Anatomy of a Controversy

The Debate over 'Essays and Reviews' 1860–64

Josef L. Altholz

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351958486
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

Controversy, especially religious controversy, was the great spectator sport of Victorian England. This work is a study of the biggest and best of Victorian religious controversies. Essays and Reviews (1860) was a composite volume of seven authors (six of them Anglican clergymen) which brought England its first serious exposure to biblical criticism. It evoked a controversy lasting four years, including articles in newspapers, magazines and reviews, clerical and episcopal censures, a torrent of tracts, pamphlets and sermons, followed by weightier tomes (and reviews of all these), prosecution for heresy in the ecclesiastical courts, appeal to the highest secular court, condemnation by the Convocation of the clergy and a debate in Parliament. Essays and Reviews was the culmination and final act of the Broad Church movement. Outwardly the conflict ended inconclusively; at a deeper level, it marked the exhaustion both of the Broad Church and of Anglican orthodoxy and the commencement of an era of religious doubt. This controversy illustrates the pathology of Victorian religion in its demonstration of the propensity to controvert and the methods of controversialists. It is both the greatest Victorian crisis of faith and the best case study of Victorian religious controversy.

CHAPTER ONE
On Controversy

Controversy, especially religious controversy, was the great spectator sport of Victorian England. The diverse movements and issues of this era of religious expansion periodically came to a head in major debates or controversies. Victorians took the issues of these debates seriously, and indeed many of them were momentous. But even more fascinating, and not yet systematically studied, is the process of controversy itself, carried to its perfection in the Victorian age. Controversy may be considered as a genre of human activity, which may be studied as one would study a genre of literature or art. This work is a study of a prototype of Victorian controversies; its subject was the greatest of that genre.

Essays and Reviews, published in 1860, was a composite volume by seven authors (six of them clergymen of the Church of England) which brought to England its first serious exposure to German biblical criticism. It evoked a controversy which included articles in newspapers, magazines and reviews, clerical and episcopal censures, a torrent of tracts, pamphlets and sermons, followed by weightier tomes (and reviews of all these), prosecution in the ecclesiastical courts, appeal to the highest court, condemnation by the Convocation of the clergy, a debate in Parliament (and letters and articles upon all these). The controversy lasted four years, drawing upon the resources of church and state, representing a crisis of faith contemporary with that provoked by Darwin's Origin of Species but more central to the religious mind, indeed ‘the greatest religious crisis of the Victorian age'.¹

Essays and Reviews was the culmination and final act of the Broad Church movement. The volume itself was modest in its pretensions and varied in the character and quality of its essays. Little of it was original, though it was new to most Englishmen. Yet this work touched Anglican orthodoxy on its most sensitive points and thus caused a controversy. Outwardly the conflict ended inconclusively, with the acquittal of two Essayists in the courts and the condemnation of the volume by the clergy. At a deeper level, it marked the exhaustion both of the Broad Church and of Anglican orthodoxy and the commencement of an era of religious doubt.

The issues raised in this controversy were substantial. All previous studies have been concerned with these substantive issues, usually with an interest in the current state of thought upon them. Men of letters have treated the subject superficially, describing the persecution of good liberals by bad literalists.² The only comprehensive study is by Ieuan Ellis, learned on the theological and critical background but confusing when dealing with the debate itself, so concerned with the gravity of the issues that he misses the sheer zest of the controversy.³ Most other studies are specific to individual figures in the debate.⁴

I am not without interest in the substantive issues,⁵ nor can they be ignored even in a study devoted to another purpose. However, this work will concern itself primarily with the debate rather than the issues. This controversy illustrated ‘the pathology of Victorian religion'⁶ not only in its exposure of the less attractive features of Victorian Christianity but also in its illustration of the propensity to controvert and the methods of controversy of the time. The debate proceeded through a number of stages usually defined by the chosen medium of expression, and it both fed on itself and spun off several side-controversies. In this study, it may be possible to establish some common features characteristic of Victorian controversy in general.

It should be noted that this is an historical study. A student of religion⁷ may evaluate the theological merits or speculate on the religious significance; the historian would not if he could. He prefers to cultivate his ignorance of the present state of the argument. If he knows that the heresies of the Essayists later became acceptable, then commonplace, then passe, he tries to forget this. Both the orthodoxy and the liberalism of the 1860s were specific to their time. The historian must relocate them in their time.

CHAPTER TWO
Broad Church?

There were two great parties in the Victorian Church of England, and there was one common orthodoxy.

