Chapter Five:  Justification

      To Luther is attributed the statement that justification by Faith is articulus stantis vel cadentis ecclesiae (the article of faith that decides whether the Church is standing or falling).¹  In 1843 a writer in the British Critic asserted that Evangelicals clave ‘to the soul-destroying heresy of Luther on the subject of justification’.²  Since justification by Faith was regarded in orthodox Protestantism as the material principle of theology, determining its substance, it is not surprising to learn that in this area of controversy the Evangelicals believed they were fighting for nothing less than the preservation within the Church of England and Ireland of the Gospel of Christ.

1.  INTRODUCTION

      During 1837 two letters from John Henry Newman, defending views expressed in the Tracts on Baptism by Pusey, appeared with lavish editorial comment in the Christian Observer.  The second letter ended with a promise from Newman that he would write on justification; commenting on this the editor claimed that his readers eagerly awaited this production which related to ‘far the most important of the questions at issue’ between the doctrine of the Tracts and of the Articles of Religion.  Indeed, Wilks was convinced that the tendency of Tractarian teaching was towards the revival within the Church of the Romanist doctrine of justification by infused righteousness.  An opportunity to assert this conviction was provided by the publication of G. S. Faber’s The Primitive Doctrine of Justification Investigated (1837), which attempted to prove, against Alexander Knoк, the Irish lay theologian, and against Joseph Milner, the Evangelical historian, that the Protestant doctrine of justification by Faith was actually taught by the early Fathers, before its corruption in the medieval period.³

      A long review of Faber’s book appeared in the first three issues of the Christian Observer for 1838.  The writer of it declared that ‘we see no substantial difference between the doctrine of Trent and the doctrines of Mr Knox and the Oxford Tracts’.  In all three cases ‘by qualifications and blending Scriptural truths with false inferences error is often made to appear so plausible that it is not easy to attack’.  So a controversy over the doctrine of justification and related truths was anticipated: ‘If the battles of the Reformation are to be fought over again, not with avowed Romanists but with professed Anglicans, who account popery their “dear sister” and consider Protestantism as a rational neologian schism, the friends of the pure Gospel of Christ, unsophisticated by human devices, have only to take up the spiritual arms of their godly forefathers, and with the Bible in their hands to contend for the faith once delivered to the saints.’  And this is what happened, the battle being fought by Evangelicals according to traditional Protestant strategy learned in the lengthy Protestant-Catholic controversy, a controversy which had been given a new lease of life in Britain because of the religious and political problems of Ireland.⁴

      Newman never sent a third letter to the Christian Observer on the subject of justification.  However, he did deliver a series of lectures in the Adam de Brome Chapel of the Church of St Mary the Virgin, Oxford, on this topic, which he later published in a revised form as Lectures on Justification (1838).  The thirteen lectures contained an attempt to restate the doctrine of justification in such a way that the primary biblical aspects of both the traditional Protestant and Roman Catholic viewpoints were preserved and fused into one new doctrine.  So the idea of the external righteousness of Christ being reckoned (imputed) to the believing Christian and the righteousness of Christ being infused into the soul by the Holy Spirit at regeneration were brought together.  Indeed, as Thomas L. Sheridan SJ has argued, it was Newman’s high view of regeneration as the impartation of the full presence of Christ into the soul, a position to which he came in the late 1820s, which was the basis for his new view of justification, as being inseparably linked to regeneration.⁵

      It is now generally agreed that the root of Newman’s emphasis on the inseparable relation of justification and regeneration was the teaching he found in the Greek Fathers, especially Athanasius, on the divinisation or deification of the Christian, through baptism and the Holy Spirit.⁶  However, his critics believed he had learned his doctrine from Western Medieval or Roman Catholic sources, a belief which is easy to understand when it is recalled that 1838 was the year when Froude’s Remains, praising medieval Christianity and edited by Newman, were being widely read.  And in the preface to the Lectures Newman admitted that one of his major aims was to show that the views of salvation expressed in the Tracts did not entail the inclusion of human merit as earning salvation.  While Döllinger believed the Lectures to be one of the best theological works of the nineteenth century, G. S. Faber found them to be confused and confusing.⁷

      Following his correspondence and personal interview with Newman, Faber introduced into the second edition of his book on justification two appendices which related to Newman and his doctrines.⁸  Although he claimed to have devoted more time to the study of the Lectures than to any other book in his life, he found it impossible to create a harmonious view of the subject out of Newman’s seeming contrary principles.  At one and the same time, he believed, Newman taught that:

      1. We are justified by Faith: we are justified by Obedience: we are justified by Baptism: we are justified conjointly by the two Sacraments of Baptism and the Lord’s Supper.

      2. Our justification precedes our Faith: and our Faith precedes our justification.

      3. Justification is a judicial process, by which a sinner is accounted and declared righteous in the court of Heaven: but still our moral renewal is fitly called our Justification ...

      4. The word Justification cannot bear two meanings, yet it clearly does bear two meanings, to wit, the accounting righteous and the making righteous.

      5. There is but one act of justification: nevertheless, there are ten thousand justifications.

      6. When the English Church declares, that Faith is the sole mean or instrument of justification, without making any exceptions or distinctions: we must not, by such a declaration understand that she wishes to deny the existence of sundry other instruments in sundry other senses of the term ... Thus, for instance, the instrumental power of faith cannot interfere with the instrumental power of Baptism.

      7. ...when the Homilies speak of Faith being the sole instrument, though they seem to predicate of it both soleness and instrumentality, they really teach, that Faith is not at all an instrument, but that it is purely a symbol. 

      So, though he loved Newman as a brother, he was obliged to state that the Lectures exhibited ‘a strange and mischievous attempt, to mix up together, wholesome food and rank poison, the sound doctrine of the Church of England and the pernicious dogmas of the Church of Rome; Scriptural Orthodoxy and Popish Heterodoxy’.⁹  In the private correspondence Newman tried to justify his position to Faber, but the latter remained convinced that Newman’s position contained irreconcilable elements.

      Immediate support for Newman came from Pusey in his Letter to the Right Reverend Father in God, Richard, Lord Bishop of Oxford (1839) who declared in his explanation of Article XI ‘Of the Justification of Man’:

The Anglican doctrine, or that which we conceive to have been the teaching of the majority of our Church differs ... from the Roman, in that it excludes sanctification from having any place in our justification: from the Lutheran in that it conceives justification to be not imputation merely, but the act of GOD imparting His Divine Presence to the soul, through Baptism, and so making us temples of the Holy Ghost ...

Or, in words taken from Newman: ‘Justification comes through the sacraments, is received by faith, consists in God’s inward presence, and lives in obedience.’  From a former Evangelical in Cambridge came support for this viewpoint.  Francis Whaley Harper, a Fellow of St John’s, argued in his A Few Observations on the Teaching of Dr. Pusey and Mr. Newman concerning Justification that Evangelicals had nothing to fear and much to accept in the teaching of Newman.  But his was a lonely voice.

      As was noted in Chapter One, defences of the traditional Anglican doctrine of justification by Faith came from men of varied churchmanship, from the gentle High Churchman Philip Shuttleworth, the supposed liberal, R. D. Hampden, and from various Bishops.¹⁰  However, since our task here is to understand the Evangelical Anglican response we shall use primarily the books of G. S. Faber, Bishop J. B. Sumner, Bishop C. P. M’Ilvaine, Professor James Garbett and C. A. Heurtley, which together provide a wide spectrum of Evangelical thinking.  Since the theological sections of this chapter will consist of quotations from and summaries of these books, we shall first provide a brief description of the publications in question.  Following this descriptive section we shall study the Evangelical response as it answered three basic questions: What is justification?  How does a sinner receive justification? and, What is the relation after baptism between justification and forgiveness?

      We shall find that in all this Evangelical literature it is presupposed that the traditional terminology of Reformational and Post-Reformational debates is valid for nineteenth-century controversy within the Church of England and is therefore the correct way to discuss the doctrine of justification.  The key expressions were, the formal cause, the meritorious cause and the instrumental cause.  Happily Roman Catholic and Protestant controversialists had long been agreed that the meritorious cause of justification was the Work of Christ in his death and resurrection.  By his sacrifice for sin he had purchased for men the salvation of God.  On the formal cause of justification, that by which God actually pronounces and accepts a sinner as righteous, there had never been agreement.  The traditional Roman Catholic position was that at baptism God infuses into the soul his divine grace and that this grace purifies the soul.  On seeing this infused righteousness in a human being God accepts him or justifies him.  This new grace of the soul is thus the formal cause of justification and is at the same time the means of sanctification.  With this view Protestant scholars had no sympathy.  They argued that once God’s grace enters the soul it becomes a human righteousness and no human righteousness is sufficient in quality to be the basis for justification and full acceptance with the eternal God.  So they pointed to the external righteousness of Christ the Mediator and argued that his righteousness was imputed or reckoned to the Christian as the formal cause of acceptance and justification.  Within both the camps, the Roman and the Protestant, there was a limited variety of teaching within the fixed limits of either the infused, inherent righteousness or the external righteousness of Christ, as the formal cause.  The instrumental cause was the means by which, or the channel through which, God actually achieved the justification of the sinner.  Here again the two sides emphasised two different instruments.  Roman Catholic divines spoke of baptism as the instrument through which grace was infused into the soul to achieve justification, while Protestant divines spoke of saving faith in the heart of the repentant sinner as the instrument through which union with Christ, through the Holy Spirit, was achieved for the purpose of justification.  Catholics did not deny the importance of faith but made baptism primary, and Protestants did not deny the importance of baptism but made faith primary.

      Of course within the theological tradition of the Church of England there had been attempts to find a doctrine of justification which mediated between the two extreme positions, and for attempts in this direction one turns to the writings of such theologians as Jeremy Taylor and George Bull.¹¹  However, while it is correct to see Newman’s doctrine as an attempt at mediation it is wrong to see it as the nineteenth-century exposition of an earlier Anglican position.  Newman’s study of the Greek Fathers had given him new insights and had led him to expound a position which, though bearing certain similarities to earlier Anglican teaching and to classic Roman Catholic teaching, was a new synthesis.  The idea of an implanted ‘presence of God’ attached to, or affiliated to, the soul (and thus commonly called ‘an adherent righteousness’) and set in the large biblical context in which Newman placed it, was novel and few seemingly understood him.

2.  EVANGELICAL LITERATURE

      Though G. S. Faber wrote his Primitive Doctrine of Justification (1837) against the teaching of Alexander Knox, not surprisingly it was regarded by many people as also an answer to the teaching of the Tractarians.  The general aim of Faber, as appears in his dedication to the Bishop of Chester, was to show that there were basically only two possible methods of justification:

The one system grounds our justification upon our own Intrinsic Righteousness, infused into us by God, through our faith in the Lord Jesus Christ.  The other System grounds our justification upon the Extrinsic Righteousness of Christ appropriated and forensically made our own by faith as by an appointed instrument.

In the pages of the book he sought to demonstrate that the systems of Knox, of the Council of Trent and even of Bishop Bull were, at root, the same, and were different from the system contained in the formularies of the Church of England.  Also he argued that the teaching of the New Testament was uniform (Paul and James being complementary rather than contradictory) and was captured in the official doctrine of the Reformed Church of England.  Further, he attempted to prove that the earliest of the Fathers did in fact teach in essence the same doctrine as that of the English Reformers.  So confident was he that the early Fathers taught the doctrine of ‘Justification upon the Extrinsic Righteousness of Christ appropriated ... by faith’, and so were faithful to the New Testament, that he used the word ‘primitive’ in his title.  As we have noted the second edition contained appendices relating to the views of Newman.  By 1842 Faber had come to believe that the system of theology behind the Tracts for the Times was an ‘unscriptural delusion based ultimately upon a gross perversion of the vital doctrine of Justification on account of the sole external Merits of Christ’.¹²

      Since John Bird Sumner had recommended his clergy regularly to read Richard Hooker’s A Learned Discourse of Justification it was no surprise that he was opposed to the Tractarian position.  His views on justification were clearly stated in his A Charge delivered to the Clergy of the Diocese of Chester (1841), his A Practical Exposition of the Epistle of Paul to the Romans and the First Epistle to the Corinthians (1843) and his brief Tract on Justification (SPCK, 1843).¹³  To the clergy of the diocese he declared that

Those have now risen up who affirm that the doctrine of the Gospel, the propitiation made for sin, is a doctrine too dangerous to be openly disclosed, too mysterious to be generally exhibited, and would thus deprive the sinner at once of his motive to repent and his comfort in repenting.  It has been another part of the same system to involve the article of our justification in obscurity; what has been done for us and what is to be wrought in us, are confused together; and practically, man is induced to look to himself and not to the Redeemer for acceptance with God.¹⁴

Therefore he felt the need to reassert what he understood to be the doctrine of the English Reformers.  Into his Practical Exposition he introduced some long introductory ‘Prefatory Remarks on the Doctrine of Justification as propounded in the Epistle to the Romans’ against Tractarian innovations, and these ‘Remarks’ were the basis of the Tract.¹⁵

      Across the Atlantic, where the Tracts for the Times and related literature were also being published, Bishop C. P. M’Ilvaine of Ohio, whose family roots were in Scotland and whose doctrinal sympathies were with the British Evangelicals, followed these publications with care and concern.¹⁶  Eventually he decided that, as a teacher of the Church, he must reassert the Evangelical Protestant character of her theology at its pivotal point and expose what he judged to be the errors of the views set forth in the Tractarian literature.  So he published a volume of over five hundred pages entitled Oxford Divinity compared with that of the Romish and Anglican Churches with a special view of the doctrine of Justification by Faith (1841).¹⁷  This book appeared both in New York and London, with the Evangelical House of Seeley and Burnside handling the British edition.

      The bishop’s method was to link Tractarian teaching with that of Alexander Knox and then to compare this ‘Oxford Divinity’ with that of the Schoolmen, the Council of Trent and the Roman Catholic Church to show their likeness.  In particular he noted that both the Tractarians and the Roman Catholics taught the doctrine of justification in and through the sacrament of baptism.  Having shown the similarity of the Oxford teaching to that of Rome, his next task was to show that it differed from that of the Articles, Homilies and standard divines of the Church of England.  His conclusion was that ‘the whole ground-work, on which they teach the sinner to rely for justification and acceptance before God, is the very reverse of that which we have learned from the Scriptures and which our Fathers have declared unto us’.  After the publication of the book, which his friend Bishop Daniel Wilson in Calcutta called ‘a masterly treatise’, he remained very concerned about the spread of Tractarian doctrines.¹⁸  For example, addressing his clergy in 1843 he declared that this controversy over justification was ‘about the very life of Christianity’.¹⁹

      James Garbett, the Oxford Professor of Poetry, did not write a treatise on justification but in the printed version of his Bampton Lectures, Christ as Prophet, Priest and King (2 vols., 1842), two important chapters are devoted to this subject.  In the preface to the book he claimed that he had nothing new to say since he was in agreement with Faber and M’Ilvaine.  The chapters on justification followed two on ‘Christ as High Priest and Sacrifice’ wherein the Protestant doctrine of the substitutionary atonement of Christ was asserted.  With this background he argued that justification by faith was fundamental to the Gospel and this he illustrated from both Old and New Testament Scriptures.  He emphasised that while Protestants and Roman Catholics agreed in the meritorious cause of justification (the Work of Christ), they were at variance on what was usually called the causa formalis.  For Protestants the formal cause was not infused, inherent righteousness but the extrinsic righteousness of Christ.  The latter was imputed to the sinner by God, being appropriated by faith, the instrument of justification.  Far from being opposed to the production of holiness, this doctrine of justification by faith, he argued, was, when rightly understood, the only true basis for holy living.  In a final section he provided arguments against the notion of an adherent righteousness (that is, the presence of God attached to the soul) as the formal cause of justification.  While Garbett’s discussion is very much in the context of the controversy during the Reformation it is prosecuted with the views of Newman very much in mind, but without detailed reference to the Greek Fathers.

      In 1845 Charles A. Heurtley, Rector of Fenny Compton, gave the Bampton Lectures and published them as Justification (1846).  He viewed this volume as a sequel to his previous book entitled The Union of Christ and His People (1842) which had its origin as sermons before the University.  It was his view, as he declared in the preface, that

Whatever blessings we either have or hope for, pertaining to life and godliness, are given us in Christ, and become ours, through our union with Him.  Justification is one of these: and to be viewed rightly it must be viewed in connection both with the root from which it springs and also with the kindred blessings, which spring with it from the same root.

While the lectures of 1845 do not particularly refer to Tractarian publications and doctrines, they do nevertheless take up and provide replies to the major questions raised by the Tractarian theology.  And, as we shall see, they represent an Evangelicalism which is seeking to be faithful not only to Articles and Homilies but also to the Baptismal Services in the Book of Common Prayer.  The subjects covered were: Man fallen in Adam, Man restored in Christ, Imputed Righteousness, Inherent Righteousness, Faith, the connection between Faith and justification, the connection between Baptism and justification, and justification in Continuance (Sanctification).

3.  WHAT IS JUSTIFICATION?

(i) The Tractarian doctrine

      In his Lectures on Justification, which are basically an exercise in biblical theology, Newman developed a comprehensive definition of justification.  He argued in the third lecture that the Word of the Lord is creative and powerful and brings into being what it declares:

Justification is an announcement or fiat of Almighty God breaking upon the gloom of our natural state as the Creative Word upon chaos; that it declares the soul righteous, and in that declaration, on the one hand conveys pardon for its past sins, and on the other makes it actually righteous.  That it is a declaration, has been made evident from its including, as all allow, an amnesty for the past; for past sins are removable only by an imputation of righteousness.  And that it involves an actual creation in righteousness has been argued from the analogy of Almighty God’s doings in Scripture, in which we find His words were represented as effective.

He claimed that this position was set forth in the Articles of Religion XI and XIII.  From this basis he stated in the fourth lecture that justification and sanctification are not separate acts of God:

Justification, then, which in its full meaning is the whole great appointment of God, from beginning to end, may be viewed on its two sides, – active and passive, in its beginning and its completion, in what God does, and what man receives; and while in its passive sense, man is made righteous, in its active, God calls or declares.  That is, it will stand either for imputation or for sanctification.  Thus divines, who in the main agree in what the great mercy of God is as a whole, may differ as to what should be called justification; for according as they view it as God’s giving or man’s receiving, they will consider it God’s accounting righteous or man’s becoming righteous.

‘In some sufficient sense Christ, as our righteousness’, he held, ‘fulfils the Law in us as well as for us; that He justifies us, not only in word, but in power bringing the ark with its mercy seat into the temple of our hearts; manifesting, setting up there His new kingdom, and the power and glory of His Cross.’

