The Oxford Movement; Twelve Years, 1833-1845Church, R. W. (Richard William)
Religion
The Oxford Movement; Twelve Years, 1833-1845
Church, R. W. (Richard William)
Oxford movement
good faith, but the complete effect as an intelligible whole is wanting.
"In the spring of 1839," we read in the _Apologia_, "my position in the
Anglican Church was at its height. I had a supreme confidence in my
controversial _status_, and I had a great and still growing success in
recommending it to others."[84] This, then, may be taken as the point
from which, in the writer's own estimate, the change is to be traced. He
refers for illustration of his state of mind to the remarkable article
on the "State of Religious Parties," in the April number of the _British
Critic_ for 1839, which he has since republished under the title of
"Prospects of the Anglican Church."[85] "I have looked over it now," he
writes in 1864, "for the first time since it was published; and have
been struck by it for this reason: it contains _the last words which I
ever spoke as an Anglican to Anglicans_.... It may now be read as my
parting address and valediction, made to my friends. I little knew it at
the time." He thus describes the position which he took in the article
referred to:--
Conscious as I was that my opinions in religious matters were not
gained, as the world said, from Roman sources, but were, on the
contrary, the birth of my own mind and of the circumstances in which I
had been placed, I had a scorn of the imputations which were heaped
upon me. It was true that I held a large, bold system of religion,
very unlike the Protestantism of the day, but it was the concentration
and adjustment of the statements of great Anglican authorities, and I
had as much right to do so as the Evangelical party had, and more
right than the Liberal, to hold their own respective doctrines. As I
spoke on occasion of Tract 90, I claimed, on behalf of the writer,
that he might hold in the Anglican Church a comprecation of the Saints
with Bramhall; and the Mass, all but Transubstantiation, with
Andrewes; or with Hooker that Transubstantiation itself is not a point
for Churches to part communion upon; or with Hammond that a General
Council, truly such, never did, never shall err in a matter of faith;
or with Bull that man lost inward grace by the Fall; or with Thorndike
that penance is a propitiation for post-baptismal sin; or with
Pearson that the all-powerful name of Jesus is no otherwise given than
in the Catholic Church. "Two can play at that game" was often in my
mouth, when men of Protestant sentiments appealed to the Articles,
Homilies, and Reformers, in the sense that if they had a right to
speak loud I had both the liberty and the means of giving them tit for
tat. I thought that the Anglican Church had been tyrannised over by a
Party, and I aimed at bringing into effect the promise contained in
the motto to the _Lyra_: "They shall know the difference now." I only
asked to be allowed to show them the difference.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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