by Edward Short
I do not care for what men say: I look to what they do. What you have done is to send Romanizers here … Undo what you have done, or at least attempt it. If you either cannot or will not, do not write any more. All you can say is that you think that they are not Romanizers—and all I can say is that, as I know them to be Romanizers, I shall warn all men of the danger of touching pitch.20
St. Saviour’s was an incontestable case in point. When the Bishop of Ripon got wind of the Romanizing of the clergy at St. Saviour’s, he wrote to his parishioners: “The nearer persons approach to the Roman system, the more will their powers of judgment be perverted, their moral sense blunted, and obliquity of moral vision superinduced, blinding them more and more to the simplicity of Christian truth, and estranging them more and more from the sincerity of Christian practice.”21 Hook was even more categorical. “It is not against Romanists but against Romanizers that we write; against those who are doing the work of the Church of Rome while eating the bread of the Church of England.”22
When it came to integrating Tractarian principles into the American Episcopal Church, American clergymen encountered comparable problems. Apropos some of these, Newman wrote to Hook in 1835: “I feel quite what you say about the American Church … . They have a great gift and do not know how to use it – Pusey tells me … that there is great fear of their splitting in to two parties or rather Churches on the point of Baptismal Regeneration – the Western taking the ultra protestant view, the New York connexion the Catholic. Bishop Chase, now of Illinois, has lately been here … He was very unsatisfactory altogether, and Pusey says he is one of the ultra protestants … I have for some time thought that a greater service could not be done to the Church, than for two or three men who agree with us to go over to New York and make it their head quarters for several years. But where will you get men unemployed? One man, especially fitted for that work, and year by year more so, is in that precarious state that we do not know what to expect, – Froude.”23
Here is wonderful fodder for counter-factual historians. Of course, one of the great ‘what ifs’ of Newman studies is what would have happened if Froude, the ‘enfant terrible’ of the Oxford Movement, as Ronald Knox called him, had not died young.24 By all accounts, Froude was an extraordinary young man. Besides being Newman’s dearest friend, he was handsome, brilliant, athletic, dashing and utterly original, a man with whom the Tractarian Isaac Williams dreaded being left alone for fear of what he might say. In addition to all his other distinctions, Froude was a confirmed celibate, which certainly set him apart in an English society that associated celibacy with what William Cobbett nicely called “monkish ignorance and superstition.”25 What Froude might have done, especially with respect to his religious development, had he not died of tuberculosis at the age of 33 in 1836 is a question that has always fascinated Newman scholars. Would he have joined Newman and converted to Rome? Or thrown in his lot with Pusey and Keble and the Anglo-Catholic party? Or, as Newman’s letter to Hook suggests, gone to live in America? The idea of Froude working with the Episcopal Church in New York to Romanize the Yankees teems with speculative possibilities.
Throughout the 1830s and 40s, Newman would receive warm testimonials from Episcopal churchmen convinced that Tractarianism could help them strengthen the Church in North America. One bishop wrote to Newman, “The sound principles which your writings and those of your friends are disseminating in England are rapidly gaining ground in the United States … Many of my clergy, who were rather low in their opinions on the Sacraments and sacred character of the Church are very much changed for the better.” 26 Prominent American churchmen also praised Newman’s Parochial Sermons. “For close pointed, and uncompromising presentation of the truths and duties of the Gospel,” the Bishop of New York, Benjamin T. Onderdonk (1791–1861) attested, “I know not their superiors …”27 George Washington Doane (1799–1859), the Bishop of New Jersey, agreed: “While they are not above the level of the plainest readers, they will interest and satisfy the highest and most accomplished minds.”28 Apropos Doane, Newman told Pusey in 1840: “A friend of Bishop Doane has been here wishing to see you. He was in the woods of Transylvania before he set out, and being with a bedridden old woman told her he was going to England and among other places to Oxford— ‘Ah’ she said ‘then you will see that wicked old man who writes Tracts.’”29
In 1843, the writer of these brilliant sermons responded by sharing with his American admirer how little his productions were appreciated by the Anglican Church, especially one, as he said, “about which there might be a difference of opinion.”30 Of course, Newman was alluding to Tract 90, in which he argued that the 39 Articles, to which all Anglican dons and clergymen were required to subscribe, might be accepted by those who were otherwise “catholic in heart and doctrine”—an argument which sharply delineated the battle-lines between those who considered the Anglican Church protestant and those who considered it catholic.31 In seceding from the Established Church, Newman showed his English and indeed his American friends that, as far as he was concerned, the catholic claims of Anglicanism were unsustainable.
