When met by the objection that the ideas of the framers of the Articles were well known, and that it was notorious that they had meant to put an insuperable barrier between the English Church and everything that savoured of Rome, the writer replied that the actual English Church received the Articles not from them but from a much later authority, that we are bound by their words not by their private sentiments either as theologians or ecclesiastical politicians, and that in fact they had intended the Articles to comprehend a great body of their countrymen, who would have been driven away by any extreme and anti-Catholic declarations even against Rome. The temper of compromise is characteristic of the English as contrasted with the foreign Reformation. It is visible, not only in the Articles, but in the polity of the English Church, which clung so obstinately to the continuity and forms of the ancient hierarchical system, it is visible in the sacramental offices of the Prayer Book, which left so much out to satisfy the Protestants, and left so much in to satisfy the Catholics.
The Tract went in detail through the Articles which were commonly looked upon as either anti-Catholic or anti-Roman. It went through them with a dry logical way of interpretation, such as a professed theologian might use, who was accustomed to all the niceties of language and the distinctions of the science. It was the way in which they would be likely to be examined and construed by a purely legal court. The effect of it, doubtless, was like that produced on ordinary minds by the refinements of a subtle advocate, or by the judicial interpretation of an Act of Parliament which the judges do not like; and some of the interpretations undoubtedly seemed far-fetched and artificial. Yet some of those which were pointed to at the time as flagrant instances of extravagant misinterpretation have now come to look different. Nothing could exceed the scorn poured on the interpretation of the Twenty-second Article, that it condemns the "Roman" doctrine of Purgatory, but not all doctrine of purgatory as a place of gradual purification beyond death. But in our days a school very far removed from Mr. Newman's would require and would claim to make the same distinction. And so with the interpretation of the "Sacrifices of Masses" in the same article. It was the fashion in 1841 to see in this the condemnation of all doctrine of a sacrifice in the Eucharist; and when Mr. Newman confined the phrase to the gross abuses connected with the Mass, this was treated as an affront to common sense and honesty. Since then we have become better acquainted with the language of the ancient liturgies—, and no instructed theologian could now venture to treat Mr. Newman's distinction as idle. There was in fact nothing new in his distinctions on these two points. They had already been made in two of the preceding Tracts, the reprint of Archbishop Ussher on Prayers for the Dead, and the Catena on the Eucharistie Sacrifice; and in both cases the distinctions were supported by a great mass of Anglican authority.[93]
But the Tract had sufficient novelty about it to account for most of the excitement which it caused. Its dryness and negative curtness were provoking. It was not a positive argument, it was not an appeal to authorities; it was a paring down of language, alleged in certain portions of the Articles to be somewhat loose, to its barest meaning; and to those to whom that language had always seemed to speak with fulness and decision, it seemed like sapping and undermining a cherished bulwark. Then it seemed to ask for more liberty than the writer in his position at that time needed; and the object of such an indefinite claim, in order to remove, if possible, misunderstandings between two long-alienated branches of the Western Church, was one to excite in many minds profound horror and dismay. That it maintained without flinching and as strongly as ever the position and the claim of the English Church was nothing to the purpose; the admission, both that Rome, though wrong, might not be as wrong as we thought her, and that the language of the Articles, though unquestionably condemnatory of much, was not condemnatory of as much as people thought, and might possibly be even harmonised with Roman authoritative language, was looked upon as incompatible with loyalty to the English Church.
The question which the Tract had opened, what the Articles meant and to what men were bound by accepting them, was a most legitimate one for discussion; and it was most natural also that any one should hesitate to answer it as the Tract answered it. But it was distinctly a question for discussion. It was not so easy for any of the parties in the Church to give a clear and consistent answer, as that the matter ought at once to have been carried out of the region of discussion. The Articles were the Articles of a Church which had seen as great differences as those between the Church of Edward VI and the Church of the Restoration. Take them broadly as the condemnation—strong but loose in expression, as, for instance, in the language on the "five, commonly called Sacraments"—of a powerful and well-known antagonist system, and there was no difficulty about them. But take them as scientific and accurate and precise enunciations of a systematic theology, and difficulties begin at once, with every one who does not hold the special and well-marked doctrines of the age when the German and Swiss authorities ruled supreme. The course of events from that day to this has shown more than once, in surprising and even startling examples, how much those who at the time least thought that they needed such strict construing of the language of the Articles, and were fierce in denouncing the "kind of interpretation" said to be claimed in No. 90, have since found that they require a good deal more elasticity of reading than even it asked for. The "whirligig of time" was thought to have brought "its revenges," when Mr. Newman, who had called for the exercise of authority against Dr. Hampden, found himself, five years afterwards, under the ban of the same authority. The difference between Mr. Newman's case and Dr. Hampden's, both as to the alleged offence and the position of the men, was considerable. But the "whirligig of time" brought about even stranger "revenges," when not only Mr. Gorham and Mr. H.B. Wilson in their own defence, but the tribunals which had to decide on their cases, carried the strictness of reading and the latitude of interpretation, quite as far, to say the least, as anything in No. 90.
