Apologia Pro Vita Sua — 07 - Chapter 2, Part 2

* * * * * I have spoken of my firm confidence in my position; and now let me state more definitely what the position was which I took up, and the propositions about which I was so confident.

These were three:-- 1. First was the principle of dogma: my battle was with liberalism; by liberalism I mean the anti-dogmatic principle and its developments.

This was the first point on which I was certain.

Here I make a remark: persistence in a given belief is no sufficient test of its truth: but departure from it is at least a slur upon the man who has felt so certain about it.

In proportion, then, as I had in 1832 a strong persuasion of the truth of opinions which I have since given up, so far a sort of guilt attaches to me, not only for that vain confidence, but for all the various proceedings which were the consequence of it.

But under this first head I have the satisfaction of feeling that I have nothing to retract, and nothing to repent of.

The main principle of the movement is as dear to me now, as it ever was.

I have changed in many things: in this I have not.

From the age of fifteen, dogma has been the fundamental principle of my religion: I know no other religion; I cannot enter into the idea of any other sort of religion; religion, as a mere sentiment, is to me a dream and a mockery.

As well can there be filial love without the fact of a father, as devotion without the fact of a Supreme Being.

What I held in 1816, I held in 1833, and I hold in 1864. Please God, I shall hold it to the end.

Even when I was under Dr. Whately's influence, I had no temptation to be less zealous for the great dogmas of the faith, and at various times I used to resist such trains of thought on his part as seemed to me (rightly or wrongly) to obscure them.

Such was the fundamental principle of the Movement of 1833. 2. Secondly, I was confident in the truth of a certain definite religious teaching, based upon this foundation of dogma; viz.

that there was a visible Church, with sacraments and rites which are the channels of invisible grace.

I thought that this was the doctrine of Scripture, of the early Church, and of the Anglican Church.

Here again, I have not changed in opinion; I am as certain now on this point as I was in 1833, and have never ceased to be certain.

In 1834 and the following years I put this ecclesiastical doctrine on a broader basis, after reading Laud, Bramhall, and Stillingfleet and other Anglican divines on the one hand, and after prosecuting the study of the Fathers on the other; but the doctrine of 1833 was strengthened in me, not changed.

When I began the Tracts for the Times I rested the main doctrine, of which I am speaking, upon Scripture, on the Anglican Prayer Book, and on St. Ignatius's Epistles.

(1) As to the existence of a visible Church, I especially argued out the point from Scripture, in Tract 11, viz.

from the Acts of the Apostles and the Epistles.

(2) As to the Sacraments and Sacramental rites, I stood on the Prayer Book.

I appealed to the Ordination Service, in which the Bishop says, "Receive the Holy Ghost;" to the Visitation Service, which teaches confession and absolution; to the Baptismal Service, in which the Priest speaks of the child after baptism as regenerate; to the Catechism, in which Sacramental Communion is receiving "verily and indeed the Body and Blood of Christ;" to the Commination Service, in which we are told to do "works of penance;" to the Collects, Epistles, and Gospels, to the calendar and rubricks, portions of the Prayer Book, wherein we find the festivals of the Apostles, notice of certain other Saints, and days of fasting and abstinence.

(3. ) And further, as to the Episcopal system, I founded it upon the Epistles of St. Ignatius, which inculcated it in various ways.

One passage especially impressed itself upon me: speaking of cases of disobedience to ecclesiastical authority, he says, "A man does not deceive that Bishop whom he sees, but he practises rather with the Bishop Invisible, and so the question is not with flesh, but with God, who knows the secret heart."

I wished to act on this principle to the letter, and I may say with confidence that I never consciously transgressed it.

I loved to act as feeling myself in my Bishop's sight, as if it were the sight of God.

It was one of my special supports and safeguards against myself; I could not go very wrong while I had reason to believe that I was in no respect displeasing him.

It was not a mere formal obedience to rule that I put before me, but I desired to please him personally, as I considered him set over me by the Divine Hand.

I

was strict in observing my clerical engagements, not only because they _were_ engagements, but because I considered myself simply as the servant and instrument of my Bishop.

I did not care much for the Bench of Bishops, except as they might be the voice of my Church: nor should I have cared much for a Provincial Council; nor for a Diocesan Synod presided over by my Bishop; all these matters seemed to me to be _jure ecclesiastico_, but what to me was _jure divino_ was the voice of my Bishop in his own person.

My own Bishop was my Pope; I knew no other;

the successor of the Apostles, the Vicar of Christ.

This was but a practical exhibition of the Anglican theory of Church Government, as I had already drawn it out myself, after various Anglican Divines.

