Project Canterbury What England Owes to the Oxford Movement
By S. L. OllardA.R. Mowbray, 1924.
"THE tree is known by its fruits." So the Lord has declared, and in every age since then, whether men have accepted His claims or not, they have accepted that saying as an axiom in forming their judgements not on trees merely, but on all men and all things. It is a test which nothing can ultimately escape. Yet it has one danger; the danger lest it should be applied too early, before the fruit has had a chance of ripening. But always, sooner or later, a time arrives when a judgement can be formed, and it is not unreasonable to think that such a time has arrived for the Catholic Revival in the Church of England. This Revival dates from the beginning of the Oxford Movement in 1833, the year which was marked by Mr. Keble's Assize Sermon and the beginning of the Tracts for the Times, and after so long a time it cannot be premature to form a judgement on what the Revival has done. Is England the better or the worse for it? In other words, what have been its fruits? for by its fruits the Revival must be known. Some of these fruits are easily recognized, others are not so plain; but for good or ill they have ripened. Public opinion is not entirely unanimous about the answer, any more than men are all of one mind about the results of Christianity as a whole; but about some of the fruit there is little dispute among religious English people, and we can call attention to and measure some of the more obvious and superficial results.
THE IDEALS OF WORSHIP Without question the Anglo-Catholic Revival has changed the conception of worship throughout the Church of England, and, by repercussion, the standard of worship in many Nonconformist bodies as well. There is a wealth of evidence of the kind of worship which was offered to Almighty God in the parish churches of England and Wales at the time immediately before and immediately after the Catholic Revival began. Scarcely a book of reminiscences written by a Churchman during the last thirty years does not give a sketch of it. The services were infrequent, dreary, and usually slovenly. This evidence comes from all parts of England. In the South, The Recollections of a Sussex Parson, published in 1912, gives picture after picture of the state of things there from 1819 onwards. In 1819, in the neighbourhood of Lewes, "almost every incumbent had two parishes, in neither of which was he probably ever seen except on Sunday. No parish, even in Lewes, had more than one service on a Sunday, and the time of these services was frequently changed without notice, the ringing of the church bell summoning the people when a clergyman came in sight. . . . Sermons were long, services dull, but those who wanted to go, went." The author describes his own experience when he was ordained deacon in 1838 and licensed to a curacy in sole charge. The incumbent lived eight miles away, but never entered the parish once during the six and a half years of the writer's curacy. The new curate had two services each Sunday, but no church for miles round had more than one, and in some a service was only held once a fortnight or once a month. At Christmas, 1838, he tells how he tried to get a priest to come to give his people Holy Communion but failed. He got a priest at the following Easter, but only on Low Sunday, and then he could not make his own Communion, for he had to exchange duty with the celebrant.
The writer of Reminiscences of Forty Years, published in 1868, gives an account of the services in a country church near Manchester as they were in 1828. "Canticles, Prayers, Psalms, Lessons were all alike gabbled through to arrive at sermon-time so soon ac possible," and the sermon, he says, lasted for an hour. A like picture was drawn of the services in the West of England about 1828 by Mr. G. R. Prynne. "I remember the parson's desk and the clerk's desk, and their alternate reading of the verses of the Psalms, in which very few of the congregation ever joined, for the clerk's responses, though in a monotone, were not musical lor easy to join in." He goes on to tell how the clerk would go into the western gallery of the church to give out verses of one of the metrical Psalms of Tate and Brady, for "hymns of any kind were not considered orthodox or correct in those days. The aged vicar then went to the pulpit in a black gown and read a sermon, and so the service ended. It was certainly not a lively function, and was not calculated to aid the devotions of the congregation." Evidence for the like state of things in quite another district of England, the East Riding of Yorkshire, has been published very recently in the Yorkshire Reminiscences of the Rev. M. C. F. Morris, though the period of which he writes is that of the 'forties and the 'fifties. There are the same tales of perfunctory ministrations, the same infrequent services, the same shamefully neglected churches. And Mr. Morris "documents," as the phrase is, his account by a reference to an official return to the archdeacon in 1843, so that his witness is specially valuable. In every detail that return bears out the same sad story. Out of fifteen incumbents six only were resident, old fonts of the parish churches were used as cattle drinking troughs, one, indeed, had been sold by auction, and the altars were of the meanest description, sometimes a chest served the purpose. The record of one specially beautiful church, a former Gilbertine priory, may serve as an illustration. "Exterior of church, all very bad and much dilapidated. Floor bad. Window casements, doors bad. Windows much defaced by plaster. Open seats and a few pews very old and bad. An ancient and large pew, said to have been occupied formerly by the squire. Font has no plug. Baptisms and christenings generally at Communion table. Communion table small and poor. No cover for table. Bible old and dilapidated. No hassocks. No vestry. Parish meetings sometimes held in church. Two bells, one cracked. Some brasses have been removed. A fine old font on pedestals, but mutilated and defaced by brickwork and colouring. . . . There are remains of a handsome old screen."
In fact, there is not a district of England which does not furnish evidence for the shocking neglect of the churches in the period before and just after the Oxford Movement began. And the services offered in such buildings matched them. Worship, as an offering to Almighty God, had almost passed out of men's minds. Preaching was valued here and there, and in such places the churches were fitted to some extent to be comfortable preaching houses, pews were made comfortable for the well-to-do, and even luxurious for the rich. But worship, apart from preaching, had very largely been forgotten. The Anglo-Catholic Revival has revived the sense of worship. It has brought back reverence, care, occasionally even splendour, into the public worship of God. It has furnished the most powerful motive for preserving and then decorating the houses of God in the land. Directly its spirit touched a parish the first outward sign of it was shown by an attempt to restore or rebuild the parish church. Undoubtedly much that was unwise was done in such restorations, old churches were occasionally scrapped to make way for new ones. But allowing for all that, the fact that English parish churches all over the land have been restored and beautified is an immense gain to English life. In poetry and prose English writers have not been slow to praise the virtues of the witness of the parish church, with its heavenward pointing spire or tower, and its silent call to a higher life and a brighter world: that appeal could have had little force when those parish churches themselves were monuments of neglect and decay, and their witness was apparently to a creed outworn. To that end it would seem that religion in England was hastening when the Catholic Revival began. Under its inspiration the parish churches of England have been rescued from neglect and decay, and others, scarcely less beautiful, have been added to them.
