B 00 K S.

MO Z LEY' S RE MINISCENCE S.*

[SECOND NOTICE.]

Mn, MOZLEY'S reminiscences of Oriel are linked, with those of a generation earlier than his own. When he was a boy at Derby, in 1815, there was a man living there who had been a Fellow of

* RominiRcencon AWN of Oriel College and the Oatford Movement, By the Rev. T. Mosley, formerly Fellow of Oriel. London : Longmans. 1882.

Oriel in the last century. Joseph Pickford had been elected because the College had a great number of very dusty books which wanted arranging on the shelves of their newly-built library. All through a very hot summer he was kept at the work, and when he was long past fifty he assured Mr. Mozley that with all his efforts he had not yet been able to wash the dust of those, books down. He believed that it existed somewhere among the tissues of his throat, and his later life was chiefly devoted to.

the task of getting rid of it. As soon as the books were arranged, his brother-fellows contrived to force him to take a living, which, with another, he held till his death, though he

never resided at either. His account of the life led by the Oriel Fellows when he was in residence—just before and after 1800—

was that they dressed for dinner at three o'clock, and smoked pipes and drank ale in the common room till five. After that they walked. in the High, or went to their rooms till seven or eight. They then returned to the common room, and played cards and drank brandy-and-water, which, with an interval for supper, carried them on till late at night. This probably was a. pretty fair picture of college life during the eighteenth century.

Gibbon's recollection of it does not differ in essentials from Pickford's. It is the comparison between this time and twenty years later that constitutes the real title to honour of Copleston and his contemporaries. They had. found Oxford in this .con-

dition, and it was through their instrumentality that it became- what Newman found it. Of Coplestou, Mr. Mozley remembers but little. He was then " content to be represented, not to say personated," by his disciple Whately. It would.

have been strange news to Whately'e contemporaries, at. the end of the first quarter of the present century, that. by the time that Mr. Mozley's Reminhicences came to be written, Whately would be chiefly interesting by reason of his early association with Newman. When the two were respec-

tively Principal and Vice-Principal of St. Alban Hall, the most noticeable difference between them was in their estimate of the Evangelical party. In 1824, Newman was curate of St.. Clement's, secretary to the local branch of the Church Mis- sionary Society, and an occasional frequenter of the religioua services held at the Vice-Principal's of St. Edmund Hall.

Whately, on the contrary, disliked and despised. the Evan- gelicals as heartily as he could dislike or despise any one,—and his powers in those ways were remarkable. Neither this nor other differences prevented the two from being excellent friends, and it was not Newman's fault that "a time came when they were in the same city for seven: years, passing one another in the street without even recognition." But this was in Whately's later life, when he had come to believe that the one duty of a Protestant Archbishop in Ireland was to show, by every means in his

power, the contempt and. hatred in which he held the Church of the country. Newman himself would "have been ready to love and. admire Whately to the end, but for the inexorable condition of friendship imposed by Whately,—absolute and implicit agreement in thought, word, and deed, This agree- ment, from the first, Newman could not accord ; his divergence was, in fact, radical. He,used to say that Whately's Logic was a most interesting book, but that there was one thing not to be found in it, and that was logic."

The three Wilberforces—Samuel, Robert, and Henry—play a considerable part in Mr. Mozley's Reminiscences. The charac- teristics of the three brothers were clearly differentiated, even. as undergraduates, and it is plain that though Mr. Mozley's

admiration was freely given to him who was afterwards the Bishop, his affection was kept for Henry. The difference between.

the two brothers is well shown in what constantly happened to them at public meetings. Both were given to be late, both had.

