CHAPTER III: THE POLITICAL THEORY OF THE OXFORD MOVEMENT142

If, in its broader aspects, Tractarianism is no more than the English side of that reactionary romanticism which, on the Continent, drove men like Schlegel back to the ideals of the Roman Church,¹⁴³ in a more narrow sense, it is to certain great political causes that we must look for its origin.¹⁴⁴ The Church of England ceased to derive benefit from that indifference which, in an age of benevolent complacency, had shielded it from criticism.

Simultaneously with the hopes of this revival, the growth of liberal ideas in the second and third decades of the nineteenth century did much to destroy the privileged position of the English Church. The repeal, in 1828, of the Test and Corporation Acts placed the Dissenters on an equal political level with Anglicans. In the next year Roman Catholic emancipation followed; and when, in 1832, the Reform Bill was forced upon a reluctant House of Lords, it must have seemed to indignant To­ries that the flood gates of democracy had been opened.¹⁴⁹ It was cer­tainly possible no longer to see Church and State as convertible terms. The State was accepting as its fully qualified members men who by no possible stretch of the imagination could be deemed Anglican in out­look.

It was scarcely remarkable that there should be deep apprehension for the future. ‘The Church of England,' wrote the Quarterly Review in 1834,¹⁵² ‘is as a beleaguered city.' Even the placid Greville was con­vinced that its reform must be undertaken;¹⁵³ and an able writer in the next year went so far as to maintain that ‘the only point worthy of con­sideration was how that reform may be effected so as at once to occa­sion the least amount of hazard to the party about to be reformed,'¹⁵⁴ while James Mill complacently speculated as to how best the Church might be transformed into a kind of gigantic mechanics institute.¹⁵⁵

It was into such an atmosphere that the Ministry of Lord Grey flung their bombshell of Irish Church Reform. The English Church in Ireland had long been the object of fierce and bitter attack. The establishment of a small minority, it was supported by the tithes of an alien community. It had means that were, unquestionably, more than sufficient to its end. The collection of its revenues had long been one of the plagues of the Home Secretary. At last the ministry decided upon a drastic reform. If State support was continued, nevertheless ten of the bishoprics were suppressed;¹⁵⁶ and it was perhaps even more striking that in his admis­sion of its abuses,¹⁵⁷ Lord John Russell went out of his way to state that where Church funds could be more profitably utilised they should be confiscated.'¹⁵⁸ It was long since the Church had received so thorough­going a challenge.

Newman has told¹⁵⁹ us how bitter was his resentment against the Liberals when news of the event travelled out to Italy. It was not the Bill itself so much as the movement of which it was the striking manifesta­tion that angered him.

But the movement was not to meet without opposition. From the outset it was bitterly anti-Erastian. ‘With Froude,' Newman tells us,¹⁶⁹ and it must be remembered that by Froude, Newman was above all influenced, ‘Erastianism was the parent, or if not the parent, the ser­viceable and sufficient tool of Liberalism.' But anti-Erastianism was not likely to meet with approval among the political ecclesiastics of London. It drew its inspiration, at any rate, in its Tractarian expression, from the Middle Ages;¹⁷⁰ and to admire the medieval popes was already to conceive of a Church infinitely superior to the secular state. It was as passionately opposed to the latitudinarian spirit of the politicians; Sir Robert Inglis with his uncompromising orthodoxy was its political ideal. The Oxford Movement set its face firmly towards the past. It did not desire a charitable breadth of view. The truth was to be found in the writings of the fathers, and of the divines of the seventeenth century.¹⁷¹ The Church was to purge itself of heresy and to build itself around the essential doctrine of the Apostolic succession.¹⁷² The identity of the Church, in fact, was to be found not in its life but in its tradition.¹⁷³ It thus relied essentially upon authority, and for its source it went back to the ages when, as it deemed, the Church was untrammelled by a State­connexion. Clearly, it had thus no sympathy from the outset with the notion of a royal supremacy— ‘that blighting influence upon our Upas­tree' as Hurrell Froude termed it¹⁷⁴—and was naturally alien in spirit to those who, like Arnold, looked upon Christianity essentially as a spirit and not a body of doctrine. It was, in brief, a Catholic and not a Protes­tant conception,¹⁷⁵ and was thus bound to challenge dissent from its conclusions.

For to the majority of men, and certainly to the majority of influen­tial men, the Church was not the Church, but the Establishment.¹⁷⁶ What it was, perhaps, even more, what it might become, was essentially a matter of parliamentary enactment. With Newman's keen sense of a separate clerical order,¹⁷⁷ and his challenging demand for independence, it was impossible for them to feel any sympathy. To men like Lord John Russell, for instance, the Church was no more than one among many national institutions, and, equally with James Mill, though unconsciously, he was prepared to apply to its revenues the criterion of social utility.¹⁷⁸ Sir James Graham did not hesitate to affirm that the State might re­distribute Church property in any manner it thought fit, ‘as long as it was distributed for purposes strictly Protestant.'¹⁷⁹ ‘The Church of En­gland,' John Cam Hobhouse told the House of Commons,¹⁸⁰ ‘is em­phatically the offspring and child of the law, and the parent may deal with the child.' Even Sir Robert Peel could only defend the right of the Church to the increment-value of its improved property by urging that no distinction should be introduced between its possessions and those of other corporations.¹⁸¹ Clearly such an attitude was virtually antithetic to that of the Tractarians. It explains the appointment of Dr. Hampden to the Regius Professorship of Divinity; for Hampden was at least a Liberal and had shown no notions of high prerogative in regard to the Church. And it was precisely on the ground of his liberalism that his appointment provoked so vehement an opposition.¹⁸²

From the moment of that conflict the story possesses a tragic inevi­tability. The Tractarians went to extremes in their effort at least to neutralise the appointment;¹⁸³ and Dr. Hampden did not forget the part they played when the opportunity for return arose.¹⁸⁴ The contest turned the inchoate band of sympathisers into a party; and its members began to understand their responsibilities not less than the need for giving them expression.¹⁸⁵ Into the story of its growth it is not now possible to en­ter;¹⁸⁶ but it is permissible to point out that few movements have been so admirably served by their leaders.

