more spacious: the pity of it was that they looked in the wrong direction, and found a worse not a better alternative. 'Loss and Gain' gives a vivid picture of the mind of Tractarian Oxford, which presented certain obvious points of contact with that of reformers of the revolutionary type. It was intolerant, and self-assertive to the verge of insolence; it was a one-sided and intemperate revolt against the tradition of the place and time. If a man be called either venerable or 'moderate, distrust him, but, if both, be sure that he is a ' scoundrel,' said a well-known member of the sect, hearing Archbishop Howley commended for venerableness and moderation; the phrase recalls Luther's boisterous railing against the bishops of his day. Of Newman, who more than any one man embodied the reaction at its best and worst, Mr. Goldwin Smith notes that he was 'always in 'quest not of the truth, but of the best system.'* This is the key to his career. Rome has system without truth; Protestantism truth without system; by a homing instinct he gravitated to Rome. He was a great artist, a consummate advocate, a distinguished man of letters, a master of stately, delicate and impassioned prose. His personality was magnetic ; his sympathy, on his own field, ready, and his insight keen. He was very human. His autocentrism,' to borrow M. Bremond's phrase, was phenomenal; a man of moods and of temperament, he rather inspired than led. His gifts were those of a prophet, not a teacher. He was not learned; his judgement was defective; his sense of fact and faculty for dealing with evidence were small: 'Tecum habita, et noris quam sit tibi curta supellex.' Mr. Abbott's unsympathetic Philomythus'† is indispensable to an estimate either of the movement or the man. : That the unscrupulous attempts made by the Tractarians to dislodge their Evangelical and Liberal opponents from their standing-ground in the Church were unsuccessful was due to that great bulwark of liberty and religion, the Royal Supremacy the judgements of the Privy Council in the Gorham case and in that of Essays and Reviews' saved the Church. Since then 'reculer pour mieux sauter' has been the key to the policy adopted; every step gained has been made the starting-point for a new advance. The Movement has known how to utilise the most questionable features of * Reminiscences, p. 207. † Macmillan, 1891. modern democracy; it is backed by a singularly ignorant, a singularly insolent, and a singularly aggressive press. That it has acted as a corrective to the insularity of English religion is true; but it has corrected this defect on one side to accentuate it on the other. It was well that the continuity of the Pre- and the Post-Reformation Church should be exhibited; and that the unreformed Churches, Latin and Oriental, should be recognised as true, though corrupt, parts of the Church of Christ. But it was mischievous in the extreme that the ambiguous and uncertain theory of the Apostolical Succession should be emphasised in such a manner as to separate the English Church by a hard and fast line from the non-Episcopalian Churches of the continent-churches with which so high a Churchman as Cosin communicated without scruple, and Ussher did 'love ' and venerate as true members of the Church Universal.' The theory carried to this point is based on sheer ignorance. The belief in the divine right of bishops may be compared to the belief, with which it is so closely allied in English history, in the divine right of kings. Both were possible till it was known how these offices came into being. As long as it was believed that they were directly and immediately of God's appointment a divinity hedged them. When it became clear that they were historical growths, they took their place in the natural order: like the Sabbath, they were made for 'man.' In this country, however, the science of history, and in particular of religious origins, is yet in the rudimentary stage; and among the clergy the tide sets strongly towards sacerdotalism. The successive Gladstone and Salisbury Ministries, which between them covered more than a generation, broke with tradition by filling the more prominent sees with men of markedly ecclesiastical type. The Rosebery administration promised better things; but it was shortlived; and since then the declension has been rapid, the Liberals, for more than one reason, having been the worse of the two parties. Mr. Cornish speaks of the 'want of counsel and more than Gamaliellike caution'* of the bishops; their inaction, if not their acquiescence, has played into the extremists' hands. The result is a wide and increasing gulf between the clerical and the lay mind. The proceedings of Diocesan Conferences and of the House of Laymen must not blind us to this. The 'laymen who figure in ecclesiastical assemblies do not represent the true lay mind of the Church, still less the lay intelligence of the whole country. They are often excellent men, given * ii. 117. 6 'to good works, but they are also usually the partisans of some special clerical school; they are, in short, clergymen ' under another form rather than the real laity themselves.'* How marked is this drift of educated, moral and religious 'men from membership in the National Church towards 'an attitude of entire indifference to religion, combined in certain cases with a spirit of hostility and contempt for the clergy and the general policy pursued in matters ecclesiastical 'is hardly realised,' says a thoughtful writer, 'except by 'those who have seriously investigated the condition of affairs.'