change the royal became only the form or mask of parliamentary supremacy, which in its turn was but the instrument of the hated"Liberalism,"-then the Anglican became as convinced as the Puritan of the excellence of independency.* The secular arm in touching had wronged the Church, and while the men who did it and those who suffered it to be done were alike reproached, she was pictured as the gracious mother of peoples, with her heroic yet saintly sons, and clinging yet stately daughters about her, creating the literature, civilizations, arts, and whatever made life rich and beautiful, and remaining benignant, though forlorn, in the midst of a greedy and graceless posterity, blind to her beauty, and forgetful of her beneficence. But Newman touched a higher strain; his genius scorned to ask aid from sentiment; he called upon the Church to become militant and equip herself in the armor of her divine attributes. The State might suppress bishoprics, but bishops were independent of the State; they were before it, existed by a higher right, were of apostolical descent and authority, stood in a divine order which the State had not made and could not unmake. And as with the bishops, so with the clergy; their orders were sacred, inalienable, instituted of God, and upheld by Him.

And their functions corresponded to their authority; to them had been committed the keys of the kingdom; they could bind and loose, and were by their commission empowered to act in their Master's name. In their hands too, and in theirs only, were the sacraments, and "the sacraments, not preaching, are the sources of divine grace." The sacred order was the condition of the Church's being, and the factor of its efficiency;

*It is instructive to see how similar ideas under similar conditions demand for their ex

pression similar terms: Thus the earliest

treatise from the High Church point of view on this subject is Charles Leslie's; the title runs: "The case of the Regale and of the Pontificate stated, in a Conference concerning the Independency of the Church upon any power on earth, in the exercise of her purely Spiritual power and authority.' This exactly reproduces the very idea as to the relation of Church and State held by those who were the ancestors of the later " Independents." Indeed, the Anglican autonomy of the Church" is but the Puritan independency, or rather a single aspect of it, and the Presby. terian" Crown rights of the Redeemer."

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where the authorized priest was not, the sacraments could not be; and no sacraments meant no Church, no life communicated by Baptism and maintained by the Eucharist. And the Church which ministered life by her sacraments, guarded, defined, and interpreted truth by her authority; for to the being and belief of the truth an authoritative interpreter was even more necessary than an inspired source. And this was to be found in tradition, not indeed as collected and preserved by Rome, but as contained in the Fathers, and as gathered from them by Anglican scholars and divines. Rome was corrupt, but Catholic; the Protestant Churches were corrupt and sectarian; but the Church of the Fathers was Catholic and pure, and after it the Anglican was fashioned, and tried to walk in its light and read the truth with its eyes. And so a proud, coherent, and courageous theory of the Church stood up to confront and dare the State; to rebuke it as of the earth, to speak to it as with the voice of heaven, to command it to revere and obey where it had thought it could compel and rule.

It is no part of my purpose to criticise the Anglican theory; it was the work of men who made an impassioned appeal to history, but were utterly void of the historical spirit. The past they loved and studied was a past of detached fragments, violent divisions, broken and delimited in the most arbitrary way. Their canon,

'quod semper, quod ubique, quod ab omnibus," they honored in speech rather than observance; the "semper" did not mean 'always,' or the "ubique" everywhere, or the "ab omnibus' by all; but only such times, places and men, or even such parts and sections of times, places and men, as could be made to suit or prove the theory. Then, for an authority to be of any use in the region of truth, it must be authoritative, accessible, self-consistent and explicit; but this authority was not one of these things-it was only the voice of these very simple, very positive, unscientific, and often mistaken men. Their supreme difficulty, which broke down the transcendent genius of the party, was to get their own Church to speak their mind, and they were even less successful with the Fathers than with their Church. There is no more splendid example anywhere of how completely a professedly historical movement can be independent of

historical truth. The Tractarians in this respect present a remarkable contrast to the Reformers. Calvin in his treatment of doctrine was nothing if not historical; the Tractarians in their treatment of history were nothing if not dogmatic. They were traditional but not historical, while the Reformers were historical but not traditional. The latter courageously, if not always thoroughly, rejected tradition and authority that they might reach the mind and realize the ideal of the Christ of history; but the former, with no less courage, tried to adapt the historical mind and bend the historical ideal to authority and tradition. Truth is patient, and suffers much at the hands of sincere men; but she always comes by her own at last.

