Summa, and read the words of the objector as though they were those of Aquinas himself. But when St. Thomas at the beginning of this article' says that it seems that in this Sacrament there is not the Body of Christ in very truth, but only according to a figure, and as it were in a sign . . according to the exposition of Augustine,' he is merely following his invariable method of stating at the outset his objector's views, before coming to the contrary arguments and deciding in favour of the latter. This is the kind of error which it is worth while pointing out, merely in the interests of accurate reference.

95

Unhappily Mr. Clarke's mistakes do not end here. It is impossible to deal with them all, but one or two may be mentioned. As regards Baptism, he urges that Nowell's Catechism, which is one of two authorised commentaries on the Church Catechism, warns us that the language of the latter about Baptismal Regeneration is to be taken on a charitable hypothesis.' I am not quite clear what these last words mean; but Nowell's Catechism speaks quite explicitly:

M. What is the secret and spiritual grace?

S. It is of two sorts; that is, forgiveness of sins and regeneration. though he adds later that we do not obtain forgiveness by the outward washing or sprinkling of water: This honour therefore it is not lawful to give to the outward element '-a doctrine which I imagine Liddon would have accepted.

But it is when he is dealing with the Higher Criticism and the attitude which modern representatives of the Oxford Movement have adopted towards it, that Mr. Clarke lets loose the floods of his displeasure. Fortunately the marks of Prejudice, and its companion, Error, are splashed in such bright colours across these pages that specific refutation is needless. Everyone knows, for instance, that the allegorising Jews of Alexandria' took over nothing from the heathen philosopher Plotinus,' because they lived a century and a half before he was born. Reckless statements such as this correct themselves in the mind of the educated reader. But it is a graver matter when Mr. Clarke tries to yoke the Church of England with a reactionary view of the Scriptures which became quite untenable over fifty years ago. Happily the time has passed when we can be bludgeoned into believing the infallibility of Scripture, as Mr. Clarke understands it. And even if we could believe it, we should realise that Mr. Clarke's argument for the necessity of a certain guide applies a fortiori to the infallibility of the Pope. But none the less it is an ominous sign, when Mr. Clarke defends the

The other is Mayor's English Catechism, which I have not got by me.

historicity of the Virgin Birth and the Resurrection by such arguments as the following:

Six Jewish and several heathen prophecies of the Virgin Birth and of a resurrection of the dead were fulfilled in Him Who was to come as 'the desire of all nations' and 'the light and life of men.'

One may ask in passing on what grounds Mr. Clarke assumes a validity in non-Scriptural prophecies which he refuses to nonScriptural miracles. More relevant is it to ask how he can hope, in the face of all the work which has been done upon the origins of Christianity, to recommend the orthodox Creed to the general public by methods such as this. One can only suppose that he is so eager to 'track' the heresy '-the phrase smacks of the Papal Curia-of Modernism to its lair in the pages of Lux Mundi, that he does not feel the necessity of choosing carefully the weapons with which to make for his quarry.

I shall have more to say later about the true relation, as I conceive it, of the Oxford Movement to the Higher Criticism. Let me now only close this portion of my article with a few words about Mr. Clarke's attack on Liddon. As I have said, Liddon needs to-day no defence. Yet since he is taken in Mr. Clarke's articles as the embodiment of the Oxford Movement, it is only right that the more glaring of his misleading statements should be corrected. And it is difficult, when one goes at all closely into this matter, to refrain from a certain just indignation at the reckless, and often brutal, way in which he assails the memory of one of the great departed. Damaging phrases torn from their context-innuendoes skilfully suggested--private expressions of grief or difficulty held up for us to mock at-these are the features of his attack. Why, for instance, does he quote for us a mutilated passage from Lord Acton's letters, to show Lord Acton's opinion of Liddon, when he might have quoted the following:

Assuredly Liddon is the greatest power in the conflict with sin, and in turning the minds of men to God, that the nation now possesses ' ? Why does he not tell us that Acton's fear that Liddon was rather inclined to rely on others '-words which he italicises in his quotation-was later completely set at rest? What does he mean by charging Liddon with being at one time a Roman

8

See p. 350, n. 25, of the February number. Acton's Letters to Mary Gladstone, p. 202. Gladstone also speaks of him as the first champion of belief.' Liddon's Life, p. 312.

Acton's Letters to Mary Gladstone, p. 191. Only when this article was in proof have I been able to find Mr. Clarke's quotation from Acton. It is composed of two quite unconnected passages from two different letters. The first is on pp. 179, 180, of the Letters to Mary Gladstone, and the sentences Mr. Clarke omits qualify the whole vitally. The second is on p. 182 of the same volume, and is the last sentence of Mr. Clarke's quotation: it represents an old doubt in Acton's mind, which Acton shows on the very next page, in the words I quote above, to have been already completely dispelled.

at heart both in doctrine and in practice,' when his own chosen authority, Lord Acton, writing at this same period, confesses his assurance that

Liddon is made of sterner stuff than I fancied, that he knows exactly where he stands, where others have stood before him, and where and why he parts with them; that the course of Newman and the rest has no secrets and no surprises for him; that he looks a long way before him, and has no disposition to cling to the authority of others. In short, it appeared very decidedly that he is . . . fixed in his Anglican position?