This continued all through my course; when at length, in 1845, I wrote to Bishop Wiseman, in whose Vicariate I found myself, to announce my conversion, I could find nothing better to say to him than that I would obey the Pope as I had obeyed my own Bishop in the Anglican Church.

My duty to him was my point of honour; his disapprobation was the one thing which I could not bear.

I believe it to have been a generous and honest feeling; and in consequence I was rewarded by having all my time for ecclesiastical superior a man, whom, had I had a choice, I should have preferred, out and out, to any other Bishop on the Bench, and for whose memory I have a special affection.

Dr. Bagot--a man of noble mind, and as kind-hearted and as considerate as he was noble.

He ever sympathized with me in my trials which followed; it was my own fault, that I was not brought into more familiar personal relations with him, than it was my happiness to be.

May his name be ever blessed!

And now in concluding my remarks on the second point on which my confidence rested, I repeat that here again I have no retractation to announce as to its main outline.

While I am now as clear in my acceptance of the principle of dogma, as I was in 1833 and 1816, so again I am now as firm in my belief of a visible Church, of the authority of Bishops, of the grace of the sacraments, of the religious worth of works of penance, as I was in 1833. I have added Articles to my Creed; but the old ones, which I then held with a divine faith, remain.

3. But now, as to the third point on which I stood in 1833, and which I have utterly renounced and trampled upon since,--my then view of the Church of Rome;--I will speak about it as exactly as I can.

When I was young, as I have said already, and after I was grown up, I thought the Pope to be Antichrist.

At Christmas 1824-5 I preached a sermon to that effect.

But in 1827 I accepted eagerly the stanza in the Christian Year, which many people thought too charitable, "Speak _gently_ of thy sister's fall."

From the time that I knew Froude I got less and less bitter on the subject.

I spoke (successively, but I cannot tell in what order or at what dates) of the Roman Church as being bound up with "the _cause_ of Antichrist," as being _one_ of the "_many_ antichrists" foretold by St. John, as being influenced by "the _spirit_ of Antichrist," and as having something "very Anti-christian" or "unchristian" about her.

From my boyhood and in 1824 I considered, after Protestant authorities, that St. Gregory I. about A. D.

600 was the first Pope that was Antichrist, though, in spite of this, he was also a great and holy man; but in 1832-3 I thought the Church of Rome was bound up with the cause of Antichrist by the Council of Trent.

When it was that in my deliberate judgment I gave up the notion altogether in any shape, that some special reproach was attached to her name, I cannot tell; but I had a shrinking from renouncing it, even when my reason so ordered me, from a sort of conscience or prejudice, I think up to 1843. Moreover, at least during the Tract Movement, I thought the essence of her offence to consist in the honours which she paid to the Blessed Virgin and the Saints; and the more I grew in devotion, both to the Saints and to our Lady, the more impatient was I at the Roman practices, as if those glorified creations of God must be gravely shocked, if pain could be theirs, at the undue veneration of which they were the objects.

On the other hand, Hurrell Froude in his familiar conversations was always tending to rub the idea out of my mind.

In a passage of one of his letters from abroad, alluding, I suppose, to what I used to say in opposition to him, he observes; "I think people are injudicious who talk against the Roman Catholics for worshipping Saints, and honouring the Virgin and images, &c. These things may perhaps be idolatrous; I cannot make up my mind about it; but to my mind it is the Carnival that is real practical idolatry, as it is written, 'the people sat down to eat and drink, and rose up to play.'

" The Carnival, I observe in passing, is, in fact, one of those very excesses, to which, for at least three centuries, religious Catholics have ever opposed themselves, as we see in the life of St. Philip, to say nothing of the present day; but this we did not then know.

Moreover, from Froude I learned to admire the great medieval Pontiffs; and, of course, when I had come to consider the Council of Trent to be the turning-point of the history of Christian Rome, I found myself as free, as I was rejoiced, to speak in their praise.

Then, when I was abroad, the sight of so many great places, venerable shrines, and noble churches, much impressed my imagination.

And my heart was touched also.

Making an expedition on foot across some wild country in Sicily, at six in the morning, I came upon a small church; I heard voices, and I looked in.

It was crowded, and the congregation was singing.

Of course it was the mass, though I did not know it at the time.

And, in my weary days at Palermo, I was not ungrateful for the comfort which I had received in frequenting the churches; nor did I ever forget it.

Then, again, her zealous maintenance of the doctrine and the rule of celibacy, which I recognized as Apostolic, and her faithful agreement with Antiquity in so many other points which were dear to me, was an argument as well as a plea in favour of the great Church of Rome.

Thus I learned to have tender feelings towards her; but still my reason was not affected at all.

