The Oxford Movement has been spoken of as a reaction against the so-called Oriel Movement, a conservative tendency over against an intellectualist and progressive one. In a measure the personal animosities within the Oxford circle may be accounted for in this way.
The Tractarian Movement, however, which issued, on the one hand, in the going over of Newman to the Church of Rome and, on the other, in a great revival of Catholic principles within the Anglican Church itself, stands in a far larger setting. It was not merely an English or insular movement. It was a wave from a continental flood. On its own showing it was not merely an ecclesiastical movement. It had political and social aims as well. There was a universal European reaction against the Enlightenment and the Revolution. That reaction was not simple, but complex. It was a revolt of the conservative spirit from the new ideals which had been suddenly translated into portentous realities. It was marked everywhere by hatred of the eighteenth century with all its ways and works. On the one side we have the revolutionary thesis, the rights of man, the authority of reason, the watchwords liberty, equality, fraternity. On the other side stood forth those who were prepared to a.s.sert the meaning of community, the continuity of history, spiritual as well as civil authority as the basis of order, and order as the condition of the highest good. In literature the tendency appears as romanticism, in politics as legitimism, in religion as ultramontanism.
Le Maistre with his _L"Eglise gallicane du Pape_; Chateaubriand with his _Genie du Christianisme_; Lamennais with his _Essai sur l"Indifference en Matiere, de Religion_, were, from 1820 to 1860, the exponents of a view which has had prodigious consequences for France and Italy. The romantic movement arose outside of Catholicism. It was impersonated in Herder. Friedrich Schlegel, Werner and others went over to the Roman Church. The political reaction was specifically Latin and Catholic. In the lurid light of anarchy Rome seemed to have a mission again. Divine right in the State must be restored through the Church. The Catholic apologetic saw the Revolution as only the logical conclusion of the premises of the Reformation. The religious revolt of the sixteenth century, the philosophical revolt of the seventeenth, the political revolt of the eighteenth, the social revolt of the nineteenth, are all parts of one dreadful sequence. As the Church lifted up the world after the first flood of the barbarians, so must she again lift up the world after the devastations made by the more terrible barbarians of the eighteenth century. England had indeed stood a little outside of the cyclone which had devastated the world from Coronna to Moscow and from the Channel to the Pyramids, but she had been exhausted in putting down the revolution. Only G.o.d"s goodness had preserved England. The logic of Puritanism would have been the same. Indeed, in England the State was weaker and worse than were the states upon the Continent. For since 1688 it had been a popular and const.i.tutional monarchy. In Frederick William"s phrase, its sovereign took his crown from the gutter. The Church was through and through Erastian, a creature of the State.
Bishops were made by party representatives. Acts like the Reform Bills, the course of the Government in the matter of the Irish Church, were steps which would surely bring England to the pa.s.s which France had reached in 1789. The source of such acts was wrong. It was with the people. It was in men, not in G.o.d. It was in reason, not in authority.
It would be difficult to overstate the strength of this reactionary sentiment in important circles in England at the end of the third decade of the nineteenth century.
THE OXFORD MOVEMENT
In so far as that complex of causes just alluded to made of the Oxford Movement or the Catholic revival a movement of life, ecclesiastical, social and political as well, its history falls outside the purpose of this book. We proposed to deal with the history of thought. Reactionary movements have frequently got on without much thought. They have left little deposit of their own in the realm of ideas. Their avowed principle has been that of recurrence to that which has already been thought, of fidelity to ideas which have long prevailed. This is the reason why the conservatives have not a large place in such a sketch as this. It is not that their writings have not often been full of high learning and of the subtlest of reasoning. It is only that the ideas about which they reason do not belong to the history of the nineteenth century. They belong, on the earnest contention of the conservatives themselves--those of Protestants, to the history of the Reformation--and of Catholics, both Anglican and Roman, to the history of the early or mediaeval Church.
Nevertheless, when with pa.s.sionate conviction a great man, taking the reactionary course, thinks the problem through again from his own point of view, then we have a real phenomenon in the history of contemporary thought. When such an one wrestles before G.o.d to give reason to himself and to his fellows for the faith that is in him, then the reactionary"s reasoning is as imposing and suggestive as is any other. He leaves in his work an intellectual deposit which must be considered. He makes a contribution which must be reckoned with, even more seriously, perhaps, by those who dissent from it than by those who may agree with it. Such deposit Newman and the Tractarian movement certainly did make. They offered a rationale of the reaction. They gave to the Catholic revival a standing in the world of ideas, not merely in the world of action.
