From ‘Essays Historical and Theological,’ by J. B. Mozley, D.D. Rivingtons, 1878. [From the Essay on Dr. Arnold.]
[By the kind permission of Messrs. J. R. & H. W. Mozley.]
‘The Church of England had, after a century of growing laxity, just come to the point at which she must either retrace her steps into a stricter state, or go forward into a formal latitudinarianism. Arnold was for the latter course; the writers of the Tracts for the Times for the former. The two schools met at these cross-roads, as it were, and a remarkable contrast indeed they presented. The foremost characters in the Church Movement (if they will excuse us
looking at them so historically) were undoubtedly phenomena in their way, as Arnold was in his. Of one of these we can speak: the death that robs us of so much, gives us, at any rate, this privilege. Singular it is that antagonist systems should so suit themselves with champions; but if the world had been picked for the most fair, adequate, and expressive specimens of German-religionism and Catholicism (specimens that each side would have acknowledged), it could not well have produced better ones for the purpose than Dr. Arnold and Mr. Froude. Arnold, gushing with the richness of domestic life, the darling of Nature, and overflowing receptacle and enjoyer, with strong healthy gusto, of all her endearments and sweets,—Arnold, the representative of high joyous Lutheranism, is describable: Mr. Froude, hardly. His intercourse with earth and Nature seemed to cut through them like uncongenial steel, rather than mix and mingle with them. Yet the polished blade smiled as it went through. The grace and spirit with which he adorned this outward world (and seemed, to an undiscerning eye, to love it), were but something analogous in him to the easy tone of men in high life, whose good-nature to inferiors is the result either of their disinterested benevolence, or sublime unconcern. In him, the severe sweetness of the life divine not so much rejected as disarmed those potent glows and attractions of the life natural: a high good temper civilly evaded and disowned them. The monk by nature, the born aristocrat of the Christian sphere, passed them clean by with inimitable ease, marked his line, and shot clear beyond them into the serene ether, toward the far-off Light, toward that needle’s point on which ten thousand angels and all Heaven move…. The Catholic system, as it advanced from the worlds beyond the grave, came with some of the colour and circumstance of its origin. It contrasted strangely with the light, hearty, and glowing form of earth that came from wood and mountain, sunshine and green fields, to meet [it]. And the unearthly, supernatural, dogmatic Church opposed a ghostly dignity to the Church of Nature and the religion of the heart….
* * * * *
‘The notion of the Church being an independent body, and able to keep her own succession going on, apart from the
State, is [to Arnold] “all essentially anarchical and schismatic,” and he is only defending, he says, “the common peace and order of the Church, against a new outbreak of Puritanism, to oppose it.” It appears a curious objection at first sight, from a man like Arnold, to urge against a particular religion the claim that it would have been considered treasonable in the days of Queen Elizabeth. But this … is the period of English History to which he always goes for his ecclesiastical principles. Another point of accusation, more of a moral one, does not come with peculiar grace from Arnold, viz., the charge of immodesty and impudence in personally daring to go so counter to received opinions in their views of things and persons. “I have read Froude’s volume,” he says, “and I think that its predominant character is extraordinary impudence. I never saw a more remarkable instance of that qualification than the way in which he, a young man, and a clergyman of the Church of England, reviles all those persons whom the accordant voice of that Church, without distinction of party, has agreed to honour, even perhaps with an excess of admiration.”[317] Now, let it be ever so true that “the accordant voice of the Church of England” has taken one view of Cranmer and the Reformers, whereas Mr. Froude took another, Arnold was not precisely the person to found a charge of impudence upon such a fact. A man who without a vestige of internal scruple or misgiving, unchristianised the whole development of the Church from the days of the Apostles; who made the very disciples, friends and successors of the Apostles teachers of corruption; who made the priesthood an Antichrist, and had just himself shocked the whole Church of England by the promulgation of a religious theory repugnant to the feeling and ideas of almost all her members to a man,—was certainly not a person to be tender in requiring compliance with received views from another, or quick to call impudence in another what in himself was the necessary adjunct of philosophy.’
From ‘Memoir of Joshua Watson,’ edited by Edw. Churton, Archdeacon of Cleveland. 2 vols. Oxford: J. H. Parker, 1861.
[By the kind permission of Messrs. J. Parker & Co.]