LETTERS TO THE EDITOR.
DR, 1:1- A MPDEN AND OXFORD FORTY YEARS AGO. [TO THE EDITOR OF THE ISPEOTATOR.1 &n,—We may be grateful to your correspondent " Sexagenarius " 'for his defence of those who opposed the appointment of Dr. Hampden to the Divinity Professorship in Oxford. The crisis of which he speaks was a very important one in English ecclesiastical history. Every one should contribute what he can, from his own point of view, to the illustration of it.
I agree with your correspondent that the principal motive of Dr. Newman and those who took part in this movement was not a dislike to Dr. Eta.mpden for the support which he had given to the claims of the Dissenters. His daughter had the best possi- ble excuse for entertaining that opinion, since the Conserva- tive Press no doubt alleged it as Lord Melbourne's reason for pro- moting him. But no one acquainted with the feelings which were most strong in Oxford at that time will doubt that the sentiments expressed in Dr. Hampden's " Bampton Lectures" were the real as well as the ostensible ground of the protest against him.
But " Sexagenarius," it seems to me, entirely perverts facts, when he represents the doctrine of these "Lectures" as new to the University in 1836, however we may have become familiarized to it since. If he will make an effort to recall the Oxford of that day, I think he will not say that the following statement is very wide of the truth :-1. The school of which Dr. Newman and Dr. Pusey were the inaugurators was confessedly a reaction against a habit of mind which they found widely diffused, and as they feared, dominant in the English Church. 2. They complained both of the Liberal school of which Dr. Whately was the representative, and of the Evangelical school for their indifference to dogmas ; the one makes a common-sense Christianity the other an experimental Chris- tianity an excuse for underrating articles of faith. 3. Dr. Ramp- den's lectures differed from the writings of Dr. Whately and his other friends, inasmuch as he had read Aquinas and they had not meddled with school divinity. But it cannot have been a surprize to any one that he should have assailed that divinity ; he was ex- pressing the general feeling of his time in doing so. A few of the old orthodox or conservative school who have been scandal- ized by his language, — many even among them, — will have a justification for it in their traditional Protestantism ; at all events, their influence was becoming more and more feeble. The more active thinkers of the time will have accepted Dr. Hampden's teaching as the witness of a learned man on behalf of an opinion which, without any special information, they had taken for granted. 4. I must add that the persons to whom these Lectures must have caused least surprise, to whom they can least have presented themselves as novelties, were Dr. Newman and Dr. Pusey. One of them, as we know from his own confession, had derived his earliest influences from the experimental schools of the commentator Scott, and had then become to a great extent the disciple of Dr. Whately. The other we know, on equally indisputable authority, had defended the Evangelical school of Germany from the charge of Rationalism. Both, therefore, were thoroughly acquainted with the anti-dogmatic tenden- cies of the age ; both had, in some measure, partaken of them. Just because that was so, and because they tbenght the temper had been a mischievous one to themselves, they were more likely to feel bitterly when they saw the most' prominent opponent of dog- matism raised to the chair of Divinity. Wishing to join in your correspondent's eulogium on Dr. Newman's candour, I must yet endorse Dean Stanley's opinion that he did produce a most unfair and garbled series of extracts from the "Bampten Lectures" in order to rouse indignation against them. I account for his falling into that sin by the rage we all feel against statements which once had a strong hold on ourselves, and which have been rejected. The temp- tation to be unscrupulous in such cases is overpowering ; which of us can say that he has resisted it, which of us can throw a stone at a brother who has yielded to it ? Bitter experience of the cruelty which makes a man an offender for a word may have taught Dr. Newman lessons which those of us who have not suffered much have yet to learn. But certainly the worst apology which can be offered for him, since it is one to which his own sermons and all the "Tracts for the Times" are an answer, is that he was con- tending against a novel opinion first propagated in the year 18813, not against one that had taken a deep root in the mind of Oxford and of England.
I am merely speaking to a point of history. My own opinion upon the controversy which this appointment called forth, and which was renewed, though much more feebly and on difficult ground when Dr. Hampden was made a bishop, is of very little consequence. But that your readers may know exactly to what bias I am subject, I will mention that I had no acquaintance with Dr. Hampden or with any of his school, and that what friends I had at Oxford were among his most vigorous, if not his most conspicuous opponents. It seemed to me, as far as a young man might judge of one who had thought and read so much more, that Dr. Hampden was making a raid on the distinctions of scholastical divinity without showing us what he would substitute for them ; or without fully appreciating their positive value in a philoso. phical momenclature,—a value which both Sir William Hamilton and Mr. Mill, widely as they dissent from each other, have both fully recognized. But it seemed to me also that Dr. Hampden might be feeling after a theology which was deeper than all these distinctions; his appeal to Scripture, I thought, need not receive that hard literal interpretation which your Correspondent has given to it. He might mean it as a demand for that witness of a
living God, and a living Christ, which separates Apostles and Prophets from the most accomplished dogmatists. I remember that I presumptuously hinted at this possibility in a letter to a man of my own age, who was very strenuous in denouncing Dr. Hampden's appointment. The kind of entertain- ment which my remarks met with from some to whom they were shown, convinced me of the tremendous force with which the reaction in favour of dogmas was setting in, and how likely it was to carry the most energetic young men along with it. Neverthe- less, I was somewhat confirmed in my judgment of Dr. Hampden's intention by the address with which he inaugurated his Divinity course. In that he represented himself, and I believe with entire honesty, as the champion of beliefs in a personal justification against the glorification of a mere system of divinity, which had buried it, and might bury it again. There have been reactions and re-reactions in the years which have elapsed since the time of rationalism, against dogmatism, of dogmatism against rationalism. They must, I suspect, continue, and wax more vehement, to the great distraction and the bewilderment of the poor and needy, whom the victory of either would send away ashamed, till we laarn that God has revealed himself, and does reveal himself, to the children of men ; that he educates their reasons and consciences to receive this revelation ; and that no efforts of those who put the dogmas of Churches or the conclusions of our intellects between him and those whom he has created and redeemed in his Son, shall at last avail to separate them from him. I have no better excuse to offer for troubling you with these reminiscences of other days than the very poor and questionable one that I am ANOTHER SEXAGENARIAN.
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