James Hope-Scott and Henry Manning

While I'm at the Spiritual Life Center today here in Wichita to present on "St. Thomas More: Conscience and Martyrdom" and "Blessed John Henry Newman: Conscience and Conversion", it's appropriate that I mention two contemporaries of Blessed John Henry Newman who were born on July 15.

Henry Manning was born on July 15 in 1808, James Hope (he added the -Scott later) in 1812.

Henry Cardinal Manning, the second Archbishop of Westminster, is one of the famous converts who became Catholic through the influence of Newman in the Oxford Movement. He and Newman had a rather contentious relationship during their Catholic years. The story of his conversion is told in David Newsome's The Parting of Friends: The Wilberforces and Henry Manning.

James Hope-Scott, on the other hand, was a most faithful friend and defender of Newman. He was a barrister and represented Newman during the Achilli trial. More on his life from the Catholic Encyclopedia:

third son of the Honourable Sir Alexander Hope, G.C.B., who was fourth son of John, second Earl of Hopetoun, a Scottish title dating from 1703. His mother was third and youngest daughter of George Brown of Ellerton, Roxburghshire. During early childhood his home was the Military College at Sandhurst, where his father was in command. Afterwards he went abroad with his parents, staying in succession at Dresden, Lausanne, and Florence, and thus gaining a mastery of the German, French, and Italian tongues. In 1825 he entered Eton, whence, in 1828, he matriculated at Christ Church, Oxford. After a visit to Paris in 1829 he went into residence at Oxford the same year. The degree of B.A. he took in 1832, coming out in the fourth class in literis humanioribus. Next year he was elected a Fellow of Merton. In 1835 he gave up his intention of entering the ministry of the Established Church, and began to study law under conveyancers, his call to the bar at the Inner Temple taking place in 1838. Meanwhile, in the latter year he graduated B.C.L. at Oxford, proceeding D.C.L. in 1843. In 1838, after publishing anonymously in pamphlet form a letter to the Archbishop of Canterbury, he saw through the press Gladstone's work entitled "The State considered in its Relations with the Church". Next year he and Roundell Palmer (the future Earl of Selborne) projected "The History of Colleges". In 1840, at Newman's request, Hope wrote in "The British Critic", a review, later published separately, of Ward's translation of "The Statutes of Magdalen College, Oxon." The same year, as junior counsel for the capitular bodies petitioning against the Ecclesiastical Duties and Revenues Bill, he delivered the remarkably able speech which moved Brougham to exclaim, "That young man's fortune is made." In 1840, moreover, he was appointed Chancellor of the Diocese of Salisbury, which post he held until 1845. About the same time he took part in the foundation of Glenalmond College, in Perthshire, for the education of the Scottish Episcopal youth. In 1840-41 he spent some eight months in Italy, Rome included, in company with his close friend Edward Louth Badeley. On his return he became, with Newman, one of the foremost promoters of the Tractarian movement at Oxford. His next publication was a pamphlet against the establishment of the Anglo-Prussian Protestant See of Jerusalem, of which a second edition appeared in 1842. In 1849 and 1850 there came the Gorham trial and judgment, and in the latter year the agitation against the so-called "Papal Aggression". These events finally determined him upon the course of joining the Catholic Church, into which, together with Archdeacon Manning, he was received in London in 1851 by the Jesuit Father Brownhill.

In 1852 he managed Newman's defence in the libel action brought against him by Achilli, and in 1855 he conducted the negotiations which ended in Newman's accepting the rectorship of the Catholic University of Ireland. As to Hope's professional work, within a few years of his call he devoted himself wholly to parliamentary practice, in which his success and emoluments became prodigious. This was the palmy period of railway construction, and eventually he became standing counsel to almost every railway in the realm. In 1849 he was appointed Q.C., with a patent of precedence.

