The Progress of the Century

by Unknown

Thomas Arnold, the head-master of Rugby, was a man of noble character, powerful mind, and intense earnestness of purpose. He was a firm believer in Christianity as a revealed religion. But he held a most liberal view of the Church. He would have admitted to it all the sects of dissenters and have identified it as far as possible with the nation. His theory of the identity of the Church with the nation probably came to him from his passionate study of the ancient commonwealths. He forgot that the philosophers of Greece, though they might sacrifice a cock to Æsculapius, were really outside the state religion, and that the state religion made the chief of them drink hemlock. Prince of educators as he was, he sometimes laid too heavy a strain on his pupils, and prematurely developed their speculative tendencies. In the case of Clough especially, mental health and vigor seem to have been impaired by premature development.

With Thomas Arnold may be coupled his friend Whately, who, though, as Primate of the state Church of Ireland, he held the most equivocal of prelacies, was, by reason of his strong understanding, his fearless character, and his shrewd wit, essentially an iconoclast and a rebuker of ecclesiastical pretensions, as well as a vigorous promoter of education. His keen sayings flew abroad, but his personal influence was greater than his influence as a divine. His Historic Doubts was an apologetic jeu d’esprit which told greatly in its day.

Bishop Connop Thirlwall was a man of first-rate power. At Cambridge he had set out as a rationalist, translating German theology of a heterodox cast and Niebuhr’s History of Rome. But his intellect was curbed by a bishopric, and though he delivered liberal charges and personally exerted a liberal influence, he was lost to the direct service of reason.

Arthur Stanley was Arnold’s best boy, his most devoted adherent, and his model biographer. He embraced Arnold’s theory of the Church as coextensive with the nation and carried his theory of the supremacy of the state so far as to feel a certain sympathy with “Bluidie Mackenzie” as the defender of a state Church against the independence of the Covenanters of Scotland. His name was for a time a terror to all the orthodox, High Church or Low. Yet there was little that was terrible about him. The sweetness of his character was remarkable. His liberality of religious sentiment was boundless. But he had little of the logical or critical faculty, and showed scarcely the desire, still less the ability, to make his way to definite truth. His passion was history, and the historical picturesque was his forte. In a haze of this to the last he floated, coming to no determinate conclusion. His best works, apart from biography, are not his commentaries or sermons, but his lectures on the history of the Russian Church and his Sinai and Palestine; although we cannot help smiling when, in his Sinai and Palestine, we see him hunting with passionate interest and implicit faith for the imaginary scenes of mythical events.

Stanley’s yoke-fellow, Jowett, was a man of a different cast of mind and of higher calibre, as all the world now knows. But in him also, though from different causes, there was the same want of inclination to grasp or capacity for grasping definite truth. These two men were eminently typical of an age of religious dissolution, when people felt the ground of faith giving way under their feet and were striving, by some sort of compromise, to save themselves from falling into the abyss. That Jowett had drifted very far away, not only from orthodoxy, but from his belief in Christianity as a miraculous revelation, and even from belief in our knowledge of the historical character of Christ, the posthumous publication of his letters has plainly shown. How he could have reconciled it to his conscience to remain a clergyman, to hold the clerical headship of an Anglican college, to perform the service and administer the sacrament, it is not easy to see. We can only say that the position was found tenable by one of the most upright and disinterested of mankind. Jowett’s defence probably was and is the defence of others, and the indication of spreading doubt. Clergymen are educated men and can hardly be proof against that which is carrying conviction to other minds.

Robertson, of Brighton, as an eloquent preacher and spiritual leader, rather on the rationalist side, is not to be forgotten. In his sermons there is an evident tendency to liberalize Christianity and to present it ethically as a religion of purity and love rather than as a miraculous revelation which did not escape the keen scent of alarmed orthodoxy and exposed the preacher to some social persecution.

