The food of Saints is not for thee!’
From poetical ‘dotings,’ Hurrell, having reached England, throws himself gladly into the interests of the young scientist his brother, who was already at work on the unique experiments concerning the resistance and propulsion of ships, which now stand connected, all over the world, with his successful name. He was going forward to be, as Hurrell anxiously wished, no ‘mere engineer,’ no ‘Liberal,’ i.e., agnostic or materialist, ‘at heart.’
To William Froude, July 11, 1833.
‘… I cannot understand how the dock-gates can make any further resistance to the water after the curvature has been squatted out of them, nor how, if the curvature is right, the pressure should have any tendency to alter it. Tell me if you succeed in getting a verdict against them; also, how your resistance experiments succeed. I will never believe that a sail will do as much work if you split it in two; but, if R ∝ area, you might have each cloth independent, and all would do as
well. I never gave you an answer about the Book of Job, for I cannot get a distinct idea of its argument. It is said to be a discussion on the moral government of God; but my view of it is not more distinct than what ladies get of Butler’s Analogy.’
Honest Hurrell and his baffled Willy were looking for the sort of intellectual company which misery is said to love, and found it in ‘ladies.’ These, as yet, were certainly busier with worsted samplers than with the problems of the educated.
On July 14, the day of the storming of the feudal Bastille, came the formal start of another revolution which had a quieter, but no less ominous foot. Mr. Keble mounted the pulpit stair of S. Mary-the-Virgin’s at Oxford, and preached his memorable Assize Sermon, which went to press under its title of National Apostasy. It served as a bugle to let men know that the work of recapturing Faith for England had begun, and that ‘things have come to the pretty pass’ (in Lord Melbourne’s celebrated expression), ‘that religion is to invade the sphere of private life!’ There had been long preliminary agitation, and much personal consciousness, especially on Newman’s part and on Froude’s, of ‘a work to do in England.’
Secular authority was on the eve of abolishing in Ireland ten Bishoprics, which, in that country at least, it is not pretended that it had not created. But there could be no guarantee whatever that secular authority, so gorged, would be sated; and operations in England being only too likely, it was time for the objectors to rise. Besides, the general change effected during 1832-3, in the relations of Church and State, was the most disheartening or enraging thing in the world to the sentinels at Oxford, according to individual mood. Up to then, ‘spiritual cases were referred by the Sovereign to the Court of Delegates, which contained a majority of spiritual persons. But in those years, the final appeal was transferred, by Act of Parliament, from the Court of Delegates to, first, the Privy Council, and then a Committee formed from it.’[143] In that bondage, a worthy legacy from the ‘unidea’d’ reign of William IV.,
the Church of England stood, and stands. Things had been bad enough before. Already Hurrell had cried out in private: ‘The Church can never right itself without a blow-up.’ This was more sanguine than Dr. Arnold’s simultaneous jeremiad, and quite as loyal. ‘The Church as it now stands,’ he said, ‘no human power can save.’ But now Froude’s song is: ‘If the State would but kick us off!’ caught from Lamennais and the great democrat-Ultramontane agitation in France. The wish is translated into the weighty and telling pages of the long essay which stands first in his Remains, and which he wrote in 1833. More suo, he uses in it all the original documents which he can lay his hands on, and furthers his argument by italicisation and capitalisation of leading words and phrases. Ambrose Phillipps de Lisle once remarked that the step of throwing off the supremacy of the State had been dreamed of, in England, only by the Nonjurors, and ‘the first authors of the Tracts for the Times.’ Has it not been dreamed of ever since? The deification of a Privy Council was the occasion, not the cause, of the High Anglican onset, itself but one movement of several against the intrenchments of British materialism, but distinct from them all, inasmuch as Scott and Coleridge, riding just before, with the armed protest of Carlyle, of Ruskin, and of Emerson to follow, bore no known emblems of a Christian Crusade. The hour of latent dissatisfaction had crept up to flood-water mark. As we are well aware, no great movement springs full-armed from the brain of any local Jupiter; and this one was a birth, and only a birth, of 1833. For years previously, semi-active agitation, fed by the feeling all over the country, was quite patent and open. There was much popular stir and screaming, all making, no doubt, for righteousness and right ideas. The thinkers, the Universities, were far clearer as to what they did not mean, or wish, than as to what they did. ‘Newman and I are both so consequential,’ Froude writes in a leave-taking letter of 1832, ‘that we fear all sorts of things going wrong while we are away.’ It is perfectly true that these men did not create, but evoke, the religious spirit of their time. The Chinese narcissus bourgeons at a miraculous rate from a bulb a year old. The Platonic theory of individual knowledge should be extended to meet
the case of nations: they, too, remember, and have rhythms which antedate the conscious life, and recur throughout it. We are always forgetting the commonplace that a spirit rather than intelligent persons with a polity, a law rather than its visible agencies, is the true operative force. Well-meaning students of the Movement have looked upon one name or another as the generating cause, whereas the real leader is ever nameless, like Odysseus in the cave of his baffled giant. There was ‘an unseen agitator,’ as Newman knew. His earliest friend of undergraduate days, whom he called, afterwards, Princeps Apostolicorum, was, for one, independently aware of it, as soon as events began.