How he came to change his name:

His first wife, whom he married in 1847, was Charlotte Harriet Jane Lockhart, only daughter of John Gibson Lockhart and granddaughter of Sir Walter Scott. She soon followed her husband into the Catholic Church. A year later he became tenant of Abbotsford to his brother-in-law, and on the latter's death, in 1853, its possessor in right of his wife, thereupon assuming the name of Hope-Scott. Not long afterwards he added a new wing to Sir Walter's mansion. In 1855 he bought the Highland estate of Dorlin, whereupon he built a new house, selling the whole to Lord Howard of Glosson in 1871. In 1858 he had to mourn the loss of his wife, who died in childbed, the newborn child dying shortly after, and Walter Michael, his infant son and heir, before the close of the year. His second wife, whom he wedded in 1861, was Lady Victoria Alexandrina Fitzalan- Howard, eldest daughter of the fourteenth Duke of Norfolk, of whose children Hope-Scott had been left guardian. In 1867 he had the honour of a visit from Queen Victoria at Abbotsford, and in the same year he bought a villa at Hyères, in Provence. Like her predecessor, his second wife died in childbed in 1870, after giving birth to James Fitzalan Hope, now (1909) M.P. Hope- Scott never overcame the grief and shock entailed by this last bereavement. He now withdrew from his profession, surviving his dead wife but little more than two years, and dying in 1873. His funeral sermon was preached by his old and intimate friend Cardinal Newman in the same Jesuit church of Farm Street in which, two and twenty years back, Hope-Scott had made his submission to the Catholic Church. His charities and benefactions were wellnigh boundless. It is reckoned that from 1860 onwards he spent £40,000 in hidden charity. Among his innumerable good works, he built at a cost of £10,000 the Catholic church at Galashiels, near Abbotsford, and he was the chief benefactor of St. Margaret's Convent, at Edinburgh, wherein he lies buried.

More about him at Abbotsford here.

At his funeral, Newman praised him for his "tender conscience", his generosity, his talents and gifts as a barrister and advocate, and then concluded:

O happy soul, who hast loved neither the world nor the things of the world apart from God! Happy soul, who, amid the world's toil, hast chosen the one thing needful, that better part which can never be taken away! Happy soul, who, being the counsellor and guide, the stay, the light and joy, the benefactor of so many, yet hast ever depended simply, as a little child, on the grace of thy God and the merits and strength of thy Redeemer! Happy soul, who hast so thrown thyself into the views and interests of other men, so prosecuted their ends, and associated thyself in their labours, as never to forget still that there is one Holy Catholic Roman Church, one Fold of Christ and Ark of salvation, and never to neglect her ordinances or to trifle with her word! Happy soul, who, as we believe, by thy continual almsdeeds, offerings, and bounties, hast blotted out such remains of daily recurring sin and infirmity as the sacraments have not reached! Happy soul, who, by thy assiduous preparation for death, and the long penance of sickness, weariness, and delay, has, as we trust, discharged the debt that lay against thee, and art already passing from penal purification to the light and liberty of heaven above!

And so farewell, but not farewell for ever, dear James Robert Hope Scott! He is gone from us, but only gone before us. It is for us to look forward, not backward. We shall meet him again, if we are worthy, in "Mount Sion, and the heavenly Jerusalem," in "the company of many thousands of angels, the Church of the first-born who are written in the heavens," with "God, the Judge of all, and the spirits of the just made perfect, and Jesus, the Mediator of the New Testament, and the blood which speaketh better things than that of Abel."

Happy Birthday to Henry Cardinal Manning

Henry Edward Manning, future Cardinal Archbishop of Westminster, was born on July 15, 1808. Although influenced in some ways by John Henry Newman and the Oxford Movement to become a Catholic in 1851, Manning did not always appreciate Newman's personality, theology, or influence among English Catholics.

