The aim of this article is to shed more light on Samuel Wilberforce and John Henry (later Cardinal) Newman through extensive references to their private and public writings, and to show how their relationship helps reaching a better understanding of this period and of these two great figures of Victorian Christianity.
To all intents and purposes, Samuel Wilberforce (1805–73) was a peripheral figure in the life of John Henry Newman. The two men rarely met in person during the 6 years they were in Oxford together, and corresponded only intermittently for some 11 years (from 1834 to 1845).Footnote 2 It is significant that in his very thorough 745-page biography of Cardinal Newman, Fr Ian Ker only made two references (amounting together to nine lines) to Samuel Wilberforce. Footnote 3
However, John Henry Newman was to remain, maybe to the end, something like a bogeyman in S. Wilberforce’s mind and the symbol of the dreaded and hated Roman Catholic Church. One should not underestimate S. Wilberforce’s violent and extreme hatred of that Church, which he called the ‘evil schism’ in his diary on 5 November 1854 concerning his brother Robert’s conversion.Footnote 4 He also wrote, after learning of his brother’s conversion:
I am debating whether contemporaneously with the announcement of your fall, I ought not to resign my bishopric, in order that without the reproach of remaining in the English Communion for the sake of my preferments, I may testify with what little strength is given me for the rest of my life against the cursed abominations of the Papacy.Footnote 5
That the two men should not have known each other more may seem surprising since they began as virtual allies in the revival of Catholic ideas in the Church of England; and had in common the love and respect of Robert Isaac Wilberforce (1802–57), Samuel’s beloved older brother and a disciple of Newman.
I will nonetheless show that, close as they were in their high view of the ministry (and particularly of the episcopate), Samuel Wilberforce and John Henry Newman parted ways over their conceptions of the Church, and of Tradition.
In the first section we will first see how Samuel Wilberforce and John Henry Newman associated with the same people at Oxford in the 1820s and the 1830s.
However, from the middle of the 1830s, Samuel Wilberforce’s emphasis on the Protestant character of the Church of England, separated him more and more from John Henry Newman and his disciples, as discussed in the second section.
To conclude on this awkward relationship, in the third section we will look to the fundamental doctrinal differences which existed between John Henry Newman and Samuel Wilberforce.
Missed Opportunities?
Similar Influences
It should first be noted that the two men were only a few years in Oxford (at Oriel College) at the same time. Samuel Wilberforce arrived at Oriel as an undergraduate in early 1823;Footnote 6 he graduated BA in the Michaelmas Term of 1826; the following year he left England to take an extended foreign tour of several months until November 1827,Footnote 7 he seems not to have come back to Oxford before December 1828 when he was ordained a deacon. Three months later he was in his first curacy, at Checkendon, 20 miles south from Oxford. He did come back to Oxford in the course of the next 16 years, for specific reasons such as preaching sermons at Saint Mary’s or to cast votes as a member of Convocation.Footnote 8 Significantly, he was not living in Oxford during the crucial years of 1833–41 when the Tracts for the Times were published. He was Dean of Westminster Abbey for six months before being appointed Bishop of Oxford in November 1845.
By contrast, John Henry Newman, who was Samuel Wilberforce’s senior by more than five years,Footnote 9 entered Trinity College in 1817 and was elected to an Oriel Fellowship in 1822. He was to remain in Oxford until 1843 when he resigned his position at St Mary’s to live a quasi-monastic life at Littlemore. Two years later, Samuel Wilberforce was appointed Bishop of Oxford, where he was to remain for the next 24 years. John Henry Newman himself did not come back to Oxford before 1876, and by that time, Samuel Wilberforce had been dead for two years.