2. What has been the result of the Anglo-Catholic revival? If the success of a religious movement is to be measured by its power to penetrate with its own spirit, to persuade and reconcile to religion the best intellects of a country, then even its most devoted advocates can hardly say that Anglo-Catholicism has succeeded. While at first championed by the greatest literary genius and master of dialectic who has in this century concerned himself with theology, it is marvellous how little it has touched our characteristic and creative minds; with these neither Roman nor Anglican Catholicism has accomplished anything. Take the poets, who alike as regards period and place ought to have been most accessible and susceptible to the Catholic spirit and influence. Arthur Hugh Clough was educated in Balliol, and elected to a Fellowship at Oriel in the days when Newman reigned in St. Mary's, and is judged by the most competent of our critics to be "the truest expression in verse of the moral and intellectual tendencies of the period in which he lived " He is fascinated by Newman and held by him for a while, but only that he may learn how little there is behind the subtle and persuasive eloquence that can satisfy a mind possessed with the passion for veracity, and he is driven by the recoil into the anxious uncertainties where "the music of his rustic lute" lost" its happy country tone,"

truth in history, studied, learned, and suffered with the Thyrsis he so deeply yet so sweetly mourned, like him became a poet, jealous of truth in thought and word, and like him, too, faced the problem and the inen of the hour, but did not dare to trust as guides for the present men too credulous of the past to read its truths aright. Too well he learned the bitter moral of all their arguing, and concluded: "If authority be necessary to faith, then an impossible authority makes faith impossible," and he turned from Oxford to learn of Weimar

"The need is everywhere, Art still has truth, take refuge there." William Morris, formed in the Oxford of a later day, when in the calm that follows conflict Anglo-Catholicism reigned, could find in it no satisfying veracious ideal of truth, of art or of life, and went instead to the wild Scandinavian and distant Greek mythologies for the forms in which to impersonate his faith and hope. Swinburne, who had the hot imagination that easily kindled to noble dreams of liberty and human good, could find no promise in the crimson sunset glories AngloCatholicism loved, and turned passionately toward what seemed to him the east and the sunrise. But it was not only those younger sons of Oxford who had in a measure "the vision and the faculty divine," that the new Catholic failed to touch; he touched as little the maturer and richer imaginations of the two men who will ever remain the representative poets of the Victorian era. Tennyson has been essentially a religious genius; the doubts, the fears, the thought perplexed by evil, by suffering, by a nature cruel in her very harmonies, by the presence of wicked men and the distance of a helpful God, the faith victorious in the very face of sin and death, certain that somehow

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good will be the final goal of ill," have all received from him rich and musical expression. But his ideals are not those of inedieval or modern Catholicismn; they may be clothed in forms borrowed from a far-off world of mythical chivalry; but it is not a priest's world, it is one of men all riors, statesmen, a world of fair women the more saintly that they are kings, warand goodly men. Browning, who was as essentially a religious poet as Tennyson, and indeed, though no writer of hymns,

as a poet more profoundly, penetratively, and comprehensively religious than Keble, bears throughout in his sympathies, in his love of liberty, in his hopeful trust in man, in his belief in God as the All-loving as well as the All-great, who through the thunder speaks with human voice, the marks and fruits of his Puritan birth and breeding.

But the sensuous seemliness of Anglo-Catholicism had no charms for him; it had too little spiritual sublimity, stood too remote from the heart of things, had too little fellowship with the whole truth of God, and all the infinite needs and aspirations of man. He had seen, too, the outworking of its ideas; had studied their action and character in history, and his curious lore and large experience helped him to many a fit yet quaint form in which to embody what he had discovered or observed. Browning more than any man has deepened the faith of our age in the Eternal, but he has also more than any man made us conscious of the evil of fancying that we can transmute our ephemeral polities and shallow symbols into the infallible and unchangeable speech of God.

In

3. This failure of Anglo-Catholicism to touch our higher literature is both remarkable and instructive. It has had and has its minor poets, a goodly multitude, but even their poetry has been mainly reminiscent and sentimental, not spontaneous and imaginative. Indeed, this has been its characteristic in all periods of its being; writers of hymns, quaint, devout, beautiful, melodious, it has always had, but never poets of the imagination; if it has ever taken possession of such, it has paralyzed the poet in them, as witness Wordsworth and his ecclesiastical sonnets. this stands expressed some of its essential characteristics. Within the rich and complicated and splendidly dight folds of the Spenserian allegories, there lives much of the brawny Puritan mind and purpose. The same mind and the faith it lived by made the noblest epic and the most perfect classical drama in the speech of our English people. No man will claim John Dryden as a religious poet, though he forced poetry into the ignoble strife of ecclesiastical politics, and made it the mean apologist of royal and papal designs. Deism lisped in numbers through the lips of Catholic Pope, and the Evangelical Revival inspired the gentle soul of Cowper