My judgment was against her, when viewed as an institution, as truly as it ever had been.

This conflict between reason and affection I expressed in one of the early Tracts, published July, 1834. "Considering the high gifts and the strong claims of the Church of Rome and its dependencies on our admiration, reverence, love, and gratitude; how could we withstand it, as we do, how could we refrain from being melted into tenderness, and rushing into communion with it, but for the words of Truth itself, which bid us prefer It to the whole world?

'He that loveth father or mother more than Me, is not worthy of me.'

How could 'we learn to be severe, and execute judgment,' but for the warning of Moses against even a divinely-gifted teacher, who should preach new gods; and the anathema of St. Paul even against Angels and Apostles, who should bring in a new doctrine?"

--_Records_, No. 24. My feeling was something like that of a man, who is obliged in a court of justice to bear witness against a friend; or like my own now, when I have said, and shall say, so many things on which I had rather be silent.

As a matter, then, of simple conscience, though it went against my feelings, I felt it to be a duty to protest against the Church of Rome.

But besides this, it was a duty, because the prescription of such a protest was a living principle of my own Church, as expressed not simply in a _catena_, but by a _consensus_ of her divines, and by the voice of her people.

Moreover, such a protest was necessary as an integral portion of her controversial basis; for I adopted the argument of Bernard Gilpin, that Protestants "were _not able_ to give any _firm and solid_ reason of the separation besides this, to wit, that the Pope is Antichrist."

But while I thus thought such a protest to be based upon truth, and to be a religious duty, and a rule of Anglicanism, and a necessity of the case, I did not at all like the work.

Hurrell Froude attacked me for doing it; and, besides, I felt that my language had a vulgar and rhetorical look about it.

I believed, and really measured, my words, when I used them; but I knew that I had a temptation, on the other hand, to say against Rome as much as ever I could, in order to protect myself against the charge of Popery.

And now I come to the very point, for which I have introduced the subject of my feelings about Rome.

I felt such confidence in the substantial justice of the charges which I advanced against her, that I considered them to be a safeguard and an assurance that no harm could ever arise from the freest exposition of what I used to call Anglican principles.

All the world was astounded at what Froude and I were saying: men said that it was sheer Popery.

I answered, "True, we seem to be making straight for it; but go on awhile, and you will come to a deep chasm across the path, which makes real approximation impossible."

And I urged in addition, that many Anglican divines had been accused of Popery, yet had died in their Anglicanism;--now, the ecclesiastical principles which I professed, they had professed also; and the judgment against Rome which they had formed, I had formed also.

Whatever deficiencies then had to be supplied in the existing Anglican system, and however boldly I might point them out, any how that system would not in the process be brought nearer to the special creed of Rome, and might be mended in spite of her.

In that very agreement of the two forms of faith, close as it might seem, would really be found, on examination, the elements and principles of an essential discordance.

It was with this absolute persuasion on my mind that I fancied that there could be no rashness in giving to the world in fullest measure the teaching and the writings of the Fathers.

I thought that the Church of England was substantially founded upon them.

I did not know all that the Fathers had said, but I felt that, even when their tenets happened to differ from the Anglican, no harm could come of reporting them.

I said out what I was clear they had said; I spoke vaguely and imperfectly, of what I thought they said, or what some of them had said.

Any how, no harm could come of bending the crooked stick the other way, in the process of straightening it; it was impossible to break it.

If there was any thing in the Fathers of a startling character, this would be only for a time; it would admit of explanation, or it might suggest something profitable to Anglicans; it could not lead to Rome.

I express this view of the matter in a passage of the Preface to the first volume, which I edited, of the Library of the Fathers.

Speaking of the strangeness at first sight, in the judgment of the present day, of some of their principles and opinions, I bid the reader go forward hopefully, and not indulge his criticism till he knows more about them, than he will learn at the outset.

"Since the evil," I say, "is in the nature of the case itself, we can do no more than have patience, and recommend patience to others, and with the racer in the Tragedy, look forward steadily and hopefully to the _event_, [Greek: tô telei pistin pherôn], when, as we trust, all that is inharmonious and anomalous in the details, will at length be practically smoothed."

Such was the position, such the defences, such the tactics, by which I thought that it was both incumbent on us, and possible for us, to meet that onset of Liberal principles, of which we were all in immediate anticipation, whether in the Church or in the University.

And during the first year of the Tracts, the attack upon the University began.

In November, 1834, was sent to me by Dr. Hampden the second edition of his Pamphlet, entitled, "Observations on Religious Dissent, with particular reference to the use of religious tests in the University."