For a time there was peace. If Newman and Ward had gone, Keble and Pusey remained and they devoted themselves with singular courage to the task of repairing the breach that had been made.¹⁹⁸ Yet the Church had by no means completed its time of travail. In 1847 Lord John Russell precipitated a further controversy by making Dr. Hampden a bishop— 'an indication,' Lord Morley comments¹⁹⁹.'.. of a determination to sub­stitute a sort of general religion for the doctrines of the Church.' Cer­tainly, it was not the type of appointment which might reassure those whom the secession ofNewman had caused to waver. But worse was to follow. In the year 1850 Bishop Philpotts refused to institute to the liv­ing of Bampford Speke the Reverend George Gorham on the ground of uncertain doctrine in regard to baptism. Mr. Gorham sued the bishop in the Court of Arches; but the court decided against him. He thereupon took his case on appeal to the Judicial Committee of the Privy Coun- cil—a purely lay body in which the two archbishops and the bishop of London sat as assessors. This latter Court reversed the proceedings of the Court of Arches by a majority verdict and Mr. Gorham took the living. But the decision was a disastrous one.²⁰⁰ Every one knew that the Court had been instituted to satisfy the restless ambition of Lord Brougham;²⁰¹ and the latter himself testified in the House of Lords that it had not been intended that the Court should deal with such a class of cases.²⁰² It was urged that political causes had not been without their influence on the judgment;²⁰³ certainly it asserted in a striking manner the inherent right of the Crown to settle matters of faith. Pusey and Keble no less than Gladstone and Manning were horrified. ‘The case of the Church of England at this moment,' wrote Mr. Gladstone to Lord Lyttleton,²⁰⁴ ‘is a very dismal one, and almost leaves men to choose between a broken heart and no heart at all. But at present it is all dark or only twilight which rests upon our future.' A declaration of protest was issued by all the leaders of the High Church movement.²⁰⁵ It was clear to Manning that the parting of the ways had come. Mr. Gladstone tried to urge delay, but to him the implications of the judgment were irresist- ible.²⁰⁶ He tried to stimulate the clergy to an attack on the extension, as he deemed it, of the royal supremacy to ecclesiastical affairs, but met with little or no response.²⁰⁷ A letter to his bishop was equally unavail­ing. His friends, men Like Dodsworth and Maskell,²⁰⁸ could do nothing by their protests. The government seemed determined to stand by the judgment. In the end Manning felt himself compelled to give up the struggle. ‘I gradually came to see,' he wrote,²⁰⁹ ‘that there was no inter­mediate position between the Catholic faith and an undogmatic pietism.' By September, 1850, it is clear that he was convinced,²¹⁰ and when he was called upon to protest against the Papal Aggression of 1851 he found it impossible to do so.²¹¹ On the sixth of April, 1851, he was received into the Roman Catholic Church. His conversion was the last of those which may be directly traced to the influence of the Oxford Movement

II

No one can read the Tracts for the Times without realising how far removed is their atmosphere from one of contented acceptance of State interference. They do not, indeed, specifically reject the establishment;'²¹² but they point out with unhesitating directness the distinction between their position and that of the world at large. The Church does not de­pend upon the State. Its property is its own. It will not submit to the test of utility. The clergy must choose whether they will be for the Church or against it;²¹³ they must magnify their office. They must protest against what seems ‘a most dangerous infringement on our rights on the part of the State.' They must not be content to be its creation. ‘No one can say that the British legislature is in our communion, or that its members are necessarily even Christians. What pretence then has it for, not merely advising, but superseding the Ecclesiastical power?”²¹⁴ The Church must resist such encroachment on its rights. ‘You may keep it before you as a desirable object that the Irish Church should at some future day meet in Synod, and protest herself against what has been done; and then pro­ceed to establish or rescind the State injunction as may be thought expe­dient.”²¹⁵ Here, clearly, is a high sense of prerogative. Its origin is equally obvious. It is not from a secular legislature that change must derive. ‘When corruptions,' says the fifth tract,'²¹⁶ ‘prevalent among the pro­fessedly Christian world render it necessary for her to state the sub­stance of her faith in articles (as was done in A. D. 1562), or when circumstances appear to require any change or variation either in the Forms of her Liturgy, or in her general internal government, the king has the constitutional power of summoning the houses of convocation, a sort of ecclesiastical parliament composed of Bishop or clergy, from whom alone such changes can fitly or legally emanate.' But the king is only the temporal head of the Church. ‘We are not thence to infer that she gave, or could give to an earthly monarch, or to his temporal legis­lature, the right to interfere with things spiritual.”²¹⁷ It was natural that a protest should in this sense be made against the re-arrangement of dioceses by a Royal Commission in 1836"²¹⁸ ‘without confirmation of their acts on the part of the Church.”²¹⁹

It is clearly against a presumed supremacy of the State over the Church that protest is made; and it is this which constitutes the key to the political theory of Tractarianism. Starting as it does in a movement against an invasion of what Keble deemed its prerogatival right to self­reformation, it was inevitable that this should be the case. Indeed seven years before the commencement of the Oxford Movement, Whately, in his Letters on the Church,'²²⁰had emphasised the idea of the Church as a perfect and self-sufficing society of divine institution, and had argued from that conception first to its rights ofjurisdiction over all who volun­tarily become its members;²²¹ and next to the need for a complete sepa­ration of Church and State since the idea underlying each of the societ­ies was essentially distinct.²²² Nor was he alone in this attitude. Almost at the end of the eighteenth century Bishop Horsley of St. David's had insisted that to think of the clergy as State-servants is self-excommuni- cation.²²³ The work of Whately, as we know, profoundly influenced Newman and Froude. ‘What he did for me in point of religious opinion,' wrote the former,²²⁴ ‘was, first, to teach me the existence of the Church as a substantive body or corporation; next to fix in me those anti-Erastian views of Church polity which were one of the most prominent features of the Tractarian movement.' For if once it was admitted that Church and State were distinct, and that the former possessed Apostolic succes­sion, to admit the superiority of the latter would be intolerable. That had been the importance of Keble's sermon. The nation had apostatised it­self; it was no longer the Church. ‘This hateful circumstance it was,' Lord Morley has written,²²⁵ ‘that inevitably began in multitudes of de­vout and earnest minds to produce a revolution in their conception of a church, and a resurrection in curiously altered forms of that old ideal of Milton's austere and lofty school,—the ideal of a purely spiritual asso­ciation that should leave each man's soul and conscience free from “secu­lar chains” and “hireling wolves.”' Once a new conception ofthe Church was needed it was inevitably upon dogma and orthodoxy that the Tractarians were driven back.²²⁶ To find out what the Church was they were compelled to discover what it had been. They sought to know it in the days of its purity—in its Catholic time. Hence the necessity for a rigid exclusiveness; since it could not claim to be a branch of the Church Catholic and Apostolic unless that steady and decisive continuity of unimpaired doctrine had been maintained.

