IN the course of what Dr. Sparrow Simpson has called ‘its laborious and sacrificial career’, the influence of the Oxford Movement has gradually spread, till there is now no corner of the Church of England which it has failed in some degree to affect. The question of its spiritual significance must thereefore concern all Anglicans, perhaps even all Englishhmen; and by this we mean, I suppose, the degree in which it has mediated eternal life and thereby helped or hindered the production of holiness. For that after all is the ultimate spiritual aim of religious revival.
We are hardly likely to get much that is interesting or valuable from such an inquiry as this, unless we try at least to relate it to first principles. For what we are looking at is a phase in the vast history of religion; that is, God’s self-revelation to men’s souls by special ways and means, and man’s response. Our own prejudices and preferences must stand down before this august fact; and we must try to consider its historical aspects humbly and with purity of sight. And first we notice that spiritual realism and spiritual
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results alone must be the acid-test of any revival. For spiritual results are worked only by the Spirit. Where they are present the movement is of God; even though disfigured by excesses or mistakes. Is there an increase of faith, hope and charity: a glad acceptance of suffering, the Cross: a spirit of austerity and renunciation: a deepening of the life of prayer? If so, we must surely say that we are truly in the presence of one of those movements of the Spirit within history, which from time to time bring fresh vigour to some branch of the Church. For these are marks of the supernatural life.
It is plainly not enough for this purpose merely to examine and base our judgement on the devotional value of certain revived practices, or even on the heroic achievements of certain saintly souls: for such facts point beyond themselves, and cannot be understood in isolation. To see the Oxford Movement, its hundred years of life and growth, in spiritual regard, we must give full value to the undoubted fact that it began as a deliberate attempt to recover the historical and institutional elements of religion; a restoration of our broken links with tradition, a knitting up of the dropped stitches in our bit of the seamless robe. This would not have happened, had there not arisen in certain spiritually sensitive minds, a deep sense of something lacking in the English Church life of a century ago; something which the Evangelical revival in its zenith had brought back to many individuals, but not to the corporate life of the Church. In other words, it began with the secret action of the Holy Spirit on certain characters. At the heart of the
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Movement we find not merely clever people or learned theologians but hidden saints like Keble and Hurrell Froude; men with a firm hold on religious essentials, and sufficiently selfless to remain true to the Church of their baptism in circumstances of great difficulty and pain.
The Evangelical Revival had revealed anew the depth and possibilities of personal religion. The Oxford Movement, initiated by souls in whom personal religion was a consuming passion, began at the other end; by an attempt to bring back lapsed elements in the Church of England and re-establish its corporate status as a part of the Divine Society. Thus it provided, as the Evangelical Revival had failed to do, a spiritual home within which personal religion of many sorts and kinds, from the most profound to the most naïve, could find shelter and food. The result of this is now seen, in developments of which the first Tractarians did not dream, and of which the possibilities are not exhausted yet. These developments followed gradually on the re-discovery of corporate and Catholic Christianity in its richness and power—the Church, as the traditional unit and essential institution. This conception is now in some degree familiar to all of us, whether we value it or not; so that we find it difficult to realize what the religious landscape was, on which Keble looked out when he preached his epoch-making sermon a hundred years ago.
An understanding of the significance of the Oxford Movement therefore presupposes an understanding of what the true object of a religious institution is.
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In the largest and deepest sense, I suppose, it exists to maintain and carry forward within history all those spiritual truths and spiritual practices which make men sensitive to God: to manifest Eternity, teach worship, and so to open and keep open paths between the unseen and the seen. The religious institution, the visible Divine Society, gathering up and preserving all the spiritual wisdom and spiritual culture of the past, provides food, warmth and shelter, a home atmosphere, a corporate religious life, a share in the common treasures, for each new Christian soul. A century ago this great vision—and with it any realistic sense of continuity with the Universal Church—had almost faded out of Anglican Christianity; and the first phase of the Oxford Movement was mainly concerned with its restoration. From that restoration all the other spiritual results have flowed. For a realistic belief in the Living Church was soon found to involve a new emphasis on the sacred reality and importance of that sacramental life which had been from the first central to Catholic Christianity. Through this the secret vivid sense of devotedness to the Person of Christ, which is the true growing point of personal religion and had been the strength of the Evangelical Movement, was enriched by a further deep and realistic sense of sharing the total life, visible and invisible, of a Body maintained by one Spirit, serving one Master, and fed from one Source. For the Catholic conception of churchmanship really consists in taking the 12th chapter of Romans quite literally.
