The first of the Tracts for the Times, published in Sep tember, 1833, and entitled Thoughts on the Ministerial Commission respectfully addressed to the Clergy, was devoted to the proclamation of the chief of those truths which it was the special aim of the Tracts to enforce. ‘There are some,’ Newman therein wrote, ‘who rest their divine mission on their own unsupported assertion; others who rest it upon their temporal distinctions. This last case has, perhaps, been too much our own; I fear we have neglected the real ground on which authority is built—our apostolic descent . . . [the many] have been deluded into a notion that present palpable usefulness, produceable results, acceptableness to your flocks, that these and such like are the tests of your Divine commission. Enlighten them in this matter. Exalt our Holy Fathers, the Bishops, as the Representatives of the Apostles, and the Angels of the Churches; and magnify your office, as being ordained by them to take part in their Ministry.’

The leaders of the Tractarian Movement were not, as some seem to imagine, ardent Ritualists, if by that term we mean men enamoured of ritual for its own sake. They were on the whole distinguished by soberness in their use of ritual. What they were seeking primarily was to renew and to deepen the supernatural Christian life of the members of the Church of England. For this it was necessary to be sure of the possession of two things—the revealed truth and the ordinary means of grace, both committed to the Apostles.

John Henry Newman was born in Old Broad Street in the City of London on February 21st, 1801, and baptised a few weeks later in the Church of St. Benet Fink. His father, John Newman, was a London banker. His mother came of a Huguenot family which had settled in England and prospered. There was nothing remarkable about Newman’s early religious training. He was encouraged to take delight in reading the Bible, and learning the Church Catechism. This seems to have been about all. Neither of his parents were attached to any particular school or party in the Church of England. The contrary is still often asserted, especially with reference to his mother, who is credited with pronounced Evangelical or Calvinistic views. But this was positively denied by his brother, Francis Newman, and by his sister, Mrs. John Mozley, and also by the Cardinal himself in a hitherto unpublished letter. It is a pity that these denials never came to the knowledge of the late Canon Barry, for the fiction of the Calvinistic mother owes much of its vogue to his able pen. The fiction originated with Newman’s brother-in-law, Thomas Mozley.

From the days of its foundation in the sixteenth century it has always been possible to trace in the Established Church, side by side with the Puritan and Erastian traditions, a tradition of teaching which approximates very closely to the doctrines of Catholicism; a tradition which lays strong emphasis on the supernatural character of the visible Body of Christ, on the importance of the sacraments in the scheme of salvation and in consequence on the Catholic ideal of holiness. At times in the history of the Church of England this Catholic tradition has flourished widely, but never to the complete exclusion of other traditions, and at times these have appeared to squeeze the Catholic tradition almost out of existence. The beginning of the nineteenth century was such a time; with the Revolution of 1688 and the consequent schism of the Non-jurors the old Catholic High Churchmanship of the Caroline divines, with its solid Patristic learning, its sober but definite exposition of the corporate existence and supernatural basis of the Church of Christ and its insistence on sacramentalism, began to fade into obscurity. Political circumstances had much to do with the gradual disappearance of a school of thought which had almost dominated the Stuart period. The failure of the ‘45 made Jacobitism for ever a lost cause, and from that date Jacobite Toryism began to make terms with the established order and Jacobite churchmen drank the health of the Hanover kings.

In 1850 John Henry Newman wrote: ‘Even when I was a boy, my thoughts were turned to the early Church, and especially to the early Fathers, by the perusal of the Calvinist John Milner’s Church History, and I have never lost, I have never suffered a suspension of the impression, deep and most pleasurable, which his sketches of St. Ambrose and St. Augustine left on my mind. From that time the vision of the Fathers was always, to my imagination, may say, a paradise of delight to the contemplation of which I directed my thoughts from time to time, whenever I was free from the engagements proper to my time of life.’

Brought up as an Evangelical, he studied the Fathers through Protestant spectacles even as late as his twenty-eighth year, when he was already under the influence of Whately and beginning to reach out to idea of a National Church with teaching powers and Sacraments. So he tells us:

‘When years afterwards (1828) I first began to read their works with attention and on system, I busied myself much in analysing them, and in cataloguing their doctrines and principles; but when I had thus proceeded very carefully and minutely for some space of time, I found, on looking back on what I had done, that I had scarcely done anything at all; I found that I had gained very little from them, and I came to the conclusion that the Fathers I had been reading, who were exclusively those of the ante-Nicene period, had very little in them. At the time I did not discover the reason of this result, though, on the retrospect, it was plain enough: I had read them simply on Protestant ideas, analysed and catalogued them on Protestant principles of division, and hunted for Protestant doctrines and usages in them.

