his sermons at St. Mary's, with their bewitching style and their penetrating unhackneyed thought, and his lectures in the chapel of the same Church, where he formally expounded the High Church principles, he exercised an immense influence. Newman stood with Hurrell Froude in believing that the times needed bold, frank action, individual initiative, an uncompromising exposition of Catholicism, and a bold endeavor to realize it in Church and State. "Living movements," he said, " do not come of committees. I want to bring out a living Church of England, made of flesh and blood, with voice, complexion, and motion, and action and will of its own. . . . There is something greater than the Established Church-the Church Catholic and Apostolic." On the other hand, Rose, Palmer, and Perceval were old-fashioned High Churchmen-"safe, sound men "--who would not do anything daring or rash. TRACTS FOR Newman and his bolder fellows made their appeal through the Tracts for the Times, 1833-41, the aim of which was by a direct appeal, after the fashion of Wesley, to the conscience and intelligence of the nation, to show that the Catholic principles of the Church of England, such as the real presence, apostolic succession, value of tradition as a rule of faith, and grace objectively bestowed in the sacraments, are the doctrines of the fathers; that these principles are also the doctrines of the old divines of the English Church; that the Disciplina Arcani of the ancient Church ought to be revived; and that the Thirty-nine Articles did not intend to deny the Catholic teaching of the pre-Reformation Church, but only the abuses and extravagances with which that teaching was popularly confounded. It was in Tract 90, written by Newman, that the last proposition was defended, and it stirred up such a furor that, at the request of the bishop of Oxford, Newman suspended the series. There was much plausibility and even truth in the contention of Tract 90, but, looking beneath the surface, it was a monstrous thesis. On Newman's principles any creed or legal paper in the world could be interpreted as meaning the opposite of what it manifestly teaches. Newman's mind was revealing its kinship to Catholicism by verging on that region where the specious insinuosities of evasion, explanation, and supposition obscure the straight and narrow road to truth. Newman joined the Roman Church in 1845, and many in the movement followed him-Oakley, Ward, Faber, Dalgairns, and others. But the larger number of Anglican Catholics remained in their own Church, in which they were encouraged by the example of their most illustrious guide (after Newman), Edward Bouverie Pusey, a man of great learning, especially in patristics, a diligent and voluminous author, a brave teacher, and of saintly life. RESULTS OF The results of the Oxford movement were: (1) A vastly increased love of the Church and zeal in her service. New churches were built, old ones were restored, services were held more frequently, communion was administered weekly, singing and music were cultivated, and both the external and internal life of the Church was revived and strengthened. (2) Development of personal piety, publication of manuals of devotion, fervor in religious observances and in keeping of fasts and holy days. (3) Ritualistic enthusiasm. The Catholic thought of the communication of grace through objective media involved emphasis on the instruments of devotion and of worship. This has led to a variety of appliances and parts to the Church worship upon which the old-time High Churchmen would have looked in dumb wonder. (4) Approach to Roman Catholicism both in doctrine and worship, in morals and method. This approach in some Anglicans is so extreme that the thin line of papal infallibility is perhaps the only barrier.' (5) Desire for reunion with Rome as a venerable and larger part of the Catholic Church. The Anglican Society for Corporate Reunion is ostensibly working for this, and many secret and quasi-secret societies, with which Anglicanism is now honeycombed, are seeking in various ways for either a spiritual or actual communion with the Papal Church. (6) Disturbance of the order of the Church by Catholic practices has gone so far that guardians of the Church's orthodoxy have been compelled to institute legal proceedings against the ritualists. Sometimes the decisions were in favor of the ritualists, sometimes in favor of the Protestants, although the court of last resort, the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council, has invariably held that the extreme methods of the Catholics in worship were illegal. But no decision has permanently affected the Catholic party. Secure in their harmony with the Catholic Church and with some basal principles of 1 For evidence of the approach to Rome in worship see The Roman Mass in the English Church, Lond., 1899. 2 Walter Walsh, in the most valuable book which has been published on the Catholic movement since Dean Church's posthumous Oxford Movement (1891), has furnished abundant evidence, not only of the existence of numerous secret ritualistic societies in the Church of England, but also of the work of these societies to bring Anglicanism into conformity with Rome in doctrine and service, if not into actual communion with her. Secret Hist. of the Oxford Movement, Lond., 1897, 6th ed., 1899, p. 38. High Church reviewers have not seriously touched the strength of Walsh's remarkable showing of damaging facts. their own Church, they have gone on with their auricular confession, their mass, their quasi-monastic orders, and their Catholic doctrinal teaching. The last trial, or rather hearing, was that of 1899, before the archbishop of Canterbury, as to the legality of incense and processional lights. The decision of Dr. Temple was adverse to the Catholics, but as his opinion was purely advisory and had no legal sanction, it is the less likely the ritualists will respect it. Unfortunately law has not been the only weapon used, as riots and mobs have been a too-frequent feature of the ritualistic history. Witness especially the repeated and fearful tumults in the church and parish of St. George's-in-the-East, London, 1859-60.' (7) Numerous converts to Rome. A book published in London (4th edition) in 1881 is entitled Rome's Recruits: List of Protestants who