If Tract 90 precipitated the crisis of Tractarianism in England, the ordination of an extraordinary young man named Arthur Carey precipitated it in America. Carey was born in London in 1822 and moved with his family to America in 1830. After a brilliant undergraduate career at Columbia College, he formed a Tractarian group at the General Theological Seminary and in 1842 was ordained deacon.32 In 1843, before his ordination as an Episcopalian priest, he was questioned by Dr. Hugh Smith, who was not prepared for the answers he received to his routine questions. Carey blithely admitted that he was “not prepared to pronounce the doctrine of transubstantiation an absurd or impossible doctrine;” he did “not object to the Romish doctrine of purgatory as defined by the Council of Trent;” he was “not prepared to consider the Church of Rome as no longer an integral or pure branch of the Church of Christ … ;” and he believed that the Reformation was “an unjustifiable act, and followed by many grievous and lamentable results …”33 After receiving these startling answers, Smith refused to sign the required testimonial. Questioned further, Carey serenely informed his inquisitor that if he was refused ordination from the Episcopal, he would apply to the Catholic Church. Despite the controversy caused by the inquest, which divided High and Low Churchmen in the Episcopal Church for a generation, Carey was eventually ordained and became assistant to Samuel Seabury (1801–1872), Rector of New York’s Church of the Annunciation. 34 In November 1843, Carey wrote Newman from New York asking him to pray for “a little band who are very lonely … [and] exposed to the temptation of shrinking from points, which will make us suspected by the High Church party …” And then he ended his brief, heartfelt letter by assuring his correspondent that “The call on your disciples to pray for their teacher has thrilled through our hearts, and made us feel more near to you, than we are to our friends in this country.”35 Newman does not appear to have replied, though it is clear that the letter made a strong impression on him.
To recuperate from overwork and poor health, Carey set sail for Cuba in 1844 but died en route. He was buried at sea on Good Friday. For Seabury, “Mr. Carey was, without exception, the ripest man of his age that I ever knew; and seldom have I conversed with one of any age whose conversation impressed me with a deeper sense, both intellectually and morally, of my own weakness … On the abstruse subjects of metaphysics, on the profound dogmas of theology, he discoursed with the wisdom of a sage; bringing up from the deep of thought and placing in a clear and intelligible light, truths which the generality even of cultivated minds seldom approach without bewilderment or discuss without confusion: and this with the unconscious ease and simplicity of a child …”36 After Carey’s death, a friend and fellow seminarian met with Newman and urged him to write the biography, an offer he turned down, convinced that the biography should be written by an American.37
Newman was profoundly affected by the news of Carey’s death. Ye
ars afterwards, in 1866, he wrote to Carey’s memoirist to tell him “how touching your Memoir of your dear friend is …” For Newman, it had, as he wrote, “a special interest, over and above its own, from the circumstance that I have for so many years followed the history of the religious school in the United States, of which you tell us so much.” Then, again, Carey reminded Newman of one of his dearest departed friends. “Perhaps it was from the likeness to Hurrell Froude,” Newman wrote, “but I was much moved by what I heard of Arthur Carey … every year since I have been a priest, up to this very morning, I have, before I began my Mass, mentioned his name with that of Hurrell Froude and of other Anglican friends, in my Preparation, recommending them to the mercy of God.”38 That both Froude and Carey died young, before they were able to fulfill their earthly roles in holy history, bound them together in Newman’s mind. It is worth recalling, in this context, something Newman wrote to Froude two years before his death: “Methought, if your health would not let you come home, you ought to be a Bishop in India – there you might be a Catholic and no one would know the difference. It quite amused me for a while; and made me think how many posts there are in his Kingdom … It is quite impossible that in some way or other you are not destined to be an instrument of God’s purposes—Tho’ I saw the earth cleave and you fall in, or heaven open and a chariot appear, I should say just the same—God has ten thousand posts of service, you might be of use in the central elemental fire, you might be of use in the depths of the sea.”39
Later, in March 1883, Newman communicated with another priest in America who might have reminded him of Carey. William Stang, a German priest who became Rector of the Cathedral in Providence, Rhode Island, wrote in his simple, self-taught English: “I bought your works and ever since I am a faithful reader of them. Often when I am alone with your books, I feel a desire to express to the author my sincerest thanks and to tell him, how much I honor and love him.” Stang also promised to remember Newman each day at Mass, just as Newman remembered Carey, and hoped God would preserve him “for the good and glory of his Church, of which you are so warm a defender.”40 Newman wrote back, “I am much touched by your letter and thank you for it with all my heart. It is a great consolation to me to know that in my declining strength, I have the spiritual aid of your prayers, and, though I should like to know you personally, still there is a special gratification in the circumstance that he who is so charitable to me, is, like the Good Samaritan in the Parable, a stranger to me.”41 Carey, if he had lived, might have said the same about Newman.