During these few years, the two men do not seem to have met in any significant way: Samuel Wilberforce testified to this in 1834 when, then a young clergyman on the Isle of Wight, he wrote to Newman: ‘I wish that … you would … allow me to repair one of my great Oxford faults – that of neglecting the endeavor to obtain a more intimate acquaintance with you’.Footnote 10 He however invited John Henry Newman to ‘a few days’ relaxation’ on the Isle of Wight in July 1836Footnote 11 while his brother Robert was present (J.H. Newman declined).Footnote 12
With more precision, John Henry Newman was to write in 1876 to Canon Arthur R. Ashwell who had written to ask him for any correspondence he might have had with the late Bishop of Oxford (of whom he was writing the biography):
As to any correspondence I have had in former years with Bishop Wilberforce, it never was much – but I will look out for you any letters of his I can find. He is the one out of the four brothers whom I never was intimate with. I knew him from the time he came up to Oxford in October (say) 1823, and we had friendly relations with each other from my affection for his brother Henry – but such kind interest as men so different in all respects might have in each other received a rude shock never recovered from on his preaching in the University Pulpit against Pusey’s views of Baptism about 1836–38.Footnote 13
However, Samuel Wilberforce, just like his brother Robert,Footnote 14 was quickly drawn towards the leaders of what was soon to be called Puseyism: like many of their contemporaries, the Wilberforce brothers had been seduced by John Keble’s Christian Year (1827). Samuel Wilberforce remained all his life in awe of John Keble (1792–1866) whose word always had enormous weight with him – even when he had become a bishop. Samuel Wilberforce also deeply respected Pusey’s learning and piety. In several letters, while lamenting what he saw as the Tractarian leaders’ want of discretion, always took pains to observe that he respected their devotion and practice of Christianity.Footnote 15
The Wilberforces came from an Evangelical household. It may be surprising that, out of William Wilberforce’s four sons – of which three became clergymen – three converted to Roman Catholicism and the only one who did not nonetheless sided firmly with the High Church and was time and again accused of being a Papist in disguise. Until the end, Samuel continued to cherish the memory of his father, and did not see any contradiction in preaching his father’s Evangelical emphasis on private devotion and self-examination and sola scriptura – all elements often associated with Evangelicalism – as well as adhering to a high view of the Church, of episcopacy and of the sacraments. In 1840, he noted in a lengthy letter to a fellow priest who had accused his latest collection of children’s stories, The Rocky Island, of reflecting Tractarian beliefs, that his opinions has been moulded ‘in a far different school’: ‘they are those of my beloved father, as I could prove, were it needful, from many written records of his judgment as to the tenor of my ministry, of which, during his late years, he was a most kind, but a close observer’.Footnote 16
John Henry Newman also came from an Evangelical background,Footnote 17 although he later identified his parents’ Evangelicalism as merely ‘“the national religion of England”, “Bible religion”, which “consists not in rites or creeds, but mainly in having the Bible read in Church, in the family, and in private”’;Footnote 18 at 15, John Henry Newman had a conversion, in which he became acutely aware of the existence of God. He wrote that, before that, his general frame of mind had been a wish ‘to be virtuous, but not religious. There was something in the latter idea I did not like. Nor did I see the meaning of loving God.’ Footnote 19 However, from the following year, he ‘fell under the influence of a definite creed, and received into [his] intellect impressions of dogma, which, through God’s mercy, have never been effaced or obscured’.Footnote 20 Despite their differences, one would be tempted to see in both men a synthesis between Catholic sacramentarianism and Evangelical personal communion with God.Footnote 21
A Lack of Personal Alchemy
Despite these common elements (the love of Robert Wilberforce and Evangelical nurturing) Samuel Wilberforce never enjoyed nor seems to have actively sought being among the circle of disciples of John Henry Newman. It was not at the start because of any prejudice against John Henry Newman, but probably because of a lack of personal alchemy, and also because of the conventions of the time which did not easily provide for circumstances in which an undergraduate would have been able to establish personal relationships with a Fellow and a College tutor. As a matter of fact, John Henry Newman dismissed Samuel Wilberforce in a private letter written in November 1838: ‘Samuel W[ilberforce] is so far from anything higher than a dish of skimmed milk that we can hope nothing from him.’ Footnote 22 In another letter (written in September 1841), he dismisses him as the man ‘whom Froude and I have stigmatized as a humbug for many years’. Footnote 23
Nonetheless, the two men could have been expected to be on the same side in the religious battles of the 1830s. On the general principles of the fight, they agreed on the importance of episcopacy. In his first published sermon, preached in 1833, Samuel Wilberforce urges priests to ‘prize at a higher rate that unbroken succession whereby those who ordained us are joined into Christ’s own Apostles’, as well as to avoid the ‘danger of quitting the high vantage ground of Apostolical authority to fight the battle out upon the doubtful level of Erastian principles’.Footnote 24
The very same year, in September, the first of the Tracts for the Times, written by John Henry Newman, was published, emphasizing as it did the episcopal ministry in its conclusion:
