THE HAMPDEN CONTROVERSY

137

Theology." It was a scholarly though not very inspiring book; it traced the influence of the Alexandrine divines and of the schoolmen on the formation of the Christian Creeds, and would in our days have been regarded as a thoughtful and useful contribution to Church History, without startling any one by its originality or daring speculation. But by the High Church and Tory party in Oxford the book was then regarded as dangerously latitudinarian in its opinions, chiefly because it exhibited with remorseless frankness the very human elements which entered into the composition of ancient formularies, such as the Nicene and Athanasian Creeds, and so might tend to deprive them of that divine authority which high Anglicans were wont to claim for them. The book was solemnly condemned by the Heads of Houses as unorthodox and dangerous, and when Lord Melbourne, in 1836, proposed to appoint Hampden to the Regius Professorship of Divinity, a strong and acrimonious opposition to the appointment arose in Oxford. The Prime Minister, however, persisted in the nomination, and the only practical effect of the agitation was by a vote in Convocation to exclude the Regius Professor from his place at a Board whose duty it was to nominate University preachers.1

1 It was not till after Arnold's death that the same controversy was revived in an aggravated form by the nomination in 1847, of Hampden to the bishopric of Hereford - a nomination which Lord John Russell, the minister of the day, persisted in, notwithstanding remonstrances from the clergy, from the Dean of Hereford, and from thirteen of the bishops.

It was not to be expected that Arnold could keep silent in the midst of this ecclesiastical ferment. He was "ever a fighter," and in regard to questions which touched the interests of religion a strong and even vehement controversialist. He threw himself with characteristic courage and energy into the thickest of the fray. Of what has been cynically called the "nasty little virtue of prudence," it must be owned he was not endowed with a large share. He wrote, in 1829, a pamphlet strongly urging the wisdom and expediency of conceding the Catholic claims. He stayed not to consider whether the outspoken utterance of unpopular opinion would injure his reputation with the governors of the school; and as we have already shown, he refused with courtesy, but with firmness, a request from one of the Rugby trustees that he would declare whether he was or was not the author of an anonymous article in a Review. Freedom to speak his mind on burning questions was a necessity of his being, and he would readily have resigned his mastership, had it been necessary, rather than surrender this freedom. That a cause was for the moment unpopular, was with him almost a primâ facie reason for espousing it,

Victrix causa diis placuit, sed victa Catoni.

His famous article in the Edinburgh Review, entitled the "Oxford Malignants," is an example of his

1

1 These were the five members of a small committee which met in the common room at Corpus to draw up a protest against Hampden's appointment as Regius Professor, on the ground that "he had contradicted the doctrinal truths which he was pledged to maintain." Eighty-one members of the University signed this protest.

RELIGIOUS CONTROVERSY

139

polemical style when specially roused to indignation; and his knowledge of history caused him to feel how impotent was the attempt to prevent the spread of opinions, whether really or only apparently heterodox, by means of ecclesiastical censures.

"He wielded a pen," said J. B. Mozley, "as if it were a ferule." The violent proceedings of the Newmanite party against Hampden were, in his opinion, glaringly unjust. He saw in the privilegium voted by Convocation nothing but Lynch law. He saw in it a reproduction in spirit and in essence of the nonjurors reviling Burnet, of the Council of Constance condemning Huss, of the Judaizers banded together against Paul.1

As one reads the story of those days, he is reminded of the terms in which Matthew Arnold, many years afterwards, apostrophized Oxford as the "home of lost causes and forsaken beliefs, and unpopular names, and impossible loyalties." 2 Father and son were alike in loving Oxford dearly, and were conscious of their deep and lifelong debt to it. But to both, the influence of the High Church party appeared profoundly mischievous to the true interests of religion and to the welfare and full development of the Church's usefulness. Indeed, Arnold almost despaired of the Church of England, although he believed that it ought to become the main instrument for the moral culture of the nation and for the exaltation of righteousness and truth. The decorous and apologetic

1 Edinburgh Review, January, 1845.

2 Preface to M. Arnold's Essays in Criticism.

orthodoxy of the eighteenth century, the negligence and apathy of many of the clergy, and their isolation from the main current of popular interests, repelled and profoundly saddened him. "Our Church,” he said, "bears, and has ever borne, the marks of her birth. The child of royal and aristocratic selfishness and unprincipled tyranny, she has never dared to speak boldly to the great, but has contented herself with lecturing the poor. 'I will speak of thy testimonies even before kings, and will not be ashamed,' is a text of which the Anglican Church as a national institution has never caught the spirit." The fact that twenty-two out of twenty-four bishops voted in the House of Lords against the Reform Bill was well calculated to arouse the sæva indignatio which, when occasion arose, was so easily excited in him. Here was no case in which the religious interests of the people needed to be safeguarded by the spiritual peers. But the incident brought into strong relief the fatal tendency of English ecclesiastics to identify themselves with the interests of the privileged classes, and seemed to Arnold to render the outlook for the future more dispiriting than ever.

In these circumstances, the new signs of life and energy which the leaders of the Oxford movement were beginning to put forth, and the desire of that party to emancipate itself from political trammels, might have been expected to win Arnold's sympathy. But in his view the whole of that movement was vitiated by the sacerdotal pretensions and claims. of some of the clergy, by their revival of some mediæ

THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND

141

val and outworn superstitions, and by their habit of regarding the acceptance of dogmas as the only basis of Christianity. He had learned from Coleridge a larger conception of the scope and office of a Christian church, whose members should include many of those now called dissenters, and whose ministers should form a clerisy-not exclusively teachers of theology, but leaders and helpers in all that concerned the intellectual interests and the social life of the people, in wise philanthropy and in practical religion.1 Dean Church thus defines what he conceives to have been Arnold's position at the time:

"Dr. Arnold's view of the Church was very simple. He divided the world into Christians and non-Christians. Christians were all who professed to believe in Christ as a divine person, and to worship him; and the brotherhood -the 'Societas' of Christians — was all that was meant by the Church in the New Testament. It mattered of course to the conscience of each Christian what he had made up his mind to believe, but to no one else. Church organization was according to circumstances partly inevitable or expedient, partly mischievous, but in no case of divine authority. Teaching, ministering the word, was a thing of divine appointment, but not so the mode of exercising it, either as to persons, forms, or methods. Sacraments there were, signs and pledges of divine love and help in every action of life, in every sight of nature, and eminently two most touching ones recommended to Christians by the Redeemer himself; but except as a matter of mere order, one man might deal with them as lawfully as another." 2

1 Coleridge's Church and State.

2 Dean Church, The Oxford Movement, p. 6.