Cited on The Victorian Web, Lawrence Poston (from his book The Antagonist Principle: John Henry Newman and the Paradox of Personality. Charlottesville and London: University of Virginia Press, 2014) comments on the conflicts between Henry Cardinal Manning and John Henry Cardinal Newman:

Newman's vexed relationship with Henry Manning was not the least of the products of his Catholic years. Over the last century, Manning, on the whole (and with the exceptions of such balanced scholars as David Newsome and James Pereiro) has had a bad press. He was doubtless much that he has been accused of being—ambitious, devious, and politically motivated—and he has earned a reputation for equivocation, particularly in interpreting Newman's actions to the hierarchy. Certainly temperament had much to do with their differences. Manning was a well-informed man and no mean theologian. But he was a man of the world, not a cloistered university don, and his practical experience as an archdeacon in the Church of England had shown his capacity to manage men. He was an accomplished bureaucrat who moved naturally in the complexities of Vatican politics; Newman was not. Both men craved power, but Manning through authority, Newman through influence. Yet Manning was no stranger to the joys and sorrows of the human condition. The loss of his wife in the years before his own reception into the Roman Catholic Church was a source of continuing sorrow throughout his life, though he did not make a public display of his bereavements, and his intervention in the London Dock Strike (1889) demonstrated a political pragmatism quite beyond Newman's ken.

To Newman's principle of personality Manning posed the antagonist principle of bureaucracy as a way of containing gifted but excitable individuals who might disrupt ecclesiastical due process. Manning had small sympathy for theories of development, and even less interest in the role of the laity, whom he famously dismissed as fit for hunting and fishing* but not for theological disputation [sic]. He was decisive where Newman was hesitant, but a virtue of his limitations as well as a consequence of his power was that he found it easier to eschew grudges. As John Page has noted, Newman's intellectual response to the papal claims was indirect, veering and tacking, in short (to take a term from Ian Ker)unscholastic, because his personality was "careful, tolerant, and given to second thoughts" (Page 421), while his historical method elevated inference over logic. His argument in counseling troubled Catholics was that confession did not demand adherence to a specific definition de fide as long as they had made an active avowal of faith in the Church's teaching. This would have struck Manning as worse than hairsplitting; it was a failure of loyalty and indeed of nerve.

More deeply, the two men held different beliefs on how one comes to religious faith. Newman's Grammar of Assent . . . was the product of a patient mind disentangling, over many years, the intricate processes by which individuals come to belief: how the reason cooperates, through the accumulation of probabilities, in the task of finding certitude. Manning’s idea of certainty (not the same as Newman's "certitude") amounted to a rejection of the Butlerian theory of probability that Newman had embraced years before, and Manning's interpretation of the Catholic position was that right reason "leads us to the fact of a Divine Teacher; but thenceforward His voice, and not our balancing of probabilities, will be the formal motive of the faith." The Church's witness was not only "human and historical" but "supernatural and divine." Thus, "My faith terminates no longer in a cumulus of probabilities, gathered from the past, but upon the veracity of a Divine Power guiding me with His presence" (Manning 75-76). This standard, enunciated three years before the appearance of the Grammar of Assent, was surely behind Manning’s belief that Newman had never really left off being an Anglican at heart. [218-19]

*While Manning might have agreed with this dismissal, I think that Poston has attributed this comment incorrectly. Monsignor George Talbot wrote to Manning, after Newman had written his famous article in The Rambler on "Consulting the Laity in Matters of Doctrine":

What is the province of the laity? To hunt, to shoot, to entertain? These matters they understand, but to meddle with ecclesiastical matters they have no right at all, and this affair of Newman is a matter purely ecclesiastical…. Dr. Newman is the most dangerous man in England, and you will see that he will make use of the laity against your Grace.

When Newman was beatified in 2010 Robert Gray wrote in The Spectator, comparing and contrasting Manning and Newman:

Newman and Manning did have one thing in common: they had both been born into evangelical families. At Oxford, however, Newman soon came to detest the smugness and vulgarity of those who claimed intimate converse with the Almighty. More pertinently, he apprehended that an ill-defined mishmash of individual enlightenment, pious sentiment and good works could never stand against the secularising tendencies of the times.

If Christianity were to survive (and Newman was quite prepared to concede that it might not), Christians must have firmly and objectively fixed propositions into which to fasten their mental hooks. In a word, they required dogma, which could only be delivered by a divinely appointed Church.