From whatever angle the Oxford Movement is examined, it is impossible to disregard the spirit of alarm which informed its opening phase. Reforms long overdue were beginning to take effect; further reforms of a more searching character were to follow. Outworn institutions and rusty machinery could not remain untouched when the national spirit was demanding radical developments in political and social institutions. Excluding a small body of the clergy, Englishmen of all ranks within and without the Established Church regarded that body and its ministers as an institution dependent for its existence upon the Body Politic. For them the Church of England was little more than a State Department; and in common with the rest this too must submit to the reforms which it urgently required.

Since the days of Elizabeth the National Church had been immediately sensitive to every political development: each successive crisis had struck it violently and left deep scars. With the termination of the Stuart period and the rejection of ‘Divine Right,’ the great days of Caroline High Churchmanship had come to an end. The High Church party as an effective power died within the Church, whilst the Non-Juring Sect languished into insignificance from lack of an object. The volumes of Caroline divinity remained untouched on the library shelves: theological interests, rules of Christian Perfection and Sacramental Doctrine had become unfashionable.

Centenaries ecclesiastical and secular have of late years crowded so fast upon one another’s heels that they have become almost dangerously popular. Cathedrals, abbey ruins, tombs of poets and birthplaces of novelists have beckoned to the devout or the sightseer and in every case the char-a-bancs have made reply, and the newspapers have risen to the occasion. A hundred years ago the staid respectability of the Established Church of England received a shock, and though at the time very few of its members knew with certainty what it was all about, the vast majority were quite sure that it was something very shocking. Rumour had it that while courtly prelates maintained a dignified isolation in their palaces and country squires dozed peacefully in their pews an insidious band of cultured divines with Oxford as their plotting ground, were seeking to change the features of the National Church so completely that even its most intimate friends would experience no little difficulty in recognising it.

Among that select group around which the battle raged, three names stand out prominently, but while Pusey lent his name to denote the adherents of this brave endeavour and Keble blunted the enemy’s sword by gentle verse making, John Henry Newman is the man whose name leaps to the tongue and captures thought whenever mention is made of the Oxford Movement.

A thorough discussion of the content of Newman’s University Sermons would exceed the proper length of an article in a review. It would involve a study of his thought as a whole, for they are essentially incomplete, and deal with problems that exercised him throughout his life. In particular, a careful comparison would have to be made between them and the Grammar of Assent. By incomplete, however, we must not be understood to mean that they are sketchy or immature or unimportant. We mean simply that they represent the first stage, the initial orientation, of a synthesis which being organic and alive, naturally in the course of time developed. Far from being unimportant they are an impressive statement of the relations between faith and reason and mark a turning point in the history of modern religious thought. Newman himself, re-reading them in Rome after his conversion, wrote in a letter to Dalgairns: ‘I must say I think they are as a whole, the best things I have written, and I cannot believe that they are not Catholic, and will not be useful’ and writing to James Hope he characterises the volume as ‘the best, not the most perfect, book I have done. I mean there is more to develop in it though it is imperfect.’ Clearly he felt that they treated of fundamental issues and were personally significant as expressions of his thought.

The notion of a development of Christianity is found in Tertullian and in Vincent of Lérins; indeed it is an immediate conclusion from the words of Our Lord, ‘I am not come to destroy but to fulfil.’ Yet no one gave the subject especial attention before Newman. The historical spirit is not rarely alien to the mind of the theologian, and theology has been received with little sympathy since the rise of modern historical science in the eighteenth century.

Newman, widely read in the Fathers, but saturated in the spirit of the Oxford of his day, approached the question by attempting to explain away a suspicion that the Roman Catholic Church of 1845 was the same body as the Primitive Church of historical research. Startling divergence seemed to reveal, as well as to conceal, an ultimate identity. His reconciliation of this seeming contradiction was the conclusion, but not the purpose, of his writing the essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine. The historical, theological, philosophical and psychological vistas which the book opens up are manifold: we can here concern ourselves only with its analysis of the subject itself.