      As was noted above, the classic question concerning the causa formalis could not be avoided in the 1830s and Newman did not shrink from it.  Rejecting Luther’s answer, and the traditional Roman Catholic answer, he argued in the fourth lecture that the formal cause must be ‘at once the special fruit of Christ’s sacrifice and also an inward gift possessed and residing within us’.  And this was ‘the habitation in us of God the Father and Word Incarnate through the Holy Ghost’.  So to be justified was ‘to receive the Divine Presence within us and be made a Temple of the Holy Ghost’.  He held that his own doctrine of the righteousness of Christ ‘both imputed and imparted by His real indwelling’ was superior to the Roman Catholic view in that it involved not an ‘inherent righteousness’ but an ‘adherent righteousness’, which depended ‘wholly and absolutely upon the Divine Indwelling’.  So the formal cause of justification was internal, adherent righteousness, that is, the presence of Christ by the Holy Spirit in the sou1.²⁰

(ii) Evangelical Response. (a) Tractarian doctrine is in essence the same doctrine as that of Alexander Knox and the Council of Trent

      In the preface to his Lectures, Newman, referring to the criticism of Knox’s views by Faber, asserted that his own work had been written without reference to either of them, and so he declared he would leave it to the reader to decide to what extent he agreed with Knox and to what extent with Faber.  M’Ilvaine did not doubt that Newman agreed with Knox and sought to prove the point both by quotations from Knox and from the British Critic.  In the latter magazine it had been written of Knox that ‘he is an instance in rudiment of those great restorations which he foresaw in development.  He shares with the eminent writers of the day in the work of advancing what he anticipated.’²¹  One of these restorations was the doctrine of justification, defined as follows by Knox: ‘In St Paul’s sense, to be justified is not simply to be accounted righteous; but also and in the first instance to be made righteous by the implantation of a radical principle of righteousness.’²²  So, claimed M’Ilvaine, Knox and the Tractarians were agreed in defining justification primarily in terms of inherent righteousness, infused by God.  Faber, of course, had already equated the teaching of Knox with the teaching of the Schoolmen and Tridentine Fathers; they agreed, he had argued, in making ‘the procuring cause of Justification, or the ground of our acceptance with God, to be our own infused and therefore inherent or intrinsic righteousness’.²³

      If the doctrine of Knox and the Tractarians was the same, and if the doctrine of Knox and the Roman Catholics was the same, then obviously the doctrine of the Tractarians and the Roman Catholics was the same.  And this latter claim is exactly what M’Ilvaine sought to demonstrate in a carefully argued section of Chapter Four of his book.  He set out three propositions and then defended them.²⁴  The first was ‘that the Schoolmen described the righteousness of justification precisely as do our Oxford Divines’.  In support of this he quoted both Newman and Aquinas.  The former admitted that ‘Lombard and Thomas Aquinas declare that the Holy Spirit indwelling is the formal cause of Justification’ and the latter stated that ‘Justifying Grace is something real and positive in the soul, a supernatural quality.’  The second proposition was that:

they felt the same necessity ... of finding out a distinction between an indwelling righteousness that justifies and an indwelling righteousness that sanctifies, and that they fell upon precisely the same subtle and shadowy expedient.

Having noted that both Newman and Pusey were at pains to state that sanctification can have no place in the justification of a sinner, the bishop went on to show that Aquinas himself had also carefully distinguished the two.  Therefore, while Newman’s charge that Romanists identify justification with renewal might be true of post-Reformation Catholics it was not true of certain medieval divines.  Aquinas himself distinguished between the gratia justificans (the justifying righteousness) and the ‘habit’ of love, the latter belonging to the will and the former to the essence of the sou1.²⁵

      The third proposition was ‘that this very distinction of the ancient Schoolmen which equally characterises the divinity of our Oxford Schoolmen, is used by our ancient writers as one distinctive characteristic of Popery’.  It was sufficient here to quote from John Keble s edition of the Works of Richard Hooker:

The Schoolmen, which follow Thomas, do not only comprise in the name of grace, the favour of God, his Spirit, and effects of His Spirit; but, over and besides these three, a fourth kind of formal habit or inherent quality, which maketh the person of man acceptable, perfecteth the substance of his mind, and causeth the virtuous actions thereof to be meritorious.  This grace they will have to be the principal effect of sacraments; a grace which neither Christ nor any apostle of Christ did ever mention.  The fathers have it not in their writings, although they often speak of sacraments and of the grace we receive by them.  Yea, they which have found it out, are as doubtful as any other, what name or nature they should give unto it.

Thus the confusion of the Medieval Scholastics is shared by the Oxford Tractarians, for both, thought M’Ilvaine, preferred ‘heathen dialectics to Holy Scripture, the words of Aristotle to the writings of the Christian Fathers’.  Here, perhaps, the Bishop of Ohio was overstating his case.

      James Garbett emphasised that the point at issue was that which had been long known as the causa formalis.  To him, as to Faber, the Tractarian doctrine was self-contradictory:

... supposing that such a substance – itself a term of Aquinas – could be considered as adherent rather than inherent, it must still be forensic, therefore our justification being placed in it, depends on a forensic formal cause.  Wherefore then, not on Christ, rather than on this ideal substance?  If it be replied, that it is in us, though not of us, then it is righteousness inherent, the direct confession of which the whole scheme is intended to elude.

Further, Newman’s idea of God’s indwelling the soul (adherent righteousness) was philosophically unacceptable to him.  Admitting that there is a sense in which it is true to say that God indwells his creation, and fully recognising that there is the hypostatic union of the divine essence with the humanity in the Person of Christ, he went on to state that:

There remains but one more sense in which God can be united to the soul, and that is morally – that is an acting upon us, and in us, as we are intelligent and spiritual beings, by His purifying energies – and so, by strengthening our faculties, and the exercise of them, through heavenly communications, He renews them into the image which they have lost and brings us into a harmony with the heavenly will, and a perception and enjoyment of His adorable perfections.  But there is no affixture of a divine substance, different from our own essence: it is only the activity of the divine Spirit within us, the motion of that which, wherever it is, morally or physically, is actus purissimus.

So Newman’s view of adherent righteousness was only possible if ‘we give grace a quasi-solid form and consider it as Aquinas says, positivum et reale – enfolding in itself all goodness and glory’.²⁶

(iii) Evangelical Response. (b) The Tractarian doctrine is similar to the condemned teaching of Osiander

      Andreas Osiander (1498–1552) became a Professor at Könisberg, where he published in 1550 his treatise, De Justificatione.²⁷  In this he taught that the formal cause of justification is the presence of the divine gift of righteousness in the soul.  This teaching, which seemed to contemporaries to be the doctrine of the Schoolmen in Protestant dress, led to a major controversy within Lutheranism and to the condemnation of the new teaching both by Melanchthon and by Calvin.²⁸  Newman knew of Osiander’s doctrine and attempted to deny that his teaching was similar.  He claimed that Osiander’s doctrine bore the same relation to his own ‘as the Manichaean blasphemies concerning the union of the substance of God with the natural world, to the Scripture truth that in Him “we move and live and have our being”.’²⁹

      The Archbishop of Cashel, Richard Laurence, was not convinced by Newman’s disclaimer and in a special section to a new edition of his The Visitation of the Saxon Reformed Church which appeared posthumously in 1839 he quoted a summary of Osiander’s doctrine of justification and then remarked that perhaps the principal point in controversy was ‘little more than a logomachy’, for Newman affixed ‘a peculiar sense to the word justification which with the exception of Osiander no Protestant ever affixed before him’.³⁰  This charge of reviving Osiander’s errors was taken up by both Garbett and M’Ilvaine.  The latter believed that Osiander like Newman spoke of justification sometimes as ‘the communication to us of the essential righteousness of the divine nature’ and sometimes as ‘our own personal holiness’, and Garbett connected Osiander’s and Newman’s doctrines with that of the Schoolmen.³¹

(iv) Evangelical Response. (c) The Tractarian doctrine is not that of the formularies and ‘standard divines’ of the Church of England

      Lying behind this assertion there was of course the belief that the formularies gave a correct presentation of the biblical teaching on justification.  The Articles of Religion which deal with justification are XI, XII and XIII, and the Homily referred to is Homily 3 ‘Of the Salvation of all mankind’.

      Heurtley, whose presentation is basically biblical, endeavoured to show ‘that our justification consists not ... in our being made righteous ... but, as our own church teaches (Article XI) in our being accounted righteous; God dealing with us, in Christ, as though we had perfectly fulfilled the whole law, not because we have done so or can do so, but because our guilt in transgressing the law has been laid upon Christ, whose members we are.’  Or, in greater detail:

In the fulness of time, the eternal son took man’s nature upon Him, in the womb of the blessed Virgin, that He might become a second Adam, the federal Head of a second race, the Fountain and Source of life to all, who, by a second birth, should be born of Him.  These great truths, the incarnation of the eternal Son, and the union between Christ and His Church, of which the incarnation is the basis, lie at the foundation of what the Scriptures teach us respecting our salvation ... Whatsoever we either have or hope for, in reference to eternal life, is given us in Christ and by virtue of our union with Him.  And it is therefore available to us, because He, in Whom it is given, and with Whom we are united, is one also with the Father and the Holy Ghost.

      Justification is one of the precious gifts thus bestowed upon us, and it consists, not in an imperfect righteousness of our own inherent in us, but in Christ’s perfect righteousness imputed to us, – ours because we are one with Christ, and Christ with us.³²

Then he went on to quote from Hooker’s Discourse on Justification, to show that this understanding of justification was that commonly held in the Church of England.

      So the issue was that according to the Evangelical understanding of the Scriptures and Formularies the doctrine of justification was the declaring of a sinner righteous by God through the imputing or reckoning to him of the forensic righteousness of Christ, while for the Tractarians justification was a declaring righteous because of the possession by the sinner of the gift of righteousness in his soul, the presence of divine life within him.  Faber, quoted with approval by M’Ilvaine (who equated the doctrine of Knox and the Tractarians), summarised the matter as follows:

Mr. Knox and the Tridentine Fathers and the Schoolmen, with whatever subtle distinctions and explanations, make the Procuring Cause of Justification, or the Ground of our acceptance with God, to be OUR OWN INFUSED AND THEREFORE INHERENT OR INTRINSIC RIGHTEOUSNESS.

      The Church of England, on the contrary, and along with her all the other Reformed Churches, make the Procuring Cause of Justification, or the Ground of our acceptance with God, to be THE EXTRINSIC RIGHTEOUSNESS OF CHRIST APPREHENDED AND APPROPRIATED BY THE INSTRUMENTAL HAND OF FAITH.³³

Thus, as Garbett emphasised, the point at issue was the old problem of the formal cause of justification: was it the imputed righteousness of the Mediator or was it the infused gift of righteousness in the soul?³⁴  Without hesitation the Evangelicals, following the Articles and Homilies, declared that it was the imputed extrinsic righteousness of Christ whereby a sinner was justified and accepted by God.

4.  HOW DOES A SINNER RECEIVE JUSTIFICATION?

(i) The Tractarian doctrine

      Recognising that Article XI declares that ‘we are justified by faith only’, and wanting to do full justice to what he believed to be the intimate relation between baptism and justification, Newman proposed to call faith ‘the internal instrument’ and baptism ‘the external instrument’.  He wrote:

The instrumental power of Faith cannot interfere with the instrumental power of Baptism; because Faith is the sole justifier, not in contrast to all means and agencies whatever (for it is not surely in contrast to our Lord’s merits, or God’s mercy,) but to all other graces.  When, then, Faith is called the sole instrument, this means the sole internal instrument, not the sole instrument of any kind.

      There is nothing inconsistent, then, in Faith being the sole instrument of justification, and yet Baptism also the sole instrument, and that at the same time, because in distinct senses; an inward instrument in no way interfering with the outward instrument.  Baptism might be the hand of the giver and Faith the hand of the receiver.

Thus ‘Faith does not precede justification; but justification precedes faith and makes it justifying’.  And ‘Baptism is the primary instrument, and creates faith to be what it is and otherwise is not, giving it power and rank, and constituting it as its own successor’.  So he rejected the ‘Lutheran’ idea of faith as trust in the atonement of Christ and saw it instead as a complex virtue in which is included ‘love and fear, and heavenly-mindedness, and obedience, and firmness, and zeal and humility’.³⁵

      Thus for Newman and his colleagues justification was received at baptism and was sustained by faith and the Eucharist.

(ii) Evangelical Response. (a) The Tractarian doctrine is in essence the Roman Catholic doctrine of Baptismal Justification

      Taking up Newman’s claim that ‘the Act of justifying is expressly ascribed to Baptism’, Faber wrote: ‘I recalled not that the dogma, We are justified by Baptism, occurs EXPRESSLY anywhere in Holy Scripture.  At all events our familiar clerical oracle, Cruden, announces not the existence of any text of this description.  If there be such a text, let it be produced: and the matter will be settled at once.’³⁶  The doctrine came either from Newman’s private judgment or from Rome.  M’Ilvaine believed it came from the latter and devoted a chapter of his book to a comparison under six headings of the Tractarian and Roman Catholic teaching.  These were:

      1. That faith before baptism is not and cannot be a living faith, that ‘which worketh by love’.

      2. That faith before baptism is said to justify or to be an instrument of justification, only as a sine-qua-non, only as a necessary preparation for, and that which leads to, baptism, which itself is the only real instrument of justification.

      3. This faith, so dead, is nevertheless a divine, supernatural gift based on the testimony of God, through the creeds and traditionary doctrines of the Church, independently of a direct application to the Scriptures, as the primary and only authoritative Rule of Faith.

      4. That this faith, before baptism, instead of being in any sense justifying, until after the sinner becomes justified in baptism, must itself be first justified, or made a living faith by baptism.

      5. That faith when regenerate and justified in baptism, is not such a trust in the divine mercy as apprehends and accepts remission of sins through the mediation of Christ, and justifies the soul through his righteousness accounted to the believer.

      6. That after it has become a regenerate and lively faith, by the love of God shed abroad in the heart by baptism, so that it is now joined with hope and love, it then only continues or sustains that justification already completed, in baptism, before it was alive; and even this not in any proper sense, as an instrument applying the righteousness of Christ, but only as united to, and acting in common with, all other virtues and works.

In order to prove the similarity of Tractarian and Tridentine teaching the bishop had to give himself to some tortuous reasoning and perhaps some quotations out of context.  His conclusion was that there was no essential difference for both took an opus operatum view of the efficacy of baptism and he added, for good measure, that ‘this opus operatum has ever been considered, among Protestants, a dark and deadly plague-spot of Popery’.³⁷  The opus operatum is simply the efficacy of the sacrament without respect to the state or condition of the recipient, except that he does not shut up his soul against the grace infused.  Opposing this, Protestant theology had always insisted on the need for faith and repentance (in the one to be baptised or in the sponsors) as a preliminary of the administration of the sacrament.

(iii) Evangelical Response. (b) ‘By faith alone’ is the teaching of the Scriptures and the Church of England

      No one asserted this more strongly than did John Bird Sumner, Bishop of Chester.  In his Charge (1841) he declared:

The Scriptural truth is as clear as it is simple.  ‘When all were dead [in sin], Christ died for all’; so that ‘he that hath the Son hath life and he that hath not the Son hath not life’.  By one way alone can man possess the Son; that is, by believing in him.  And therefore, faith alone can justify; faith alone can appropriate to us that remedy, which God has appointed for the healing of our plague: faith alone can give us an interest in that sacrifice which God has accepted as satisfaction for sin.  Thus ‘being justified by faith we have peace with God through Jesus Christ’.

And in the ‘Preface on Justification’ to his Practical Exposition of Romans (1843) he wrote:

When our Church says that we are accounted righteous before God for the merits of Jesus Christ by faith; this must not be understood as if faith were a work of obedience or an act of duty, which God accepts instead of other duties or other obedience, and that therefore the man who has faith is justified, whilst the man who has not faith is condemned for wanting it.  The meaning is that Christ has ‘redeemed from the wrath to come’ ‘as many as receive him and believe in his name’: but that he must be trusted by those whom he redeems: that his death must be relied on, in order that it may be efficacious for salvation: faith being, as it were, the graft by which a believer is united to the ‘true vine’ and separated from the natural corrupt stock to the root of which the axe is laid.

Of this justifying faith Garbett wrote: ‘By its very nature it is self-renunciatory – it rests upon the merit of another – and in this forensic relation it has its very being and exhibits its vigor’.³⁸

      Heurtley devoted a chapter to the topic of ‘the connection of faith and justification’ and had the following to say about faith:

We are justified by faith, because faith, instead of holding out something of our own to rest upon, whether pointing to works done, or calling our attention to itself as the root and foundation of all works, remits us simply and at once to Christ, who is ‘the Lord our righteousness’, that we may receive in Him and from Him, what we have not, and cannot have, of ourselves, both that perfect righteousness of Justification which we may boldly plead before God, and also that inherent, though as yet imperfect, righteousness of Sanctification, which shall qualify us for admission into His presence.³⁹

The last sentence introduces the relation of Justification and Sanctification and to this we shall return below.

(iv) Evangelical Response. (c) The true relation of Baptism and Justification

      In the Articles of Religion there is no specific mention of baptism in relation to justification.  However, in the services of Holy Baptism in the Book of Common Prayer, baptism is clearly connected with the forgiveness (washing away) of sins, which is a part of justification, and in the creed the words ‘I believe in one baptism for the remission of sins’ occur.  M’Ilvaine and Heurtley each devoted a whole chapter to the stating of the relation of baptism and justification and their slightly differing emphases indicate that within Evangelicalism there were several viewpoints.  We shall first set forth Heurtley’s position concerning each point covered and then indicate or describe M’Ilvaine’s attitude.

      Heurtley explained, with reference to adult baptism, that ‘the office of baptism is the solemn ratification of the great Christian covenant, between God and the faithful recipient’.

In adults ... faith is instrumental to our incorporation into Christ in that ... it leads us, on the one hand, to accept salvation ... as God’s free and unmerited gift, bestowed upon us in Christ; on the other, to consecrate ourselves and all we have unreservedly to His service.  Faith produces the cordial and unfeigned assent to this covenant in our hearts.

So before baptism ‘the covenant is already made in intention; only it is not made formally.  The soul is betrothed to Christ, but the marriage ceremony has not taken place.’

Baptism completes what is yet lacking.  It is the solemn signing and sealing of the covenant by both the contracting parties.  And consequently, it actually conveys and makes over to both of them the benefits to which they respectively become entitled.  Thus, on the one hand, God does, in and by baptism, incorporate the baptized person, as a living member, into Christ’s mystical body, and invest him with the full privileges and immunities, so far as he is yet capable of them, of that blessed fellowship ... On the other hand, the baptized person renounces for ever all other lords; he accepts Christ, and God, in Christ, as his only Master; and he solemnly engages himself to the performance of whatsoever duties ... are involved in this new relationship.⁴⁰

Justification is, of course, along with Adoption into God’s family, one of ‘the privileges and immunities’.

      For M’Ilvaine this covenant emphasis, which Heurtley seems to take partly from Vossius (1577–1649), is not so prominent.  He wrote that

Baptism is a sign of separation from the world, and consecration to God; a seal of the Promises of God to those who truly repent and believe; an effectual sign and seal, whereby the grace of repentance and faith is confirmed and increased.⁴¹

This type of definition reflects the Anglican Calvinistic tradition of William Romaine and Thomas Scott.