And next, this re-discovery of the whole Christian tradition and practice in its integrity, brought with
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it a new appreciation of the disciplined life, as the necessary foundation of any full and deep spiritual life. And as a result of this renewed understanding of interior ways, this deliberate austerity of life and generous spirit of self-dedication, there appeared once more as the product and the glory of the Church in England heroic lives, both corporate and individual, of the genuine saintly type: a revival of the Religious Life of poverty, chastity and obedience, and great souls to remind the rank and file of what human nature can do and be, when it is utterly self-given to the purposes of God.
So, here we have four major results of the Oxford Movement to which the word ‘spiritual’ can reasonably be applied.
(1) the restoration of Catholic Tradition, the sense of the Church;
(2) the revival of sacramental and liturgical worship;
(3) the disciplined life;
(4) sanctity.
I do not suggest that any of these great realities had ever died out of English religion. They had not. But they had certainly become, as regards the Church at large, very dim in the period before Tracts for the Times; and were only held and practised by rare and special souls.
II
We come to the first spiritual gift which the Tractarians made to the Church; the recovery of tradition, of the sense of the Church as an objective whole, and the baptized Christian as part of a great and living body—the Body of Christ—with an organic life that stretches back into history and out into Eternity, including us in one living communion with
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our brothers and sisters the Saints. This conception, once it is truly grasped, removes the emphasis of religion from the devotional experience of the indiividual to that of the Church. And by one of those paradoxes which abound in the Christian life, this transfer of emphasis greatly deepens and enriches the experience of the individual soul; which loses its indiividual life to find another richer life. The Evangelical mind tends to present spiritual experience as a duet. for the Catholic mind it is, or should be, a symphony; and now English Christians heard once more the mighty orchestration of the Saints. The bringing back of this concept of the social nature of Christian spirituality into the field of practical religion has profound effects upon the soul. It is, for one thing, completely incompatible with an attenuated, comfortable, this-world Christianity. The standard of the Saints, in love, in suffering and in service, becomes the standard of the Church.
Brothers, we are treading
Where the Saints have trod.
All one Body we,…
O blest Communion, fellowship Divine,
We feebly struggle—they in glory shine!
Through these and other hymns—all written by the Tractarians and their descendants, and used more and more by Christians of all types—this great organic conception of our status, condemning all pious pettiness and redeeming us from religious loneliness, has percolated to every branch of the Church; compelling
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a realization that the spiritual life, like any other kind of life, needs a social environment, food and atmosphere, and cannot with any hope of good health be pursued in isolation. The common idea of the mystic as a sort of holy cat-that-walks-by-himself and has no need of the common religious life, is, of course, fundamentally false. The deepest and noblest of the mystics—Rolle and Hilton, Francis, Catherine, Teresa—have found the riches of Eternity in means of grace accessible to every soul. Their significance is social. They have lived in close touch with their fellow Christians, have widely influenced others, and received influence in their turn. For invisible religion, with its intense concentration on God, soon overstrains the poor human creature, unless it is balanced and suppported by a humble acceptance of visible religion, and corporate religious life. Nor indeed is such invisible religion an ideal for Christians, unless they practise it as members of the Mystical Body of Christ; that is, channels through which the Divine Charity flows out to the Church and other souls. This great lesson is very far from being fully learnt by Anglicans. But they have to thank the Tractarians for the fact that it has got back into the syllabus.
