THE ROMAN QUESTION

The Hampden controversy had contributed to bring to the front a question, which from the first starting of the Tracts had made itself felt, but which now became a pressing one.  If the Church of England claimed to be part of the Catholic Church, what was the answer of the Church of England to the claims and charges of the Church of Rome?  What were the true distinctions between the doctrines of the two Churches on the great points on which they were supposed to be at issue?  The vague outcry of Popery had of course been raised both against the general doctrine of the Church, enforced in the Tracts, and against special doctrines and modes of speaking, popularly identified with Romanism; and the answer had been an appeal to the authority of the most learned and authoritative of our writers.  But, of course, to the general public this learning was new; and the cry went on with a dreary and stupid monotony.  But the charges against Dr. Hampden led his defenders to adopt as their best weapon an aggressive policy.  To the attack on his orthodoxy, the counter buffet was the charge against his chief opponents of secret or open Romanising.  In its keenest and most popular form it was put forth in a mocking pamphlet written probably under Whately’s inspiration by his most trusted confidant, Dr. Dickinson, in which, in the form of a “Pastoral Epistle from his Holiness the Pope to some Members of the University of Oxford,” the Tract-writers are made to appear as the emissaries and secret tools of Rome, as in a jeu d’esprit of Whately’s they are made to appear as the veiled prophets of infidelity.[68] It was clever, but not clever enough to stand, at least in Oxford, against Dr. Pusey’s dignified and gravely earnest Remonstrance against its injustice and trifling.  But the fire of all Dr. Hampden’s friends had been drawn on the leaders of the movement.  With them, and almost alone with them, the opposition to him was made a personal matter.  As time went on, those who had been as hot as they against Dr. Hampden managed to get their part in the business forgotten.  Old scores between Orthodox, Evangelicals, and Liberals were wiped out, and the Tractarians were left to bear alone the odium of the “persecution” of Dr. Hampden.  It must be said that they showed no signs of caring for it.

But the Roman controversy was looming in earnest, and it was idle to expect to keep it long out of sight.  The Tracts had set forth with startling vehemence the forgotten claims of the Church.  One reason why this had been done was the belief, as stated in the first volume of them, “that nothing but these neglected doctrines, faithfully preached, will repress the extension of Popery, for which the ever-multiplying divisions of the religious world are too clearly preparing the way."[69] The question, What is the Church? was one which the conditions of the times would not permit men any longer to leave alone.  It had become