      Both writers were conscious that the early Fathers and even the Reformers had used language of the sacraments which could be interpreted as teaching an opus operatum doctrine.  Heurtley admitted that ‘the fathers ... in speaking of baptism often use language, which might seem to put its efficacy upon another ground, besides this of its being the ratification of the Christian covenant’.  He concluded that ‘such language is obviously to be understood mystically’.

We are truly said to be in baptism washed in Christ’s blood, yet not because the element of water is substantially changed into blood, but because the blood of Christ is really, though mystically, applied to us in the sacrament.⁴²

M’Ilvaine was content to follow Jewell and Augustine and state that sacraments ‘receive the names of the self-same things they signify’.  So baptism is called ‘baptism for the remission of sins’ because it signifies remission of sins and it is called ‘the washing of regeneration’ because it signifies that washing.  So,

when we speak sacramentally, it is right to say of those in general who are baptised, that in Baptism they are born of God, because then the profession of newness of life is made; then, the seal of the Church is set upon that profession; then the promises of God to those who embrace them are visibly pledged and assured; then the man is received into visible fellowship of the household of faith, and communion with the people of God.  Then, therefore, his Christian life, as one of the children of God, visibly and professedly begins.

Therefore in stating that remission of sins comes at baptism the Church is saying that baptism is like the delivery of a deed: ‘A man is said to have received the conveyance of an estate, which he has been long enjoying, and of which, before God, he had long been the rightful owner.’⁴³

      Heurtley put the last point in somewhat stronger relief; and in so doing took a position that was not common in nineteenth-century Evangelical theology:

But the question may be asked, What is the condition of those, to whom God has already given the grace of faith, but who are not yet baptised?  I answer, Their condition is an imperfect condition: their union with Christ is, as it were, in an incipient state, but it is not formally effected; they have life in some sort, but not life fully developed; the life of the womb, not the life which is given at birth.

He did admit that ‘indispensable as baptism is to salvation under ordinary circumstances, we may not doubt, but that where men are prevented from receiving it by unavoidable necessity, the faith, which desired the sacrament, is accepted instead of the sacrament’.⁴⁴

      The discussion thus far has referred to adults.  Concerning infants Heurtley proposed that

Infants need the grace which adults receive in baptism as truly as adults.  They need to be admitted into God’s covenant; they need to be incorporated into Christ’s body; they need remission of sins.  And they are certainly capable of these benefits.⁴⁵

The sin remitted in infant baptism is the guilt of Adam and so, normally justification may be said to occur at baptism, but is a reality which has personally to be appropriated and recognised later by the child.  M’Ilvaine wrote that in infants

Original Sin is thus remitted on account of the imputed righteousness of the ‘Second Adam’ without their personal faith, just as they have been brought, without any act of theirs, under the curse of the sin of the first Adam.  When baptized infants come to be capable of what is called actual sin, that is, sin after baptism, then they must personally ‘repent and believe on the Lord Jesus Christ’ or else they cannot be saved; but their baptism, as to all participation in God’s mercy, will be then as if they had not been baptized; just as the circumcision of the Jews was made, by unbelief, ‘uncircumcision’.⁴⁶

So the state of justification could be lost by a child who refused to obey the Gospel.

      To summarise this long section we may say that the Evangelicals, while seeking to preserve a very intimate relation between justification and baptism, differed from the Tractarians in that they insisted that justifying faith in adults is always preliminary to the sacrament and though increased and enriched by the sacrament is not the fruit of it, as Tractarians taught. 

5.  WHAT IS THE RELATION AFTER BAPTISM BETWEEN

JUSTIFICATION AND FORGIVENESS ?

(i) Differences in terminology

      Within Evangelical Protestant theology it was usual to dis­tinguish carefully between justification and sanctification, justification and regeneration, regeneration and sanctification.  Justification was seen as the act of God declaring the believing sinner to be righteous in Christ; sanctification was seen as the work of the Holy Spirit in the believing sinner gradually making him righteous; regeneration was seen as the implantation of divine life (or a new nature) in the soul of the believing sinner at the same time as justification and thus being the beginnings of sanctification.  Thus while justification was seen as an act of God within his heavenly court, regeneration was seen as an act of God within the soul of the believing sinner.  Sanctification then began immediately and its purpose was to make righteous that person whom God had already declared to be righteous in Christ.  Naturally Protestants emphasised that the true outcome of justification by faith was the life of increasing holiness and good works (a point which our authors strongly asserted) in which could be enjoyed the assurance of sins forgiven and peace with heaven.⁴⁷

      As we have seen the Tractarians used the words justification and sanctification in a different way from traditional Protestantism and this made the Evangelicals claim that they used the terminology of the Schoolmen and the Council of Trent, to propound doctrines similar to those of Roman Catholicism.  And it was because the Tractarians had such strong doctrines of baptismal regeneration and baptismal justification that the problem, of how sins committed after this unique washing of regeneration were to be forgiven, arose.

(ii) The Tractarian doctrine of the forgiveness of sins after baptism

      In his Scriptural Views of Holy Baptism, Pusey had surprised and shocked many churchmen by his apparent teaching that there was no sure possibility of full assurance of the forgiveness for sins committed after baptism.  This sacrament was, for him, the God-ordained means of both the implantation of divine life into the soul and the remission of sins.  Baptism was the washing of regeneration.  Yet, since baptism was by its very nature administered only once, the problem of the forgiveness of post-baptismal sins was a vital one.  On this point Pusey shared the view of certain teachers of the Early Church that the faithful could never know with full assurance that sins committed after their baptism were cleansed until after death.⁴⁸  He maintained his original position in his Letter to the Bishop of Oxford (1841) where in his explanation of Tractarian teaching on Article XVI ‘Of Sin after Baptism’ he wrote:

She [our Church] has no second Baptism to give and so she cannot pronounce him altogether free from his past sins.  There are but two periods of absolute cleansing, Baptism and the day of Judgment.  She therefore teaches him continually to repent, that so his sins may be blotted out, though she has no commission to tell him absolutely that they are.⁴⁹ 

The question of repentance by Christians was taken up by Charles Wordsworth, second Master of Winchester School, in a printed sermon entitled Evangelical Repentance (1841).  Wordsworth, who later became Bishop of St Andrews, advocated the restoration in the Church of public penance, arguing that forgiveness of sins after baptism can be received only through much self-abasement.  Of the Prodigal Son he wrote: ‘It was the very extremity of pain and misery which humbled the Prodigal’s pride; it is by definite acts of self-punishment and self-abasement that we shall best humble ours’ and thus be in the position to be forgiven.  W. G. Ward was very impressed by Wordsworth’s reasoning and stated that ‘it is impossible to add anything to the masterly treatment it has received at Mr. Wordsworth’s hands, and we would anxiously refer any one who at present takes on trust the popular views [Evangelical] on that awful question, to examine carefully the arguments there adduced’.⁵⁰  It is interesting to note that when Newman came to write his Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine in 1845 he expressly stated that the whole system of penance which developed in the Early Church was inherent in the idea of baptism as the ‘Washing of Regeneration’.  Pusey himself realised that his position as set forth in the Tracts of 1835 was severe and so later he preached several sermons setting forth the comforts afforded by the Gospel to penitents.  The first of these was the famous The Holy Eucharist a Comfort to the Penitent (1843).

(iii) Evangelical Response.  A full assurance of the forgiveness of sins is promised under the Gospel

      Evangelicals, without exception, held that the Scriptures, Article XVI ‘Of Sin after Baptism’, and the service of Holy Communion promised to Christian people full forgiveness after baptism upon the condition of repentance for the sin and faith in Christ the Saviour.  Bishop O’Brien, author of the classic exposition of justification published in 1833, took up this matter in his lengthy Charge of 1842 and insisted that as there was a welcome and forgiveness for the Prodigal Son, so there was a welcome and forgiveness from God to all the unbaptised or baptised who repented of their sins and turned in faith to Christ.  God did not require a perfect repentance.  The reason why Evangelicals asserted that the full forgiveness of sins was the continuing privilege of the baptised Christian, who remained repentant for sins and trusting in Christ, the Saviour, was not only because of the ‘comfortable words’ of Holy Scripture (which are quoted in the service of Holy Communion) but also because of their doctrine of justification and the Baptismal Covenant of Grace.  God’s declaration of forgiveness, imputation of the righteousness of Christ and adoption into his family, ratified in baptism were constant realities from God’s side and human sin merely destroyed the experience of them; but the breach caused by sin was lovingly healed, and the barrier of sin readily removed by God when he found repentance for sin and trust in his Son by the sinner.  The offer of the Gospel, Evangelicals affirmed, included not only the forgiveness of past sins but the promise of the forgiveness of future sins, on condition of faith and repentance.

      M’Ilvaine was severe in his criticism of Pusey’s teaching and likened it to Roman Catholic doctrine; Heurtley stressed the positive side of the matter. ‘We may not doubt’, he wrote, ‘but that God’s arms of mercy are still open to receive those who truly and earnestly turn to Him, even though they have forsaken the guide of their youth, and forgotten the covenant of their God.’  Like O’Brien he referred to the Prodigal Son and insisted that the human side of the covenant of grace is faith and repentance and when these truly occur then God welcomes and fully forgives the person in questíon.⁵¹

6.  CONCLUSION

      It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that the Evangelicals never really answered the doctrine of justification proposed by Newman.  They were so wedded to looking at the subject in terms of the possible formal causes, either internal or external, that they looked for a scholastic basis for Newman’s doctrine of an internal adherent righteousness and believed they found it in the teaching of Aquinas.  So their response to the Tractarian teaching was governed by their knowledge of the controversy between Protestants and Roman Catholics in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.  And, it must be said, they faithfully expounded the position of the Protestant Reformers as far as the doctrine of justification by Faith was concerned.  But they did no fresh biblical exegesis and only in the case of Heurtley is there the glimmer of an attempt to look once more at the teaching of the apostles.  If the Evangelicals had responded by examining the roots of Newman’s views (that is the teaching of the Greek Fathers) and challenged these roots by the teaching of the Apostle Paul and James, then the whole controversy (and perhaps the development of Evangelical theology) would have taken on a different character.  Though Pusey certainly felt the need to explain the Tractarian doctrine of justification to the Christian public, it appears that Newman never felt that his Lectures had been seriously challenged.  The same, however, cannot be said of Pusey’s teaching concerning the forgiveness of sin after baptism.  He expounded an extreme position as early as 1835 and it did not necessarily follow from Newman’s doctrine of justification, which achieved full flower only in 1837–8.

      Justification by Faith, as expounded by Luther and his contemporaries was a liberating doctrine.  It was a doctrine which described a joyful experience of the pardon of sins and of peace with heaven.  In polemical theology it became an integral part of a system of doctrine, the material principle of the Reformation, as it was called.  It is possible to hold to a doctrine both in its experiental and its polemical aspects and it appears that many of the first, second and later generations of Protestants managed to do this.  The great danger which Evangelicals faced in the Victorian period was that of reducing this great Protestant doctrine to a party slogan as they fought what they saw as erroneous systems around them, the teaching of salvation by works or salvation by sacraments.  It is easy to claim that such a corruption of Justification by Faith occurred in the 1830s and 1840s and was the religious, ideological platform of members of the various Protestant societies and Orange orders.  Yet, even in this context, where it was so easy to reduce the experiental aspects of justification to a minimum, one finds a man such as Lord Shaftesbury, whose ‘Diary’ clearly reveals that he knew a similar experience as the Reformers described, and the stalwart Protestant, Alexander Haldane, also appears to have had a deep experiental sense of the forgiveness of God.⁵²  So all that can be safely said is that the tendency of this battle with the Tractarians was in the direction of reducing the prominence of the experiental aspects of the doctrine, which had been primary in the work of the Evangelical leaders of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and enlarging its polemical and ideological aspects.

      It is interesting to observe that in each of the three National Churches of the United Kingdom during the third, fourth and fifth decades of the nineteenth century there were sensitive thinkers challenging the traditional doctrine of forensic justification within Protestantism, based as it was on the analogy of the law court.  In Ireland there was the layman, Alexander Knox; in Scotland there was Thomas Erskine, another layman, and John McLeod Campbell, minister of Row, near Cardross on the Gareloch; and in England there was John Henry Newman and Frederick Denison Maurice.⁵³  The systems which these men produced were different but perhaps a common thread which united them was the search for an internal and an ethical approach to, and account of, justification.⁵⁴  In defending the forensic account of justification the Evangelicals in the Church of Ireland, the Church of Scotland and the Church of England fought a common fight with common weapons, and because they were on the defensive they brought no new light from Scripture to shine upon this important area of Christian doctrine and experience.  Perhaps their failure can be overlooked in that even today biblical scholars cannot seemingly agree as to what exactly is the New Testament or the Pauline, doctrine of justífication.⁵⁵

Notes:  CHAPTER FIVE

1.  While the statement is probably from a second generation Lutheran theologian, Luther himself said something similar in his comments on Gal. 1.3 in his Commentary on Galatians (1535).

2.  British Critic, xxxiv (1843), p. 33.

3.  Faber wrote against Knox’s views as they were stated in his Remains (4 vols, 1834–7).  Knox had made use of the admission by Milner that from early times until the Reformation there had been no clear teaching on Justification by Faith in the Church.  For Milner’s approach to history, see John Walsh, ‘Joseph Milner’s Evangelical Church History’ JEH, (1959). pp. 174 ff.  Knox refers to Milner in Remains, i, 256 ff., and iv, 252.

4.  Already in 1833 James Thomas O’Brien of Trinity College, Dublin, had published what became a standard Protestant work on justification: An Attempt to Explain the Doctrine of Justification by Faith Only (1833).  See further E. R. Norman (ed.), Anti-Catholicism in Victorian England (1968) and note the reprint in 1848 of Gibson’s Preservative against Popery, by the British Reformation Society.

5.  T. L. Sheridan, ‘Newman and Justification.  A Study in the Development of a Theology’, a thesis submitted to the Faculty of Theology of the Institut Catholique de Paris (1963).  See also David Newsome, ‘Justification and Sanctification: Newman and the Evangelicals’, Journal of Theological Studies, n.s. xv (1964), pp. 32 ff.

6.  See further C. S. Dessain, ‘Cardinal Newman and the Eastern Tradition’, The Downside Review, 94, No. 315 (1976), pp. 83 ff:

7.  W. Ward, Life of Newman (1912), i, p. 432; and Faber, The Primitive Doctrine of Justification (2nd ed., 1838), p. 410.  Newman himself believed the Lectures to be one of the five constructive books he produced in his lifetime.  Ward, Life, ii, p. 262.

8.  Appendices v and vi, pp. 393 ff. and 408 ff.

9.  Faber, op. cit., pp. 425–7.

10.  See further W. S. Bricknell, The Judgment of the Bishops upon Tractarian Theology (1845), chapter xiii.  Nonconformists also joined in the controversy: for example, James Bennett, a Secretary of the London Missionary Society, published Justification as Revealed in Scripture (1840).

11.  C. F. Allison, The Rise of Moralism (1966), pp. 63 ff.

12.  Faber, Provincial Letters (1842), preface.

13.  Sumner had previously published expositions of Matthew, Luke, John and Acts.  The Hon and Rev A. P. Perceval published A Letter to the Right Rev. John Bird, Lord Bishop of Chester: with remarks on his late Charge, more especially as relates to the Doctrine of Justification (1841).  The points he made were that the bishop did not mention the relation of baptism and justification and did not say enough about repentance and justification.

14.  Charge (1841), p. 22.

15.  In the British Critic, lxvii (1843), pp. 63 ff. there is a review of the book and on p. 74 there is an attempt to summarise the differences between the systems of Sumner and Newman.  The publication of the Tract by the SPCK led to a minor controversy.  William Scott in An Appeal to the Members of the SPCK criticised Sumner’s doctrine while R. Burgess, the Evangelical rector of Upper Chelsea, defended it in Observations on ‘An Appeal’.  See further Churchman’s Monthly Review (1844), pp. 298 ff:  Sumner himself defended the relation of justification by faith and holy living in Christian Charity the Test of Christian Faith (1843), a sermon preached in Liverpool on 2 November, 1843.

16.  See further William Carus, Memorials of the Rt Rev Charles Petit McIlvaine (1882).  Carus was also the biographer of Charles Simeon, and the latter’s successor at Trinity Church, Cambridge.

17.  A reply to the bishop came from Vanburgh Livingston in An Inquiry into the merits of the Reformed Doctrine of Imputation (New York, 1843).

18.  Carus, op. cit., p. 129.

19.  The address was published as The Chief Dangers of the Church in these Times (New York and London, 1843).

20.  For an exposition of Newman’s doctrine see Sheridan, op. cit., chap. ix.  See also C. S. Dessain, ‘The biblical basis of Newman’s ecumenical theology’, in The Rediscovery of Newman: An Oxford Symposium (ed. J. Coulson and A. M. Allchin, 1967), pp. 100 ff.  Hans Küng, Justification (1964), pp. 202–3 refers to Newman with admiration.

21.  British Critic, xxviii (1840), No. 56, p. 42, cited by M’Ilvaine, Oxford Divinity, p. 40.

22.  Knox, Remains, ii, p. 60, cited by M’Ilvaine, op. cit., p. 42.

23.  Faber, Primitive Doctrine of Justification (2nd ed., 1838), p. xx.

24.  M’Ilvaine, Oxford Divinity, pp. 126–32.

25.  For useful articles on ‘habitus’ as used in medieval theology see C. A. Dubray, ‘Habit’, The Catholic Encyclopedia (1910), vii, p. 102, and R. J. Tapia, ‘Habit (in Theology)’, New Catholic Encyclopedia (1967), vi, pp. 884–5.

26.  Garbett, Jesus Christ as Prophet, Priest and King, i, pp. 460–2.

27.  There is no biography of him in English.  For his doctrine of justification see M. J. Arntzen, Mysticke rechtvaardigingsleer.  Een bijdrage ter beoordeling van de theologie van Andreas Osiander (Kampen, 1956).

28.  See further Franz Lau and Ernst Bizer, A History of the Reformation in Germany to 1555 (1969), pp. 230–1, and Émile G. Léonard, A History of Protestantism, Vol. I. The Reformation (1965), pp. 93 and 150–1.  Osiander’s teaching is condemned in the Formula of Concord, Art. III and by Calvin in Institutes, Bk. 3, Ch. 11, sec. 5–12.

29.  Lectures, p. 426.  Newman probably knew Osiander’s teaching through the description of it in Scott’s Continuation of Milner’s History, ii, p. 116.