Again, the recovery of the sense of the Church has meant an ever- growing interest in our spiritual inheritance; a re-discovery of the treasures of the past. If the splendours of heroic sanctity are once more venerated, and even a little more understood, and the spiritual wisdom of the Saints, their mighty witness to the beauty and reality of God, is known and loved again, we have to thank the Oxford Movement for
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preparing the ground. For a recognition of all that it means to be members of a Catholic Church has meant fresh reverence for the supernatural lives that have been led within it, and a new and more intelligent recognition of the immense spiritual wealth of that tradition which is the inheritance of every Christian soul. If we compare the tone and contents of such a book as Vaughan’s Hours with the Mystics, with its contemptuous references to ‘dry old fathers’ with the respectful treatment which the Saints now receIve even at the hands of those who do not believe in them, we perceive one direction in which the Tractarian spirit set going a much needed reform. Did we strip the devotional bookshelf of all the works which this movement has, directly or indirectly, produced or given back to us and current religious literature of their all-pervading influence, we should be poor indeed.
III
Next, it is notorious that the second phase of the Movement—the form in which it rallied from the crisis of 1845 and the following years, when it was struggling for survival under the heavy blows dealt by the persecutions of its critics and the apostasy of its friends—the ground on which its chief battles were fought—was the development of sacramental and ceremonial worship; all that was rather clumsily known as 'ritualism'. Here it took more and more a dlrection which the Tractarians themselves had never contemplated; and perhaps would not have approved. Indeed, some of the more conservative men of the second generation did disapprove of many of the later
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developments. Yet this was without doubt the direction in which the new life now tended to expand. From the point of view of the interests of the spiritual life, what are we to think about that?
First, it is clear that any developed corporate religion, of the Church type, must find some outward expression by means of ritual and ceremony, in order that it may satisfy a deep instinct of man; and that the more solemn and objective the character of this outward expression, the more it conveys the 'beauty of the mysterious', the more it will awaken and suppport his religious sense. Ritual as an aim in itself must always be absurd; and we cannot say that the Movement was or is without examples of this extravagance. But ritual as the outward sign of inward action is, in one form or another, natural and necesssary to human creatures. It releases religious energy; and both expresses and stimulates transcendental and corporate feeling. Even the Freemasons witness to the value of a common ceremonial in binding men together in loyalty to a common ideal; and when we come to the things of the Spirit, this corporate use of a solemn ritual, taking up into one great tide of worship the devotion of the individual believers, balances the obvious danger of formalism by two immense advantages.
(1) Its emphasis is social and objective. It represents the ordered and all-inclusive action of the whole Church, visible and invisible; adoring God and supplicating God, for Himself alone. It is, as St. Benedict called it, the Opus Dei; done, not because it does us good, not because we want something, but for Him.
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It is done because it is meet right and our bounden duty to make, as a group, this small response to the Divine Charity. Here men and women of all types and levels of enlightenment find common ground and a common task, with Angels and Archangels and all the company of Heaven praising and magnifying one Holy Name. Thus liturgic worship is the great school of theocentric religion; and should be a complete cure for self-interested piety and devotional pettiness.
(2) Next to this in importance is the fact that ceremonial worship gives religious value and religious opportunity to the whole of man’s mixed nature, body, mind and spirit. It meets him where he is, and takes him as he is—a finite being with a certain capacity for the infinite—a creature of sense and of soul. It uses rhythm and gesture, contact, sight and speech, not only the bit of us which we like to call spiritual, in the approach to God. Whilst we are in this life, we can never of course get rid of the close partnership of body and spirit; and in the Incarnation Christians find this partnership blessed and endorsed by God. In our strange, rich, human experience nature and supernature are distinct, but not divided. God the invisible and ineffable shows Himself and speaks to us in natural ways, and by the consecrated use of homely things. Thus we set up a very dangerous dualism if we try to put sense and spirit in opposite camps; and this fact must control our religious practice. As spirit must enter into the life of the body if we are to be fully human; so too the body must play its part in the spirit’s life. This principle, now made familiar to us by von Hügel and other
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religious philosophers, may not in that form have been clear to the Anglican revivers of ritual. But it explains the fruitfulness of their work; and the fact that in spite of much that was extreme and provocative, its influence in a modified form has penetrated all branches of the Church, so that few would now feel at home at an average service of the pre-Tractarian type.
