Newman and His Contemporaries

by Edward Short

  Men persuade themselves, with little difficulty, to scoff at principles, to ridicule books, to make sport of the names of good men; but they cannot bear their presence; it is holiness embodied in personal form, which they cannot steadily confront and bear down: so that the silent conduct of a conscientious man secures for him from beholders a feeling different in kind from any which is created by the mere versatile and garrulous Reason.94

  Here is a good description of that personal influence which so many of Newman’s contemporaries found so captivating. In the chapters that follow I trust I have done this aspect of my subject justice.

  Chapter 1

  John Keble and the Crisis of Tractarianism

  “I fear so very much that all you who do not come forward will go back. You cannot stand where you are.”

  John Henry Newman, Loss and Gain (1847)1

  When we revisit the history of the Oxford Movement, whether in Newman’s letters and writings, or those of other Tractarians and Anglicans, or the classic account that R. W. Church wrote, we naturally concentrate on Newman’s long-gestating conversion. This is the event that gives all the other events their interest and point. Had Newman not converted, the Movement would have ended, not, as Church famously wrote, in “catastrophe,” but in bathos. And yet Newman, for all his inexhaustible richness, never deliberated or acted in isolation.2 He consulted others, especially those, whether living or dead, whose good judgment promised good counsel. This flowed naturally from his distrust of private judgment. If it was ill-advised to trust oneself in acquiring one’s religious opinions, it was equally ill-advised to trust oneself in testing them. So Newman consulted St. Athanasius and St. Augustine, St. Cyprian and St. Austin; he reread the Caroline divines Bramhall, Bull, Wake, Stillingfleet, Taylor, and Laud; he corresponded with his old Oriel pupil, S. F. Wood; he corresponded with William Dodsworth and W. F. Hook; he kept Henry Edward Manning abreast of his evolving thoughts, and through Manning, Gladstone; he exchanged letters with a brilliant Irish priest and professor of philosophy at Maynooth, Dr. William Russell; he sparred with the future Cardinal Nicholas Wiseman on, among other matters, “idolatrous usages;” he read the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius Loyola; he conferred with the Tractarian lawyers Edward Bellasis, Edward Badeley and James Hope; he confided in his sister Jemima.3 But the person whose confidence and counsel he sought out most was John Keble. There were a number of reasons why Newman should have singled Keble out. He wrote to his good friend on 18 May 1843, when unsure whether he should retain or relinquish St. Mary’s, “I feel it is almost ungenerous to entangle you in my troubles; at least it would be so, were it not a rule of the Gospel that Christians should not stand alone or depend on themselves. And if so, to whom can I go, (for surely I may speak without irreverence) but to you who have been an instrument of good to so many, myself inclusive? To whom is it natural for me to go but to you whom I have tried to follow so long and on so many occasions? To whom would Hurrell go, or wish me to go but to you? And doubt not that, if such is the will of Providence, you will in the main be able to do what is put on you.”4 There were other reasons why Newman sought out Keble, “that meek, patient, and affectionate soul.”5 Newman meant his “dearly, deeply beloved friend” to share his doubts about the Anglican Church so he could join him in discovering the one holy catholic and apostolic Church. Newman meant Keble to undergo the crisis of Tractarianism fully conscious of the stakes involved. If we grant that this reason, more than any other, underlay Newman’s confidences, two things follow. First, the primary purpose of his correspondence with Keble was not introspection but apostolic counsel. Second, Keble’s failure to convert, his decision to remain within the Anglican fold, had an immense impact on Newman’s future life as a Catholic, for henceforth he would devote a good deal of that life to trying to persuade Keble and the Anglo-Catholic party to reconsider their attachment to the Established Church. In this respect, the correspondence can be read as a prelude to Newman’s Anglican Difficulties, the lectures he delivered in 1850 to show his former co-religionists the true character of the Established Church in relation to the Movement of 1833. In a passage addressed to his former Tractarian friends and relations, Newman declared the primary object of his lectures with moving urgency.

  My dear brethren, there is but one thing which forces me to speak,—and it is my intimate sense that the Catholic Church is the one ark of salvation, and my love for your souls … It is [the] keen feeling that my life is wearing away, which overcomes the lassitude which possesses me, and scatters the excuses, which I might plausibly urge to myself for not meddling with what I have left for ever, which subdues the recollection of past times, and which makes me do my best, with whatever success, to bring you to land from off your wreck, who have thrown yourselves from it upon the waves, or are clinging to the rigging, or are sitting in heaviness and despair upon its side.6

  Here Newman fully involved himself in his critique of the Established Church and it is this personal witness that gives his correspondence with Keble in the pivotal period before his conversion its special character. Before revisiting those labyrinthine letters, I shall look at how both men viewed the various factors that gave rise to the Oxford Movement, as well as the via media, which Newman devised to try to find some happy medium between Rome and Augsburg. But first I should say something of Keble’s life.