30.  Laurence, Visitation of the Saxon Reformed Church (1839), p. 189.

31.  Garbett, op. cit., i, p. 459; and M’Ilvaine, op. cit., pp. 99–100.

32.  Heurtley, Justification (2nd ed., 1849), pp. 88 and 342.

33.  Faber, op. cit., pp. xx-xxi, quoted by M’Ilvaine, op. cit., pp. 44–45.

34.  Garbett, op. cit-, i, pp. 374–5.

35.  Newman, Lectures, pp. 259, 293 and 303.

36.  Faber, Primitive Doctrine of Justification (1838), p. 418.  ‘Cruden’ is Cruden’s Concordance.

37.  M’Ilvaine, op. cit., pp. 185 ff.

38.  Garbett, op. cit., i, p. 395.

39.  Heurtley, op. cit., p. 227.

40.  Ibid., pp. 254–5.  Bishop Burnet defined baptism thus: ‘Baptism is a federal admission into Christianity: in which, on God’s part, all the blessings of the Gospel are made over to the Baptised; and, on the other hand, the person baptised takes on him, by a solemn profession and vow, to observe and adhere to the Christian Religion.’  Thirty-Nine Articles, comment on Article XXVII.

41.  M’Ilvaine, op. cit., p. 413.

42.  Heurtley, op. cit., pp. 258–9.

43- M’Ilvaíne, op- cit., pp. 420–1, 433–4.

44.  Heurtley, op. cit., pp. 268–70.

45.  Ibid., p. 281.

46.  M’Ilvaine, op. cit., p. 374.

47.  Garbett, op. cit., pp. 445–7.  Sumner, Charge, pp. 23–4, and Practical Exposition, pp. xxvii-xxix.

48.  He was unjustly accused of Novatianism.  For the way in which Clement, Origen and Tertullian faced the problem of the forgiveness of post-baptismal sins see Maurice Wiles, ‘One Baptism for the Remission of Sins’, Church Quarterly Review, clxv, 1964, pp. 59 ff.  For the role of penitence in the history of the Church see P. E. McKeevеr, ‘Sacrament of Penance’, New Catholic Encyclopedia (1967), xi, pp. 73–83 and the literature there listed. 49.  Pusey, Letter, p. 93.  See also the whole section, pp. 81-96.

50.  Ward’s comments appear in the review of Heurtley’s The Union of Christ and His People (1842), and in the British Critic, xxxi (1842), pp. 449–452.

51.  Heurtley, op. cit., p. 330.

52.  For both Shaftesbury and Haldane see Hodder, op. cit., ii, pp. 400 ff.

53.  There are useful summaries of the teaching of Knox, Erskine, Campbell and Maurice in B. M. G. Reardon, From Coleridge to Gore (1971).

54.  See further on this point O. Pfleiderer, The Development of Theology in Germany since Kant and its Progress in Great Britain since 1825 (1890), p. 382.

55.  See e.g. J. A. Ziesler, The Meaning of Righteousness in Paul (Cambridge, 1972) and the review by G. B. Caird in Journal of Theological Studies, xxiv (1973), pp. 555 ff.  Ziesler consciously attempts to weave together Protestant and Catholic understanding.

Chapter Six:  Church, Ministry and Sacraments

      At the time when the Oxford Movement began, Anglican Evangelicals were engaged in a sometimes bitter controversy with some of their Nonconformist brethren concerning the biblical, theological and political justification for an Established Church.  Apparently they convinced few Dissenters but they did strengthen their own conviction that they were in an institution which was within God’s will for his universal Church and for Britain.  They welcomed the famous Lectures on Church Establishments by Dr Chalmers and gave support to the position outlined by two of their number – Hugh McNeile, the eloquent Irishman, in his Lectures on the Church of England (1840) and R. B. Seeley, the publisher, in his Essays on the Church (1833).

      Controversy with Tractarians over the doctrine of the Church and related issues was a different matter.  Ironically, in this case, Anglican Evangelicals who were staunch defenders of the national Church were accused of being open or disguised Dissenters or Puritans within the episcopalian structures.  Thus while Evangelicals zealously argued from biblical teaching (often from the Old Testament) and political theory to defend Church Establishments against Nonconformists, they argued with a similar zeal against Tractarians from what they heartily believed to be New Testament principles and the teaching of the Anglican Reformers.

1.  INTRODUCTION

      The nature of the Church, ministry and sacraments constituted an area of doctrine to which Tractarians gave increasing attention as the years from 1833 passed by.  In the earliest Tracts clergy were reminded of the apostolic ministry which was theirs and the efficacious sacraments of grace which they administered in Christ’s name.  In later treatises a via media course for the Church of England was plotted between popular Protestantism and Romanism, a full-blooded doctrine of baptismal regeneration and a very high doctrine of the Real Presence in the Eucharist were proclaimed; auricular confession was claimed to be a neglected but genuinely Anglican doctrine and practice.  To say the least, in terms of the traditions of the English Church since the sixteenth century these doctrines were either novel or controversial.  So they were opposed in sermons, pamphlets and treatises, as usual with varying degrees of skill and learning.

      It has been noted in the historical survey how ecclesiological differences between Tractarians and Evangelicals surfaced in terms of different attitudes adopted by each side to specific matters.  For example, in the activity to promote the Jerusalem Bishopric and in the subsequent support for Bishop Gobat, Evangelicals worked from a view of the Church which presumed that German Lutheran ministers were truly ordained to the ministry of the Church of Christ and which suspected that the Greek Churches were apostate.  Tractarians regarded the apostolic succession of bishops as fundamental and ordination as valid only if conducted by such a bishop; for them, therefore, the Lutherans were not valid ministers and the Greek Churches, having the succession of bishops, were true Churches.  Then the passionate controversy surrounding the views of Charles Gorham highlighted not only different approaches to the understanding of what God does in infant baptism but also different views as to the part the state should play in deciding for the Church what was true doctrine.  Evangelicals were happy to see the state having a part but the Tractarians believed that doctrinal matters should be left to bishops and church synods.

      In the pages which follow an attempt will be made to present those aspects of the doctrines of Church, ministry and sacraments as held by Evangelicals which were directly challenged in the controversy between the two parties.  Put another way, as in the two previous chapters, an attempt will be made to explain how Evangelicals responded out of their own tradition to central questions raised by the Tractarian literature.  These questions were: What is the relation of the invisible Church and the visible churches?  Is episcopacy of the esse of the bene esse of the visible churches?  What are the effects of infant baptism? and, In what sense is Christ present in the Eucharist?  First of all, however, a brief description of the literature to be used will be given.

2.  THE EVANGELICAL LITERATURE

      Strictly speaking only two treatises by Evangelicals on the doctrine of the Church were published between 1833 and 1856.  The first, popular in style and betraying a sermonic origin, came from the pen of Hugh McNeile and had the title, The Church and the Churches; or, The Church of God in Christ and the Churches of Christ militant here on earth (1846).  It followed his earlier volume defending Church Establishments.  Its title reveals his full commitment to the Protestant distinction between the invisible and visible aspects of the Church.  Much of his argument was directed against what he took to be the traditional Tridentine doctrine of Rome in which there is a close identification of the visible Church, with the Pope as Head, and the mystical Body of Christ with Christ as Head.  He did, however, take Tractarian views into account for he saw Tractarianism as a halfway house between the Protestant Church of England and the Church of Rome.  One of his major worries was that the Tractarian clergy were driving many faithful Protestant laity from the established Church towards congregational independency; another worry was that the British Roman Catholics, strengthened by secessions from the Church of England, were making significant numerical advances.  So, perhaps more to strengthen his brethren than to convert either Tractarian or Roman Catholic, he wrote his book.  First, he dealt with the object of faith described in the creed as ‘One-Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church’.  In four chapters he explained that this Church was in fact the invisible Church composed of all elect believers of all times and places.  Its unity was in the union of Christ by the one Spirit; its holiness was that offered and provided in the work of the Holy Spirit; its catholicity was in virtue of the fact that the elect came from every tribe and nation, and its apostolicity was in the doctrine of the apostles by which the elect came to their salvation.  In a further chapter he dealt with the visible churches composed of the elect and the reprobate, and followed this with chapters on Baptism, the Lord’s Supper and the Ministry.  While far from being a good book it does provide very useful information as to the views of one of the most popular of Evangelical preachers and presumably, therefore, reflects the views of many of his hearers.  Eugene Stock, the historian of the Church Missionary Society, believed that McNeile was ‘unquestionably the greatest Evangelical preacher and speaker in the Church of England’ during the century.

      In contrast Edward Arthur Litton’s The Church of Christ, in Its Idea, Attributes and Ministry (1851) is an academic treatise, aimed primarily at Roman Catholic doctrine but including what he called ‘Catholic, or Church, or Sacramental’ principles which were rife in the Church of England in 1851.  In his terminology he entered a contest between what he saw as an Evangelical and an Ecclesiastical Christianity, a contest which he believed was as old as the Gospel itself; and, as he told readers in the Preface, ‘the ground assumed throughout is that of Evangelical Protestantism, the Protestantism of Luther, Calvin and our own Reformers, as distinguished from the political, eclectic and rationalistic systems which at different times have taken its place’.  The arrangement of the work may be briefly described.  In the first book an attempt was made to fix the true idea of the Church, that is to determine whether it was as the Romanist claimed an external institution or as Protestants claimed a society which has its true being or ‘differentia’ within.  The second book is devoted to the consideration of the predicates or attributes of the Church as expressed in the Catholic Creeds and in the rival confessions of faith.  The third book contains an exposition of the difference between the Roman Church and the Church of England on the subject of the ministry.  In each area Litton attempted first to determine from the authentic documents of each party what was the real point at issue and then to examine to which side truth inclined.  Unlike many of his contemporaries Litton read German and so his discussion of the topics was informed by his reading of works by Möhler and De Maistre on the Roman side and by Baur, Neander and Nitzsch on the Protestant side.  Since Litton was, next to Goode, the most learned of Evangelical theologians, his work is valuable as a sophisticated presentation of a controversial doctrine.  One weakness of it was that it assumed that the Protestant doctrine from the Anglican side was uniform, an assumption which Dr Woodhouse has shown cannot be maintained.¹

      Turning to the doctrines of Baptism and the Lord’s Supper we find that the scene is dominated by important treatises from William Goode.  During the Gorham controversy he published his The Doctrine of the Church of England as to the elects of Baptism in the case of Infants (1849).  With the help of testimonies from divines of the sixteenth century he attempted to show what was the general doctrine of the Articles of Religion and Prayer Book.  Then with testimonies from divines of later centuries he showed that the belief that spiritual regeneration always and invariably occurs in the baptism of infants had little or no support in the major Anglican traditions.  Though the greater part of the book is taken up with extracts from the writings of bishops and divines there is interpretative comment which is perceptive.  In his conclusions Goode anticipated not only the findings of the judicial Committee of the Privy Council which were announced in 1850 but also the valuable study of J. B. Mozley entitled A Review of the Baptismal Controversy (1862).

      Goode’s large work, The Nature of Christ’s Presence in the Eucharist (2 vols., 1856) is likewise dominated by quotations and was directed against the views of Denison, Wilberforce and Pusey.²  This time the quotations came from both the Fathers and Anglican divines.  They were followed in each case with careful comment and the whole purpose was to show that the Tractarian doctrine had certainly no justification in the Anglican tradition and only minimal justification in the patristic tradition.  It has been claimed by W. H. MacKean that no opponent of the new doctrine was ‘so learned and deeply read as William Goode’ who not only covered a massive field but who showed ‘a greater discrimination’ than the Tractarians in sifting the complex evidence.³

      Of popular sermons and pamphlets in these areas there was no shortage, especially on the topic of baptism.  In view of the existence of the major books described above only minimal use will be made of the more popular literature.  In particular the printed sermons of Hugh Stowell of Manchester entitled Tractarianism Tested by Holy Scripture (2 vols, 1845–6) and which represent perhaps the most balanced, popular critique of Tractarianism, and those of Christopher Benson, Master of the Temple, entitled Discourses upon Tradition and Episcopacy (1839), which are profound in their simplicity, will be quoted.

3.  WHAT IS THE RELATION OF THE INVISIBLE CHURCH

AND THE VISIBLE CHURCHES?

      To speak of the One, Holy, Catholic Church as invisible and churches as visible was fundamental to Victorian Evangelicalism, be it Anglican or Nonconformist.  The invisible Church was taken to be the true Church of Christ and members of this Church, together with false professors of Christianity, were to be found in visible (parish) congregations.  By this division Evangelicals believed that they were able to surmount the problems raised for them by the worldliness or even apostasy of both large churches and individual churchmen as well as by the existence of Protestant denominations and sects outside the State Churches of Europe.  Also they felt able to support the printing and distribution of the Scriptures by the Bible Societies without reference to any specific ecclesiastical control.  Evangelicals were confident that their doctrine faithfully expounded the insights and basic teaching of Holy Scripture and the Reformers.⁴  So it is not surprising that in 1853 Goode claimed that the theological differences between Tractarianism and Evangelical Protestantism could be traced to different estimates of the relationship of the invisibility and visibility of the Church of Christ:

Both the Roman and Tractarian systems are founded upon one and the same fundamental error; namely, that the true Church of Christ must be a body of individuals united together by external and visible bonds of union and communion, under the government of those ordained in succession from the Apostles as their bishops and pastors.  From this primary false principle springs an abundant harvest of errors.  Truth is sacrificed to unity.  The ‘priesthood’ are exalted to a place not belonging to them, and the ministry of service is turned into a ministry of lordly government.  Usurped power is sustained by the expedients to which usurpers are wont to resort, fictions and delusions of every kind calculated to place the minds of men under their yoke.  And the spiritual kingdom of Christ, of which hearts are the subjects, and His word and the unseen influences of His Spirit the ruling and directing authorities, is turned into an earthly kingdom, whose subjects are all those who submit themselves to certain human authorities and hold themselves bound by certain human laws.⁵

Therefore true Protestants put the spiritual kingdom of Christ first.

      Initial Protestant theological reflection in the sixteenth century concerning the Church gladly took over the division into visible and invisible which was to be found in the writings of Augustine of Hippo.⁶  For polemical reasons this way of looking at the subject appeared useful and so it was developed in the Reformed, Lutheran and Anglican traditions.  However, while it appears specifically in the Reformed and Lutheran Confessions of Faith, it is not explicitly found in the Thirty-Nine Articles.⁷  Article XIX reads:

The visible Church of Christ is a congregation of faithful men, in the which the pure Word of God is preached and the Sacraments be duly administered according to Christ’s ordinance in all those things that of necessity are requisite to the same.

      As the Church of Jerusalem, Alexandria and Antioch have erred; so also the Church of Rome hath erred, not only in their living and manner of Ceremonies, but also in matters of Faith.

The roots of this Article are in the Augsburg Confession but the latter does not use the word ‘visible’.  It is possible to argue that this Article and others take for granted the doctrine of the invisible Church, a doctrine which is presupposed in the post-Communion prayer and the collect for All Saints’ Day in the Prayer Book.  Litton and other Evangelicals proceeded on the assumption that Article XIX had to be interpreted by means of Nowell’s Catechism (1570) and the Continental Confessions of Faith of the same period.⁸

      On this basis Litton was able to provide a clear summary of the Protestant position on the invisibility of the Church in these words:

The one true Church, the holy Catholic Church of the Creed, is not a body of mixed composition, comprehending within its pale both the evil and the good: it is the community of those who, wherever they may be, are in living union with Christ by faith, and partake of the sanctifying influences of His Spirit.  Properly, it comprises, besides its members now upon earth, all who shall ultimately be saved.  In its more confined acceptation, the phrase denotes the body of true believers existing at any given time in the world.

      The true Church is so far invisible as that it is not yet manifested in its corporate capacity; or, in other words; there is no one society, or visible corporation upon earth, of which it can be said that it is the mystical Body of Christ.  Hence, of course, the Head of this Body is not visible.

Of the visible churches Litton wrote:

Particular churches, otherwise unconnected societies, are one by reason of their common relation to, and connexion with, the one true Church or mystical Body of Christ.  The outward notes of this connexion, and therefore of a true visible Church, are, the pure preaching of the Word (in fundamentals at least), and the administration of the Sacraments ‘according to Christ’s ordinance in all those things that of necessity are requisite to the same’.  These are the two indispensable notes of true Church: to them may be added, though it stands not in the same order of necessity, the exercise of discipline.

      Although visible Churches are, according to the idea, ‘congregations of the saints’, i.e. really sanctified persons, and must be regarded as such if they are to have the name of Churches, yet they are never really so; in point of fact, they are always mixed communities, comprising hypocrites and nominal Christians, as well as true believers, a perfect separation between whom is, in the present life, impossible and is reserved to the Second Coming of Christ to judgment.  Hence the aggregate of visible Christian Churches throughout the world is not exactly identical with the true Church, which ... consists only of the living members of Christ.

This way of understanding the doctrine of the Church became fairly common in Anglican theology and clearly surfaced in the controversy with Rome.  For example, in the collection of controversial divinity of the seventeenth century known as Bishop Gibson’s Preservative Against Popery it is both presupposed and argued explicitly.⁹

      There is another way of understanding Article XIX and that is to insist on the ‘remarkable’ fact that there is no reference whatever to the invisible Church in the whole Thirty-Nine Articles.  It is possible to identify in the Prayer Book, the Ordinal and the Canons of 1604, a way of stating the relation of the invisibility and visibility of the Church which, while not being Roman, is neither Lutheran nor Reformed.¹⁰  This alternative viewpoint works from a much closer identification of the visible and invisible seeing the two as two sides of one coin, or, as it were, of existing close together in parallel lines.  So viewed from above the Church is the mystical Body of Christ (invisible from below) and viewed from below is the One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church (divided into national Churches and other groupings).  Such a way of stating the relation of the two does not necessarily imply that every baptised member of the visible churches is a member of the mystical Body of Christ, but it does affirm that much more of the New Testament teaching about the Church applies to the visible, continuing, historical, mixed churches than much sixteenth-century Protestant theology allowed.  Perhaps in the Service of Infant Baptism this close relation of the mystical and the visible is clearly seen:

We receive this Child into the congregation of Christ’s flock ... Seeing this Child is regenerate, and grafted into the body of Christ’s Church ... We yield Thee hearty thanks, most merciful Father, that it hath pleased Thee to regenerate this Infant with thy holy Spirit, to receive him for thine own Child by adoption and incorporate him into thy holy Church.

