No More Learning

" The exposition of these propositions constitutes the subject matter of Green's philosophy of religion. He finds the foundation of faith in God in the intellectual and moral nature of man. Our know ledge of the world, being the mind's active combination of various appearances into the unity of consciousness, becomes the ground of the knowledge of self-conscious Mind in the universe, which the necessary condition of the existence of
works, the following sketch of his religious philosophy based.
? a like activity in ourselves, and the source and bond of the ever growing synthesis called knowledge. But as the source of all knowledge God not knowable by us in the same sense as any other object, and can only be thought of under metaphors and practically experienced as the power by which our minds think and love. As our thought presupposes as the ground of its possibility an eternal thinking Mind, so our moral action presupposes an eternal Will employing man as the instrument of the realisation of its ends. For all moral action self-realisation, the development of our true nature, the endeavour to perfect our actual nature in the direction of a highest ideal. This effort after self-improvement the practical proof of an absolute perfection. For the possibili ties of our nature which wait for realisation
presuppose a superhuman self from which, in which, and for which they are actual there must be an eternal subject which all that the imperfect subject destined to become by the unfolding of
its powers. in this sense that Green uses the somewhat bold expression, " God our possible or ideal self. " But he
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? 346 THEOLOGY IN GREAT BRITAIN SINCE 1825. [Bk. IV.
does not mean by this that this self is an empty, merely
ideal ; on the contrary, it is the only realising principle, or cause, of our personal self, which is never more than a relative reality. As little may this be understood in the sense of a pantheistic identification of God with man, be cause our imperfect, perpetually developing being distinguishes us essentially from the eternally perfect being of God. But what the expression does mean is that the human mind is in principle one with the Divine, relatively participates in God, is a reproduction of the Divine under the conditions of the finite. According to Green, the inner essence of Christianity lies in its sense of this fact, that God is not an alien, far-off outward Power, but the Father, whose " word is nigh unto us," of whom we may say that we are reason of his reason, whose spirit lives in us, and for whom we live in living for the brethren ; and thereby we live freely, because in obedi ence to a spirit which is our self; and in communion with whom we have assurance of eternal life. A self which can think and will eternal ideas, can seek to realise eternal ends, is itself above time, shares in the nature of the eternal ; the perfect development of its capacities cannot be its annihila tion, although we can form no conception of the positive state of the realised ideal, because it lies beyond our experience.
The philosopher is accordingly conscious of being in essen tial accord with Christian faith when this is conceived in its religious sense, that as disposition of mind or character, consisting in the consciousness of potential unity with God, and issuing in the effort to realise this unity in life, self- denial, and in confiding love. This faith independent of historical proofs in every form, and carries the evidence of its own certainty along with As a religious faith cannot come into conflict with knowledge, as both alike have their source in reason or self-consciousness, which itself again a
revelation of the Divine reason. But religious faith its empirical ecclesiastical form has another side, by which necessarily comes into conflict with knowledge. The one spiritual truth clothed in the forms of the imagination, which can never adequately represent the idea. The pro gressive revelation of God in the spirit of man and in the whole course of human history narrowed to an event of the past, occurring but once or occasionally, and of an exceptiona and absolutely miraculous nature. Events of this kind are
imaginary
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? Ch. I. ] PHILOSOPHY IN RELATION TO THEOLOGY. 347
then made to constitute the immediate object of faith, and this faith in miracle the indispensable condition of Christian piety and morality. But in this view it is forgotten that as sent to historical traditions, be they well or attested, true or untrue, can never be more than an act of the intellect, which would make no difference to the moral value of man, to his religious and moral character. From this faith, still required in the churches, in the miraculous as the specific form of divine revelation, the moral feeling and the intellectual culture of our day have revolted. For when once the idea of
" nature " conceived as continuous, uniform system of laws, " supernatural event " would be breach of the con tinuity of the order of which was supposed to be an ele ment, that would contradict the conditions under which alone a thing can be an event. " As long as the truth of religion supposed to depend on supernatural events, science
? right in pronouncing fiction and in identifying faith with unreason. " The business of apologetics can be no other
than to distinguish faith its spiritual and religious essence from the inadequate forms of the imagination, and to learn to
understand historically the rise and growth of the latter.
was not within the scope of Green's vocation as a philo
sopher to deal with the critical history of Christian faith, but he everywhere shows close acquaintance with the results of recent historical criticism, as far as they could serve to confirm
his philosophical speculations. " The glory of Christianity," he says,1 " not that excludes, but that comprehends
not that came of a sudden into the world, or that
complete in particular institution, or can be stated complete in particular form of words but that the expression of a common spirit which gathering together all things in one. We cannot say of Lo, here or Lo, there now, but was not then. We go backward, but we cannot reach its source we look forward, but we cannot foresee its final power. We do wrong in making depend on a past event, and in identifying with the creed of certain age, or with visible society established at particular time. What we thus seem to gain in definiteness, we lose in permanence of conviction for importunate inquiry will show us that the event can only be approached through series of fluctuating
The Witness of God, Works, iii. pp. 240 sqq.
given
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it is
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? 348 THEOLOGY IN GREAT BRITAIN SINCE 1825. [Bk. IV.