have become Roman Catholics since the Tractaian Movement. It contains the names of about twenty-two hundred people, all of whom belong to Great Britain except a hundred more or less. ROBERTSON The Catholic movement has caused a reaction which has accentuated the progress of rationalism. What Newman and Hurrell Froude did for Catholicism their brothers, Francis W. Newman and James Anthony Froude, did for infidelity. The Broad Church has done magnificent work under the very shadow of ritualism, as witness the names of Frederick W. Robertson, the most quickening preacher of the nineteenth century, Charles Kingsley, Christian socialist in a noble sense, and Frederick D. Maurice, the Christian philosopher and mediator between Jesus and the intellectual and social conscience, who denounced the party system as tending to divide Christ's body both in the Church and State, and who lifted up the Cross as the ruling power in the universe and the touchstone of political economy and sociology. The influence of these men was never more regnant than now. That is in part the secret of the Toynbee movement and the numerous university and other settlements, as well as the Institutional Church movement, which in the case of thousands of souls have made the desert blossom as the rose. 'Full accounts of these riots in St. George's-in-the-East will be found in Harper's Magazine, Nov., 1881, 914 ff. 2 PRESBYTERI UNITARIAN DOCTRINE. CHAPTER VI. THE FREE CHURCHES. THE history of the Presbyterian Church in England during a large part of the last two centuries and that of Unitarianism are almost identical, because the Calvinistic Church suffered the same Socinian evolution in the old country as in the new, and as in its cradle city, Geneva. What were the causes of the Unitarianizing of English Presbyterianism? These, among others: First, a natural reaction from the severity of Calvinism. Second, ANS AND THE a cast of worship, religious life, and preaching exclusively intellectual. The intuitions, the feelings, and all the rich experiences of the heart were overshadowed by intellectualism. Third, the quiet, perhaps unconscious, appropriation by the minister of the functions of the Church, the laymen taking more and more a position of irresponsiveness and irresponsibility. The minister elaborated his theories in his study, and the people allowed themselves to be led into the pleasant pastures of his easy-going theology.' Fourth, the dearth of revivals in Presbyterianism. The breath of the Holy Spirit alone can counteract the tendency of men to naturalism and keep the Church close to truth. A Church spiritually dead will be a Church heretically alive. Fifth, a dry, cold method of preaching. "No greater contrast," says the Congregational historian Stoughton, "can be imagined than that between the Methodist and the Presbyterian preacher, the Methodist and the Presbyterian people. The unction, the fire, the moral force, so visible in the one case is absent in the other. Methodism laid hold of the conscience of England; Presbyterianism did not. The sympathy elicited there is found wanting here; and no culture, no intellectual power, no respectability of position could make up for the lack of earnest Gospel "A Presbyterian congregation claimed and exercised no such republican rights [as the Congregational]. The people chose their pastor, and when they had done so, they left the management of Church business very much in his hands. They did not hold meetings for discussion, or to admit and suspend communicants. . . Guidance being implicitly left to the man of their choice, he had free scope for his theological inquiries and plenty of room for the sway of his opinions. The shepherd went before, the flock followed."-Stoughton, History of Religion in England under Queen Anne and the Georges, ii, 265. preaching and warm-hearted spiritual life." Sixth, the fierce conflicts of the seventeenth century made many thoughtful and peace-loving men dread the conflict and battle to which God calls those who are set for the defense of the faith once delivered to the saints. If the orthodox Christology is true, it is to be fought for as for the citadel of Christianity; but the heats and excesses of that elder age had made many indisposed to strenuous action. The Socinian leaven worked unhindered. But whatever the causes, the slow transformation or petrifying of English Presbyterianism into Unitarianism is one of the most instructive things in Church history. The old evangelical Puritanism, however, had never died utterly, but had always retained pure and able defenders. These, reinforced by Scotch immigrants, reclaimed the herit PURITANISM age. They reorganized the Presbyterian Church of ALIVE. England in 1876, which has done noble work. In 1889 it readjusted its doctrinal basis, adopting a new creed, which has the merit of stating Christian truth in terms so catholic that it might almost be taken as a symbol of a reunited Christendom. No Arminian could object to its doctrine of decrees. ENGLISH Unitarianism itself always had notable adherents in modern England, even although it was a criminal offense to deny the divinity of Christ until 1813. Milton was an Arian in his last days. Sir Isaac Newton was inclined the same way, and Locke's Reasonableness of Christianity was written in the same spirit. Lardner, author of that impregnable apology, The Credibility of the Gospel History (1727-55), as invaluable for certain large results as when first published, might be considered a kind of Unitarian of the extreme orthodox wing, who held to a real doctrine of Christ's divinity, though not in the full Nicene sense. Many of the old Unitarians, indeed, would have looked with horror on the amiable and shallow neo-paganism which goes under the name of Unitarianism to-day. Theophilus Lindsey may be said to have inaugurated modern Unitarianism. In 1774 he resigned his place in the Establishment, and became pastor of a Unitarian Church in Essex Street, London. PRIESTLEY. The greatest English Unitarian was Joseph Priestley, the founder of pneumatic chemistry, who discovered oxygen in 1774 and the composition of water in 1781. When in Paris some scoffing men of science told him that he was the only man of understanding they had ever known who be 1 Stoughton's History of Religion in England, vi, 314. |