Lord John Russell, Stuart J. Reid [types of ebook readers TXT] 📗

For the moment, however, passion and prejudice everywhere ran riot, and on both sides of the controversy common sense and common fairness were forgotten. A representative Irish politician of a later generation has not failed to observe the irony of the position. ‘It was a curious incident in political history,’ declares Mr. Justin McCarthy, ‘that Lord John Russell, who had more than any Englishman then living been identified with the principles of religious liberty, who had sat at the feet of Fox, and had for his closest friend the Catholic poet Thomas Moore, came to be regarded by Roman Catholics as the bitterest enemy of their creed and their rights of worship.’[24] It is easy to cavil at Lord John Russell’s interpretation of the Oxford Movement, and to assert that the accusations of the Durham Letter were due to bigotry and panic. He believed, in common with thousands of other distressed Churchmen, that the Tractarians were foes within the gates of the Establishment. He regarded them, moreover, as ministers of religion who were hostile to the work of the Reformation, and therefore he deemed that they were in a false position in the Anglican Church. Their priestly claims and sacerdotal rites, their obvious sympathies and avowed convictions, separated them sharply from ordinary clergymen, and were difficult to reconcile with adherence to the principles of Protestantism. Like many other men at the time, and still more of to-day, he was at a loss to discover how ecclesiastics of such a stamp could remain in the ministry of the Church of England, when they seemed to ordinary eyes to be in league with Rome. The prelates, almost to a man, were hotly opposed to the Tractarians when Lord John wrote the Durham Letter. They shared his convictions and applauded his action. Since then many things have happened. The Oxford Movement has triumphed, and has done so largely by the self-sacrificing devotion of its adherents. It has summoned to its aid art and music, learning and eloquence; it has appealed to the æsthetic and emotional elements in human nature; it has led captive the imagination of many by its dramatic revival of mediæval ideas and methods; and it has stilled by its assumption of authority the restlessness of souls, too weary to argue, too troubled to rebel. The bishops of to-day have grown either quite friendly towards the Oxford Movement, or else discreetly tolerant. Yet, when all this is admitted, it does nothing towards proving that Lord John Russell was a mistaken alarmist. The Durham Letter and its impassioned protest have been justified by the logic of events. It is easy for men to be charitable who have slipped their convictions.

Possibly it was not judicious on Lord John’s part to be so zealously affected in the matter. That is, perhaps, open to dispute, but the question remains: Was he mistaken in principle? He saw clergymen of the English Church, Protestant at least in name, ‘leading their flocks step by step to the very verge of the precipice,’ and he took up his parable against them, and pointed out the danger to the hitherto accepted faith and practice of the English Church. One of the most distinguished prelates of the Anglican Church in the Queen’s reign has not hesitated to assert that the tenets against which Lord John Russell protested in the Durham Letter were, in his judgment, of a kind which are ‘destructive of all reasonable faith, and reduce worship to a mere belief in spells and priestcraft.’ Cardinal Vaughan, it is needless to say, does not sympathise with such a view. He, however, has opinions on the subject which are worthy of the attention of those who think that Lord John was a mere alarmist. His Eminence delivered a suggestive address at Preston on September 10, 1894, on the ‘Re-Union of Christendom.’ He thinks—and it is idle to deny that he has good ground for thinking—that, in spite of bishops, lawyers, and legislature, Delphic judgments at Lambeth, and spasmodic protests up and down the country, a change in doctrine and ritual is in progress in the Anglican Church which can only be described as a revolution. He asserts that the ‘Real Presence, the sacrifice of the Mass, offered for the living and the dead, no infrequent reservation of the Sacrament, regular auricular confession, Extreme Unction, Purgatory, prayers for the dead, devotions to Our Lady, to her Immaculate Conception, the use of her Rosary, and the invocation of saints, are doctrines taught and accepted, with a growing desire and relish for them, in the Church of England. ’

Cardinal Vaughan also declares that the present churches of the Establishment are ‘often distinguishable only with extreme difficulty from those belonging to the Church of Rome.’ Such statements are either true or false. If false, they are open to contradiction; if true, they justify in substance the position taken up in the Durham Letter. Towards the close of his life, Lord John told Mr. Lecky that he did not regret his action, and to the last he maintained that he was right in the protest which he made in the Durham Letter. Yet he acknowledged, as he looked back upon the affair, that he might have softened certain expressions in it with advantage. Parliament met on February 4, 1851, and the Queen’s Speech contained the following passage: ‘The recent assumption of certain ecclesiastical titles conferred by a foreign Power has excited strong feelings in this country; and large bodies of my subjects have presented addresses to me expressing attachment to the Throne, and praying that such assumptions should be resisted. I have assured them of my resolution to maintain the rights of my crown and the independence of the nation against all encroachments, from whatsoever quarter they may proceed.’