interpretations of behind which its original nature cannot be clearly ascertained that the visible Church of one age
never essentially the same as that of the next that
only in word, or to the intellectually dead, that the creed of the present the same as the creed of the past. " But
doubtless true that the roots of the system of practical ideas which we call Christianity are as old as mankind, the ideas would never have been developed save through definite historical events and personal influences, among which some outweigh all others in importance. The Son of Man came, who was conscious, in the meanness of human life and death, of the communication of God to himself, and through him to mankind. Then came Paul, who found his idea of the " heavenly man," borrowed from the philosophy of his day, realised in Jesus, and made the death and resurrection of
the symbol of the fundamental principle, that man comes to his true self only by the passing out of his old nar row self into the true divine self. But while Paul had placed this moral and spiritual element above the miraculous, sub
the relation was reversed the miraculous over powered the moral and the spiritual. Yet two generations after Paul followed the author of the Fourth Gospel, " who gave that final spiritual interpretation to the person of Christ which has for ever taken out of the region of history and of the doubts that surround all past events, to fix in the puri fied conscience as the immanent God. " By combining faith the spiritual with the moral, God with man, "this Gospel has filled the special function of presenting the highest thought about God in language of the imagination, and has thus become the source of the highest religion. " But while according to Paul and John Christ dwells and works as spirit in believers, the Church he has been step by step " ex ternalised and mystified. " Thus arose dogma with its mys teries, from which knowledge and the purest moral culture are estranged. But trustful, child-like love, set before us by the Biblical presentation of Christ, and made an inward part of our life and character, sufficient to meet and overcome all the blows of criticism and the problems as to historical events. And as must be allowed, no longer possible for the modern thinking Christian to retain the communion
'Works, iii.
? Jesus
sequently
219.
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? Ch. PHILOSOPHY IN RELATION TO THEOLOGY.
349
and fellowship of the confessions and creeds of the ancient Church, he must, nevertheless, continue to feel bound to his fellow-Christians by the ties of practical love. Green's own life was an example of this, and he combined in an uncommon degree practical social labours with philosophical pursuits.
There are not wanting various indications that, as in Ger
many the original Hegelianism, so England Neo-Hege- lianism, so far from being the final end of philosophy, that even those thinkers who are intimately conversant with the latter, and ungrudgingly acknowledge its noble and massive idealism, have nevertheless not been able to convince them selves of the tenability of the system, and so find themselves compelled to advance in the direction of speculative theism (which also predominates the post- Hegelian speculation of Germany). We must mention, as written on these lines, the able book of Andrew Seth, Hegelianism and Personality
(1887), which appears to have been occasioned by the writ ings of Green for begins with critical observations on the crucial doctrine of Green's system, that a universal or divine self present in every individual as the efficient principle of its theoretical and practical knowledge. In order to under stand and fairly judge this doctrine, Seth holds necessary to go back to its genesis in the philosophy of Kant and his successors, especially of Hegel. An acute analysis and cri tique of these systems leads to the result that the fundamental error of Hegelianism and the allied English doctrine the identification of the human and the divine self-consciousness, and that this identification depends throughout on the ten dency to take mere form of consciousness, which the same in all individuals, and so universal, as a real being, to hypostatise and call the self common to God and men. This contrary, Seth maintains, to the characteristic nature of the self, which, although in knowledge principle of unity,
in existence, or metaphysically, principle of isolation (? ). For the most certain testimony of consciousness that have a centre of my own -- will of my own. Nor does the
? consciousness lend any countenance to the represen tation of the human soul as a mere mode or efflux of the divine. On the contrary, religious self-surrender of the will
to the divine will presupposes the active self of the man. What Hegel calls "spirit," "absolute spirit," at bottom
religious
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? 350 THEOLOGY IN GREAT BRITAIN SINCE 1825. [Bk. IV.
nothing more than the abstract scheme of intelligence, which Fichte constructs in his VVissenschaftslehre. But this ab stract form has neither reality nor real value. The attempt of the Hegelian schools to unify the divine and the human subject is ultimately destructive of both. We cannot rightly conceive either the divine or the human self in this impossible union ; nor is this wonderful, seeing they are merely two in separable aspects of our own conscious life isolated and hypo- statised. If we are to ascribe real existence to God, Seth declares with truth, there must be a divine centre of thought, activity, and enjoyment, which can no more be lost in its manifestations in the universe than human personality in its life for others. The admission of a real self-consciousness in God moreover, demanded by the fundamental principle of the theory of knowledge --interpretation by means of the highest category within our reach the self-conscious life the highest in us, we cannot deny to God he may, indeed must, be infinitely more than we know ourselves to be, but he cannot be less. The Hegelian system, continues Seth, as ambiguous on the question of man's immortality as on that of the personality of God, and for precisely the same reason-- that the self of which assertions are made not a real but a logical self. The two positions are two complementary sides of the same view of existence. If we can believe, with the Hegelians of the Left, that there no permanent Intelligence
and Will at the heart of things, then the self-conscious life degraded from its central position, and becomes merely an accident in the universe but, on the other hand, to a philo sophy founded upon self-consciousness, and especially upon the moral consciousness, must seem incredible that the suc cessive generations should be used up and cast aside -- as character were not the only lasting product and the only valu able result of time. Seth summarises his critique of Hegel and Neo-Hegelianism the sentences, " Hegel the pro tagonist of idealism, and champions the best interests of hu manity but in its execution the system breaks down, and ultimately sacrifices these very interests to a logical abstrac tion styled the Idea, in which both God and man disappear. "
The speculative theism towards which Seth seeks to bring
Hegelian speculation represented also in the writings of Robert Fl1nt, Professor of Divinity in the University of Edinburgh, Antitheistic Theories (1877) and Theism (1876),
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? Ch. PHILOSOPHY IN RELATION TO THEOLOGY.