To the young Henry Manning, preaching the Word to a rustic congregation at Lavington in Sussex, such teaching appeared as manna in the desert. How infinitely more satisfying, for a temperament attracted to power, to stand before his humble flock as a successor of the Apostles than as a mere expositor of biblical texts.

Yet while Manning followed Newman in theology, he retained throughout his life an evangelical sympathy for the outcast. Newman, on the other hand, was in general far too obsessed by the eternal drama to bestow much time or notice upon the sufferings of this world.

Read the rest there, especially as Gray comments on all the good work Henry Manning did as Archbishop of Westminster:

His first duty, he judged, was to the Irish in London, in danger of being lost to the Church in the slums of the capital. By the time of his death in 1892 more than 10,000 extra places had been provided in parish elementary schools. He also succeeded, with the help of his friend William Gladstone, in extricating thousands of Catholic children from Protestant workhouses, so that by 1884 not a single one was left therein.

At the same time he developed orphanages and reformatories for neglected children. After the Education Act of 1870, he raised funds to ensure that Catholic schools did not fall under the rule of godless local boards of education. Later he played an important role in establishing the principle that denominational, or ‘voluntary’ schools should be financed from the rates on the same basis as board schools.

Whereas the Oxford Movement converts who followed Newman into the Catholic Church may be measured in hundreds, those whom Manning saved for Rome must be numbered in tens of thousands. Catholic intellectuals, however, have rarely found the Archbishop’s social labours as compelling as Newman’s exquisite disquisitions on the nature of faith or on the evolution of his religious opinions.

That last comment is echoed by the author of the CTS Biography of Cardinal Manning, pictured above, as I've posted before.

Froude's Remains and the Oxford Martyrs Memorial

Image Credit: Wikipedia Commons

On October 16, 1555, Protestant bishops Hugh Latimer and Nicholas Ridley were burned at the stake in Oxford, having been tried and convicted of heresy during the reign of Queen Mary I. In 1843, a Gothic style memorial, designed by George Gilbert Scott, was erected at the intersection of St. Gile's, Magdalen and Beaumont streets near Balliol College. Why was the memoral erected 288/287 years after the martyrdom of Latimer, Ridley, and Thomas Cranmer (executed on March 21, 1556)? Why did the memorial include such a pointedly anti-Catholic dedication?

To the Glory of God, and in grateful commemoration of His servants, Thomas Cranmer, Nicholas Ridley, Hugh Latimer, Prelates of the Church of England, who near this spot yielded their bodies to be burned, bearing witness to the sacred truths which they had affirmed and maintained against the errors of the Church of Rome, and rejoicing that to them it was given not only to believe in Christ, but also to suffer for His sake; this monument was erected by public subscription in the year of our Lord God, MDCCCXLI.

The memorial project was launched in response to the Oxford Movement and the publication of Richard Hurrell Froude's Remains, which demonstrated the late Oriel Fellow's interest in some Catholic devotions, in 1838, two years after his death. Newman and Keble, when editing the Remains, included a Preface containing strong denials tht Froude would have considered becoming a Catholic! Nevertheless, the Reverend Charles Pourtales Golightly (who did not "go lightly"), formerly John Henry Newman's curate at St. Mary's-St. Nicholas' in Littlemore, and other evangelical Anglicans were alarmed by the Romanizing tendencies of the Oxford Movement (Sacraments, sacramentals, and saints) and even more angered by some of Froude's comments: particularly his regrets that the Reformation--particularly the English Reformation--had ever happened. Golightly began the subscription campaign to build the memorial as an effort to counter and protest the Oxford Movement.

Golightly and Newman had a Huguenot background in common and they had been acquaintances for a long time, and Golightly was independently wealthy and therefore could take on poor Anglican parishes and do many good works. He was completely opposed to the ritualistic aspects of the Oxford Movement. It seems curious that Sir Gilbert Scott built the memorial in the Gothic style, since many could identify Gothic with the Catholic Middle Ages, but Scott did not equate Gothic with solely ecclesiastical architecture. He also designed the Albert Memorial in Kensington Gardens across from the Royal Albert Hall. It also displays Scott's interest in the Gothic Revival style.

