As we saw in the previous posting on this subject, in
March of 1834 members of the Cambridge University Senate petitioned parliament. Their goal was to abolish the requirement for
students and faculty to subscribe to the Thirty-Nine Articles of the Church of
England in order to take a degree or obtain a fellowship, respectively. Although it was not rigorously enforced at
Cambridge, requiring someone to sign the Third-Nine Articles kept anyone who
was not a member of the established church from obtaining a degree or teaching.
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| Pusey left, Newman middle, possibly Keble second from right. |
To the modern — or any other — mind with a proper
grounding in principles of natural law and a justly structured social order,
requiring a religious test to get an advanced degree or enter a profession is
not merely unfair. It is an offense
against the dignity of the human person.
Yet it is essential to the maintenance of some form of orthodoxy in an
established religion, or there is a real and present danger that political
considerations will begin to influence religious doctrines and disciplines.
Members of the Oxford Movement thereby found themselves on
the horns of a dilemma, a paradox that ultimately could not be resolved. Orthodoxy of doctrine and discipline
absolutely require that a religion be independent of the civil power. At the same time, conservative adherents of
an established religion are usually absolutely convinced that establishment of
the religion is essential to safeguard orthodoxy of doctrine and discipline.
Adding another complexity was the situation of the Church
of England in the early nineteenth century. Liberalism of the European type, almost
inevitably accompanied by socialism, combined with liberalism of the English
type (usually accompanied by capitalism) to threaten traditional notions of
both civil and religious society.
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| Charles Lever, "the Forgotten Victorian" |
Members of the Oxford Movement consequently found
themselves in what amounted to a “three-front war.” The first and most obvious front was the
attack from the European type liberals who were working to change the whole
meaning not merely of Christianity, but of all religion, turning it into what
amounts to a materialist social service agency under the auspices of the
government.
Second was the intrusion of European liberalism into
English government. Growing
ever-stronger as the evils of English liberalism and capitalism became
increasingly evident, liberalizing forces inside the Church of England were
quick to seek allies among the more radical type of liberal politicians.
Third was the slower, but just as inexorable intrusion of
English type liberalism and the principles of capitalism into the doctrine and
discipline of the Church of England.
This is not surprising, given that local parishes were responsible for
such social welfare as was available. As
workers in the new factories tended to be grossly underpaid and subjected to
subhuman conditions (as recorded, e.g.,
in the fiction of Charles Dickens and Charles Lever and the non-fiction of
Peter Gaskell), religious doctrines regarding charity and justice tended to be
distorted to the point of incomprehensibility to decrease the financial burden
on the local church and increase the income of far too many non-resident
clergy.
Eventually this would result in the merging of socialism
and capitalism in what Hilaire Belloc called “the Servile State.” In the meantime, however, as Newman and the
other participants in the Oxford Movement now discovered, it meant that
liberals of both types in the Church, in the government, and in civil society
all had a vested interest in changing fundamental religious doctrines and even
the nature of religion itself.
Unless this point is clearly understood, the whole history
of Christianity in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (and to a great extent
that of organized religion itself in modern times) becomes incomprehensible. Efforts were under way to change what
religion itself means and to subsume religion into civil society even if not
directly controlled by the State, creating what Fulton Sheen a century later
would call a “religion without God.”
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| William Hurrell Mallock |
The demand that established doctrine be changed to
accommodate to a personal, political, or religious agenda that had its own
doctrines at odds with those defined by an organized religion in its “laws and
formularies” would gain momentum in the Church of England as well as in the
Catholic and Protestant world in general.
By 1900 William Hurrell Mallock (1849-1923) would note,
Though every party in the English Church to-day — including
even the extreme Broad Churchmen — desires, so far as it can, to prove that its
own doctrines are consistent with those embodied in the laws and formularies of
the Reformation, it desires to do this for the practical reason only, that it
thus will at once secure for itself a tolerable modus vivendi; but no
party is prepared to give its own doctrines up, even if every historical expert
and every legal authority should conclusively show that the laws and the
formularies of the Reformation condemned them.
