THE HIGH ANGLICAN SEVERITY.'

/THE Solicitor-General has appended a letter to his father's graceful memoir of the Author of the Christian Year, in which he gives a very striking illustration of that Puseyite severity' which had been one of the moral fashions—we were going to say,—at all events, one of the deliberate practical principles put forward and brought into sharp relief against the tendencies of the day, till it almost looked like a fashion—of the original movement of 1833.' Sir J. D. Coleridge's anecdote is this,—walking with Mr. Keble in London in 1851,—" I was telling him how much I had been impressed with the difficulties as to the inspiration of Holy Scripture, which were growing stronger, and spreading more widely day by day ; and that it seemed to me this would shortly become the great religious question of the time. I added that there was not, as far as I knew, any theory or statement on the subject which even attempted to be philosophical, except Coleridge's, in his Confessions of an Inquiring Spirit ; and that I wished Mr. Keble, or some one as competent as he, would take up the subject, and deal with it intellectually and thoroughly. He showed great dislike to the discussion, and put it aside several times ; and on my pressing it upon him, he answered shortly that most of the men who had difficulties on this subject were too wicked to be reasoned with. Most likely he thought that a young man's forwardness and conceit needed rebuke, and he administered it accordingly ; but besides this, it was an instance of that in him which would be called severity or intolerance. I do not pretend to say that it would be wrongly called so ; but it is certain that there are distinct indications of this spirit in the writings of St. Paul and St. John, and I suppose that the more absolute and the more certain the faith a man has in religious doctrine, the more probable it is that he will be intolerant of doubt in others." It seems to an ordinary mind that has entered with any earnestness into the various theological questions of the day, almost incredible that Mr. Keble should have been sincere in making such an assertion as this. But it is not only perfectly certain that ho was sincere, but his life was a (somewhat imperfect) attempt to carry out this high principle of severity,' which was, indeed, the principle of the whole school, rather than of the individual man, though many of the scholars seem to think that Mr. Keble was among the most eminent of the school in relation to this particular virtue. A critic in the Literary Churchman, who evidently knew Keble well, says of him in relation to this anecdote of Sir J. D. Coleridge's, and by way of a very heartfelt tribute to Keble's virtues, that "this sterner side of Mr. Keble's character. . . was not merely a side of his character at all, but rather its staple material." "When," he goes on, " at the approach of irreverence or unbelief, he was roused to let a little of that strength flash out, you found

that you were taught something of the thunder as well as of the love of a Saint John." And this critic evidently thoroughly admires Mr. Keble, for launching his thunderbolts at the unfortunate persons who have been compelled by aimpie integrity of intellect to admit that there are flaws of all kinds—historical, scientific, moral,— imbedded deep in the miscellaneous narratives of those various and very different authors who have been the means of giving us our

clearest knowledge of the character and actions of God. The Dean of Westminster, in his beautiful and admiring criticism of Keble in the March number of Macmillan's Magazine, commentsnpon the same moral rigidity of charactec—though we need hardly say without congratulating himself upon it is as a noble or meritorious feature. As a matter of fact, Keble carried his severity so far in this direction that he cut himself off for many years from all intercourse with his once intimate friend Dr. Arnold on account of the

latter's heresies, and in spite of Arnold's solemn protest,—" though with a happy inconsistency he renewed a kindly connection after

the heat of the first agitation had passed away." The Dean remarks how strange it is that in spite of Keble's own deliberate support of the marvellously lax interpretation of the Articles advocated by Dr. Newman in Tract XC., in spite of his own unhesitating assent to " the most fantastic" interpreta

tions of scripture by the utterly uncritical old Fathers, " he rejected without examination, without thought, the inquiries of scholars the most deeply learned in Hebrew andRiblical lore that Christendom has ever seen," as proceeding from men "too wicked to be reasoned with." And this, of course, was all done on moral grounds. The difficulties as to inspiration were in his eyes moral sins. The severity which condemned such sins, was a purely

moral severity. Doubts of this kind were like the sin of Korah. Iu Keble's own words, after describing the destruction of Korah and his companions,— " Thus rebels fare: but ye profane Who dared the anointing power disdain, For freedom's rude unpriestly vaunt, Dire is the fame for you in store."

And such dire fame' he evidently expected for even his old friend, Dr. Arnold, at times ; and without any hesitation for such a heretic as he of Natal.

But the severity' of the old leaders of the High-Church party was in no way confined to heresy. Dr. Newman, indeed, early laid it down that the old bigotry and persecuting spirit which we condemn so much in the Roman Church was, at least, far superior to the indolent latitudinarianism of the nineteenth century. But it was a note' of the party to take a ' severe ' line on almost every question. They were severe,—very severe,— with themselves, no one more honestly so than Keble. They

made a duty of severity with each other,—carefully avoiding anything like mutual praise or the relaxing tendencies of too tender a sympathy. Of the little volume of poetry issued by the party of movement, the Lyra Apostolica, severity of tone is one of the

principal notes. There are three pieces with this title, and above thirty of which this is the principal string harped upon. The writers preached that the pagan age was to be tamed' by strong words :

"And would'st thou reach, rash scholar mine, .