THE QUICKENING OF ARCHITECTURE Thus it comes about that a revival of the idea of worship has inevitably shown itself by the quickening of those arts which aid worship. Architecture first of all. Here, as has been said above, the debt which England owes to the Revival is easily seen. Church architecture has risen from its ashes. The English Reformation produced in its first two stages no new churches: the classes enriched with the spoils of the Abbey lands and the funds of the Guilds were too greatly occupied in building their own new houses to find time to build churches. The Laudian Revival produced a few new churches in its early days, and its great architect in its last period was Sir Christopher Wren. But from Wren's death until the Revival of the last century church architecture was at a standstill. The Anglo-Catholic Revival inspired not only a desire to build churches, it inspired artists capable of building them. The names of four men particularly stand out; first in time, that of William Butterfield, who, born in 1814, lived until 1900. Butterfield was from its beginning a devoted disciple of the Anglo-Catholic Revival, and his work, as Mr. Paul Waterhouse has said, "cannot be considered apart from the inner spirit of the Church Revival." Butterfield's work can be seen in the restoration of S. Augustine's College, Canterbury, in 1845, and in the famous London churches that he built--All Saints', Margaret Street, and, a little later, S. Alban's, Holborn. Keble College, Oxford, is his work. That Butterfield had strange eccentricities in the use of colours cannot be denied, but to fasten on that defect and to ignore the noble proportions of his churches and their majestic design is to blind oneself to true beauty.
John Loughborough Pearson, who was almost exactly Butterfield's contemporary, was an artist of equal if not higher genius. He has enriched London with three noble churches: S. Augustine's, Kilburn, in the north; S. John's, Red Lion Square, in the centre; and S. Peter's, Vauxhall, in the south-west. S. Michael's, Croydon, is another fine example of his genius, which reached its highest expression in Truro Cathedral.
George Edmund Street, who died at the age of fifty-seven in 1881, was another architect of genius who was profoundly influenced by the Revival. He designed Cuddesdon Theological College for Bishop S. Wilberforce in 1853, and his, too, are the splendid buildings of the Convent of S. Margaret, East Grinstead. For this last work he refused any fee. His most famous public work is the Royal Courts of Justice in the Strand, the only public building in London, we believe, to bear upon it the figure of our Lord; and Street, too, has enriched England with some splendid churches--S. Mary Magdalene, Paddington, in London, and in the provinces All Saints', Clifton, S. Peter's, Bournemouth, and some eight or ten exquisite churches on Sir Tatton Sykes's estates in the Yorkshire Wolds. Street was a life-long Anglo-Catholic, and so too was the not less famous Royal Academician, George Frederick Bodley, who, like Street, had been partly trained in the office of Sir Gilbert Scott. Bodley built the churches of S. Michael's, Brighton (now the south aisle of the present church), and S. Martin's, Scarborough, and the church and conventual buildings of the Society of S. John the Evangelist at Cowley, and he learned not only to build but to decorate his churches. The richness of his decoration of choirs and sanctuaries and altars brought back to English churches a wealth of gold and colour they had not known for three centuries. Side by side with Bodley as a decorator of English churches, though specially famous for his skill in stained glass, was Charles Earner Kempe, who, ten years younger than Bodley, died at the age of seventy in the same year, 1907. Kempe's life and work was entirely inspired by the Anglo-Catholic Revival. There is scarcely an important church in England which cannot show its "Kempe window," and Kempe worked not only in glass, but in the precious metals as well, and designs of rare beauty for chalices and vestments, and other ornaments, flowed from his richly stored mind. The two brothers Edmund and John Dando Sedding, both pupils of G. E. Street, were, like him, Anglo-Catholics and architects of distinction. Edmund Bedding, who was a considerable musician as well as an architect, died when only thirty-two in 1868, and his churches are chiefly to be found in Cornwall; but his younger brother survived him until 1891, and his genius is attested by such churches as the Church of our Most Holy Redeemer, Clerkenwell, S. Clement's, Bournemouth, and Holy Trinity, Sloane Street, S.W. (which he did not live to finish).
Masters like these have trained others and inspired them not only with love for their art, but with that consecration of it to the work of the Church of Christ in England which was a new thing in English life. Had there been no Anglo-Catholic Revival the genius of Butterfield, of Pearson, of Street, and of Bodley and Kempe would have remained undeveloped certainly in the direction which it took, and English life would have been the poorer by the loss of works of art which are to-day among its treasures. This outburst of restoration and creative genius was evoked and inspired by the Anglo-Catholic Revival. The old parish churches up and down the country were the creation of the Catholic spirit; in un-Catholic hands they had ceased to do their proper work, they became atrophied and began to fall into disuse and decay. One thing only could restore them, the restoration of the spirit of devotion, of Christian and Catholic devotion, which had originally inspired their building. That spirit had for generations been dormant in the Church of England, it awoke in 1833 and it possessed the minds of the great artists whose names we have mentioned. The revival of Gothic architecture, which in fact began a few years before the Anglo-Catholic Revival, would no doubt have inspired some work from an antiquarian and historical standpoint. And the leader of that revival was unquestionably the famous A. W. Pugin (1812-52), who seceded from the English Church at about the time that the Anglo-Catholic Revival was beginning. Pugin certainly led the Gothic revival in England, but save in two or three cases his work was done for Roman Catholics, and so far as the English Church is concerned his influence was on the historical and antiquarian side. And without the religious revival it may safely be said that it would have done little.
The revival of Catholic truth was the fire which kindled the flame, not only in the great artists but in the hearts of those who found the money for their work. The Methodist and the Evangelical Revivals did not lack generous givers, and they too, certainly the Methodists, have been responsible for not a few buildings up and down England. But their buildings were not such as, by their form and proportions, to uplift the beholder. Opponents of the Catholic Revival in the early days set their faces and raised their voices sternly against this development. Dean Close, in 1844, preached and published a sermon, "The Restoration of Churches is the Restoration of Popery," and he declared in a further treatise in 1853 that "the architecture of our cathedrals and old parish churches was Popish; was designed and adapted for Mass-houses, not for hearing and reading of God's Word: but for ceremonies, processions, and solemn operas; they are, therefore, ill-adapted for Protestant congregational services." Dr. R. W. Dale, in his famous sermon on "The Evangelical Revival," preached in 1879, makes a like point, though, it need hardly be said, he makes it in a far more scholar-like and Christian fashion. "The Evangelical clergy," he says, "thought nothing about restoring 'churches'; it was their business to restore men to God. It did not occur to them that heavy galleries and high-backed pews were ugly, if only they were crowded with men and women eager to listen to the Gospel. The portentous 'three deckers' from which they preached did not provoke any hostile criticism among their hearers; it mattered nothing in what kind of a pulpit the preacher stood if he could only tell them the way of salvation. To spend money in scraping columns of Purbeck marble which had been covered with whitewash, or in filling windows with painted glass, would have seemed to many of them an odd way of glorifying God, and work of this kind would have contributed nothing to the depth of their devotion. I am not saying," he adds, "whether they were right or wrong." But he goes on to say that the Evangelical Revival "fears rather than welcomes the awe and solemnity which are produced by the wonderful work of the architects of the Middle Ages." "Naturally" he concludes wit a sort of relief, "most of the attempts of Evangelical Nonconformists at 'ecclesiastical architecture' have been fortunate failures; and we all fail alike--Methodists, Baptists, and Independents. No matter what knowledge we think we have on our building committees, no matter what architect we employ, we never get quite the right thing. And a real success would be a portent." In this connection it is worth recalling how Dale's own principles seem to have undergone a change from dislike to something akin to appreciation of the Anglo-Catholic Revival. Six years after the preaching of that sermon Dale was at the centre of the movement for building a Nonconformist college in Oxford. The building was entrusted to an architect whose art was instinct with the principles of the Anglo-Catholic Revival, Mr. Basil Champneys, and soon Dale himself was busy suggesting figures to adorn the chapel. Naturally he was eager to include Protestant and Puritan divines, but he was not less eager about S. Augustine and S. Athanasius and other Catholics.