  “From all I could hear,” Tom Mozley wrote of Keble’s youth, “he spent his earlier years in what may be called the sacred seclusion of old English family life, among people enjoying a perfect harmony of taste and opinion.”7 Mozley is not the most reliable of memoirists but here he hit on an essential truth about Keble. The world outside his own embattled High Church world—the world of liberals and rationalists, Evangelicals and Roman converts—shattered the “sacred seclusion” that he had known and enjoyed as a child and he would spend most of his subsequent life trying to recapture its lost harmony.

  Keble was born at Fairford, Gloucestershire, on 25 April 1792. For over fifty years, his father, John (1745–1834) was vicar of Coln St. Aldwyn, three miles north of Fairford, a short ride on horseback but “in those days of muddy, unmade side-roads, a tiresome enough journey for any wheeled vehicle, especially in winter.”8 His mother, Sarah, the daughter of John Maule, incumbent of Ringwood in Hampshire, was of Scotch descent. John was the second child and eldest son of a family consisting of two sons and three daughters. “We are so united, so fond of home,” Keble wrote to his friend John Coleridge, “and just separated enough to make us know and value each other’s society.”9 From his father, Keble inherited the High Church Anglicanism that he never abandoned. His younger brother Tom, the vicar of Bisley, also kept alive the father’s High Churchmanship, and in what became known as the Bisley school, which included Isaac Williams and George Prevost, he resisted the more radical, Rome-leaning aspects of Tractarianism. Charlotte Yonge, a close friend of Keble’s, characterized him as “of the old reticent school, reverent and practical.”10 Whenever Keble met with religious points of view of which he approved he would say, “Yes, that is exactly what my father taught me.”11 In the preface to his Sermons Academical and Occasional (1848), Keble gave memorable expression to his ingrained conservatism when he remarked, “it is a sad truth, that no one of us is safe from being called on, at any moment, to exercise something like a judgment of his own, on matters which in better times would have been indisputably settled for him. If we are spared external persecution, and escape trials of our faith and courage, we are tempted perhaps more severely than the early Christians on the side of intellectual pride and willfulness. Our guide is comparatively out of sight, and we are the more tempted to be our own guides; and all thoughtful persons know how that must end.”12 In trying to make sense of why Keble resisted Rome, one can never underestimate his allegiance to the Church of England. As Dean Church pointed out, Keble “was a deeply convinced Churchman, finding his standard and pattern of doctrine and devotion in the sober earnestness and dignity of the Praye
r Book… . And as his loyalty to the Church of England was profound and intense, all who had shared her fortunes, good or bad, or who professed to serve her, had a place in his affections; and any policy which threatened to injure or oppress her, and any principles which were hostile to her influence and teaching, roused his indignation and resistance.”13

  Little is known about the childhood Keble spent in Fairford. Surviving family letters attest to what Battiscombe calls the family’s “Franciscan fondness for animals:” they kept not only tame hares and tame rooks but tame kestrels.14 Moreover, all the men in the family, with the exception of the absent-minded John, were crack horsemen. Besides that, we know that Keble was so enchanted with the biblical scenes on the stained-glass windows in Fairford Church that he later replicated them in his own church at Hursley.

  The gentleness and intransigence in Keble’s character could only have been reinforced by his never having had to endure the barbarities of public school life; he was educated at home by his father. This gave him not only a shyness, but also a belief in the rightness of his own point of view that some found abrasive. Tom Mozley, who became an Oriel Fellow in 1829 and later married Newman’s sister Harriett, complained that Keble “had not the qualities for controversy, or debate, which are necessary for any kind of public life. He very soon lost his temper in discussion. It is true there were one or two in our college who might have tried the temper of an angel, but there was really no getting on with Keble without entire agreement, that is submission.”15 The historian James Anthony Froude, Hurrell’s brother, felt the same: “To his immediate friends he was genial, affectionate, and possibly instructive, but he had no faculty for winning the unconverted. If he was not bigoted, he was intensely prejudiced. If you did not agree with him there was something morally wrong with you …”16 Owen Chadwick qualifies this by pointing out that when admirers of The Christian Year met the author, “they found his person to conform perfectly to his book … modest, quaint, unpretentious, quiet, even naïve.” Those more familiar with Keble “saw his intolerance and some at least thought it too fierce. But they allowed their reverence to brush a kindly shadow over the warts. They accepted the limitations and enjoyed the man in despite.”17

  When Keble enrolled in his father’s college, Corpus Christi, at the precocious age of 14, “a fresh, glad, bright, joyous boy,” he was well-prepared and went on to have a brilliant university career, obtaining a double first when he was 18, an honor attained only once before, two years earlier, by the 20-year-old Robert Peel, the future Prime Minister.18 (The next man to garner a double first would be Newman’s brother Frank.) When Keble’s beloved older sister Elizabeth heard of his academic accomplishments, she wrote to congratulate him, “It is indeed stupendous that such a young chap should be likely to make such a fuss and row in the world,” though she was “monstrous glad” when he returned to Fairford at end of term.19 Having her bright brother at home was better than hearing of his triumphs from afar.

