Famous Reviews, Selected and Edited with Introductory Notes by R. Brimley Johnson
History
Famous Reviews, Selected and Edited with Introductory Notes by R. Brimley Johnson
Books -- Reviews; Criticism; English literature -- 18th century -- History and criticism; English literature -- 19th century -- History and criticism
rather flourished with a new vigour when the party of the movement was
so greatly broken up. It is surely one of the strangest objections which
can be urged against a living spiritual body, that the loss of many of
its foremost sons still left its vital strength unimpaired. Yet this was
Dr. Newman's objection, and his witness, fourteen years ago, when he
complained of the Church of England, that though it had given "a hundred
educated men to the Catholic Church, yet the huge creature from which
they went forth showed no consciousness of its loss, but shook itself,
and went about its work as of old time."[2]
[1] "Collection of Papers connected with the Theological Movement of
1833." By the Hon. and Rev. A.P. Perceval. 1843. Second Edition.
[2] "Lectures on Anglican Difficulties," p. 9.
As the unity of the party was broken up, the fire which had burned
hitherto in but a single beacon was scattered upon a thousand hills.
Nevertheless, the first breaking up of the party was eminently
disheartening to its living members. But it was not by external violence
that it was broken, but by the development within itself of a
distinctive Romeward bias. Dr. Newman lays his hand upon a particular
epoch in its progress, at which, he says, it was crossed by a new set of
men, who imparted to it that leaning to Romanism which ever after
perceptibly beset it. "A new school of thought was rising, as is usual
in such movements, and was sweeping the original party of the movement
aside, and was taking its place" (p. 277). This is a curious instance of
self-delusion. He was, as we maintain, throughout, the Romanising
element in the whole movement. But for him it might have continued, as
its other great chiefs still continue, the ornament and strength of the
English Church. These younger men, to whom he attributes the change,
were, in fact, the minds whom he had consciously or unconsciously
fashioned and biassed. Some of them, as is ever the case, had outrun
their leader. Some of them were now, in their sensitive spiritual
organism, catching the varying outline of the great leader whom they
almost worshipped, and beginning at once to give back his own altering
image. Instead of seeing in their changing minds this reflection of
himself, he dwelt upon it as an original element, and read in its
presence an indication of its being the will of God that the stream
should turn its flow towards the gulf to which he himself had unawares,
it may be, directed its waters. Those who remember how at this time he
was followed will know how easily such a result might follow his own
incipient change. Those who can still remember how many often
involuntarily caught his peculiar intonation--so distinctively singular,
and therefore so attractive in himself and so repulsive in his copyists
--will understand how the altering fashion of the leader's thoughts was
appropriated with the same unconscious fidelity.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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