35
and in his brief but very instructive article on Theism in the ninth edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica. In the first- named book Flint has passed under review the naturalistic,
and pantheistic theories, and shown their untenability he does not in this work deal with agnosti
positivist, pessimistic,
cism, but has reserved for a separate work, which has not yet appeared. This will be looked for with the greater in terest, as the article on Theism in the Encyclopaedia offers some excellent observations upon the
agnostic position. Flint maintains that agnosticism so far from being the
necessary corollary of Kantian criticism, that, on the contrary, contradicts its true principles. For the categories
which make experience possible, their validity cannot be re stricted to sense experience, but extends as truly to the realm of moral and religious experience. And the objective validity of the categories, or the necessary forms of thought, generally called in question, not merely theology which
thereby deprived of all foundation, but equally all other sciences, which are then all resolved into castles in the air. But against such scepticism human consciousness testifies, for cannot think the mere subjectivity of true category. As
against Hamilton and Mansel, Flint observes that the idea of the Absolute so far from being, as they alleged, an empty ne gation, abstraction, and fiction, because out of all relation to the knowable, contains the foundation of all relations, the basis not less of existence than of thought, and therefore far from being unknowable, the richest and highest idea, to which all other knowledge conducts as its necessary com pletion. In all the metaphysical categories are included, for God the absolute Being all the physical categories, for he absolute Force and Life all the mental categories, for he absolute Spirit all the moral categories, for he the absolutely Good. Thus the idea of God brings all ideas which are the conditions of human reason and the basis of a know ledge of things into an organic system the whole truth of the world, unfolded in the various sciences, as well as the truth of the mind, included the idea of God. A philo sophy of the Absolute, such as Hegel's, may in its contro versy with Agnosticism fall into some extravagances of Gnos ticism but a theist may nevertheless sympathise with its general aim and appropriate many of its results. Undoubt edly this philosophy needs correction, so far as fails to do
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? 352 THEOLOGY IN GREAT BRITAIN SINCE 1825. [Bk. IV.
to the personality and transcendence of the Divine.
And this error is due to its having obtained the idea of God
too exclusively by the method of formal logical thought, and
to its neglect of the other sides of the mind, the moral and
justice
The idea of God cannot be laid hold of solely by the scientific organising intellect, but only by the combined theoretical and practical powers of the mind. It is a truth ever more clearly perceived, that the
divine glory has its centre in moral perfection, in holy love. On the other hand, the general movement of theism tends to a mediation between the extremes of pantheism and deism,
religious experience particularly.
to a harmonious combination of the personal
self-equality
and the universal agency of God. Positive science has
powerfully co-operated with speculative philosophy in pro
moting this movement. The modern scientific view of the world has not as its result pantheism, but it gives sanction to the relative claims of pantheism, and demands a theism which
God's immanence in the world while holding fast to his personality. The theory of evolution as applied to nature and history does not lead to Agnosticism, but to a more vivid knowledge of God, from whom and through whom and to whom are all things, who is the eternal source of all forces in nature, and also the power in history working for truth and righteousness. These excellent views of Professor Flint seem to me to contain, in fact, the quintessence of the best thoughts of modern speculative philosophy and the pro gramme of its further development.
Lastly, as tending in a similar direction, must be mentioned the works on the philosophy of religion of James Mart1neau, the revered and venerable theologian who has spent his life outside the Established Church as a preacher and theological tutor amongst the Unitarians. By his Essays Philosophical
and Theological (2 vols. , 1869), which appeared originally chiefly in the National Review, and his college addresses, he was known as one of the ablest antagonists of agnostic and materialistic philosophy ; and his two larger works, Types of Ethical Theory (2 vols. , 1885), and A Study of Religion (2 vols. , 1888) have more than sustained his reputation. In his " Introductory chapter on recent developments," prefixed to the re-issue of the second edition of John James Tayler's
? acknowledges
of the Religious Life of England (1876), Martineau could speak of the emendation of the idea of God which had
Retrospect
? ? ? Ch. PHILOSOPHY IN RELATION TO THEOLOGY.