Apparently here it is understood that the child becomes a member of the Body of Christ and of the visible church where the baptism takes place.  While this way of understanding the Anglican doctrine appears to go more naturally with a high view of the historical episcopate and threefold ministry, many of those who were committed to it did nevertheless find room in their definitions of the visible Church for the Reformed and Lutheran Churches.¹¹

      Tractarianism is best seen as a development of this second way of understanding the Anglican tradition.  Tractarians certainly did not deny that the Church could be, and indeed should be, described as both visible and invisible.  Several of the early Tracts made use of this distinction and in some of the parochial sermons of Newman the relation of the two aspects of the Church is expressed in a beautiful way.  There seems to be little doubt that for Newman the mystical Body was the primary concept but he held that this divine, invisible reality was to be closely identified with the visible, historical, episcopal communion, as one superior reality hovering over and encircling another inferior reality.¹²  Furthermore, William Palmer’s Treatise on the Church of Christ (1838), which was highly respected by Tractarians, likewise accepted the distinction but, in a more scholastic fashion than Newman, saw a close relationship between the visible Catholic Church and the mystical Body of Christ.  For this reason he was criticised by both McNeile and Litton.¹³  What the Tractarians appear to have done, and to have done the more after Tract 90, was to insist that the mystical Body of Christ can be encountered and entered only through the sacraments of the visible, episcopal Churches, which alone make up the One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church.  Robert Wilberforce expressed this new emphasis when he wrote:

For that which joins men to Christ’s mystical Body, the Church, is their union with His man’s nature; and their means of union with His man’s nature is bestowed in His Church or Body mystical.  This will become more evident when it is shown that the Sacraments, which are the means of binding us to the mystical Body of Christ, derive their efficacy from the influence of His body natural.  And hence the impossibility of answering a question which is sometimes asked, whether men are joined to Christ by being joined to His Church or joined to His Church by being joined to Him ... The two relations hang inseparably together.  By the mystical Body of Christ is meant the whole family of those who by the Holy Ghost are united in Church ordinances to His man's nature.  Our real union with each is what gives us a part in the other.¹⁴

To the ear of the Evangelical these statements sounded like a claim that Christ was being replaced by Episcopal Church and Sacraments.¹⁵

      In 1843 Goode regretted that this development of the doctrine of the Church was taking place within Tractarian thinking; he also regretted that it was being justified by reference to earlier Anglican divines.  It was his conviction that Tractarians were confusing two different questions by making them identical questions.  ‘What constitutes a man a member of the visible Church?’ was being equated with ‘What unites a man to Christ and constitutes him a member of his body?’  Because they were treating the two different questions as the same question the Tractarians were equating entry into the invisible Church with entry into the visible parish congregation.  As he was very much aware that High Church divines had taken great care in the controversy with Roman Catholicism to show that the Roman claim of the identification of the Roman Church with the mystical Body of Christ was untenable, Goode re-published short treatises by Thomas Jackson (1579–1640) and Robert Sanderson (1587–1663), both authors whom Tractarians esteemed.¹⁶  In a long introduction he showed that Jackson, especially, though he had a high view of the visible churches ruled by bishops, did nevertheless teach that it was possible to be a member of the mystical Body of Christ without being a member of an episcopal communion.  More importantly, Jackson taught that spiritual union with Christ and membership of his Body by the grace of adoption was primary and was attainable without necessary recourse to the sacraments administered by an episcopally ordained priest; the One, Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church was the mystical Body of Christ.  Therefore, instead of following the Anglican fathers it was the case, Goode believed, that ‘the attention of the Tractarian is directed to the determination of the nature and constitution of the visible Church as it existed in primitive times and, having laid down an exclusive rule of Church government and discipline, he affirms that those who only have submitted to this form Christ’s Body and are united to Him and His Church’.  Litton agreed and argued that Tractarians put themselves into an intellectually embarrassing position when they rejected both the Romanist doctrine of the universal Church under a visible head and the Protestant doctrine of the priority of the invisible Church under an invisible Head.  Their via media was a ‘no man's land’.

      While Goode appears to have been ready to develop a doctrine of the Church based on the writings of both Elizabethan and Caroline divines, Litton appears to have believed that the Protestant Confessions of Faith of the sixteenth century had said all that was necessary – at least in terms of principles if not of terminology.  McNeile’s position, though not precisely stated, appears to have been that of Litton except that he took great care to emphasise the idea of predestination as central to the understanding of the invisible Church.

      On the basis of the biblical evidence (mostly Pauline) which he examined Litton expressed the opinion that:

The expression Catholic Church may be, as it is commonly in the Fathers, very fitly used to denote the whole or the totality of the churches which make up, at any given time, visible Christendom; but all, save Romanists, hold that the aspect which visible Christendom is ordinarily to present is that, not of one visibly organised society, but of a collection of societies, founded on certain common principles: the Catholic Church in this sense being nothing but an aggregate of local Christian societies, distinct from and independent of each other.  But there is something more than this involved in the figurative terms ‘Body of Christ’ or ‘spiritual house’ by which the Church ... is commonly described.¹⁷

The something more was the mystical Body of Christ, the invisible Church which is an object of faith in the creed.  Of this Communion he claimed that ‘as the characteristic of the mystical Body of Christ is organic unity under one Head, so the component members of it are not churches but individuals’.  Then from such passages as Ephesians 4.15–16, 2.20–2 and Colossians 2.19 he claimed to deduce that:

The union of the members with the Head here described is such, that the vital energy which animates the whole Body flows directly, and by virtue of real incorporation from the Head into each member; a kind of union of which, as it is evident, a society, as such, is incapable.  Between a local church, or collection of such churches, and Christ there is no vital, organic connexion such as exists between the branches of a tree and the tree itself; it is individual believers who are in Christ, as the branches are in the vine; it is into individuals and not merely into communities as such that the influences of the Spirit are derived from the Head.

He reinforced this last point when he wrote that local churches may only be said to have Christ as their Head in a mediate sense, the reason being that `the societies are churches of Christ but it is the individuals who compose them that are (if they be in truth what they profess to be) members of Christ's Body'.¹⁸

      For McNeile, as was noted above, predestination was the key to the understanding of the reality of the invisible Church.  To have clear views of the Church of God in Christ was to see the Church as composed of four classes of people.¹⁹  The first consisted of those who ‘have fallen asleep in Jesus’ and ‘whose spirits ... are present with the Lord in joy and felicity’.  Then on earth there are those ‘who are quickened into spiritual life by divine grace ... and who walk by faith and not by sight’.  Also on earth are those who, being fore-ordained by God unto salvation, are still in sin and await the work of the Holy Spirit in their hearts, producing repentance and faith.  Finally, there are those yet to be born into the world who are elect according to the foreknowledge of God and who will be regenerated by the Spirit after their earthly birth.

      McNeile, apparently, had no problems with the word ‘invisible’ but Litton did.  He believed that ‘it gave occasion to the papal theologians to charge their adversaries sometimes with reducing the Church to a platonic republic, having no actual existence, and sometimes with making two distinct Churches – a visible and invisible one’.  Therefore he suggested that the ‘Reformers would have better expressed their meaning and avoided the risk of misrepresentation had they, instead of saying that the true Church is invisible, simply affirmed that that which constitutes the true being of the Church is invisible’.²⁰  That which was the true being of the Church was expressed in the heart of the doctrine of justification by faith, that is the grace of God and the living faith of men, both unseen but both real.  This vital union of individuals to Christ, at present an object of faith expressed in the creed as belief in the One Catholic Church, will at the end of the age become an object of sight, but until that glorious moment ‘it is as regards its proper organic unity, or its corporate capacity, invisible’.  This explanation does not, of course, change the basic position; it only clarifies further the nature of the mystical Body of Christ.

      Happily, some recent Protestant theology has attempted to avoid what in Litton and others appears to be a dualistic (the marked separation of the invisible Church from the visible churches) and individualistic (the insistence that the relation of Christ to a congregation is only in terms of relations with individuals) approach.  Karl Barth, for example, has condemned what he calls an ecclesiastical docetism and has emphasised that the one Church is both invisible and visible.  There is not some invisible Church different from the visible churches; rather, by the eye of faith the Christian sees the invisible Church in and through the visible churches.²¹

4.. IS THE EPISCOPACY OF THE ‘ESSE’

OR THE ‘BENE ESSE’ OF THE CHURCH?

      Tractarians did not doubt that the historical episcopate was of the ‘esse’ of the Church.  In their view this was needed in order to guarantee the orders of presbyters, who in turn administered valid sacraments of efficacious grace, especially the Eucharist by which spiritual union with Christ was achieved and sustained.  Writing in 1839 when the Tracts were still regularly appearing Benson could state with some justice:

I cannot but think that the doctrines laid down in the Tracts for the Times though they neither deny salvation to Presbyterians as individuals, nor expressly unchurch the Presbyterian communities, do still imply that there is no ground for believing, but rather every reason to disbelieve the validity of any of their ministrations.  And if so, I apprehend, a Presbyterian would not be able to see much difference between the two views.²²

What was implicit in 1839 was made explicit in the next two decades.

      Looking at the relation of the invisible and visible aspects of the Church and at the purpose and efficacy of the sacraments from a different perspective, the Evangelicals viewed episcopacy as of the ‘bene esse’ of the Church.  For example, Bishop Daniel Wilson made the following positive affirmation in 1843:

Our episcopal form of Church government affords us the best means under God of preserving the faith.  Had Protestant Germany retained her Episcopacy the Neology of the last hundred years might possibly have been averted.  Had Reformed France kept her Episcopacy the Arianism of the eighteenth century might never have prevailed.  Had Geneva preserved the primitive order of church government she might never have apostosized from the principles of her great founder.  If the Church of England is to be saved peaceably and in an orderly manner it is her bishops who under God must save her.²³

He saw Tractarianism and Latitudinarianism as the threats.  Ironically it was the same order of bishops whom Tractarians elevated to whom Wilson looked for the removal of Tractarianism from the Church. Tract 10 had claimed that ‘he that despiseth the Bishops despiseth the Apostles’, but there was point to Archbishop Whateley’s oft-quoted comment that ‘by none is a professed veneration for the episcopal office carried to a more extravagant height than by some who ... set at nought with the greatest contumely every Bishop who ventures to disagree with them’.²⁴

      The majority of Evangelicals, including those whom Conybeare called the ‘Recordites’, appear to have believed that the episcopal form of government was instituted by the apostles and was the polity God intended should be the norm in the visible churches.  McNeile, Stowell and Seeley (Recordites?), Benson and Litton all took for granted that in his consecrating of Timothy and Titus, the apostle Paul was creating the distinction between a bishop and a presbyter.  Litton wrote:

Since it is an historical fact that towards the close of the apostolic age the ministry is found to have assumed the episcopal form, and that to the bishop was reserved the right of ordaining, the ministerial commission must, of course, have descended in the line of the episcopate.  The fact, therefore, that the ministerial commission, beginning with the apostles, was perpetuated in the episcopate as its regular channel for more than 1500 years after the commencement of the Church is undeniable.²⁵

One author who did not believe that the distinction between bishop and presbyter was created in the apostolic period was Charles Bowdler, but he did allow that it began and became the norm in the period immediately following the apostolic times.  Opposing the high claims of Tractarians he agreed that ‘the worth of episcopacy is readily granted’ and proceeded:

High antiquity, everything short of apostolic origin and appointment is conceded to it, with all of privilege and authority that can be asked for it on that account.  What is denied to it is heavenly birth; its asserted institution by our Lord or his apostles; and the consequent claim to that exclusive purity which belongs to any stream whose fountain is divine.²⁶

In this last denial he spoke for Evangelicals as a whole who did not believe that any special grace was communicated in the succession of bishops; for them grace was related to the truth of the Gospel and the power of the Spirit while the succession related to the areas of good order and historical continuity.

      All Evangelicals appear to have believed that while much could be said in terms of the superiority of the episcopal form of Church government, it could not be said to belong to the centre of the Gospel, or the centre of the Christian Faith.  Hugh Stowell claimed:

We find enough in apostolic precedent, in primitive usage, and in universal order to warrant, nay, we conceive to enforce our conscientious adhesion to an episcopal church, where the church maintains the truth; but we do not find anything which authorizes us to demand the same adhesion at the hands of others, on peril of their souls.  Repentance, faith, obedience – these are clearly constituted conditions of acceptance with God, but not so the possession of an episcopal ministry.  And shall we presume to be more exclusive than God, or to make the strait gate narrower than He has made it?  Can we hold that episcopacy is necessary to the prosperity without holding that it is essential to the existence of a church?²⁷

And Christopher Benson likewise claimed:

Nowhere in the Gospel is a perfect uniformity of ecclesiastical polity so indispensably required as to make it meet for any Christian to pass an absolute sentence of excommunication upon a brother who differs from himself.  To his own master he standeth or falleth and our duty lies rather in persuading him to agreement than in urging condemnation because he disagrees with ourselves.²⁸ 

Or, in a brief sentence of Seeley, the Church of England ‘carefully abstains from making episcopacy an indispensable requisite in a Christian Church’.²⁹  Evangelicals were confident that the majority of evidence from Anglican tradition was in favour of the position to which they were committed.  To show that even High Church divines held to it Goode printed a letter of Bishop Cosin (1594–1672), containing acceptance of the orders of foreign pastors, in the volume in which were Jackson and Sanderson’s treatises.³⁰

      The spiritual and moral reasons why Evangelicals could not deny the validity of the ministry of Lutherans, Presbyterians and Nonconformists is well expressed in the words of Stowell:

Much as we prize uniformity, how much more ought we to prize living union with Christ.  The former without the latter is the shell without the kernel, the body without the soul.  Show us the image of our Saviour, in lowliness, in meekness, in patience, in love, in spirituality of mind, in holiness of character, in all the fruits of the Spirit – and if we love the original we cannot but love the likeness.  We shall love it when set in alloyed metal, though we may love it better when set in the fine gold of the sanctuary.  We are bound to love the pious dissenter as a brother, we are not bound to love him as a dissenter.  His dissent we deplore; his holiness we love.³¹

If pious Dissenters were in spiritual union with the same living Lord by the same Holy Spirit then they could not be treated as heathen and their ministers could not be treated as mere laymen.  And if this were true of separatists from the Church of England how much more was it true of the State Churches of Europe and of Scotland.  It is significant that Dr Darwell Stone, a noted Anglo-Catholic historian, was obliged to admit that any appeal to the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in terms of the Anglican tradition is a broken reed for anything except the practical requirement of episcopal ordination in the Church of England.³²  And this was a position which Goode clearly argued in 1852 in his controversy with Chancellor Harington.

5.  WHAT ARE THE SPIRITUAL EFFECTS OF

INFANT BAPTISM?

      This was the vital question at the heart of the Gorham controversy.  The Bishop of Exeter, supported by Tractarians, insisted that there was only one way to interpret Scripture and the Anglican formularies and that was by stating that regeneration always occurs in baptism conducted within the episcopal communion in services taken by ordained clergy.  By regeneration they meant the infusion of grace into the soul, which in turn included the forgiveness of original sin and incorporation into the mystical Body of Christ.  This, of course, was not very far removed from the Roman position of the ex opere operato nature of baptism, a point which Phillpotts actually conceded.³³  It could claim support from antiquity and from strands of the Anglican tradition.³⁴

      It was noted in the description of the historical development of the controversy that the topic of baptismal regeneration early became a major focus of attention so that there was at no time after 1838 a shortage of pamphlets, printed sermons and magazine articles on the subject.  Such stalwarts as T. T. Biddulph, the leader of Bristol Evangelicalism, and Henry Budd, the passionate advocate of the writings of the English Reformers, reprinted their earlier books with suitable prefaces related to Tractarianism.  The Record claimed that ‘the subject of infant regeneration must be considered the theological turning point of this age in the Church’.  This was written on 6 May, 1844.  A year earlier another Evangelical had written: ‘It is idle to deny, or to undervalue, the strength of the testimony on which the doctrine of baptismal regeneration is founded.  In Scripture, in the writings of the early Christians, in the standards of our own Church and in the works of our own Reformers, we constantly find baptism spoken of in a tone quite irreconcileable with the hasty dismissal of the subject by which many modern writers attempt to settle the questíon.’³⁵

      Though Evangelicals to a man opposed the dogmatism of Phillpotts and his supporters they did not agree among themselves as to the doctrine of infant baptism.  Before attempting to summarize Goode’s response it will be useful to note the different approaches to this sacrament which, according to S. C. Wilks, appear to have been held within Evangelicalism as legitimate interpretations of the Thirty-Nine Articles and the Book of Common Prayer.³⁶  These approaches are to be seen as being rooted in one or more of the tributaries of the Anglican tradition but as having solidified in the controversy over baptism which followed Bishop Mant’s controversial Tracts on Regeneration and Conversion, based on his earlier Bampton Lectures on the same topic.  They were published by the SPCK in 1815 and thus had the appearance of being ‘official’ Church teaching.  In them Mant argued that regeneration, the infusion of grace, always occurs at baptism and that if the child who receives this grace is brought up in a Christian environment then he or she will not need to be converted later but will grow into the faith and obedience of Christ; however, if the grace is lost then there will be need for a fresh turning to God in repentance and faith, that is, a conversion experience.  A lot of Evangelicals disagreed with him and so there was a protracted debate involving Biddulph, Daniel Wilson, Charles Simeon, John W. Cunningham and others.³⁷

      In 1844 Wilks claimed that Evangelical views could be divided into four types.  First of all there were those who, following the Augustinian footsteps of Archbishop Ussher, affirmed that all who are regenerated are regenerated in or at baptism.³⁸  Baptism was thus seen as the ‘instrument’ of regeneration, as taught in Article XXVII (‘.... as by an instrument, they that receive baptism are grafted into the Church’).  To quote Wilks: ‘They would not consider that an unbaptized adult though [seemingly] in a state of repentance, faith and holiness was regenerate if the sacrament had not yet been administered to him; and they would consider that an adult who had been baptized in infancy, but had lived an ungodly life, without any indication of renewal of heart, if he was at length led to repentance and faith was not then regenerated; but, that he had been regenerated in baptism, though until now the seed sown did not give signs of vegetation’.  Regeneration is here understood in terms of the implantation by the Holy Spirit of the principle of new life in the soul.  This approach, a modification of that found in the Lutheran formularies, connects regeneration with both divine election and with baptism so that all who are elect according to the foreknowledge of God are regenerated in baptism, being born ‘of water and of the Spirit’.  It was taken for granted that the children of Christians who were brought to baptism were of the elect and would be brought up in the nurture and admonition of the Lord so that the seed of heavenly life would blossom into full Christian commitment.

      Secondly, there were those who, influenced by Henry Budd, and including Edward Bickersteth and Hugh McNeile, also closely connected baptism with both regeneration and eternal electíon.³⁹  They claimed that on the analogy of the baptism of adult believers regeneration (again understood as the implantation of eternal life and incorporation into the mystical Body of Christ) occurred prior to baptism in response to the prayer of God’s people (the prayer beginning ‘Almighty, everliving God ... ) in order that baptism could be a full sign of an inward spiritual change and a seal of God’s gracious promises towards the child.  Again it is presumed that a baptised child, brought up in a Christian home and the visible Church, will come personally to profess the faith which is already his.

      Thirdly, there were those who understood regeneration as being synonymous with conversion and as being impossible without being accompanied by repentance towards God, saving faith in Jesus Christ and the visible fruit of the Spirit in the life.  Biddulph, Wilson and M’Ilvaine, with perhaps the majority of Evangelicals held one or other form of this approach.⁴⁰  They could not allow that divine life implanted in infancy at baptism could take ten, fifteen or twenty years to manifest itself in a conversion experience.  For them regeneration had to be a visible change of character and attitude.  The baptism of infants was approached through a simple covenant theology; the promises of salvation were declared and a sign and seal of them given because of the belief in the faithfulness of God to honour his covenant-promise which is ‘to you and to your children’ (Acts 2.39).  Thus baptism involved no immediate, inward change but the confirmation of God’s covenant promise that he would, when the child reached an age of discretion, work salvation in the life.  This covenant approach was possible for both Calvinists and Arminians, for Biddulph as well as for Heurtley; it popularised the familiar idea of ‘charitable supposition’ in Evangelical vocabulary.  That is, it was charitably supposed that the parents and sponsors of the child who made the profession of faith were truly Christians and that their child was therefore an heir of the promises of God in the Gospel.  It perhaps needs to be added that a covenant theology was also behind the first two views described above, but in their case the grace of the covenant was immediately given, not held over until later years.