But this is not the worst. In the January article on p. 142 Mr. Clarke writes of Liddon that he studiously insults on every occasion the cause of the Reformation and the Protestant interest,' and he cites as examples of this two facts-one, that 'he attends High Mass on St. Bartholomew's Day-the day on which . . . the Huguenots were massacred, with full concurrence of the Pope'; the other, that he preaches his first sermon at Oxford on St. Thomas's Day at the Church of St. Thomas the Martyr; for St. Thomas was the chief saint of the Middle Ages, a man of worldly mind and ungovernable temper, canonised for his lifelong successful opposition to the Crown.' Now what does all this rest upon? In The Life and Letters of Henry Parry Liddon, on page 15, we read:

In the following month he was travelling on the Continent with his friend and pupil, Charles Bridges. Everywhere he notices with interest the Church life. He attends the High Mass at the Cathedral at Ghent on S. Bartholomew's Day.

And later, on page 28, we read:

He was ordained deacon.. on the Fourth Sunday in Advent, December 19, 1852 .. His first sermon was preached on the following Tuesday, St. Thomas's Day, at the Church of St. Thomas the Martyr in Oxford. Often, indeed, has men's distempered imagination put upon simple events constructions which they would not bear, but rarely, one must admit, to the extent which we find here."

Such, then, are the methods which Mr. Clarke employs in his attack on the Oxford Movement. It is clearly best not to characterise them, but, by laying them bare, to let them speak for themselves. They have already delayed us too long. And we must come to the proper subject of this article.

II

In attempting to estimate the future of the Oxford Movement, and to gauge which, if any, of its especial principles are still pregnant and vitalising in the life of the Church of England to-day, one is confronted at the outset by several difficulties.

'A similar parody of the facts is to be found on pp. 146, 147 of Mr. Clarke's first article. See the Life, pp. 142, 143.

On the one hand, much of what the Oxford Movement stood for has been so thoroughly fused with the whole mass of forces and tendencies which have been operating in the Church for the last eighty years, that it is hard to disengage the one from the other, and to say that these features are a fruit of the Movement, and those others of something else. One has to beware, that is to say, of claiming for the Oxford Movement a future which belongs to the entire Church of England, and, indeed, to English Christianity itself. On the other hand, there is a real sense in which the Oxford Movement has died, and that more than once, even though it died each time only in giving birth to new forms. It died, for instance, with the birth of the Ritualistic movement; it died again when the authors of Lux Mundi frankly recognised the claims of that Liberalism-whether on its theological or its political side-which Newman said 'fretted him inwardly,' and against which he had fierce thoughts'; perhaps it has to die yet again, when the Church of England suffers the Disestablishment which the Movement was called into being to repel. But in all these cases it is a death to live. Its deepest characteristics -the sense of sacramental union with the Church of all the ages, the insistence on Theology as making religion rational, the tendency towards the ascetic life-all, in short, which has gone to make up its peculiar genius-these things have been transmitted without a break. There is no reason to suppose that they will pass.

When the Industrial Revolution came at the end of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth, it found the Church of England quite unready to cope with the new conditions of life which were then brought into being. The Church had not yet woken from the comfortable slumbers of the previous age. They were only relative slumbers, it is true; for, if the clergy were not awake to the higher and more spiritual claims of religion, they were awake to the pleasures and occupations of country life, and to the duties of bringing up families. We should never forget that to that age belongs the immortal Vicar of Wakefield. But they were emphatically not a clergy who could go anywhere and do anything; and by the end of the century, when this was most needed, their deficiencies were only too patent. Wesley's efforts to remedy them merely ended in his followers carrying on his work outside the Church's borders. There was, indeed, the Evangelical movement within the Church, and it bore much fruit; but, in the words of Dean Church, referring to the years immediately preceding the Oxford Move

ment :

Their system was a one-sided and unnatural one, indeed in the hands of some of its expounders threatening morality and soundness of character.

And in the meantime the old High Church party was asleep, until their dreams were rudely broken by the thundering approach of 1832.

Whether or not the leaders of the Church had good reason for their fears of Disestablishment at the time of the Reform Bill is not very clear. True it is that one Bishop's palace was burnt; but later events would seem to show that their alarm was at least exaggerated. Be that as it may, Keble and Newman show quite plainly that it provided the outward stimulus for the Oxford Movement. The immediate question was: How could the Church be saved? And it involved a more ultimate one : What is the Church? The answer came in the form of a claim— the claim that the Church of England was one by unbroken historic succession with the Church of the First Age of Christianity, of the period covered by the New Testament writings. And the claim was substantiated by a twofold appeal to antiquity, on the one hand, and, on the other, to the English Divines; or rather, to antiquity through the English Divines. Bishop Creighton used to point out that the reason why the English Reformation issued so differently from the Continental was that our Reformers were men of greater learning than Luther, Melanchthon, or Calvin. In other words, they appealed to antiquity with far wider and more accurate knowledge. So that the leaders of the Oxford Movement did not need to disown or to correct the principal Divines who had preceded them in the English Church. The appeal to them and the appeal to the Fathers went pari passu. Newman, for instance, writes:

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. 10

Still more remarkable perhaps is the famous passage in the third chapter of the Apologia:

As I declared on occasion of Tract 90, I claimed in behalf of who would in the Anglican Church, the right of holding with Bramhall a comprecation with the Saints, and the Mass all but Transubstantiation with Andrewes, or with Hooker that Transubstantiation itself is not a point for Churches to part Communion upon, or with Hammond that a General Council, truly such, never did, never shall err in a matter of faith, or with Bull that man had in Paradise, and lost on the Fall, a supernatural habit of grace, or with Thorndike that penance is a propitiation for post-baptismal sin, or with Pearson that the all-powerful name of Jesus is no otherwise given than in the Catholic Church.

Such then was the cardinal principle of the Oxford Movement at its beginning. It was to make the belief, which the Creed enshrines, in 'one Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic Church,' a living and real thing for members of the Church of England. But this Apologia, ch. ii.

10