Each party, under circumstances such as these, would indeed admit that
some kind of change was necessary; but each would maintain that the things
requiring change were the laws and formularies, which should be made to
accommodate themselves to the doctrines; not the doctrines, in order that they
should accommodate themselves to the laws and formularies. (W.H. Mallock, Doctrine and Doctrinal
Disruption: Being an Examination of the Intellectual Position of the Church of
England. London: Adam and Charles
Black, 1900, 5-6.)
Thus, it should not come as a surprise that the effort was
centered on the Church of England and the Catholic Church. These were at the time the most dogmatic and
organized Christian bodies apart from the autocephalous Orthodox churches which
were not at that time under assault, at least directly. Thus, had it not been for the efforts of
Gregory XVI and subsequent popes, and to a lesser degree the Oxford Movement,
the recent history of Christianity could have been significantly different.
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| R.W. Church |
To explain, the members of the Oxford Movement were
socially just in loving their institution (the Church of England) as they loved
themselves and were also correct that the fundamental principles of the
institution were under attack.
Nevertheless, their strategy was flawed, as they defended another social
organization — the university — which was itself in need of reform, enmeshed as
it was in English type liberalism. As
R.W. Church noted, bringing us dramatically back to the point,
Oxford was the fulcrum from which theological revival hoped
to move the Church. It was therefore a
shock and a challenge of no light kind, when not merely the proposal was made
to abolish the matriculation subscription with the express intent of attracting
Dissenters, and to get Parliament to force the change on the University if the
University resisted, but the proposal itself was vindicated and enforced in a
pamphlet by Dr. Hampden by a definite and precise theory which stopped not
short of the proposition that all creeds and formularies — everything which
represented the authority of the teaching Church — however incidentally and
temporarily useful, were in their own nature the inventions of a mistaken and
corrupt philosophy, and invasions of Christian liberty. This was cutting deep with a vengeance,
though the author of the theory seemed alone unable to see it. (Church, The Oxford Movement, op. cit.,
109.)
As Church observed, then, Hampden’s reason for trying to
abolish all doctrine was to expand de
facto membership in the Church of England to non-Anglicans, even
non-Christians by making membership in the Church meaningless to all intents
and purposes. It did not occur to
Hampden and his supporters, or to his antagonists for that matter, that the
obvious way out of the problem of treating non-Anglicans unjustly due to the
existence of an established church is not to destroy, redefine, or “re-purpose”
religion into a non-religious institution (a “Religion without God”), but
simply to disestablish the Church of England.
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| Edward Hawkins |
In direct consequence to the effort mounted by the members
of the Oxford Movement and faced with what amounted to a public outcry against
the measure, the House of Lords threw out the bill to abolish the requirement
to subscribe to the Thirty-Nine Articles in July of 1834. Efforts to abolish the requirement to
subscribe to the Articles, however, continued.
On November 10, 1834, a few months after the measure failed in
parliament, the Provost of Oxford, Edward Hawkins (1789-1882), persuaded the
heads of the colleges to introduce a measure of their own into the university
Convocation.
A modified version of the petition to parliament, the
proposal was not to abolish the subscription requirement. Rather, the idea was to replace the
Thirty-Nine Articles with a much milder document that would dissenters to sign
in good conscience. Inauspiciously, the
decision to introduce the measure passed by a single vote.
This new initiative was the occasion for the issuance in
November 1834 of a second edition of Hampden’s pamphlet, Observations on Religious Dissent.
Possibly out of a sense of fair play, Hampden sent a copy of the second
edition to Newman . . . and got a little more than he bargained for in return.
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| John Henry Newman |
Newman was polite when he acknowledged receipt of the
pamphlet, but he was also honest. He
thanked Hampden for his thoughtfulness, but then expressed his “very sincere
and deep regret” that the little publication had ever seen the light of
day. As Maisie Ward described Newman’s
reaction to Observations on Religious
Dissent,
Deprecating Hampden’s pamphlet Newman had prophesied that it
would prove the first step “towards interrupting that peace and mutual good
understanding that has prevailed so long in this place,” and that there would
result “dissensions the more intractable, because justified in the minds of
those who resist innovation by a feeling of imperative duty.” (Ward, Young Mr. Newman, op. cit.,
288-289.)
Newman was, of course, wrong about the “peace and mutual
good understanding” that had allegedly prevailed up to that time. A goodly number of people had been taken
completely off guard by the Movement.
