[113] Peel to Croker (Sept. 28, 1833), ibid., p. 224.
[114] Russell, Recollections and Suggestions, p. 113.
[115] Parker, Sir Robert Peel, ii., 212-16.
[116] Greville, Memoirs, ii., 364, 365.
CHAPTER XVI.
RELIGIOUS MOVEMENTS AND POOR LAW REFORM.
The year 1833, so fruitful in legislation, may be said to have witnessed the birth of a religious movement which has profoundly affected the character of the national Church. The neo-catholic revival, which afterwards took its popular name from Pusey but drew its chief inspiration from Newman, was in a great degree the outcome of the reform act and a reaction against the more than Erastian tendencies of the reformed parliament. In the early part of the century, as we have seen, personal and practical religion was mainly represented by the evangelical or low Church party, which did admirable service in the cause of philanthropy, as well as in reclaiming the masses from heathenism. The high Church party was comparatively inactive, but co-operated with its rival in opposition to catholic emancipation. The clergy, as a body, were hostile to reform, and the bishops incurred the fiercest obloquy by voting against the first reform bill, which had unfortunately been rejected by a majority exactly corresponding with the number of their votes.[117] The democratic outcry against the Church became louder and louder, as the evils of nepotism, pluralism, and sinecurism were exposed to public criticism, and a growing disposition was shown to deal with Church endowments both in England and in Ireland, if not as the property of the state, yet as under its paramount control.
THE TRACTARIAN MOVEMENT.
The recent infusion of Irish Roman catholics into the house of commons, following that of Scotch presbyterians a century earlier, rendered it less and less fit, in the opinion of high Churchmen, to legislate for the Church of England, and every concession to religious liberty shocked them as a step towards "National Apostasy". This was, in fact, the impressive title of a sermon preached by John Keble, in July, 1833, before the university of Oxford. From this sermon Newman himself dated the origin of the Oxford or "Tractarian" movement, but its inward source lay deeper. Having lost all confidence in the state and even in the Anglican hierarchy as a creature of the state, a section of the clergy had already been looking about for another basis of authority, and had found it in theories of apostolical succession and Church organisation. The university of Oxford was a natural centre for such a reaction, and it was set on foot with the deliberate purpose of defending the Church and the Christianity of England against the anti-catholic aggressions of the dominant liberalism. It was not puritanism but liberal secularism which Newman always denounced as the arch-enemy of the catholic faith. For, as Wesley's sympathies were originally with high Church doctrines, so Newman's sympathies were originally with evangelical doctrines, nor were they ever entirely stifled by his ultimate secession to the Roman Church.
The later development of this movement, which had its cradle in the common room of Oriel College, belongs rather to ecclesiastical history, and to the reign of Queen Victoria. But from the first it rallied a considerable body of support. Many who were not influenced by the movement, shared its earlier aspirations. Shortly after the formation of an association, under Newman and Keble's auspices, seven or eight thousand of the clergy signed an address to the Archbishop of Canterbury, insisting upon the necessity of restoring Church discipline, maintaining Church principles, and checking the progress of latitudinarianism. A large section of the laity ranged themselves on the side of the revival, and meetings were held throughout England. The king himself volunteered a declaration of his strong affection for the national Church now militant, and prepared to assert itself, not merely as a true branch of the catholic Church, but as a co-ordinate power with the state. In the autumn of 1833, Newman and one of his colleagues launched the first of that series of tracts from which his followers derived the familiar name of Tractarians. From that day he was their recognised leader, yet he claimed no allegiance and issued no commands. He felt himself, not the creator of a new party, but a loyal son of the old Church, at last awakened from her lethargy. The spell which he exercised over so many young minds was due to a personal influence of which he was almost unconscious, but which spread from the pulpit of St. Mary's Church and his college rooms at Oriel over a great part of the university and the Church. It was broken some years later, when he gave up the via media which he had so long been advocating, accepted the logical consequences of his own teaching, and reproached others for not discovering that Anglicanism was but a pale and deformed counterfeit of the primitive Christianity represented, in its purity, by the Church of Rome.