RELIGIOUS ENCYCLOPEDIA
Tractarianism
England he hoped for a restoration of the Roman Church with a revival of medieval piety, fasting, good works, asceticism, celibacy, and the virgin cult. To this end he advocated the separation of Church and State. As late as the beginning of the fourth decade, Froude held reunion with Rome possible and desirable, but his journey to Rome changed his view and convinced him that the Roman Church likewise must be transformed to the model of the primitive Church. The spirit of a man who hated Protestantism and combated Rome, a Roman Catholic without a pope, and an Anglican without Protestantism, yet was the prophetic antecedent of the Tractarian system in all its phases. On their return from the south of Europe, Froude and Newman found Oriel in ferment. John Keble, then a member of Oriel and a man of deep piety and gentleness, had published his famous Christian Year (1827), a collection of poems which profoundly influenced Newman, who about this time broke with Whately. On the Sunday after Newman's return Keble preached before the university the Assize Sermon, published under the title On the National Apostasy, which became the alarm-cry for the assembling of the associates. A few days later Hugh James Rose, rector of Hadleigh, Suffolk, of his own accord, invited Froude, William Palmer, and A. P. Perceval to the famous Hadleigh Conference to consider the best means to avert the threatening liberalizing dangers. Keble and Newman, though invited, were unable to be present. The result of the conference was the formation of the Association of Friends of the Church, and Palmer was directed to frame two addresses to the primate, Archbishop Howley, one of which, within a few weeks, was signed by 7,000 clergy (more than half the total number in the country) and the other (drawn up by Joshua Watson) by 230,000 heads of households. The Scottish and American episcopates likewise subscribed, and the former requested archiepiscopal sanction, though in vain. The only point of difference was that of the separation of Church and State, which Keble and Froude strongly urged, while Newman wavered. In the interests of peace the point was not debated. Early in September Keble set forth the program of the new movement as follows: (1) the sole way to salvation is to eat the flesh and drink the blood of Christ; (2) the means ordained is the Holy Eucharist; (3) the right administration of the sacrament is guaranteed by the apostolic commission given to bishops and priests; (4) all possible means must be taken to impress and perpetuate the inestimable prerogative of communion with the Lord through the successors of the apostles, to strive for daily communion and worship in the churches, and oppose every alteration of the established liturgy. This was followed by The Churchman's Manual (Oxford, 1834) by Perceval, as the expression of the conservatives. A new phase opened with the tracts undertaken by Newman, fixing a name upon the entire development. Newman was averse to organization and committees, preferring a wide popular movement stirred by personal sacrifice. The fitting points of dissemination were the universities, centers of intellectual and religious influence in England, such XI.— 31
as Oxford. The method must be by tracts or pamphlets, the favorite form of religious propaganda in that country. As history 2. The proved, Newman was the one pecul- Tracts. iarly gifted to prepare the brief theological reviews. Of his own accord he issued Tract 1 (Sept. 9, 1833), followed by eightynine others (seventy before Nov., 1835) under the title of Tracts for the Times (6 vols., Oxford, 1833- 1841). These, seldom over eight or ten pages in length, treated primarily of organization, discipline, and worship, of the nature of the Church and her relation to the primitive Church, on historic objections to the privileges, doctrines, and liturgy of the Anglican Church, her forms of prayer and her burial service, proposed changes in the liturgy, lax discipline, andthe needs of the individual churches. The Roman Catholic problem, however, had not yet become prominent. Newman was the author of nos. 1, 2, 6-8, 10, 11, 19-21, 34, 38, 41, 45, 47, 71, 73, 75, 82, 83, 85, 88, and 90. Next to him was Keble, and then Pusey (no. 18, on fasting; nos. 40, 67-69, on baptism); Froude contributed but one (no. 63). The Tracts were supplemented, after 1833, by a series of extracts from such Church Fathers as Ignatius, Justin, and Irenaeus, prepared by the other Oxford leaders under the title Records of the Church; while in 1838 Pusey, Keble, Newman, and Charles Marriott began a translation of all the Fathers, which appeared as the Library of the Fathers of the Holy Catholic Church, Anterior to the Division of the East and West (50 vols., 1838-85). All three works were polemical, and passed beyond the initiative of Keble and Rose, in demanding not only religious but ecclesiastical and ecclesiastico-political reform, the return development of the present Church to the Church of the first three centuries, before the rise of the cult of images, angels and saints, purgatory, transubstantiation, the restriction of the cup to the clergy, auricular confession, indulgences, and papal infallibility. By Newman's presentation of the doctrine of the visible Church as the source of all spiritual gifts and the channel of all grace, set forth in the teaching and usage of the early English Church, the Tracts at first gained a most cordial welcome, furnishing the bishops with the argument of divine right through apostolic succession, in their struggle with parliament, and the High-churchmen with a weapon against Evangelicals and Dissenters. Later Tracts, however, began to exceed the demand for the restoration of the system represented by the great Anglican divines of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and were deemed suspiciously akin to Roman Catholic tenets, by their fogging of words and ideas and submerged sense becoming transparent (see below, High-church Doctrines). The Evangelical organ, The Christian Observer, clearly perceived the issue and began battle against the manifest tendency toward Rome. The old popular cry of the eighteenth century, " no popery," resounded again from press and thoroughfare.
In reply Newman, undisputed leader from 1834, came forward (Tracts 38, 41) with his doctrine of the via media. He maintained that it was the glory of the Anglican Church to have taken the middle course between the so-called Reformation and
Tractarianism