Whether their reasoning has weight to-day, is a question upon which opinion is divided. Yet Newman and his compeers, by their character and standing, by their distinctively English qualities and by the road of reason which they took in the defence of Catholic principles, made Catholicism English again, in a sense in which it had not been English for three hundred years. Yet though Newman brought to the Roman Church in England, on his conversion to it, a prestige and qualities which in that communion were unequalled, he was never _persona grata_ in that Church. Outwardly the Roman Catholic revival in England was not in large measure due to Newman and his arguments. It was due far more to men like Wiseman and Manning, who were not men of argument but of deeds.
NEWMAN
John Henry Newman was born in 1801, the son of a London banker. His mother was of Huguenot descent. He came under Calvinistic influence.
Through study especially, of Romaine _On Faith_ he became the subject of an inward conversion, of which in 1864 he wrote: "I am still more certain of it than that I have hands and feet." Thomas Scott, the evangelical, moved him. Before he was sixteen he made a collection of Scripture texts in proof of the doctrine of the trinity. From Newton _On the Prophecies_ he learned to identify the Pope with anti-Christ--a doctrine by which, he adds, his imagination was stained up to the year 1843. In his _Apologia_, 1865, he declares: "From the age of fifteen, dogma has been a fundamental principle of my religion. I cannot enter into the idea of any other sort of religion." At the age of twenty-one, two years after he had taken his degree, he came under very different influences. He pa.s.sed from Trinity College to a fellowship in Oriel. To use his own phrase, he drifted in the direction of liberalism. He was touched by Whately. He was too logical, and also too dogmatic, to be satisfied with Whately"s position. Of the years from 1823 to 1827 Mozley says: "Probably no one who then knew Newman could have told which way he would go. It is not certain that he himself knew." Francis W. Newman, Newman"s brother, who later became a Unitarian, remembering his own years of stress, speaks with embitterment of his elder brother, who was profoundly uncongenial to him.
The year 1827, in which Keble"s _Christian Year_ was published, saw another change in Newman"s views. Illness and bereavement came to him with awakening effect. He made the acquaintance of Hurrell Froude.
Froude brought Newman and Keble together. Henceforth Newman bore no more traces either of evangelicalism or of liberalism. Of Froude it is difficult to speak with confidence. His brother, James Anthony Froude, the historian, author of the _Nemesis of Faith_, 1848, says that he was gifted, brilliant, enthusiastic. Newman speaks of him with almost boundless praise. Two volumes of his sermons, published after his death in 1836, make the impression neither of learning nor judgment. Clearly he had charm. Possibly he talked himself into a common-room reputation.
Newman says: "Froude made me look with admiration toward the Church of Rome." Keble never had felt the liberalism through which Newman had pa.s.sed. Cradled as the Church of England had been in Puritanism, the latter was to him simply evil. Opinions differing from his own were not simply mistaken, they were sinful. He conceived no religious truth outside the Church of England. In the _Christian Year_ one perceives an influence which Newman strongly felt. It was that of the idea of the sacramental significance of all natural objects or events. Pusey became professor of Hebrew in 1830. He lent the movement academic standing, which the others could not give. He had been in Germany, and had published an _Inquiry into the Rationalist Character of German Theology_, 1825. He hardly did more than expose the ignorance of Rose.
He was himself denounced as a German rationalist who dared to speak of a new era in theology. Pusey, mourning the defection of Newman, whom he deeply loved, gathered in 1846 the forces of the Anglo-Catholics and continued in some sense a leader to the end of his long life in 1882.
The course of political events was fretting the Conservatives intolerably. The agitation for the Reform Bill was taking shape. Sir Robert Peel, the member for Oxford, had introduced a Bill for the emanc.i.p.ation of the Roman Catholics. There was violent commotion in Oxford. Keble and Newman strenuously opposed the measure. In 1830 there was revolution in France. In England the Whigs had come into power.
Newman"s mind was excited in the last degree. "The vital question," he says, "is this, how are we to keep the Church of England from being liberalised?" At the end of 1832 Newman and Froude went abroad together.
