act. CHAPTER XV AFTER NO. 90 THE proceedings about No. 90 were a declaration of war on the part of the Oxford authorities against the Tractarian party. The suspicions, alarms, antipathies, jealousies, which had long been smouldering among those in power, had at last taken shape in a definite And it was a turning-point in the history of the movement. After this it never was exactly what it had been hitherto. It had been so far a movement within the English Church, for its elevation and reform indeed, but at every step invoking its authority with deep respect, acknowledging allegiance to its rulers. in unqualified and even excessive terms, and aiming loyally to make it in reality all that it was in its devotional language and its classical literature. But after what passed about No. 90 a change came. The party came under an official ban and stigma. The common consequences of harsh treatment on the tendencies and thought of a party, which considers itself unjustly proscribed, showed themselves more and more. Its mind was divided; its temper was exasperated; while the attitude of the governing authorities hardened more into determined hostility. From the time of the censure, and especially after the events connected with it, the contest for the Poetry Professorship and the renewed Hampden question,-it may be said that the characteristic tempers of the Corcyrean sedition were reproduced on a small scale in Oxford.1 The scare of Popery, Į not without foundation—the reaction against it, also not without foundation-had thrown the wisest off their balance; and what of those who were not wise? In the heat of those days there were few Tractarians who did not think Dr. Wynter, Dr. Faussett, and Dr. Symons heretics in theology and persecutors in temper, despisers of Christian devotion and selfdenial. There were few of the party of the Heads who did not think every Tractarian a dishonest and perjured traitor, equivocating about his most solemn engagements, the ignorant slave of childish superstitions which he was conspiring to bring back. It was the day of the violent on both sides: the courtesies of life were forgotten; men were afraid of being 1 Τόλμα ἀλόγιστος ἀνδρία φιλέταιρος ἐνομίσθη τὸ δὲ σῶφρον τοῦ ἀνάνδρου πρόσχημα, καὶ τὸ πρὸς ἅπαν ξυνετὸν ἐπὶ πᾶν ἀργόν· τὸ δὲ ἐμπλήκτως ὀξὺ ἀνδρὸς μοίρᾳ προσετέθη . . καὶ ὁ μὲν χαλεπαίνων πιστὸς ἀεί, ὁ δὲ ἀντιλέγων αὐτῷ ὕποπτος.—Thuc. iii. 82. "Reckless daring was held to be loyal courage; moderation was the disguise of unmanly weakness; to know everything was to do nothing; frantic energy was the true character of a man ; the lover of violence was always trusted, and his opponent suspected."-Jowett's translation. A weak in their censures, their dislike, and their opposition; old friendships were broken up, and men believed the worst of those whom a few years back they had loved and honoured. It is not agreeable to recall these long extinct animosities, but they are part of the history of that time, and affected the course in which things ran. And it is easy to blame, it is hard to do justice to, the various persons and parties who contributed to the events of that strange and confused time. All was new, and unusual, and without precedent in Oxford; a powerful and enthusiastic school reviving old doctrines in a way to make them seem novelties, and creating a wild panic from a quarter where it was the least expected; the terror of this panic acting on authorities not in the least prepared for such a trial of their sagacity, patience, and skill, driving them to unexampled severity, and to a desperate effort to expel the disturbing innovators-among them some of the first men in Oxford in character and ability—from their places in the University. In order to do justice 1 One of the strangest features in the conflict was the entire misconception shown of what Mr. Newman was-the blindness to his real character and objects—the imputation to him not merely of grave faults, but of small and mean ones. His critics could not rise above the poorest measure of his intellect and motives. One of the ablest of them, who had once been his friend, in a farewell letter of kindly remonstrance, specifies certain Roman errors, which he hopes that Mr. Newman will not fall into—adoring images and worshipping saints-as if the pleasure and privilege of worshipping images and saints were to Mr. Newman the inducement to join Rome and break the ties of a lifetime. And so of his moral qualities. A prominent Evangelical leader, Dr. Close of Cheltenham, afterwards Dean of Carlisle, at a complimentary dinner, in on each side at this distance of time, we are bound to make allowance—both for the alarm and the mistaken violence of the authorities, and for the disaffection, the irritation, the strange methods which grew up in the worried and suspected party—for the difficulties which beset both sides in the conflict, and the counter-influences which drew them hither and thither. But the facts are as they are; and even then a calmer temper was possible to those who willed it; and in the heat of the strife there were men among the authorities, as well as in the unpopular party, who kept their balance, while others lost it. Undoubtedly the publication of No. 90 was the occasion of the aggravated form which dissension took, and not unnaturally. Yet it was anything but what it was taken to mean by the authorities, an intentional move in favour of Rome. It was intended to reconcile a large and growing class of minds, penetrated and disgusted with the ignorance and injustice of much of the current controversial assumptions against Rome, to a larger and more defensible view of the position of the English Church. And this was done by calling attention to that which was not now for the first time observed-to the loose and which he himself gloried in the "foul, personal abuse to which he had been subjected in his zeal for truth," proceeded to give his judgment on Mr. Newman: "When I first read No. 90, I did not then know the author; but I said then, and I repeat here, not with any personal reference to the author, that I should be sorry to trust the author of that Tract with my purse."-Report of Speech in Cheltenham Examiner, 1st March 1843. unguarded mode of speaking visible in the later controversial Articles, and to the contrast between them and the technical and precise theology of the first five Articles. The Articles need not mean all which they were supposed popularly to mean against what was Catholic in Roman doctrine. This was urged in simple good faith; it was but the necessary assumption of all who held with the Catholic theology, which the Tractarians all along maintained that they had a right to teach; it left plenty of ground of difference with unreformed and usurping Rome. And we know that the storm which No. 90 raised took the writer by surprise. He did not expect that he should give such deep offence. But if he thought of the effect on one set of minds, he forgot the probable effect on another; and he forgot, or under-estimated, the effect not only of the things said, but of the way in which they were said.1 No. 90 was a surprise, in the state of ordinary theological knowledge at the time. It was a strong thing to say that the Articles left a great deal of formal Roman language untouched; but to work this out in dry, bald, technical logic, on the face of it, narrow in scope, often merely ingenious, was even a greater stumbling-block. It was, undoubtedly, a great miscalculation, such as men of keen and farreaching genius sometimes make. They mistake the strength and set of the tide; they imagine that minds round them are going as fast as their own. We can 1 οὐ γὰρ ἀπόχρη τὸ ἔχειν ἃ δεῖ λέγειν, ἀλλ ̓ ἀνάγκη καὶ ταῦτα is deî eiπeîv.-Arist. Rhet. iii. 1. |