Apologia pro vita sua being a history of his religious opinions
should have denounced them. There is that good fellow, Worcester Palmer,
can whitewash the Ecclesiastical Commission and the Jerusalem Bishopric.
And what is the consequence? that our Church has, through centuries,
ever been sinking lower and lower, till good part of its pretensions and
professions is a mere sham, though it be a duty to make the best of what
we have received. Yet, though bound to make the best of other men's
shams, let us not incur any of our own. The truest friends of our Church
are they, who say boldly when her rulers are going wrong, and the
consequences; and (to speak catachrestically) _they_ are most likely to
die in the Church, who are, under these black circumstances, most
prepared to leave it.
"And I will add, that, considering the traces of God's grace which
surround us, I am very sanguine, or rather confident, (if it is right so
to speak,) that our prayers and our alms will come up as a memorial
before God, and that all this miserable confusion tends to good.
"Let us not then be anxious, and anticipate differences in prospect,
when we agree in the present.
"P.S. I think when friends" [i.e. the extreme party] "get over their
first unsettlement of mind and consequent vague apprehensions, which the
new attitude of the Bishops, and our feelings upon it, have brought
about, they will get contented and satisfied. They will see that they
exaggerated things.... Of course it would have been wrong to anticipate
what one's feelings would be under such a painful contingency as the
Bishops' charging as they have done,--so it seems to me nobody's fault.
Nor is it wonderful that others" [moderate men] "are startled" [i.e. at
my Protest, &c. &c.]; "yet they should recollect that the more implicit
the reverence one pays to a Bishop, the more keen will be one's
perception of heresy in him. The cord is binding and compelling, till it
snaps.
"Men of reflection would have seen this, if they had looked that way.
Last spring, a very high churchman talked to me of resisting my Bishop,
of asking him for the Canons under which he acted, and so forth; but
those, who have cultivated a loyal feeling towards their superiors, are
the most loving servants, or the most zealous protestors. If others
became so too, if the clergy of Chester denounced the heresy of their
diocesan, they would be doing their duty, and relieving themselves of
the share which they otherwise have in any possible defection of their
brethren.
"St. Stephen's [Day, December 26]. How I fidget! I now fear that the
note I wrote yesterday only makes matters worse by _disclosing_ too
much. This is always my great difficulty.
"In the present state of excitement on both sides, I think of leaving
out altogether my reassertion of No. 90 in my Preface to Volume 6 [of
Parochial Sermons], and merely saying, 'As many false reports are at
this time in circulation about him, he hopes his well-wishers will take
this Volume as an indication of his real thoughts and feelings: those
who are not, he leaves in God's hand to bring them to a better mind in
His own time.' What do you say to the logic, sentiment, and propriety of
this?"
An old friend, at a distance from Oxford, Archdeacon Robert I.
Wilberforce, must have said something to me at this time, I do not know
what, which challenged a frank reply; for I disclosed to him, I do not
know in what words, my frightful suspicion, hitherto only known to two
persons, viz. his brother Henry and Mr. Frederic Rogers,[13] that, as
regards my Anglicanism, perhaps I might break down in the event,--that
perhaps we were both out of the Church. I think I recollect expressing
my difficulty, as derived from the Arian and Monophysite history, in a
form in which it would be most intelligible to him, as being in fact an
admission of Bishop Bull's; viz. that in the controversies of the early
centuries the Roman Church was ever on the right side, which was of
course a _primâ facie_ argument in favour of Rome and against
Anglicanism now. He answered me thus, under date of Jan. 29, 1842: "I
don't think that I ever was so shocked by any communication, which was
ever made to me, as by your letter of this morning. It has quite
unnerved me.... I cannot but write to you, though I am at a loss where
to begin.... I know of no act by which we have dissevered ourselves from
the communion of the Church Universal.... The more I study Scripture,
the more am I impressed with the resemblance between the Romish
principle in the Church and the Babylon of St. John.... I am ready to
grieve that I ever directed my thoughts to theology, if it is indeed so
uncertain, as your doubts seem to indicate."
[13] Now Lord Blachford.
While my old and true friends were thus in trouble about me, I suppose
they felt not only anxiety but pain, to see that I was gradually
surrendering myself to the influence of others, who had not their own
claims upon me, younger men, and of a cast of mind in no small degree
uncongenial to my own. A new school of thought was rising, as is usual
in doctrinal inquiries, and was sweeping the original party of the
Movement aside, and was taking its place. The most prominent person in
it, was a man of elegant genius, of classical mind, of rare talent in
literary composition:--Mr. Oakeley. He was not far from my own age; I
had long known him, though of late years he had not been in residence at
Oxford; and quite lately, he has been taking several signal occasions of
renewing that kindness, which he ever showed towards me when we were
both in the Anglican Church. His tone of mind was not unlike that which
gave a character to the early Movement; he was almost a typical Oxford
man, and, as far as I recollect, both in political and ecclesiastical
views, would have been of one spirit with the Oriel party of 1826-1833.