to verse, always genial and graceful, and often gay. But Anglo-Catholic poetry measured by the Putitan is remarkable for nothing so much as its imaginative poverty, its inability to create a literature that shall adequately embody the true and the sublime. And this has its parallel in the theology of the past half-century. Newman, of course, stands alone-Catholic still, but Anglican no more. Apart from him, what names represent the most potent forces in theology and the higher religious thought? Of all preachers, Frederick Robertson has most moved the mind and conscience of this generation; but though an Oxford man of the time when the Tracts were at their mightiest, he escaped from their toils with a rare love of reality, an abhorrence of all false sanctities, a dread of all violence offered in the name of authority to reason. Frederick Maurice was a personality of rare charm, with a soul ever turned toward the light, with a large range of vision, and a love of love and light that makes him the most mystical thinker of our century; yet his whole life was one sustained protest against the attempt to incorporate the religion of Christ in a sentimental and sacramental symbolism. There has been in our generation no writer in religious history so picturesque, no churchman so bold in speech and in action, so possessed of a broad and inclusive ideal of the national Church as Arthur Stanley; but he lived and died as the resolute antagonist of those Catholic schemes that so labored to sectionalize the Church he loved. Of another, though lower, order was Charles Kingsley; but he was in his carlier period full of generous impulses, philanthropies, socialisms, quick and fertile at embodying his ameliorative dreams in attractive fiction; and he was possessed with what can only be described as a great terror lest the rising tide of sacerdotalism should drown what was most ethical and historical in the life of the English people. If Oxford has had within this period a scholar who could be named a Humanist, it was Mark Pattison. But, though he fell under the spell of Newman, and indeed for him the spell was never broken, yet to him the Catholic theory became ever more incredible and false, and the system ever more mischievous in its working, fatal to freedom, learning, and all the fair humanities. may, too, be allowed to the writer to al

It

lude to one, though the grass above his grave is not yet green, who, of all recent Oxford men, most fulfilled the ideal of the scholar in theology, and applied in a spirit as reverent as it was thorough the scientific method to the history of ecclesiastical institutions. But there was no man who so strongly believed, or was so armed with proofs to support his belief, that AngloCatholicism was utterly unhistorical, as Edwin Hatch. It is needless to multiply names; it is not in literature nor yet in theology that the movement has hitherto achieved success. * Perhaps success here is not possible to it; the signal of victory would be the sign of decease.

IV.

But this has brought us face to face with another and no less interesting problem, or rather series of problems. How does it happen that the party that has been so active and so eminent in literature has accomplished so little in religion, while the party that has accomplished most in religion has been less eminent in literature? For two things seem manifest and beyond dispute-the decay, pointing to approaching extinction, of the Broad Church, and the revival and growing dom. inancy of the High. It may seem more dubious to say, a main condition of the success achieved by the High Church has been the literary activity and efficiency of the Broad; but, paradoxical though it may sound, this represents the sober historical truth. Why it has so happened is a question we must discuss in order to get a fuller view of the situation.

1. The same events that had occasioned the rise of Anglo Catholicism determined the being of the modern Broad Church. The latter was due to an attempt to adapt the Church to the new conditions by broadening it as the State had been broadened. Its fundamental notion was not their ideal difference, but their material identity. The Broad Church has throughout its history been dominated, though not always clearly or consciously, by Arnold's idea, which was also Hooker's, of

*We do not forget distinguished names in connection with the Anglo-Catholic School. It has had, and still has, learned historians and men of fine literary gifts; but to have noticed these would have taken us beyond the limits defined by our problem.