More and more we are realizing that Christianity in its richness, its complete penetration of life, cannot find adequate expression on invisible levels alone. And being what we are, it is just this appeal to the whole of us, this sacramental mingling of sense and spirit—turning the whole man Godward, and emphasizing the deep mystery of our life—which as a matter of fact gives the spirit its best chance, and provides that environment in which the life of prayer can flourish best. Believers in an Incarnational religion ought not to find this strange: but a hundred years ago it was an idea which had become entirely foreign to English Christianity. We begin then to see the significance of that intense ceremonial phase through which the Oxford Movement passed, and which still appears to many people its outstanding and to some its most objectionable characteristic. Though it was a phase the pioneers had not conceived of, and with which their sympathy would not have been great, without it the Oxford Movement would never have moved far from University precincts, lost its highbrow character, or developed all its devotional possibilities.
That concern with ritual has still a real importance in promoting the interests of holiness: the unique goal of all Christian life, whether Catholic or Evan-
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gelical. It is not, as is often supposed, an aesthetic question. It goes far deeper than that, and arises out of our belief in the nature of God and nature of Man. For ritual, where genuine, is always a dramatic expresssion of doctrine. It is one of the Church’s great weapons in her ceaseless war against a merely utilitarian and ethical religion, and has proved to be a main channel through which the sense of the supernatural has re-entered Anglican life. It was not easy for the average Christian to experience the ‘sense of the numinous’ in the average Church service of 100 years ago. We easily forget what battles were fought and what sufferings undergone by those who insisted on a standard of public worship and of reverence now taken for granted everywhere. The mere opening of a church for service on a weekday— even a major saint’s day—preaching in a surplice, reciting the prayer for the Church Militant, using flowers, or such ordinary pieces of church furniture as the credence table or the lectern; these were all occasions for persecution in the stormy forties and later still.
As to reverence for the Sacraments, one incident is enough to show the depth to which this had fallen in the early years of the century. Charles Simeon, as a Cambridge undergraduate, attended the Easter Eucharist in King’s College Chapel. At the end of the service the celebrant gave to him and his fellow students some of the Consecrated Elements which remained over. Simeon knelt to receive them, and covered his face with his hands. He looked up, to find the clergyman laughing at this strange display of enthusiasm. If such an incident as this has now
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become impossible in any part of the Anglican Church, the credit for the change must go to the Oxford Movement, which—largely by its emphasis on ceremonial order—has made religious realism and the reverence that goes with it the standard of behaviour, and not the special possession of fervent souls. For among modern religious development directly due to the Tractarians, we must include the realistic acceptance of the plainly-declared truths of the Prayer Book, especially the entirely uncompromising language of the Sanctus and the Prayer of Oblation; and the tendency to restore such ancient liturgic features as the Kyrie Eleison and the Agnus—not out of a mere love of medievalism, but because of their spiritual significance, their place in the total movement of worship.
And that which men receive through their religious practices, is conditioned by the reverence and awe which they bring to them.
This does not mean that in the central place which they gave to Eucharistic devotion the Tractarians were inventing or importing some new thing. Here they had with them many of the saints of the Evangelical revival. John Wesley’s sacramental fervour is well known, and frequent communion was a rule with the first Methodists. The same devotional temper is found in more surprising places. ‘In the forenoon’, says the great Presbyterian, David Brainerd, in one place, ‘while I was looking on the sacramental elements . . . my soul was filled with light and love, so that I was almost in an ecstasy.’ Charles Simeon and Henry Martyn—so accessible to what he called the ‘mysterious glories of religion’—can be quoted
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in the same sense. But these individual enlightenments were without effect on the common Church life. By the Oxford Movement this devotion, at once so transcendental and so intimate, which—central to primitive Christianity—never dies out in the Church, was brought out, developed, articulated anew to history and to doctrine; and once more made accessible to the blessed company of faithful people. The fervour, the deepened experience of prayer, the disciplined life and heroic charity which were among the most obvious spiritual fruits of the Movement—all these are closely related to the fact that frequent access to the sacraments became more and more a part of the normal routine of Anglican Church life, heightening religious sensitiveness and feeding both the corporate and the sacrificial aspect of Christian experience.