something to say, and. wanted to say it; but somehow, when

they were late, Samuel was always on the platform and always. a speaker, while Henry was always sitting silent in the body of

the room :--

"How could this be P Samuel explained it straight. He was per- fectly sue that he had something to say, that the people would be glad to hear it, and that it would be good for them. He was also quite certain of having some acquaintance on the platform. So. immediately on entering the room he scanned the platform, caught somebody's eye, kept his own eye steadily fixed upon his acquaint- ance, end began a slow movement in advance, never remitted an - instant till he found himself on the platform. The people, finding their toes in danger, looked round, and seeing somebody looking hara and pressing onwards, always made way for him. By.und-hy there would be a voice from the platform, 'Please allow Mr. Wilberforce to come this way,' or, 'Please make way for Mr. Wilberforce.' Such a movement, of course, requires great confidence, not to say self. appreciation ; but anybody who is honestly and seriously resolved to do good, must sometimes put a little force on circumstances."

Mr. Mosley tells a story of Henry Wilberforce which he himself used to give as an instance of what happens when a simple man attempts to act the part of a perfectly sensible man. When he became a curate, he found it necessary to be economical, and it occurred to him that the newly-coined fourpenny-pieces would be a great help in this way :—

"Chancing to meet his banker, a natural association of ideas led to his mentioning this unexpected boon. But how was he to get a stock of fourpennies ? Nothing more easy,' the good-natured banker said. 'Have you a sovereign about you ? Give it me. Go to the bank and tall them to give you that in fourpennies.' Henry was much pleased, and took the first opportunity of walking into the bank and giving them his order from their chief. The clerk said be had nothing to do with that. His duty was to hand nothing over the counter, except for an equivalent. Mr. Wilberforce had better take a sovereign's worth of fourpennies in the usual way and state it to the banker, who would of course repay the sovereign which had been paid him irregularly. Henry fell in with this suggestion, and thereby .parted with the sovereign he had reckoned on for settling some small accounts. A few days after he paid a bill for twelve or thirteen shillings in fourpennies, having no other money about him. Henry never renewed his stock of fourpennies, and, what was worse, he never had the courage to tell the kind banker that he had been obliged to pay for them over again at the counter."

Many things besides Oriel and the Oxford Movement find a record in Mr. Mozley's volumes. His first living was in Northamptonshire, and when he went to Peterborough, to be licensed by Bishop Marsh, the Bishop asked him how he pro-

posed to get to his benefice. "I," he said, "have always found that my best way from one end of my diocese to another is through London." Cross journeys in England then were things not to be rashly undertaken. Bishop Hinclicliff, the predecessor of Bishop Marsh, "used to go about in his visita- tions and confirmations on a pillion behind the churchwarden," this being the only way he could travel in Northamptonshire.

At Moreton Pinckney, Mr. Mosley was employed to make the "Tracts for the Times" known to the clergy. It carries one back a long way to think of Mr. Mozley scouring the country, a young incumbent on a shaggy pony, with his pockets filled with the tracts, then as innocent-seeming as a mislabelled case of dynamite. But we are carried back still further when we read that his first visit was to a clergyman, much over ninety, who

had come to his living before the American Declaration of Independence, and had passed his lifetime there in resisting to the utmost of his power first a turnpike road, then a canal, and then a railway. The last he was full of when Mr. Mosley visited him. In spite of his two previous defeats, he was sanguine this time of success. "The traffic could never pay ; the poor-rate alone would ruin it ; the damages for setting fire to crops and farm buildings would be overwhelming." In 1836 Mr. Mosley became Rector of Cholderton, on Salisbury Plain.

The chronicler of the Tractarian movement has not seen much of those ritual splendours which are commonly associated with it. "I have been an incumbent," he says, "altogether twenty- eight yell's, and I never yet had any of the luxuries of worship I have never had a vestry, or a stove, or a candle, or an organ' or a painted window. I have always robed, as I have often seen the Pope do, in the sight of the congregation:" He did his best, however, at Cho1derton to leave his successor better off than himself in these respects. When he came to the living, the church was only forty feet long by sixteen feet wide, the slab of the communion-table was a foot below the surface of the