      Fourthly, there were those who made a distinction between ecclesiastical (or sacramental) and spiritual regeneration.  Henry Ryder, the first Evangelical bishop, felt obliged to do this and wrote of ecclesiastical regeneration:

I would ... wish generally to restrict the term to the baptismal privileges and considering them as comprehending, not only external admission into the visible church – not only a covenanted title to the pardon and peace of the Gospel but even a degree of spiritual aid vouchsafed and ready to offer itself to our acceptance or rejection, at the dawn of reason.⁴¹

The strength of this approach was that it did take seriously the fact that in the service of the Prayer Book the child is actually pronounced regenerate.  Its weakness was that it used regeneration in two ways, reserving full or true regeneration until conversion later in life.

      With this sketch of Evangelical views completed, the contribution of Goode can now be examined.  Goode’s primary aim, a negative one, was to prove that the Church of England does not teach that all infants who are baptised are necessarily regenerated, that is made members of the mystical Body of Christ.  In pursuing this aim it was not his purpose to attempt to prove that spiritual regeneration never took place in baptism, for he obviously believed that in some, perhaps many, cases it did occur.  Rather he opposed the view which claimed that whereever an episcopally ordained clergyman baptises a child and uses the service of the Prayer Book that child is born into the kingdom of God and adopted into his heavenly family.  Conceding that some roots for this view could be found in divines of the Laudian school and more recently in the Tracts of Mant he was quite sure that the major strands of the Anglican tradition did not support it, even though a full-blown ex opere olerato doctrine could be found in Tridentine Catholicism and earlier Western theology.  What he found through his historical researches was that the Church of England allowed not one but a cluster of views concerning the effects of infant baptism.  And he believed this to be a wise position in view of the nature of the case:

It must be carefully remembered, that as the doctrine of Infant Baptism is deduced inferentially, and by analogical reasoning, from statements of scripture applying more expressly to the case of adult baptism, so the doctrine of the effects of infant baptism can be obtained only in the same way.  Now as we deduce without difficulty, in one case, the fact that baptism is to be administered; so, in the other, we equally without doubt, deduce the fact that there is, under corresponding circumstances, a blessing given to the child similar to that given to the adult.⁴²

But what were the corresponding circumstances?  It appears that they were the suppositions that the infant in question was from a Christian home and would, when it reached the age of responsibility, personally appropriate the faith into which it had been baptised.

      From this basis Goode allowed that there were several legitimate interpretations of Article XXVII and the services of the Prayer Book.  It was possible to follow the learned Dr Jackson and distinguish between a measure of regeneration suitable to a child, that is a regeneration which removes the guilt of original sin and ensures that a child dying in infancy will go to heaven, and a fuller measure of regeneration later in life which is related to the exercise of repentance, faith and love.⁴³  Then it was possible to link the efficacy of baptism to divine election so that baptism becomes the instrument by which the elect child is incorporated by a spiritual birth into the mystical Body of Christ.  The first two Evangelical views described above may be seen as subdivisions of this general position.

      Also, it could be held, as Bishop Hooper appears to have taught, that the efficacy of baptism depended upon the prevision or foreknowledge by God of future faith and repentance in the child in a subsequent period of 1ife.⁴⁴  Therefore, as Goode commented,

In such cases, it may be fairly held that the guilt of original sin being removed from the child baptised, as the child of a believer (the vicarious faith of the parent uniting with baptism to produce this result), it is in contemplation of its subsequent faith and repentance, then promised for it, made a member of the true Church of Christ, and so regenerate.⁴⁵

The best way to illustrate this position, thought Goode, was by the example of an estate purchased by trustees for a minor on the condition (promised by them on his behalf) that when he came of age he would pay a certain amount of money before taking up the full possession of the estate.  Here the estate is his, but only his hypothetically until he pays the money; likewise faith and repentance being foreseen by God in the child the covenant made in baptism is valid and effectual and therefore the child is assumed by the Church to be a member of the mystical Body of Christ.  The third Evangelical view described above was of this type, though in the majority of nineteenth-century expositions it did not appear to have the certainty of the future regeneration which is found in Hooper’s writings.  A further position was admissible, said Goode, and that was the position of Luther which stated that as faith and repentance is required in an adult so likewise, in proportion, were they required of infants in order to the full blessing of the ordinance.  This faith of the infant could be described as true faith or as the seed or principle of faith.  In his Larger Catechism Luther wrote that infants are brought to baptism ‘hac spe atque animo, quod certo credant’.  This approach was held by Lancelot Ridley, whom Cranmer made one of the six preachers of Canterbury in 1551.⁴⁶

      So Goode was prepared to defend any doctrine which came within the areas delineated by these four general positions as being in harmony with the principles of the Articles and Prayer Book.  However, he was of the opinion that the separation of ecclesiastical and spiritual regeneration, favoured by Bishop Ryder, was an unacceptable way to interpret the Anglican formularies.  Where Phillpotts and the Tractarians were wrong was in their supposition ‘that because they are ministers of Christ, and that certain ministrations were appointed for certain ends, therefore those ministrations must always be effectual to the accomplishment of those ends’.  Goode conceded that this view was logical but its ‘fallacy lies in arguing from a general statement, where conditions are tacitly implied, to particular cases in which those conditions are not fulfilled’.

      Goode’s personal position was a positive one:

Baptism is the formal act of incorporation into Christ’s Body, the Church; not merely the visible Church, but (when God acts in the ordinance) the true Church, the mystical Body of Christ.  And therefore it may justly be said, that, where it is efficacious, that we are regenerated by it.  For whereas, before, we were only the children of Adam, and so of wrath; we are hereby made children of grace, members of Christ.  But it must be remembered that as in the natural birth, there was life previously; so in the spiritual new birth, life, a living principle of faith must have been implanted to make the birth by baptism effectual to the production of a being spiritually alive.⁴⁷

Here he is taking what may be described as a Lutheran view and he was quite convinced that in the Service for the Baptism of Infants the blessing prayed for, and the blessing given, were nothing less than true spiritual regeneration and incorporation into the mystical Body of Christ.

      It would appear that because of the intensity of feeling raised by the Gorham controversy there developed in Evangelicalism such a fear of baptismal regeneration ex opere operato that gradually all views involving full baptismal regeneration were given up and thus part of Evangelical belief later in the century was the denial of baptismal regeneration.

6.  IN WHAT SENSE IS CHRIST PRESENT IN THE EUCHARIST?

      In the century which preceded the Oxford Movement there were three major doctrines of the Eucharist found in the Church of England, usually described as the Virtualist, the Memorialist and the Receptionist.  To understand both the Tractarian developed doctrine and the Evangelical response it is necessary to understand these three positions.  Often associated with John Johnson (1662–1725) of Cranbrook, author of The Unbloody Sacrifice, was the Virtualist teaching;⁴⁸ this was characterised by Tractarians as the doctrine of the real absence, a significant comment when it is recalled that Non-Jurors held to this doctrine.  The bread and wine, once set apart by consecration, become means by which the grace of God is conveyed to the recipients.  The presence of Christ is not actually in them but they are more than mere figurative or representative symbols.  Though they are not actually the body and blood of Christ they are so in virtue, power and effect through the power of the Holy Spirit.  That is, by the grace and power of God, the symbols of bread and wine are instrumentally efficacious and thus ‘virtue’ or true grace is conveyed by them.  One notable teacher of this doctrine in the nineteenth century was Alexander Knox of Ireland, who insisted that the consecrated symbols were actually vehicles through which the blessings of God were conveyed.⁴⁹

      The memorialist view is associated primarily with the name of Bishop Benjamin Hoad1y (1676–1761) whose treatise on the Eucharist was entitled A Plain Account of the Nature and End of the Sacrament of the Lord’s Supper.  Removing much of the mystery from the sacrament, and probably reacting against transubstantiation, he insisted that Christ was present only in the same way that he was in all worship and fellowship; the purpose of the sacrament was to commemorate, not to partake of or in the benefits of Christ’s death.  Seen as memorials of the body and blood of Christ, the taking of bread and wine leads God’s people to such good thoughts, resolutions and practices as will strengthen their faith and their Christian witness.  Hoadly’s view was acceptable to those of a latitudinarian frame of mind and according to the Tractarians the low views of this sacrament in the first third of the nineteenth century could be traced to his influence.

      The classic exposition of the Receptionist position is in the book, A Review of the Doctrine of the Eucharist by Daniel Waterland (1683–1740).  Probably the most widespread doctrine of the Eucharist in England it was held by High Churchmen and Evangelicals and is clearly expressed in the eucharistic hymns of Charles Wesley. Mackean neatly summarises it as follows:

The bread and wine by consecration are set apart for a new and holy use but they remain bread and wine.  The presence or gift is not in the elements nor associated with them.  But Christ is present wherever two or three are gathered together in His name; and as the faithful communicant takes part in the sacred service of remembrance, and receives the appointed symbols of Christ’s body and blood, his faith opens the door by which the presence of Christ enters the soul.  The whole service as well as the reception of the symbols is the means whereby the communicant realises Christ’s presence and receives His gifts and is united with Him; the elements are efficacious signs that strengthen his faith and love. Christ can be said to be specially present because He is specially remembered.

Mackean adds that the expression ‘the real presence’ can be used in this way of understanding the Eucharist and then the idea is usually of Christ as the unseen Giver, who presides at the sacred meal.⁵⁰

      While the Tractarian doctrine of the Eucharist could be said to have had its roots in both the Virtualist and Receptionist schemes and to have been a reaction against the Memorialist, it was also a doctrine which reached its mature expression only after 1845.  Though earlier expositions were rightly criticised as containing novel emphases as far as the Anglican tradition was concerned, they were not precise formulations and so were open to a variety of interpretations – Pusey’s University Sermon of 1843, for example.  The later developed teaching of Pusey, Wilberforce and Denison was different from the earlier in that its essential points were clear to both friend and foe.  With such studies as those of Mackean and Alf Hardelin we do have available sound expositions of this developed Tractarian doctrine, the very teaching which was challenged by Goode in 1856 and by John Harrison and T. S. L. Vogan in 1871.⁵¹

      To attempt to summarise the Tractarian position is a big undertaking but Goode made the attempt as follows:

The doctrine of Archdeacon Denison and Dr Pusey ... is that, in the Lord’s Supper, the Bread and Wine are so influenced and operated on by the act of consecration, that though bread and wine remain, yet there is by consecration a real though spiritual presence of the Body and Blood of Christ so united to the Bread and Wine as to form with them one compound whole; and hence that the Body and Blood of Christ are received by all the communicants whatever their state of mind may be.  Whether they are present by transfusion or conjunction, they do not clearly state – and the difference is unimportant except as affecting the terms used – but it is maintained that that which the communicant puts into his mouth consists of two parts, one bread and wine, the other the Body and Blood of Christ present in a spiritual and supernatural manner in conjunction with the bread and wine.⁵²

The position of Wilberforce was similar but not exactly the same in that he spoke of ‘the essential or substantial presence of Christ’s body’ in the consecrated bread, and wrote: ‘Christ is present Himself, and not merely by His influence, effects, and operation; by that essence, and in that substance which belongs to Him as the true Head of mankind.  And therefore He is really present; and gives His body to be the res sacramenti, or thing signified.’  Wilberforce also held that the process by which Christ’s body and blood act upon the receiver is spiritual and not physical.  Only through the soul did the body and blood of Christ act upon man and for this action he saw faith as essential if the res sacramenti was to be the spiritual nourishment of the soul.  So though the body and blood of Christ are received by the mouth they do not affect the body except through the soul and the soul cannot profit by their nourishment unless it is alive through faith.⁵³

      In his preliminary comments on the Tractarian doctrine Goode pointed out that there was little difference between the position of Pusey and Denison and that of the Lutheran theologian, Johann Gerhard (1582–1637).⁵⁴  Though Denison had denied that his doctrine was close to that of consubstantiation, he was, maintained Goode, totally ignorant of the writings of Lutheran divines and so unable to judge the matter.  Pusey, who did not make such disclaimers, was unwilling to admit the similarity of his position to that of Lutheranism but his early studies in Germany and his long friendship with Professor F. A. G. Tholuck of Halle pointed in this direction.⁵⁵  Of Wilberforce, Goode was unable to say that he had adopted fully the doctrine of transubstantiation but he did claim that the former Archdeacon had come sufficiently near to it for it to be said that the only difference between his doctrine and that of Rome was a matter of words.  It was not an accident, Goode claimed, that the Dublin Review and the Rambler were able to welcome Wilberforce’s book on the Eucharist as containing doctrine which they could recognise as being substantially that of their own Church.⁵⁶

      Before noticing some of the theological, philosophical and historical objections raised by Goode there are two preliminary points which he made and are worth mentioning.⁵⁷  First of all he contended that Tractarians had confounded two entirely distinct assertions: they equated the doctrine of ‘the Real Presence’ with their own ‘doctrine of the Real Presence in the consecrated elements’ and gave the impression that only they who believed the latter believed the former.  This was not acceptable when the Articles of the Church taught the doctrine of the Real Presence not actually in or with the consecrated bread and wine but perceived and received by faith after a heavenly and spiritual manner.  Secondly, he pointed out that Tractarian authors had made ‘a remarkable blunder’ in using a quotation from an advertisement in the first Book of Homilies (1547).  The advertisement of the printer included the words, ‘due receiving of His Blessed Body and Blood, under the form of bread and wine’, which, on the surface, appeared to agree with or to confirm the doctrine of Pusey, Wilberforce and Denison.  When the second Book of Homilies was added, in which was contained a homily against transubstantiation and related doctrines, certain printers continued to print the old advertisement, though it had never been a part of the actual first Book of Homilies.  Instead of recognising that the words had no authority, at least two Tractarians quoted them as if they were an account of the teaching of the Church.⁵⁸

      Following an examination of what he considered bad exegesis of Holy Scripture by the three Tractarians he was opposing, Goode put forward ten objections to the Tractarian doctrine and eight ‘sophisms and fallacies’ by which the doctrine was maintained.  There is space here only to note brief examples.  Two of the objections can, however, be taken together.⁵⁹  They are:

1. The doctrine in question is opposed to the testimony of Scripture as to Christ’s departure from the world, ascension, and session at the right hand of the Father until the end of the world.

2. That Christ’s body, being a human body, cannot be present in more than one place at one and the same time.

The three Tractarians had claimed that while Christ with his glorified human nature was localised in heaven, the same human nature, through its unique relation with the divine nature was, in the Spirit and by the love and omnipotence of God, present in or with the elements of bread and wine in the Eucharist.⁶⁰  Admitting that truly God can do anything, Goode maintained that his omnipotence does not involve contradictions.  The Tractarian position contained three contradictions.  It was claimed that one finite, created body, remaining one, should at one and the same time exist in different places in two totally different forms – one material the other immaterial, one tangible the other intangible, one passible the other impassible; that is, should in fact be two bodies.  Secondly, with specific reference to the Body of Christ eaten in the Eucharist, it was maintained that a finite, created body was in many different places at the same time and under different circumstances.  Thirdly, it involved the self-contradiction that a body remaining a body should nevertheless be without any of those properties which are the distinguishing characteristics of a body, that is be a body but not yet a body but a spirit, at one and the same time.  As Goode surveyed his opponents’ books he could not but remark that the arguments used by learned divines and bishops of the Church of England against the confusion of thought concerning the Body of Christ involved in the two theories of consubstantiation and transubstantiation applied equally well against the general position of the Tractarians.⁶¹

      An example of a sophism was:

The charge of Zwinglianísm or Calvinism against all who interpret the words of institution figuratively; and the calumny that a denial of the real bodily presence in the elements involves the assertion that the consecrated bread and wine are in all cases mere naked and inoperative signs.

To show that many learned Anglicans, especially authors favoured by Tractarians, interpreted the words ‘This is my body’ figuratively, Goode quoted from their works.  After making the point that ‘all who do not hold a real corporeal or bodily presence must maintain that the words of institution were spoken in a figurative sense’ he went on to show how the doctrine of the Church of England differed from Zwinglianism (another term for Memorialism).  ‘Our Church’, he wrote, ‘does not hold that the consecrated elements are inoperative signs, to the reception of which by the faithful no particular blessing is, by promise, attached; but, that they are effective instruments, in the case of all faithful recipients, for bringing the communicant into a state of spiritual union and communion with Christ, and causing him to enjoy the blessings which such an union brings with it.’

      Having discussed the Tractarian doctrine with the aid of theology, history and philosophy, Goode applied himself to the question whether the early Fathers taught such an objective presence of the Body and Blood of Christ, in, with, or under the consecrated bread and wine, or under their forms, as to make with them one conjoined whole, so that the Body and Blood were substantially, though in a spiritual and immaterial form, received into the mouths of the communicants.  This massive enquiry took nearly four hundred pages and that which he believed he found to be the truth of the matter he expressed in two brief paragraphs.

First, that the Fathers, generally, did not hold, that the real Body and Blood of Christ, in any form, are so joined to the consecrated bread and wine, or so exist under their forms, that they are received into the mouths of the communicants; but that the mode of reception is spiritual, that is, by the soul or spirit, the sole mean by which they are received being faith.

      Secondly, that the Fathers generally held that the wicked, who have no faith, do not eat and drink the real Body and Blood of Christ; but only the Sacramental Body and Blood of Christ, that is the sacred symbols and representatives of them.

One of his major complaints against the way in which Wilberforce and Pusey interpreted the Fathers was that they did not take sufficient account of the simple fact that ‘signs are commonly called by the Fathers by the names of the things signified’.  Other complaints he made included the point that they did not always take into account that the Fathers were not obliged to use precise language in areas where later controversy was to show the need for precision, and the further point that there is a love in the Fathers for mystifying the doctrines and rites of the Faith, a tendency to be explained in terms of their education in pagan philosophy.

      Goode’s second volume is given over to an examination of the teaching of the formularies and writings of divines of the Church of England.  The joint testimony of the latter who included men from the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, mostly High Churchmen, was, he believed, to show an unqualified rejection of the doctrine of the real presence of the substance of the Body and Blood of Christ, even in a supernatural mode of existence, or in a spiritual and immaterial form, in or under the consecrated bread and wine, or under their forms.  Goode’s own understanding of the doctrine of the Church of England was what was described above as the Receptionist position, although he did not outlaw the Virtualist position.  He obviously believed that the Memorialist position was inadequate.

      To summarise the Evangelical response to the Tractarian doctrine of the presence of Christ in the Eucharist it may be said that it was argued that there is no foundation for the doctrine either in the Fathers or in Anglican divinity; the only foundations for it were in the Roman doctrine of transubstantiation and the Lutheran doctrine of consubstantiation.  It was, therefore, a major innovation in the doctrinal tradition of the Church of England.