A notion has gone abroad, that they can take away your power. They think they have given and can take it away. … Enlighten them in this matter. Exalt our Holy Fathers, the Bishops, as the Representatives of the Apostles, and the Angels of the Churches; and magnify your office, as being ordained by them to take part in their Ministry.Footnote 25
Samuel Wilberforce himself was reading the Tracts. On Good Friday (17 April) 1835, we find him noting in his journal: ‘Read Pusey’s tract on FastingFootnote 26 – am convinced by it, if not of the duty, yet certainly of the expediency of conforming to the Rules of the Church on this point. I think it likely to be especially useful to me ….’Footnote 27 He was also (probably) distributing them as evidenced by a letter of June 1836 where he asks Newman: ‘will there be a fresh supply of Tracts on July 1? I wish to know that I may order.’Footnote 28
However, when one turns to the practical aspects of the fight, one sees distance getting more and more obvious. The first skirmish was the Hampden affair, which started in late January 1836, when King William IV, acting on the recommendation of the Prime Minister, the 2nd Viscount Melbourne, appointed Renn Dickson Hampden (1793–1868) to the vacant Regius Professorship of Divinity at Oxford University. Dr Hampden’s orthodoxy was questioned, mainly on the basis of his Bampton Lecture of 1832, and of his Observations on Religious Dissent (1834). For Owen Chadwick, Hampden’s writing was ‘dull’ and his statements ‘often vague and obscure’.Footnote 29 Certainly, Samuel Wilberforce agreed with this, who observed jocularly in a letter of 12 February 1836 to his brother Robert: ‘could we not pass a vote that Hampden should always preach in Hebrew?’Footnote 30
John Henry Newman, for his part, was scandalized at Hampden’s alleged latitudinarianism which led the prospective Professor, notably, to draw a distinction between the original text of Scriptures and the various dogmatic formulas introduced (or should one say ‘forced’?) into it over time.Footnote 31 John Henry Newman observed in a private letter written at the time: ‘there is no doctrine, however sacred, which he does not scoff at – and in his Moral Philosophy he adopts the lowest and most grovelling utilitarianism as the basis of Morals – he considers it is a sacred duty to live to this world – and that religion by itself injuriously absorbs the mind.’Footnote 32
Seventy-three residential fellows and tutors on the one hand, and nine heads of houses on the other signed petitions of protest. After many articles, petitions and angry letters, Hampden’s appointment was duly gazetted on 20 February, 12 days after it had unofficially become public knowledge.Footnote 33 Convocation then moved to limit as much as possible Hampden’s prerogatives: a motion of no confidence in Hampden passed by the Board of Heads was passed on 2 May (by 474 to 94).Footnote 34 Samuel Wilberforce, who had pronounced Hampden’s rumoured appointment in the same 12 February letter ‘disgusting’,Footnote 35 convened some of his colleagues in his rural deanery to draw up some sort of protest (however, nothing seems to have come out of it).Footnote 36 He was evidently present at Convocation in March to vote against Hampden and seized the opportunity to have
some very long conversations with Newman upon several of the most mysterious parts of the Christian Revelation, the Trinity, &c., as well as upon some of the greatest practical difficulties to faith arising from the present torn state of Christendom; and it was really most sublime as an exhibition of human intellect when in parts of our discussions Newman kindled, and poured forth a sort of magisterial announcement in which Scripture, Christian antiquity deeply studied and thoroughly imbibed, humility, veneration, love of truth, and the highest glow of poetical feelings, all impressed their own pictures upon his conversation.Footnote 37
Unsurprisingly, Samuel Wilberforce pronounced himself ‘delighted’ at the meeting. John Henry Newman and Samuel Wilberforce found themselves allied in this fight, even though it was not only High Churchmen, but also Evangelicals,Footnote 38 who opposed Hampden’s appointment. The Archbishop of Canterbury himself, William Howley, noted publicly in the House of Lords on 21 December 1837 that Hampden’s appointment was the only Crown appointment he had ever objected to.Footnote 39
That was really the high-water mark of Samuel Wilberforce’s opinion of John Henry Newman. Of this honeymoon between the two men, Samuel Wilberforce’s Lent sermon of 1837 before the University bears testimony. Taking as its text 2 Cor. 6.1,Footnote 40 the sermon exposed a view of Justification and Sanctification deeply tributary to John Henry Newman’s Lectures on Justification published this very same year. Emphasizing the gifts of Baptism (in a manner perfectly consistent with the XXXIX Articles), he pointed the fearful dangers of sin after baptism by observing: ‘you may reclaim the sinner from open vice; you cannot renew him to holiness’.Footnote 41
However, as soon as 1838, the two men parted ways, quite radically so.
So the two men, whose upbringing and intellectual itineraries and preoccupations should have brought them together, however quickly drifted apart, mainly because of a lack of personal alchemy, but maybe more than that, because of a fundamental difference on doctrinal questions.
Samuel Wilberforce: The ‘Puseyite’ that Wasn’t
Doctrinal Proximity
As many High Churchmen, Samuel Wilberforce was regularly – almost routinely – accused of being a Tractarian, or a Papist, or both, in disguise. These labels were of course at the time insulting, and were meant to be; but they are also misleading since they obscure the various shades of Anglo-Catholicism of the time, and which can’t simply be put down to a distinction between Henry Phillpotts and E.B. Pusey.Footnote 42
Even to the casual observer, it is striking how quickly Samuel Wilberforce parted ways with John Henry Newman (and the Tractarian movement in general). Take almost all the controversies that erupted in Oxford or nationally, and in which the Tractarians displayed their (for the time) peculiar churchmanship, and one will find Samuel Wilberforce taking the opposite side.
