High Minds Read online

  II

  While religion faced new challenges among the people, some theologians chose to complicate what once had been matters of simple faith. There was a growing belief among some Anglicans that their church had, during the eighteenth century and in the early nineteenth, become increasingly worldly, cynical and (not to put too fine a point on it) degenerate. This had happened, it was felt, not least because of the proximity of the State to the Established Church, which was stipulated by the Thirty-nine Articles. It had had a corrupting effect, reducing the Church’s independence and encouraging the manipulation of ecclesiastical wealth and patronage. The Oxford Movement, some of whose founders converted to Roman Catholicism, was an attempt to reduce the interference in religion of a State perceived as incapable of taking its religious duties sufficiently seriously, and determined to reduce the power of the Church and enhance the power of the State. The Thirty-nine Articles were in part regarded with disapproval and disdain by the Anglo-Catholics: and not merely the strictures against the Bishop of Rome.

  John Henry Newman, possibly the most eminent member of the Movement, decreed it to have begun on 14 July 1833. That day John Keble delivered the Assize Sermon in Oxford subsequently published under the title of National Apostasy, which examined the ‘apostate mind’ of the era and rebuked the State for interfering in the Church of England. Newman had arrived back in England five days earlier, after seven months travelling the Mediterranean with his friend Richard Hurrell Froude and Froude’s father, an archdeacon. His theological mind had been turned first by a visit to Corfu, where he had noted similarities between Orthodox and Roman Catholic worship, and Rome, where he felt the conflict of the religious veneration and piety of the people, and the superstitions and venality of their Church.

  This combination of circumstances caused an earthquake in Newman’s soul. A fortnight later a group of high-churchmen met at the rectory at Hadleigh in Suffolk, home of the Reverend Hugh James Rose, editor of the recently founded high-church British Magazine, to discuss a new approach to doctrine. Newman was not present: but he would soon become a guiding spirit of the movement these men would constitute. He started to write prolifically. On 9 September 1833 he published the first of the Tracts for the Times, written anonymously, on the subject of the apostolic succession. Later that autumn he contributed a series of papers to the British Magazine that would later be published as The Church of the Fathers. He gave weekly sermons in his church, St Mary’s Oxford, the university church, outlining his view of the revised doctrine the Anglican Church needed. He had in his sights liberals like Dr Arnold, who wanted the Church to dilute its doctrine to allow it to embrace members of dissenting sects. Arnold and Newman would be at odds for the rest of Arnold’s life, and indeed after it.

  Keble and Edward Pusey, the Regius professor of Hebrew, were also among the authors of the Tracts, which soon provoked acrimonious argument. Pusey had spent time in the 1820s at Göttingen, which would become Bismarck’s alma mater, where he imbibed modern German ideas of religion and was accused, for a time, of being a rationalist. However, his aim on returning to England was to reconnect the Church of England, of which he became an ordained priest, with the Catholic underpinnings essential to it even after the Reformation had installed the King of England as head of the Church, but which were lost in the torrent of anti-popery after the Glorious Revolution. Newman had argued in 1834, in response to the contention that he was undermining the Protestant nature of the Church of England, that the Church could both be reformed and remain Catholic – what he termed the via media, or middle way, between Protestantism and Catholicism. The Tracts were widely read and circulated, and the movement caught on: young, impressionable minds at Oxford and elsewhere were swept up in it. Elsewhere among Anglicans there was horror, and a sense of being menaced by this attempt to restore Catholicism to England.

  The crucial and, as it turned out, final Tract – number XC – was written by Newman and published on 27 February 1841. It argued that Anglicans could adhere to Catholic doctrine, except for recognising the Pope’s supremacy, because the Thirty-nine Articles could have a Catholic interpretation. This was a tendentious reading: it meant a wholesale repudiation of the Reformation. Gladstone, who read it on 12 March, used a single word to describe the effect on him: ‘ominous’.12 Newman was censured by the university’s vice-chancellor, proctors and heads of house; and was compelled by his bishop to promise not to publish any more Tracts. This drove Newman from Oxford – to Littlemore, 2 miles outside the city, and part of his parish. It caused him to reflect on what he considered the insufficiently religious tone of the Church of England, and what it could offer in the way of spirituality and devotion to young priests. Rome became an ever more attractive prospect.