In this Pamphlet it was maintained, that "Religion is distinct from Theological Opinion," pp. 1. 28. 30, &c. ; that it is but a common prejudice to identify theological propositions methodically deduced and stated, with the simple religion of Christ, p. 1; that under Theological Opinion were to be placed the Trinitarian doctrine, p. 27, and the Unitarian, p. 19;

that a dogma was a theological opinion formally insisted on, pp. 20, 21;

that speculation always left an opening for improvement, p. 22; that the Church of England was not dogmatic in its spirit, though the wording of its formularies might often carry the sound of dogmatism, p. 23. I acknowledged the receipt of this work in the following letter:-- "The kindness which has led to your presenting me with your late Pamphlet, encourages me to hope that you will forgive me, if I take the opportunity it affords of expressing to you my very sincere and deep regret that it has been published.

Such an opportunity I could not let slip without being unfaithful to my own serious thoughts on the subject.

"While I respect the tone of piety which the Pamphlet displays, I dare not trust myself to put on paper my feelings about the principles contained in it; tending as they do, in my opinion, altogether to make shipwreck of Christian faith.

I also lament, that, by its appearance, the first step has been taken towards interrupting that peace and mutual good understanding which has prevailed so long in this place, and which, if once seriously disturbed, will be succeeded by dissensions the more intractable, because justified in the minds of those who resist innovation by a feeling of imperative duty."

Since that time Phaeton has got into the chariot of the sun; we, alas!

can only look on, and watch him down the steep of heaven.

Meanwhile, the lands, which he is passing over, suffer from his driving.

* * * * * Such was the commencement of the assault of Liberalism upon the old orthodoxy of Oxford and England; and it could not have been broken, as it was, for so long a time, had not a great change taken place in the circumstances of that counter-movement which had already started with the view of resisting it.

For myself, I was not the person to take the lead of a party; I never was, from first to last, more than a leading author of a school; nor did I ever wish to be anything else.

This is my own account of the matter; and I say it, neither as intending to disown the responsibility of what was done, or as if ungrateful to those who at that time made more of me than I deserved, and did more for my sake and at my bidding than I realized myself.

I am giving my history from my own point of sight, and it is as follows:--I had lived for ten years among my personal friends; the greater part of the time, I had been influenced, not influencing; and at no time have I acted on others, without their acting upon me.

As is the custom of a University, I had lived with my private, nay, with some of my public, pupils, and with the junior fellows of my College, without form or distance, on a footing of equality.

Thus it was through friends, younger, for the most part, than myself, that my principles were spreading.

They heard what I said in conversation, and told it to others.

Under-graduates in due time took their degree, and became private tutors themselves.

In their new _status_, they in turn preached the opinions, with which they had already become acquainted.

Others went down to the country, and became curates of parishes.

Then they had down from London parcels of the Tracts, and other publications.

They placed them in the shops of local booksellers, got them into newspapers, introduced them to clerical meetings, and converted more or less their Rectors and their brother curates.

Thus the Movement, viewed with relation to myself, was but a floating opinion; it was not a power.

It never would have been a power, if it had remained in my hands.

Years after, a friend, writing to me in remonstrance at the excesses, as he thought them, of my disciples, applied to me my own verse about St. Gregory Nazianzen, "Thou couldst a people raise, but couldst not rule."

At the time that he wrote to me, I had special impediments in the way of such an exercise of power; but at no time could I exercise over others that authority, which under the circumstances was imperatively required.

My great principle ever was, Live and let live.

I never had the staidness or dignity necessary for a leader.

To the last I never recognized the hold I had over young men.

Of late years I have read and heard that they even imitated me in various ways.

I was quite unconscious of it, and I think my immediate friends knew too well how disgusted I should be at such proceedings, to have the heart to tell me.

I felt great impatience at our being called a party, and would not allow that we were such.

I had a lounging, free-and-easy way of carrying things on.

I exercised no sufficient censorship upon the Tracts.

I did not confine them to the writings of such persons as agreed in all things with myself; and, as to my own Tracts, I printed on them a notice to the effect, that any one who pleased, might make what use he would of them, and reprint them with alterations if he chose, under the conviction that their main scope could not be damaged by such a process.

It was the same with me afterwards, as regards other publications.

For two years I furnished a certain number of sheets for the British Critic from myself and my friends, while a gentleman was editor, a man of splendid talent, who, however, was scarcely an acquaintance of mine, and had no sympathy with the Tracts.

When I was Editor myself, from 1838 to 1841, in my very first number I suffered to appear a critique unfavorable to my work on Justification, which had been published a few months before, from a feeling of propriety, because I had put the book into the hands of the writer who so handled it.