An earlier generation, possibly Dr. Dale himself in his hot youth, would have spoken sternly about "graven images." But Mansfield College and its chapel arose, and form a beautiful and striking group of buildings which suggests neither British nor Continental Protestantism, but the influence of the Anglo-Catholic Revival. The same criticism applies to Manchester New College, which stands in Oxford next door to Mansfield. It is a Unitarian foundation, but its buildings, and especially its chapel, have been built in the style which is wholly and entirely Christian, and stained glass of the most beautiful and elaborate type fills its chapel windows. And these "portents," if portents they be, are not alone. English Dissent has everywhere been influenced by this new spirit which animated the Anglo-Catholic Revival. The men who seceded to Rome, like Faber, Ward, and even Newman himself, reacted against this restoration; they, rightly, felt it to be the product of Anglo-Catholicism. For them the classical style was the ideal, and the Brompton Oratory and churches after the Italian manner spoke to them of Catholicism pure and undented. English art has not responded to their leading in church architecture. It is the Anglo-Catholic Revival which, in its work of restoring to Englishmen the Faith of their forefathers, has begun by restoring to them those houses of God which that Faith built. So much any one can see as he goes about England, but let him reflect also on the generosity which accomplished this result.
No Acts of Parliament such as those as were required to rebuild S. Paul's Cathedral after the Great Fire and to build churches in the great towns after the Napoleonic wars were needed to furnish the means for this work. The funds for it came from those whose hearts God had touched in the Anglo-Catholic Revival. Sometimes there were great benefactors like Mr. Beresford Hope and Lord Beauchamp and Sir Tatton Sykes; Sir Tatton spent, it is said, £1,500,000 in church restoration and rebuilding. And there were the Talbots in Glamorgan, and others. But much of the money has come from humbler folk, from men and women who caught the fire and who, once their lives were lighted by it, resolved to make God's worship a thing of glory and of beauty. That witness remains, and English people can point with a just pride to this splendid tide of generosity which was stirred in a materialistic age by the teaching of the Anglo-Catholic Revival.
MUSIC Architecture is but one of the arts that serve the worship of God on earth. Music is a handmaid of that worship. And here again the Revival came to redeem public worship from the dinginess and dreariness which had fallen upon it. The ordinary church-goer of today has probably no conception of the difference which the Anglo-Catholic Revival has made in this respect. "Hymns of any kind," as Mr. G. R. Prynne says in the passage already quoted, "were not considered orthodox or correct in those days," i.e. in the period before the Oxford Movement.
Hymn singing was a feature of the Methodist Revival, and to a less degree it marked the Evangelicals in the Church of England; for that very reason it was regarded by the "ordinary" Churchman at the beginning of the nineteenth century as "unorthodox" and eccentric. Indeed there were not very many hymns to sing, save those of the Wesleys and Cowper and Newton, and they would sound "peculiar" to those who were not Evangelicals. There had been no attempt to unlock the treasury of the ancient hymns of the Church; they still remained, except for the Veni Creator in the Ordinal, untranslated. Reginald Heber in 1820 had tried to induce the leading bishops to authorize his MS. collection of hymns, urging that since hymns were being used in church it was better to regulate what was reckoned an irregularity, but Archbishop Manners-Sutton and Bishop Howley (then of London) refused the authorization. The Revival of 1833 made startling changes. It produced great hymn-writers, it inspired a new zeal for Church music, and it altered the place of music in worship, for with it a choral service returned to English parish churches. Church people of all shades arc now so used to an allowance of three hymns at Mattins and Evensong on Sunday, canticles and Psalms sung, versicles and responses intoned, and voluntaries on the- organ at the beginning and end of the service, that few of them realize that this now normal standard of Sunday worship is a result of the Anglo-Catholic Revival. In most of the English cathedral churches, it is true, and in some few college chapels, the tradition of music sung at the choir offices survived at the period before the Revival, Psalms and canticles were chanted and anthems sung. In a very few town churches, as at S. Anne's, Manchester, in 1828, there was a similar use. Thus the author of Reminiscences of Forty Years witnessed in 1868: "In my father's church the Te Deum and canticles were given with the full burst of the choir, and powerful instrumental accompaniment." But Manchester, as he adds, was even then celebrated for its concerts, and few other towns were as musical. The fact that the use of music in the ordinary service of parish churches in England was a change due to the Catholic Revival can be seen by the opposition which it first encountered and by the names of the Church musicians whose lives and works are part of its story.
