In a wider space it would be interesting to comment on numerous other exponents of the Movement. Archdeacon afterwards Cardinal Manning (1807-93), the successful rival of Newman among those Anglican clergymen who joined the Church of Rome, was less a man of letters than a very astute man of business; but his sermons before he left the Church had merit, and he afterwards wrote a good deal. Richard Hurrell Froude (1803-36), elder brother of the historian, had a very great and not perhaps a very beneficent influence on Newman, and through Newman on others; but he died too soon to leave much work. His chief distinguishing note was a vigorous and daring humour allied to a strong reactionary sentiment. Isaac Williams, the second poet of the Movement (1802-65), was in most respects, as well as in poetry, a minor Keble. W. G. Ward, commonly called "Ideal" Ward from his famous, very ill-written, very ill-digested, but important Ideal of a Christian Church, which was the alarm-bell for the flight to Rome, was a curiously constituted person of whom something has been said in reference to Clough. He had little connection with pure letters, and after his secession to Rome and his succession to a large fortune he finally devoted himself to metaphysics of a kind. His acuteness was great, and he had a scholastic subtlety and logical deftness which made him very formidable to the loose thinkers and reasoners of Utilitarianism and anti-Supernaturalism. One of the latest important survivors was Dean Church (1815-91), who, as Proctor, had arrested the persecution of the Tractarians, with which it was sought to complete the condemnation of Ward's Ideal, and who afterwards, both in a country cure and as Dean of St. Paul's, acquired very high literary rank by work on Dante, Anselm, Spenser, and other subjects, leaving also the best though unfortunately an incomplete history of the Movement itself; while the two Mozleys, the one a considerable theologian, the other an active journalist, brothers-in-law of Newman, also deserve mention. Last of all perhaps we must notice Henry Parry Liddon (1829-90), of a younger generation, but the right-hand man of Pusey in his later day, and his biographer afterwards—a popular and pleasing, though rather rhetorical than argumentative or original, preacher, and a man very much affected by his friends. Even this list is nothing like complete, but it is impossible to enlarge it.
Midway between the Movement and its enemies, a partial sympathiser in early days, almost an enemy when the popular tide turned against it, almost a leader when public favour once more set in in its favour, was Samuel Wilberforce, Bishop of Oxford and Winchester (1805-73). The third son of the celebrated emancipationist and evangelical, he had brothers who were more attracted than himself by the centripetal force of Roman doctrine, and succumbed to it. Worldly perhaps as much as spiritual motives kept him steadier. He did invaluable work as a bishop; and at all times of his life he was in literature a distinct supporter of the High Church cause, though with declensions and defections of Erastian and evangelical backsliding. He was a very admirable preacher, though his sermons do not read as well as they "heard"; some of his devotional manuals are of great excellence; and in the heyday of High Church allegory (an interesting by-walk of literature which can only be glanced at here, but which was trodden by some estimable and even some eminent writers) he produced the well hit-off tale of Agathos (1839). But it may be that he will, as a writer, chiefly survive in the remarkable letters and diaries in his Life, which are not only most valuable for the political and ecclesiastical history of the time, but precious always as human documents and sometimes as literary compositions.
Three remarkable persons must be mentioned among the opponents of (and in one case harsh judgment might say the deserters of) the Movement. These were Arthur Penrhyn Stanley, Mark Pattison, and Benjamin Jowett. Stanley, born in 1815, was the son of the (afterwards) Bishop of Norwich and a nephew of the first Lord Stanley of Alderley, and was brought up very much under the influence of Arnold, whose biographer he became. But he went further than Arnold in Broad Church ways. His career at Rugby and at Oxford was distinguished, and after being fellow and tutor of University College for some ten years, he became successively Canon of Canterbury, Canon of Christ Church, and Professor of Ecclesiastical History at Oxford, and Dean of Westminster, in which last post he had almost greater opportunities than any bishop, and used them to the full. He also wrote busily, devoting himself especially to the geography of Palestine and the history of the Eastern Church, which he handled in a florid and popular style, though not with much accuracy or scholarship. Personally, Stanley was much liked, though his conception of his duties as a sworn servant of the Church has seemed strange to some. He died in July 1881.
Mark Pattison (1813-84), Fellow and Rector of Lincoln College, had a less amiable character than Stanley's, but a greater intellect and far nicer, profounder, and wider scholarship, though he actually did very little. He fell under the influence of Newman early, and was one of that leader's closest associates in his monastic retreat at Littlemore. But when Newman "went over," the wave swept Pattison neither to Rome nor safely on to higher English ground, but into a religious scepticism, the exact extent of which was nowhere definitely announced, but which was regarded by some as nearly total. He did not nominally leave the Church, but he acted always with the extreme Liberal party in the University, and he was one of the famous Seven who contributed to Essays and Reviews[11]. The shock of his religious revolution was completed by a secular disappointment—his defeat for the office of Rector, which he actually attained much later; and a temper always morbid, appears, to judge from his painful but extraordinarily interesting and characteristic Memoirs, to have been permanently soured. Even active study became difficult to him, and though he was understood to have a more extensive acquaintance with the humanists of the late Renaissance than any man of his day, his knowledge took little written form except a volume on Isaac Casaubon. He also wrote an admirable little book on Milton for the English Men of Letters, edited parts of Milton and Pope, and contributed a not inconsiderable number of essays and articles to the Quarterly and Saturday Reviews, and other papers. The autobiography mentioned was published after his death.
