CHAP. II.]

THE VIA MEDIA.

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The Prophetical Office of the Church, viewed relatively to Romanism and Popular Protestantism. This work appeared in 1837. Its subject was the Via Media, a designation "which had already been applied to the Anglican system by writers of repute. Its main object was to furnish an approximation in one or two points towards a correct theory of the duties and office of the Church Catholic." "If we deny that the Roman view of the Church is true," the author says, "we are bound in very shame to state what we hold ourselves." The Lectures on the Prophetical Office attempted to put forward such a statement. There was, however, an initial objection, which their author felt keenly, and stated in the Introduction to his work, with his habitual candour and peculiar power:

When we profess our Via Media as the very truth of the Apostles, we seem to bystanders to be mere antiquarians or pedants amusing ourselves with illusions or learned subtleties, and unable to grapple with things as they are. Protestantism and Popery are real religions. No one can doubt about them. They have furnished the mould in which nations have been cast, but the Via Media, viewed as an integral system, has never had existence, except on paper.

He grants the objection, although he endeavours to lessen it.

It still remains to be tried whether what is called AngloCatholicism, the religion of Andrews, Laud, Hammond, Butler, and Wilson, is capable of being professed, acted on, and maintained on a

large sphere of action and through a sufficient period, or whether it be a new modification and transition state of Romanism or of popular Protestantism.

The trial was made, and we know with what results. In these Lectures on the Prophetical Office the case stated is put with marvellous dialectic skill and great persuasive power; but the logic of facts is stronger than the strongest logic of words. And facts were against the Via Media, the facts both of antiquity and of modern times. Its author had taken the historical foundation for granted.' It was an unfortunate assumption. The national feeling did but assert, with whatever passion and prejudice, the testimony of the national history-of which, indeed, that feeling is to a large extent the outcome

-against the ethos of the movement, as alien from the established religion. It was nothing to the purpose to show that the views put forward by the Tractarians, with ever-increasing boldness, might be paralleled, one from this Anglican authority, another from that. It was not pretended that any accredited writer of the Establishment had ever ventured to hold such a body of doctrine as was at last set forth in Tract 90. The essentially Protestant mind of the country was shocked at the attribution of a theology practically indistinguish

1 Preface to the third edition, p. xxiii. In the Apologia, pp. 114-120, and p. 139, Cardinal Newman tells us of his dismay when ancient ecclesiastical history disclosed to him veritable examples of a Via Media in the Monophysite and Arian heresies. See also the Twelfth Lecture on Anglican Difficulties.

CHAP. II.]

1

able from the Tridentine, to a Church whose timehonoured boast was (as South had declared) that "it alone made Protestantism considerable in Europe." Such was the ultimate resolution of the idea-dogmatic, sacerdotal, hierarchical-of the movement of 1833. To this goal had it conducted its authors. Tract 90 was received throughout the country with a storm of indignation, and the living rulers of the Establishment began to move. "These are they," Cardinal Newman says, "who reverse the Roman's maxim, and are wont to shrink from the contumacious, and to be valiant towards the submissive." This little touch of bitterness is not unnatural, but, pace tanti viri, I venture to say that Anglican bishops seem to have acted towards Tractarianism with much long-suffering, and in the event to have condemned it only when the primary obligation of fidelity to themselves compelled them to do so. Excellent men, but not heroic; respectable, but not sacerdotal; solidly adhering to things settled, and, in Mr. Carlyle's phrase, mainly occupied in burning their own smoke—what sympathy could they have had with such a movement? Indeed Tract 1, in which the author declared that he "could not wish them a more blessed termination of their course than the spoiling of their goods and martyrdom," might reasonably have distressed and alarmed them. But for years they bore and for

1 "Parcere subjectis et debellare superbos." Anglican Difficulties vol. i. p. 152.

bore; it was difficult to be hard upon men who assured them that they were "Apostles true." And when at length they acted, in obedience to strong popular pressure, surely no action could have been milder. Contrast it with any conceivable action by Catholic bishops in respect of a Protestantising movement within the communion of Rome. Still, in the event, they did undoubtedly pronounce against Tract 90 in a series of charges lasting through three years. "It was a formal, determinate movement;" Cardinal Newman says: "I recognised it as a condemnation. It was the only one that was in their power." It was the beginning of the end. To the adverse verdict of public opinion, to the censure of academical boards, he might have been comparatively indifferent. He had not entered upon his course to be turned aside from it arbitrio popularis auræ, or to quail before the ardor civium prava jubentium. But the condemnation of the episcopate was a fatal blow to the Tractarian party. Its leaders felt, Cardinal Newman tells us, that "their occupation was gone. Their initial principle, their basis, external authority, was cut away from under their feet. They had set their fortunes upon a cast, and they had lost." "Henceforward they had nothing left but to shut up their school and retire into the country, unless, indeed, they took up some other theory, unless they changed their

1 Apologia, p. 139.

"THE PARTING OF FRIENDS."

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CHAP. II.] ground, unless they strangely forgot their own Juminous and most keen convictions," "ceased to be what they were, and became what they were not, or, "looked out for truth and peace elsewhere."1 These were, indeed, the three courses open to the adherents of the movement, and some followed one of them, some another. There were those who, withdrawing from a world not moving to their mind, to the seclusion of rural parishes, sought there to reap the reward of "toil unsevered from tranquillity," in the beneficent activity of an English clergyman's life and the soothing influences of his home. Many "vindicated the right of private judgment," modified their views, and cast in their lot with other sections of religious thought. No inconsiderable number, after more or fewer years of anxiety and suspense, determined that the Church of Rome was the true home of the theological idea which they could not surrender. Of these was John Henry Newman. It is unnecessary to dwell here upon the workings of his mind which led him to this conclusion. They may be followed, step by step, in the Apologia and the Essay on Development. It was on September the 25th, 1845, that his last words as an Anglican clergyman were spoken to the little knot of friends assembled in the chapel of his house at Littlemore to keep with him the anniversary of its consecration. There were few dry eyes there save the preacher's, as, from the text which 1 Anglican Difficulties, vol. i. p. 153.