This emphasis on Eucharistic devotion was and is fiercely attacked as a mere imitation of Rome. But it was as a matter of fact a return to New Testament standards and practice; which, so far as the rank and file of the faithful were concerned, had died out for many centuries in both the Eastern and Western Church. The Tractarians were the pioneers of frequent Communion for the laity in modern Christendom; and it is interesting to note that the Roman Catholic Church is now treading the path which they, at the cost of much misunderstanding and in the teeth of actual persecution, were really the first to clear. It is on record that in St. Paul’s Cathedral on Easter Day, 1800, there were six communicants.
Compare this with the life of the twentieth-century cathedral;
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with its daily celebrations, its rich sense of history, articulated to all the interests, activities and needs of the modern world. All this has grown and is growing very slowly; but it springs from that seed which was planted, at the cost of great suffering, 100 years ago.
Whenever we find churches kept open for prayer and meditation, reminding us that the House of God is also the home of Man, and we discover on entering that welcoming atmosphere peculiar to a place of prayer—whenever the service is of such a character that it overcomes our sluggishness and incapacity and lifts us towards God—we might remember that it is to the Oxford Movement and those who suffered for it that we owe these and many other things.
We may allow then that the Oxford Movement has meant for English religion the restoration of two great essentials of spiritual life. It has given a renewed contact with history and tradition, bringing new access to the vast common treasury of the Church, and a new appreciation of all we have to learn from those who have gone before. It has revived that rich liturgic and sacramental worship in which, as in some living work of art, the Church’s corporate life of adoration and sacrifice is expressed.
All this has meant or rather is meaning, for there is much work to be done yet—a gradual penetration of the Anglican mind by the profound truth that God works through history, and that a great religious tradition, gathering the insights and experiences of countless souls, is one of the chief instruments through which He feeds and moulds the spirit of man.
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IV
But the final test of a religious movement is not to be sought in the realms of doctrine and practice, but in the souls that it forms. The promotion of holiness—this alone can guarantee any institution’s spiritual worth. For Christianity is life; ‘eternal life lived in the midst of time’. And the question is, do we find this life being produced among us more richly and more generally, and are the Alpine heights of prayer and self-sacrifice more frequently attained, as the result of those changes which the Oxford Movement set going in the English Church? It is difficult to approach this question without bias: but I think we must answer it in the affirmative. Certainly the Christian spiritual life in its full beauty has never died out. No branch of the Church has ever been without its hidden saints. The Evangelical revival produced great souls of the temper of Charles Simeon and Henry Martyn, heroic missionaries, devoted servants of the poor. Yet we are aware as we read their lives of how many of these struggled for existence in isolation; quite ignorant of those spiritual ancestors with whom they had so much in common, or the meaning of the experiences through which they passed, and obtaining from the Church of their day the minimum of shelter, support and food. Baron von Hügel has said, in a well-known passage, that ‘Souls who live an heroic spiritual life within great religious traditions and institutions, attain to a rare volume and vividness of religious insight, conviction and reality’—far more seldom achieved by the religious individualist.
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The history of the English Church during the last century, especially the section most influenced by the Oxford Movement, illustrates this saying in a striking way. Newman, says Dean Church, arrived at the conviction that Devotion and Sacrifice—the substance of Holiness—are the authentic marks of a living Church. He sought these graces for himself where he saw them already existent. The friends whom he left behind strove at great cost to express them in action where they were. Thus they not only set going the renovation of the Church of England, but also lit before its altar the lamp of sanctity. In the greatest of the many dedicated lives that Church has since produced, we seem to recognize once more the authentic note of a sanctity that emerges within a society, a Church, conforms to the family pattern, is supported and fed by the supernatural life indwelling that Church; and so reaches a solid maturity of holiness which is beyond the span of religious individualism, however intense. We surely feel this quality, for instance, in Father Richard Benson, the founder of Cowley; or in Father Wainright of Dockland, whose fifty years’ devoted service of the poor was the result of an early reading of the lives of St. Vincent de Paul and the Cure d’ Ars, and was nourished by that long period of rapt devotion before the altar with which each working day began. In some, too, of those heroic women who brought back the life of the religious orders to the English Church.