Despite Pattison's peculiar temper he had warm and devoted friends, and it was impossible for any one, whether personally liking him or not, to deny him the possession of most unusual gifts. Whether his small performance was due to the shocks just referred to, to genuine fastidiousness and resolve to do nothing but the best, or to these things mixed with a strong dash of downright indolence and want of energy, is hard to say. But it would be entirely unjust to regard him as merely a man who was "going to do something." His actual work though not large is admirable, and his style is the perfection of academic correctness, not destitute of either vigour or grace.
There were some resemblances between Pattison and Jowett (1817-94); but the latter, unlike Pattison, had never had any sympathies with the religious renaissance of his time. Like Pattison he passed his entire life (after he obtained a Balliol fellowship) in his College, and like him became head of it; while he was a much more prominent member of the Liberal party in Oxford. His position as Regius Professor of Greek gave him considerable influence even beyond Balliol. He, too, was an Essayist and Reviewer, and he exercised a quiet but pervading influence in University matters. He even acquired no mean name in literature, though his work, after an early Commentary on some Epistles of St. Paul, was almost entirely confined to translations, especially of Plato, and though in these translations he was much assisted by pupils. He wrote well, but with much less distinction and elegance than Pattison, nor had he by any means the same taste for literature and erudition in it. But, as an influence on the class of persons from whom men of letters are drawn, no one has exceeded him in his day.
The dramatic catastrophe of the Disruption of the Scotch Kirk, which, by a strange coincidence, was nearly contemporary with the crisis of the Oxford Movement, set the final seal upon the reputation of Thomas Chalmers, who headed the seceders. But this reputation had been made long before, and indeed Chalmers died 30th May 1847, only four years after he "went out." He was a much older man than the Oxford leaders, having been born in 1780, and after having for some years, though a minister, devoted himself chiefly to secular studies, he became famous as a preacher at the Tron Church, Glasgow. In 1823 he was appointed Professor of Moral Philosophy at St. Andrews, and (shortly afterwards) of Theology in Edinburgh. He was one of the Bridgewater treatise writers—a group of distinguished persons endowed to produce tractates on Natural Theology—and his work, The Adaptation of External Nature to the Moral and Intellectual Constitution of Man, was one of the most famous of that set, procuring for him a correspondence-membership from the French Institute and a D.C.L. from Oxford. Chalmers' works are extremely voluminous; the testimony as to the effect of his preaching is tolerably uniform; he was a man of very wide range of thought, and of remarkable faculty of popularisation; and there is no doubt that he was a born leader of men. But as literature his works have hardly maintained the reputation which they once had, and even those who revere him, unless they let reverence stifle criticism, are apt to acknowledge that there is more rhetoric than logic in him, and that the rhetoric itself is not of the finest.
Edward Irving, at one time an assistant to Chalmers, and an early friend of Carlyle, was twelve years the junior of Chalmers himself, and died thirteen years before him. But at nearly the time when Chalmers was at the height of his reputation as a preacher in Glasgow, Irving was drawing crowds to the unfashionable quarter of Hatton Garden, London, by sermons of extraordinary brilliancy. Later he developed eccentricities of doctrine which do not concern us, and his preaching has not worn much better than that of his old superior. Irving, however, had more strictly literary affinities than Chalmers; he came under the influence of Coleridge (which probably had not a little to do both with his eloquence and with his vagaries); and he may be regarded as having been much more of a man of letters who had lost his way and strayed into theology than as a theologian proper.
To what extent this great and famous influence of Coleridge actually worked upon Frederick Denison Maurice has been debated. It is however generally stated that he, like his friend Sterling, was induced to take orders in the Church of England by this influence. He was not a very young man when in 1834, the year of Irving's death, he did this, for he had been born in 1805, and had been educated at Cambridge, though being then a Unitarian he did not take a degree. He afterwards went to Oxford and took an M.A. degree there, and he was regarded for a time as a sort of outlying sympathiser with the Tractarian Movement. But his opinions took a very different line of development not merely from those of Newman, but from those of Keble and Pusey. He indeed never left the Church, in which he held divers preferments; and though his views on eternal punishment lost him a professorship in King's College, London, he met with no formal ecclesiastical censure. But he came to be regarded as a champion of the Broad Church school, and upheld eloquently and vehemently, if not always with a sufficiency either of logic or of learning, a curious conglomerate of "advanced" views, ranging from Christian Socialism to something like the views of the Atonement attributed to Origen, and from deprecation of dogma to deprecation of the then fashionable political economy. He was made Professor of Moral Philosophy at Cambridge in 1866, and died in 1872. Maurice's sermons were effective, and his other works numerous. A very generous and amiable person with a deficient sense of history, Maurice in his writing is a sort of elder, less gifted, and more exclusively theological Charles Kingsley, on whom he exercised great and rather unfortunate influence. But his looseness of thought, wayward eclecticism of system, and want of accurate learning, were not remedied by Kingsley's splendid pictorial faculty, his creative imagination, or his brilliant style.
Somewhat akin to Maurice, but of a more feminine and less robust temperament, was Frederick Robertson, generally called "Robertson of Brighton," from the place of his last cure. Robertson, who was the son of a soldier, was born in London on 3rd February 1816. After a rather eccentric education and some vacillations about a profession, he went, rather late, to Oxford, and was ordained in 1840. He had very bad health, but did duty, chiefly at Cheltenham and at Brighton, pretty valiantly, and died on August 1853. He published next to nothing in his lifetime, but after his death there appeared several volumes of sermons which gained great popularity, and were followed by other posthumous works. Robertson's preaching is not very easy to judge, because the published sermons are admittedly not what was actually delivered, but after-reminiscences or summaries, and the judgment is not rendered easier by the injudicious and gushing laudation of which he has been made the subject. He certainly possessed a happy gift of phrase now and then, and remarkable earnestness.