It is this notion of a Church as a societas perfecta, founded upon a definite and statutable creed, which so clearly lies at the basis of the Tractarian antagonism to the State. For the State had become non-An- glican, or, as they would have said, non-Christian, and they could not submit to a reform they knew to be inevitable at the hands of men whose doctrines they abhorred.²²⁷ They had an uncomfortable suspicion that, as J. A. Froude remarked,²²⁸ ‘the laity would never allow the Church of England to get on stilts... the State would remain master, let Oxford say what it pleased.' Inevitably, therefore, the central point of their attack was the royal supremacy since in it, as they were to learn,²²⁹ was in­volved the notion that the State was supreme no less in spiritual than in temporal affairs. Their object from the outset was, if not to free the Church from the trammels of an Establishment, at any rate to minimise its consequences in the direction of secular control. ‘Churchmen,' said Dean Church many years later,²³⁰ ‘believe the Church to be a religious society as much as a congregational body, as much so as the Roman Catholic body. It has also become in England an Established Church; but it has not therefore ceased to be a religious society with principles and laws of its own.' The claim is that of the Presbyterians in 1843²³¹ and, repudiated in both cases by the State, it led to the foundation of the Free Church of Scotland in one event as to the revival of Roman Ca­tholicism in the other.

It was emphatically against Erastianism that the Tractarians were contending. ‘Lord Grey,' Mr. Froude has reported,²³² ‘had warned the bishops in England to set their houses in order, and was said to have declared in private that the Church was a mare's nest.' Bishop Wilberforce—assuredly no enemy to the Establishment—quoted in the House of Lords an extraordinary example of contemporary opinion. ‘The Church of England,' so the Globe asserted,²³³ ‘as by law estab­lished, is emphatically a creature of this world. It is impossible to affix any intelligible character to her profession or practice unless we bear steadily in mind that she is essentially a machine for embodying the spiritual element in the changing public opinion of the day, and not a contrivance for transmitting sacraments, or defining creeds.' The doughty Mr. Faithfull was urging in the House of Commons that Church and nation were synonymous terms, and that the nation might dispose freely of its property; he had no high conception of office-bearers in the Church who were merely ‘the arbitrary choice of the Crown or of certain indi­viduals who had the right of appointing them.'²³⁴ To assert that the Church had any ‘absolute and unalienable rights,' Lord Brougham told the House of Lords,²³⁵ was a ‘gross and monstrous anomaly' since it would make impossible the supremacy of Parliament. The argument of Dr. Arnold against the admission of ‘Jews or any other avowed unbelievers in Christ' into Parliament was based on the fact that in such an event ‘Parliament can not be the legislature of the Church, not being an assembly of Chris­tians; and as there is no other Church legislature to be found under our actual constitution, the government of the Church will be de jure ex­tinct,'²³⁶—an unqualified acceptance, even if on high grounds, of the fuliest Erastianism. ‘The House,' Joseph Hume complacently remarked in 1823,²³⁷.'... must be well aware that there was no precise authority in the Scriptures for any particular establishment; it was altogether a civil institution, the creature ofthe law; and by every rule of reason, the same authority that created could alter, nay! could even annul it altogether.' Nor was the purport of such doctrines mistaken by the more high-minded bishops of the time. ‘The legislature, in fact,' wrote Lloyd of Oxford to his old pupil, Sir Robert Peel,²³⁸ ‘say to the Church of England: so long as we guarantee you your property, we will take for ourselves the right of controlling your discipline, and of preventing you from exercising any spiritual power over your own members.' It is a villainous argu­ment, and as oppressive as it is mean.'

