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THE

OXFORD COUNTER-REFORMATION.1

[GOOD WORDS. 1881.]

LETTER I.

THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND FIFTY YEARS AGO.

MY DEAR You remind me of a promise which I have left too long unfulfilled. We had been looking over some of your old family papers, and we had found among them a copy of the once famous Tract 90, scored over with pencil marks and interjections. The rocket which had flamed across the sky was now a burnt-out case. It was hard to believe that the whole mind of England could have been so agitated by expressions and ideas which had since become so familiar. We were made to feel how times had changed in the last forty years; we had been travelling on a spiritual railroad, and the indifference with which we turned the leaves of the once-terrible pamphlet was an evidence how far we had left behind our old traditionary landmarks. Mysteries which had been dismissed as superstitions at the Reformation, and had never since been heard of, were now preached again by half the clergy, and had revolutionised the ritual in our churches. Every county had its Anglican monasteries and convents. Romanism had lifted up its head again. It had its

These letters were originally published before the appearance of Mr. Mozley's Reminiscences of the Oxford Movement. I have not found it necessary to make any alterations.

hierarchy and its cardinals; it was a power in Parliament, and in the London salons. The fathers confessors were busy in our families, dictating conditions of marriages, dividing wives from husbands, and children from parents.

By the side of the revival of Catholicism there was a corresponding phenomenon of an opposite and no less startling kind. Half a century ago any one who openly questioned the truth of Christianity was treated as a public offender and was excommunicated by society. Now, while one set of men were bringing back mediævalism, science and criticism were assailing with impunity the authority of the Bible; miracles were declared impossible; even Theism itself was treated as an open question, and subjects which in our fathers' time were approached only with the deepest reverence and solemnity were discussed among the present generation with as much freedom as the common problems of natural philosophy or politics.

Both these movements began within a short distance of one another, and were evidently connected. You asked me to write down what I could recollect about their origin, having had, as you supposed, some special opportunities of knowing their history. I hesitated, partly because it is not agreeable to go back over our own past mistakes, partly because I have ceased to feel particular interest in either of them. For myself, I am convinced that they are roads both of them which lead to the wrong place, and that it is better for us to occupy ourselves with realities than fret our minds about illusions. If the Church of Rome recovers power enough to be dangerous, it will be shattered upon the same rocks on which it was dashed three centuries ago. The Church of England may play at sacerdotalism and masquerade in mediæval garniture; the clergy may flatter one another with notions that they can bind and loose the souls of their fellow-Christians,

and transform the substance of the sacramental elements by spells and gestures; but they will not at this time of day persuade intelligent men that the bishops in their ordination gave them really supernatural powers. Their celebrations and processions may amuse for a time by their novelty, but their pretensions deserve essentially no more respect than those of spirit-rappers, and the serious forces of the world go on upon their way no more affected by them than if they were shadows.

As little is it possible to hope much from the school of negative and scientific criticism. For what science can tell us of positive truth in special subjects we are infinitely thankful. In matters of religion it can say nothing, for it knows nothing. A surgeon may dissect a living body to discover what life consists in. The body is dead before he can reach the secret, and he can report only that the materials when he has taken them to pieces and examined them are merely dead matter. Critical philosophy is equally at a loss with Christianity. It may perhaps discover the doctrines of the creed in previously existing Eastern theologies. It may pretend to prove that the sacred records were composed as human narratives are composed; that the origin of many of them cannot be traced; that they are defective in authority; that the evidence is insufficient to justify a belief in the events which they relate. So far as philosophy can see, there may be nothing in the materials of Christianity which is necessarily and certainly supernatural. And yet Christianity exists, and has existed, and has been the most powerful spiritual force which has ever been felt among mankind.

If I tell the story which you ask of me, therefore, I must tell it without sympathy, either way, in these great movements. I cannot, like the sow that was washed,' return to wallow in repudiated superstition. If I am to be edified, on the other hand, I must know what is true in religion; and I do not care about negations. In this

respect I am unfit for the task which you impose on me. It is, perhaps, however, occasionally well to take stock of our mental experience. The last forty or fifty years will be memorable hereafter in the history of English opinion. The number of those who recollect the beginnings of the Oxford revival is shrinking fast; and such of us as survive may usefully note down their personal recollections as a contribution, so far as it goes, to the general narrative. It is pleasant too to recall the figures of those who played the chief parts in the drama. If they had not been men of ability they could not have produced the revolution that was brought about by them. Their personal characters were singularly interesting. Two of them were distinctly men of real genius. My own brother was at starting the foremost of the party; the flame, therefore, naturally burnt hot in my own immediate environment. The phrases and formulas of Anglo-Catholicism had become household words in our family before I understood coherently what the stir and tumult was about.

We fancy that we are free agents. We are conscious of what we do; we are not conscious of the causes which make us do it; and therefore we imagine that the cause is in ourselves. The Oxford leaders believed that they were fighting against the spirit of the age. They were themselves most completely the creatures of their age. It was one of those periods when Conservative England had been seized with a passion for Reform. Parliament was to be reformed; the municipal institutions were to be reformed; there was to be an end of monopolies and privileges. The constitution was to be cut in pieces and boiled in the Benthamite caldron, from which it was to emerge in immortal youth. In a reformed State there needed a reformed Church. My brother and his friends abhorred Bentham and all his works. The Establishment in its existing state was too weak to do battle with the

new enemy. Protestantism was the chrysalis of Liberalism. The Church, therefore, was to be unprotestantised. The Reformation, my brother said, was a bad setting of a broken limb. The limb needed breaking a second time, and then it would be equal to its business.

My brother exaggerated the danger, and underestimated the strength which existing institutions and customs possess so long as they are left undisturbed. Before he and his friends undertook the process of reconstruction, the Church was perhaps in the healthiest condition which it had ever known. Of all the constituents of human society, an established religion is that which religious men themselves should most desire to be let alone, and which people in general when they are healthy-minded are most sensitive about allowing to be touched. It is the sanction of moral obligation. It gives authority to the commandments, creates a fear of doing wrong, and a sense of responsibility for doing it. To raise a doubt about a creed established by general acceptance is a direct injury to the general welfare. Discussion about it is out of place, for only bad men wish to question the rule of life which religion commands; and a creed or ritual is not a series of propositions or a set of outward observances of which the truth or fitness may be properly argued; it grows with the life of a race or nation; it takes shape as a living germ develops into an organic body; and as you do not ask of a tree, is it true, but is it alive, so with an established Church or system of belief you look to the work which it is doing. If it is teaching men to be brave and upright, and honest and just, if it is making them noble-minded, careless of their selfish interests, and loving only what is good, the truth of it is proved by evidence. better than argument, and idle persons may properly be prohibited from raising unprofitable questions about it. Where there is life, truth is present not as in propositions,

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