On this journey, as he lay becalmed in the straits of Bonifacio, he wrote his immortal hymn, "Lead, Kindly Light." He came home a.s.sured that he had a work to do. Keble"s a.s.size Sermon on the _National Apostasy_, preached in July 1833, on the Sunday after Newman"s return to Oxford, kindled the conflagration which had been long preparing. Newman conceived the idea of the _Tracts for the Times_ as a means of expressing the feelings and propagating the opinions which deeply moved him. "From the first," he says, "my battle was with liberalism. By liberalism I mean the anti-dogmatic principle. Secondly, my aim was the a.s.sertion of the visible Church with sacraments and rites and definite religious teaching on the foundation of dogma; and thirdly, the a.s.sertion of the Anglican Church as opposed to the Church of Rome."
Newman grew greatly in personal influence. His afternoon sermons at St.
Mary"s exerted spiritual power. They deserved so to do. Here he was at his best. All of his strength and little of his weakness shows. His insight, his subtility, his pathos, his love of souls, his marvellous play of dramatic as well as of spiritual faculty, are in evidence. Keble and Pusey were busying themselves with the historical aspects of the question. Pusey began the _Library of the Fathers_, the most elaborate literary monument of the movement. Nothing could be more amazing than the uncritical quality of the whole performance. The first check to the movement came in 1838, when the Bishop of Oxford animadverted upon the _Tracts_. Newman professed his willingness to stop them. The Bishop did not insist. Newman"s own thought moved rapidly onward in the only course which was still open to it.
Newman had been bred in the deepest reverence for Scripture. In a sense that reverence never left him, though it changed its form. He saw that it was absurd to appeal to the Bible in the old way as an infallible source of doctrine. How could truth be infallibly conveyed in defective and fallible expressions? Newman"s own studies in criticism, by no means profound, led him to this correct conclusion. This was the end for him of evangelical Protestantism. The recourse was then to the infallible Church. Infallible guide and authority one must have. Without these there can be no religion. To trust to reason and conscience as conveying something of the light of G.o.d is impossible. To wait in patience and to labour in fort.i.tude for the increase of that light is unendurable. One must have certainty. There can be no certainty by the processes of the mind from within. This can come only by miraculous certification from without.
According to Newman the authority of the Church should never have been impaired in the Reformation. Or rather, in his view of that movement, this authority, for truly Christian men, had never been impaired. The intellect is aggressive, capricious, untrustworthy. Its action in religious matters is corrosive, dissolving, sceptical. "Man"s energy of intellect must be smitten hard and thrown back by infallible authority, if religion is to be saved at all." Newman"s philosophy was utterly sceptical, although, unlike most absolute philosophical sceptics, he had a deep religious experience. The most complete secularist, in his negation of religion, does not differ from Newman in his low opinion of the value of the surmises of the mind as to the transcendental meaning of life and the world. He differs from Newman only in lacking that which to Newman was the most indefeasible thing which he had at all, namely, religious experience. Newman was the child of his age, though no one ever abused more fiercely the age of which he was the child. He supposed that he believed in religion on the basis of authority. Quite the contrary, he believed in religion because he had religion or, as he says, in a magnificent pa.s.sage in one of his parochial sermons, because religion had him. His scepticism forbade him to recognise that this was the basis of his belief. His diremption of human nature was absolute.
The soul was of G.o.d. The mind was of the devil. He dare not trust his own intellect concerning this inestimable treasure of his experience. He dare not trust intellect at all. He knew not whither it might lead him.
The mind cannot be broken to the belief of a power above it. It must have its stiff neck bent to recognise its Creator.
His whole book, _The Grammar of a.s.sent_, 1870, is pervaded by the intensest philosophical scepticism. Scepticism supplies its motives, determines its problems, necessitates its distinctions, rules over the succession and gradation of its arguments. The whole aim of the work is to withdraw religion and the proofs of it, from the region of reason into the realm of conscience and imagination, where the arguments which reign may satisfy personal experience without alleging objective validity or being able to bear the criticism which tests it. Again, he is the perverse, unconscious child of the age which he curses. Had not Kant and Schleiermacher, Coleridge and Channing sought, does not Ritschl seek, to remove religion from the realm of metaphysics and to bring it within the realm of experience? They had, however, pursued the same end by different means. One is reminded of that saying of Gretchen concerning Mephistopheles: "He says the same thing with the pastor, only in different words." Newman says the same words, but means a different thing.