The decisive year was 1838: in a letter written to his friend Dr Walter Farquhar Hook on 29 January, Samuel Wilberforce clarified his stance on the Tractarians:
You do not, I hope, [think] that I belong to the school of the ‘Tracts for the Times’. I admire most highly the talents of some of those men: I revere far more their high and self-denying holiness and singleness of purpose: but I cannot agree with them in all their leading views of doctrine (e.g. Pusey’s, as far as I understand it, view of Sin after Baptism), and I often find in practical matters that I differ from them, on points, and in ways, (…) in which, as it seems to me, they are for enforcing an ancient practice at the expense of a still more ancient principle.Footnote 43
The following month, in a belated reaction to Pusey’s Tracts on Baptism, Samuel Wilberforce preached on 18 February 1838 his first sermon as select preacher before the University.Footnote 44 The sermon was entitled ‘The Penal Consequences of Sin’ and was clearly intent on balancing the harsh view expressed in the sermon I mentioned previously and that he had preached barely a year before. In the published version of 1839, where they constituted the first two sermons, Samuel Wilberforce took care to make clear that both texts ‘should be read together: for some expressions of the first, taken by itself, might seem to favour that view which the second is specifically intended to counteract’.Footnote 45 The second sermon, indeed, took as its text the conclusion of the parable of the prodigal son in which, he said, ‘all still speaks it the description of the recovery of a fallen son of the Most High’.Footnote 46 He argued that, however great may be one man’s sin, the Heavenly Father’s love would still be greater.Footnote 47
And even to the first acts of a sincere penitence, surely there are here promised some gracious marks of acceptance, as what shall be given to the returning sinner. Baptised, indeed, he cannot be afresh: but does he lose by that? No, truly; …. [A]nd now, if he comes in sincerity and faith, the seal is still sure, and is for him; his baptism is on him, fresh as when its waters glistened upon his infant brow; he is received into his Father’s house; and there the words of gracious promise, the blessed seals of holy eucharists, and the fresh-springing fountain of the Saviour’s blood, these are sure and for him; and they are meant to carry to his soul the same certain consolation which the holy waters of baptism would be the outward means of bringing, if he came as a catechumen, instead of coming as a penitent.Footnote 48
Such words were widely seen as rebuking Tract LXVII’s stringent view of sin after baptism, in which Pusey notably wrote (my emphasis):
For our modern system, founded, as it is, on the virtual rejection of Baptism as a Sacrament, confounds the distinction of grievous sin before and after Baptism, and applies to repentance, after falling from Baptismal grace, all the promises which, in Scripture, are pledged, not as the fruit of repentance simply, but as God’s free gift in Baptism. Yet our reformers thought differently; for had their theology been like ours, there had been no occasion for an article on ‘Sin after Baptism’ (Art. XVI), or for denying that ‘every such sin is sin against the Holy Ghost, and unpardonable’. It had been a matter of course. The possibility or efficacy of such repentance I have not denied; God forbid: but that such repentance is likely, especially after a relapse, or that men, who have fallen, can be as assured of the adequacy of their repentance, as they might have been of God’s free grace in Baptism, daily experience, as well as the probable meaning of Scripture, forbid us to hope. Footnote 49
John Henry Newman very rightly considered Samuel Wilberforce’s sermon as directly aimed at Pusey’s (and the Tractarians’) conception of Justification. Five months later, on 18 July, John Henry Newman wrote to Samuel Wilberforce to decline any further contribution from him to the British Critic:Footnote 50
To say frankly what I feel – I am not confident enough in your general approval of the body of opinions which Pusey and myself hold, to consider it advisable that we should cooperate very closely. The land is before us, and each in our own way may, through God’s blessing, be useful; but a difference of view, which, whether you meant it or not, has shown itself to others in your sermons before the University, may show itself in your writings also; and though I feel we ought to bear differences of opinion in matters of detail, and work together in spite of them, it does not seem to me possible at once to oppose and to cooperate; and the less intentional your opposition to Pusey on a late occasion, the more impracticable does co-operation appear.Footnote 51
Samuel Wilberforce appeared very disappointed by the letter, and saw this refusal as a manifestation of petty party spirit.Footnote 52 Let the reader note that J.H. Newman’s argument is totally coherent with S. Skinner’s observation that the British Critic ‘came to serve as the principal medium for the movement’s commentary’.Footnote 53 This can somehow make us less surprised that the break came in this way: not over a particular review’s phrasing or content, but because J.H. Newman refused out of hand the perspective of any further collaboration with S. Wilberforce. We can wonder whether the following estrangement was not (at least in part) driven by some sense pique from the younger man. By doing so, J.H. Newman can be seen as needlessly disturbing a potential ally.
The Roads that Don’t Lead to Rome
Pusey’s tract on Baptism appears to have been a decisive factor in S. Wilberforce’s deserting the Tractarian cause. However, another important element appears to have been the publication, in January 1838, of Hurrell Froude’s Remains, edited by J.H. Newman and J. Keble. S. Wilberforce had known Froude well, even though the latter was his senior by two and a half years: they had been undergraduates at Oriel together for a year in 1823–24. S. Wilberforce appears to have been seeking Froude’s company during his time at Oxford, and it seems that Froude was the first person to whom he mentioned his desire to seek orders.Footnote 54 S. Wilberforce was all the more astounded by the book when it came out. His letters and diary come back again and again on the Remains which clearly startled him and deeply repelled him: in his diary, at the date of 25 March 1838, he writes thus: ‘Evening, read a little of Froude’s “Journals”. They are most instructive to me. Will exceedingly discredit Church principles, and show an amazing want of Christianity, so far. They are Henry Martin unchristianized.’Footnote 55
The publication of Froude’s mostly private papers, in which he made remarks such as ‘The Reformation was a limb badly set – it must be broken again in order to be righted’Footnote 56 or ‘I believe I have a want of reverence, else I should not have got to hate them [the Reformers] so soon as I did’,Footnote 57 came as a shock to S. Wilberforce, and seems to have acted as an eye-opener for him.
