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The writer deplores the general neglect of "all correct and primitive notions respecting the Church"; refers to ministers deriving their commission in succession from the apostolic source; and cites as a warning to schismatics the fate of Korah, whose crime was "his attempt to assume the priesthood in opposition' to the divine ordinance." So long as the Church retained its civil privileges under the protection of an aristocratic legislature from which all but its own members were at least nominally excluded, those who insisted on its supernatural basis were not likely to command attention; but their teaching acquired a new significance when the Church had lost its monopoly of public office and was even in danger of being disowned by the State; and this had been foretold by Bishop Jebb as early as 1814: "Perhaps a little of persecution, or of somewhat resembling persecution, may be providentially permitted to train up men with an attachment to the Church as a hierarchy as distinct from the State and as dignified only by its intrinsic excellence, by its venerable antiquity and by its apostolical institution.”

The Tractarians shrank with as great a horror as Daubeny from "the intoxicating cup of modern liberality"; but the more they developed their idea of the Church as a spiritual society, the less were they disposed to respect the social exclusiveness which characterised it as an Establishment. Froude spoke with contempt of prizes to tempt men into the Church and the whole train of stuff."1 Newman, in September 1833, told a friend who was leaving England that on his return he might find him and his associates "unflinching Radicals"; and, a few months later, he wrote to the same correspondent: "Those who live by the breath of State patronage, who think that the clergy must be gentlemen, and the Church must rest on the great, not the multitude, of course are desponding. Woe to the profane

1 Miss Guiney's Hurrell Froude, p. 118.

hands which rob us of privilege or possession! but they can do us no harm." 1

Tractarianism had none of the breadth and tolerance which characterised the riper High Churchmanship of an older school; but, unlike the Evangelical movement which influenced its growth, it was the fruit of genuine, though restricted, culture; and, considering the untrammelled conditions of its birth, one might have expected that it would adapt itself much sooner and much more largely than it has done to the critical spirit. We have seen that Newman was prepared rather to discontinue the Tracts than to subject them to official or collective supervision. The following words were written by Palmer half a century later; but, if his impressions at the time were accurately recalled, he may be thought to have foretold the influence for liberalism which Newman was to exert, not in the English Church, but as the father of Modernism in the Church of Rome: "It seemed to me that the unbounded freedom of speculation and argument which formed the basis of the system did not very well harmonise with the dogmatic and objective basis (?) upon which it rested; and that, as it was identical in essence with the spirit of the philosophic systems of the nineteenth century, so it might have the result of converting Christianity into another form of philosophy."

1 Letters, i. 454; ii. 35.

2 Newman had been brought up as an Evangelical, and Froude detected Methodism in Keble's Christian Year.—Autobiography of Isaac Williams, p. 22.

3 Consider the words of Chrysostom prefixed to Tract 34: "He who is duly strengthened in faith does not go so far as to require argument and reason for what is enjoined; but is satisfied with the tradition alone." This looks unpromising; but tradition as a record of human experience may well have been a more hopeful study than the juggling with texts in a historical vacuum which was the bane of Evangelicalism.

"

CHAPTER III

CHURCH AND DISSENT, 1834-1836

THE problem of ecclesiastical reform had a twofold aspect according as it was concerned with the internal economy of the Church or with the Church's relations to the community at large; and the latter question, being the more urgent, was the first to engage the attention of Parliament. The promoters of the Clerical Address and the Lay Declaration were naturally anxious to make their influence felt in this quarter. They were rather slow in mobilising their forces, for it was not till the summer of 1834 that the Church could be congratulated on its host of petitions." Some of these were against Disestablishment, but most of them were of a Tractarian complexion, deprecating "any change in the Church which can possibly injure or weaken her apostolical institutions and thereby betray her into the hands of her enemies." Meanwhile a great agitation was going on amongst the Dissenters for the completion of the process which had begun with the repeal of their political disabilities in 1828. The whole number of their petitions was not much larger than the total of those from the Church, but as many as 550 had been presented to the Commons before Easter; 1 and their principal demands were a general registration of births, deaths, and marriages, the right to baptise, marry, and bury according to their own forms, and admission to the Universities. It was

1 Commons' Journals, 1834.

urged, not only by Dissenters but by some Churchmen, that all these reforms should be conceded at once in 'one general and comprehensive measure "; 1 but the Government were as anxious to conciliate their opponents as to gratify their friends, and sought to make as easy as possible to the Church the descent from its privileged position.

A good example of this policy was the Dissenters' Marriage Bill introduced by Lord John Russell on February 25, 1834. This measure secured to Dissenters the legalisation of their rites; but these rites were to be performed in chapels licensed for the purpose, and then only on evidence, for which a fee must be paid, that the banns had been published in the parish church; and the minister of a licensed chapel was required to transmit his record of marriages every three months to the diocesan registrar. So qualified a boon was far from satisfying the Dissenters, who claimed that, like Jews and Quakers, they should have the right of celebrating their marriages wholly by and among themselves," and declared that they were placed " upon a footing inferior to their fellowsubjects by getting from another Church a rite which they should have from their own." The Bill was abandoned, but we shall find that a measure not liable to these objections became law in 1836.2

"

A less practical grievance of the Dissenters, but one which on account of its injustice they always put first, was their liability to Church rates. The annual amount of this tax was about £560,000, of which £250,000 was applied to the upkeep of edifices; and it appears to have been only for this purpose that payment could be legally enforced. Resistance had been growing since 1818, when church-building was subsidised at the cost

1 Hansard, xxi. 788.

* Ibid., xxi. 776, 784; xxii. 396. In 1830-1831 repairs of churches cost £248,000; organs and bells, £41,000; books and wine, £46,000; salaries of clerks and sextons, £126,000; and sundries, £184,000.-Hansard, xxii. 383.

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of the national exchequer; and it was fortunate for the Church that the Parish Vestry Act of the same year had given a plurality of votes to persons rated at not less than £50. Thus in the huge parish of Manchester in 1833 the levy of a halfpenny in the pound was carried by 156 votes, though the majority of individuals who voted against the tax was nearly two to one. At this period there was a lull in the agitation, as it was known or at least believed that Ministers would propose a measure of relief; and Sir Robert Inglis did not impress the House when he declared that only in fifty or sixty parishes had the imposition been successfully opposed. It was on principle, not on hardship, that the Dissenters founded their case; but, had they preferred the latter ground, it would have been a powerful argument in their favour that they raised from £300,000 to £400,000 a year for the support of their ministers, chapels, and missions.1 Rates might be abolished or they might be continued on a basis of exemption. It was an obvious objection to the second of these alternatives that persons not seriously religious might be induced to declare themselves Dissenters; and a distrust of voluntary contributions was not the most serious objection to the first. whilst the Dissenters maintained that they should not be compelled to support a ritual of which they disapproved, Ministers were equally emphatic in their declaration—which surprised and delighted Inglis—that a religion recognised by the State must be maintained at the common expense. "If there was anything more than another," said Stanley, "which constituted an established religion, it was that." The Government scheme as outlined by Lord Althorp was consequently in the nature of a compromise, and was compared, not inaptly, to their "odious Marriage Bill." Church rates were to be abolished; but, though much was left to

For

1 So said Wilks, member for Boston and a leading Dissenter. Other speakers put the amount at a million.