a.s.suming the reduction of religion to experience, in which Kant and Schleiermacher would have agreed, and a.s.serting the worthlessness of mentality, which they would have denied, we are not surprised to hear Newman say that without Catholicism doubt is invincible. "The Church"s infallibility is the provision adopted by the mercy of the Creator to preserve religion in the world. Outside the Catholic Church all things tend to atheism. The Catholic Church is the one face to face antagonist, able to withstand and baffle the fierce energy of pa.s.sion and the all-dissolving scepticism of the mind. I am a Catholic by virtue of my belief in G.o.d. If I should be asked why I believe in G.o.d, I should answer, because I believe in myself. I find it impossible to believe in myself, without believing also in the existence of him who lives as a personal, all-seeing, all-judging being in my conscience." These pa.s.sages are mainly taken from the _Apologia_, written long after Newman had gone over to the Roman Church. They perfectly describe the att.i.tude of his mind toward the Anglican Church, so long as he believed this, and not the Roman, to be the true Church. He had once thought that a man could hold a position midway between the Protestantism which he repudiated and the Romanism which he still resisted. He stayed in the _via media_ so long as he could. But in 1839 he began to have doubts about the Anglican order of succession. The catholicity of Rome began to overshadow the apostolicity of Anglicanism. The Anglican formularies cannot be at variance with the teachings of the authoritative and universal Church. This is the problem which the last of the _Tracts_, _Tract Ninety_, sets itself. It is one of those which Newman wrote. One must find the sense of the Roman Church in the Thirty-Nine Articles.
This tract is prefaced by an extraordinary disquisition upon reserve in the communication of religious knowledge. G.o.d"s revelations of himself to mankind have always been a kind of veil. Truth is the reward of holiness. The Fathers were holy men. Therefore what the Fathers said must be true. The principle of reserve the Articles ill.u.s.trate. They do not mean what they say. They were written in an uncatholic age, that is, in the age of the Reformation. They were written by Catholic men. Else how can the Church of England be now a Catholic Church? Through their reserve they were acceptable in an uncatholic age. They cannot be uncatholic in spirit, else how should they be identical in meaning with the great Catholic creeds? Then follows an exposition of every important article of the thirty-nine, an effort to interpret each in the sense of the Roman Catholic Church of to-day. Four tutors published a protest against the tract. Formal censure was pa.s.sed upon it. It was now evident to Newman that his place in the leadership of the Oxford Movement was gone. From this time, the spring of 1841, he says he was on his deathbed as regards the Church of England. He withdrew to Littlemore and established a brotherhood there. In the autumn of 1843 he resigned the parochial charge of St. Mary"s at Oxford. On the 9th of October 1845 he was formally admitted to the Roman Church. On the 6th of October Ernest Renan had formally severed his connexion with that Church.
It is a strange thing that in his _Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine_, written in 1845, Newman himself should have advanced substantially Hampden"s contention. Here are written many things concerning the development of doctrine which commend themselves to minds conversant with the application of historical criticism to the whole dogmatic structure of the Christian ages. The purpose is with Newman entirely polemical, the issue exactly that which one would not have foreseen. Precisely because the development of doctrine is so obvious, because no historical point can be found at which the growth of doctrine ceased and the rule of faith was once for all settled, therefore an infallible authority outside of the development must have existed from the beginning, to provide a means of distinguishing true development from false. This infallible guide is, of course, the Church. It seems incredible that Newman could escape applying to the Church the same argument which he had so skilfully applied to Scripture and dogmatic history. Similar is the case with the argument of the _Grammar of a.s.sent_. "No man is certain of a truth who can endure the thought of its contrary." If the reason why I cannot endure the thought of the contradictory of a belief which I have made my own, is that so to think brings me pain and darkness, this does not prove my truth. If my belief ever had its origin in reason, it must be ever refutable by reason. It is not corroborated by the fact that I do not wish to see anything that would refute it.[8] This last fact may be in the highest degree an act of arbitrariness. To make the impossibility of thinking the opposite, the test of truth, and then to shut one"s eyes to those evidences which might compel one to think the opposite, is the essence of irrationality.
One attains by this method indefinite a.s.sertiveness, but not certainty.
Newman lived in some seclusion in the Oratory of St. Philip Neri in Birmingham for many years. A few distinguished men, and a number of his followers, in all not more than a hundred and fifty, went over to the Roman Church after him. The defection was never so great as, in the first shock, it was supposed that it would be. The outward influence of Newman upon the Anglican Church then ceased. But the ideas which he put forth have certainly been of great influence in that Church to this day.