  Tract XC deeply troubled some who read it or encountered its ideas, but revolted others. In the latter category was Charles Kingsley who, upon reading an extensive account of it in the Edinburgh Review, wrote that it supported ‘pernicious superstition’ and observed: ‘Whether wilful or self-deceived, these men are Jesuits, taking the oath to the Articles with moral reservations, which allow them to explain them away in senses utterly different from those of their authors – All the worst doctrinal features of Popery Mr Newman professes to believe in . . .’13

  In October 1843 Gladstone noted in his diary that he had read ‘with pain and dismay’ a letter Newman had sent to Henry Manning talking of how the ‘general repudiation’ by the Church of Tract XC was driving him out of the Anglican communion, and how he ‘justly felt to be a foreign material incapable of assimilating with the Church of England’.14 Newman felt the Church was becoming ‘alien from Catholic principles’, and found ‘increased difficulty in contending that she is a branch of the Catholic Church – that it is a dream to talk of Catholicity.’ Gladstone was relieved Newman was saying this in public, but he could not keep the truth from Manning, to whom he was close. ‘He has considerably weakened his powers for good,’ Gladstone noted. ‘They remain great for mischief: but we may yet trust he will not be abandoned.’

  That hope would not be fulfilled. Within days Manning sent Gladstone a second note from Newman, ‘who announced that since the summer of 1839 he had had the conviction that the Church of Rome is the Catholic Church, and ours not a branch of the Catholic Church because not in communion with Rome!’15 The Movement would fragment, notably with Keble being grieved by Newman’s decision, in October 1845, to go over to Rome. The split had been coming for years, with some early adherents realising that there was increasingly little difference between Anglo-Catholicism, as advocated by Newman, and Roman Catholicism. This had become apparent when Newman refused in 1839 to subscribe to a monument to be erected in Oxford to Cranmer, Ridley and Latimer, three of the Protestant martyrs of the sixteenth century. He was keen to be provocative: in an early sermon he said that ‘I do not shrink from uttering my firm conviction that it would be a gain to the country were it vastly more superstitious, more bigoted, more gloomy, more fierce in its religion than at present it shows itself to be.’16 His fundamental criticism of the Protestant Church of England, and its dissenting variants, was that they lacked spiritual authority: and he increasingly came to realise that only one Church, in his view, had the authority he sought.

  His friend Hurrell Froude, in one of the statements that would make his Remains (edited anonymously by Newman and Keble) so toxic to Newman’s cause, said that ‘we are Catholics without the Popery, and Church-of-England men without the Protestantism’, and that religious life was ‘cramped by Protestantism’, which rather gave the game away.17 Gladstone had read the first volume of Remains in 1838 ‘with repeated regrets’, for he could see where the movement was leading.18 The editors went on the defensive in their Preface, arguing, unconvincingly, that the letters that comprised the Remains ‘bear a strong testimony against the actual system of Rome; strong, as coming from one who was disposed to make every fair allowance in the Church’s favour; who was looking and longing for some fuller develo
pment of Catholic principles than he could easily find, but who was soon obliged to confess, with undissembled mortification and disappointment, that such development was not to be looked for in Rome.’19

  These statements were made of one who also wrote: ‘The reformation was a limb badly set – it must be broken again in order to be righted.’20 Rome was the destination, years before Newman bought his ticket. Greville, in his diary in August 1841, recalled meeting at dinner ‘a smooth, oily and agreeable Priest’, Bishop Wiseman, who talked of little other than the Oxford Movement, and (having claimed close acquaintance with Pusey) said that ‘the great body of that persuasion, Pusey himself included, are very nearly ripe and ready for reunion with Rome, and he assured us that neither the Pope’s supremacy nor Transubstantiation would be obstacles in their way.’21

