A history of the University of Oxford

by George C. Brodrick

The immediate outcome of these Oriel conferences was the formation of an association designed to rally all friends of the Church against the common enemy. This was the signal for which zealous Churchmen had been waiting, and it met with an enthusiastic response in all parts of the country. An address to the Archbishop of Canterbury was drawn up and signed by eight thousand of the clergy, insisting upon the necessity of restoring Church discipline, maintaining Church principles, and resisting the growth of latitudinarianism. A large section of the laity ranged themselves on the side of the revival. Meetings were held throughout England, and the King himself volunteered a declaration of his strong affection for the National Church, now roused from its apathy, and prepared to defend itself vigorously, not merely as a true branch of the Catholic Church, but as a co-ordinate power with the State.

Newman assumes the lead

Newman had returned from Italy deeply imbued with the conviction that he had a definite mission to fulfil. He was no less firmly assured of the need for individual action at this juncture than impelled to it by his own self-reliant nature. While others, therefore, were urging combinations and committees as the best methods of working, Newman’s strong individuality revolted from joint control, especially in the form of a ‘Committee of Revision,’ and pressed him forward to strike the first blow for himself. He took counsel with Froude alone, when, in the autumn of 1833, he suddenly brought out the first of that series of Tracts from which his party derived its familiar name of Tractarians. In so doing he took his own colleagues by surprise, and precipitated the crisis destined to result from the publication of the Tracts. From that day forth he was the recognised leader of the Tractarians. No one among them was equally fitted for that position. Keble was too modest and studious by disposition, Pusey was not an original pioneer of the movement, Froude was disqualified by delicate health. Newman stepped naturally into the place. The influence which he gained in his own college as a tutor, and in the University as a preacher from the pulpit of St. Mary’s, had drawn round him a band of followers; his sympathetic character won the confidence of young minds; his confessions of speculative doubt added weight to his acceptance of dogmatic authority. Yet the secret of his personal ascendency was never fully revealed to himself, nor did he ever fully realise the impression produced by his sermons. To him the Tractarian Movement was ‘no movement, but the spirit of the times.’ He felt himself, not the leader of a new party, but a loyal son of the old Church; now awakened from her lethargy. He claimed no allegiance and issued no commands. It was through friends and disciples, as we learn from himself, that his principles were spread, and, as in the case of Socrates, their reports of his conversations were perhaps the main source of the spell which he exercised over the University and the Church.

Spread and objects of the movement. Publication of Tract XC.

The adhesion of Pusey in 1835 was a great accession of strength to the Tractarians. He had contributed a Tract to the series in December 1833, but he did not formally join the Movement until a year and a half later. His learning, social connections, and official position gave it a certain dignity and solidity in which it had been lacking. Recruits now offered themselves in abundance, and gifted young men spent their days and nights in poring over materials for the Library of the Fathers originated by Pusey, or in journeying from place to place, in the spirit of the Methodist Revivalists, though in the pursuit of a very different ideal. But the influence of Tractarianism over Oxford thought must not be exaggerated. While it fascinated many subtle and imaginative minds of a high order, and gathered into itself much of the spiritual and even of the intellectual life of the University, there were many robust intellects and earnest hearts which it not only failed to reach but stirred into hostility. If it would be easy to draw up an imposing list of eminent Oxford men who became Tractarians, it would not be less easy to enumerate an equal number of equally eminent men who consistently opposed Tractarianism, and predicted that it must lead to Romanism. Nothing was further from the original intentions and expectations of Newman himself. His object was to revive the usages and doctrines of the primitive Church; to co-operate, indeed, with the Church of Rome, so far as possible, but to keep aloof from its pernicious corruptions; to establish the catholicity of the Anglican Church, but, above all, to hold the via media laid down by its founders. His faith in Anglicanism was first disturbed in the Long Vacation of 1839 by his supposed discovery of a decisive analogy between the position of the Monophysite heretics and that of the Anglican communion. Still, though he was gradually assimilating the doctrines, he rebelled against the abuses and excesses, of the Roman Church. Anglicanism as a distinctive creed had become untenable to him, but he clung to a hope that its title might be lineally deduced from the primitive Church, instead of being founded on a secession from the Church of Rome. It was in this frame of mind that he published Tract XC. in the year 1841, for the purpose of showing that the Articles of the English Church were directed, not against the doctrines of the Church of Rome as interpreted by the Council of Trent, but against earlier heresies disavowed by that Council.