It's also interesting to note that in 1843 when the Martyrs Monument was dedicated, Newman was in Littlemore at the College and by September of that year had resigned from St. Mary's and was working on the Development of Christian Doctrine, writing himself into the Catholic Church.

Happy Birthday, Hilaire Belloc! Born in Arcadia

Hilaire Belloc was born on July 27, 1870 in La Celle-Saint-Cloud, west of Paris. Above: the seal of the city. Did you know that his mother, Bessie Raynor Parkes Belloc, was a suffragette? She was also a convert to Catholicism, influenced not only by the intellectual arguments of the Oxford Movement converts but also by the practical charity work of Catholic nuns and she joined the Catholic Church in 1864. According to the wikipedia article on her life:

Aged 38, Bessie Rayner Parkes fell in love with a Frenchman of delicate health, named Louis Belloc, himself the son of a notable woman, Louise Swanton-Belloc. Their five-year long marriage, spent in France, was described by Parkes as Arcadia. The family lived through the Franco-Prussian War and was deeply affected by it on a material level. Parkes never got over her husband’s sudden death in 1872. Their children, Marie Belloc Lowndes (1868-1947) and Hilaire Belloc (1870-1953), went on to become renowned writers in their different ways.

Another source gives more background on the family tree.

According to this site, her husband died of sunstroke. Belloc's sister, Marie, wrote The Lodger, based on the Jack the Ripper crimes. Alfred Hitchcock filmed a silent version, starring Ivor Novello, while Laird Gregar and Merle Oberon starred in the 1944 "talkie". After his father's death, Belloc's mother returned to England and he attended the Oratory in Birmingham.

Happy birthday, JOSEPH HILAIRE PIERRE RENE BELLOC!

Erastianism and Marriage in the Church of England

The Church of England's official prayer book and liturgy contains this commentary on and definition of marriage and its purposes, as written in the Book of Common Prayer:

Dearly beloved, we are gathered together here in the sight of God, and in the face of this Congregation, to join together this man and this woman in holy Matrimony; which is an honourable estate, instituted of God in the time of man's innocency, signifying unto us the mystical union that is betwixt Christ and his Church; which holy estate Christ adorned and beautified with his presence, and first miracle that he wrought, in Cana of Galilee; and is commended of Saint Paul to be honourable among all men: and therefore is not by any to be enterprised, nor taken in hand, unadvisedly, lightly, or wantonly, to satisfy men's carnal lusts and appetites, like brute beasts that have no understanding; but reverently, discreetly, advisedly, soberly, and in the fear of God; duly considering the causes for which Matrimony was ordained.

~First, It was ordained for the procreation of children, to be brought up in the fear and nurture of the Lord, and to the praise of his holy Name.

~Secondly, It was ordained for a remedy against sin, and to avoid fornication; that such persons as have not the gift of continency might marry, and keep themselves undefiled members of Christ's body.

~Thirdly, It was ordained for the mutual society, help, and comfort, that the one ought to have of the other, both in prosperity and adversity. Into which holy estate these two persons present come now to be joined. Therefore if any man can shew any just cause, why they may not lawfully be joined together, let him now speak, or else hereafter for ever hold his peace.

But now, as Father Dwight Longenecker states, the British Parliament has redefined marriage, superceding the authority of the Church of England's doctrine and order. This is the crucial issue for the authority of the Church of England--the reason Pusey, Newman, and Keble started writing Tracts and preaching sermons in Oxford. Whence its authority to teach as Christ's Church--from Jesus or from the State? Who is Head of the Church of England: Jesus or the monarch? Does the Church of England lead the State and the national culture or does the State and the national culture lead the Church of England? Are the teachings and discipline of the Church determined by divine or Erastian authority, based on revelation or on political trends? Those were exactly the issues that inspired the Oxford Movement. As John Henry Newman worked to substantiate the via media of the Anglican Church with apostolic and catholic authority, he found himself unable to find solid ground; thus his conversion to Catholicism in 1845.