  In 1874 John Morley, who was at Oxford in the 1850s, defended the Movement by saying that ‘it was at any rate a recognition in a very forcible way of the doctrine that spiritual matters are not to be settled by the dicta of a political council. It acknowledged that a man is answerable at his own peril for having found or lost the truth.’22 Gladstone, whose biography Morley would write, became increasingly despairing of the Oxford divines. Tract XC was to him ‘like a repetition of the publication of Froude’s Remains, and Newman has again burned his fingers’, he told Lord Lyttelton.23 He saw Newman had put himself outside the Church of England ‘in point of spirit and sympathy’. Oxford became polarised: an election for the professorship of poetry in December 1841 was between candidates who were avowedly ‘no popery’ and a Puseyite. Pusey himself was forbidden to preach in the university for two years in 1843.

  The mood that helped feed Tractarianism (as the Oxford Movement was also known, because of the religious tracts its members regularly published) was the same that fed Young England: a romantic attachment to the Middle Ages and feudalism, of which the old religion was an integral part. To go back to the Middle Ages was to go back to the religion that had prevailed before the Reformation. That sentiment was reflected in the style of the many new churches built to accommodate the expanding population: the Gothic Revival echoed the style of the pre-Reformation era. The notion of Ritualism that became so significant a part of Tractarianism – the close study of ancient liturgies and then of ecclesiology – was brought firmly to bear on much nineteenth-century church building, and at times gave it an exoticism never before seen in this country.

  The horrors of the industrialised society were as much to blame for the debate about faith as for the political quarrels of the time. When society undergoes seismic change – as Britain did in the first half of the nineteenth century – retreat to a familiar past is irresistible, if futile. In the case of the Tractarians, and more so the Ritualists, it was a retreat to fantasy past, as anyone who studies their church buildings and those from the medieval age will tell at once: though some of what the Ritualists wanted to do would have been familiar from the medieval church, such as the adornment of chancels, the use of images and the use of pre-Reformation style vestments. Such things caused heated controversy and even litigation. This was the climate of religious disputation at Oxford into which went three of the most important intellectuals of the early and mid-Victorian period, whom we shall meet in the next chapter: Arthur Hugh Clough, Matthew Arnold and James Anthony Froude.

  III

  While the upper and upper-middle classes battled with the intellectual niceties of modern theology, and the new middle classes were being shaped by the dissenting sects from which they were often sprung, the working class was having a much more straightforward ride. Engels found in 1844 that ‘all the writers of the bourgeoisie are unanimous on this point, that the workers are not religious, and do not attend church.’24 A spiritual dimension was usually absent from the lives of the lower orders. Spirituality had never encountered them, or vice versa. The new communities in which many lived – they were frequently first- or second-generation emigrants from the countryside – were not merely rootless, but were unserviced by the Church of England. The 1851 census found that for the first time in the history of any significant nation more than half the population was urban. In all industrial towns except Leeds more than the half the population were immigrants.25

  The dissenting chapels often did not want the working classes, regarding them as incapable of conforming with their core clientele. The move from old community to new seemed to break the tradition of regular churchgoing. Methodism in particular was an aspirational religion, encouraging habits of hard work and frugality; there was little evidence that it was interested in helping the non-aspirational. One of the earliest historians of the Methodist movement observed in 1860 that it hardly had a footing in the large towns, but flourished in small ones.26 Congregationalists had a similar view: ‘Our mission is neither to the very rich nor to the very poor, but to the great middle section of the community,’ noted the chairman of the sect, Thomas Binney, in 1848.27 The duty of helping the dispossessed fell upon the Church of England and on the only Church that had increased its numbers of working-class adherents thanks to the Irish Potato Famine, the Roman Catholic.