Newman was himself a musician, and at Littlemore he spent much pains on training the choir. Another early follower of the Revival, Frederick Oakeley, Fellow of Balliol, Prebendary of Lichfield and Incumbent of Margaret Street Chapel in London from 1839 to 1845 (when he seceded), was, like Newman, a musician, and the musical services at the Margaret Chapel soon became famous. A great ecclesiastic, then Archdeacon of Surrey but destined to become in the next year Bishop of Oxford, Samuel Wilberforce, went to Evensong there on a Sunday in May, 1844. He disliked the sermon, but he wrote, "the singing beautiful; one Old Version Psalm to an old Gregorian tune, quite marvellously beautiful." Some three years later, in 1847, Benjamin Webb noted that at the Margaret Chapel there was "a complete musical Mass--the Commandments, Epistle, Gospel, Preface, etc., all sung to the ancient music." He declared that "there has been nothing so solemn since the Reformation," which was possibly true, but his foreboding that "it may never be able to be done again" has proved ludicrously false. For other churches caught the fire, notably S. Paul's, Knightsbridge, and its district church, S. Barnabas', Pimlico. This revival provoked strong opposition. The Bishop of London (Dr. Blomfield), in deference to Protestant feeling, stopped in great measure the choral service at the parish church, and had ordered it to be given up at S. Barnabas', but here the much-enduring Catholic laity interfered. The priest-in-charge (the Rev. James Skinner) tells how he "honestly tried to obey the Bishop, but," he says, "my first attempt at saying instead of singing the versicles was received by the congregation with so loud and determined a burst of song in the responses, that I felt obliged to go to the Bishop and tell him plainly that if choral service was to be discontinued at S. Barnabas', I must decline to have any responsibility for keeping order there. The people were determined to assert and use the liberty given them in the Prayer Book. I told him so distinctly, and the Bishop did not persevere." To S. Barnabas', Pimlico, came many visitors to the Great Exhibition of 1851. Most, perhaps, came out of curiosity, to see the type of worship which was so much spoken against. The result was startling. The visitors who came to mock returned strongly impressed with what they had seen and heard, and they formed a new notion of Prayer Book worship. From that time forward the type of worship offered to God in the churches of the Catholic Revival in London became the end towards which many earnest Church folk sought to attain. Cathedral services undoubtedly gave an impetus to the movement, but the fact that the normal town church and most country churches to-day have surpliced choirs who sing the responses and chant the Psalms is due to the example set by the churches of the Anglo-Catholic Revival in London and elsewhere in the period from 1839 to 1855. Many middle-aged persons can remember a time when the idea of singing the Psalms and arraying the men and boys of the choir in surplices was regarded as a Popish innovation. To-day the absence of such arrangements, not their presence, provokes comment. In the visible Church, as the Twenty-sixth Article declares, the evil is ever mingled with the good, and though English life is richer and better for this more beautiful and reverent rendering of the Church's offering of praise, there are drawbacks to be set on the other side of the account. A too close attempt to introduce the musical services of cathedrals into parish churches, an undue attention to the music with an exaggeration of the place, both of choir and organist, are some of them. But by comparison, these are slight disadvantages. For English Church people are learning that in God's worship only the best is tolerable, and they are recovering the ancient beauty and rediscovering the power of the Lord's service enriched, not merely with outward reverence, but with the beauty of Christian song. "When they had sung an hymn" marked the close of the first Christian Eucharist, and church after church in the Anglican Communion is each year showing its congregation that there is a yet more beautiful form of the Lord's service than the form which our Roman brethren call "Low Mass." The astonishment caused by the revival of sung Eucharists can be partly gauged by a reminiscence of the 'seventies of the last century. Ely Cathedral was being reopened after restoration, and Church people of the diocese were invited to attend the services. These began with a "choral celebration of the Holy Communion." Lord Charles Russell, a resident in the diocese, receiving the invitation, was astounded to read of a "choral celebration." "What in the world is that?" he asked in astonishment, "Do they sing the words of Administration?" His son, the late Mr. G. W. E. Russell, hastened to explain that those words were practically the only part of the service that was not sung.
This revolution, for it was little less, of a "sung" for a "said" service could only have been accomplished by the aid of the musicians of the Revival. Foremost among them was Richard Redhead, who, born in 1820, lived until 1901. He published his Plainsong Psalter, Laudes Diurnae, in 1843, when he was organist at the Margaret Chapel, and he followed this up with his Church Hymn Tunes in 1853. Thomas Helmore, who became connected with S. Mark's College, Chelsea, in 1842, made the chapel services there famous by his revival of the Plainsong music. More widely known are the names of Sir Frederick Gore Ouseley and J. B. Dykes, both of them priests. Sir Frederick was a curate at S. Barnabas', Pimlico, at the time of the troubles there, and later founded a collegiate church at Tenbury, in Herefordshire, which was designed to raise the standard of choral worship in the English Church. This college, it is believed, was the first foundation of a collegiate church in England since the confiscations of the sixteenth century, for the reconstitutions of Manchester, Ripon, and Southwell under Elizabeth and James I respectively were partial restorations, not original foundations. Ouseley's anthems, chants, and carols are well known; his best-known hymn tunes are those set to "The radiant morn hath passed away" and "Sweet Saviour, bless us ere we go." Dr. Dykes is famous for his popular hymn tunes, which largely made the fortune of Hymns, Ancient and Modern, published in 1861. Fifty-five of the tunes in that book were his, among them "Holy, Holy, Holy," "The King of Love my Shepherd is," "Jesu, Lover of my soul," and "Nearer, my God, to Thee."
Dr. W. H. Monk, who lived from 1823 to 1889, was a devoted lay follower of the Revival, some of whose tunes, notably that set to "Abide with me," are in most collections. He had a great share in the making of Hymns, Ancient and Modern, for he edited its music. And Sir John Stainer, who made the music of S. Paul's Cathedral famous, played a large part in this side of the Revival, for he had been trained at Ouseley's college at Tenbury and was at Oxford a pupil of Dr. Liddon, who brought him to S. Paul's in 1872. There has been a considerable reaction of late years against the music of Dykes and Stainer, but it is still very widely popular, and, without question, to the Anglo-Catholic Movement England owes a real revival in Church music, by which it is richer by far than it was before. Here, again, Dr. R. W. Dale is a valuable if unwilling witness. In his famous sermon on the Evangelical Revival he recorded that Evangelicals had then become "weary or ashamed of the music" of their fathers, and were singing the strains of musicians who were strangers to the Evangelical tradition. "I often wonder how it is," he said, "that we have not created musicians of our own." The earlier music which was being abandoned, he admitted, could not be retained, but, he added with real pathos, "as I listen to much of the singing which has become common among us during the last quarter of a century, I feel that there is something in it which is foreign to the religious traditions which have come to us from our fathers, and I say to myself that these are not the songs of my own land." Thus had the musical revival which was part of the Anglo-Catholic Movement begun to affect Nonconformist worship.
From hymn tunes to hymns is a short step, and by its hymns the Anglo-Catholic Revival has added enormously to the reality of worship and to the appeal of religion. The Movement began practically with a burst of song, for John Keble's Christian Year, first published in 1827, was its herald. Among Keble's hymns, or rather poems, are some of the best-loved in the English language, "New every morning is the Love" and "Sun of my Soul, Thou Saviour dear." Newman's "Lead, kindly Light," written in 1833, just before the Revival formally began, unquestionably belongs to it, though his almost equally well-known "Praise to the Holiest in the height" was written in his Roman Catholic period.