ground outside, the walls were shaky, and the light came partly from a skylight. "People sat during the sermon, not only on the communion rail and the step before it, but on the table itself, and said they had no other place to go to." An accident determined Mr. Mosley to build a new church. The Corporation of Ipswich had reroofed some municipal building, and news came to Cholclerton that the old roof, highly ornamen- tal in character, was then lying on the quay, and to be had

cheap." "Whet did I not sacrifice," says Mr. Mosley, "to this dumb idol P" It decided the dimensions of the church, the size and position of the windows, the character of the fittings. By

the time that the church was finished, Mr. Mosley had given ini up the living three years, stud had not much to make up to h for the V5,000 he had paid out of his own pocket to bal. ilcl it.

A not uninteresting part of these volumes to some readers will be the account they give of Mr. Mosley's own theological position. He is a striking example of how completely a man may be in an ecclesiastical movement, yet not of it. Mr. Mosley was the friend and associate of all the early Tractarians, the

editor and one of the principal contributors to their periodical organ, and yet he never seems to have been genuinely con- vinced of one of the doctrines which it was the aim of the Tractarian movement to bring to light and establish. It was not, seemingly, until he had made up his mind to go to Rome that he realised how little call he had to go there. That he did not actually take the step was due to Newman. "A man," said Dr. Newman, "ought to give at least two years to the con- sideration of it, and be assured that his reasons and motives were right." By the time the two years were over, Mr. Mosley had come to the conclusion that a man was not "the worse Christian for being a Christian after the manner of his fathers and of those &boat him." His approaches to.

Rome had nothing in common with those of men to whom a state of doubt is a state of misery, and who seek in the Church an infallible and. ever-present teacher. They were rather those of a man who finds himself in accidental agreement with Rome, who has arrived at the same conglusions on certain points by a wholly independent process. One of these pro- cesses we give as an example. It is Mr. Mozley's answer to the question,—What is the teaching of Nature as regards that "great rock of offence, the one thing which innumerable Christ- ians, not unfavourably disposed to the Church of Rome, say they cannot get over,—the worship of the Blessed Virgin P"—

" What became of the household of Nazareth, when death finally released it from its earthly ties ? For thirty years was Jesus living there, in the completest obedience, and in the most loving inter- change of kindnesses, and even benefits. It was a real and true companionship. It was an actual family. Jesus was no shadow. He was not a piece of divine mechanism. He was not deceiving Mary and Joseph with a show of goodness. He was not acting the part of a son. We cannot doubt that he loved Mary to the fullness of his nature, which was divine. It would be a very idle refinement to say that he loved her as man only, for in him the human and divine nature were united. That nature, human and divine, he bore with. him to heaven. But what is human nature, without its objects and belongings ? What, indeed, do we think of the man who has no sooner risen a stop, than he begins to be ashamed of his humble relatives ? We despise him as a traitor to the dignity of true human nature, a hollow counterfeit, a thing formed by vulgar fashion, the circumstances of the hour. The love of Mary and of Joseph could not be bound by conditions of space and time. We may think it a terrible presumption to place Mary and Joseph the carpenter, whose very name and profession were a reproach to Jesus, near the throne of the Universe. But it would be a far more terrible pre- sumption to place them anywhere else. Can we possibly suppose them to be laid deep in the dull catacombs of the intermediate state, waiting the solemnity of the trumpet-call? Can we suppose.thein somewhere walking sadly and pensively in laurel groves ? Can we suppose them enjoying that mere rest which is of all things the most wearisome ? Can we imagine them relegated for ages to some corner of the Universe, out of sight and out of mind ? Would the Son intermit his love, and stop the flow of his affection for thou- sands of years, till the time arrived for the reappearance of Joseph and Mary, in the innumerable crowd to be thou gathered, and sepa- rated right and loft? In a word, is there any one positive concep- tion of the present state of Joseph and Mary so natural and so reasonable as that they are now with Christ and where He is,—at the right hand of the Father ?"