The two parties are known for convenience as Low Church and High Church. The Low Church, or evangelicals, spiritual heirs of the Puritan tradition, stressed individual religious experience; their quasi-Calvinistic theology, based on the Bible alone, regarded the Atonement as the central doctrine of Christianity. Their initial momentum had produced the religious revival of the nineteenth century; but by the 1830s they had narrowed into a party, with exclusive tenets and a special cant. The High Church, which traced its roots to the early Anglican divines, had been revived by the Oxford Movement (or Tractarians) of the 1830s. Their emphasis was on the corporate Church rather than the individual and his Bible, a Church which had an authority of its own beyond state establishment, transmitted by the apostolic succession of the bishops. Their sacramental principles had, since the Oxford days, taken the distinctive form of ritualism. Their leading figure was E. B. Pusey, regius professor of Hebrew at Oxford.

The controversies between Low and High Church, which seemed to occupy most of church history from the 1830s to the 1850s, have obscured the fact that there was a real doctrinal consensus or common orthodoxy among them. It was rarely articulated. Indeed, it may well have been the chief function of the Essays and Reviews and related controversies to bring about the articulation of Anglican orthodoxy at almost the last period of its existence.

The assumptions of this common orthodoxy have been stated as: ‘(a) the transcendence of God; (b) the origin of the material world in an act of creation in time; (c) the claim of Scripture to be an authoritative revelation of truth otherwise unobtainable by man; (d) the happiness and salvation of souls as the supreme concern of religion'.¹ Two features of this definition are of concern here. The first is the insistence on an external revelation, given by God, and consisting of data to be received in faith. The second is the emphasis on salvation to the exclusion of any fundamental concern for morality. Both features posit a remote God supplying materials for faith in the revelation of Scripture, on the right reception of which salvation depends.

A theology resting upon an external written revelation faced challenges, beginning with the eighteenth-century deists, to the credibility, authenticity and accuracy of its Scriptures. The great Anglican divines of the eighteenth century, especially Joseph Butler (Analogy of Religion, 1736) and William Paley (Evidences of Christianity, 1794),² had produced a system of external evidences of revelation, resting the case for Christianity on arguments from miracles which validated those who delivered the revelation, from the fulfilment of prophecies and from the correspondence of types and antitypes in the Old and New Testaments. This evidential theology seemed to have routed the deists and provided the staple of theological teaching, forming the minds of most of those who were to take part in the Essays and Reviews debate. It may be described as an Anglican scholasticism.³ The evidences were spoken of as the ‘foundations’ of the faith, and apologists sought ‘to prove that the “Scriptures are authentic”, and with that established it must follow that “Christianity is true”’.⁴

That this orthodox apologetic, this rationalistic anti-rationalism, was alive and well on the eve of the Essays and Reviews controversy was shown by the reception accorded to the Bampton Lectures of 1858 by H. L. Mansel on The Limits of Religious Thought. Seeking to place the Christian faith beyond the reach of rational challenge, Mansel argued that the Absolute or Unconditioned (God) was utterly beyond the power of human reason to understand. He thus summarily dismissed both demonstration of the existence of God and attempts to disprove it. This scepticism left it to God to supply truth to man through revelation. Human reason was capable of examining only the evidences, not the contents, of revelation. The evidences adduced by Mansel were the external evidences of miracles and prophecy. These supplied the credentials of the Bible, which must therefore be accepted in its entirety. ‘If there is sufficient evidence ... to show that the Scripture, in which this doctrine is contained, is a Revelation from God, the doctrine itself must be unconditionally received, not as reasonable, nor as unreasonable, but as scriptural.’ Neither critical nor ethical difficulties could be considered. ‘If the teaching of Christ is not in any one thing the teaching of God, it is in all things the teaching of men.'⁵

Paradoxically employing scepticism in defense of orthodoxy, staking the truth of Christianity on its weakest point, Mansel won a momentary victory for the orthodox apologetic. Although challenged by F. D. Maurice,⁶ himself suspected of heresy, Mansel was hailed enthusiastically by the religious public as a ‘champion of orthodoxy'⁷ who had definitively put down rationalism. On the eve of the Essays and Reviews controversy, the religious world was at once fearful of rationalism and over-confident in the intellectual foundations of its faith.