      Few scholars today would question Goode’s conclusions about the teaching of Anglican divines from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries.  Few also would question that in the Fathers of the first three centuries there is no doctrine of the Real Presence which approaches that of Pusey and Wilberforce.  The early Fathers are realist in their interpretation, taking the consecrated bread and wine to be what they were designated to be, the Saviour’s body and blood.  However, the later Fathers of the fourth and fifth centuries begin to show a tendency to explain the identity not in realist terms but as being the result of an actual change or conversion in the bread and wine.  This probably means that Goode overstated his case.

Notes:  CHAPTER SIX

1.  H. F. Woodhouse, The Doctrine of the Church in Anglican Theology, 1547–1603 (1954), pp. 43 ff.

2.  Two years later Goode published A Supplement to His work on the Eucharist; containing Two Letters of Bishop Geste ... illustrating the history and meaning of the twenty-eighth and twenty-ninth Articles; together with a Reply to Dr Pusey’s Answer ... (1858).  Pusey’s work was The Real Presence ... (1857).  Liddon, iii, pp. 438 ff.

3.  MacKean, The Eucharistic Doctrine of the Oxford Movement (1933), pp. 194–5.

4.  It is perhaps worth making the point that the issue as to whether an Anglican should join the Evangelical Alliance had nothing to do with the priority of the invisible Church.  Rather it had to do with the claim of the national Church over against Nonconformity.

5.  Goode, Rule of Faith (2nd ed.), i, p. 444.

6.  See further Woodhouse, op. cit., p. 52, and Litton, Church of Christ (1851), p. 319.

7.  See e.g. First Helvetic Confession (1536), sec. 15, and Augsburg Confession (1530), art. 3.

8. Litton, op. cit., pp. 48 ff.  For the same viewpoint see J. D. MacBride, Lectures on the Articles of the United Church of England and Ireland (1853), pp. 345 ff.

9.  See e.g. the treatises by Freeman, Sherlock and others collected in vols. iii, iv and xiv of the edition of 1848, edited by John Cumming.  To assert that the doctrine was common in controversial literature is not to assert that it is not to be found in earlier Anglican divinity – see e.g. Hooker, Ecclesiastical Polity, bk. 3, chap. 1, sec. 1–3, and Field, Of the Church, bk. 1, chap. 10.

10.  See further Leonard Hodgson, The Doctrine of the Church as held and taught in the Church of England (1948).

11.  See further N. Sykes, Old Priest and New Presbyter (1956), pp. 85 ff, and F. L. Cross and P. E. More, Anglicanism (1951), sec. 10.

12.  O. Chadwick, The Mind of the Oxford Movement (1960), pp. 138–40; and Y. Brilioth, The Anglican Revival (1933), pp. 260 ff.

13.  Litton, op. cit., pp. 304–5; and McNeile, The Church and Churches (2nd ed., 1846), p. 88.

14.  Wilberforce, Doctrine of Incarnation (4th ed., 1852), p. 255.

15.  C. S. Bird made this criticism in The Sacraments and Priestly System Examined (1854).

16.  Two Treatises on the Church (ed. W. Goode, 1843).

17.  Litton, op. cit., pp. 310–11.

18.  Ibid., p. 313.

19.  McNeile, op. cit., pp. 61–2.

20.  Litton, op. cit., p. 322.

21.  Barth, Church Dogmatics IV. Doctrine of Reconciliation, I. (1956).

22.  C. Benson, Discourses upon Tradition and Episcopacy (2nd ed., 1839), p. 107.

23.  Wilson, Charge (1843), p. 33.

24.  Whately, Kingdom of Christ, essay 2, sec. 42.

25.  Litton, op. cit., p. 577.

26.  C. Bowdler, Two Letters on Apostolic Episcopal Succession and Tradition (1841), p. 74.

27.  Stowell, Tractarianism tested by Holy Scripture (1845), i, p. 162.

28.  Benson, op. cit., p. 95.

29.  Seeley, Essays (1840), p. 228.

30.  The letter was from Cosin for a Mr Cordel.  The article in DNB on Cosin comments on his sympathetic approach to the orders of foreign Protestants.

31.  Stowell, op. cit., i, p. 260.

32.  Stone as cited by N. Sykes, Old Priest and New Presbyter, p. 211.

33.  Phillpotts, Charge (3rd ed., 1849), p. 11.

34.  J. B. Mozley, A Review of the Baptismal Controversy (2nd ed., 1883), pp. 177 ff.

35.  CMR (1843), 367.

36.  CO (1844), pp. 662–85.

37.  See further J. H. Overton, The English Church in the Nineteenth Century (1894), pp. 70 ff., and L. P. Fox, ‘The work of T. T. Biddulph ...’, pp. 100 ff.

38.  For Ussher see R. B. Knox, James Ussher, Archbishop of Armagh (Cardiff, 1967), p. 117.

39.  Budd, Infant Baptism (1841); Bickersteth, A Treatise on Baptism (1840).  In the light of the Gorham case he probably modified his position.  See his letters in the Record, December 1849; McNeile, op. cit., pp. 336 ff.

40.  Biddulph, Doctrine of Baptismal Regeneration (1837); Wilson, Sermons and Tracts (1825), i, pp. 53 ff.; and M’Ilvaine, Oxford Divinity, pp. 413 ff.

41.  Ryder, Charge (1816), cited by Wi1ks in CO (1844), p. 682.  For Ryder see G. C. B. Davies, The First Evangelical Bishop (1957).

42.  Goode, Doctrine of ... the Effects of Baptism, p. 9.

43.  Jackson, Works (1672–3), iii, p. 471, where he is writing on the creed.  Bk. xi. c. 17.  This view was also shared by Bishop Davenant. Goode, op. cit., pp. 270 ff,

44.  Hooper, Early Writings (Parker Society), p. 74.

45.  Goode, op. cit., p. 15.

46.  See further the discussion by W. Niesel, Reformed Symbolics.  A Comparison of Catholicism, Orthodoxy and Protestantism (1962), chap. 9, and for Luther see James Atkinson, Martin Luther and the Birth of Protestantism (1968), pp. 191–2.

47.  Goode, op. cit., pp. 21–2.

48.  There are older forms of Virtualism – see e.g. Jeremy Taylor, The Real Presence ... proved (1654).  See further R. T. Beckwith, Priesthood and Sacraments (1964), pp. 61 ff.

49.  Mackean, op. cit., pp. 6–7.

50.  Mackean, op. cit., pp. 11–12.

51.  Harrison, An Answer to Dr Pusey ... (2 vols., 1871); and Vogan, The True Doctrine of the Eucharist (1871).

52.  Goode, The Nature of Christ’s Presence (1856), i, p. 2.

53.  Wilberforce, Doctrine of the Holy Eucharist (1853), pp, 178 and 404–6.

54.  Goode, op. cit., p. 20 citing Gerhard, Loci Theologici, Loc. 20.  Perhaps a weakness of Härdelin, The Tтactarian Understanding of the Eucharist, is that he does not take sufficiently seriously the correspondence between Tractarian and developed Lutheran theology of the Eucharist.

55.  For the friendship see Liddon, i, pp. 160–2, and ii, pp. 158–60.  In Pusey House there are MS letters from Tholuck to Pusey.

56.  Dublin Review (April 1854), pp. 48–74; and Rambler (January 1834), pp. 55–6.

57.  Goode, op. cit., pp. 29–47.

58.  E.g. Pusey, The Presence of Christ ... (1853), pp. 14, 16 and 22, and Wilberforce, Doctrine of Eucharist (1853), pp. 130, 165 and 180.

59.  Goode, op. cit., pp. 131–73.

60.  Pusey, op. cit., pp. 21–3; and Wilberforce, op. cit., pp. 155 ff.

61.  In particular he mentioned three bishops – Taylor, Bilson and Morton.  The last two were ‘two of the most able and learned prelates our Church has ever produced’.  Goode, op. cit., p. 172.

CONCLUSION

      From the vantage point of the late twentieth century perhaps what is most impressive about the controversy between the Tractarians and Evangelicals is the great area of agreement which existed between the two parties.  They were agreed on the divine inspiration of Holy Scripture, the catholic doctrines of the Holy Trinity and the Person of Christ, the need to pursue holiness both in the visible Church and in the individual life, the blessed hope of the Second Coming of Christ, the resurrection of the dead, and the life everlasting.  Yet, in the early years of Queen Victoria’s reign these large areas of agreement were not regarded as significant; what mattered were the differences concerning the place of tradition, the authority of the ordained ministry, the nature and efficacy of the sacraments, and the place of ritual and ceremonial in worship.  To Evangelicals the Tractarian doctrine and ethos appeared as a disguised or dressed up Romanism and as such was bitterly attacked.  To Tractarians the Evangelical doctrine and ethos appeared as an incomplete religion, lacking the depth of catholic principles.

      The way in which a theological controversy develops is influenced as much by its social and religious context as by the personalities involved.  Thus, as was noted above, the Evangelical response to Tractarianism was affected by the presence within and around Evangelicalism of strong feelings about the preservation of Protestantism in Great Britain and its constitution.  Novel doctrines were examined in the light of the teaching of Rome.  This consciousness of a Protestant heritage, however, had also been fed into the Evangelical ethos from other sources as well – for example, the contest over Mant’s tracts on baptism, the heightened sense of prophecy as a means of interpreting the signs of the times, the calls from Henry Budd and his friends to read the Reformers’ works, the controversy with Irvíngism and the defence of the Establishment against attacks from Dissenters.

      What, then, were the general effects of this controversy on Evangelicalism?  First of all it can be said that the controversy helped to increase and to cement party feeling within Evangelicalism and probably also within the Church of England.  It is common knowledge that whenever a cause is under attack those whose position is threatened feel a common responsibility and loyalty one to another.  They feel the need to stand together to oppose what they fear or dislike.  The years from 1833 to 1856 witnessed the creation of several distinctly Evangelical societies and organisations, the Church Extension Fund and the Church of England Education Society for example, founded in direct opposition to similar institutions which it was believed were infected with Tractarianism.  These new organisations, together with older ones such as the Church Missionary Society, and not forgetting the Protestant societies of older or more recent vintage, gave a further definite identity to Evangelicalism in the Church.  The Gorham case also served to isolate the sympathetic High Churchman (Conybeare’s ‘Anglican’) from Evangelicals and make the noble ideal of the Evangelical High Churchmen or the High Church Evangelical a nearly impossible goal.  Nevertheless, and this may seem paradoxical, Evangelicals remained, in general, individualists at heart and were never organised solely under one banner.  Instead they gave their allegiance to one or more societies which were Evangelical.

      Another result of the controversy was the claim, be it implicit or explicit, that Evangelical theology and the theology of the Reformation were to all intent and purpose the same.  As the Reformers were invoked as authorities in the attempts to put down Tractarianism, and as the Parker Society faithfully published the works of sixteenth-century divines to strengthen Victorian Protestantism a confidence arose in Evangelicalism that its theology rested on secure grounds, those of Scripture and the Reformation.  Certainly in such areas as that of justification by faith there appears to be no significant difference between the Reformers and Victorian Evangelicals but the same cannot be said of other areas, the sacrament of baptism and the exercise of private judgment for example.  Henry Budd believed that too many of his Evangelical brethren did not understand or appreciate the teaching of the Reformers and thus he spoke somewhat harshly of ‘modern Evangelism’ meaning the Anglican Evangelicalism of 1840.¹  William Goode, hardly a ‘modern Evangelist’ of Budd’s definition, was so influenced by what we now know to be latitudinarian interpretations of the Reformation that he believed that the doctrine of private judgment was an essential principle of the Reformers, and this claim became a standard Evangelical presupposition.  The basic point here is that the belief that their theology was identical with that of the divines of the sixteenth century gave a false confidence to Evangelicalism and blinded later Evangelicals to the differences between the Reformers and themselves in various points of doctrine, making the renewal of Evangelical theology difficult.

      A sad aspect of the controversy was the generally negative attitude that it bred among the average clergy and laity towards the early Fathers and to the usefulness of tradition.  This mentality is well expressed in the comment of the Record that the expository commentaries of Prebendary Horne were of more value than the whole works of the Fathers in giving to people the message of the Gospel of Christ.  Twenty years later J. C. Ryle could speak of the Fathers being greatly ‘overrated as commentators and expositors’.  In the period after 1856 a few Evangelicals were first-rate patristic scholars, a good example being Professor Heurtley, but in general the Fathers and tradition were not given a fair hearing or reading in Evangelicalism.  Instead the idea of sola scriptura with private judgment and related to sola fide was much emphasised.  In practice this meant for ordinary laity the daily reading of the Bible with the help of popular expository aids and its effect was to assist the general process of individualism in religious faith and practice.

      Then also it must be admitted that this controversy produced an unhealthy antagonism towards innovations in ceremonial, ritual and architecture.  Again the pendulum of reaction swung too far.  In its extreme form this antagonism insisted on pursuing relentlessly through the courts those priests who introduced ritual which was not permitted by the canons and rubrics, and in refusing to co-operate with Anglo-Catholics and ritualists; in a less extreme form it meant that the wearing of the surplice when preaching, or the use of choirs in robes and surplices, or even a weekly communion service were seen as capitulating to Tractarian notions.  Therefore possibilities of improving the sacramental, aesthetic, ceremonial and musical side of Evangelical worship were either lost or restrained.  The mentality was encouraged that to change is necessarily to change for the worse and so services and ceremonial and ritual tended to stay as they were in 1840 or 1845.  To what extent preaching, and the contents of sermons, changed through this controversy admits of no easy answer and requires more research.

      However, though the negative effects of the controversy cannot be overlooked for they seriously influenced the face and the development of Victorian Evangelicalism, it must also be stated, and stated firmly, that the Evangelicals, by the position they took up, did help preserve for the Church of England aspects of her Protestant heritage which could easily have been lost.  Tractarians, often with only minimal knowledge of earlier Anglican divinity (a fact which Goode rightly was often pointing out), made a series of claims concerning the pedigree of their doctrines – of the episcopate and the sacraments, for example – which could have been uncritically and generally adopted in the Church had not Evangelicals (sometimes assisted by High and Broad Churchmen) reminded the whole Church that the Tractarians were essentially innovators and that their historical claims were all too often ill-founded.  Of course it cannot be denied that the influence of Tractarianism on the thought and practice of both the Church of England and the Anglican Communion has been immense.  It would probably have been much greater had not the Evangelicals reminded the Church that it had long and strong Protestant roots as well as Catholic ones.

      Having claimed this positive role for Evangelicalism in helping to preserve the principles of Protestantism for the Church of England, it must be admitted that nothing positive appears to have been added to Evangelical thought or practice by this controversy.  Certainly those Evangelicals of a scholarly persuasion who engaged in research and debate probably clarified and extended their own knowledge of the Church of England and her theology, not to mention that of the Fathers and the Early Church; but, for the majority who had only minimal time for study and reflection, controversy had the effect it appears, of confirming them in the position they already held before the contest began.  Indeed, it could be argued that the ‘Catholic’ as over against the ‘Protestant’ ingredients of Evangelical faith were minimised, reduced or maimed.  While the advantages of the threefold ministry were never questioned the possibility of a doctrine of baptismal regeneration (even in its more Augustinian expression) was apparently soon abandoned after the Gorham controversy; and while the creeds were accepted without question the use of the Fathers who helped to compose them became, as was noted above, minimal or nil.  On the other hand, the distinctively Protestant emphases of the priority of the invisible Church and the right of private judgment were probably over-developed.

      Perhaps the negative impact of controversy with Tractarians would have been less severe had not a new battle been joined immediately by Evangelicals against those in and outside the Church who were apparently setting aside the authority and inspiration of Holy Scripture in the name of natural science or the latest German ‘neological’ scholarship.  So already forced on the defensive in one major controversy, Evangelicals were kept on the defensive, even driven back more beyond their own lines, by this second controversy which was to last a long time, and for some, has not yet finished.  (The Evangelical response to the new ideas on Scripture and science from 1855 onwards has yet to be written.)

      There are two questions which must be faced before this work is complete.  The first is whether or not the Evangelicals and the Low Churchmen (‘heirs of latitudinarianism and minimisers’) were originally two separate groups who so came together in their opposition to Tractarianism that after the struggle the Evangelical party had become a fusion of the two.  Y. Brilioth, following Elliott Binns and H. A. Wilson, asserts that there was such an alliance for the defence of Protestantism of Evangelicals and Low Churchmen (by which he means Latitudinarians) and that the printed organ of this Low Church Evangelicalism was the Record.²  As it stands this is a false assertion and needs to be modified by the following observations.  First of all, the Evangelicals before 1828, the year in which the Record began, were not an homogeneous group.  They were not all of one theological mould or of one persuasion in the application of theology to life.  They included different types of Calvinists and Arminians with various eschatological theories and different degrees of commitment to what may be termed Protestant Constitutionalism.  Secondly, the problems raised by Roman Catholicism in Ireland, and the existence of a vigorous Protestantism within the Church of Ireland from 1820, meant the arrival in England of clergy and laity who, though firmly committed to Evangelical Protestantism, were nevertheless also much committed to the overthrow of Popery and certainly committed to opposition to all concessions being made towards it or its priests.  These men, with their English supporters, gladly co-operated with Dissenters and Scottish Presbyterians in societies and organisations whose purpose was to defend or to propagate Protestant principles and whose headquarters were usually at Exeter Hall.  They were called ‘Low Churchmen’ because the doctrine of the historical episcopate was low in their order of priorities of theological doctrines.  They did not deny it but rather made little of it because of its Association with Roman Catholicism and because it was a barrier between them and Protestant Non-conformists.  This vigorous Protestantism, which believed passionately in the need to convert men to God through Christ, was fully supported by the editorial policy of the Record.  In Conybeare’s language they were ‘Recordites’.³  Thirdly, Evangelicals opposed the appointment of Dr Hampden as Regius Professor at Oxford because of his supposed latitudinarian tendencies; but a decade later the Record supported him when Tractarians tried to prevent his consecration as Bishop of Hereford.  This support was based on the belief that in his years at Oxford as Professor he had faithfully maintained Protestant doctrine against all Tractarian innovations.  In fact this case is a good illustration of the way in which Evangelicals co-operated with liberal thinkers.  When the latter served the cause of Protestantism then the Evangelicals were glad to praise them, but they did not support them when they set themselves up as critics of the Bible.  As the new Broad Church party took form in the late 1840s the Evangelicals had little or no sympathy with it for on the crucial doctrine of the inspiration of Scripture they found the Broad Churchmen were lacking.  Therefore the truth would seem to be that the only fusion which took place was a fusion of elements which were there in Evangelical Protestantism in 1833.  That is, the tough negative aspect of Protestantism, consisting of opposition to popery, especially in Ireland, made a great noise as the 1830s turned into the 1840s because more Evangelicals felt the need to move in this direction, joining themselves together in such societies as the Protestant Association.  The Low Churchmen were in fact none other than right-wing Evangelical churchmen who worked with Dissenters and who made little of the value of the historical episcopate.