We can probably date from this moment S. Wilberforce’s cutting himself off from the Tractarians, in whom he seems to have discerned a dangerous Rome-ward trend (although he kept his deep respect for Keble).Footnote 58
Starting from here, S. Wilberforce’s break with the Tractarians further materialized itself in the debate surrounding the building, in the Winter of 1838–39, of Oxford’s Martyr’s Memorial. The endeavour had been specifically contrived to embarrass the Tractarians: if they contributed, they would be seen as turning their backs on their beliefs; if they refused (as they ultimately did), they could be denounced as enemies of the Reformation and Papists in disguise. S. Wilberforce pronounced himself in favour of contributing in a letter to his brother Henry dated 29 November 1838:
The proposal for putting up a Memorial to the martyred bishops now fills men’s mouths. Some say it is a slap at Froude’s ‘Remains’, and so at Newman and Pusey. It is exceedingly desirable surely that they should turn aside such an imputation by at once subscribing, as the inscription … is most entirely unobjectionable, me judice. Indeed I believe Pusey originally suggested part of it. Party division runs high at Oxford, and numbers are sent to Cambridge instead of Oxford, even by parents not Evangelicals, through fear of Popery etc. … Surely this is the necessary consequence of publishing such a book as Froude’s.Footnote 59
S. Wilberforce was of course right in his assessment that the Memorial was a ploy to confound the Tractarians: even though urged to contribute to it by Bishop Richard BagotFootnote 60 and, it seems, S. Wilberforce, Newman, Pusey and Keble did not. J.H. Newman justified it by not wishing to be seen as disavowing FroudeFootnote 61 but also for more serious reasons.Footnote 62
There is no doubt that the Memorial was indeed a party project (even though his main promoter, C.P. Golightly, was a traditional High Churchman)Footnote 63 : thus, S. Wilberforce appears, at best, naïve when he argues that the Tractarians should contribute to a project implicitly intended at embarrassing them. The main argument in favour of such a move, however, was the need of showing unity in the defence of the Church – always a very potent argument in S. Wilberforce’s view.
Three years later (in Autumn 1841), John Keble was to retire from the University’s Chair of Poetry, and the vote by Convocation to choose his successor was scheduled for January 1842. Isaac Williams (1802–65) was widely considered as being due to succeed him; however, his long association with the Tractarian leaders could hardly be passed over in the deeply polarized Oxford of the time: he had published many times in the British Magazine and the British Critic, had been a curate to Newman and had contributed three Tracts between 1837 and 1840. Thus, an opponent was quickly found in the person of the Evangelical James Garbett (1802–69); although he had published no poetry, contrary to Williams.Footnote 64 Garbett’s candidacy was helped by what some saw as the necessity of checking the Tractarians’ progress. A letter by Pusey injudiciously attacking Garbett and explicitly supporting Williams turned the election into a referendum on Tractarianism in which the poetry credentials of the two candidates were becoming irrelevant.
This episode found S. Wilberforce clearly differentiating himself from the Tractarians: he had at first intended to vote for Williams, on the basis of his poetry credentials and of ‘old friendship’.Footnote 65 In a letter to Sir George Prevost (a friend of his and also Williams’s brother-in-law) written in November 1841, S. Wilberforce curiously states that he had at least intended not to vote against him.Footnote 66 However, in his view, Pusey’s letter had ‘altered the circumstances of the case’: ‘I cannot hide from myself that now it must be, whatever one means, simply expressing publicly, aye or no, one’s approbation of, or dissent from, the most peculiar features of the teaching of the Tract writers. With them, as you well know, I have never agreed.’Footnote 67 The following month, he declinedFootnote 68 to join the endeavour of 257 members of Convocation (including his friend Gladstone, Bishop Phillpotts of Exeter and Bishop Bagot of Oxford)Footnote 69 calling on both candidates to desist, as unjust to Garbett (whom he assessed as being most likely to win the election anyway). As a matter of fact, on 20 January 1842, an estimate of pledged votes was made which indicated that Garbett would indeed be elected (921 : 621), whereupon Williams retired from the contest and the former was elected unopposed one week later. Footnote 70 This debate led S. Wilberforce to strongly condemn the Tractarians in the various letters that he wrote at the time. Thus in his already quoted letter to Sir George Prevost: ‘their views on many points (specially the Tract on Reserve) have appeared to me so dangerous, that, at all costs, I felt I must bear my feeble testimony against them in my Oxford sermons &c. &c. of late, also, they have seemed to me to advance at immense speed.’Footnote 71 He then went on to list his grievances against the Tractarians:
Newman’s view of Justification; the language of Tract 90, the ‘British Critic’ &c., as to Rome; the craving after unity through some visible centre; the saying that old Rome was that centre …; the fearful doctrine of Sin after baptism, the whole tone about the Reformers, &c. &c. – all this has pained me and grieved me so entirely, that I have felt daily obliged more and more, from love of the truth as I saw it, from love to our Church, whose principles and very life I believe this teaching threatens, … to take on all occasions a position of more direct opposition to the School than I had of old thought necessary.Footnote 72
Quite logically, in view of his expressed resolution to oppose the Oxford movement, he voted three years later, on February 1845, in Convocation in favour of degrading William George Ward (1812–82) and of condemning his Ideal of a Christian Church (published in late 1844) which contained such passages as ‘I know no single movement in the Church, except Arianism in the fourth century, which seems to me so wholly destitute of all claims on our sympathy and regard, as the English Reformation’,Footnote 73 or ‘Three years have passed, since I said plainly, that in subscribing the Articles I renounce no one Roman doctrine.’Footnote 74 The condemnation of passages from the book was carried 776 : 386 and the degradation 569 : 511, S. Wilberforce voting for both motions, while Gladstone, Pusey, Keble, Dr Hook and his brother Robert voted against both.Footnote 75
Beginning in 1838, S. Wilberforce was thus affirming himself as a representative of a new High Church, distinct from the traditional High Church Toryism of, say, Bishop Henry Phillpotts of Exeter (1778–1869). S. Wilberforce’s High Churchmanship valued involving oneself in the work of the Commonwealth, while valuing the ordained ministry, and particularly the episcopate, and at the same time keeping jealously one’s distance with anything smacking of Rome. S. Wilberforce was also quietly but staunchly attached to the Protestant identity of the Church of England.