It is sufficiently clear that between such an attitude as this, and that of the Tractarians, there could be no compromise. If the Church of En­gland was to fulfil the function assigued to it by the Globe, and do no more than mirror in itself the shifting gusts of popular opinion on reli­gious questions the notion of a dogmatic basis must be abandoned. What to men like Newman were its very roots would have to be torn up. There would be room for the continuous exercise of private judgment and in­fluence—to the Tractarians essentially a dangerous thing.²³⁹ There would be ‘fraternisation' with ‘Protestants of all sorts' which, in the matter of the Jerusalem bishopric Newman called ‘a fearful business.'²⁴⁰ It would have prejudiced what they deemed the essential thing in Anglicanism— the title to be a branch of the Apostolic Church.²⁴¹ State control to them was essentially a handle to novelty—itself among the most deadly of religious sins. ‘If the English Church,' wrote Newman to the Bishop of Ox- ford,²⁴² ‘is to enter upon a new course and assume a new aspect, it will be more pleasant to me hereafter to think that I did not suffer so grievous an event to happen without bearing witness against it.' They were anxious, moreover, to emphasise their complete dissociation from temporal concerns, even such as were concerned with the pos- sessions of the Church.²⁴³ Their only reason, indeed, for not ‘dreading’ alliance with the State was the fact that they simultaneously emphasised their determination to maintain ‘the integrity of the Church’s rights and privi­leges.’²⁴⁴ Their relations were being continuously altered by the civil power and it was ‘the duty of the Church to demand corresponding alterations’ in favour of the prevention of any extra-ecclesiastical inter­ference.²⁴⁵ So eager are they for the rigid defi- nition of doctrine that, as they urge,’²⁴⁶ ‘the abandonment of State prosecutions for blasphemy, etc.... and the disordered state ofthe Christian Knowledge Society, where books are taken cognisance of and condemned, render it desirable that there should be some really working Court of heresy and false doc­trine... the chief advantage of this would be its practical curb upon the exercise ofthe king’s power... the whole Church would be kept in order, the theological law of the Church must be revived, and ecclesiastical law, moreover.’ They are anxious to take patronage out of the hands of the Crown, on the ground that it encroaches on the action of the Arch­bishops.²⁴⁷ They expect the probable abandonment of Church by State and ask how it may best be builded in the hearts of the people;²⁴⁸ for the Church is essentially a divine institution ‘with nothing to hope or fear from Whig or Conservative governments, or from bishops, or from peers, or from courts, or from other visible power. We must trust our own ήθος—that is, what is unseen, and its unseen Author.’²⁴⁹ Where people shrink from the Catholicity of their doctrine as ‘implying want of affec­tion for our National Church’ they are bidden ‘remind them that you take the National Church, but only you do not take it from the Reforma­tion. In order to kindle love of the National Church and yet to inculcate a Catholic tone, nothing else is necessary but to take our Church in the Middle Ages’²⁵⁰—that is, to take the Church at a time when the Tractarians believed it to be pure from the corruption of the State con­trol introduced by Henry VIII. They object to an effort after Church comprehension which does not include ‘public revocation’ by dissent­ers, ‘of their wicked errors.’²⁵¹ Even should the State Church remain there would be special and peculiar ground for its retention. It would be because a visible Church existed upon earth upon which all States should depend and by which they should be guided. Within her sphere the Church would retain her independence and the State would refuse to assist those who were hostile to her claims. It was an alliance of two kingdoms;²⁵² nor were there wanting those who were prepared to assert that the Church was far from being the inferior power.²⁵³ So moderate a man as Dean Church thought that it might urge the deposition of kings, and in a choice between a weak church system and one with the pretensions of Gregory VII and Innocent III, he approves of the latter's decision.²⁵⁴

It is a tremendous and brilliant plea for ecclesiastical freedom that is clearly born from the passionate sense of a corporate church. The Tractarians were anxious, so to speak, to delimit its boundaries that the exclusiveness of its character might become the more apparent. They insist on a rejection of all doctrine that encroaches upon its indepen­dence. They desire to proclaim definitely the character of its doctrine and to insist on the acceptance of that doctrine so that none save those who felt as they did might be its members. They were eager to control Church patronage and Church discipline²⁵⁵ for the same reasons as those urged by Presbyterian theorists—because the Church only can deal ef­fectually with ecclesiastical matters. Since they do not possess the safe­guards which make possible such self-control, ‘it may obviously be the duty of churchmen in mere self-defence to expose and protest against their destitute and oppressed condition.'²⁵⁶ They need these things be­cause the Church must possess unity, and unity can not be obtained if they allow the play of private fancy about its dogmas.²⁵⁷ Everywhere, too, the Tractarians magnify the clerical office and depreciate what­ever in the liturgies or doctrine seems traceable to lay influence.²⁵⁸ Nor do they admit the possibility of change save in the limited degree that expansion may take place ‘only as to whatsoever is read in Holy Scrip­ture, or may be proved thereby';²⁵⁹ and it is rather to the declaration of old truth than the determination of new that they desire men's energies to be directed. That such an unconscious theory of the State was at the bottom of much Tractarian speculation becomes the more obvious when one examines those times at which the leaders of the movement judged themselves to have special cause for resentment against the government of the day. Keble's sermon in 1833 was nothing so much as the casting off of a nation which by following false gods had been guilty of grave heresy.²⁶⁰ Mr. Golightly, having urged Newman to arouse an indignant activity among the Irish clergy, goes on to beseech him not to be too moderate in what he says ofthe Establishment. ‘One of your principles,' he wrote,²⁶¹ ‘I own I do not like; you protest “against doing anything directly to separate Church and State.” I would do the same, perhaps, in ordinary times; but, when the State takes upon herself to decide, and that without consulting the Church, how many bishops are necessary for the superintendence of the clergy, and the clergy are cowardly or ignorant enough to submit to her decisions, it appears to me that the time for separation is come.' Though Newman is eager for the retention of the Establishment he writes to F. Rogers that ‘the State has deserted us,' and that ‘if the destructives go much further in their persecution of us—e.g., if they made Arnold a bishop—I might consider it wrong to maintain that position longer, much as I should wish to do so.'²⁶² ‘They who are no Christians themselves,' wrote Mr. Rickards to New- man,²⁶³ ‘must not legislate on matters of religion for those who are Christians.' It was the events of these past few months, so he told Hurrell Froude, ²⁶⁴ which brought to Newman the realisation that with most Englishmen ‘the Church is essentially a popular institution, and the past English union of it with the State has been a happy anomaly.' How passionate was the sense of resentment against the State the reader of Mr. Palmer's fascinating narrative will not fail to detect.²⁶⁵ The Address to the Arch­bishop of Canterbury, for which he was responsible, was well under­stood to have no other significance than this.²⁶⁶ Not less clearly does this vivid corporate sense appear on the two occasions when Dr. Hampden was made a protagonist in the drama. It has already been noted that his appointment it was which made the Tractarians from a scattered band of enthusiasts into a party.²⁶⁷ For whatever merits Dr. Hampden may have possessed, he represented in the highest possible degree those lati- tudinarian principles against which the Oxford Movement was the in­carnate protest. ‘He had just reasserted,' wrote Church²⁶⁸ ‘that he looked upon creeds, and all the documents which embodied the traditional doc­trine, and collective thought of the Church, as invested by ignorance and prejudice with an authority which was without foundation.' He had, in fact, no sense whatever of its corporateness, and no respect for its history. He regarded its creeds and dogmas as matter not for belief but for speculation. He did not realise, as Dean Church so strikingly said,²⁶⁹ ‘that the Church is so committed to them that he can not enter on his destructive criticism without having to excuse, not one only, but all these beliefs, and without soon having to face the question whether the whole idea of the Church, as a real and divinely ordained society, with a defi­nite doctrine and belief is not a delusion.' That Dr. Hampden did answer that question in the affirmative does not admit of doubt; but he was suspect because, Scripture apart, all other authority was to him matter for human inference. The appointment, however well meant, was a mis­taken one; but what was far more significant was the way in which, despite almost unanimous protest in Oxford, Dr. Hampden was forced upon the University.²⁷⁰ ‘Again,’ said Newman,²⁷¹ ‘the Ministry will be at open war with the Church.’ The idea of a petition to the king—which frightened the Archbishop—called forth a protest from a nettled Prime Minister who unwarily betrayed the realities behind a legal fiction.²⁷² Convocation protested against the appoint- ment, though the Proctors vetoed the proposal.²⁷³ Almost immediately, and very significantly, Newman writes of the ‘probability of the whole subject of Church au­thority, power, claims, etc., etc., being re-opened.²⁷⁴ ‘It was,’ said Dean Church of the appointment,²⁷⁵ ‘a palpable instance of what the Church had to expect’ when her guardianship was taken from her own hands. Eleven years later Lord John Russell, neglecting the obvious warning of 1836, and, seemingly, with the thought of paying a tribute to the liberal­ism of Arnold in his mind,²⁷⁶ appointed Hampden to the bishopric of Hereford. To accept it, protested Pusey,²⁷⁷ ‘was to connive at heresy.’ They attempted to open up the whole question of Dr. Hampden’s ortho­doxy but in vain. Yet they learned certain important lessons. ‘It is cer­tainly humbling enough,’ Pusey wrote,²⁷⁸.... if there is no help what­ever, if any person, however unfit, whether on moral or doctrinal grounds, be chosen by the Minister of the day for a Bishop, except in a resistance to the law.’ ‘The injury therefore to the Church of England,’ said Mr. Baddeley in arguing for a mandamus in the Court of King’s Bench,²⁷⁹ ‘if its pastors are thus to be forced upon it at the mere beck of the Prime Minister of the day, will be incalculable.’ For the Church would lose its identity unless some means were taken to remove it from control by the chance turns of the political wheel. That, surely, was what Newman had meant in 1836 when he asked Pusey if it were not ‘very clear that the English Church subsists in the State, and has no internal consistency (in matter of fact, I do not say in theory), to keep it together, is bound into one by the imposition of articles and the inducement of State protection, not by o and a common faith? If so, can we regret very much that a deceit should be detected.’²⁸⁰