But he had entered late into the Movement; he did not know its first
years; and, beginning with a new start, he was naturally thrown together
with that body of eager, acute, resolute minds who had begun their
Catholic life about the same time as he, who knew nothing about the _Via
Media_, but had heard much about Rome. This new party rapidly formed and
increased, in and out of Oxford, and, as it so happened,
contemporaneously with that very summer, when I received so serious a
blow to my ecclesiastical views from the study of the Monophysite
controversy. These men cut into the original Movement at an angle, fell
across its line of thought, and then set about turning that line in its
own direction. They were most of them keenly religious men, with a true
concern for their souls as the first matter of all, with a great zeal
for me, but giving little certainty at the time as to which way they
would ultimately turn. Some in the event have remained firm to
Anglicanism, some have become Catholics, and some have found a refuge in
Liberalism. Nothing was clearer concerning them, than that they needed
to be kept in order; and on me who had had so much to do with the making
of them, that duty was as clearly incumbent; and it is equally clear,
from what I have already said, that I was just the person, above all
others, who could not undertake it. There are no friends like old
friends; but of those old friends, few could help me, few could
understand me, many were annoyed with me, some were angry, because I was
breaking up a compact party, and some, as a matter of conscience, could
not listen to me. When I looked round for those whom I might consult in
my difficulties, I found the very hypothesis of those difficulties
acting as a bar to their giving me their advice. Then I said, bitterly,
"You are throwing me on others, whether I will or no." Yet still I had
good and true friends around me of the old sort, in and out of Oxford
too, who were a great help to me. But on the other hand, though I
neither was so fond (with a few exceptions) of the persons, nor of the
methods of thought, which belonged to this new school, as of the old
set, though I could not trust in their firmness of purpose, for, like a
swarm of flies, they might come and go, and at length be divided and
dissipated, yet I had an intense sympathy in their object and in the
direction in which their path lay, in spite of my old friends, in spite
of my old life-long prejudices. In spite of my ingrained fears of Rome,
and the decision of my reason and conscience against her usages, in
spite of my affection for Oxford and Oriel, yet I had a secret longing
love of Rome the Mother of English Christianity, and I had a true
devotion to the Blessed Virgin, in whose College I lived, whose Altar I
served, and whose Immaculate Purity I had in one of my earliest printed
Sermons made much of. And it was the consciousness of this bias in
myself, if it is so to be called, which made me preach so earnestly
against the danger of being swayed in religious inquiry by our sympathy
rather than by our reason. And moreover, the members of this new school
looked up to me, as I have said, and did me true kindnesses, and really
loved me, and stood by me in trouble, when others went away, and for all
this I was grateful; nay, many of them were in trouble themselves, and
in the same boat with me, and that was a further cause of sympathy
between us; and hence it was, when the new school came on in force, and
into collision with the old, I had not the heart, any more than the
power, to repel them; I was in great perplexity, and hardly knew where I
stood; I took their part; and, when I wanted to be in peace and silence,
I had to speak out, and I incurred the charge of weakness from some men,
and of mysteriousness, shuffling, and underhand dealing from the
majority.
* * * * *
Now I will say here frankly, that this sort of charge is a matter which
I cannot properly meet, because I cannot duly realize it. I have never
had any suspicion of my own honesty; and, when men say that I was
dishonest, I cannot grasp the accusation as a distinct conception, such
as it is possible to encounter. If a man said to me, "On such a day and
before such persons you said a thing was white, when it was black," I
understand what is meant well enough, and I can set myself to prove an
_alibi_ or to explain the mistake; or if a man said to me, "You tried to
gain me over to your party, intending to take me with you to Rome, but
you did not succeed," I can give him the lie, and lay down an assertion
of my own as firm and as exact as his, that not from the time that I was
first unsettled, did I ever attempt to gain any one over to myself or to
my Romanizing opinions, and that it is only his own coxcombical fancy
which has bred such a thought in him: but my imagination is at a loss in
presence of those vague charges, which have commonly been brought
against me, charges, which are made up of impressions, and
understandings, and inferences, and hearsay, and surmises. Accordingly,
I shall not make the attempt, for, in doing so, I should be dealing
blows in the air; what I shall attempt is to state what I know of myself
and what I recollect, and leave to others its application.
While I had confidence in the _Via Media_, and thought that nothing
could overset it, I did not mind laying down large principles, which I
saw would go further than was commonly perceived. I considered that to
make the _Via Media_ concrete and substantive, it must be much more than
it was in outline; that the Anglican Church must have a ceremonial, a
ritual, and a fulness of doctrine and devotion, which it had not at
present, if it were to compete with the Roman Church with any prospect
of success. Such additions would not remove it from its proper basis,
but would merely strengthen and beautify it: such, for instance, would
be confraternities, particular devotions, reverence for the Blessed