arisen. Theology could make no serious progress until it
should emancipate itself from the outworn conventions of the
previous century, and be free to face the urgent questions of the
new age. The fashionable utilitarianism of Paley could kindle no
warmth. Idealism already had its prophets in Germany; but it
needed a Coleridge to discover and interpret them for English
readers. There were also on the continent pioneers of a more
scientific literary criticism; but their work was still unknown in
this country. Herbert Marsh, fellow of St John's college, Cam-
bridge, who had studied at Leipzig under Michaelis, published in
four volumes (1793-1801) a translation of the latter's Introduction
to the New Testament, together with essays and a dissertation of
his own on the sources of the first three Gospels. He did not
escape reproof for his rashness; but neither was he debarred from
becoming a divinity professor and a bishop. The work had no
immediate sequel. English scholarship was not ready for such ques-
tions; but, twenty-four years later, another future bishop, Connop
Thirlwall, picked up the threads, in introducing to an English
public Schleiermacher’s A Critical Essay on the Gospel of St Lrike.
Still more necessary than critical learning was a freer view of
biblical inspiration. Theological scholars worked in shackles, if
not in blinkers, so long as à priori theories of the inerrancy of
Scripture were unchallenged. When the critical methods that
were already being applied to other literature should come to
be applied to the Bible, a revolution would follow. If, in his
Shakespearean studies, said Coleridge, he were to use the same
uncritical liberties as divines allowed themselves in harmonising
the inconsistencies of Scripture, ‘I would almost undertake to
harmonise Falstaff's account of the rogues in buckram into a
coherent and consistent narrative. The eighteenth century was
seriously lacking in the historic sense; but, so soon as Wolf set
himself to prove the plural authorship of the Iliad, and Niebuhr
began discussing the origin of the early legends of Roman history,
the day was not far distant when similar tests must be applied
to biblical literature. The growth of the scientific temper in the
new century, with its ruling idea of development, would also
create a more sympathetic interest in doctrine viewed historically
rather than as absolutely defined. The time was ripe for the
advent of Christian scholars who, with a more daring spirit,
## p. 281 (#305) ############################################
XIII]
281
The Evangelicals
would set their sails to catch the new breezes that were
stirring.
But in what direction was a truer theology to be looked for?
The spirit of religion burned brightest among the evangelical
churchmen and methodists. The new century witnessed a new
literary venture, The Christian Observer, which enlisted most
of the evangelical talent—Henry Thornton, Thomas Scott the
commentator and John Venn. The evangelicals were not wanting
in ability or energy, but, as a body, had little taste for literature,
except of a directly practical purpose. They showed their capacity
for meeting the religious needs of their less critical followers in
devotional and homiletic literature. Hannah More's Cheap
Repository Tracts had an enormous vogue, and a simple moral
tale by Legh Richmond, The Dairyman's Daughter, reached two
million copies. For more cultivated readers, there was a great
outpouring of pious biography. Charles Simeon, with all his
wider interests, published almost nothing except homiletic litera-
ture, skeletons' of sermons, as he frankly called them. Even a
professed work of learning like Joseph Milner's History of the
Church of Christ (1794–7) aimed chiefly at edification; 'genuine
piety is the only thing which I intend to celebrate. ' Neither
he nor his brother, dean Isaac Milner, who brought the history
down to Luther's reformation, thought it necessary to read
anything in Luther's language. Evangelical theology concentrated
itself upon a few favourite doctrines which formed the scheme of
salvation; its language was soon learnt, and it was all-sufficient.
The peculiarity of this language, together with its hackneyed
use, was enough to deter some minds, as the outspoken baptist
minister, John Foster, complained in his essay on the Aversion
of Men of Taste to Evangelical Religion (1805). Even biblical
interpretation commanded but a narrow field of interest; the
unfulfilled prophecies alone gave scope for speculation. The
rigid theory of inspiration, in general, foreclosed enquiry, and the
evangelicals retained that theory longest of all.
The true glory of the evangelicals lay in their pastoral zeal and
in their philanthropy. The Clapham sect, as Sydney Smith nick-
named them, maintained a long struggle against the slave trade,
and supported missionary societies and charitable enterprises with
princely generosity. William Wilberforce, member of parliament
for the county of York, raised a hitherto unpopular and mis-
judged party in the public esteem when, in 1797, he produced his
Practical View of Christianity. It found more readers than any
## p. 282 (#306) ############################################
282 The Growth of Liberal Theology [[
CH.
book by a clergyman; its effect is comparable with that of The
Serious Call. It had, however, none of William Law's wit,
though its writer was deemed by Madame de Staël the wittiest
talker she had met in England. “The present state of things in
France, where a brood of moral vipers, as it were, is now hatching,'
was the occasion for the serious self-examination proposed in it.
“We bear upon us but too plainly the marks of a declining empire. '
The author sees no hope of averting this ruin, except by a revival
of real Christianity, as contrasted with the decent selfishness'
which passed muster with most Christians. “The grand defect'
in these nominal Christians is that they forget
the peculiar doctrines of the Religion which they profess-the corruption of
human nature-the atonement of the Saviour-and the sanctifying influence
of the Holy Spirit.