F. W. Faber, whose hymns are sung by English-speaking Christians of practically all denominations, though for a time a Tractarian, wrote all his hymns after becoming a Roman Catholic, and thus they can hardly be reckoned among the results of the Anglo-Catholic Revival. But the name of John Mason Neale stands without any such qualification, for his faith in the English Church knew no wavering. His special genius lay in translating the old hymns of the Church; "Jerusalem the Golden" is a small part only of his exquisite rendering of the great poem of Bernard of Morlaix. "O happy band of pilgrims" and "Art thou weary," nominally translations from the Greek, are really Neale's original work.
As the Revival grew so its hymns became more frequent. Dr. Bright's two hymns for Holy Communion, "And now, O Father" and "Once, only once, and once for all "are among the treasures of the English Church, and the list of hymns and translations which came from the followers of the Revival requires a pamphlet, not a paragraph. How many worshippers realize that "Onward, Christian Soldiers," "Now the day is over" (first printed in the Church Times in 1865), "Daily, daily sing the praises" (which also appeared in the Church Times in the same year), and "Through the night of doubt and sorrow," are the work of that most loyal follower of the Revival, the venerable and distinguished Rector of Lew Trenchard, the Rev. Sabine Baring-Gould, who died in 1924 in his ninetieth year? "The King of Love my Shepherd is," "There is a blessed home," and some thirty other hymns were written by the Rev. Sir H. W. Baker, Bart., the first editor of Hymns, Ancient and Modern; "Jesu, meek and lowly" and "Jesu, my Lord, my God, my All," by the Rev. Henry Collins, who later became a Roman Catholic; "Jesu, meek and gentle," by the Rev. G. R. Prynne--these are familiar hymns taken at random from the very great number which have sprung from the Anglo-Catholic Revival. It is common to emphasize the debt owed by English religion to the hymns of the Wesleyan and the Evangelical Revivals, and it is just and right so to do. But far more rarely does the splendid work done in this field by the singers of the Anglo-Catholic Revival receive its due notice. Yet if from almost any modern collection of hymns those written by the followers of the Anglo-Catholic Revival were removed, the collection would be poor indeed.
LITERATURE The Anglo-Catholic Revival began in a University; its leaders were not only earnestly religious men, they were also scholars, and it was inevitable that in literature the Revival should leave a mark. Is English literature the better for the Anglo-Catholic Revival? What are its fruits in that field? The works of John Henry Newman, written while he was a convinced Anglo-Catholic and a leader of the Movement, are the first and obvious answer. Men may agree or disagree with the argument of Tract 90, but there is no question about the sermons preached at S. Mary's, Oxford, between 1833 and 1843. "There had been nothing like them in the English pulpit," wrote the late Dean of Winchester, who describes them with the appreciation of a man of letters when he says (in the Cambridge History of English Literature, vol. xii), "Their English is simple, clear and refreshing; answering to every changing thought of the speaker's mind. The thought is as limpid as the language." Newman was one of the great masters of English prose, and his Anglican treatises are literature as well as theology or philosophy or history. His tradition was carried on by his friend and disciple, Dean Church. In Church's sermons as well as in his literary and historical works, there is a clearness and simplicity and a literary truthfulness comparable only to that of his old leader. English prose is the richer for the work of Newman and of Church, from the point of view of literary style alone. Newman had the poet's fire within him, though his poetical gift was little used, and it reached its height (in the "Dream of Gerontius") after he left the English Church. John Keble was a sacred poet whose verse will never be forgotten, and Isaac Williams, who was one of the original Revival, was a true poet as well as a prose writer of distinction. John Keble's sermons and treatises and letters, like the delightful "Commentaries" of Isaac Williams, have all the directness and simplicity, the austerity, indeed, which was the atmosphere in which the Movement grew.
Dr. Pusey's sermons and treatises are in all theological libraries, their deep devotion as well as their great learning made them of first-rate importance in their own day, and they are important still. There are passages of great solemnity and arresting appeal in them, but their literary style it not the style of Newman and Church. It was Dr. Pusey's known life and character as much as the weight of his learning which made him, as Lord Chancellor Selborne said, "a power in the Church of England greater than Archbishop or Bishop for more than half a century." His influence extended far outside the limits of the Church of England. We have before quoted the eminent Congregationalist divine and preacher, Dr. R. W. Dale; no one, probably, has had a wiser or deeper devotion to the Evangelical Revival than he, but after reading the first two volumes of Dr. Pusey's Life, he wrote, "I closed the book with a deep impression of the nobleness and massiveness of his nature, and feeling more than ever that the power of God was in him." That judgement on Dr. Pusey's life may well serve as a true judgement on Dr. Pusey's writings.
John Keble, Isaac Williams, and Newman were poets--so also was F. W. Faber; but a name of the next generation of the Revival, that of Christina Rossetti, is not less famous. To her "the Catholic theology of the English Church was the very breath of life," it was the inspiration of all her poetry, and her poetry has set her among the writers of English literature. The Revival has not only added to our poets. Strange as it seems, this movement, begun by dons in a University, has given its message also through tales and ctories, and the Anglo-Catholic Revival began the long series of religious novels. The influence exercised upon some classes of English society by the novels of Charlotte M. Yonge was exceedingly wide, and Miss Yonge was the spiritual child of Mr. Keble. Through her stories the message and the spirit of the Revival reached regions inaccessible to the "Tracts for the Times," or to the more formal treatises of the theologians. The novels of Miss Sewell were hardly less popular, and those of the accomplished F. E. Paget, Rector of Elford, reached a wide public. Dr. J. M. Neale, too, was a first-rate writer of romance, and the stories of William Gresley, A. D. Crake, and William Adams were adventures in a like direction. These last helped boys and girls, as well as their elders, to realize the high adventure of Churchmanship, its glories and its heroism, as well as its demands. And this was a new thing in English life, for no English school of writers had ever before made Churchmanship picturesque. This fruit of the Revival is unquestioned; the characters of multitudes of young people were strengthened, and a fresh direction given to their ideals by such books. Its formal results cannot be tabulated precisely, because most of those who knew this influence are now elderly men and women who have lived humble, self-denying lives far from, the glare of the limelight.