Certain parliamentary legislation dealing with the Church at this time called forth opinions of some importance. They protested against using the churches for the announcement of dissenters’ marriages.²⁸¹ When, in 1836, it was proposed to abolish the ancien bishopric of Sodor and Man, they urged not merely that it was an unjustifiable interference with established ecclesiastical right, but also that the Commission was acting in tyrannical fashion²⁸²—the fact that the see did not carry with it membership in the House of Lords they regarded as a valuable prece­dent.²⁸³ In 1838, Philpotts of Exeter protested against the Church Disci­pline Bill of that year in significant fashion. He condemned it because ecclesiastical authority seemed to him independent of the sanction of the temporal laws ‘which merely adds temporal consequences to the eccle­siastical censures, the infliction of which is part of the power of the Keys, vested in the Church by its divine founder, and exercised by it in the earliest ages. It follows that the State, though it may refuse to add a civil sanction to the exercise of the spiritual authority, can not either grant that authority, which does not spring from any human source, or take it away from any one in whom the divine constitution of the Church has vested it;²⁸⁴ and it is in a similar sense that the Bishop of London protested against the Church Discipline of 1850.²⁸⁵ The consistency of these protests is beyond all question. They connect as closely with the ήθος; of the Oxford Movement as the Claim of Right in 1842 with the whole character of Presbyterian history.

But nowhere is the whole nature of that ήθος so apparent as in the controversy which raged round the Gorham judgment. ‘It is,' Mr. Gladstone wrote to Manning,²⁸⁶ ‘a stupendous issue.' Here was a defi­nite declaration on the part of the State as to what must be taken to be the true doctrine of the Church of England. The judgment caused wide­spread consternation. It seemed to make the Church what an able writer later termed ‘simply a religious body to which the State concedes cer­tain rights, dignities and possessions not enjoyed by non-established churches, and over which the State, in return for this concession, exer­cises an authority from which non-established Churches are free.'²⁸⁷ It was, a denial of the Church's right to declare its o belief to which, so Pusey urged, Magna Charta was the pledge; ‘if the State,' he told a great London audience,²⁸⁸ ‘will not, as Magna Charta pledges it, allow that “the Church should have liberities inviolate,” that must ask that the State will set us from A striking protest was drawn up against the right of the Privy Council ‘practically to exercise in spiritual matters a juris­diction for which they are utterly incompetent, and which never has been, nor even can be, confided to them by the Church.'²⁸⁹ Mr. Maskell, the well-known liturgical scholar, wrote a pamphlet urging that not even a bench of bishops could deal with the matter, so long as their authority was not derived from the Church.²⁹⁰ ‘It was now,' writes Pusey's biog­rapher,²⁹¹ ‘definitely asked whether the changes which had been assented to on the part of the Church of England three centuries ago were such as to forfeit her claim to be a part of the Church of Christ.' Pusey himself wrote a laborious tract to prove, as he hoped, that ecclesiastical author­ity alone could decide doctrine. A priest, so he urged, who appeals to a lay court from his bishop's decision is degrading his office. Manning, Robert Wilberforce and Mill of Cambridge, drew up a protest which repudiated, all acceptance of the royal supremacy in any save a strictly temporal sense.²⁹² Gladstone repudiated all idea of a commission to de­cide doctrine which did not originate with, and depend upon the Chruch²⁹³ Philpotts of Exeter actually renounced communion with the Archbishop of Canterbury his share in the judgment.²⁹⁴