      The second question is to what extent Tractarianism can be said to be the continuation of, or the fulfilment of, the earlier Evangelical Revival and Evangelical Movement.  J. H. Overton claimed that the Tractarian ‘Revival was not the antagonist but the supplement of the Evangelical Revival which preceded it’ and, in stating this he was following others, Gladstone for examp1e.⁴  Looking at this question from an Evangelical viewpoint, the relation could probably be expressed as follows.  The Tractarian could only legitimately be regarded as the fulfilment of the Evangelical Revival had it taken up the central Evangelical emphases – the sole authority of Scripture as the Word of God and justification by grace through personal faith – and set them in a dynamic, ecclesiological framework.  In other words, had the Tractarians produced a high doctrine of the visible Church as the Body of Christ in the here and now, of the ordained ministry as the servant of Christ, of the sacraments as vital vehicles of grace, at the heart of which doctrines were the basic Evangelical emphases, then there would be a strong case for asserting that Tractarianism was the completion of Evangelicalism.  As it was, the Tractarians virtually denied the Evangelical emphases by their sacramental theology.  To reject Overton’s claim is not to deny that there were similar emphases in each movement – the quest for personal holiness and the desire to propagate the faith in city parish and heathen land – but it is to insist that the foundations of the two systems were not the same.  Both held to the doctrines of the creed but in terms of their differing systems what mattered was that for Evangelicals the individual sinner approached God directly through Jesus Christ the Mediator, in faith and prayer, while for Tractarians this direct route through Jesus Christ involved a detour through the visible Church with her apostolic ministry and efficacious sacraments.  Thus for an Evangelical to become a Tractarian, be he a Newman, a Manning or a Wilberforce, there had to be a basic change of theological reference in the doctrines of salvation and ecclesiology.  The move from an Evangelical position to a Tractarian was not a simple expansion of a previously held faith and it was not a logical development of principles and views already held, but it was a basic change of reference in the account of how a holy and loving God grants salvation to a needy sinner.  A careful study of the spiritual and theological pilgrimages of the converts from Evangelicalism to Tractarianism (and, in some cases, to Rome) should confirm this claim.⁵

      We may end this book with a quotation from Bishop H. C. G. Moule, an Evangelical leader at the close of the nineteenth century.  His evaluation of the impact of Tractarianism on the Church of England was a wise one:

With all readiness I admit that this epoch and its results brought contributions of good to English Christianity.  An exaggeration is sometimes used to correct its opposite, and the extreme prominence given by the Tractarians to the sacraments and to the corporate idea and to the greatness of worship had a work to do in that way and did it.  But this cannot overcome in me the conviction that the root principles of the Oxford Movement were widely other than those of the Reformation, and out of scale with the authentic theology of the Scriptures.  I do not wonder then that from nearly the first the new teaching was regarded with suspicion, and that earnest efforts were made to counteract it.⁶

It was the contribution of the Evangelicals to ensure that the Church retained that which the Tractarians overlooked and denied, the Protestant character of her theology.

Notes:  CONCLUSION

1.  Budd, Infant Baptism (1840), preface.

2.  Brilioth, Three Lectures on Evangelicalism and the Oxford Movement (1934), pp. 28–30; D. Voll, Catholic Evangelicalism, p. 30 follows Brilioth.

3.  After the appearance of Conybeare’s article in the Edinburgh Review (which was later printed in his Essays) the Record of 14 November, 1853 reviewed it and took particular exception to the insinuation that ‘Recordites’ were antinomian in principle.  It was argued that the paper had always insisted that living faith in Christ was vital to Christianity and that this worked itself out in holy living.  The assertion that there were Evangelicals to the right of the moderates associated with the Christian Observer was not denied.

4.  Overton, The Anglican Revival (1897), p. 15.  W. E. Gladstone, Gleanings of Past Years, 1843–1879, (1879), vii, pp. 232–5; and R. Wilberforce, A Charge (1851), pp. 10–12.  See also Voll, op. cit., p. 38, and Newsome, op. cit., p. 14.

5.  G. W. E. Russell, A Short History of the Evangelical Movement (1915), pp. 90 ff. lists some of the well-known converts.

6.  Moule, The Evangelical School in the Church of England (1901), pp. 31–2.

Select Bibliography

1.  MANUSCRIPT

a.  Bodleian Library, Oxford

        Add. MS C. 290.  ‘The Principal Clergy of London classified according to their opinions on the great Church Questions of the Day’. 1844

        St Edmund Hall MSS 67/9.  ‘The Diary of John Hill’

        MS Eng. Lett. e. 144, f. 233.  Letter of E. B. Pusey to T. G. Tyndale

b.  Pusey House, Oxford

        ‘Newman to Pusey.  MS Letters (1823–1840)’, i. Letter of 10 January, 1837

        ‘Correspondence of Mrs Tyndale with E. B. Pusey’

c.  The Oratory, Birmingham

        ‘Correspondence of G. S. Faber with J. H. Newman’

d.  Lambeth Palace Library, London

        Lambeth MSS 1804–1811.  ‘The Correspondence of C. P. Golightly’

e.  Church Missionary Society Archives, London

        ‘Reports of Association Secretaries, 1840–1848’

2.  NEWSPAPERS AND JOURNALS

British Critic

British Magazine

British Protestant

Christian Examiner

Christian Guardian

Christian Lady’s Magazine

Christian’s Monthly Magazine

Christian Observer

Christian Remembrancer

Church of England Quarterly Review

Churchman

Churchman's Monthly Review

Ecclesiologist

Eclectic Review

Edinburgh Review

English Churchman

Guardian

North British Review

Protestant Magazine

Oxford and Cambridge Review

Record

3.  SELECT TRACTARIAN PUBLICATIONS

Allen, L. (ed.), John Henry Newmaп and the Abbé ,Jager: A Controversy on Scripture and Tradition (Oxford, 1975)

Denison, G. A., The Real Presence: Three Sermons (1853)

Denison, G. A., Notes on My Life (1879)

Froude, R. H., Remains (2 vols., 1838–9, ed. J. H Newman and J Keble)

Gresley, W., The Real Danger of the Church of England (1846)

Keble, J., Primitive Tradition recognised in Holy Scripture (1836)

Keble, J., On Eucharistical Adoration (1857)

Mozley, A. (ed.), Letters and Correspondence of John Henry Newman (2 vols, 1891)

Newman, J. H., The Arians of the Fourth Century (1833)

Newman, J. H., The Prophetical Office of the Church (1837)

Newman, J. H., Lectures on the Doctrine of Justification (1838)

Oakeley, F., The Subject of Tract XC historically examined (1845)

Pusey, E. B., A Letter to the Bishop of Oxford (1839)

Pusey, E. B., A Letter to the Archbishop of Canterbury (1842)

Pusey, E. B., The Holy Eucharist a Comfort to the Penitent (1843)

Pusey, E. B., The Presence of Christ in the Holy Eucharist (1853)

Pusey, E. B., The Doctrine of the Real Presence (1855)

Tracts for the Times (1833–1841)

Wilberforce, R. I., The Doctrine of the Incarnation (1850)

Wilberforce, R. I., The Evangelical and Tractarian Movements.  A Charge (1851 )

Wilberforce, R. I., The Doctrine of the Holy Eucharist (1853)

Wordsworth, Chas., Evangelical Repentance (1841)

4.  SELECT POST-TRACTARIAN PUBLICATIONS

Newman, J. H., An Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine (1845)

Newman, J. H., Apologia Pro Vita Sua (Oxford, 1967, ed. M. J. Svaglic)

5.  ANGLICAN EVANGELICAL WRITINGS AGAINST TRACTARIANISM

Atwell, W., Dr Pusey Answered (1842)

Bateman, J., Tractarianism as described in Prophecy (1845)

Bateman, J., The Tractarian Tendency of Diocesan Theological Colleges (1853)

Benson, C., A Theological Enquiry into the Sacrament of Baptism (1817 and 1843)

Benson, C., Discourses on Tradition and Episcopacy (1839)

Benson, C., Discourses upon the Power of the Clergy (1841)

Benson, C., Rubrics and Canons of the Church of England considered (1845)

Bickersteth, E., The Christian Fathers (1838)

Bickersteth, E., A Treatise on Baptism (1840)

Biddulph, T. T., The Doctrine of Baptismal Regeneration as it has been stated in some recent Tracts (1837)

Bird, C. S., The Oxford Tract System ... with reference to Reserve (1838)

Bird, C. S., A Plea for a Reformed Church (1841 )

Bird, C. S., A Second Plea: A Defence of the Principles of the English Reformation (1843)

Bird, C. S., The Danger attending an immediate revival of Convocation (τ8ς2)

Bird, C. S., The Sacramental and Priestly System Examined: or Strictures on Archdeacon Wilberforce’s Works on the Incarnation and Eucharist (1854)

Bowdler, C., Two Letters on Apostolic Episcopal Succession and Tradition (1841)

Bricknell, W. S., Preaching ... considered with reference to the ‘Tracts’ (1841 )

Bricknell, W. S., ‘Is there not a cause?’  A Letter to ... E. B. Pusey (1841)

Bricknell, W. S., ‘Horae Canonicae’.  A Second letter to ... E. B. Pusey (1841)

Bricknell, W. S., Resignation and Lay Communion ... a reply to Professor Keble (1841)

Bricknell, W. S., Oxford: Tract 90 and Ward’s ‘Ideal’ (1845)

Bricknell, W. S., The Judgment of the Bishops upon Tractarian Theology (1845)

Browne, J. H., Strictures on some parts of the Oxford Tracts (1838)

Browne, J. H., Strictures on some parts of the Oxford Tract System (1840)

Budd, H., Infant Baptism (3rd ed., 1841)

Close, F., The Written Tradition (1842)

Close, F., The Tendency of ‘Church Principles’ ... to Romanism (1843)

Close, F., Church Architecture scripturally considered (1844)

Close, F., The Restoration of Churches is the Restoration of Popery (1845)

Close, F., An Apology for the Evangelical Party (1846)

Close, F., High-Church Education Delusive and Dangerous (1855)

Cotton, R. L., Lectures on the Holy Sacrament of the Lord’s Supper (1849)

Croly, D., An Index to the ‘Tracts for the Times’ (1842)

Croly, G., The Reformation a direct gift of divine Providence (1839)

Davies, J., The Standard of Faith (1841)

Davies, J., The Present Crisis of the Church (1842)

Davis, C. H., Hints and Suggestions on a Revision of the Liturgy (1851)

Declaration of Ministers and Members of the Church of England respecting several controverted truths (1844)

Elizabeth, C., A Peep into Number Ninety (1841)

Elliott, E. B., The Delusion of the Tractarian Clergy (1856)

Faber, G. S., The Primitive Doctrine of Justification (2nd ed., 1838)

Faber, G. S., The Primitive Doctrine of Regeneration (1840)

Faber, G. S., Provincial Letters (1842)

Fawcett, J., Baptism considered in connexion with Regeneration (1842)

Fitzgerald, W., Episcopacy, Tradition and the Sacraments considered in reference to the Oxford Tracts (1839)

Fitzgerald, W., Holy Scripture the Ultimate Rule of Faith to a Christian Man (1842)

Fry, C., The Listener in Oxford (i 84o)

Garbett, J., Christ as Prophet, Priest and King (2 vols., 1842)

Garbett, J., A Review of Dr Pusey’s Sermon on the Eucharist (1843)

Garbett, J., Diocesan Synods and Convocation (1852)

Goode, W., Some Difficulties in the late Charge of the Bishop of Oxford (1842)

Goode, W., The Case as it is (1842)

Goode, W., The Divine Rule of Faith (3 vols., 1842 and 1853)

Goode, W. (ed.), Two Treatises on the Church (1843)

Goode, W., Altars prohibited by the Church of England (1844)

Goode, W., Tract XC historically refuted (1845)

Goode, W., A Letter to a Lay Friend on the state of the Church (1845)

Goode, W., A Defence of the Thirty-Nine Articles (1848)

Goode, W., A Vindication of ‘A Defence’ (1848)

Goode, W., The Doctrine of the Church of England as to the effects of Baptism in the case of Infants (1849)

Goode, W., A Reply to the Letter and Declaration respecting the Royal Supremacy (1850)

Goode, W., A Letter to the Bishop of Exeter (1850)

Goode, W., An Address delivered at a Public Meeting (1851)

Goode, W., A Reply to the Bishop of Exeter’s Second Arraignment of his Metropolitan (1852)

Goode, W., A Reply to Archdeacon Churton and Chancellor Harington (1852)

Goode, W., The Case of Archdeacon Wilberforce compared with that of Mr Gorham (1854)

Goode, W., The Nature of Christ’s Presence in the Eucharist (2 vols., 1856)

Graham, J., Essays for Family Reading; intended to counteract the errors of the ‘Tracts for the Times’ (1843)

Griffτths, J., Letters with a few remarks concerning rumours which have lately been in circulation (1844)

Harrison, J., Whose are the Fathers? (1867)

Harrison, J., An Answer to Dr Pusey’s Challenge respecting the doctrine of the Real Presence (2 vols., 1871)

Heurtley, C. A., The Union of Christ with His People (1842)

Heurtley, C. A., Justification (1846)

Hill, F. T., A Letter to the Laity ... on some points connected with the Tractarian Controversy (1842)

Hoare, E. N., The Tendency of the Principles advocated in the ‘Tracts for the Times’ considered: in Five Letters (1841)

Hughes, H., The Voice of the Anglican Church; being the declared opinions of her Bishops on the doctrines of the Oxford Tracts writers (1843)

Jackson, M., The Oxford Tracts Unmasked (1838)

Jordan, J., A Review of Tradition as taught by ... the ‘Tracts’ (1840)

Jordan, J., The Crisis Come, being Remarks on Mr Newman’s Letter to Dr Jeff and on ‘Tract 90’ (1841)

Lee, S., Remarks on the Sermon of Dr Pusey (1843)

Litton, E. A., The Church of Christ (1851)

MacBride, J. D., Lectures on the Articles of the United Church of England and Ireland (1853)

McNeile, H., The Church and the Churches (1846)

McNeile, H., ‘Baptism doth save’.  A Letter to the Bishop of Exeter (1851)

Maguire, R., Transubstantiation a Tractarian Doctrine.  Suggested by Archdeacon Wilberforce on the Holy Eucharist (1854)

Maguire, R., The ‘Oxford Movement’; Strictures on the ‘Personal Reminiscences’ and revelations of Dr Newman, Mr Oakeley and others (1855)

Marsh, E. G., The Christian Doctrine of Sanctification (1848)

Marsh, E. G., A Letter to R. I. Wilberforce on his Inquiry into the Principles of Church Authority (1854)

Maurice, P., The Popery of Oxford confronted, disavowed and repudiated (1837)

Maurice, P., A Key to the Popery of Oxford (1838)

Meller, T. W., Dr Pusey and the Fathers (1843)

Miles, C. P., The Voice of the Glorious Reformation; or an Apology for Evangelical Doctrines of the Anglican Church (1844)

Miller, J. C. ‘Subjection. No; not for an hour’ (1850)

M’Ilvaine, C. P., Oxford Divinity compared with that of the Romish and Anglican Churches (1841)

Nevile, C., A Review of Mr Newman’s Lectures on Romanism (1839)

Noel, B., The First Five Centuries of the Church; or the Fathers no safe guides (1839)

Nolan, F., The Catholic Character of Christianity as recognised by the Reformed Church (1839)

O’Brien, J. T., A Charge (1843)

O’Brien, J. T., A Charge (1846)

Pearson, G., The Doctrine of Tradition as maintained by the Church of England and the Primitive Church (1838)

Plain Tracts for Critical Times (1838)

Pratt, J., Perverted Tradition the Bane of the Church (1839)

Royal Supremacy discussed in a Correspondence between Archdeacon Wilberforce and Dr McNeile (1850)

Scholefield, J., Scripture Grounds of Union considered (1841)

Scholefield, J., The Christian Altar (1842)

Scholefield, J., Baptismal Regeneration as maintained by the Church of England (1849)

[Seeley, R. B.], Essays on the church (1833–1841)

Shirley, W. W., The Supremacy of Holy Scripture (1847)

Sinclair, J., Synodal Action in the Church unreasonable and perilous (1852)

Smith, G. S., The Tractarian and Evangelical Systems (1843)

Spooner, W., A Charge (1837)

Stowell, H., Tractarianism Tested by Holy Scripture and the Church of England in a series of sermons (2 vols., 1845–6)

Sumner, J. B., A Charge (1841)

Sumner, J. B., A Practical Exposition of the Epistle to the Romans ... (1843)

Sumner, J. B., A Tract on Justification (1843)

Symons, B. P., The Claims of the Church of England upon her members (1842)

Tayler, C. B., Tractarianism not of God (1844)

Taylor, I., Ancient Christianity (2 vols. and Supplement, 1840, 1842 and 1844)

Taylor, J., An Appeal to the Archbishop of York on the uncondemned heresies of Archdeacon Wilberforce’s Doctrine of the Holy Eucharist (1854)

Townsend, G., The Doctrine of Atonement to be taught without Reserve: A Charge (1838)

Townsend, G., Sermons ... with Two Charges (1849)

Wilson, D. (Snr.), The sufficiency of the Scriptures as a Rule of Faith (1841)

Wilson, D. (Snr.), A Charge (1843)

Wilson, D. (Jnr.), Our Protestant Faith in Danger (1850)

Wilson, D. (Jnr.), A Revival of Spiritual Religion the only effectual remedy for the dangers which now threaten the Church of England (1851)

Wilson, F., No Peace with Tractarianism (1850)

Wilson, W., A Brief Examination of Professor Keble’s Visitation Sermon (1837)

Young, E., Protestantism or Popery.  A Tract for the times showing that the Tractarian Movement is a departure from the principles of the Church of England (1842)

6. NON-ANGLICAN WRITINGS AGAINST TRACTARIANISM

Alexander, W. L., Anglo-Catholicism not Apostolical (Edinburgh, 1843)

Bennett, J., Justification as Revealed in Scripture in opposition to ... Mr Newman’s Lectures (1840)

Brown, J., The Exclusive Claims of Puseyite Episcopalians to the Christian Ministry indefensible (Edinburgh, 1842)

Buchanan, J., On the Tracts for the Times (Edinburgh, 1843)

Bulteel, H. B., The Oxford Argo ... by an Oxford divine (1845)

Candlish, R. S., ‘The Progress of Tractarianism’, North British Review 3 (1845)

Cumming, J., Tractarianism tried by its own standards (1842)

Cumming, J., Popery and Tractarianism (1843)

Darby, J. N., Puseyism (1855)

D’Aubigné, J. H. M., Geneva and Oxford (1843)

Godwin, B., Examination of the Principles ... of Dr Pusey’s Sermon (1843)

Jackson, T., A Letter to Dr Pusey, being a vindication of the tenets and character of the Wesleyan Methodists (1842)

Weaver, R., A Complete View of Puseyism (1843)

Yorke, C. J., The Puseyism of all ages briefly analysed (1842)

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