Apart from the possible question of purely personal alchemy (or lack of it) between John Henry Newman and Samuel Wilberforce, I previously noted that the differences between the two men was due to doctrinal differences. I think we can trace the root of these differences of viewpoints to the two men’s visions of the Church.
What Is the Church?
The Episcopate
I will not enter here in a detailed dissertation on what the Tractarians stood for or against; others have done it (including Ian Ker and Owen Chadwick). However, let me remind the reader, if it were necessary, that the Tractarians put much emphasis on the Episcopal ministry and the apostolic succession.
The first tract, authored by John Henry Newman, explicitly addressed to priests of the Church of England, adopted an energetic tone to remind them of what the apostolic succession was, as well as the fact that the doctrine was explicitly professed by the Church of England:
[E]very one of us believes this. I know that some will at first deny they do; still they do believe it. Only, it is not sufficiently practically impressed on their minds. They do believe it; for it is the doctrine of the Ordination Service, which they have recognised as truth in the most solemn season of their lives.Footnote 76
John Henry Newman, for one, had an exalted view of the Episcopal office. In his pamphlet, The Restoration of Suffragan Bishops (1835), he argued that the clergy were not ‘mere instruments and adjuncts of the State’Footnote 77 but ‘those who are by office guides of conduct, arbiters in moral questions, patterns of holiness and wisdom, and not the mere executive [sic] of a system which is ordered by prescribed rules, and can go on without them’.Footnote 78 He added that the bishop was really ‘the centre and emblem of Christian unity, the bond of many minds, and the memento of Him that is unseen’.Footnote 79
Later on, John Henry Newman developed the ‘Branch theory’:
The Catholic Church in all lands had been one from the first for many centuries; then, various portions had followed their own way to the injury, but not to the destruction, whether of truth or of vanity. These portions or branches were mainly three: – Greek, Latin, and Anglican. Each of these inherited the early undivided Church in solido [as an undivided block].Footnote 80
According to this reasoning, the three branches had kept the faith handed down by the Apostles, and particularly the apostolic succession, which warranted the validity of the sacraments. For J.H. Newman, the position of the Church of England was unique because it was mid-way between the extremes of Roman Catholicism and Protestantism, both poles containing in themselves elements of truth (the Trinity, for example) and of corruption (the place of the pope for one, the negation of apostolic succession for the other).Footnote 81
S. Wilberforce was in total agreement with this high view of the episcopate and of the apostolic succession. He always asserted the legitimacy of the Church of England against all those – Protestants and Catholics alike – who saw it as only one confession among many and/or an Erastian creature of the Tudors’ Caesaropapism. He insisted, on the contrary, on the uninterrupted continuity beetween the Apostles’ Church and the then Church of England: as I noted, one of his first sermons had included a call to his fellow priests to ‘prize at a higher rate that unbroken succession Whereby those who ordained us are joined into Christ’s own Apostles’.Footnote 82
Even before being himself a bishop, S. Wilberforce saw the episcopate as the fundamental ministry, as the cornerstone of the Church. On the subject of the colonial expansion of the Church, he immediately and constantly supported the creation of Colonial bishoprics. For him, as he argued, in a sermon in May 1837, the Church had the power to appoint and to ordain bishops without a royal mandate for lands outside the British Isles.Footnote 83 According to Standish Meacham, ‘Wilberforce grew to believe that without power to appoint missionary bishops of its own, the Church would be bound in an unseemly – and indeed an unholy – way to the State.’Footnote 84 In 1853, he piloted through the House of Lords a (Church) Missionary Bishops Bill ostensibly drafted by the Archbishop of Canterbury John Bird Sumner, but in reality prepared by S. Wilberforce himself,Footnote 85 which would have allowed the Church to launch missions to the heathens with English bishops consecrated in England but without the royal mandate. The Bill was adopted by the Upper Chamber but was thrown out in the Commons because of Low Church fears that Wilberforce’s hidden agenda was to take over Evangelical missions to force High Church bishops and ideas upon them and their flocks.Footnote 86