Most men know the portrait of the great cardinal, the wide forehead, ploughed deep with horizontal furrows, the pale cheek, down which "long lines of shadow slope, which years and anxious thought and suffering give." One looks into the wonderful face of those last days--Newman lived to his ninetieth year--and wonders if he found in the infallible Church the peace which he so earnestly sought.
[Footnote 8: Fairbairn, _Catholicism, Roman and Anglican_, p. 157.]
MODERNISM
It was said that the Oxford Movement furnished the rationale of the reaction. Many causes, of course, combine to make the situation of the Roman Church and the status of religion in the Latin countries of the Continent the lamentable one that it is. That position is worst in those countries where the Roman Church has most nearly had free play. The alienation both of the intellectual and civil life from organised religion is grave. That the Roman Church occupies in England to-day a position more favourable than in almost any nation on the Continent, and better than it occupied in England at the beginning of the nineteenth century, is due in large measure to the general influence of the movement with which we have been dealing. The Anglican Church was at the beginning of the nineteenth century preponderantly evangelical, low-church and conscious of itself as Protestant. At the beginning of the twentieth it is dominantly ritualistic and disposed to minimise its relation to the Reformation. This resurgence of Catholic principles is another effect of the movement of which we speak. Other factors must have wrought for this result besides the body of arguments which Newman and his compeers offered. The argument itself, the mere intellectual factor, is not adequate. There is an inherent contradiction in the effort to ground in reason an authority which is to take the place of reason. Yet round and round this circle all the labours of John Henry Newman go. Cardinal Manning felt this. The victory of the Church was not to be won by argument. It is well known that Newman opposed the decree of infallibility. It cannot be said that upon this point his arguments had great weight. If one a.s.sumes that truth comes to us externally through representatives of G.o.d, and if the truth is that which they a.s.sert, then in the last a.n.a.lysis what they a.s.sert is truth. If one has given in to such authority because one distrusts his reason, then it is querulous to complain that the deliverances of authority do not comport with reason. There may be, of course, the greatest interest in the struggle as to the instance in which this authority is to be lodged.
This interest attaches to the age-long struggle between Pope and Council. It attaches to the dramatic struggle of Dollinger, Dupanloup, Lord Acton and the rest, in 1870. Once the Church has spoken there is, for the advocate of authoritative religion, no logic but to submit.
Similarly as to the _Encyclical_ and _Syllabus of Errors_ of 1864, which forecast the present conflict concerning Modernism. The _Syllabus_ had a different atmosphere from that which any Englishman in the sixties would have given it. Had not Newman, however, made pa.s.sionate warfare on the liberalism of the modern world? Was it not merely a question of degrees?
Was Gladstone"s att.i.tude intelligible? The contrast of two principles in life and religion, the principles of authority and of the spirit, is being brought home to men"s consciousness as it has never been before.
One reads _Il Santo_ and learns concerning the death of Fogazzaro, one looks into the literature relating to Tyrrell, one sees the fate of Loisy, comparing the really majestic achievement in his works and the spirit of his _Simple Reflections_ with the _Encyclical Pascendi_, 1907.
One understands why these men have done what they could to remain within the Roman Church. One recalls the att.i.tude of Dollinger to the inauguration of the Old Catholic Movement, reflects upon the relative futility of the Old Catholic Church, and upon the position of Hyacinthe Loyson. One appreciates the feeling of these men that it is impossible, from without, to influence as they would the Church which they have loved. The present difficulty of influencing it from within seems almost insuperable. The history of Modernism as an effective contention in the world of Christian thought seems scarcely begun. The opposition to Modernism is not yet a part of the history of thought.
ROBERTSON
In no life are reflected more perfectly the spiritual conflicts of the fifth decade of the nineteenth century than in that of Frederick W.
Robertson. No mind worked itself more triumphantly out of these difficulties. Descended from a family of Scottish soldiers, evangelical in piety, a student in Oxford in 1837, repelled by the Oxford Movement, he undertook his ministry under a morbid sense of responsibility. He reacted violently against his evangelicalism. He travelled abroad, read enormously, was plunged into an agony which threatened mentally to undo him. He took his charge at Brighton in 1847, still only thirty-one years old, and at once shone forth in the splendour of his genius. A martyr to disease and petty persecution, dying at thirty-seven, he yet left the impress of one of the greatest preachers whom the Church of England has produced. He left no formal literary work such as he had designed. Of his sermons we have almost none from his own ma.n.u.scripts. Yet his influence is to-day almost as intense as when the sermons were delivered. It is, before all, the wealth and depth of his thought, the reality of the content of the sermons, which commands admiration. They are a cla.s.sic refutation of the remark that one cannot preach theology.
