THE ANGLO-CATHOLIC MOVEMENT, PAST AND

THE

FUTURE.

`HERE are several reasons why it seems especially desirable, at the present time, to undertake a careful and candid review of the past, and to glance at the possible future, of the great spiritual and ecclesiastical movement to which the title is commonly assigned which forms part of the heading of this article. The Anglo-Catholic movement has equally affected the Churches of America and England; and no just estimate of the present characteristics of the Church movement in either of those great Christian communities can possibly be formed without a careful consideration of the early aims, development, and history of what by general consent is now called Anglo-Catholicism, or, in other words, the Oxford movement of five-and-forty years ago.

The chief reasons why such a review may be profitably attempted at the present time would appear to be as follows: First, that there seem to be many grounds for thinking that the movement, under its old aspects, is becoming spent; that also, in part, it is approaching that goal towards which it has been silently but steadily advancing; in its larger and better part is at last appreciating the perilous nature of recent developments, and the need of a reconsideration of the whole position. The movement in its original form has apparently passed through all its phases, and we now have arrived, in the case of some who claim to belong to the movement, at what seems to be, by the very nature of the case, the last-resistance to authority as at present constituted, and a determination to maintain an attitude which, in England, is irreconcilable with the present relations of the Church and the

State, and which, in America, is becoming more and more incompatible with that order and loyalty which are the essentials of a Christian Church.

There is another reason why, at this particular time, it seems desirable to undertake the survey that is contemplated in the present article, and it is this: that the movement has certainly failed to countervail the influences which it was originally designed to oppose; and that if change or rehabilitation is now near at hand, a due consideration must be given to the original principles of the movement, and especially to those vitiating elements which have hitherto prevented it accomplishing its clearly announced and deliberate purpose. As we now know, on the authority of those who had most to do with the early aims and efforts of the Oxford movement, it was not specially designed to oppose the Evangelical school of thought, but the liberal principles in religion that were disclosing themselves at that period of change and agitation, which was so nearly contemporaneous with the appearance of the "Tracts for the Times."

Now, that it has failed to arrest this tendency to liberalism in religion and doctrine is perfectly certain. It has undoubtedly called out, and to some extent organized, a school of thought that has always consistently opposed itself to the liberal developments of the day, but it has never succeeded in turning the positions of the adversary. It has never produced any real effect on scepticism; nay, if the whole truth has to be told, it has, we fear, of late, by the extravagance of the sacerdotal assumptions, and the lawless opposition to authority of some of its self-styled adherents, aggravated much of the doubt, and given ground for much of the antagonism to the Church which is now unhappily current.

If this be so, it certainly is of prime importance, at a time like the present, to examine very carefully the general principles of a movement which, however much good it may have done in many other ways-and vast good confessedly it has done has failed to solve the problem it proposed to itself, a problem which, if urgent fifty years ago, is incomparably more so now. The vital question then was, how to prevent the Church of England being liberalized. Can it be said that this

result has been secured when a preacher, under the most solemn circumstances, could give such a picture of the state of religious opinion in England as was indirectly given a couple of months since by Mr. Wilkinson in St. Paul's Cathedral, at the recent consecration of the Bishop of Lichfield? If, as was then asserted, we suffer from want of confidence in Christ, and from utter worldliness refuse to believe in life everlasting, rely on the popular opinion of the intellectual and the great, find our oracles in clubs, and spend our time in wondering at the power and beauty of the Beast of this world, the check given to liberal opinions cannot have been very serious, the lines of religious thought, as traced out in the great movement we are considering, cannot have converged with any thing like the effect which was originally hoped and anticipated.

A third and still more serious consideration why, at the present time, it would seem almost imperatively necessary to review the whole principles and tendencies of Anglo-Catholicism, is not only that the system has failed in its primary purpose, but that, under some of its present aspects and developments, it is working inimically to the Church of the Reformation, whether in England or America. Restoration of the corporate union of Christendom, and so, by necessary consequence, some form at least of reunion with Rome, is now, by some at least, actually avowed to be the ultimate solution of the Oxford movement; and public resolutions to this effect have been actually passed, only three or four months since, in the very city where the movement originally took place. Surely this alone is enough to induce us to re-examine the whole question, and to endeavor fairly to ascertain whether the movement has always involved these developments, or whether they are only an utter misapplication or perversion of its principles.