353
been effected since the days of the older Natural Theology, " an emendation which had taken place long ago among the Unitarians," that "God no longer conceived as the First Cause prefixed to the scheme of things, but as the Indwelling Cause pervading not excluded by Second Causes, but coinciding with them while transcending them as the One everliving Objective Agency, the modes of which must be classified and interpreted by science in the outer field, by con science in the inner. " And he considers that " this change of conception due to the lessened prominence of mechanical ideas and the advance of physiology to dominant position, substituting the thought of life working from within for that of transitive impulse starting from without. " Modern science, with its doctrine of evolution, leaves theism, he maintains, undisturbed and unharmed, as no physical knowledge can prevent from conceiving the unity of the Causal Power, which evolution presupposes, as mind, a thesis implied in the very idea of causality. This thought Martineau has worked out in his Study of Religion. After valuable introductory book on the limits of human intelligence, from which we quoted above,1 the idea of causality reduced to that of operative power, and this again to that of voluntary activity whence the conclusion drawn, that all that takes place in nature has one kind of cause, which we can only conceive as a will analogous to our own that therefore the universe of originated things the product of a supreme Mind. To the charge of anthropomorphism, Martineau replies, that what ever idea we form of the ultimate principle of the universe,
must be taken from the analogies of human experience, and the one thing that makes the difference whether be drawn from the lower or the higher aspects of our human nature. The notion, too, that God as designer must be separated from the world and left outside of unfounded, for " the ism at liberty to regard all the cosmical forces as varieties of method assumed by God's conscious causality, and the whole of Nature as the evolution of his thought. " Yet the immanency of God must not be so conceived as to leave no room for the personality of created minds, or to make the actual cosmos the boundary of the possibilities of the divine activity. To get the more definite contents of the idea of
Ante,
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? 354 THEOLOGY IN GREAT BRITAIN SINCE 1825. [Bk. IV.
God, the inference from our own moral nature to God as the perfect Ideal is made, since that Ideal cannot be merely sub
jective fancy, but the objective authority, in whose legislation our conscience finds its origin and its explanation. Martineau had previously maintained in his essay on Ideal Substitutes
for God, in opposition to the ethical idealism without God, of such writers as Matthew Arnold and F. A. Lange, that the truth of our religious and moral consciousness stands or falls with the reality of the divine ideal.
Martineau's Study of Religion is a most instructive and suggestive work ; what it seems to lack is a closer analysis of the psychological nature of religion, and particularly a more thorough examination of the historical development of the religious consciousness of mankind. But it is not only this work, but the English philosophy of religion generally which seems to me to require supplementing and developing in this direction. It would thereby exert greater influence upon the theology of the Church, which appears to have remained hitherto too much out of touch with the progress of philosophical thought. 1
1 During the translation of the manuscript of this book has appeared Martineau's work, The Seat ofAuthority in Religion (London, 1890), which supplements his Study of Religion in a desirable way. For it follows up the philosophical examination of the ultimate ground of religious certainty, and of the relation of the divine and the human factor in all revelation with an historical analysis of the traditional authorities (the Church, the Bible), and with a review of the historical process by which the religion of Jesus was transformed into a religion about him, and the kernel of moral and religious truth was covered by a husk of " Christian mythology. " Even those who may think Martineau's critique of the early Christian traditions here and there too radical, must be compelled to admit that it is the result of a thorough examination of the facts, and of a penetrating and discerning judgment. And every unprejudiced reader can convince himself by a careful study of the fine concluding chapter, that this bold critique is quite consistent with a fervent reverence for the religious personality of Jesus, and accordingly does not detract from the essence of Christian faith. The work with which Dr. Martineau has crowned the labours of his long life will be a lasting monument of a mind not less free than devout. May it find many grateful readers at home and abroad ! --O. P.
? ? ? ? CHAPTER II.
PARTIES AND MOVEMENTS IN THE THEOLOGY OF GREAT BRITAIN.
It was remarked at the beginning of the previous chapter that that general revolution of thought and feeling, commonly known as " Romanticism," which took place at the com mencement of this century, produced good fruit in the revival and reanimation of the religion of the Church. The first
and most influential representative of this new tendency in England was Coleridge, in whose Aids to Reflection (1825), German idealistic philosophy was transplanted to English soil, and employed in the revivification of theological thought. We have seen that in Coleridge, as in Schleiermacher, his
German predecessor, intellect and feeling, faith and know ledge, entered into such a close alliance with each other, that he appeared on the one hand as the apologist of the faith of the Church, in opposition to anti-religious rationalism ; and,
on the other, as at the same time the champion of a more liberal view of traditional doctrines, in opposition to a literal
orthodoxy. These two aspects of Coleridge's thought, while combined in his own person, separated into two distinct parties or tendencies in the Church, their common origin, in the set of feeling in Romanticism, betraying itself outwardly in the fact that both parties proceeded from the same circle of Oxford students, and were represented by men who were personal friends in their university days, far as their courses
? In this also we meet with a striking similarity to the early days of modern German theology. The relation of J. H.
Newman, the originator and early
leader of the Anglo-Catholic movement, to his liberal teacher and mentor, Whately, may be compared with Neander's relation to his teacher Planck ; and the parallel between the friendship of Thomas Arnold with Keble, the friend of
Hurrell Froude and Newman, and the friendship of the youthful Schleiermacher with Novalis and Friedrich Schlegel,
subsequently diverged.