In his enthusiasm for the Episcopal institution, S. Wilberforce even initially supported the Jerusalem Bishopric in October 1841: King Frederick William IV of Prussia and Queen Victoria jointly decided, on the advice of Baron von Bunsen (the Prussian ambassador to the UK from 1840 to 1854 and a close friend to the Prussian King) to establish a Protestant Bishopric in Jerusalem, in order for Protestantism to stand its ground in the Holy City in front of the Latin and Greek Orthodox Patriarchs. This was a way for England (and to a lesser extent Prussia, which was not a colonial power) to gain a foothold in a region, still under Ottoman control, which was at the centre of the attention of the European powers. The Bishop of Jerusalem was supposed to be nominated in turn by each of the two countries, and to adhere to the XXXIX Articles and to the Augsburg Confession. The scheme caused alarm among the Tractarians, by appearing to dissolve the sanctity of the Episcopal office in an official marriage with non-episcopal Lutheranism. It also looked as an affront to the Catholic Churches which were already present in the Holy City.Footnote 87 John Henry Newman wrote privately that the plan was ‘to collect a communion out of Protestants, Jews, Druses and Monophysites, conforming under the influence of our war-steamers, to counterbalance the Russian influence through Greeks, and the French through Latins’.Footnote 88 S. Wilberforce, for his part, was quietly but certainly welcoming, for Baron Bunsen (whom he saw frequently when at Court) had assured him that the aim of the scheme was to make Prussians accustomed to episcopacy, prior to its introduction in the Lutheran Church: this is how he described it to his brother Robert: ‘a truly noble plan by which, I trust, on a back current, Episcopacy will flow into Prussia’.Footnote 89
As already noted in this article, Samuel Wilberforce was appointed Bishop of Oxford in 1845.Footnote 90 In this position, he was a major force behind the ‘new episcopacy’ which saw English bishops reinvest the pastoral side of their ministry: when W.E. Gladstone noted that Wilberforce was ‘a most able Prelate getting all [he] can for the Church, asking more, giving nothing’,Footnote 91 he only testified to the active role Samuel Wilberforce took among the episcopate of the Church of England.Footnote 92 Since the article deals with S. Wilberforce’s relations with J.H. Newman, and that these were non-existent after 1845 – when Wilberforce was appointed a bishop and J.H. Newman converted to Roman Catholicism – this paper will not deal with S. Wilberforce’s transformative episcopal ministry. Let it suffice to note that Wilberforce shared with the Tractarians an exalted view of the episcopate, according to which the latter was clearly part of the esse of the Church Catholic. However, he also clearly differentiated himself from the Tractarians by his vision of what the Church was, and his belief that they transferred to the Church the adoration due to Christ himself.
The Church Instead of Christ
I’ve already mentioned S. Wilberforce’s debt to his beloved father’s Evangelicalism. Indeed, the younger Wilberforce often intended his sermons to remind his hearers of the main tenets of Evangelical religion: the believer’s closeness to God, the importance of personal holiness and a call to private conscience.Footnote 93 The believer was to aim at reaching or comforting a personal and loving relationship with his God who had given his only son in sacrifice for the remission of the sinner’s faults. So to follow Christ was not merely a philosophical or intellectual choice but a thorough personal commitment involving every aspect of one’s life.
While emphasizing these traditionally Evangelical themes, Wilberforce put forward the necessity – also insisted on by High Churchmen – of placing this spiritual journey and this personal union with God within the greater framework of the visible Church. As mentioned earlier, the apostolic succession he saw as a gift from God bringing, without any doubt, the power of the Holy Spirit to the Christian Community endowed with such a ministry: inside this community, led by a clergy whose origins could be traced back to the Apostles themselves, the believer could and would find God present. According to Wilberforce, the believer could not safely be their own guide, nor simply rely on their sole conscience, without running the risk of falling into what he called in 1831 ‘self-idolizing’.Footnote 94 Self-idolization would also be checked by the believer’s diligent reading of the Bible, which they must acknowledge as the only rule of faith.