† No feature of the religious situation is more disquieting: the Latin countries show us its effects on religion, on public policy, on family and individual life. Hitherto in England we have been free from it, because we have had one education in which Englishmen have shared, according to their opportunities, without distinction of calling or creed. Now two rival and incompatible systems, the University and the Seminary, or theological college, compete for the training of our religious teachers. The object of the former is to unite, that of the latter to separate. Une formation spéciale et 'défectueuse crée nécessairement une mentalité particulière et 'inférieure.' An examination of the text-books which form the basis of the instruction given in these establishments explains the failure of the Church to come into contact with the intelligence of the people better than all the discussions that have taken place at the Church Congress or the Lambeth Conference : there can be no greater delusion than to base our hopes for the future of religion on the assumption that the people do not think. They think, often, to better purpose than we do; and what their thought loses in sophistication it gains in strength. A generation ago Froude summed up the position. —and his words are truer now than then : 'Externally the Ritualists have won the battle. But what a price has the victory cost! The nation has ceased to care what the clergy say or do. As the Church has become Catholic," the honoured name of Protestant has passed to the Nonconformists. The laity stand aloof, indifferent and contemptuous. The thinking part of it has now a seriousness of its own and a philosophy of its own which has grown and is growing. The clergy magnify their office, but the more they make of themselves the less is their intellectual influence. The great body of the English people, which *Stanley, Essays on Church and State,' p. 276. is Protestant at heart, will never allow their pretensions; and while they are discussing among themselves the nature of their supernatural commission, they are driving science and criticism to ask if there is anything in the world supernatural at all. The storm will die away; agitation is wearisome, and we may subside into a dull acquiescence even in the travesty of ecclesiasticism which is now in possession of the field. But the active mind of the country will less and less concern itself with a system which it despises. A ritualist English Church will be as powerless over the lives of the people as the Roman augurs over the Rome of Cicero and Caesar; and centuries will pass before religion and common sense will again work together with the practical harmony which existed between them in the days of Whately and Arnold and Hare and Sedgwick.'* The provincialism which is so distinctive a note of English religion is of comparatively late origin. Till the sixteenth century the common relation to the Papacy made Christendom an organic whole; nor did the Reformation isolate us. The intercourse between the English Church and the Reformed Churches was close and frequent; the divines of the Stewart period were familiar with the works of the great Schoolmen and of the Roman Catholic controversialists of their time. After the Revolution the preponderance of Louis XIV. and his support of the exiled royal family threw England back upon herself such theology as existed among us-it was small both in quantity and quality—was insular in the extreme. To this day it remains out of the main stream, and is national not European. It is not a little mortifying to observe how seldom an English writer is quoted by a continental theologian, and to notice that the exception is generally a non-episcopalian author whom we scarcely know by name. The Liberalising movement in the Church took, in the first instance, the shape of practical reform. It produced the Ecclesiastical Commission; it dealt with tithes, Church rates, education, and tests. It had links with the past-the old Latitudinarian school lingered in men like Bishop Watson-nor was it separated by any hard and fast line from tendencies which could not be described as Liberal. Coleridge and Marsh were among the first to introduce German ideas to English readers; the latter, who had studied at Leipzig, translating (1802) J. D. Michaelis' • Introduction to the New Testament.' Thirlwall translated Schleiermacher's Treatise on St. Luke' (1825), and, in conjunction with Julius Hare, that memorable work Niebuhr's History of Rome' (1828), which, making history * Short Studies on Great Subjects, iv. 337. a science, gave life and meaning to the past. Milman's History of the Jews' marked the birth of a new age of Biblical study. 'Its influence on the thought of the time cannot easily be exaggerated. The admission of historical perspective into the field of sacred history had far-reaching and unexpected consequences. Theologians and philosophers may confute each other without interesting many readers outside their own circle: progress in the history of religion and in the knowledge of the Bible is made not by theologians but by historians. The advance, whether in truth or error, which has been made during the last century is due to the historical and comparative method of discovering facts in textual, Biblical and historical science. This movement necessarily came in with the study of physical science and the development of the comparative method. Broad Churchmen and Latitudinarians are those who in every age accept scientific conclusions and endeavour to adapt traditional beliefs to them. Coleridge and Maurice believed themselves to be orthodox and conservative; Milman and Pattison knew that limits could not be set to enquiry, and believed that their duty was to look forward, not back. Such thinkers approach problems of faith from different points of view and in a different spirit; but their paths converge, and the upholder of Biblical and ecclesiastical authority instinctively knows them for his enemies.' * This accentuation of facts as distinct from ideas is characteristically English. It may easily become one-sided. It is impossible, indeed, to overestimate the importance of the historical method; Comte's great service to philosophy was to bring it into touch with the concrete. But perception without thought is blind. In vain would we rid ourselves of speculation; a philosophical theory, held consciously or unconsciously, underlies the simplest statement of fact. The history of thought is not thinking. And an exiled king returns a tyrant: the best safeguard against the predominance of theory is that theory should be established in its legitimate place. Of Arnold Mr. Cornish says truly that, had he lived, 'intellect, 'honesty and force of character pointed him out as the leader ' of the reformers'† not only at Oxford but in the Church at large. He was the one man who could have held his own against Newman; and his fundamental conception of the Church as co-extensive with the nation would have cut the ground from under the Oxford Movement, which, under a semblance of Catholicism, was essentially a sect. He saw more clearly and spoke more boldly than those who * i. 187. VOL. CCXIV. NO. CCCCXXXVII. † i. 189. |