? ? ? 35^ THEOLOGY IN GREAT BRITAIN SINCE 1825. [Bk. IV.
is still more obvious. We must begin with the movement of the High Church, or Tractarian, or Puseyite party, and then take up that of the Broad Church, led by Thomas Arnold and F. D. Maurice, which, from the first, existed by the side of the Tractarian movement, but did not obtain general influence until the latter had passed the zenith of its power. This movement of the Broad Church party has been more recently followed by a liberalism of a more decided type, which has been represented during this generation in the rise of Biblical criticism in Great Britain.
The Tractarian movement dates from the summer of 1833, though its roots extend a few years further back. In the
Year, a collection of religious lyrics on the principal festivals of the ecclesiastical
year 1827 appeared Keble's Christian
? year ; the poems clothe a tender and deep piety in the symbolic garb suggested by the seasons of the natural and Christian year, and are the production of a true poet. We might call Keble the English Novalis, the poet of religious idealism, to whose vision " two worlds " lie always open, the visible being but a type of the invisible, which always lay nearest his heart. Only Keble did not possess the philo sophical culture and learning of Novalis, and lacked con sequently his largeness of view : in Keble's mind, profound personal piety was so exclusively associated with the forms
of Anglican doctrines and ceremonies, that he could not con ceive Christianity or religion at all, apart from the Anglican system ; his religious intolerance went so far, that when the Queen selected a Lutheran prince to be godfather to one of her sons, he set on foot a protest against it from English
clergymen. The religious poems of the Christian Year gave such perfect and admirable expression to a wide-spread state of feeling amongst English people, that the little volume found everywhere the warmest reception, and probably ob tained more friends than all the subsequent theological tracts and learned books for the new movement in the Church. It produced a still deeper effect on the convictions and the subsequent life of John Henry Newman, who had hitherto
passed amongst Oxford men as a disciple of Whately's, though as early as 1826 his mind began to take another turn, chiefly through intercourse with his friend Hurrell Froude. This young man seems to have played a similar part amongst the allies of English Romanticism to that
? ? ? Ch. II] PARTIES AND MOVEMENTS IN THEOLOGY.
357
played by Friedrich Schlegel in the same movement in Germany. From Froude's Remains, which were published (1836-9) after his death by Newman and Keble, one gets the impression of a man not of great natural capacity, but of loose and neglected mind, which was greatly lacking both in moral strength and solid learning ; a man who loved to indulge in paradoxes, which aimed at being clear and pro found, but were often meaningless, and who, from his limited
aristocratic Anglican standpoint, passed sentence upon every thing outside and beyond it with the greater arrogance in proportion to his ignorance. " He hated the Reformation and the Reformers, especially Luther, Melanchthon and Co. ," because they denied the jus divinum of the Catholic Church, preferred preaching to the sacraments, and put an end to ecclesiastical discipline. He demanded the restoration of
monasticism, celibacy, fasting, ancient ritual and art, but especially the emancipation of the Church from the supre macy of the State. The fanatical thoroughness with which
Froude advocated his views made a deep impression on
Henry Newman, to whose nature submission to a stronger personal authority was a necessity, and who was just then passing through a mental crisis. When then at length, soon after the appearance of the Christian Year, a
friendship between Keble and Newman was brought about by Froude, the triumvirate was constituted, the object of which was nothing less than a second Reformation, or counter- Reformation, of the English Church.
The movement thus prepared for in this circle of Oxford friends was brought to a head through the political and ecclesiastico-political agitations at the beginning of the thirties. In order to allay the agitation in Ireland, Sir
Robert Peel had carried his Bill for Catholic Emancipation, to
the great alarm of the Oxford orthodox party. The French
Revolution of July, 1830, and the accession of William IV. ,
brought the Whigs into power, who, after a violent conflict
with the Tory lords and prelates of the Upper House,
passed in 1832 the Reform Bill, a measure which had been
long and loudly called for by the majority of the nation.
? John
The next followed a Bill to abuses in the Irish
year remedy
Church, by which the income of the Anglican Church Ireland was greatly reduced, and one-half of its (superfluous) sees were abolished. The unyielding opposition on the part
in v
? ? ? 358 THEOLOGY IN GREAT BRITAIN SINCE 1825. [Bk. IV.
of the nobility and clergy to all these absolutely necessary reforms had so much excited liberal feeling amongst the people generally, that the bishops were on several occasions insulted and attacked ; and the premier, Lord Grey, ad vised the bishops "to set their house in order. " In High Church circles the feeling prevailed, that the very existence of the Church was imperilled, and that what was required was to create a powerful counter-movement to the liberal tendencies of the day. The Assize Sermon of Keble's in the University pulpit at Oxford, on the " National Apostasy," formed the signal for its friends ; and in July, 1833, at a conference at Hadleigh, it was resolved to take immediate action. Under the conviction that " living movements do
(not come of committees," but depend on personal influence, Newman placed himself at the head of this, and began in 1833 the issue of the Tracts for the Times, as their editor
and principal author ; this being the origin of the name " Tractarian. " In the space of eight years (1833-41), ninety tracts were published, which are collected in six volumes.
? there appeared also, by various writers, extracts from the Church Fathers, under the title of Records ofthe Church. When in 1835, Pusey, Professor and Canon
of Christ Church, joined the movement, an English transla tion of the whole of the Fathers was projected, which began to appear in 1838, under the title of A Library of the Fathers of the Holy Catholic Church.
