THE DECLINE OF TRACTARIANISM. T HE writer of the paper on
"The Decline of Trac- tarianisui " in the Contemporary Review for this month has been fortunate in his title. He is so well aware of this that he heightens the interest by dwelling in his opening paragraph on its seeming incorrectness. "At the present moment," he says, "what may be described as the Tractarian school holds a most com- manding position. By far the greater number of the Bishops are in sympathy with it, it contains a considerable majority of the beneficed and unbeneficed clergy, and the theological colleges—those nurseries of the clergy to come —are very largely in the hands of its adherents If it is less powerful among the laity, it has laid hold of a considerable section of them, and the spirit of jealousy and dislike once entertained towards it by a majority among them has died out save among a class of persons neither numerous nor intellectually strong." And then, having concentrated the reader's attention upon this picture of health and strength, he suddenly reveals the unsuspected truth of which his diagnosis has convinced him. "Nevertheless, there are not wanting signs that the reign of Tractarianism is over, that the current which has flowed so long and so steadily in its direction has begun to ebb, and that before very long English religious thought will be found flowing in a very different direction." There are those who "may think otherwise ; " but look beneath the surface and you will see that they are but "superficial observers."
We are not at all prepared to deny that this position is arguable ; that there are signs here and there which point to a conclusion not very different from that at which "A. Country Parson" has arrived. What we are concerned with, however, is not merely his conclusion but the process by which that conclusion has been reached, and from this point of view we are altogether at issue with him. The causes to which he attributes the decline of Tractarianism are in our judgment neither true nor sufficient. The method of "A Country Parson" is historical. He goes through the three phases through which the movement has passed,—the Newman phase, the Pusey phase, and the Gore phase. His picture of the Newman phase, or rather of Newman himself, seems to us curiously misleading. He was a "brilliant but erratic genius" who never "clearly grasped the doctrines he had set himself to propagate," whose pride drove him, on the appear- ance of serious opposition, "into sullen isolation and alienation," and who finally left the Church of England as one of a group of "paradoxical sentimentalists." We do not think much of conclusions which necessitate for their acceptance the writing of ecclesiastical history in this fashion. The second phase is more correctly described,—up to a point. It is quite true that Pusey's work "might have been without fruit but for a move- ment with which he had very little to do." "A Country Parson" is wrong, we think, in describing that work as an effort "to enlarge the borders of our Church in a Home- ward direction," but he is right when he says that but for the Ritual Movement, Pusey might have remained a leader without followers. He is unjust, again, to the Ritual Move- ment. There was, and perhaps is, a side to it to which his extremely unflattering description is quite applicable. But he treats it as though that description were equally applicable to the whole movement, with the result that he is driven to attribute the success of Tractarianism to its association with a system under which "half-educated and uninquiring English men and women are nourished, some would say stupified, on superstitions half-warmed up from the Vatican kitchen." In this way the reader is prepared to hear, with something more than composure, that "the predominance of Tractarianism in the Church of England is a very superficial one."
At this point we enter upon the third, or present, phase of the movement, and are introduced to the cause of the decay which is about to set in. "On the fundamental question of the basis of authority in the Church they [the modern Tractarians] are rent asunder from the top to the bottom." They can agree well enough on "secondary points." "They are at one about high sacramental doctrine and ritual, about the importance of fasting communion, about the power of the priest in absolution." But whereas some of the party "hold strongly to the old Tractarian principle of the co-ordinate authority of Holy Scripture and the Universal Church," others belong to a new school in which criticism takes the place of authority. It is this division that convinces "A Country Parson" that "the Tractarian school has done its work and is doomed to dis- appear before very long." Canon Gore is destined to undo what Newman founded, and Pusey built up, aud the .Ritualists diffused and popularised. But when we come to inquire in what way Canon Gore has overthrown the authority of " Holy Scripture and the Universal Church," we find ourselves furnished with assertions rather than proofs. No doubt the new school of Tractarians hold very different views as to the dates when and the ways in which the books of the Old Testament were written from those held by their predecessors. But in what has this change had its origin ? Not in any change of view as to the value of authority, but in the production of new evidence as to the genesis and character of the documents to which authority has been ascribed. When "A Country Parson" describes "the Catholic party" as sitting "with bated breath" while the enemy is "thunder- ing at the gate of the Catholic citadel," he confounds the principle of authority with the seat of authority. "In the eyes of the original Tractarians," he says, "the Old Testament was as infallible as the New." The teaching of "Lux Mundi" "would seem little short of blasphemous in the eyes of the school of 1833," and when "the authority of our Lord was invoked against them" the new school "met the argument by the avowal of principles which seemed to challenge the decrees of Ephesus and Chalcedon." The explanation of all this we take to be that as "A Country Parson" dislikes Tractarianism and is anxious to see its decline hastened, he seeks to pin it down to statements made when our knowledge of whole departments of history and criticism was still unborn. Recognition of the authority of Scripture does not demand that we should put aside all inquiry into what constitutes Scripture and how Scripture came into existence. If so, the Reformers rejected the authority of Scripture when they challenged the claim of the apocryphal books to a share of that authority. So far as authority is attributed to documents it must be on the assumption that their genuineness has been ascertained, and no decision on this head can be so final as to dispense with the examination of fresh evidence, sup- posing it to be produced. Whatever be the authority of the Old Testament, it must be of a kind which is con- sistent with what is known of the circumstances in which the several books came into being. Otherwise the appeal would not be to the Old Testament, but to some possibly disproved theory as to the composition of the Old Testament. The New Criticism may be altogether wrong in what it supposes itself to have discovered on this head. The "later developments of Tractarianism which have recently emanated from the Pusey House" may be altogether wrong in accepting what the New Criticism has put forward. But if so, this in an error of fact, not of principle. It involves no conflict with the original Traetarian doctrine that "the basis of authority " is "Scripture as interpreted by the undivided Church." The utmost that it does involve is the admission that later study has narrowed the province of Scripture. As regards the Ecclesiastical element in the basis of authority " A Country Parson" does not so much as pretend to make out a ease. To avow "principles which seemed to challenge the decrees of Ephesus and Chalcedon" is not the same thing as challenging those decrees. When "A Country Parson" quotes this or that statement of Canon Gore's or Mr. Ottley's, and either argues that they contradict, or maintains that to "many orthodox theologians" they seem to contradict, "the decisions of the Universal Church," he is within his rights. But he altogether outsteps those rights when he assumes that for Canon Gore or Mr. Ottley the decisions of the Universal Church have no longer the authority which they had for the "original Tractarians." To differ upon interpretation is not the same thing as differing upon the authority of the thing interpreted. Just as there is more than one theory of Papal infallibility which is consistent with the Vatican decree, so there may be more than one doctrine of the Kenosis which is consistent with the decrees of Ephesus and Chalcedon.
Whatever, then, may be the future fortunes of Tractarianism, its decline will not be due to the cause to 'which it is assigned by "A Country Parson." When lie talks about that decline, he refers to a process which would be more accurately described as its develop- 'neat or its transformation. What he alleges against it is really so much evidence in its favour. The best teat of vitality is growth, the faculty of adaptation to changed conditions. If Tractarianism had opposed a simple Non possumus to the New Criticism, it would have proclaimed its own inability to confront or deal with the world in which it lives. That would, to our thinking, have been a far graver symptom of impending decay than any of those which "A Country Parson" has so industriously and so ineffectually piled together.
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