This gradual revival of the religious orders, and the re-establishment among us of the steadfast routine of the monastic life, subordinating all things to the Opus
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Dei, the corporate worship of God—this is a spiritual phenomenon to which we hardly attach all the importance it deserves. It has come bit by bit, as the necessary expression of one strand in that new and rich life which sprang from the Oxford Movement; bringing with it the spirit of wholesale dedication, whether to the enclosed life of heroic prayer, or the mixed life of action inspired by contemplation. As the great orders of the past sprang into being through the personal initiative and unlimited faith of a few determined souls, so the history of their modern counterparts is full of the romance of the consecrated life. The great Community of St. Mary the Virgin at Wantage, with branches in every part of the world, began with a couple of friends in a country cottage struggling to live the Religious Life. Three heroic women establishing themselves in a dilapidated loft , ‘in literal acceptance of the Gospel precepts’ to nurse the sick poor in their homes, founded in the teeth of insult and persecution the Sisterhood of St. Margaret at East Grinstead.
It is surely a great matter that this life of absolute consecration, this literal obedience to the demand to ‘Leave all’ should thus have returned to the Church of England; to reprove and to stiffen our easy-going religiosity, by its vivid witness to the unlimited claim of God on the souls that He calls, the power and attraction of the other-worldly life, the ghostly energy which is released by entire renunciation, for the support of souls and the battle against sin. It has meant for all brought into contact with it a new recognition of what it can mean to be in body, soul and spirit a servant of the Crucified,
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a reasonable and living sacrifice; and has already shown us what human nature can become, when it leaves all and gives itself without limit to the purposes of God, whether in the life of service or the life of prayer. The presence within the Church of these dedicated lives, and the production of that holiness, that poetry of goodness which is the fruit of dedication —this is surely a marvellous witness to the reality and attraction of God.
It is often assumed that God can bring forth His saints anywhere, and give them their meat in due season; in other words that the emergence and development of spiritual genius has very little to do with institutional religion. But history and psychology seem to oppose this view. The great saints have mostly arisen within the religious system they were destined to purify or adorn, and their debts to the deepest and most stable elements in that system—especially its tradition of prayer and self-discipline—have been great. Saints, if they are to develop their fullest capacity, need much education. The appearance among us of heroic souls, the many decisive vocations to poverty, chastity and obedience—and also the widespread desire for a revival of the life of prayer, and uneasy realization of its necessity, which has now covered England with a network of Retreat Houses and brings eager pupils to all who offer instruction on the inner life—all this I am sure is very closely connected with the restoration of the forgotten ideal of Christian asceticism in its true sense, which we owe ultimately to the Tractarians. For this restoration of the tradition of Christian austerity, the severe standards
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of life and unmitigated moral claim of the full Catholic outlook—this renewed appreciation of the costly character of all deep religion—has alone made possible the development of those men and women of prayer who are themselves actual channels of the Spirit and means of grace. It is not for nothing that his fellow—workers in East London were accustomed to call Father Wainright the Eighth Sacrament: for wherever he went, that small untiring figure seemed to bring the power of God.
The interior life as a practical fact, and the discipline of thought and action which goes with it—all this re-entered English Church life with the Tractarians. It had, and is having, its effect, in the formation of souls which without this spiritual culture would hardly have developed their full capacity whether for contemplation or for service. The modern world, knowing the worth and necessity of specialists in science and the arts, should value these spiritual specialists more than it is at present inclined to do. They are the eyes and ears of the Body of Christ.
Baron von Hügel was fond of saying, that in the true order of religious development the Church comes first and the mystics afterwards. When Peter and John—types of the institutional and the mystical elements of Christianity—ran together to the Holy Sepulchre, John the seer reached the mystery first; but it was Peter, the Church, who went in first. So the intuition of the spiritual realist may arrive first; but his fullest lights and convictions come to him when he follows where the Church has first trod.