the coincidence and co-extension of Church and State. The idea is at once English and historical; it implies a far deeper sense than the other party possesses of the continuity of history and the unity of the institutions created and maintained by the English people both before and since the Reformation. The idea underlying the old legislation was right, but the legislation was in spirit and method wrong, calculated to defeat rather than fulfil its idea. What was necessary was to realize the idea by changing the legislation. Parliament had made civil rights independent of ecclesiastical tests; tests ought now to be so construed as to guard rather than invade religious freedom and ecclesiastical privilege. The Act of Uniformity had but created division and established variety; it was time to attempt, by an Act of comprehension, to legalize variety and create unity. The idea was thus through the State to reconstitute and reunite the Church, as by the State the Church had been broken and divided. Comprehension and relaxed subscription were to undo what uniformity and enforced subscription had done. The Broad Church was thus the very opposite of the Anglo-Catholic, while the one emphasized difference till it became independency, the other accentuated coincidence and relation till they became identity. The primary element in the one idea was, the English people constitute the English Church; the primary element in the other idea was, the Anglican Church constitutes the religion the English people are bound to confess and obey. The one conceived the Church as national, able to be only as it included and was realized by the nation; the other conceived the Church as of divine authority, because of divine institution, able to fulfil its mission only by enforcing its claims. In the one case, not establishment, but incorporation with the State or Civil constitution was of the very essence of the Church as English and national; in the other case, control of the Church by the State was held to be alien to its very idea as a society divinely founded and ruled. The parties differed in their conception of the Church, but still more in their notion of religion. To the Anglican, in a very real sense, Church was religion, that without which religion could not be acceptable to God, or sufficient for man; to his rival the two were

separable, religion inward, spiritual, a matter of heart or conscience; Church, a means for its cultivation, good in proportion to its suitability and efficiency. In polity and dogina, ritual and symbol, the Anglican could hardly distinguish between accidental and essential, all was of God, and all was sacred; but in all these things his opponent saw the creations of custom or law, to be upheld or dismissed as expediency or advantage might determine. In a word, to the one the Church was a creation of God, instituting religion, but to the other the Church was an institution of man, though religion an inspiration of God.

2. Now, these differences were radical, and determined in each case the mental attitude and action on all religious questions. The Broad Church attitude tended to become critical, acutely conscious of the inconvenience of a too positive mind, and institutions too authoritative to be capable of adaptation to the new conditions of thought and policy. Civil legislation was conceived as able to accomplish what was impossible to it, while the differences that divided, the agreements or affinities that united men were conceived more from without than from within, from the standpoint of the State rather than of the Church. Hence, there was superabundant criticism of things positive, the dogmas authority formulated and enforced, the institutions it created and upheld. The criticism struck the Evangelical most heavily, for his faith was of the fixed and rigid type that most invites criticism. The Pauline Epistles were translated into a speech and resolved into ideas that were not his; his theories of justification and atonement were assailed at once from the historical, exegetical, and speculative points of view; his doctrine of inspiration was discredited and made untenable, and his conception of the Church dismissed as arbitrary and insufficient. But to hit the Evangelical so hard was to do the utmost possible service to the Anglican. It disabled, preoccupied, paralyzed his most resolute adversary, thinned his ranks, blunted his weapons, deprived him of the convictions that give courage. Then the Broad Church criticism, while making no impression on the Anglican, appealed to the sort of minds the Evangelicals had been most able to influence, surrounded them with an atmosphere, begot in them

a tendency within and before which the old Evangelical formulæ could not vigorously live, and yet it did nothing to provide new homes or agencies for the generation and direction of religious life. The Broad Church is only the name of a tendency, but the Anglo-Catholic denotes a party, well officered, well led, disciplined, organized, and inspired by a great idea. The representative men within the former have all been marked by a certain severe individualism, they have attracted disciples, but have not formed schools. Arhold was a man of intense ethical passion, and to it he owed what we may call the most transcendent personal influence of our century; Maurice was a thinker seeking to translate Christian ideas into the terms of a Neo-Platonic idealism; Arthur Stanley was a charming irenical personality, fertile of schemes for reconciling our divided religious society; but neither they nor any of their allies had the enthusiasm of the sect. They loved a Church as broad and as varied as the English people, but would neither do nor attempt anything that threatened to narrow its breadth or harass it into a prosaic uniformity. And their positive qualities helped the Anglican even more than their negative. They loved liberty, used the liberty they loved, but preached toleration even of the intolerant. They were impatient of formulæ, but patient of aggressive difference; they resisted every attempt to restrict freedom, but encouraged attempts at its extension and exercise. Hence they helped at once to create room for Anglo-Catholic developments, and to lessen the forces of resistance. Their intellectual activity made the English nind tolerant to the most varied forms of belief and worship, which means that they prepared the way and the opportunity for the men who believed that theirs was the only form of divine sufficiency and authority.

V.

1. But while the Broad Church was thus securing for it an easier path and a freer field, the Anglican was gathering momentum and growing more missionary and theological. The Tracts had been mainly historical and ecclesiastical; only in a very minor degree doctrinal and religious. They had been more concerned with the archeology than the theology of