Does Parliament subsequently to the passage of this law direct the Church of England to rewrite the Book of Common Prayer and this scriptural explanation and definition of Matrimony (marriage) cited above? Does English society achieve the parity and equality it desires if the Church of England has two different services: one according to the biblical faith of the Book of Common Prayer as currently published and one according to Parliamentary definition of marriage as a commitment? It's an Erastian knot that's impossible to untie--unless the official ties between the Church and the State are cut?

The Shield of St. Patrick

I bind this day to me forever by
power of faith Christ's incarnation,
his baptism in the Jordan river,
his death on the cross for my salvation;
his bursting from the spiced tomb,
his riding up the heavenly way,
his coming at the day of doom I bind
unto myself today.

I bind unto myself today the power of
God to hold and lead,
his eye to watch, his might to stay,
his ear to harken to my need,
the wisdom of my God to teach,
his hand to guide, his shield to ward,
the Word of God to give me speech,
his heavenly host to be my guard.

Christ be with me, Christ within me,
Christ behind me, Christ before me,
Christ beside me, Christ to win me;
Christ to comfort and restore me;
Christ beneath me, Christ above me,
Christ in quiet, Christ in danger,
Christ in hearts of all that love me,
Christ in mouth of friend and stranger.

I bind unto myself the name,
the strong name of the Trinity,
by invocation of the same,
the Three in One, and One in Three,
of whom all nature hath creation,
eternal Father, Spirit, Word;
praise to the God of my salvation,
salvation is of Christ the Lord!

This English version of the Shield or Breastplate of St. Patrick was created by Cecil Frances Alexander, an Anglican hymnist much influenced by the Oxford Movement and particularly by John Keble. More about her here. More about St. Patrick here.

Happy St. Patrick's Day!

William Wilberforce

William Wilberforce was born on August 24, 1759. Several years ago, my husband and I enjoyed the movie Amazing Grace so much that we gave everyone in our families a copy of the DVD for Christmas. While it may not have emphasized the connection between Wilberforce's faith in Jesus Christ to his humanitarian efforts, which included child welfare and the end of the slave trade, of slavery, and other ethical and moral issues, like the prevention of cruelty to animals, it made it clear that he was a Christian and a good man.

Wilberforce was an evangelical Anglican, yet his sons were all influenced in one way or another by the Oxford Movement. Three of his sons followed Blessed John Henry Newman and Henry Manning into the Catholic Church (William, Henry, and Robert). The other son, Samuel, was Bishop of Oxford and then of Winchester. Wilberforce at first had opposed Catholic Emancipation but he later supported its passage in 1829, although he was out of office by then.

The BBC posts a biography here.

The Oxford Movement and Anglican Patrimony

Apropos of the anniversary of the beginning of the Oxford Movement, Monsignor Andrew Burnham recently discussed the influence of that Movement on the Anglican Patrimony of prayer and worship. The New Liturgical Movement blog documents his presentation at the Anglican Use Conference in Texas.

He begins by mentioning the Oxford Movement:

The vigorous discussion of ‘Anglican Patrimony’, a phrase used by Pope Benedict XVI in Anglicanorum cœtibus, has established two things for sure. One is that it is not only a liturgical tradition which former Anglicans bring into the Catholic Church: there is a sense in which ‘patrimony’ is far wider than that, and includes a whole cultural mindset and experience which is no less real for being hard to define. The other thing that the discussion has established is that, whatever it is, ‘Anglican Patrimony’ certainly does include a liturgical tradition, a tradition which is powerfully Benedictine, in its continued celebration of the public office, often within buildings that were abbeys and priories. It is also a tradition which, somewhat self-consciously, has adopted the Eucharist as its mainstay. This we all owe to the Oxford Fathers as much as to the Twentieth Century Liturgical Movement, which has influenced us all.