By this time a strong current in an opposite direction had begun to flow. The religious movement was closely connected with the political movement, especially where there was a state Church. Alarmed by the progress of liberalism, which had carried the Parliamentary Reform bill and threatened to withdraw from the Church of England the support of the state, some of the clergy began to look about for a new foundation of their authority, and thought that they found it in apostolical succession and the sacerdotal theory of the sacraments. The leaders of the movement were Pusey, professor of Hebrew at Oxford; Henry Newman, a Fellow of Oriel College; and, in its opening, Hurrell Froude, in whose Life of Becket its spirit and aims are plainly revealed. It took practically the shape of an attempt to return to the priestly Middle Ages. Oxford, with its mediæval colleges, the Fellows of which were then clerical and celibate, formed the natural scene of such an attempt. Pusey, who, by his academical rank, gave his name to the movement, was a man of monastic character and mind, with a piety intense but austere and gloomy enough almost to cling to such a doctrine as the irremissibility of post-baptismal sin. Henry Newman was a man of genius, a writer with a most charming and persuasive style, great personal fascination, and extraordinary subtlety of mind. What he lacked was the love of truth; system, not truth, was his aspiration; and as a reasoner he was extremely sophistical, however honest he might be as a man. In this respect he presented a singular contrast to his brother, Francis Newman, in whom the love of truth was the ruling passion, intense and uncompromising, while he was totally devoid of the gifts of imagination with which Henry was endowed. Henry Newman’s attempt to revive mediæval doctrines presently landed him, with his immediate following, in the mediæval Church. Pusey was illogical enough to refuse the leap. He was also believed to be rather strongly attached to the leadership and spiritual directorship which, as a magnate of the Church of England, he enjoyed. He went so near to the brink as, in his Irenicon, to avow that nothing separated him from Rome but the unmeasured autocracy of the Pope and the excessive worship of the Virgin, both of them mere questions of degree. Manning in time followed: an aspiring hierarch who would probably have stayed in the Church of England if they had made him a bishop. Passing into the Church of Rome, he became a Cardinal, an active intriguer of the Vatican, and an extreme Ultramontane, outvying Newman, who, when the convert’s first ecstasy was over, might be said to be converted rather than changed.

The mediævalizing movement owed much to the fascinations of mediæval art. The Gothic churches and cathedrals and the Gothic ruins of abbeys have been very powerful conservators and propagators of the faith of their builders. It is curious that this talisman should have been renounced by the Church of Rome in favor of the heathen style, of which St. Peter’s is the paragon, magnificent but, in a religious sense, unimpressive.

By the progress of Tractarianism British Protestantism was alarmed and incensed. The Oxford Convocation was the scene of a pitched battle brought on by a bold deliverance of Ward, a disciple of Newman, more logical and daring than his master, who exultingly proclaimed that English clergymen were embracing “the whole cycle of Roman doctrine.” Ward, after a struggle which was a sort of Armageddon of High and Low Church, was condemned and deprived of his degree. Newman’s conversion speedily followed. The rationalists, such as Stanley and Jowett, voted on liberal grounds against the condemnation of Ward.

A storm from the other quarter was raised by Essays and Reviews, a collection of seven essays written by clergymen of the rationalistic school, having for its object the liberalizing of inquiry in the Church. The manifesto at the time created an immense sensation, though in the present advanced state of doctrinal disintegration it would almost pass unnoticed. One of the essays, the most innocent, it is true, which nevertheless committed the author to the general object of the combination, was written by the present Archbishop of Canterbury, and caused the High Church clergy to protest against his appointment as a bishop. The glove thus thrown down was taken up by the High Churchmen. The writers were arraigned for heresy before the Privy Council, and, as Carlyle said, you had a bench of old British judges, “like Roman augurs, debating with iron gravity questions of prevenient grace, supervenient moonshine, and the color of the bishop’s nightmare if that happened to turn up.” Before the same tribunal was arraigned Colenso, a missionary bishop of South Africa and an eminent mathematician, whose arithmetical instincts had led him to examine the numerical statements of the Pentateuch, with highly heretical results. Both the essayists and Bishop Colenso escaped conviction. The Committee of Privy Council, if it was judicial, was also political, and it was resolved, if possible, to avert a rupture in the state Church. Veteran lawyers had little difficulty in finding grounds for acquittal when they did not choose to convict. The language of the impugned writings was seldom so precise as to defy the power of interpretation. “Either the passage means what I say, or it has no meaning,” thundered the counsel for the prosecution. “Is it not possible, Mr. Blank, that the passage may have no meaning?” was the reply of the judge. The Rev. Mr. Voysey, however, succeeded in obtaining the honor of a conviction. Tendered a week to retract, he thanked the court for the opportunity they had given him of rejecting the offer of repurchasing his once cherished position in the Established Church by proclaiming himself a hypocrite.