But there were dissenters from this orthodoxy, intellectual nonconformists within Anglicanism. Few in number, working as individuals or as small groups, diverse as befitted upholders of diversity, they could hardly be called a party, still less a movement. This tendency might best be called liberal Anglicanism,⁸ but it came to be known as Broad Church after that term was used in a celebrated article in 1853.⁹ The word Broad, by way of distinction from either High or Low, had apparently been used at Oxford for some time and had surfaced in an article by the liberal A. P. Stanley in 1850: the Church of England was ‘by the very condition of its being neither High nor Low, but Broad'.¹⁰ The term Broad Church is used here, with the understanding that, unlike the High or Low Church, the Broad Church was not a movement or a party but a tendency of mind common to assorted individuals or small groups.

The Broad Churchmen had in common a rejection of a theology of passive acceptance of doctrines derived from a Bible validated by external evidences. More important than Christian doctrine was the Christian life, for morality was better suited than miracles to validate Christianity in modern times. The Bible was to be read with freedom, even by clergymen, to find its original, essentially spiritual message. The critical study of the Bible, using methods which German scholars had pioneered, was a duty owed to truth.

The founders of the Broad Church were Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Thomas Arnold, representing different approaches to these common themes. Coleridge, who had studied in Germany in 1798–99, provided a philosophical basis for the Broad Church in Aids to Reflection (1825). Revelation and grace were not interposed upon nature but were developed from it; faith was not opposed to reason but was the perfection of reason; Christianity was not a set of doctrines but a life, with the development of morality as its object. Coleridge rejected the evidential rationalism of Paley: ‘Evidences of Christianity! I am weary of the word. Make a man feel the want of it; rouse him ... to the self-knowledge of his need of it; and you may safely trust it to its own Evidence'.¹¹ In his Constitution of the Church and State (1830), Coleridge stressed the ‘nationality’ of the Church, established by the State to guide the spiritual progress of the nation, with a special role of education. In his posthumous Confessions of an Inquiring Spirit (1840), Coleridge urged the duty of biblical criticism, reading the Bible afresh with no presumption of inerrancy, studying it as literature which, though inspired, had been developed by human hands: ? take up this work with the purpose to read it for the first time as I should read any other work'. This only enhanced his sense of the Bible being inspired by God unlike any other book, for more than any other it reaches man's spirit: ‘Whatever finds me, bears witness for itself that it has proceeded from a Holy Spirit'.¹² The Bible and Christianity are their own best evidences.

Thomas Arnold is remembered as the great headmaster of Rugby, but he was also the founder of the historical—critical approach to the Bible. Himself a classicist and Roman historian, he was attracted by B. G. Niebuhr's History of Rome, with its critical treatment of the classical sources of Roman history; and he kept in contact with German biblical scholarship through Christian von Bunsen, whom he had met in 1827. Arnold's great insight was the progressive nature of revelation, adapted to the knowledge and wants of those to whom it was first made, hence not always accurate in its details. The Bible must be examined historically and philologically, with no presumption of inerrancy. Its inspiration was general, not plenary, sufficient for its practical use as a guide to morality. Significantly, Arnold's Essay on the Right Interpretation and Understanding of the Scriptures (1832) is embedded in a volume of his Sermons, for he valued biblical exegesis chiefly as an aid to the promotion of morality. He was indifferent to dogmatic theology, prizing the connection of the Church with the State because the State helped to keep the Church from being overly dogmatic or exclusive. Arnold was linked to the later scholarly generation of Broad Churchmen through his disciple and biographer A. P. Stanley.

Of the first generation of Broad Churchmen, the Cambridge friends Connop Thirlwall and Julius Charles Hare were the most active in bringing German critical scholarship to an England indisposed to receive it. Thirlwall remarked that ‘it would almost seem as if at Oxford the knowledge of German subjected a divine to the same suspicion of heterodoxy which we know was attached some centuries back to a knowledge of Greek'.¹³ In 1825 Thirlwall published a translation of Schleiermacher's essay on St Luke with an introduction in which he defended the German critical approach and dismissed the verbal inerrancy of Scripture. In 1828–32 Thirlwall and Hare published a translation of Niebuhr's History of Rome, provoking orthodox opposition which feared rightly that the techniques of historical criticism applied to Roman literature might be applied to biblical literature. Hare diffused his many talents, and his main significance for the Broad Church was as a connecting link among its various groups until his death in 1855. But Th...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• 1 On Controversy
• 2 Broad Church?
• 3 The Essayists
• 4 The Essays
• 5 Early Responses
• 6 The Great Reviews
• 7 Censures
• 8 The War of the Pamphlets
• 9 Tracts into Tomes
• 10 The Case in Court
• 11 Verdict
• 12 Appeals
• 13 Acquittal
• 14 Condemnation
• 15 Aftermath
• 16 Epilogue
• 17 The Night Battle
• Notes
• Selected Bibliography
• Index