The design of this movement was certainly not purely religious by any means, but ecclesiastico- political, not to say political ; it was a general war against the Liberal tendencies of the age, and in defence of custom and tradition in the Church and society. As a means to this end, the revival and confirmation of the doctrines and usages of the Anglican Church was to be taken in hand. But while to all appearance the object was only to restore historical Anglicanism in its original purity, in reality the tendency to Catholicism was so decided that Anglicanism was from the very first left a long way behind, and the end of the movement, it could be fore seen, must be Romanism. This could be perceived in the first declarations of the Tractarians, the principal of which were the following: that salvation is based upon the objective efficacy of the sacraments, which again depends on their ad ministration by apostolically appointed priests, that on the
Contemporaneously
? ? *
1
is,
? Ch. II. ]
PARTIES AND MOVEMENTS IN THEOEOtTT.
J59
apostolic succession of the bishops, who, as successors of the apostles, are the inheritors of the gifts of the Holy Ghost, and are thereby the highest authority, in complete inde pendence of the State, in matters of life and doctrine. The writings of the Tractarians were devoted to the exposition and the dogmatico-historical (rather than the Biblical) proof of these positions. A few special points may be here men tioned. A tract of Pusey's, which appeared in 1835, on
Baptism, attacked the evangelical doctrine of regeneration through faith, and its separation of the baptism of the spirit from the baptism of water ; Pusey taught that the real re- y generation is effected by the act of baptism, that the only condition presupposed is that no bar be placed in the way by unbelief; that since this cannot be the case with infants, the baptized child is regenerated. The Catholic doctrine of opus operatum is adopted as correct ; but as the grace of baptism may be lost again, for sins committed after baptism satisfac tion must be made by earnest penance, which has to be shown also in the old ecclesiastical form of ascetic observances.
? Hence the necessity of Church discipline as a means of grace. The mere preaching of the cross of Christ can lead to carnal security. It is not preaching, but ecclesiastical
that forms moral character. -- In the sacrament of the Lord's Supper, such is the doctrine, the body and blood of Christ is present, without transubstantiation, in reality in a mystical manner, and the sacrament is a sacrifice
discipline
(sacrificium, not merely sacramentum), that the mystical application of the sacrifice of Christ on the cross, in which Christ and the Church are together the subject and the
of the sacrifice. R. Wilberforce connected this theory with the doctrine of the Incarnation of Christ, holding that the Incarnation perpetuated the consecration and the sacrifice of the eucharist in spiritual but real manner. To confession also, sacramental significance ascribed fre quent private confession, in accordance with prescribed rules,
advocated. But as the sacraments owe all their saving efficacy to their administration at the hands of the Church, the whole stress falls ultimately, as the Catholic doctrine, upon the true doctrine of the Church. the actual visible saving institution founded by Christ through the agency of the apostles by the bishops, as the successors of the apostles,
the Holy Spirit descends through the means of grace are
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? 360 THEOLOGY IN GREAT BRITAIN SINCE 1825. [Bk. IV.
efficaciously administered and the truth infallibly taught. The invisible Church is composed solely of the living and perfected members of the visible Church, so that to the latter salvation is unconditionally confined. The " notes " of the true Church are apostolicity, catholicity, and autonomy. The most important condition is the apostolical succession of the bishops, which includes the other essential signs. The most perfect Church is the Anglican. The other episcopal Churches are branches of the one Catholic Church, but dis eased branches (especially the Romish Church), on account of their errors ; on the other hand, all communities of Dis senters, as well as the Protestant Churches of the Continent that have no bishops, are severed branches, sects, which do not possess the means of salvation. For it is only through the apostolic succession of the bishops that the gift of the Holy Spirit, and therewith the saving efficacy of the sacra ments, has been preserved to the Church. As Christ is the supreme Mediator, the bishop is his representative on earth, the mediator between the Church and Christ, the highest authority for the laity. The Scriptures cannot be taken as the final and sufficient norma fidei on account of their ambiguity ; they must be interpreted according to the rule of tradition, especially of the earlier centuries. Thus we have in the Nicene Creed the witness of the whole Church, affirming that the doctrine of the Trinity is the teaching of Scripture when properly understood. In the Preface to the translation of the Fathers, it is maintained that the New Testament is the source of doctrine, but that the Catholic Fathers are the channels through which it comes down to us, and that an earnest study of Catholic antiquity conducts those who are tired of modern questionings into the haven of security.
