Page:Catholic Encyclopedia, volume 11.djvu/408

 OXFORD

372

OXFORD

ference, 25-29 July, ;iiiil wore ondeavourinp to start a society of Cliurcli ilffi'iici-, with machinery and sal'c- guards, iis bolillcd ri'sponsiblo jJiTsons. But Xcwnian would not be swamiHil by committops. " Lutlifr", lie wrote, "Wius an individual". He proposed to be an Apostolical Luther. He was not now tutor of Oriel. Hawkins had turned him out of offire — a curious ac- knowli'dfiement of the vote by which he had made Hawkins jjrovost instead of Keblo. But he was Vicar of St. Mary'.s — a parish dependent on Oriel, and the university church. His jjuljiit was one of the most fa- mous in England. He knew the secret of journalism, and had at his command a stern eloquence, barbed by convictions, which his reading of the Fathers and the Anglican folios daily strengthened. He felt supreme confidence in his position. But he was not well read in the history of the Anglican origins or of the Royal Supremacy. His Church was an ideal; never, cer- tainly, since the legislation of Henry and Elizabeth had the English Establishment enjoyed the freedom he sought. It had issued articles of faith imposed by po- litical expediency; it had tolerated among its communi- cants Lutherans, Calvinists, Erastians, and in the persons of high dignitaries like Bishop Hoadley even Socinians. It had never been self-governing in the past any more than it was now. If the "idea or first princi- ple" of the movement was "ecclesiastical liberty", it must be pronounced a failure; for the Royal Suprem- acy as understood by lawyers and lamented over by High Church divines is still intact.

On that side, therefore, not a shadow of victory ap- pears. Anyone may believe the doctrines peculiar to Tractarian theology, and any one may reject them, without incurring penalties in the Church Establish- ment. They are opinions, not dogmas, not the exclu- sive teaching that alone constitutes a creed. Fresh from Aristotle's "Ethics", where virtue is said to he in a mean, the Oriel scholar termed his position the Via Media; it was the golden mean which avoided papal corruptions and Protestant heresies. But did it exist an>-where except in books? Was it not "as a doctrine, wanting in simplicity, hard to master, indeterminate in its provisons, and without a substantive existence in any age or country"? Newman did not deny that "it still remains to be tried whether what is called Anglo-Catholicism, the religion of Andrewes, Laud, Hammond, Butler, and Wilson, is capable of being professed, acted on, and maintained ... or whether it be a mere modification or transition-state of Roman- ism or of popular Protestantism." The Via Media was an experiment. Perhaps the Established Church "never represented a doctrine at all . . . never had had an Intellectual ba.sis"; perhaps it has "been but a name, or a department of State" (Proph. Office, In- trod.). To this second conclusion the author finally came; but not until during eight years he had made trial of his "middle way" and had won to it a crowd of disciples. The Tractarian Movement succeeded after his time in planting among the varieties of Anglican religious life a Catholic party. It failed altogether in making of the Establishment a Catholic Church.

Palmer, of Worcester College, and his clerical asso- ciates presented an athlress in 1834, signed with 10,000 names, to the Archbishop of Canterbury, defending the imperilled interests. Joshua Watson, a leading layman, brought, up one more emphatic, to which 230,- 000 heads of families gave their adhesion. But of these collective efforts no Ixsting result came, although they frightened the Government and damped its revolu- tionary zeal. Mr. Rose, a man of hifrh character and distinction, had started the "British Magazine" as a Church organ; the conference at Hadleigh was due to him; and he seemed to be marked out as chief over "nobodies" like Froude and Newman. His friends objected to the "Tracts" which were the doing of these free lances. Newman, however, would not give way. His language about the Reformation offended

Mr. Rose, who held it to be a "deliverance"; and while Froude was eager to dissolve the union of Church and State, which he considered to be the parent or the tool of "Liberalism" in docrtrine, he called Hose a "conservative". Between minds thus drawing in op- posite directions any real fellowshl)) wius not likely to endure. Rose may be termed an auxiliary in th<' first stage of Church defence; he never was a'Praeturian; and he died in 1839. His ally, William I'ahiier, long survived him. Palmer, an Irish Protestant, learneil and pompous, had printed his "Origines Liturgica-" in 1832, a volume now obsolete, but the best book for that period on the Offices of the Church of England. His later "Treatise on the Church", of 1838, was purely Anglican and therefore anti-Roman; it so far won the respect of Father Perrone, S.J., that he replied to it.

Palmer was no Tractarian either, as his "Narrative of Events", pubhshed in 1843, sufficiently proves. The (lifTcrence may be sharply stated. (Jenuine .Angli- cans idem if led the Catholic Church once for all with the local bo( ly c if which they were members, and infeqireted the phenomena whether of medieval or reformed Christianity on this principle; they were Englishmen first and Catholics after. Not so with Newman, who tells us, "I felt affection for my own Church, but not tenderness ... if Liberalism once got a foot- ing within her, it was sure of the victory in the event. I saw that Reformation principles were powerless to rescue her. As to leaving her, the thought never crossed my imagination; still I ever kept before me that there was something greater than the Established Church, and that was the Church Catholic and Apos- tolic, set up from the beginning, of which she was but the local presence and the organ." These divergent views went at last asunder in 1845.

"The new Tracts", says Dean Church, "were re- ceived with surprise, dismay, ridicule, and indigna- tion. But they also at once called forth a response of eager sympathy from numbers. ' ' An active propa- ganda was started all over the country. Bishops were perplexed at so bold a restatement of the Apostolic Succession, in which they hardly believed. Newman affirmed the principle of dogma; a visible Church with sacraments and rites as the channels of invisible grace; a Divinely ordained episcopal system as inculcaleil by the Epistles of St. Ignatius. But the Erastian or Lib- eral did not set store by dogma; and the Evangelical found no grace ex opcre operato in the sacraments. Episcopacy to both of them was but a convenient form of Church government, and the Church itself a voluntary association. Now the English bishops, who were appointed by Erastians ("an infidel govern- ment" is Keble's expression), dreaded the jiower of EvangcUcals. At no time could they dare to sui)[)ort the "Tracts". Moreover, to quote Newman, "All the world was astounded at what Froude and I were say- ing; men said that it was sheer Popery." There were searchings of heart in England, the like of which had not been felt since the non-jurors went out. Catholics had been emancipated; and "those that sat in the re- formers' seats were traducing the Reformation". To add to the confusion, the Liberalizing attack on the university had now begun. In 1834 Dr. Hampden wrote and sent to Newman his pamphlet, in which he recommended the abolition of tests for Dissenters, or, technically, of subscription to the Articles by under- graduates. On what grounds? Because, he said, re- ligion was one thing, theological opinion another. The Trinitarian and Unitarian doctrines were merely opin- ions, and the spirit of the English Church was not the spirit of dogma. Hampden did little more than repeat the well-known arguments of Locke and Chilling- worth; but he was breaking open the gates of Oxford to unbelief, as Newman foresaw, and the latter an- swered wrathfully that Hampden's views made ship- wreck of the Christian faith. "Since that time", says