But, apart from this sincere allegiance to the orthodox language,
Wilberforce, as Sir James Stephen has shown, 'was very much
a latitudinarian. His catholic spirit had no taste for polemical
divinity, and he gave himself, as he advised others to give them-
selves, to practical Christianity.
Among the evangelicals there was not enough of speculative
interest to revive and liberate theology. Emancipation would not
come from them. It came in part from an unexpected quarter,
from the poet-philosopher and amateur theologian, Samuel Taylor
Coleridge. From early days, he was in revolt against the utilitarian
fashion in philosophy and in theology, and it became his aim, as
Julius Hare said, to spiritualise both the one and the other. It
was high time that philosophy should again have a hearing in
English religion, as it had already had in Germany. English theo-
logy had been suffering, for at least a generation, from the poverty
of its intellectual interest; it was Coleridge's province to stimulate
that interest, as a long succession of religious thinkers have amply
testified.
Coleridge would himself have recognised the truth and the
pathos of Charles Lamb's description of him as 'an archangel a
little damaged. The contrast between his spiritual ideals and his
sordid failures was as painful to him as it could be to his friends.
He laboured under a deep conviction of sin which gave a personal
intensity to his Confessions, as, for instance, when he says that, in
the Bible, he has ‘found words for my inmost thoughts, songs for
my joy, utterances for my hidden griefs, and pleadings for my
shame and my feebleness. The theological reading of this
'
‘literary cormorant,' as he called himself, was discursive. He leapt
## p. 283 (#307) ############################################
X11] Erskine of Linlathen 283
contemptuously back over the aevum rationalisticum into the
seventeenth century, where he found poets and divines to his mind.
Archbishop Leighton, Jeremy Taylor and other writers of that age
furnished him with matter for comment in his Aids to Reflection
(1825). Some readers might feel themselves being led into a holy
jungle' by Coleridge's musings on the persons of the Trinity as
representing ipseity, altereity and communeity; but, at least, he
gave them more to think about than did the orthodox defenders
of the faith in their eminently lucid writings. It was time that some-
one called a halt to the prevailing mode in theological literature.
Evidences of Christianity! I am weary of the word. Make a man feel
the want of it; rouse him, if you can, to the self-knowledge of his need of it;
and you may safely trust it to its own evidence.
Confessions of an Enquiring Spirit was published by his
nephew, posthumously, in 1840. These seven letters on inspiration,
simpler in style and thought than most of Coleridge's writings,
are a remarkable anticipation of the attitude of modern Christians
towards the Bible. Coleridge exhibits a happy union of complete
freedom and of deep gratitude for the Scriptures. He combats
the contemporary view that the Bible was not to be reasoned
about in the way that other good books are. ' He maintains that
'the Bible and Christianity are their own sufficient evidence. '
In the Bible there is more that finds me than I have experienced in all
other books put together;. . . the words of the Bible find me at greater depths
of my being; and. . . whatever finds me brings with it an irresistible evidence
of its having proceeded from the Holy Spirit.
He rests secure on his own dear experience' and, regardless of
discrepancies and moral imperfections in the Scriptures, pursues
his study with free and unboding spirit. '
If Coleridge's theological influence depended less on his books
than on his conversation and friendship with religious thinkers,
the same is hardly less true of another contemporary layman,
Thomas Erskine of Linlathen. Erskine’s natural gift lay rather
in intimate spiritual converse and letters than in set writing. In
mid-life he ceased to publish books, as if himself questioning his
effectiveness as an author; but, for another thirty years, he talked
and wrote to those who would find more readers than he ever could.
Among his friends he counted Carlyle, Maurice, Stanley and McLeod
Campbell, besides an interesting group of Christians on the con-
tinent, with whom, also, he corresponded, Vinet, Gaussen, Adolphe
Monod and C. C. J. Bunsen. Erskine's writings, however, have
considerable importance, in spite of their amateurishness and lack
6
6
## p. 284 (#308) ############################################
ch6
a
284 The Growth of Liberal Theology [CH.
2
.
of method: 'your books,' wrote Maurice, in dedicating Prophets
and Kings to him, "seem to me to mark a crisis in the theological
movement of this time. While the orthodox Scottish divines of
'
Erskine's younger days grimly propounded the sovereign decrees'
of unbending Calvinism, there was room for his assertion in The
Unconditional Freeness of the Gospel (1828) that 'Christ died, not
for believers, but for the world. Forgiveness, he declared, “is a
permanent condition of the heart of God'; 'God's arms are open. '
Man must not claim even faith as the ground of his pardon; if he
does so claim, it is only an instance of his unextinguished pride;
'He must have self to lean on, and so when he is obliged to
surrender his own works, he betakes himself to his own faith as
his prop. But this is still self. ' The satiric humour, as well as
the strong mystical vein in his writings, recalls William Law, who
was one of Erskine's favourite authors. In the comparatively
few writers whom his defective eyesight allowed him to study,
he looked for 'light' rather than for theological learning : he
preferred Plato and the neo-Platonists, Leighton and Law, to
professional divines and their critical opponents. He dismisses
a polemical writer with the judgment: ‘he is a great reasoner:
but I do not find any light in him at all. 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
logia
Lai
UNI
it
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ith
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22
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ma
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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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
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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.