SOCIAL WORK The effects of this literary side of the Revival are, as has been said, diffusive and hard to analyse, but there are other results which are more easily seen. To the Anglo-Catholic Revival is due the attempt to bring religion to bear on social questions, both in thought and in action. In characteristically English fashion, indeed, the action seems to have preceded the thinking. In July, 1856, the famous Mission Settlement at the London Docks in the parish of S. George-in-the-East was begun. Its story is imperishably associated with the name of Charles Lowder, but its importance for this survey is that it began the movement which has gradually developed into the "Settlements" which have during the last fifty years been planted in the slum areas of most great cities. The S. George's Mission, as it was called, blazed the trail for them, its success encouraged others, but it should be remembered that it was no mere philanthropic or humanitarian motive that started that remarkable development in English social work. Its motive lay in the supernatural truth believed and taught by the men of the Catholic Revival. The foundation of S. Saviour's Church in the slums of Leeds by Dr. Pusey in 1845 had had the same aim, but it had little chance of realizing it in the midst of constant theological controversy, and a House of Charity in Soho had begun its work on more modest lines a little earlier, but it was the S. George's Mission which began the great attempt to bring life and light into the vast district of East London, and in that attempt priests and laymen and Sisters of Mercy were united. They went down and lived among the poor. Oxford House, Cambridge House, the great College and School Missions, not in London only, have all sprung from that effort of the Anglo-Catholic Revival in 1856.
ECONOMIC PROBLEMS Later came the attempt to bring the intellectual powers of the Movement to bear on economic problems, and here the Christian Socialism of F. D. Maurice and Charles Kingsley had been already in the field. But Maurice, though certainly not a Tractarian, was fundamentally at one with the leaders of the Anglo-Catholic Revival in his profound belief in the Visible Church, its ministry and its sacraments, and his teaching has in fact done much to widen and humanize the Movement. That the Christian is bound to concern himself with economic and social problems was emphasized afresh by a later generation of Anglo-Catholics like Dr. Henry Scott Holland and Bishop Gore, and the foundation of the Christian Social Union, due to Dr. Holland in 1889, brought home to many a too complacent Churchman his duty with regard to social and economic evils to which he had formerly hardly given a thought. This development was intellectually a direct and logical consequence of the principles of the Anglo-Catholic Revival. Its first leaders had to set to work to teach the nature of the Church as a Divine Society, to insist on its supernatural claims, its creeds, ministry, and sacraments. It was the work of a later generation to explain the moral and social obligations of this revived and quickened Churchmanship which had already shown themselves, in fact, in the work of the Anglo-Catholics in the slums of the great cities.
THE RELIGIOUS LIFE One good result of the Revival, which even its sternest critics are wont to allow, is the restoration of the community life in the Church of England. The idea of that life had never died out since the last of the old communities was dissolved at the beginning of Queen Elizabeth's reign; indeed, three or four attempts at reviving it were made before the Anglo-Catholic Revival of 1833. Very early in the Movement, in 1839, this revival suggested itself to Dr. Pusey and to Mr. Newman independently. In 1841 the first Anglican Sister dedicated herself to the Religious life, but for several years there was no community which she could enter. In 1844 the first definite Sisterhood was founded in the Diocese of London in the parish of Christ Church, Albany Street; in 1847 Canon Chamberlain founded at Oxford the Community of S. Thomas the Martyr, which is now the oldest community of the Revival; in 1848 began the Society of the Holy Trinity, of Devonport, under Miss Sellon, and the Community of S. Mary the Virgin at Wantage. Within a few years sprang up what are now the great Sisterhoods of All Saints, of Clewer, of S. Margaret, East Grinstead, and the first in the Northern Province, viz. that of S. Peter, Horbury; seven more were founded in the 'sixties, six more in the 'seventies, one in the 'eighties, five in the 'nineties, and so the revival has gone on. It met at first with fierce opposition, but the kind of opposition offered to it could not resist its spiritual force, and now even Erastian and "Liberal" Churchmen (like the late Mr. Warre-Cornish in his English Church in the Nineteenth Century, published in 1910) are constrained to admit that so far as the revival of Sisterhoods goes, "the High Church clergy and laity (deserve the credit of having set in motion and maintained an organization of great efficacy and most beneficent spiritual power, which works with untiring energy against the evils concentrated in our great towns." The tone is patronizing and the praise faint, but it is wrung from a stern opponent. The revival of the community life for men has been slower, and so far as results go it has been remarkable rather for its quality than its quantity. The Community of S. John the Evangelist, Cowley, founded in 1866 by Richard Meux Benson, is established in four continents; that of the Resurrection, at Mirfield, founded by Bishop Gore in 1892, and that of the Sacred Mission at Kelham, founded by Father H. H. Kelly in 1891, not to mention the Society of the Divine Compassion, founded in 1894, are names honoured throughout the English Church. An attempt was made by Father Ignatius as early as 1863 to revive the Rule of S. Benedict, but his community ceased to exist soon after his death. A more successful attempt to revive the Rule began in 1898 with the special sanction of Archbishop Temple, and this community now has its home at Nashdom Abbey. What England owes to these communities in raising the standard of English life it is again impossible at all accurately to estimate. One or two results are obvious on the surface: English Church people have become accustomed to the idea of the Religious life as being part of the normal working of the Church of God; English people have become accustomed to the sight of the Religious habit, so that it is almost impossible now for a Sister of Mercy to be shouted at in the streets as "Old Mother Nightcap," or for a priest in his cassock to be described by a diocesan bishop as "a parson in petticoats"! But the revived community life has done work that no human judgement can appraise in the spheres of rescue work and of education.
EDUCATION Education in England, indeed, owes to the Anglo-Catholic Revival a real debt which it is well to put on record. Neither the Methodist nor the Evangelical Revivals in their prime gave England one single public school or college. But just as the Anglo-Catholic Revival has contributed to the stream of national life its artists and musicians and theologians and poets and preachers and social workers and religious, so it has produced its founders and educationalists.