Out of them, even in their fragmentary state, a well-articulated system might be made. He brought to his age the living message of a man upon whom the best light of his age had shone.
PHILLIPS BROOKS
Something of the same sort may be said concerning Phillips Brooks. He inherited on his father"s side the sober rationalism and the humane and secular interest of the earlier Unitarianism, on his mother"s side the intensity of evangelical pietism with the Calvinistic form of thought.
The conflict of these opposing tendencies in New England was at that time so great that Brooks"s parents sought refuge with the low-church element in the Episcopal Church. Brooks"s education at Harvard College, where he took his degree in 1855, as also at Alexandria, and still more, his reading and experience, made him sympathetic with that which, in England in those years, was called the Broad Church party. He was deeply influenced by Campbell and Maurice. Later well known in England, he was the compeer of the best spirits of his generation there. Deepened by the experience of the great war, he held in succession two pulpits of large influence, dying as Bishop of Ma.s.sachusetts in 1893. There is a theological note about his preaching, as in the case of Robertson. Often it is the same note. Brooks had pa.s.sed through no such crisis as had Robertson. He had flowered into the greatness of rational belief. His sermons are a contribution to the thinking of his age. We have much finished material of this kind from his own hand, and a book or two besides. His service through many years as preacher to his university was of inestimable worth. The presentation of ever-advancing thought to a great public const.i.tuency is one of the most difficult of tasks. It is also one of the most necessary. The fusion of such thoughtfulness with spiritual impulse has rarely been more perfectly achieved than in the preaching of Phillips Brooks.
THE BROAD CHURCH
We have used the phrase, the Broad Church party. Stanley had employed the adjective to describe the real character of the English Church, over against the ant.i.thesis of the Low Church and the High. The designation adhered to a group of which Stanley was himself a type. They were not bound together in a party. They had no ecclesiastical end in view. They were of a common spirit. It was not the spirit of evangelicalism. Still less was it that of the Tractarians. It was that which Robertson had manifested. It aimed to hold the faith with an open mind in all the intellectual movement of the age. Maurice should be enumerated here, with reservations. Kingsley beyond question belonged to this group.
There was great ardour among them for the improvement of social conditions, a sense of the social mission of Christianity. There grew up what was called a Christian Socialist movement, which, however, never attained or sought a political standing. The Broad Church movement seemed, at one time, a.s.sured of ascendancy in the Church of England. Its aims appeared congruous with the spirit of the times. Yet Dean Fremantle esteems himself perhaps the last survivor of an ill.u.s.trious company.
The men who in 1860 published the volume known as _Essays and Reviews_ would be cla.s.sed with the Broad Church. In its authorship were a.s.sociated seven scholars, mostly Oxford men. Some one described _Essays and Reviews_ as the _Tract Ninety_ of the Broad Church. It stirred public sentiment and brought the authors into conflict with authority in a somewhat similar way. The living antagonism of the Broad Church was surely with the Tractarians rather than with the evangelicals. Yet the most significant of the essays, those on miracles and on prophecy, touched opinions common to both these groups. Jowett, later Master of Balliol, contributed an essay on the "Interpretation of Scripture." It hardly belongs to Jowett"s best work. Yet the controversy then precipitated may have had to do with Jowett"s adherence to Platonic studies instead of his devoting himself to theology. The most decisive of the papers was that of Baden Powell on the "Study of the Evidences of Christianity." It was mainly a discussion of the miracle. It was radical and conclusive. The essay closes with an allusion to Darwin"s _Origin of Species_, which had then just appeared. Baden Powell died shortly after its publication. The fight came on Rowland Williams"s paper upon Bunson"s _Biblical Researches_. It was really upon the prophecies and their use in "Christian Evidences." Baron Bunsen was not a great archaeologist, but he brought to the attention of English readers that which was being done in Germany in this field. Williams used the archaeological material to rectify the current theological notions concerning ancient history. A certain type of English mind has always shown zeal for the interpretation of prophecy. Williams"s thesis, briefly put, was this: the Bible does not always give the history of the past with accuracy; it does not give the history of the future at all; prophecy means spiritual teaching, not secular prognostication. A reader of our day may naturally feel that Wilson, with his paper on the "National Church," made the greatest contribution. He built indeed upon Coleridge, but he had a larger horizon. He knew the arguments of the great Frenchmen of his day and of their English imitators who, in Benn"s phrase, narrowed and perverted the ideal of a world-wide humanity into that of a Church founded on dogmas and administered by clericals. Wilson argued that in Jesus" teaching the basis of the religious community is ethical. The Church is but the instrument for carrying out the will of G.o.d as manifest in the moral law. The realisation of the will of G.o.d must extend beyond the limits of the Church"s activity, however widely these are drawn. There arose a violent agitation. Williams and Wilson were prosecuted. The case was tried in the Court of Arches. Williams was defended by no less a person than Fitzjames Stephen. The two divines were sentenced to a year"s suspension. This decision was reversed by the Lord Chancellor. Fitzjames Stephen had argued that if the men most interested in the church, namely, its clergy, are the only men who may be punished for serious discussion of the facts and truths of religion, then respect on the part of the world for the Church is at an end. By this discussion the English clergy, even if Anglo-Catholic, are in a very different position from the Roman priests, over whom encyclicals, even if not executed, are always suspended.