It is not for a moment denied that the movement has done good in many ways, and has advanced the cause of true religign and of reverential worship; but it is not only a fair, but a necessary, subject of inquiry whether there were not elements in the Oxford movement, almost from the first, which carried with them the grave consequences which we are now contemplating. In the sequel we hope to make it plain that

whereas Anglo-Catholicism originally rested on three principles, one of which was unchanging opposition to Rome, it was to the early neglect of this principle that all the evil may be ascribed which has been so lamentably disclosed during the last half generation. But we will not anticipate.

I. With these feelings on our minds of the need, and even the duty, of reconsidering the whole movement, we may now, under the guidance of those who have since disclosed to us what may be called the spiritual history of Anglo-Catholicism, review the circumstances of its rise and early progress, and the true nature of the principles which it involved from the very first.

We begin by looking backward fifty years, and bringing up, as far as we are able, the aspect and circumstances of those now well-nigh forgotten times. Fifty years ago! What a time of apathy and hopelessness, and yet how strangely marked by tokens of coming change! The "Christian Year," to which all the founders of the Oxford movement ascribe the first stirrings of the stagnant pool, had been published just a year, and was beginning to produce its effect on the minds of a few earnest thinkers, and especially on the mind of one to whom the whole movement owed more than to any other writer of those days-the devoted, enthusiastic, truth-seeking, keenly: logical, yet, at the same time, imperfectly-balanced thinker, John Henry Newman of Oriel. The year that followed, that is, the very year to which we have now in thought transported ourselves, a very different agency first came into existencethe Record newspaper-which, if we remember rightly, first appeared in the year 1828. It was designed to concentrate and reanimate the Evangelical party, and, whatever else may be said of it, it proved then, and continues to this very hour, to be a consistent and thoroughly efficient exponent of the views of the great party which it undertook to represent. Four or five years afterwards Dr. Newman wrote in it, as he himself tells us, a few letters on Church Reform, but the divergence between himself, though once of Evangelical opinions, and the editor soon became apparent, and the connection very speedily ceased.

The state of the Church of England, at the time we are now

considering, was singularly hopeless. Of the two great schools of thought, only the Evangelical had any degree of vitality, and that vitality was far from healthy or attractive. The love for souls, which had so nobly distinguished it fifty years before, was now dying out, and a cold and narrow exclusiveness was fast quenching that enthusiasm and glowing devotion which had breathed again the breath of life into the Church of England in the closing decades of the preceding century. The writer of this article, himself the son of a country clergyman, is now old enough to have some remembrance of those dull and dreary days. The only life that seemed to show itself was in the missionary field, and to some extent in the work of meetings of the Bible Society; but it was not the bright and joyous life of an earnest and developing Church, but the lower life, sometimes selfish and exclusive, of the sect and the party. The shadows of Calvinism were resting on well-nigh one half of the Church of England in those dreary days. The young were chilled and saddened in all their higher aspirations; the way of salvation seemed a narrow and joyless path; the idea of a Church was something utterly unfelt and unrealized. The individual struggler and fighter of the "Pilgrim's Progress" formed the highest conception of the religious life with which the boy of those days could solace his more aspiring and his better thoughts. The books that were placed in his hands, if bearing on religious subjects, were commonly tinged with a sub-Calvinistic teaching which chilled and antagonized. There was no sunshine; no appeal to the ages of Faith; no stirring calls through the lives of the great and the good of the early days of the primitive Church; nay, no genial teaching of that ever fresh and ever quickening gospel story, on which the young mind, if rightly directed, will always be found to dwell with an enthusiastic and almost impassioned interest. Religion was sombre and unattractive, and, especially in the persons of some of its exponents, seemed utterly irreconcilable with the brightness and love of a high-toned and chivalrous life.

Such, to the young at least, were the aspects of those weary days. Yet the change was near at hand. The "Christian Year," though at the time but imperfectly realized, seemed to disclose a new realm, and to give a reality to the dim aspirations of