An Outline of the History of Christian Thought Since Kant

by Edward Caldwell Moore

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 assumes that truth comes to us externally through representatives of God, and if the truth is that which they assert, then in the last analysis what they assert 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 Döllinger, 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 passionate warfare on the liberalism of the modern world? Was it not merely a question of degrees? Was Gladstone's attitude 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 attitude of Döllinger 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 manuscripts. 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 classic 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 Massachusetts in 1893. There is a theological note about his preaching, as in the case of Robertson. Often it is the same note. Brooks had passed 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 constituency 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 antithesis 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, assured 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 illustrious company.

The men who in 1860 published the volume known as Essays and Reviews would be classed with the Broad Church. In its authorship were associated 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 archæologist, but he brought to the attention of English readers that which was being done in Germany in this field. Williams used the archæological 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 God as manifest in the moral law. The realisation of the will of God 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.