Unhappily Tract 90 was met at Oxford, not with argument, but with panic and wrath.[94] There is always a sting in every charge, to which other parts of it seem subordinate. No. 90 was charged of course with false doctrine, with false history, and with false reasoning; but the emphatic part of the charge, the short and easy method which dispensed from the necessity of theological examination and argument, was that it was dishonest and immoral. Professors of Divinity, and accomplished scholars, such as there were in Oxford, might very well have considered it an occasion to dispute both the general principle of the Tract, if it was so dangerous, and the illustrations, in the abundance of which the writer had so frankly thrown open his position to searching criticism. It was a crisis in which much might have been usefully said, if there had been any one to say it; much too, to make any one feel, if he was competent to feel, that he had a good deal to think about in his own position, and that it would be well to ascertain what was tenable and what untenable in it. But it seemed as if the opportunity must not be lost for striking a blow. The Tract was published on 27th February. On the 8th of March four Senior Tutors, one of whom was Mr. H.B. Wilson, of St. John's, and another Mr. Tait, of Balliol, addressed the Editor of the Tract, charging No. 90 with suggesting and opening a way, by which men might, at least in the case of Roman views, violate their solemn engagements to their University. On the 15th of March, the Board of Heads of Houses, refusing to wait for Mr. Newman's defence, which was known to be coming, and which bears date 13th March, published their judgment They declared that in No. 90 "modes of interpretation were suggested, and have since been advocated in other publications purporting to be written by members of the University, by which subscription to the Articles might be reconciled with the adoption of Roman Catholic error." And they announced their resolution, "That modes of interpretation, such as are suggested in the said Tract, evading rather than explaining the sense of the Thirty-nine Articles, and reconciling subscription to them with the adoption of errors which they are designed to counteract, defeat the object, and are inconsistent with the due observance of the above-mentioned statutes."[95]
It was an ungenerous and stupid blunder, such as men make, when they think or are told that "something must be done," and do not know what. It gave the writer an opportunity, of which he took full advantage, of showing his superiority in temper, in courtesy, and in reason, to those who had not so much condemned as insulted him. He was immediately ready with his personal expression of apology and regret, and also with his reassertion in more developed argument of the principle of the Tract; and this was followed up by further explanations in a letter to the Bishop. And in spite of the invidious position in which the Board had tried to place him, not merely as an unsound divine, but as a dishonest man teaching others to palter with their engagements, the crisis drew forth strong support and sympathy where they were not perhaps to be expected. It rallied to him, at least for the time, some of the friends who had begun to hold aloof. Mr. Palmer, of Worcester, Mr. Perceval, Dr. Hook, with reserves according to each man's point of view, yet came forward in his defence. The Board was made to feel that they had been driven by violent and partisan instigations to commit themselves to a very foolish as well as a very passionate and impotent step; that they had by very questionable authority simply thrown an ill-sounding and ill-mannered word at an argument on a very difficult question, to which they themselves certainly were not prepared with a clear and satisfactory answer; that they had made the double mistake of declaring war against a formidable antagonist, and of beginning it by creating the impression that they had treated him shabbily, and were really afraid to come to close quarters with him. As the excitement of hasty counsels subsided, the sense of this began to awake in some of them; they tried to represent the off-hand and ambiguous words of the condemnation as not meaning all that they had been taken to mean. But the seed of bitterness had been sown. Very little light was thrown, in the strife of pamphlets which ensued, on the main subject dealt with in No. 90, the authority and interpretation of such formularies as our Articles. The easier and more tempting and very fertile topic of debate was the honesty and good faith of the various disputants. Of the four Tutors, only one, Mr. H.B. Wilson, published an explanation of their part in the matter; it was a clumsy, ill-written and laboured pamphlet, which hardly gave promise of the intellectual vigour subsequently displayed by Mr. Wilson, when he appeared, not as the defender, but the assailant of received opinions. The more distinguished of the combatants were Mr. Ward and Mr. R. Lowe. Mr. Ward, with his usual dialectical skill, not only defended the Tract, but pushed its argument yet further, in claiming tolerance for doctrines alleged to be Roman. Mr. Lowe, not troubling himself either with theological history or the relation of other parties in the Church to the formularies, threw his strength into the popular and plausible topic of dishonesty, and into a bitter and unqualified invective against the bad faith and immorality manifested in the teaching of which No. 90 was the outcome. Dr. Faussett, as was to be expected, threw himself into the fray with his accustomed zest and violence, and caused some amusement at Oxford, first by exposing himself to the merciless wit of a reviewer in the British Critic, and then by the fright into which he was thrown by a rumour that his reelection to his professorship would be endangered by Tractarian votes.[96] But the storm, at Oxford at least, seemed to die out. The difficulty which at one moment threatened of a strike among some of the college Tutors passed; and things went back to their ordinary course. But an epoch and a new point of departure had come into the movement. Things after No. 90 were never the same as to language and hopes and prospects as they had been before; it was the date from which a new set of conditions in men's thoughts and attitude had to be reckoned. Each side felt that a certain liberty had been claimed and had been peremptorily denied. And this was more than confirmed by the public language of the greater part of the Bishops. The charges against the Tractarian party of Romanising, and of flagrant dishonesty, long urged by irresponsible opponents, were now formally adopted by the University authorities, and specially directed against the foremost man of the party. From that time the fate of the party at Oxford was determined. It must break up. Sooner or later, there must be a secession more or less discrediting and disabling those who remained. And so the break-up came, and yet, so well grounded and so congenial to the English Church were the leading principles of the movement, that not even that disastrous and apparently hopeless wreck prevented them from again asserting their claim and becoming once more active and powerful. The Via Media, whether or not logically consistent, was a thing of genuine English growth, and was at least a working theory.
FOOTNOTES:
[84] Apologia, p. 180.
[85] Essays Critical and Historical, 1871.
[86] Apologia, pp. 181, 182. Comp. Letter to Jelf, p. 18.