From these glimpses it would appear that Wiseman was a much more sincere man in his religious feeling than he is given credit for by Browning. His belief is with him not a matter of cold, hard calculation as to the attitude which will be, so to speak, the most politic from both a worldly and a spiritual point of view. The beautiful passage beginning "Just when we are safest, there's a sunset touch" etc., comes nearer to the genuine enthusiasm of a Wiseman than any other in the poem. There is an essential difference between the minds of the poet and the man he portrays, which perhaps made it impossible for Browning fully to interpret Wiseman's attitude. Both have religious fervor, but Browning's is born of a consciousness of God revealed directly to himself, while Wiseman's consciousness of God comes to him primarily through the authority of the Church, that is through generations of authoritative believers the first of whom experienced the actuality of[342] Revelation. Hundreds and thousands of people have minds of this caliber. They cannot see a truth direct for themselves, they must be told by some person clothed in authority that this or that is true or false. To Wiseman the beauty of his own form of religion with its special dogmas made so strong an appeal, that, since he could only believe through authority, under any circumstances, it was natural to him to adopt the particular form that gave him the most satisfaction. Proofs detrimental to belief do not worry long with doubts such a mind, because the authority they depend on is not the authority of knowledge, but the authority of belief. This comes out clearly enough in one of Wiseman's letters in which after enumerating a number of proofs brought forward by various scholars tending to cast discredit on the dogmas of the Church, he triumphantly exclaims, "And yet, who that has an understanding to judge, is driven for a moment from the holdings of faith by such comparisons as these!"
Sacred Heart
F. Utenbach
Upon looking through his writings there will always be found in his expression of belief, I think, that ring of true sincerity as well as what I should call an intense artistic delight in the essential beauty of his religion.
[343] As to Blougram's argument that he believed in living in the world while he was in it, Wiseman's life was certainly not that of a worldling alone, though he is described by one person as being "a genuine priest, very good looking and able bodied, and with much apparent practice in the world." He was far too much of a student and worker to be altogether so worldly-minded as Browning represents him.
His chief interest for Englishmen is his connection with the Tractarian Movement. The wish of his soul was to aid the Catholic Revival in England, and with that end in view he visited England in 1835. Two years before, the movement at Oxford, known as the Tractarian Movement had begun. The opinions of the men in this movement were, as every one knows, printed in a series of ninety tracts of which Newman wrote twenty-four. It was an outgrowth of the conditions of the time. To sum up in the words of Withrow,[3] "The Church of England had distinctly lost ground as a directing and controlling force in the nation. The most thoughtful and earnest minds in the Church felt the need of a great religious awakening and an aggressive movement to regain its[344] lost influence." As Dean Church describes them, the two characteristic forms of Christianity in the Church of England were the High Church, and the Evangelicals, or Low Church." Of the former he says: "Its better members were highly cultivated, benevolent men, intolerant of irregularities both of doctrine and life, whose lives were governed by an unostentatious but solid and unfaltering piety, ready to burst forth on occasion into fervid devotion. Its worse members were jobbers and hunters after preferment, pluralists who built fortunes and endowed families out of the Church, or country gentlemen in orders, who rode to hounds and shot and danced and farmed, and often did worse things."
But at Oxford was a group of men of intense moral earnestness including Newman, Pusey, Keble, Arnold, Maurice, Kingsley, and others, who began an active propaganda of the new or revised doctrines of the Oxford Movement.
"The success of the Tracts," says Molesworth, "was much greater, and the outcry against them far louder and fiercer, than their authors had expected. The Tracts were at first small and simple, but became large and learned theological treatises. Changes, too,[345] came over the views of some of the writers. Doctrines which probably would have shocked them at first were put forward with a recklessness which success had increased. Alarm was excited, remonstrances stronger and stronger were addressed to them. They were attacked as Romanizing in their tendency."