The doctrinal teaehing may he summed up in one word—the Incarnation. This, as witnessed by Church and Scripture, was the sum and sub stance of the apologetic work of both the early and the later leaders of the movement. Under neath the contention as to holy orders and valid sacraments lay this basic truth of Christianity. It gave the world a living Christ, whose quicken ing and energizing humanity permeated the whole body of the faithful. He, it was held, inspired sermons, gave vitality to worship and efficacy to sacraments, and imparted energy both to in dividual lives and to corporate agencies for good. The sacraments were openly proclaimed as 'the extension of the Incarnation.' The immediate cause of the movement was the suppression by the reform Government in 1833 of ten Irish bishoprics, coupled with the significant hint to the English prelates to 'set their house in order.' John Keble, professor of poetry at Oxford, had long chafed under the manifest Erastian ism of the times; and what the poet had already sung, in the Christian Year, the preacher now proclaimed from the pulpit. But if Keble's ser mon was the first word, the first step was taken at a meeting of a few friends at Hadleigh vicar age, in Suffolk, the home of Hugh James Rose, in July of the same eventful year. It was there decided to begin the publication of the Tracts for the Times, and the decision opened a new era in Christian polemics. The first three tracts ap peared under date of September 9, 1833, and dur ing that and the following year forty-six were printed and circulated among the parochial clergy. They were short but incisive statements, bearing upon the polity, doctrine. and worship of the Church. In 1S34 an address signed by seven thousand clergymen of the English Church, ex pressing a general adherence to her apostolic doc trine and polity. was presented to Archbishop Howley, and this was followed by another of the same purport from the laity hearing the signa tures of two hundred and thirty thousand heads of families. An 'association' was formed by William Palmer, and a short supplement to the Catechism was prepared and published by William l'erceval. But the 'Oxford Tracts' were the mo tive power of the new' movement and its leaders were soon known as 'Tractarians.' Concurrent with the issue of the Tracts were Newman's four o'clock sermons at Saint 'Mary's. They were plain, but pointed and pungent. Men read the Tracts and listened to the sermons. An atmosphere was created and in it the urgent issues of the hour were discussed and weighed. Toward the close of 1834 Pusey joined the movement. As a professor and a canon of Christ Church, Oxford. he brought with him a name and a position. The Tracts grew' into heavier and more exhaustive treatises. A trans lation of the early Fathers was begun. The Anglo-Catholic library was started. The move ment met with unexpected success, and. under the leadership of Newman, Keble. and Pusey. gath ered great strength in the effort to return. in doctrine and worship, to the Anglieanism of the seventeenth century.
But in 1S39 a new school was formed within the movement which from that year until 1845 had a large. if not the chief. share in its guid ance. It originated with William George Ward and other younger men who came into it. as Newman afterwards said. "at an angle and were sweeping the original party aside." It is said to have represented the ethical and philosophical side of the effort rather than the historical. The sympathies of its leading spirits were dis tinctly Roman. The vivid picture of Church authority and Catimlic sanctity painted in Hurrell Fronde's ilcumins faseinated many earnest and devout minds. The Protestant Retormatiun was represented as a deadly sin, and restoration to communion with Rome was the ideal. There was clearly a rift in the Traetarian forces. Ward's party were drifting toward the Roman Catholic Church. Pusey and Keble stood firm on the orig
inal foundation. Newman was unsettled. "The large and sweeping conception of a vast and ever growing Imperial Church," we are told, "appealed strongly to his statesmanlike imagination." Flaws and imperfections were of no account in such greatness and could be overlooked. In 1839 his sympathies were strongly Roman Catholic. Ile had striven to present the Church of England as holding a central historic position between a bald Protestantism on the one hand and an in• fallible Roman Catholicism on the other. His appeal had been to the authority of the undivided Church. But his belief in the reality of the English Church was now being severely tested. While studying the Monophysite question in the summer of that year he says himself: "For the first time a doubt came across me of the tenable ness of Anglicanism. f had seen the shadow of a hand on the wall. He who has seen a ghost cannot lie as if he had never seen it. The heavens had opened and closed again. The thought for the moment had been, the Church of Rome will be found right after all. And then it had vanished. My old convictions remained as before." Still the movement went on, with no outward signs of failure. But with the publication of Tract 90 there came a marked change. It was written by Newman. and interpreted the articles in what Ward called a 'non-natural' sense. It was an attempt to show, by an ingenious applica tion of Article XXXV. on the Homilies, that the Articles were not necessarily anti-Roman. They were represented as condemning the popular ex aggerations and misconceptions of Roman doc trine current at the time they were drawn up. This was enough in the temper of the times to let the storm loose. Dislike and suspicion had been seething, conspiracy and disloyalty had been darkly hinted : but with the appearance of the obnoxious Tract, the innate Protestantism of Eng land flew to arms. The Tracts were stopped. Newman withdrew from Oxford to Eittlemore. Saint Auntstitie's words about the Donatists, "Symms judieat orb is terrarnin," kept ringing in his ears words out of the skf'." The ghost came a?etin, and this time it would not. leave him. The attempt to establish a joint bishopric at Jerusalem, representing both the Church and the Prussian Lutherans. pressed hard upon a sensitive and over-strained conscience. The Government and the Archbishop appeared guilty of the sacrifice of principle. Then came Pusey's suspension for his sermon on the Eucharist in IS43. followed by the eondemna tion of Ward's Ideal of a Christian. Church, and the withdrawal of his degrees in the next year. Pe the summer of 1845 he and Faber and Itakeley had 7one over to P,onie, and in October the long blow fell. Newman transferred his allegiance from the Angliean to the Latin Obedience.
The catastrophe shattered the Tractarian Pv it checked but did not stop the Oxford -Mint.unlit. The influence of the re\ ival had al ready reached tar beyond the Church in England. The events connected with the Carey case in America arc sufficient to show. this. Arthur Carey was a graduate of the General Theological Seminary in NCW York, and a young man of unusual promise: but he had become imbued with the teaching of the Tractarians, and a protest was entered against his ordination on the ground that he was unsound in the faith. 11c was, however, after the case had caused excite ment, ordained wl loll he had passed a special ex amination by a committee of clergymen appointed for the purpose. The movement became the sub ject of an able and earnest debate in the Ameri can General Convention of 1844. were adopted to the effect that the faith was already sufficiently proclaimed in the formularies of the Church, and that the canons were amply adequate to govern any eases of supposed hetero doxy. Victory seemingly rested with the ad vanced or Catholic school.