Pre-eminent among them stands Dr. Nathaniel Woodard, who died in his eightieth year in 1891, and was, therefore, a contemporary with the Revival from its beginnings. When a poorly paid and devoted young priest, ministering in Bethnal Green, he had been removed from his post by the Bishop of London in 1843 for teaching the doctrine of the Church about confession and absolution. "Your doctrine is erroneous," said the Bishop, "and your being so excellent a person makes you more dangerous." Mr. Woodard produced Bishop Bull as an authority for his statements; the Bishop retorted that Bishop Bull was not Woodard's bishop, and the zealous young priest was compelled to retire from his cure, though he had a wife and children dependent on him. Such harshness might have daunted the spirit of a lesser man, it did not daunt the spirit of Woodard, and five years later, in 1848, he published what is now a famous pamphlet, A Plea for the Middle Classes, and followed it up with a second appeal in 1852, Public Schools for the Middle Classes. His point was that there were great Church schools for the higher classes and National schools for the poor, but that the middle classes were practically omitted. He was a man of large designs, he dreamed of planting in each of the five sections into which he divided England a school for each of the three social grades which form the middle class. His work was astonishingly successful; in 1853 he opened the first of his great schools, S. John's College, Hurstpierpoint, at a cost of £50,000. The yet more famous S. Nicholas' College, Lancing, followed in 1854. S. Saviour's College at Shoreham was removed to Ardingly in 1870, and the southern group was complete. In the Midlands, S. Chad's College, Denstone, which cost over £70,000, built largely by the generous Anglo-Catholic, Sir Percival Heywood, was opened in 1873. S. Oswald's College, Ellesmere, followed in 1884, and S. Cuthbert's, Worksop, in 1895. King Alfred's College at Taunton was opened in 1880, and another public school, All Saints', Bloxham, founded by a follower of the Revival, the Rev. P. R. Egerton in 1860, at a cost of £25,000, was in 1896 handed over to the Society founded by Woodard. These were schools for boys. But there were also schools for girls. S. Michael's, Bognor, in the south, those at Abbots Bromley in the Midlands, S. Winifred's, Bangor, in Wales, Queen Margaret's at Scarborough, and Queen Ethelburgs's at Harrogate, are of the same foundation, and attest the soundness of the founder's plan. Before his death it is reckoned that Dr. Woodard had raised over half a million pounds for his great scheme.
Dr. Woodard was not alone. S. Andrew's College at Bradfield, Berkshire, owes its foundation in 1850 to the Anglo-Catholic Revival. Its founder, Thomas Stevens, the "squarson" of the parish, had been a pupil of Newman at Oriel, and had caught the fire of the Revival, and to further its work he spent himself and his fortune in founding this well-known public school.
S. Peter's College at Radley owes its existence to the same motive. Its founder, William Sewell, was broadly in sympathy with the Movement, and when his financial incapacity threatened the college's existence, it was saved by the generosity of some laymen of the Revival, especially by the first Lord Addington. To have added Lancing, Radley, and Bradfield, to say nothing of Hurstpierpoint and Denstone, to the public schools of England, is not a slight achievement. Nor were the poorer classes neglected. It was the care of every Tractarian incumbent to see that his parish schools were efficient, and the time and labour and money were lavished by the followers of the Movement on this object. It was unshowy work, and it has never been chronicled, but part of its record can be read in the biography of any follower of the Oxford Movement who was a parish priest. To build and rebuild their schools, to found colleges for training Church men and women to teach in them, for this the men and women of the Catholic Revival denied themselves not merely luxuries and comforts, but in many cases almost necessities. Part of what they have accomplished can be seen by any one who reads the biography of such a typical follower of the Revival as the late Canon C. E. Brooke, Vicar of S. John the Divine, Kennington. Low Churchmen and Evangelicals and Liberals may have laboured in many cases with equal zeal, but outside Lancashire the results were not so obvious, for to the Latitudinarians, and in a less degree to the Evangelicals, the teaching permitted by the Cowper-Temple clause of the Education Act of 1870 was not objectionable. "Let the children go to the Baptist Sunday school on Sunday afternoons," said an easy-going Low Church rector in a south country parish in this century, "they will learn their Bible there, and it will do them no harm." The followers of the Anglo-Catholic Revival could not play so fast and loose with the principles of the Church; in their view Christians will only come together by Baptists being good Baptists and by Church people being good and instructed Churchmen. And here we approach a fruit of the Revival which was somewhat grudgingly admitted by one who was among its keenest, cleverest, and most influential opponents, the famous Master of Balliol, Professor Benjamin Jowett. Having criticized the Revival with considerable dialectical skill, Professor Jowett added (in an appendix to W. Ward's W. G. Ward and the Oxford Movement), "Nevertheless they rendered a considerable service to the English Church in making us regard our Catholic brethren in a kindlier and more sympathetic spirit. Henceforward the Church of Rome was to be regarded no longer as Antichrist, but in a manner more in accordance with Christian charity and with the truth of history." This witness, as S. Paul said of the statement of the Cretan poet, is true. The Anglo-Catholic Revival has slowly dissolved the prejudices, the scandalous and iniquitous prejudices, which, since the days of Foxe's Book of Martyrs, and the perjuries of Titus Oates, have stained the minds of most English people. Much prejudice still remains among the ignorant, but much has disappeared. This is due to the Anglo-Catholic Revival, but not perhaps precisely to the set of causes to which Professor Jowett might have assigned it. Practical motives were continually uppermost in that shrewd mind, but here the causes were deeper. It was not the fact that eminent persons like Newman and Manning and Ward and Lord Ripon became Roman Catholics and succeeded in retaining the goodwill of their countrymen, as the Professor might have argued, it was because the Anglo-Catholic Revival had for its aim two objects--truth in history as in all other departments of life, and the reunion of the separated portions of the flock of Christ.
The Reformation legend of Foxe and Burnet received its death-blow from the historians of the Oxford Movement. Hurrell Froude began the work, hastily and savagely; his work was followed up more carefully but not less surely by Dr. S. R. Maitland, Bishop William Stubbs, and Freeman, and in a later generation Bishop Creighton and Aubrey Moore, and Dixon and Gairdner, not to mention Wakeman and eminent historians now living (who are certainly not followers of the Revival), have continued the exposure. Educated persons to-day are aware of the fact that the old anti-Roman Catholic abuse, and the old glorification of the sixteenth century reformers, is to a large extent untrue. The Anglo-Catholic Revival meant genuine historical criticism, and it is no longer possible for English people to celebrate, let us say, the Fifth of November with the gusto of an earlier day.
REUNION At the same time the Anglo-Catholic Revival has kept steadily before Church people the hope and the aim of the Unity of Christendom as part of our Lord's intention for His Church. From being an Anglo-Catholic "fad," the idea of a reunited Christendom is slowly becoming a serious and concrete aim for English Christians. Multitudes are yet entirely untouched by it, but it is there; and the old idea that Christendom is meant to be divided permanently into "Roman Catholics" and "Protestants" is slowly giving place to a wider and more Christian view. That this is a gain to English life and to English thought few would deny.
A FAILURE Certainly the Anglo-Catholic Revival has failed to influence English life in some directions. It has produced no great painters, for instance, though some distinguished artists like William Dyce (1806-64) and Charles Allston Collins, the brother of the more famous Wilkie Collins and son-in-law of Charles Dickens, were among its followers. Dyce's fresco paintings in the House of Lords and in All Saints', Margaret Street, and Collins's well-known picture, "Convent Thoughts," in the University Galleries at Oxford, attest their genius, but the fact remains that the development of painting in England was unaffected by the Movement. The Pre-Raphaelites were touched by it, but they developed on other lines. George Richmond, famous for his portraits, was indeed a loyal follower of the Revival; but he stood, in that as in other respects, almost alone among the artists of his day.