That Tractarianism inspired the same Protestant fears in America that it inspired in England is clear from a report of Carey’s ordination written by perhaps the most articulate critic of the Oxford Movement in America, John Duer (1782–1858), a prominent Low Church Episcopalian, who studied law with Alexander Hamilton and eventually rose to become Chief Judge of the Superior Court of New York City, the state’s commercial court. Indeed, commercial law was the judge’s métier—a not insignificant detail in light of what Newman saw as the influence of commerce on the character of Anglo-American religion.
In his account of Carey’s ordination, Duer claimed that Carey was only ordained as the result of Bishop Onderdonk acting as a sort of Roman mole, with the help of his crypto-Catholic accomplice, Seabury. Duer warned of the subversion that might result from such slack ordination procedures. “If the bishop, in deciding on the admission of candidates, is to act secretly, and, of course, irresponsibly; if suspected candidates are not to be subjected to a close and rigid examination … if what occurs at such examinations is not to be carefully recorded, and the record carefully preserved, a bishop might pursue the treacherous course I have described for a series of years … A Romanist bishop in a Protestant Church is no longer an improbable event.”42 Such fears were not those of an isolated alarmist. Catholics in America, even before the mass influx of Catholic immigrants in the 1840s, were deeply distrusted by their Protestant neighbors, as the English historian Paul Johnson relates:
There were … widespread fears of Catholic political and military conspiracy, fears which had existed … since the 1630s, when they were associated with Charles I, and which had been resurrected and foisted on George III. In the 1830s, Lyman Beecher, so sensible and so rational in so many ways, included in his Plea for the West details of a Catholic plot to take over the entire Mississippi Valley, the chief conspirators being the pope and the Emperor of Austria. Samuel Morse, who was not particularly pro-Protestant but had been outraged when, during a visit to Rome, his hat had been knocked off by a papal guard when he failed to doff it as the pope passed, added plausibility to Beecher’s theory by asserting that the reactionary kings and emperors of Europe were deliberately driving their Catholic subjects to America to promote the takeover.43
It is in light of these fears that Duer’s fears should be seen. In his account of Carey’s ordination, Duer asked: “Why is it that the minds of some of our clergy, and of a very large portion of our laity, are filled with suspicion and alarm? I shall answer these questions frankly and fully … The doctrines of the Tractarian writers of Oxford have, in certain quarters, been openly embraced—have been propagated in the diocese with unusual diligence and zeal …” And “the doctrines in question are neither warranted by Scripture nor reconcilable with our Articles … On the contrary … if adopted as the doctrines of the Church, they would gradually efface and abolish its true, distinctive, Protestant character.”44 For Duer, Tractarianism was crypto-Catholicism, which, if unstopped, would lead to Catholicism proper.