  In 1851 the census asked, for the first time, about religious worship. On the Sunday before census day details of attendance were supplied by 14,077 places belonging to the Established Church, and from 20,390 dissenting chapels.28 It found that since 1831 the Church had built 2,029 places of worship, to counter what the report of the census’s findings called ‘spiritual destitution’.29 The number of churches in Lancashire had risen from 292 to 521, in twenty years when the population had almost doubled. There was a similar story in Middlesex, which had a church for every 4,658 people, against one for every 5,522 in 1831. Nationally, the census estimated that there were 5,317,915 ‘sittings’ in the 14,077 places of worship in the Established Church, and that 2,541,244 of these were occupied on the census Sunday morning; 1,890,764 in the afternoon; and 860,543 in the evening.30

  Families might attend church three times each Sunday, so these figures do not merit being added together. A similar proportion of sittings was occupied in dissenting chapels during the morning and afternoon, but with the highest attendance during the evenings. Only the Roman Catholic Church, whose places of worship were still being built in the twenty-third year after emancipation, was overcrowded, with many churches holding more than one morning service. Lancashire had the largest Roman Catholic population of any English county, mainly because of its proximity to Ireland, but also for historic reasons as a centre of opposition to Anglicanism. In 1850 the Pope established dioceses in England, to the outrage of militant Protestants. This outbreak of intolerance coincided with the campaign to welcome foreigners to Britain for the Great Exhibition.

  The census counted thirty-five Christian churches or sects in England and Wales. It accounted, in terms of non-Christians, only for Jews (‘a nation and a Church at once’) finding fifty-three synagogues for 8,438 Jews.31 It was assumed that accommodation for half of England’s 18 million people to worship would be ‘ample’.32 This was because ‘immaturity or Sunday-school engagements’ would mean about 3,000,000 children would ‘justifiably’ be absent.33 Also, a million would be ‘usually and lawfully away from public worship’ on the grounds of ‘sickness or debility’, with an equal number kept from worship by household duties, or because they were medical practitioners. Some were employed on the Lord’s Day in connection with ‘public conveyances’.

  The 1854 report concluded that 7,500,000 people would have a valid excuse to be elsewhere, and provision would only be needed for 10,427,609. The holding of three services on a Sunday meant that some who could not attend in the morning might do so in the afternoon or evening: and it reassured the potentially over-zealous: ‘It will be found that very many persons think their duties as to Sabbath worship adequately discharged by one attendance.’34 Many sittings were, however, to be found in the ancient medieval churches of largely depopulated villages: and it was in growing towns where ‘spiritual destitutio
n’ was most prevalent. Of the great towns and cities of England, only Bath, Colchester, Exeter, Oxford, Wakefield, Worcester and York had enough sittings. At the other extreme, Lambeth had sittings for only 24.8 per cent of its people; Birmingham for 28.7 per cent, Halifax for 30.3 per cent, Manchester and Bradford for 31.6 per cent.35 The report called a central drive to build new churches: because the rootlessness in those towns meant an absence of local wealth and interest to provide them.

  However, more than half the 10 million sittings were ‘appropriated’ – belonging to aristocracy, gentry or the new middle classes who paid ‘pew rents’. These rents paid the wages of the sexton or pew-opener: but they severely limited accommodation for the masses. Yet the report admitted that ‘it is tolerably certain that the 5,288,294 who every Sunday, neglect religious ordinances, do so of their own free choice, and are not compelled to be absent on account of the deficiency of sittings.’36 Most who went to church paid to do so, suggesting they were almost entirely well-to-do. The empty sittings suggested that there was no need to build churches, except in places of severe overcrowding; and that the working classes, as Engels had noted, had voted with their feet where religion was concerned, and were seeking a different sort of opium. The report suggested, hopefully, that new churches might attract people who would not worship in old ones, with their class divisions and other social rigidities that suggested exclusivity.