However, while holding a high view of the Church, he differed from the Tractarians’ view of the Church on two points: Tradition, and what he saw as their deification of the Church. Both points he mentions briefly in a letter to his brother Robert dated 2 February 1842 (my emphasis):
The two leading errors seem to me to be (i) the authority as to teaching with which they invest the early Fathers, which implies the greater purity of celibacy, that fearful lie which has destroyed the sanctity of married life and polluted every female mind in Italy, to say nothing of other consequences; (2) their craving after a visible centre of unity, from a belief that the Church is to us instead of an absent Christ, instead of a means of His true presence.Footnote 95
Wilberforce was not actually hostile to Tradition, even though the main authorities he regularly quoted (apart from the Bible) were Hooker and AndrewesFootnote 96 whom he seems to have seen more as excellent exegetes than as original thinkers. In a letter dated 18 May 1842, he writes:
I believe the Bible, and the Bible only, to be the rule of faith; and I believe, that to bring this strongly and sharply out is a matter of the greatest moment. I think the whole school of the Tract writers fail here: that they speak, and seem to love to speak, ambiguously of the necessity of Tradition, &c. &c. – the tendency of all which (even if they do not mean what is positively erroneous) must be, I think, and is, (1) to lead men to undervalue God’s word …; (2) to lead men to regard the Romish view of Tradition without suspicion and dread.Footnote 97
John Henry Newman of course laid down an entirely different vision of the place of Tradition. In Lectures on the Prophetical office of the Church, he wrote: ‘We agree with the sectaries around us so far as this, … to believe that our creed can be proved entirely, and to be willing to prove it solely from the Bible; but we take this ground only in controversy, not in teaching our own people or in our private studies.’Footnote 98 ‘We [Anglo-Catholics] rely on Antiquity to strengthen such intimations of doctrine as are but faintly, though really, given in Scripture’,Footnote 99 contrary to Protestantism, which ‘considers it a hardship to have anything clearly and distinctly told it in elucidation of Scripture doctrine, an infringement of its right of doubting, and mistaking and labouring in vain’.Footnote 100 Elsewhere in the same book, Newman asserts: ‘Catholicity, Antiquity, and consent of Fathers, is the proper evidence of the fidelity or Apostolicity of a professed Tradition.’Footnote 101
David Newsome very aptly summed up Wilberforce’s vision of the danger posed by over-reliance on Tradition: ‘[He] felt it was his duty to warn all those who were boarding the Tractarian vessel that – once they slipped their scriptural mooring – they would be likely to drift into stormy seas and maybe at the last end up in an alien port’.Footnote 102
As for the deification of the Church, a reproach already introduced in his letter of 2 February 1842 to his brother, he was to return to it in another letter to his brother Robert (dated 18 December 1843):
I do not agree with you as to the – in fact – impossibility of substituting the Church for Christ. Indeed as I speak of it, I believe it to be the prominent danger, amongst the many, of the Tract system. The Church, I say, separated from the head is substituted for Him!Footnote 103
Three years later, in December 1845, S. Wilberforce observed, about John Henry Newman’s Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine:
Newman’s book is wonderfully clever and full of Ecclesiastical history, but the most deeply sceptical book I ever read. It is in fact an assertion from beginning to end that all religion is so uncertain except the fact of there being the Church that we can only go to its living authority to convince us there is a God at all.Footnote 104
Of course, by the time Wilberforce wrote this, John Henry Newman had joined the Roman Catholic Church and an actual gulf now existed between them.
In fact, on both counts, and under the harshness of the denunciation, we have the impression that Wilberforce lamented that the Tractarians should go too far in what he believed to be the right direction. This is how I, for one, read Wilberforce’s mixed description of the Oxford movement in July 1869, when reviewing Sir John Taylor Coleridge’s biography of John Keble: ‘a great religious movement, which is still more than any other affecting for good, or for evil, or for both, the present and future tone of the Church of England’. Footnote 105
Conclusion
Nineteenth- and twentieth-century biographers of Samuel Wilberforce have tended to interpret his life as a struggle for true High Church principles against the Romanizing tendencies of the Tractarians and their heirs. This is basically the thesis of George William Daniell’s Bishop Wilberforce (1891) who presents Wilberforce as ‘the remodeller of the episcopate’,Footnote 106 a man aware that ‘Rome is kept afar off by the development, and not by the terror-stricken suppression, of the true Catholic idea’.Footnote 107 The third biography of the 30th Bishop of Oxford, John Charlton Hardwick’s Lawn Sleeves: A Short Life of Samuel Wilberforce (1933), is full of bitter attacks against the Oxford Movement which, in 1933, was then exactly 100 years old. In his episcopate – first at Oxford and then at Winchester – S. Wilberforce showed considerable dedication in his ministry, and made much to raise the standard of episcopacy in the eyes of his contemporary, even gaining the title of the ‘great diocesan’Footnote 108 – all this while clearly distancing himself from Tractarianism and their ‘Ritualistic’ successors.Footnote 109
And indeed S. Wilberforce’s bitterness against the Tractarians was clearly influenced by his dismay at seeing honourable men promoting much-needed forgotten truths about the Church while (in his view) mixing them up with Romanizing tendencies.
But wasn’t there something else at play when it comes to his actual relationship with John Henry Newman? Wasn’t there something like jealousy in seeing his dear brother getting so close to John Henry Newman?
In 1850, both men were present at the funeral of Sophia Ryder.Footnote 110 This is the last known occasion on which Samuel Wilberforce crossed J.H. Newman’s path and the former observed: ‘I heard the unmistakeable voice like a volcano’s roar tamed to the softness of a flute-stop, and got a glimpse … of a serpentine form through an open door – “The Father Superior”.’Footnote 111 The reader will recognize here the typical Victorian disgust of Roman Catholicism, but wasn’t there somehow more to it?
As it was, the following year (1851) saw an actual struggle by proxy between Newman and S. Wilberforce, whose object was the soul of Robert Wilberforce. On 12 September 1854, Samuel Wilberforce writes to his brother (replying to the letter in which he had announced his conversion): ‘I see that originally J. Newman obtained a great power over your mind; that since, through your great humility, Manning, by his great subtlety of intellect, and Henry by his unceasing repetition of argument, have overmastered your own far superior understanding.’Footnote 112
Was there, at the bottom of all of this, bitterness at not having fully understood Robert, whom he called in a letter written to him some time before his conversion: ‘my brother and friend, – my friend, guide and aid since boyhood?’Footnote 113 It is difficult to judge, of course, but there may well have been, at the bottom, of this strained relationship between John Henry Newman and S. Wilberforce, the unhappy love of a disappointed brother.