Similar was the issue in the case of Colenso, Bishop of Natal. Equipped mainly with Cambridge mathematics added to purest self-devotion, he had been sent out as a missionary bishop. In the process of the translation of the Pentateuch for his Zulus, he had come to reflect upon the problem which the Old Testament presents. In a manner which is altogether marvellous he worked out critical conclusions parallel to those of Old Testament scholars on the Continent. He was never really an expert, but in his main contention he was right. He adhered to his opinion despite severe pressure and was not removed from the episcopate. With such guarantees it would be strange indeed if we could not say that biblical studies entered in Great Britain, as also in America, on a development in which scholars of these nations are not behind the best scholars of the world. The trials for heresy of Robertson Smith in Edinburgh and of Dr. Briggs in New York have now little living interest. Yet biblical studies in Scotland and America were incalculably furthered by those discussions. The publication of a book like _Supernatural Religion_, 1872, ill.u.s.trates a proclivity not uncommon in self-conscious liberal circles, for taking up a contention just when those who made it and have lived with it have decided to lay it down. However, the names of Hatch and Lightfoot alone, not to mention the living, are sufficient to warrant the a.s.sertions above made.
More than once in these chapters we have spoken of the service rendered to the progress of Christian thought by the criticism and interpretation of religion at the hands of literary men. That country and age may be esteemed fortunate in which religion occupies a place such that it compels the attention of men of genius. In the history of culture this has by no means always been the case. That these men do not always speak the language of edification is of minor consequence. What is of infinite worth is that the largest minds of the generation shall engage themselves with the topic of religion. A history of thought concerning Christianity cannot but reckon with the opinions, for example, of Carlyle, of Emerson, of Matthew Arnold--to mention only types.
CARLYLE
Carlyle has pictured for us his early home at Ecclefechan on the Border; his father, a stone mason of the highest character; his mother with her frugal, pious ways; the minister, from whom he learned Latin, "the priestliest man I ever beheld in any ecclesiastical guise." The picture of his mother never faded from his memory. Carlyle was destined for the Church. Such had been his mother"s prayer. He took his arts course in Edinburgh. In the university, he says, "there was much talk about progress of the species, dark ages, and the like, but the hungry young looked to their spiritual nurses and were bidden to eat the east wind."
He entered Divinity Hall, but already, in 1816, prohibitive doubts had arisen in his mind. Irving sought to help him. Irving was not the man for the task. The Christianity of the Church had become intellectually incredible to Carlyle. For a time he was acutely miserable, bordering upon despair. He has described his spiritual deliverance: "Precisely that befel me which the Methodists call their conversion, the deliverance of their souls from the devil and the pit. There burst forth a sacred flame of joy in me." With _Sartor Resartus_ his message to the world began. It was printed in _Fraser"s Magazine_ in 1833, but not published separately until 1838. His difficulty in finding a publisher embittered him. Style had something to do with this, the newness of his message had more. Then for twenty years he poured forth his message.
Never did a man carry such a pair of eyes into the great world of London or set a more peremptory mark upon its notabilities. His best work was done before 1851. His later years were darkened with much misery of body. No one can allege that he ever had a happy mind.