Right Hon. W. E. Gladstone, M.P.
In the same year, 1846, the appointment of Dr. Hampden to the see of Hereford was 'a heavy blow and great discouragement' to the Tractarian party; but the correspondence does not throw much light on the subject as far as regards Mr. Hope. He must have felt his profession sucking him in like a vortex, from which it is wonderful how he could grasp the Catholic faith in the end. Many of his friends were now doing so, but he still held back. The following sentences from a letter he wrote to Father Newman, then (April 23, 1846) contemplating his departure for Rome, will show something of Mr. Hope's then position—Anglican ideas not so vanished that they might not possibly have been, at least in imagination, renewed—Catholic ideas not yet distinctly written in their place.
I can construe the obscure wish with which your letter concludes. I join heartily in desiring some termination to my present doubts; but whether in the direction you would think right, or by a return to Anglicanism, is the question. I am astonished to find how resolute Keble is in maintaining his present position. Others, also, of more earnestness and better knowledge than myself, are recoiling—and this troubles me, for I cannot but look around for authority.
To his own family he became more and more reserved on the subject, and showed unwillingness that difficulties should be touched; for, great as was his wish that the Church of England should assert herself Catholic, he dreaded, on good grounds, that if awakened from her slumbers, the only effect would be that she would use her giant strength against her friends as well as enemies, hit them knocks, and then relapse into repose. Unable even yet to make up his mind whether those of his friends who had joined the Church of Rome had done right or wrong, materially, at all events, he remained an Anglican. Such a state of mind necessarily varied, if not from day to day, at least at longer intervals. At the close of 1846 came the troubles at St. Saviour's, Leeds, a stronghold of the section peculiarly under Dr. Pusey's influence, which encountered the opposition of the old Tractarianism, or rather Church-of-Englandism of Dr. Hook. They ended in some important conversions, but, as affecting Mr. Hope, seem scarcely to require to be dwelt on. In May 1847 I find him exerting himself in favour of Mr. Gladstone's candidature for the University of Oxford. On December 9 he writes (from Rankeillour) to Mr. Gladstone on the question of Jewish emancipation as follows:—
On the Jewish question my bigotry makes me liberal. To symbolise the Christianity of the House of Commons in its present form is to substitute a new Church and creed for the old Catholic one; and as this is delusive, I would do nothing to countenance it. Better have the Legislature declared what it really is—not professedly Christian, and then let the Church claim those rights and that independence which nothing but the pretence of Christianity can entitle the Legislature to withhold from it. In this view the emancipation of the Jews must tend to that of the Church, and at any rate a 'sham' will be discarded. However, I am not disposed to press my views on this or similar points. I have withdrawn from Church politics, and never had to do with any others. How long this peaceful disposition may last I know not, but my station in life does not seem to me to require that I should meddle. For this reason, if for no other, you may be sure I do not regret having lost the honour of being armour-bearer to the Bishop of Exeter in the Hampden strife. That appointment, however, is certainly bad enough.
Mr. Hope was now, in the ordinary sense of the word, 'settled in life' (he married in August of that year, 1847); but the great happiness he found in this change of condition was no talisman that could ward off the question which still imperiously demanded a solution; and perhaps scarce a month passed in these times without some new event arising to bring it more forcibly upon minds that had once been fairly within its influence. Mr. Hope's style in writing to Mr. Badeley on the Hampden affair, under date January 16, 1848, shows in some degree a renewed interest, but with symptoms, like the passage last quoted, of passing off into Liberalism.
I am right glad that you have got your Rule, and have good hopes that you will make it absolute…. When the argument is resumed pray remember my favourite plan of establishing the old Ecclesiastical Law as the Common Law of England before the Reformation, and requiring evidence of a direct statutory repeal. Reid writes me that there is a fund for the expense of the opposition. If so I shall be happy to contribute, for I feel very strongly (not about Dr. Hampden, though I do feel as to him, but) about this violent piece of Erastianism, such as no Christian community ought to endure.
Following this, for about two years, the Church of England was convulsed with the Gorham case. This, too, has passed into the history of Anglicanism. It will be sufficient to remind the reader that Dr. Philpotts, the Bishop of Exeter, had refused to institute the Rev. G. C. Gorham to the vicarage of Brampford Speke, because he denied the doctrine of baptismal regeneration, Mr. Gorham sued the Bishop in the Court of Arches, but judgment was given by Sir H. J. Fust against the plaintiff, who then appealed to the Crown, and the result was that the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council, on March 8, 1850, reversed Sir H. J. Fust's judgment, and held that Mr. Gorham's doctrine was not repugnant to that of the Church of England. On March 12 a meeting was held at Mr. Hope's house in Curzon Street by several leading men of the Tractarian party—the number, I believe, was fourteen—including Mr. Hope himself, Archdeacon Manning, Archdeacon Kobert Wilberforce, and Mr. Badeley—to consider the effect of this sentence on the Church of England. Certain resolutions were passed and signed, and afterwards circulated in a somewhat modified form. The document, as finally issued, is to be found in more publications than one, and may be referred to in Mr. Kirwan Browne's 'Annals of the Tractarian Movement,' 3rd edition, p. 191. Its main significance is contained in Resolutions 5 and 6, which are given as follows, in a printed copy now before me:—
5. That inasmuch as the Faith is one, and rests upon one principle of authority, the conscious, wilful, and deliberate abandonment of the essential meaning of an Article of the Creed destroys the Divine Foundation upon which alone the entire Faith is propounded by the Church.
6. That any portion of the Church which does so abandon the essential meaning of an Article of the Creed, forfeits not only the Catholic doctrine in that Article, but also the office and authority to witness and teach as a Member of the Universal Church.