The explanation of this defect lies probably in the strength of English Puritanism in the earlier period of the Revival. Pictures in churches were then generally regarded as Popish, painting was not so directly connected with worship as were architecture and music, and the chilly atmosphere of English public opinion in that day effectually froze any development of painting inspired by the Anglo-Catholic Revival. Where there it no demand, supply, as a rule, ceases, for even painters have to live, and the genius which might have been devoted to sacred art flowed into other channels.
THE RENEWAL OF SPIRITUAL LIFE We have mentioned some of the more obvious and superficial benefits which England owes to the Anglo-Catholic Revival. The restored and beautiful churches, their more careful and devout services, their music and a certain dignity in the place of pomposity or slovenliness, these the eye and the ear can easily appreciate. More subtle but not less real are the effects of the Revival on literature. The stately buildings of public schools, the religious houses up and down England, Keble College at Oxford and Selwyn at Cambridge, the sight of Sisters of Mercy in the streets, and especially in the meaner and poorer streets: these, like the sound of the church bell daily in country as well as in town parishes, witness to a wealth of self-sacrifice and devotion which has ennobled English life by infusing new power into English religion. The ceremonial of public life has been affected by it, secular functions are more carefully performed, they are more stately and better ordered than they were a hundred or even fifty years ago. The historical and antiquarian learning of the Revival is at the root of this; but antiquarianism by itself, without the religious sanctions which the Revival gave, could never have produced this change in public feeling.
But the real work of the Revival and its greatest gifts to England lie deeper. It has changed the conception of the work of the Christian ministry, and the whole idea both of a bishop and of a priest has been altered in the minds of most Englishmen. The episcopate has been remodelled and the bishop of 1933 is a very different functionary from the wealthy and leisured and inaccessible prelate of a century ago. So, too, with the lower rank of the clergy; the clerical type of three generations ago is almost extinct, far more is expected of the parson to-day. He is expected to be a spiritual man, and he is most respected when in fact he knows his job. The ideal of gentlemanlike and genial incompetence is fading; it is the bishop of the type of Edward King and George Howard Wilkinson, parish priests like Arthur Stanton and Charles Lowder and Charles Edward Brooke, who have set a new standard or, rather, have revived an older one. And so with the laity of the Church, the standard has risen higher. More is expected of a Churchman than was expected a century ago. Nominal Churchmanship has not ceased, perhaps never will cease, but it becomes increasingly uncomfortable as the moral and spiritual obligations of the Churchmanship around it rise. In fact, the sincerity and the hatred of unreality and sham, which marked the Revival at first, have been slowly penetrating English religious life. The characteristic teachers of the Movement to-day are concerned not only to teach the truths of the Catholic Faith, but to moralize them, to show how they work out in everyday life. And there the lives of the leaders of the Revival, both clergy and laity, have been no less effective than their printed or spoken words. There has followed an increased respect for the Church and for religion; there is not the hatred and contempt for it which was fairly widely shown a century ago. Slowly the message of the Church has been seen to be not a message for one particular class in England--viz. the higher and the upper middle class. The classes which had been left to Nonconformity or left to themselves have heard the message and responded to it, and in many working-class parishes the Church is stronger by far than in richer and more comfortable districts.
The Anglo-Catholic Revival, by teaching the meaning of belief in the Holy Catholic Church, had to contend against two of the strongest ideas of the Victorian age, the belief in individualism which had proved superficially so successful in business, and the disbelief in the supernatural which had followed the great discoveries in natural science. The whole witness of the Revival was directly against those popular conceptions. To have preserved England from being submerged in the flood of a prosperous materialism has been to no small extent the work of a Revival which has steadily insisted on the truth and the reality of the Unseen. And, in the face of the scientific criticism of the Bible which came upon English religion in the nineteenth century, the Anglo-Catholic Revival has done work of supreme importance. It sprang in great part from the knowledge its leaders possessed of the storm that was coming from the new teaching and from their consciousness that English Christians were utterly unprepared for it. For English religion had come to be based upon a strong but not very intelligent Bibliolatry. Once the belief in verbal inspiration and the like was shaken, the religion of the Englishman would have no secure foundation, since it was theoretically based upon that authority alone.
The fact that that danger was met, and met successfully, is one of the greatest debts that the English people owes to the Catholic Revival. For its followers taught thoughtful men and women to realize that beside the witness of Holy Scripture there was also the concurrent witness of the Church, and that the Faith did not stand upon the testimony of Holy Scripture alone, but on the continuous witness of the Divine Society founded by the Lord. Some of the leaders of the Revival like Dr. Pusey and, later, Dr. Liddon fought the new criticism in detail, and, as it were, hand to hand; but it cannot be said that their efforts were very successful, and, in fact, the old views of the Bible have gone by the board. The effect of this upon Christianity in England would have been disastrous and catastrophic unless the Anglo-Catholic Revival had taught men that though "the Bible and the Bible only" might be "the religion of Protestants," yet it was not the religion of the Apostles nor of their successors in the Holy Catholic Church. "The Church to teach, the Bible to prove," a phrase made by Dr. Hook of Leeds, represents briefly the Anglo-Catholic teaching, and as that truth sank down into men's minds they could face without dismay the new discoveries which to their less-instructed fathers might have seemed subversive of revealed religion. Here again, as in its work in the moral sphere, and in its work in stone in the parish churches, the Movement was restoring--restoring a truth that had been forgotten and a proportion that had been lost; and for the result of that restoration every one who values the Christian revelation, if only for its effect on national character, must give thanks.
Other gains of the Revival, its heroic achievements in extending the kingdom of God in foreign lands, especially in Central Africa, India, and in Melanesia, and its persistence in holding steadily before Englishmen the heroic standard of the Christian life, it shares with the Revivals which have preceded it; but for a comprehensive judgement upon its broad effect on English life we turn to a man who was by temperament and conviction emphatically opposed to it, the eminent Nonconformist divine we have quoted before, Dr. Dale of Birmingham. "The blessing of God was in it," he said in his later years, "though we did not see it, and in a form they [i.e. the Tractarians] did not understand; in the lives and in the devotion of these men a new endowment of the Holy Spirit came into the life of England." That is a noble summary of the answer to the question, "What has the Anglo-Catholic Revival done for this country?" "A new endowment of the Holy Spirit came into the life of England."
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