The reason for this indignation is perfectly clear. The Church of England would cease to be a separate society did she permit such inva­sions of her proper sphere. ‘There can be no doubt,' wrote Mr. Henry Drummond,²⁹⁵ ‘that the Church of England is not organised as the Church and Kingdom of Christ ought to be; that she has ever been, and is now more than ever, trampled upon by the civil power; that having recognised fully only two sacraments, one of these has been pronounced by the civil power to be useless, in other words, no sacrament at all, and that conse­quently she is almost unchurched altogether.' ‘Either the governing power in the State must allow the objectionable decision to be reviewed by proper authority and the usurpation to be abated for the future,' wrote the gentle Keble,²⁹⁶ ‘or the governing power in the Church must at all hazards demur to the State's interference and disregard its enactments.' ‘To all calling themselves churchmen,' he urged again,²⁹⁷ ‘we may say, is there not a treasure of Sacred Truth, and a living Body entrusted with that treasure And can it be right for any consideration to make over the trust to those who are not of the Body Again, to all candid persons of every creed we may say, Is it not a part of Religious Liberty for a Reli­gious Body to declare its own doctrine; or, if its civil and social position equitably interfere with its freedom in this respect, to be allowed at least a choice which of the two it will forego?' ‘The imposition of any doc­trine by such an evidently human institution as that (the Crown),' wrote Mr. W. J. E. Bennett to Lord John Russell,²⁹⁸ ‘would be the very sever­est of tyranny.' ‘Men have not yet learned,' the same clergyman com­plained again,²⁹⁹ ‘to separate the spiritual power of the Church from the temporal... the royal supremacy in civil matters, as well as in ecclesias­tical matters, as long as they are merely ecclesiastical and not spiritual; also in all temporal matters, causes and trials, arising out of them we cheerfully acknowledge: but the royal supremacy in the doctrines of our Blessed Lord, in the discipline of the Church within, in the regulation of her pastors, in the enunciation of her doctrines, we utterly and explicitly deny.' ‘If the decision of the Judicial Committee be the voice of the English Church,' protested Mr. J. M. Neale,³⁰⁰ ‘she is actively commit­ted to heresy.'

Of the meaning of such an attitude there can be no question; it is simply the assertion of the sovereignty of the Church over its own con­cerns. Naturally, this is even more vehemently asserted by those whom the decision drove into the Roman Catholic Church. ‘He found,' wrote Mr Allies,³⁰¹ ‘that supremacy of the civil power to consist in a supreme jurisdiction over the Establishment in matters both of faith and of disci­pline, and in the derivation of Episcopal mission and jurisdiction not as to their origin indeed, but as to their exercise—from the Crown or the nation. The writer at once felt that he must repudiate either that su­premacy, or every claim of the Church, that is the one divinely-consti­tuted society to which the possession of the truth is guaranteed, the royal supremacy and the Church of God are two ideas absolutely in­compatible and contradictory.' For assuredly a Church that claims to derive its character from divine institution can not admit of human in­terference. What she is, she is by virtue of her origin, nor does she need the aid of the State to complete her social powers. This was very dis­tinctly proclaimed by Manning. ‘The Church of England,' he said,³⁰² ‘then being thus an integral whole, possesses within itself the fountain of doctrine and discipline, and has no need to go beyond itself for suc­cession, orders, mission, jurisdiction and the office to declare to its own members in matters of faith, the intention of the Catholic Church.' He emphasised the fact that the royal supremacy was in no sense ‘spiritual or ecclesiastical—understanding the word ecclesiastical to mean any­thing beyond a civil power accidentally applied to ecclesiastical persons or causes. To make this as clear as I can, I would further add that I know ofno supremacy in ecclesiastical matters inherent in the civil power or prince but either (1) such power as all princes, Christian or heathen, alike possess; or, (2) such as has been received by delegation from the Church itself.'³⁰³ The claim to complete independence could hardly be more incisively stated. Nor would he have any compromises. ‘It seems to me,' he wrote of Mr. Gladstone's proposal,³⁰⁴ ‘a plan to amuse and lull real intentions.' He felt himself compelled to admit that laws he held divine had been violated. ‘My contest now,' he told his sister,³⁰⁵ ‘is with the State and the world, with secular churchmen, and those who of a divine would make it a human society, or at the best a Protestant Com­munion.' ‘A body,' he said again,³⁰⁶ ‘which teaches under the authority of human interpretation descends to the level of a human society,' and he felt keenly that the whole ήθος of the Church would disappear were the bishops to betray their trust and admit the judgment. He felt that ‘all Divine authority in England is at stake,' and urged to Robert Wilberforce the necessity of bearing witness ‘against the whole Reformation schism, which is a national and corporate private judgment.³⁰⁷ Obviously his mind turned more and more against the Erastian nature of the sixteenth century settlement. ‘Surely,' he wrote a little later,³⁰⁸ ‘the Reformation was a Tudor statute. carried by violence and upheld by political power; and now that the State is divorcing the Anglican Church, it is dissolv­ing.' The Reformation had shut out ‘the authority of the living and uni­versal church' for three hundred years until it was no longer a Church of Christ.³⁰⁹ And it was essentially the implicit Erastianism of the Gorham judgment which for him was decisive. ‘The violation ofthe doctrine of baptism,' he wrote in his diary nearly forty years later,³¹⁰ ‘was of less gravity to me than the violation of the divine office of the Church by the supremacy of the Crown in Council.'