  One notable friend that Keble made at Oxford was Thomas Arnold, a contentious, radical, lively young man who later became the famous Headmaster of Rugby and the leader of Broad Church Anglicanism, with whom Keble broke over issues demonstrating that if there was a gentleness there was also a certain ruthlessness in his character. As Dean Church remarked, “to his attainments he joined a temper of singular sweetness and modesty, capable at the same time, when necessary, of austere strength and strictness of principle.”20 In 1811, Keble was elected to a Fellowship at Oriel College, where he joined Richard Whately, the university’s premier logician, Edward Copleston, who became Provost, and John Davison, a taciturn Northcountryman, who shared Keble’s conservative, High Church loyalties. Beginning in the 1820s, Oriel became home to the Noetics, who although initially committed to demonstrating the reasonableness of the Christian religion, later made common cause with the Whig-liberal governments of the 1830s and Broad-Churchmanship of the 1850s and 1860s. If Keble was not entirely comfortable with the liberal sympathies of the Noetics, he enjoyed the tutorial influence he exerted over Hurrell Froude, Robert Wilberforce and Isaac Williams, all of whom would later become significant figures in the Oxford Movement.

  In 1816, Keble was ordained and took temporary charge of the Eastleach and Burthorp parishes near his father’s parish of Coln St. Aldwyn. Living out of Oxford always suited him: he relished returning to the country, as he said, to “give myself up entirely to my profession, my dear, delightful profession, which I grow fonder of every day.”21 By 1821, Keble was already contemplating retiring from the Oriel Senior Common Room. “My Donship begins to sit uneasy upon me,” he confessed. “I know very well it is not the life for me, and I always feel more at home in my parish in two hours than in my College in two weeks.” In the spring of 1823, Keble resigned his Oriel Fellowship to take up the curacy of Southrop, a few miles from Fairford. After this, Keble was rarely in Oxford. “Yet,” as Tom Mozley recalled, “everybody who visited Oriel inquired after Keble, and expected to see him. It must be added that he was present in everybody’s thoughts, as a glory to the college, a comfort and a stay, for the slightest word he dropped was all the more remembered from there being so little of it, and from it seeming to come from a different and holier sphere.”22

  Next to his father, the man who influenced Keble most was Hurrell Froude, “that infinitely attractive enfant terrible,” as Ronald Knox wrote of him, “who so charmed and dazzled and shocked his contemporaries.”23 Like Keble, Froude grew up in a country parsonage; he was brought up to regard the English Church as “the one historic uninterrupted Church;” and he delighted in riding.24 But there the similarities between the two ended, for Froude had nothing of Keble’s deferential conservatism; he exulted in the paradoxical. The more reserved, circumspect Keble was drawn to Froude because, as he said, his “paradoxical way was one of his artifices for veiling deep earnestness and real meaning.”25 As Keble told Newman when they were at work together on the publication of Froude’s Remains, “deep reverence will occasionally veil itself, as it were, for a moment even under the mask of its opposite, as earnest affection is sometimes known to do. Any expedient will be adopted by a person who enters with all his heart into this portion of the ancient Character, rather than he will contradict that Character altogether by a bare, unscrupulous, flaunting display of sacred things or good thoughts.”26 Froude himself recognized this quality in Hamlet. “When Hamlet is talking nonsense to the grave-diggers, or calls the Ghost ‘old mole’, we annex to his words a depth of feeling, which, so far from describing, he is endeavoring to conceal. Indeed this may be said of almost every word and action which is given to that most astonishing character.”27 This was precisely the sort of reserve that Keble divined in his sardonic young friend. For Froude’s biographer, Piers Brendon, “It is a great tribute to Keble’s perception that he alone first managed to pierce Froude’s sparkling exterior, and come to an appreciation of his inner worth.”28 In his Apologia, Newman would fully corroborate Keble’s estimation by recalling his dearest friend “as a man of high genius, brimful and overflowing with ideas and views,” which, besides being strikingly original, “were too many and strong even for his bodily strength, and which crowded and jostled each other, in their effort after distinct shape and expression. And he had an intellect as critical and logical as it was speculative and bold.”29 In questioning the soundness of the Reformers of the English Reformation, in arguing that the sacramental tradition, not Erastianism, was the true source of ecclesiastical authority, and in holding that Roman Catholics were entitled to respect, not obloquy, Froude articulated some of the basal tenets of Tractarianism. Keble inspired Froude to approach the devout life with the practical assiduity it requires, and Froude inspired Keble to think beyond Tory High Churchmanship. “If a national Church means a Church without discipline,” he wrote in one letter, “my argument for discipline is an argument against a national Church; and the best thing we can do is to unnationalize ours as soon as possible … let us tell the trut
h and shame the devil; let us give up a national Church and have a real one.”30 Even more radically, he wrote: “I believe it to be the most indispensable of all the duties of external religion, that every one should receive the communion as often as he has opportunity … the Church of England has gone so very wrong in this matter, that it is not right to keep things smooth any longer.”31 Froude’s reforming influence can be seen clearly in Keble’s assize sermon “On National Apostasy,” though it is difficult to detect it in Keble’s later acquiescence in precisely the Erastianism of which Froude was so trenchantly critical. What Froude’s influence might have achieved if he had not succumbed to tuberculosis at the age of 35 has always inspired intriguing speculation.