chapter 12 Tract 90 and the Trial of Patience in the Church of England
John Henry Newman had insisted in an 1837 tract that “we are in no danger of becoming Romanists.”1 Not everyone was reassured, especially after Newman and John Keble oversaw the publication of Hurrell Froude’s Remains, which crackled with unabashed criticism of the Protestant reformation. Godfrey Faussett, the Lady Margaret Professor of Divinity at Oxford, was among many who reacted with alarm. A high churchman, he shared many pri- orities with the Tractarians. He fought Renn Dickson Hampden’s campaign to loosen the hold of the Articles in Oxford and more generally shared the Tractarians’ disgust with liberal philosophy and its “schemes of insidious or mistaken policy” which threatened the connection between civil and religious institutions.2 But he could tolerate neither Froude’s “wild and visionary” pref- erences for “Romish corruptions” nor his complaints against the Reformation. He expressed his displeasure in 1838 with a conspicuous sermon against the “revival of popery.” This account reversed the narrative of the Remains to depict Froude’s attachment to the medieval church as self-indulgence, detecting “pride, the primeval curse of man’s race,” in the Tractarians’ flirtation with the idolatry, superstition, and spiritual despotism of the Roman Church. Faussett offered this advice: “Above all, let us not, though impatient zeal and the prema- ture and vain expectation of realizing Catholic views in the midst of the sur- rounding desolation, incautiously entangle ourselves in those mysteries of iniquity, from which God’s mercy has once granted us so signal a deliverance.”3 Newman was not chastened. He responded indignantly that the Catholic prac- tices which Faussett denounced fell entirely within the “liberty of thought” allowable under the church’s existing terms of communion.4
1 Newman, On Purgatory, p. 3. 2 G. Faussett, The Alliance of Church and State Explained and Vindicated in a Sermon Preached Before the University of Oxford at St. Mary’s, on Sunday, June 8, 1834 (Oxford, 1834), p. 3. 3 G. Faussett, The Revival of Popery: A Sermon Preached Before the University of Oxford, at St. Mary’s, on Sunday, May 20, 1838 (Oxford, 1838), pp. 13–14, 30–37. 4 Newman, A Letter to the Rev. Godfrey Faussett, pp. 8–9. For the growing backlash against Tractarian that crystalized after the publication of Froude’s Remains, see Brendon, “Newman, Keble and Froude’s Remains;” Nockles, The Oxford Movement in Context, pp. 79–80, 187–188,
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Newman understood that many of his followers wanted to use this “liberty” to embrace the sort of Catholic devotional practices that aroused general dis- trust within the Church of England. He attempted to placate these men with Tract 90, Remarks on Certain Passages in the Thirty-Nine Articles, which he pub- lished on February 27, 1841, the same day the seventh and final Tamworth letter appeared in the Times. It opened a controversy that would propel him from the Church of England and shatter the Oxford Movement in its original form.
The Articles: Perfected in Humiliation and Grief or in Pride, Elation and Triumph?
Newman explained publicly that he wrote Tract 90 to argue that “the Articles need not be so closed as the received method of teaching them closes them, and ought not to be for the sake of many persons.” Artificial restrictions on the legitimate meaning of the Articles would marginalize and demoralize Anglo- Catholics and send them “straggling in the direction of Rome.” The message was intended for an audience internal to the Oxford Movement and, as he told Edward Pusey, “I was UTTERLY without any idea that the Tract would make any disturbance.”5 Tract 90 followed the logic of Newman’s response to Faussett in attempting to demonstrate the Articles’ compatibility with pre-Reformation Catholic tra- dition. While he worked out in detail the concordance between the individual articles and Catholic tradition, appeals to the virtue of humility underwrote the enterprise as a whole.
Even supposing then that any changes in contemplation, whatever they were, were good in themselves, they would cease to be good to a Church, in which they were the fruits not of the quiet conviction of all, but of the agitation, or tyranny, or intrigue of a few; nurtured not in mutual love, but in strife and envying; perfected not in humiliation and grief, but in pride, elation and triumph.
By this logic, the moral legitimacy of the Articles depended upon their conti- nuity with the deep Catholic past. If they did represent a break then this would
239, 281–282; Turner, Contesting Cultural Authority, pp. 50–55; and Turner, John Henry Newman, pp. 313–321. 5 Newman, A Letter to the Rev. R.W. Jelf, pp. 26–27. J.H. Newman to E. Pusey (18 March 1841), Letters and Diaries of John Henry Newman, ed. Dessain and others, vol. 8, p. 97.