This same feeling clearly underlay the conversion of Dodsworth.³¹¹ The attitude of the Establishment he held to be ‘simply one of non­resistance, of acquiescence in what the State pleases to dictate to it,'³¹² and therefore was no part of the Church at all. It is plain, he argued,³¹³ ‘that the whole spiritual supremacy over the Church, en- joyed by the Pope before the Reformation has been transferred to the Crown and is now exercised by it, or rather by the State of which the Crown is the executive.' It does not matter that this power is exercised constitution­ally since ‘this would not relieve men's consciences, which are com­pelled to reclaim against the spiritual jurisdiction of the Crown, or of the State, in whatever way exercised.'³¹⁴ It is to enter the one society which can claim the possession of Catholic principles that he is com­pelled to leave the Church of England. The Church has lost its ήθος as it has lost its constitution and its freedom.³¹⁵

III

The Oxford Movement, so far as the working out of the principles of 1833 are concerned, ended with the defection of Manning. Yet because the principles for which it stood lie buried as deeply as the origins of the Church itself they are no less living to-day. If the State has ceased to invade the functions of the Church with the ruthless determination of the last century, Erastianism is far from dead, and so long as it remains Tractarianism can not die. For, in its essence, Tractarianism is essen­tially the plea of the corporate body which is distinct from the State to a separate and free existence. It is a denial that the members of the Church are as its members no more than individuals, living under the all-inclu­sive sovereignty of the Crown. Certain churchmen have striven increas­ingly to stress its corporateness, its sense of a real life to which it is of right entitled. The Church has striven to free itself from Newman's re­proach that it is ‘nothing more nor less than an establishment, a depart­ment of government, or a function or operation of the State—without a substance, a mere collection of officials, depending on and living on the supreme civil power. Its unity and personality are gone..' ³¹⁶ Where the hand of the State has seemed to imperil the right of the Church to its own life, distinguished churchmen, willing to repudiate the State­connexion have not been wanting. ‘Once free from State-control,' wrote Father MacKonochie,³¹⁷ ‘we shall begin, I trust, to feel as a body and not merely as individuals, that we belong to a ‘kingdom which is not of this world.' Our bishops will know that their power is that of servants of Christ, not Lords of Parliament. We of the clergy shall be free from the temptations to worldly gain and ambition with which an Establishment surrounds men; and our people will receive or reject us for Christ's sake, not as ministers appointed by the State.' A similar spirit is to be observed among those who have been responsible for the growth of ritualism in the English Church. It was Dean Church who condemned what he called the ‘short and easy' method of dealing with the ritualists on the ground that ‘English clergymen are ministers of an Established Church, and are therefore as much bound to submit to all that Parlia­ment orders as any other public functionary.' ‘If the Church be sup­posed to have an existence and, powers of its own,' he said,'³¹⁸ ‘besides what the State gives it, and, however closely joined with the State, to be something which the State, though it may claim to regulate, may neither create nor destroy—then the debate is open whether the conditions of union and co-operation have been observed on either side.' The Royal Commission on Ecclesiastical Discipline of 1906 contains a series of comments on the Erastianism of the Supremacy of the Crown which might well date back to 1833. Clergyman after clergyman unhesitatingly rejected the right of the Judicial Committee to deal with matters of ritual. ‘I deny,' is the usual formula,³¹⁹ ‘the competence of that tribunal as a court of final appeal in matters relating to the doctrine, discipline, and ceremonial of the Church.' Lord Hugh Cecil, in his very remarkable evidence, insisted on the distinction between Church and State. ‘It is untruthful and pernicious,' he said,³²⁰ ‘to go on making believe that the Church and the State are one set of people considered in different as­pects. They must be now thought of as distinct bodies.' From that un­hesitating rejection of Arnoldism, he drew the obvious conclusion. ‘I could not, so far as I am concerned, approve of any settlement which still left it possible for any one except the bishops to define the doctrine of the Church in they course of an ecclesiastical judgment and to make that definition binding upon the whole body of the Church.'³²¹ ‘For my action as a priest of the Church,' one witness informed the Commis- sion,³²² ‘I am responsible to the bishop alone, to whom I am ready at all times to give account, not to the Privy Council.' Mr. G. J. Talbot, one of the most distinguished of ecclesiastical lawyers, urged that the Judi­cial Committee as an ecclesiastical tribunal was theoretically indefen­sible and practically a failure.³²³ The Bishop of Exeter drew an interest­ing distinction between the legal and moral sovereignty of Parliament. ‘While according to our constitution,' he said,³²⁴ ‘Parliament has unlim­ited power, the effect of its legislation must depend on the moral power behind it, and churchmen generally will distinguish between legislation invited by the Church, and legislation merely forced upon the Church from without.' The Bishop of Birmingham repudiated the sovereignty of the State outside the temporal sphere in no less uncompromising fash­ion. ‘The Church,' he said³²⁵.... has become only one of many religious bodies in the State... and in consequence the legislative and judicial au­thorities of the State have ceased to be in any real sense... capable of claiming the allegiance of churchmen in spiritual matters.' The attitude was that of Bishop Blomfield in 1850. ‘I rest my case,' he said,³²⁶ ‘on the inherent and indefeasible right of the Church to teach and maintain the truth by means of her spiritual pastors and rulers, a right inherent in her original constitution.' We are clearly dealing again with the notion of aperfecta societas set over against the State. There is no room in such conception for that stern Erastianism of Sir William Harcourt when he urged, with reference to this controversy,³²⁷ ‘if there is to be such a (national) church, it must be based upon national authority, and the only national authority which we recognise is that of the Crown and of Par­liament.' The very strength of such contrast is a measure of the Tractarian achievement.