Love's high, unruffled state?

Awake, thy easy dreams resign, First learn thee how to hate,"

wrote Dr. Newman ; and Keble was never weary of singing " how dire the Church's lightnings burn." The old Anglican leaders were always far more severe and rigid in tone,—far narrower, we may say,—than the Catholic Church itself, which some of them have since joined. The very uncertainty and difficulty of their position seems to have trained them into a sort of artificial and starched reserve towards all other parties and churches. Dr. Newman has himself told us how severe his tone became towards Romanism itself, though he felt that on some sides he was approaching it. It became ' necessary to his position ' to mark out more strongly than ever his condemnation of the views he still rejected. Fortifying themselves on a very narrow ledge of doctrine, and assuming to start with, the wrong of private judgment, the Anglicans were compelled to see sin ' in a hundred directions

where it was natural to see only error. Dr. Newman has himself, since he joined the Roman Church, described very humourously the extraordinary narrowness and severity of the school he quitted. He paints the Anglican as saying, "I read the Fathers, and I have determined what works are genuine and what are not ; which of them apply to all times, which are occasional ; which historical, and which doctrinal ; what opinions are private, what authoritative ; what they only seem to hold ; what they ought to hold ; what are fundamental, what ornamental. Having thus measured and cut and put together my creed by my own proper intellect, by my own lucubration, and differing from the whole world in my results, I distinctly bid you, I solemnly warn you, not to do as I have done, but to take what I have found, to revere it, to use it, to believe it, for it is the teaching of the old Fathers, and of your Mother, the Church of England. Take my word for it, that this is the very truth of Christ ; deny your own reason, for I know better than you, and it is as clear as day that some moral fault in you is the cause of your differing from me. It is pride, or vanity, or self-reliance, or fullness of bread. You require some medicine for your soul ; you must fast ; you must make a general confession, and look very sharp to yourself, for you are already next door to a rationalist or an infidel."

That is a true description of the wonderfully narrow ground which the Anglicans were obliged to take, and the artificial severity of tone by which they were compelled to enforce their position. The essence of that severity appears to us to consist in an artificial extension of conscience beyond its natural and legitimate range, so as to make it cover, if possible, the whole scope of the intellectual life. The original instinct of the Puseyites was in favour not only of covering the whole range of positive and even municipal law by ethical sanctions, but of making the weighing of historical evidence, the measurement of practical probabilities, a question of the most rigid conscience too. Indeed, Keble himself adopted heartily Butler's theory of probable evidence as the basis of our religious life, and applied it with much care to prove to his Puseyite friends that they ought to stay in the Church of their baptism, and not follow Dr. Newman to Rome. We feel no doubt that if, by hook or by crook, any man of genius among them could have made out a plausible case for the duty of believing in the old Roman numeral system rather than the Arabic numerals, or of returning to the old style as regards the Calendar, or of regarding the American continent with condemnation because it was unknown to the primitive Church, or for preferring the emissive to the undulatory theory of light, or for importing morality into any other region of pure science,—the investigation of the laws of motion, for instance,—the whole school would have adopted it with enthusiasm. It craved with the greatest eagerness any excuse for finding a moral basis for phenomena which were not in any sense moral at all,—and of course the necessary consequence, even amongst the purest and noblest of them, was a prim and starched and almost incredible severity,—a severity that feigned sin and holiness to be where it was next to impossible that any sin and holiness could be, except, indeed, so far as there may sometimes really be sin in the mere lust of setting up for oneself a moral distinction where no moral distinction really is. We can quite understand the root of the craving in humble and childlike minds. There is something almost of dread and awe at the amount of responsibility and liberty left to them. There is a genuine yearning in them to 'refrain their soul, and keep it low, like a child that is weaned from its mother.' They like to diminish to the utmost the verge allowed to man, and to find a law of guidance where there is none visible. The divine voice to them is not a command to choose freely, but a specific command what to choose; and if they see a real alternative, they think it must be due to their own sin. Thus the severity ' of this school really springs partly of incredulity that God can have meant to leave us without specific guidance for a single step of our way, and partly of the fertile but submissive imagination which weaves fanciful obligations for itself wherever it cannot find real ones. In this school, Keble,—one of the humblest and purest of men, —was an -adept. Both his delicately minute fancy, and the passive character of that fancy, v‘hich was rather obedient to suggestions from without than creative of new inventions, promoted this tendency. And we do not doubt that by spreading moral obligation over spheres where it had no existence, he and his party weakened the true springs of the conscience, and paved the way for that modern reaction which ventures as far as it can in the opposite direction— of ignoring moral obligation altogether.