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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 February 2024
In words that tried, but failed, to temper growing contempt with resignation, John Henry Newman in Tract XC wrote this of the Thirty Nine Articles: ‘let the Church sit still; let her be content to be in bondage; let her work in chains; let her submit to her imperfections as a punishment; let her go on teaching with the stammering lips of ambiguous formularies...’. In Newman’s ears the language of the Via Media had come to seem deceitful. It took pride in plain speech, yet its words were so framed to include heresy with orthodoxy, false with true. The assured tones of the Articles and Prayer Book, cadences in which generations of Englishmen had come to find comfort and devotion, now seemed in 1841 to belong to a Church that would not listen to the sterner, clear, voices of Church Fathers. Such tones seemed instead to lull their hearers into complaisance. The lips of the Church could be said with irony to stammer, for assurance was only the proud veneer that smoothed over, as it smooth-talked, doctrinal confusion and hesitation. Newman’s words were those of Isaiah, who prophesied that the ‘stammering lips’ of foreign conquerors would command the sinful Israelites, as a result of their desertion of the Law’s clear precepts. Such words hit home: those who complained that the allusion to Isaiah fell wide of the mark could not do so except by excluding broad interpretations of Scripture and Creed of this kind, Newman’s very targets. But if not thus, how are we to proclaim our faith?
1 Quoted in The Victorian Church Part One, 1829—1859, by Owen Chadwick, SCM, pbk, 1987, p. 184.
2 I am indebted to Gilbert Markus OP for this quotation.
3 ‘The Value of Literature: I—Chaucer's language of forgiveness’, New Blackfriars Vol 69 No. 819 (September 1988), pp. 374—382; ‘The Value of Literature: II—Shakespeare and the Tudor Homilies’, New Blackfriars Vol 69 No. 822 (December 1988), pp.516—525.
4 In, Enoch Arden and In Memoriam, annotated by Tennyson, Alfred Lord, ed. by Hallam, Lord Tennyson, Macmillan 1908, p.203Google Scholar.
5 The first stanza of ‘Love I’, in The English Poems of George Herbert, ed. C.A. Patrides, Dent 1974, reprinted 1978, p.73.
6 In Enoch Arden and In Memoriam, op. cit., p.224.
7 In The Psalter or Psalms of David: in English Verse, by MA, Rev J Keble, Vicar of Hursley, Oxford and London, 1869, pp.10—11Google Scholar.
8 Ibid, pp.18—19.
9 Lectures on the Present Position of Catholics in England, Longmans, 1903, p. 322Google Scholar.
10 Loss and Gain, The Story of a Convert, Part three, chapter five, Universe Books, 1962, p.211.
I would like to close this short series on the value of literature by saying that I am to blame for whatever may be amiss in these articles, but, for whatever good is in them, I am indebted to the teaching and patience of Eric Griffiths. His book The Printed Voice of Victorian Poetry is the place to turn to for further insight on Tennyson.
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