Collapse of Tractarianism, and secession of Newman

This Tract brought the Movement to a climax. It was received with a storm of indignation throughout the country. The bishops delivered charges against it, the great mass of Churchmen regarded it as an attack on the Protestant Establishment, and a direct invitation to Romanism. The Bishop of Oxford intervened, and the farther issue of Tracts was stopped. Henceforth the real tendency of Tractarianism was disclosed, and its promoters were hopelessly discredited. Newman found, to his own great surprise, that his power was shattered. He retired, during Lent 1840, to his parish at Littlemore, entrusting St. Mary’s to a curate, in view of his possible resignation. His loyalty to the English Church wavered more and more as he renewed his study of the Arian controversy, and his misgivings were intensified by the hostile attitude of the bishops, as well as by an incident which to a secular mind would have appeared trivial—the institution of the Jerusalem bishopric on a semi-Anglican and semi-Lutheran basis. His resignation of St. Mary’s in the autumn of 1843, two years after the publication of Tract XC., was due to an impulse of despondency on failing to dissuade a young friend from conversion to Romanism. After preaching his last sermon there he retired into lay-communion, giving up all idea of acting upon others, and turning all his thoughts inwards. Two years later, on October 8, 1845, his remaining difficulties being removed, he was himself received into the Church of Rome, and finally left Oxford early in the following year. Though his defection had long been foreseen, it caused a profound shock throughout the English Church. The first panic was succeeded by a reaction; some devoted adherents followed him to Rome; others relapsed into lifeless conformity; and the University soon resumed its wonted tranquillity.

The ‘Hampden Controversy’

The ‘Hampden Controversy,’ in 1836, may be regarded as an episode of the Tractarian revival, already in full course of development. This controversy arose out of Dr. Hampden’s Bampton Lectures on Scholastic Philosophy, delivered in 1882, which, however, had attracted little attention until he was appointed Regius Professor of Divinity four years later. No sooner was this appointment known, than an anti-Hampden Committee was formed, of which Pusey and Newman were members. The Crown was actually petitioned to recall its nomination, but this petition was coldly rejected by Lord Melbourne, and a vote of censure on Dr. Hampden, proposed by the Hebdomadal Board, was defeated in Convocation by the Proctors’ joint-veto—a very unusual, but perfectly constitutional, exercise of the Proctorial authority. A war of pamphlets ensued, and the vote of censure being reintroduced, after a change of Proctors, was carried by an overwhelming majority. According to the opinion of eminent counsel, the proceeding was illegal, as transgressing the jurisdiction of the University under the Charter of 1636, but the sentence was never reversed, and Dr. Hampden remained under the ban of the University, excluded from various privileges of his office, until his elevation to the See of Hereford in 1847. The opposition to him then broke out afresh, and the Dean of Hereford, in a letter to Lord John Russell, held out a threat of resistance to the Royal congé d’élire. The answer of Lord John Russell was such as might be expected, but thirteen bishops supported the Dean’s protest by a remonstrance, which Lord John Russell met by a peremptory refusal to make the prerogative of the Crown dependent on the caprice of a chance majority at one University, largely composed of persons who had since joined the Church of Rome. Nevertheless, a final attempt was made to negative the ‘confirmation’ of Dr. Hampden’s appointment at Bow Church. An argument on this point in the Court of Queen’s Bench ended in a dismissal of the case, owing to differences of opinion among the judges, and on March 25, 1848, Dr. Hampden was duly consecrated Bishop.

Proceedings against Pusey and Ward