"4. That under the present circumstances of the church in England, there is peculiar danger of these matters being slighted and practically disavowed, and of numbers of Christians being left, or tempted to precarious and unauthorized ways of communion, which must terminate often in vital apostasy:--
"We desire to pledge ourselves one to another, reserving our canonical obedience, as follows:--
"1. To be on the watch for all opportunities of inculcating, on all committed to our charge, a due sense of the inestimable privilege of communion with our Lord, through the successors of the apostles, and of leading them to the resolution to transmit it, by his blessing, unimpaired to their children."
Then follow two other resolutions: one to provide and circulate books and tracts, to familiarize men's minds with this doctrine; and the other, "to do what lies in us towards reviving among churchmen, the practice of daily common prayer, and more frequent participation of the Lord's Supper."
The fourth resolution, "to resist unauthorized alterations of the Liturgy," I have already quoted: the fifth and last engages generally to place within the reach of all men, accounts of such points in our discipline and worship as may appear most likely to be misunderstood or undervalued.
These resolutions were drawn up more than seven years ago, and their practical results have not been contemptible. The Tracts for the Times amount to no fewer than ninety; while the sermons, articles in reviews, stories, essays, poems, and writings of all sorts which have enforced the same doctrines, have been also extremely numerous. Nor have all these labours been without fruit: for it is known that a large proportion of the clergy have adopted, either wholly or in great part, the opinions and spirit of the Tracts for the Times; and many of the laity have embraced them also.
It seems also, that in the various publications of their school, the object originally marked out in the resolutions quoted above, has been followed with great steadiness. The system has been uniform, and its several parts have held well together. It has, perhaps, been carried on of late more boldly, which is the natural consequence of success. It has in all points been the direct opposite of what may be called the spirit of English protestantism of the nineteenth century: upholding whatever that spirit would depreciate; decrying whatever it would admire. A short statement of the principal views held by Mr. Newman and his friends, will show this sufficiently.
"The sacraments, and not preaching, are the sources of divine grace." So it is said in the Advertisement prefixed to the first volume of the Tracts for the Times, in exact conformity with the preamble to the resolutions, which I have already quoted. But the only security for the efficacy of the sacraments, is the apostolical commission of the bishops, and under them, of the presbyters of the Church. So it is said in the preamble to the resolutions. These two doctrines are the foundation of the whole system. God's grace, and our salvation, come to us principally through the virtue of the sacraments; the virtue of the sacraments depends on the apostolical succession of those who administer them. The clergy, therefore, thus holding in their hands the most precious gifts of the Church, acquire naturally the title of the Church itself; the Church, as possessed of so mysterious a virtue as to communicate to the only means of salvation their saving efficacy, becomes at once an object of the deepest reverence. What wonder if to a body endowed with so transcendant a gift, there should be given also the spirit of wisdom to discern all truth; so that the solemn voice of the Church in its creeds, and in the decrees of its general councils, must be received as the voice of God himself. Nor can such a body be supposed to have commended any practices or states of life winch are not really excellent; and the duty either of all Christians, or of those at least who would follow the most excellent way. Fasting, therefore, and the state of celibacy, are the one a christian obligation, the other a christian perfection. Again, being members of a body so exalted, and receiving our very salvation in a way altogether above reason, we must be cautious how we either trust to our individual conscience rather than to the command of the Church, or how we venture to exercise our reason at all in judging of what the Church teaches; childlike faith and childlike obedience are the dispositions which God most loves. What, then, are they who are not of the Church, who do not receive the Sacraments from those who can alone give them their virtue? Surely they are aliens from God, they cannot claim his covenanted mercies; and the goodness which may be apparent in them, may not be real goodness; God may see that it is false, though to us it appears sincere; but it is certain that they do not possess the only appointed means of salvation; and therefore, we must consider their state as dangerous, although, we may not venture to condemn them.
I have not consciously misrepresented the system of Mr. Newman and his friends in a single particular; I have not, to my knowledge, expressed any one of their tenets invidiously. An attentive reader may deduce, I think, all the Subordinate points in their teaching from some one or more of the principles which I have given; but I have not wilfully omitted any doctrine of importance. And, in every point, the opposition to what I may be allowed to call the protestantism of the nineteenth century is so manifest, that we cannot but feel that the peculiar character of the system is to be traced to what I have before noticed--the extreme antipathy of its founders to the spirit which they felt to be predominant in their own age and country.
It is worth our while to observe this, because fear and passion are not the surest guides to truth, and the rule of contraries is not the rule of wisdom. Other men have been indignant against the peculiar evils of their own time, and from their strong impression of these have seemed to lose sight of its good points; but Mr. Newman and his friends appear to hate the nineteenth century for its own sake, and to proscribe all belonging to it, whether good or bad, simply because it does belong to it.--This diseased state of mind is well shown by the immediate occasion of the organization of their party. Mr. Perceval tells us that it was the Act for the dissolution of some of the Irish bishoprics, passed in 1833, winch first made the authors of the Tracts resolve to commence their publication. Mr. Perceval himself cannot even now speak of that Act temperately; he calls it "a wanton act of sacrilege," "a monstrous act," "an outrage upon the Church;" and his friends, it may be presumed, spoke of it at the time in language at least equally vehement. Now, I am not expressing any opinion upon the justice or expediency of that Act; it was opposed by many good men, and its merits or demerits were fairly open to discussion; but would any fair and sensible person speak of it with such extreme abhorrence as it excited in the minds of Mr. Perceval and his friends? The Act deprived the Church of no portion of its property; it simply ordered a different distribution of it, with the avowed object on the part of its framers of saving the Church from the odium and the danger of exacting Church Rates from the Roman Catholics. It did nothing more than what, according to the constitution of the Churches of England and Ireland, was beyond all question within its lawful authority to do. The King's supremacy and the sovereignty of Parliament may be good or bad, but they are undoubted facts in the constitution of the Church of England, and have been so for nearly three hundred years. I repeat that I am stating no opinion as to the merits of the Irish Church Act of 1833; I only contend, that no man of sound judgment would regard it as "a monstrous act," or as "a wanton sacrilege." It bore upon it no marks of flagrant tyranny: nor did it restrain the worship of the Church, nor corrupt its faith, nor command or encourage anything injurious to men's souls in practice. Luther was indignant at the sale of indulgences; and his horror at the selling Church pardons for money was, by God's blessing, the occasion of the Reformation. The occasion of the new counter-reformation was the abolition of a certain number of bishoprics, that their revenues might be applied solely to church purposes; and that the Church might so be saved from a scandal and a danger. The difference of the exciting cause of the two movements gives the measure of the difference between the Reformation of 1517, and the views and objects of Mr. Newman and his friends.