Another proof of how seriously the Episcopal Church took the threat of Tractarianism can be found in its vilification of the man most receptive to Tractarian principles. In 1844 Bishop Onderdonk was falsely accused of public drunkenness by an assembly of Low Churchmen who gave the condemned man no opportunity to defend himself. Ironically, the man who finally suspended Onderdonk from the Anglican priesthood was none other than Bishop Chase of Illinois, the ultra protestant whom Newman found so distasteful. Chase, according to one biographer, shared the battle cry of the Evangelical party, “No priest, no Altar, no Sacrifice”—not a cry likely to win much sympathy from John Henry Newman, who once observed, “If the word, Altar, Absolution, or Succession are not in Scripture … neither is the word Trinity.”45
The taint of Romanism was of particular concern to the American Episcopal Church because it was faced with such aggressive competition from other Protestant sects ready to poach disaffected members. In a review of a book on the Anglo-American Church by Henry Caswall, an Englishman who travelled to America as a young man, studied at Kenyon College, and was ordained Deacon by the Bishop of Ohio, Newman described some of the sects driving the great evangelical revival in Antebellum America.46 “Besides the old Calvinistic Baptists,” he wrote, “there are the Free-will, the Seventh-day, and the Six-principle Baptists; the Christian Baptists, who deny the proper Divinity of Christ; and the Campbellite Baptists … . Besides these there are the Seed and Snake Baptists, who, carrying out the Calvinistic system, divide mankind by a rigid line into the seed of the woman and the seed of the serpent; and lastly, the Dunkers, who are principally German Baptists …” Newman described these last as wearing “a peculiar dress, a long robe with a girdle and hood.” In addition, they “let their beards grow, feed on roots and vegetables, live men with men and women with women, not meeting even in their devotions, have each his own cell, a bench for a bed, a block of wood for a pillow, admit works of supererogation, and deny the eternity of future punishment. This strange mockery of Catholic Truth,” Newman noted, “numbers as many as 30,000 adherents.” He also marveled at the fact that various Calvinistic sects considered “the religious education of children as a sacrilegious interference with the work of divine grace.” Then, again, among the Methodists, he recognized “the same disorders … which marked their first rise in England.” And with regard to the Quakers, “one-third have lately declared themselves Unitarians.” And besides these, there we
re “600,000 Universalists, who teach the annihilation of the wicked …”47
Catholics listening to this catalogue might be inclined to snigger but they should recall what Newman said about the Catholic hierarchy after he worked so hard to make the Catholic University succeed, against immense apathy and opposition: “I cannot help feeling that, in high circles, the Church is sometimes looked upon as made up of the hierarchy and the poor, and that the educated portion, men and women, are viewed as a difficulty, an encumbrance, as the seat and source of heresy; as almost aliens to the Catholic body, whom it would be a great gain, if possible, to annihilate.”48 One result of Newman’s study of the American Church was to convince him that the laity, however inclined to private judgment, could not be ignored, though he also recognized that the Church could not simply truckle to the prejudices of the laity, especially those of the educated laity. At the same time, by founding the Catholic University, Newman sought to form an educated laity expressly, as he wrote: “To provide a series of sound and philosophical Defences of Catholicity and Revelation, in answer to the infidel tenets and arguments, which threaten us at this time.”49
In comparing the Episcopal Church to the various Protestant sects, Newman was happy to concur with Caswall that its very survival argued a certain staying power. “At the same time,” as Caswall noted, “the wonderful progress and improvement of the American Church serve to confute the Romanist, who asserts, that the Church of England is sustained merely by the secular arm, and that in the event of losing that support, she must of necessity become extinct.”50 The Anglican Church, which first held services in America in Jamestown in 1607, and eventually became the Episcopal Church, with its own episcopate, in 1789, was disestablished after the American Revolution, which Lyman Beecher saw as a good thing. “They say ministers have lost their influence,” he wrote, but “the fact is, they have gained. By voluntary efforts, societies, missions, and revivals, they exert a deeper influence than ever they could by queues, and shoe buckles, and cocked hats and gold-headed canes.”51 Newman would have entirely agreed. Nonetheless, he never lost sight of the fact that if the Episcopal Church was free of the American state, it was still liable to become thrall to the American laity. “Nothing is more Christian than that the people of the Church should ‘willingly offer’ for her support,” he wrote; “nothing more unchristian than that individual clergyman should be at the mercy of the people, and be under the temptation of ‘preaching smooth things’ …”52