This love of ecclesiastical antiquity sprang out of the his torical impulse of Romanticism as much as Sir Walter Scott's poetical revival of Scottish and English antiquity, or again, the sympathetic learned study of German antiquity by the brothers Grimm and the poet Uhland. But the mystical
realism of the above doctrine of the sacraments sprang like wise from the inclination of Romanticism towards a certain Helldunkel, something neither light nor darkness, neither sensible nor supersensible, a love of mysteries behind experi ence ; Novalis, for instance, liked to call himself a magischer Idealist. So, again, the emphasis laid on the supernatural
? ? ? ? Ch. II. ] PARTIES AND MOVEMENTS IN THEOLOGY. 36 1
authority of the bishops by virtue of their supposed succession from the apostles was equally acceptable to an age that had grown tired of disputation ; and it was at the same time adapted to confirm afresh the position of the bishops, which had been shaken by political events. It therefore, not surprising that Tractarian doctrines were received at first with great favour in the English Church, especially amongst the clergy. true that there was at the beginning no lack of opposition, particularly on the part of the Evangelicals, who at once perceived, and passed sentence on, the weak place in the new movement -- its drift towards Rome. New man, indeed, endeavoured to defend his Anglo-Catholic posi tion as the true " Via Media" between Romanism and Protes tantism. This he did by undertaking to show the complete agreement of the doctrines of the Church of England with
apostolic, that ancient patristic teaching, making use of very free and sometimes sophistic method of interpreting the language of the Thirty-Nine Articles (in Tract 90). But was precisely this daring attempt to set aside the distinctive points of the Anglican creed in relation to Roman doctrine by the aid of forced and spurious interpretation, which brought about the revulsion of public opinion. Tract 90 was censured by the University 84 and the Bishop of Oxford, and New man felt called upon to discontinue the series. Newman resigned the leadership of the movement, which passed into the hands of the more learned and cautious Pusey, who had previously cast round an academical nimbus, and at length
to his name also. Many who had been so far its friends now withdrew, or went over to the opposite party. But this, again, produced the effect on the more faithful ones of causing them to abandon all reserve in following out their principles their full consequences. In the course of his studies in Church History, which he carried on in the retire ment of his country parish, Newman himself arrived at the conviction by degrees that his Via Media was untenable more and more the catholicity of the Romish Church out weighed in his estimation the apostolicity of the Anglican and the more he felt the defects of the latter, the dark spots in the disk of the former tended to vanish. When at last the Church of England committed what was in the eyes of him self and his friends the unpardonable crime of associating itself with the Lutheran and Calvinistic sects of the
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Church of Prussia, with the view of founding a new bishopric in Jerusalem, it appeared to Newman, as it had appeared still earlier to some more zealous friends, that to continue in such a Church was no longer possible. In October, 1845, he was received into the communion of the Romish Church, and in the course of a year he was followed by 1 50 clergymen and laymen of position belonging to his party. The party itself survived the heavy blow, but has subsequently shunned cautiously the slippery region of dogmatics, and devoted itself with the greater zeal to the elaboration of a ritual as nearly like that of the Catholics as possible. This Ritualism, how ever, has very little in common with theology. 1
books, which are of interest as giving an insight into his own reli
After his conversion Newman published several
? gious character, and as throwing indirectly light upon the movement of which he was the author and at first the chief leader. This is especially the case with his Apologia pro Vita Sua: being a History of his Religious Opinions (1865, 1st ed. ). This autobiography owes its attractiveness, not only to the universally acknowledged beauty of its style, but also to the honest openness with which the author describes the various phases of his religious opinions. A sincerely religious char acter is unveiled, as it struggles to reach the certainty of con viction with deepest earnestness ; and if the appearance of ambiguity and want of sincerity sometimes arises, it is not from the slightest wish to conceal anything from others from external considerations, but because the writer is not clear in his own mind, and because he is trying to hold perforce what is untenable and to conceal from himself consequences that are inevitable. But honourable as such a character may be, its weak side cannot be overlooked. The weakness consists rather in a moral than an intellectual inability to distinguish between religion and a particular form of its transmission in doctrine and ritual ; 2 because the firm centre of religious and
1 In one of his letters to Emerson, Carlyle criticises this ritualistic Pusey- ism in his somewhat pessimistic strain, as a symbol of the speedy dissolution of the superannuated English Church. In Past and Present, and elsewhere in his writings, he gives vent to similar vaticinations.
s Coinp. Apologia, p. 49. " From the age of fifteen, dogma has been the
fundamental principle of my religion :
enter into the idea of any other sort of religion ; religion as a mere sentiment, is to me a dream and a mockery. "
I know no other religion ; I cannot
? ? ? Ch. II. ] PARTIES AND MOVEMENTS IN THEOLOGY.
363
<
moral certainty cannot be found in the man himself, he clings to external authorities, maintains vehemently their inviolability, and all the time is driven further and further by the inevitable feeling of their insufficiency, until, weary of searching and inquiring, the secure haven of Romish infallibility is at last resorted to. What a different picture is presented in the religious history of Francis Newman, the younger brother of
l
!
John Henry, as it is described in his Phases of Faith
both brothers we have the same deep religious nature and the same restless desire for real conviction ; but in the case of the younger brother there is also the moral courage to aban don traditional opinions about the truth and to search for the truth itself, to let the outward props of authority fall one after the other, to gain in the soul itself true certainty of the reve lation of God. John Henry Newman has also formulated a theory of religious certainty, with a view to justifying his dog
probability being converted into certainty by a voluntary
assent and believing reception. Although this principle is not
wholly devoid of truth, there is reason to object to it,s that a
rule of certainty which is based neither on the reason nor on
proofs from fact, but on the simple power of the will to hold
something to be true, possesses no value, and may easily be
come as fruitful a source of superstition as of faith. In fact,
the subjective character of this purely emotional certainty
is acknowledged by Newman himself in the very remarkable
"
words :
The from in the matter of argument probability,
religion, became an argument from personality, which, in fact, is one form of the argument from authority. " It will be diffi cult to avoid this conclusion, if it is once granted that religious certainty rests merely upon emotional motives without rational
grounds ; in that case it of course, only subjective cer
See ante,
Apologia,
See Tulloch, in the Edinburgh Review, Oct. , 1870, and his Movements
Religious Thought,
103.
