The three propositions about which I was so confident were as follow: First was the principle of dogma; my battle was with liberalism--and by liberalism I mean the anti-dogmatic principle and its developments. I have changed in many things, but not in this; religion, as a mere sentiment, has been to me from childhood a dream and a mockery. Secondly, I was confident that there was a visible Church, with sacraments and rites which are the channels of invisible grace. Here, again, I have not changed. But, thirdly, I held a view of the Church of Rome which I have utterly renounced since.
The attack of liberalism upon the university and upon the old orthodoxy of England began in 1834. Thus, in a pamphlet by Dr. Hampden it was maintained that religion is distinct from theological opinion, that it is but a common prejudice to identify theological propositions with the simple religion of Christ; and so on. The tracts were widely read and discussed, but the counter-attack against liberalism was not a power until Dr. Pusey joined us. His great learning, his immense diligence, his simple devotion to the cause of religion, no less than his great influence in the university, at once gave us a position and a name. He taught us that there ought to be more sense of responsibility in the tracts and in the whole movement. Under his influence I wrote a work defining our relation to the Church of Rome, namely, "The Prophetical Office of the Church viewed relatively to Romanism and to Popular Protestantism." The subject of this volume,published in 1837, is the "Via Media." This was followed by my "Essay on Justification," and other works; and so I went on for years up to 1841. It was, in a human point of view, the happiest time of my life. We prospered and spread.
But the movement was to come into collision with the nation, and with the Church of the nation. In 1838 my bishop made some light animadversions on the tracts. But my tract on the Thirty-nine Articles, designed to show that the Articles do not oppose Catholic teaching, and but partially oppose Roman dogma, while they do oppose the dominant errors of Rome, brought down, in 1839, a storm of indignation throughout the country. I saw that my place in the movement was lost.
III.--A Theological Death-bed
In the long vacation of 1839 I began to study the history of the Monophysites, and was-absorbed in the doctrinal question. It was during this course of reading that for the first time a doubt came upon me of the tenableness of Anglicism, and by the end of August I was seriously alarmed. My stronghold was antiquity; yet here, in the fifth century, I found Christendom of the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries reflected.
The drama of religion and the combat of truth and error were ever one and the same; the principles of the Roman Church now were those of the Church then; the principles of heretics then were those of Protestants now; there was an awful similitude. Be my soul with the saints! In the same month the words of St. Augustine were pointed out to me, "Securus judicat orbis terrarum"; they struck me with a power which I had never felt from any words before; the theory of the "Via Media" was absolutely pulverised.
In the summer of 1841, in retirement at Littlemore, I received three blows which broke me. First, in the historyof the Arians I found the same phenomena which I had found in the Monophysites: the pure Arians were the Protestants, the semi-Arians were the Anglicans, and Rome now was what it was then. Secondly, the bishops, one after another, began to charge against me in a formal, determinate movement. Third, it was proposed by Anglican authorities to establish an Anglican bishopric in Jerusalem--a step which amounted to a formal denial that the Anglican Church was a branch of the Catholic Church, and to a formal assertion that the Anglican was a Protestant Church. The Jerusalem bishopric brought me to the beginning of the end.
From the end of 1841 I was on my death-bed, as regards my membership of the Anglican Church, though at the time I became aware of it only by degrees. A death-bed has scarcely a history; it is a tedious decline, with seasons of rallying and seasons of falling back. My position at first was this: I had given up my place in the movement in the spring of 1841, but I could not give up my duties towards the many and various minds who had been brought into it by me; I expected gradually to fall back into lay communion; I never contemplated leaving the Church of England; I could not hold office in its service if I were not allowed to hold the Catholic sense of the Articles; I could not go to Rome while she suffered honours to be paid to the Blessed Virgin and the saints which I thought in my conscience to be incompatible with the supreme glory of the One, Infinite and Eternal; I desired a union with Rome under conditions, Church with Church; I called Littlemore my Torres Vedras, and thought that some day we might advance again within the Anglican Church; I kept back all persons who were disposed to go to Rome with all my might.
The "Via Media" was now an impossible idea; I abandoned that old ground, and took another. I said, "Much as Roman Catholics may denounce us at present as schismatical, they could not resist us if the Anglicancommunion had but that one note of the Church upon it--sanctity." I was pleased with my new view, but my friends were naturally offended at a novel line of argument which substituted a sort of methodistic self-contemplation for the plain and honest tokens of a divine mission in the Anglican Church.
In spite of my ingrained fears of Rome, in spite of my affection for Oxford and Oriel, yet I had a secret longing love of Rome, the Mother of English Christianity. It was the consciousness of this bias in myself which made me preach so earnestly against the danger of being swayed in religious inquiry by our sympathy rather than by our reason. I was in great perplexity, and hardly knew where I stood; I incurred the charge of weakness from some men, and of mysteriousness and underhand dealing from the majority. But I have never had any suspicion of my own honesty.