Others had not completely understood what a significant challenge it
represented to the growing encroachment of European type liberalism, socialism,
and modernism — the total focus on purely religious matters ensured that. Yet others kept silent for fear of offending
members of a group that appeared to be in the ascendant.
As touched on briefly in the previous posting, Hampden’s
pamphlet set out his doctrines much more clearly than had been the case in the
Bampton Lectures. It thereby provided
both a trigger and a rallying point for a significant number of people who had
become increasingly uneasy about the direction of the Oxford Movement, as well
as what they considered its radical, even revolutionary methods.
The main bone of contention as far as Newman was concerned
was the fact that Hampden claimed his theories returned the teachings of the
Church of England to “the simple religion of Christ.” This, of course, has been the claim behind
virtually every schism, heresy, or division in Christianity, with similar
claims made for the same circumstances in other faiths and philosophies.
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| Renn Dickson Hempden |
Specifically, Hampden argued that “Religion” is entirely
distinct from “Theological Opinion,” and then proceeded to group essential
Christian doctrines under the heading of “Theological Opinion.” For example, the doctrine of the Trinity
(that God is one God in three divine Persons) is — according to Hampden — just
as true and as valid as the Unitarian belief that God is a single entity and
Jesus, while specially inspired by God, is not God.
With, e.g., the
Trinitarian “opinion” being equally valid with the Unitarian “opinion,” then,
the Church of England — being non-dogmatic — could therefore embrace
everyone. Embrace everyone, that is,
except those like members of the Oxford Movement who insisted on the absolute
nature of the absolute doctrines and principles of faith and reason.
As for the appearance of the Church of England being
dogmatic on which the members of the Oxford Movement insisted, that (according
to Hampden) was an illusion. The Church
of England is — according to Hampden — not dogmatic in spirit, although some of its formulation of Theological Opinions
might sound that way.
And the specific formulation at issue? The Thirty-Nine Articles, to which every
student and faculty member of Oxford University had to subscribe if he wanted
to attend the university or teach there.
These had been made purposely vague, even contradictory in some points,
in order to prevent anyone who was not a member of the Church of England from
attending Oxford.
This meant that dissenters and non-conformists (as well as
Catholics and Jews) were barred from higher education. Hampden therefore proposed abolishing the
requirement to subscribe to the Thirty-Nine Articles as they constituted mere
opinion; believing or refusing to believe specific religious doctrines should not,
in Hampden’s view, preclude anyone from membership in the Church of England or
attending the university.
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| Matthew Arnold |
To this day Newman’s stand on Hampden’s proposal excites
extreme emotional responses among many Church of England members. The campaign to retain the requirement to
subscribe to the Thirty-Nine Articles is often described as a persecution or
the martyrdom of Hampden at Newman’s vindictive and malicious hands.
Newman’s stand, and that of others in the Movement, was it
was not only proper that members of the Church of England subscribe to a
specific set of beliefs, it should be required.
He considered that deliberate vagueness of points of doctrine and
specific beliefs led to liberalism, socialism, modernism, as well as the
latitudinarianism and religious indifference that were the main problems the
Movement was attempting to counter.
Hampden’s most notable — and vocal — supporters included
Matthew Arnold (1822-1888), Richard Whately (1787-1863), and Hawkins. Arnold took the position that since during
the tenure of Gilbert Burnet (1643-1715), Bishop of Salisbury, Church of
England authorities had censured the particular expression of the Thirty-Nine
Articles in use at Oxford, demanding that the requirement to subscribe to the
Articles should be abolished. Whateley
maintained that their meaning was vague, and therefore it was unfair to require
anyone to agree to them when he might not know what they meant.
Hawkins, who owed his election to the position of Provost
to Newman (for persuading Keble to withdraw his candidacy), opposed Newman and
the others possibly because he felt Hampden’s political power was growing and,
in any event, he had introduced the measure in the first place. When the measure finally came to a vote, it
was defeated 459 to 57.
That was not, however, the end of the matter. Even though the measure had been defeated,
and resoundingly at that, the acrimony not only did not diminish, it
increased. The real issue — what did
Christianity mean in the Church of England? — was something at which Newman had
only hinted, but which was the battleground that would determine the roles of
Church and State, as well as the direction of economic and social development,
down to the present time, with the results that we see around us today.
#30#