Then he exercises his true function within the Mystical
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Body: which is not to have strange and individual adventures, to dart off as it were into the Eternal, but rather to enter into and explore ever more fully the wonder and significance of the revealed. Something of this sort seems to me to have happened—or rather to be still happening—in connexion with that great English revival of Church-religion which began 100 years ago. And I do not think either its friends or its critics will come to an understanding of its true quality and meaning, until they have considered it from this point of view. Great movements within history unfold their deep implications stage by stage. Although appearances may sometimes deceive us, there is as a matter of fact nothing hurried and cataclysmic about them. They partake of the great divine rhythm which we discover within all life. First the blade, then the ear, then the full corn in the ear. This was true of the Primitive Church; so closely dependent on the Spirit’s guidance yet exhibiting almost at the beginning characters which we should scarcely regard as the peculiar marks of a spiritual Church. For it is apparent that the first great impulse—often claimed as wholly non-dogmatic and non-ecclesiastical—led, as a matter of fact, to the prompt formation of a theology and an institution, and very soon to the development of a certain ritual practice. It was within the home thus provided, and in dependence upon that rich tradition which it handed on, that the spiritual life took root and flowered in the various love and holiness of the Saints.
So too in each succeeding period. The Middle Ages consolidate, even over-consolidate the institution, and
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give through St. Thomas an absolute precision to the theology: and from within a Church thus intensely organized, utterly Petrine, again the mystical life in its freedom and beauty, the pure heroic passion for Christ and God, the energy of sacrifice, break out with power. The great family of the fourteenth-century mystics are truly the children, even though sometimes the unruly children, of the medieval Church. Careful study will convince most students of this; and show that even the repressive elements of that Church acted as a useful check on individual intuition.
Again, the Reformation—even though we are now learning to appreciate the genuinely religious character of Luther’s genius—was first of all concerned with the overhaul of theology and institutional practice. And perhaps because in all this there was so much that was crude and controversial, because the Church-type with its warm inclusiveness was departed from and the sect-type with its dangerous individualism took its place—above all because the ideals of asceticism were ruthlessly flung away—we miss here the depth and reality, the self-abandoned beauty, of the spiritual life as seen in the Saints. Only in the seventeenth century does it begin to reappear, struggling for existence in religious surroundings which are rather suggestive of the old family mansion that has been broken up into a series of not very convenient fiats. In the Latin countries the Counter-Reformation followed much the same path. St.Peter put his house in order; and the spirit of St. John emerged again.
First the Council of Trent and the Jesuits; then the revival of the religious orders and marvellous out-
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burst of spiritual life—the missionary saints and the mystical saints—Francis Xavier and Marie Martin, Teresa and John of the Cross, Francis de Sales and Madame Acarie. Certainly diagrams of this kind must not be pressed too far. The free action of God on souls is manifest at every point in history, and takes little account of our neat ideas. But on the whole and in a general sense we find that the genuine revival of corporate and traditional Christianity in its fullness provides the environment within which the spiritual life develops best.
In the remarkable growth of Church religion which sprang from the Oxford Movement, and has produced and is still producing developments and results of which the Tractarians themselves never dreamed, we seem to detect the same order of growth. First the intense concentration on history and tradition: the recovery of the Catholic idea, and of neglected parts of our great inheritance. Then the institutional development; the concentration on ritual and ceremony, sometimes carried to absurd lengths, yet giving once again a stimulus and a vehicle for devotion and so enriching both the corporate and the personal life towards God. Then the intellectual reconstruction which began with Lux Mundi; and now has to its credit the work of a brilliant group of theological scholars. And, emerging among all this very quietly, yet steadily gathering way, the supernatural life of prayer, sacrifice, love; feeding on these other various factors, incarnating itself in many different types, both active and contemplative, and many different careers. And let the philanthropic Christian, always a little
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bit tempted to put the Second Commandment before the First, take note of the fact that only the philanthropic work which is done directly or overtly for God, and draws its energy from the communion of the Spirit, glows with the selfless passion that gives power. A theocentric religion is the best starting-point for that fundamental reconstruction of society which all now have at heart: and a sacramental religion gives both philosophic sanction and spiritual support to its ideals. The rich amalgam of history and spirituality—the love of man which is born of the Love of God, and therefore shares in the energy of the Divine Charity—this is the Christian hope of the future, and perhaps it is the world’s hope too. The neglected elements which the Oxford Movement brought back into English Christianity, are surely those best calculated to feed and steady that flame.