Afterwards I suffered an article against the Jesuits to appear in it, of which I did not like the tone.

When I had to provide a curate for my new church at Littlemore, I engaged a friend, by no fault of his, who, before he had entered into his charge, preached a sermon, either in depreciation of baptismal regeneration, or of Dr. Pusey's view of it.

I showed a similar easiness as to the Editors who helped me in the separate volumes of Fleury's Church History; they were able, learned, and excellent men, but their after-history has shown, how little my choice of them was influenced by any notion I could have had of any intimate agreement of opinion between them and myself.

I shall have to make the same remark in its place concerning the Lives of the English Saints, which subsequently appeared.

All this may seem inconsistent with what I have said of my fierceness.

I

am not bound to account for it; but there have been men before me, fierce in act, yet tolerant and moderate in their reasonings; at least, so I read history.

However, such was the case, and such its effect upon the Tracts.

These at first starting were short, hasty, and some of them ineffective; and at the end of the year, when collected into a volume, they had a slovenly appearance.

It was under these circumstances, that Dr. Pusey joined us.

I had known him well since 1827-8, and had felt for him an enthusiastic admiration, I used to call him [Greek: ho megas].

His great learning, his immense diligence, his scholarlike mind, his simple devotion to the cause of religion, overcame me; and great of course was my joy, when in the last days of 1833 he showed a disposition to make common cause with us.

His Tract on Fasting appeared as one of the series with the date of December 21. He was not, however, I think, fully associated in the Movement till 1835 and 1836, when he published his Tract on Baptism, and started the Library of the Fathers.

He at once gave to us a position and a name.

Without him we should have had little chance, especially at the early date of 1834, of making any serious resistance to the Liberal aggression.

But Dr. Pusey was a Professor and Canon of Christ Church; he had a vast influence in consequence of his deep religious seriousness, the munificence of his charities, his Professorship, his family connexions, and his easy relations with University authorities.

He was to the Movement all that Mr. Rose might have been, with that indispensable addition, which was wanting to Mr. Rose, the intimate friendship and the familiar daily society of the persons who had commenced it.

And he had that special claim on their attachment, which lies in the living presence of a faithful and loyal affectionateness.

There was henceforth a man who could be the head and centre of the zealous people in every part of the country, who were adopting the new opinions; and not only so, but there was one who furnished the Movement with a front to the world, and gained for it a recognition from other parties in the University.

In 1829, Mr. Froude, or Mr. Robert Wilberforce, or Mr. Newman were but individuals; and, when they ranged themselves in the contest of that year on the side of Sir Robert Inglis, men on either side only asked with surprise how they got there, and attached no significancy to the fact; but Dr. Pusey was, to use the common expression, a host in himself; he was able to give a name, a form, and a personality, to what was without him a sort of mob; and when various parties had to meet together in order to resist the liberal acts of the Government, we of the Movement took our place by right among them.

Such was the benefit which he conferred on the Movement externally; nor were the internal advantages at all inferior to it.

He was a man of large designs; he had a hopeful, sanguine mind; he had no fear of others; he was haunted by no intellectual perplexities.

People are apt to say that he was once nearer to the Catholic Church than he is now; I pray God that he may be one day far nearer to the Catholic Church than he was then; for I believe that, in his reason and judgment, all the time that I knew him, he never was near to it at all.

When I became a Catholic, I was often asked, "What of Dr. Pusey?"

; when I said that I did not see symptoms of his doing as I had done, I was sometimes thought uncharitable.

If confidence in his position is, (as it is,) a first essential in the leader of a party, this Dr. Pusey possessed pre-eminently.

The most remarkable instance of this, was his statement, in one of his subsequent defences of the Movement, when moreover it had advanced a considerable way in the direction of Rome, that among its more hopeful peculiarities was its "stationariness."

He made it in good faith; it was his subjective view of it.

Dr. Pusey's influence was felt at once.

He saw that there ought to be more sobriety, more gravity, more careful pains, more sense of responsibility in the Tracts and in the whole Movement.

It was through him that the character of the Tracts was changed.

When he gave to us his Tract on Fasting, he put his initials to it.

In 1835 he published his elaborate Treatise on Baptism, which was followed by other Tracts from different authors, if not of equal learning, yet of equal power and appositeness.

The Catenas of Anglican divines, projected by me, which occur in the Series were executed with a like aim at greater accuracy and method.

In 1836 he advertised his great project for a Translation of the Fathers:--but I must return to myself.

I am not writing the history either of Dr. Pusey or of the Movement; but it is a pleasure to me to have been able to introduce here reminiscences of the place which he held in it, which have so direct a bearing on myself, that they are no digression from my narrative.