317. 19.
In
? matism, and has expounded it in the two books, An Essay on the Development ofChristian Doctrine (1845), and An Essay
in Aid of a Grammar of Assent (1870). In the latter he works out a principle which he had learnt from Keble,2 namely, that religious conviction does not rest on intellectual but emotional grounds, which cannot be theoretically proved,
? ? 821
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? 364 THEOLOGY IN GREAT BRITAIN SINCE 1825. [Bk. IV.
tainty that cannot rest upon itself, but to render it secure stands in need of the support of the greatest possible number of other subjects, that of external authority.
Newman's work on the Development Christian Doctrine takes as its starting-point the incontestable principle, that Christianity, like every historical institution, has passed through process of development, of growth, in doctrine and custom, and was not given to the world at the beginning in perfect form. He offers number of instances going to show that orthodox Protestantism under delusion, when
sup poses that all its doctrines and practices are taught in Scrip
ture and are prescribed therein, or are to be directly deduced therefrom. impossible to remain in the mere letter of Scripture, because the necessities of interpretation, for in stance, of such a phrase as " the Word became flesh," lead at once to a series of further questions. Other questions, such as the Canon of Scripture, its inspiration and authority, can not be answered from Scripture itself, because the Apostles had not then given any decision on them. As within the Biblical religion itself there " development through the Prophets to Jesus, so, again, in the apostolic teaching no historical point can be fixed at which the growth of doctrine ceased, and the rule of faith was once for all settled. " Finally, in Scripture itself the necessity of such a progressive develop ment distinctly indicated, for instance, the parables of the Leaven and the Mustard Seed. If in all this the author displays undoubtedly degree of sound historical sense, the reader immediately surprised by a very unhistorical and
? of the true principle! In order to guide the process of the development of Christianity, to distinguish correct developments from false, and to sanction them, there -- required an infallible authority outside the
genuinely dogmatic application
development namely, the Church. If Christianity as a whole, revelation, the results of its development must share the guarantee of its credentials. Revealed religion distin guished from Natural by the very fact that substitutes the voice of Law-giver --an objective authority, Apostle, Pope, or Church --for the voice of conscience. In Protestantism this authority the Bible but as can be proved that this authority insufficient, we must conclude that this required living and present source of revelation can only be the infal lible arbiter of all true doctrines -- the Church. Nor
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? Ch. II. ] PARTIES AND MOVEMENTS IN THEOLOGY. 365
sonal judgment precluded by this infallible authority, but is only limited to its proper range and preserved from error. --We must allow that this defence (following in the footsteps of the German Catholic Theologian Mohler) of the principle of Catho
lic tradition and authority is conducted very cleverly. It rests,
all the same, upon a great fallacy. The fact is overlooked
that the alleged infallible authority is itself a product of the f general development, and that it participates in its changes,
and is therefore subject, like every historical phenomenon, to the law of relativity. Moreover, the false traditional idea of development is throughout taken for granted -- namely, that development consists solely in positive growth, in an extension and more complete definition of older truth ; we hear nothing of the great fact, that development has also a negative aspect, that new truth does not come merely as an addition to the old, but often abrogates the old, so that in reality there is accom plished in it the continuous criticism of mind in the process of its development. We readily grant that this process does not go on without obedience to an inner law of rationality ; but precisely because reason is realised in the process of historic development, it does not require a special infallible institution to guide which can only become an impediment to the living spirit.
In the same year in which Newman set on foot the reac tionary High Church movement, Thomas Arnold, the Head Master at Rugby, published his pamphlet on The Principles\l of Church Reform, which, though provoked at first storm of indignation on all sides, presented in its fundamental thoughts the ferment of a new progressive movement in the English Church in the next decades. Arnold had, like New man, been a pupil of Whately's at Oxford, and a friend of Keble's. But while in the case of Newman the influence of
the devout friend soon overcame the cool intellectual acute-
ness of the tutor, with Arnold was the reverse.
out his life Arnold continued to combine profoundly earnest piety with clearness of intellect, manly love of truth, and a restless desire for practical work indeed, not easy to say which of these aspects of the noble man's character was most marked. Arnold was at the beginning of the thirties not less alarmed than Newman and his Oxford friends at the political troubles and threatening tempest which appeared to
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? 366 THEOLOGY IN GREAT BRITAIN SINCE 1825. [Bk. IV.
be gathering thick over the Church ; but while they sought salvation by the abandonment of the Reformation in a reform of dogma and the constitution and ritual of the Church, by which its boundaries would be narrowed and more sharply separated from the pulsating life of the nation, he demanded a reform in the opposite direction.