And toward the end he also invokes the Oxford Movement:

As you will see, these three issues – the Sarum Use, the Anglican and English Missals, the contemporary versions of Anglican liturgy – take us back into the early history of the Oxford Movement. There were strong arguments then for restoring the Sarum Use. There were strong arguments then for aligning faith and practice with the contemporary Catholic Church. There were strong arguments then too for attending loyally to the agreed Anglican texts and for seeking to revise them to strengthen their ability to convey Catholic teaching. The working party began work with the last two of these three issues dominant in the minds of its English members.

The Oxford Movement's emphasis on the universal catholic church, of which they thought the Church of England was a branch, the via media led them to seek for those apostolic connections. Their study of the Fathers of the Church led Newman and others to join the Catholic Church while those who remained developed a higher ritualistic celebration of the Paschal Mystery, as I've discussed before, here and here for example.

More coverage of the Anglican Use Conference here. Image: photo taken inside Dorchester Abbey, renovated by a Tractarian/Ritualist Anglo-Catholic vicar in the 19th century.

July 14, 1833: The Beginning of the Oxford Movement

John Henry Newman always dated the beginning of the Oxford Movement from John Keble's sermon in the University Church of St. Mary the Virgin from this date. He preached on the "National Apostacy" urging a renewal of the Church of England. Keble's sermon, focused on the Parliamentary proposal to suppress ten bishoprics in Ireland, expressed the concern that the secular Government had too much control over the Church of England. He was particularly concerned that these Anglican bishops in Catholic Ireland were being treated as mere government officials.

As Keble proclaimed, "Under the guise of charity and tolerance we are come almost to this pass, that no difference, in matters of faith, is to disqualify for our approbation and confidence, whether in public or domestic life. . . . The point really to be considered is, whether, according to the coolest estimate, the fashionable liberality of the generation be not ascribable, in a great measure, to the same tempter which led the Jews voluntarily to set about degrading themselves to a level with the idolatrous Gentiles? And, if it be true anywhere, that such enactments are forced on the Legislature by public opinion, is APOSTASY too hard a word to describe the temper of that nation?"

Keble's outcry inspired first the Hadleigh Conference and then the Tracts for the Times, written by Keble, John Henry Newman, E.B. Pusey of Christ Church, Richard Hurrell Froud, and others. The Tracts were then supplemented, or perhaps even surpassed, by Newman's popular sermons from the pulpit at St. Mary the Virgin, sermons so popular that even the University's rescheduling of the evening meal could not dissuade students from attending. I say that the sermons may have surpassed the Tracts because they presented the content of Christian doctrine so persuasively that they were a demonstrated argument for the apostolic authority of the Church of England. Excerpts from Keble's National Apostasy sermon, the Tracts, Newman's Parochial and Plain Sermons, and other works by members of the Oxford Movement are presented in a volume by Canterbury Press, Firmly I Believe: An Oxford Movement Reader. Ignatius Press offers a one volume collection of Newman's Parochial and Plain Sermons.

Remember that Newman had just been on that trip to Italy and recovered from serious illness: he thought he had been saved by God for some work to do in England--and here it was, fulfilling his desire to serve:

Lead, kindly Light, amid the encircling gloom,
Lead Thou me on!
The night is dark, and I am far from home—
Lead Thou me on!
Keep Thou my feet; I do not ask to see
The distant scene—one step enough for me.

I was not ever thus, nor prayed that
Thou Shouldst lead me on.
I loved to choose and see my path; but now,
Lead Thou me on!
I loved the garish day, and, spite of fears,
Pride ruled my will: remember not past years.

So long Thy power hath blessed me, sure it still
Will lead me on,
O'er moor and fen, o'er crag and torrent, till
The night is gone;
And with the morn those angel faces smile
Which I have loved long since, and lost awhile.

(The picture above is of the pulpit in St. Mary the Virgin, taken on a visit there several years ago.)