It is not a little curious that more attention should not have been paid to the remarkable analogy between the Oxford Movement and the Disruption of 1843 in the Established Church of Scotland.³²⁸ Each was essentially an anti-Erastian movement. It was against an all-absorptive State that each group of men was contending. There is a striking tempo­ral parallel between the two move- ments. That of Oxford, in the nar­rower sense, begins in 1833 and ends with the conversion ofNewman in 1845; that of which Chalmers was the distinguished leader begins in 1834 with the abolition by the General Assembly of lay patronage, and ends in 1843 with the secession of those who refuse to accept what they term an invasion oftheir peculiar province by the State. In each case, as was well enough admitted by contemporaries, the attempt was made— and in the case, particularly of Presbyterianism, this lay at the very root of its theory—to work out a doctrine of the Church which, neglecting the State, gave the Church the general organisation of a perfect society. In each case, that attempt was resisted by Parliament on the one hand, and by the Courts on the other. The State claimed a sovereignty against which, as it deemed, no part of itself might contend. But to this it was in each case retorted that Church and State were in essence distinct from one another, that each was a self-sufficing society, into the province of which the other might not wander. Both to Chalmers and Newman it seemed very clear that to admit a right of control on the part of the State was to deny that divine constitution to which their churches laid claim. They would have urged, with Warburton, that the two societies are ‘sov­ereign and independent of each other;' but they would have denied his conclusion that ‘their joint forces must co-operate thus to apply and enforce the influence of religion'³²⁹ if in that union the sovereignty of the Church was impaired. If, as seems probable, the effort of Chalmers was more logical and more consistent than the somewhat chaotic antago­nism of the Tractarians, that was rather because he had inherited a defi­nite theory of Church and State, which Newman and his followers had to hammer out for themselves. Both Chalmers and Newman believed in a purified Establishment;³³⁰ but each also asserted roundly that the ben­efit was derived by the State rather than the Church. It was when it was conceived that the fact of a statutory alliance involved also the idea of a statutory control, that they found themselves compelled to abandon the Church of their origin.³³¹

It was a definition of the Church that the Tractarians attempted, and they found almost immediately that to define its identity was to assert its exclusiveness. If it was created by God it could not be controlled by man; if it was created by God, it was not subject to the ordinances of a man-created institution like the State. They would never have accepted the federalism of Nicholas of Cusa, with its implied admission that the State might reform the Church;³³² between jus publicum and jus sacrum they drew a firm distinction. In reality, their position is singularly medi­eval: it is almost an adequate description of their attitude to the State to say that it is a Guelfic attitude. It was against the pretensions put for­ward in the name of the Prince by men like John of Paris³³³ that they were contending, ofWycif,³³⁴ of Hus,³³⁵ and of Gregory of Heimberg.³³⁶ For, in all these cases, the position of the controversy between Pope and Emperor had led the imperialists to assume the superiority of kingly power, and, as a consequence, the right of the Crown to deal as it would with the Church; just as Lord John Russell in 1833 implicitly assumed the right of the State to deal with the Irish Church. Marsilio of Padua's claim that the Church is no more than an institution within the State,³³⁷ was exactly the expression of the Whig government's attitude. With him it would have said that the ecclesiastical sovereign was the body of the faithful, just as he would, with their approval, identify the faithful with the nation as a whole. The whole foundation of Tractarianism lies in the fact that this had ceased to be the case. They argued, therefore, that the change meant logically the impossibility of confiding the government of the Church to those without its fold. This sense they felt so passionately is already fully developed in Thomas Aquinas,³³⁸ and in as in them, this led to the common notion of the Church itself as a State; ³³⁹ and in the Middle Ages not even the stoutest imperialist denied the truth of this, even when he repudiated its connexion with worldly concerns.³⁴⁰ So that it is not difficult to understand the medievalism of the Oxford Move­ment. It is therein but seeking its natural affiliations. If it goes back for its atmosphere to those beginnings of the controversy it so strikingly illustrates, that is because it is itself the continuator of that controversy. The Reformation had decided the battle in favour of the State, but it had secured rather independence than sovereignty for the State and sover­eignty the Church could still, and does still, challenge. If it seems, as with the Tractarians, to have put aside the dreams of men like Gregory VII with his absorption of Church in State,³⁴¹ that is, as the work of W. G. Ward makes very clear, rather from necessity than from desire. They realised that the time for a world-church had passed away. It seemed then natural to demand that what remained of her mighty dominion she should have the right to cultivate undisturbed.³⁴² It is in one significant sense alone that they have advanced beyond the prevalent conceptions of medieval thought. Where, to men like Baldus and Innocent IV, the Corporation of the State—whether that State be lay or ecclesiastical— is essentially a fictitious thing, the Tractarians had transcended the lim­ited conception of personality as associated only with the individual life. One who reads the sermons of Newman, above all that most elo­quent and most tragic of farewells before his Hegira to Littlemore, will not doubt that to him than the Church there is no life more real or more splendid. She is his mother; it is for her infinite woes that above all he has concern. In her is all the richness of his life, and her injury brings to him what is worse than desolation. Nor is that sense less keenly felt, even if it finds a less eloquent expression, in Pusey and Keble. To all of them to be members of a Church was to be of a fellowship the more precious because in its life they found the mysterious oneness of a vivid personality.³⁴³

IV

It is becoming more and more clear that the future trend of political theory is away from that attitude which bids us read all things in their relation to the State. Certain things that body will not undertake be­cause it is not competent to undertake them. It will cease to attempt the control of religious doctrine. The tribunals of the State no less than its legislature only interfere with the most precious part of corporate free­dom when, though an alien organisation, they attempt a perilous inva­sion. The Church has its history, its laws, its doctrines; the State can not, from a stunted theory of its sovereign power, attempt the fusion of her customs with its own.³⁴⁴ It will rather leave her free to work out, as she best may, the grave and complex problems that confront her. From her own sense of righteousness it will welcome the good. From her own right to freedom it will cherish the beneficent product. From a new world, moreover, that has been perhaps untrammelled by the struggles of the old, it will learn certain great and significant lessons. Where civil right is not directly concerned, it will, as in America,³⁴⁵ maintain that it has no jurisdiction. It will say that Church membership is a Church right not a civil right,³⁴⁶ Church discipline a matter for the ecclesiastical tri­bunal. It will realise that, should the Church use her powers ill, she and she only, will suffer. She will forfeit her privileges not because they are conditional, and therefore subject to revocation,³⁴⁷ but because where men are wronged they will renounce their membership of the State, be

Studies in the Problem of Sovereignty/63 its nature lay or clerical. And the State will understand that the degree of her freedom will be the measure of her progress. In that event the tragedies of Oxford will not have been vain.