Chapter 13: New Anglican Friends
CHAPTER 13
NEW ANGLICAN FRIENDS
AFTER the uproar caused by the Peel controversy of 1829, Newman rose as a visible leader at Oxford. Whately blamed him for a selfish desire to gain power by becoming the leader of a party. Newman had, instead, acted out of ideas and convictions. He had become a leader by his intelligence, determination, and capacity for persuasion. The days of shyness and lack of self-confidence in the Oriel Common Room were now very distant.1 Interested by past and current events and their causes, he had read a great deal for his young age. He was gifted with an excellent capacity for synthesis, reasoning, and clarity of expression.
Newman sought the truth in theology, history, and philosophy without intimidation by others’ opinions. He was willing to labor over an intellectual difficulty and to correct his mistakes and views. He was well disposed to seek advice from his seniors and peers. Newman’s breadth of knowledge and his passion for the truth drew others to him. Whately was correct: Newman was the center of a party, but his motives were not power. Once he became a Fellow, and even more when he became a Tutor, Newman entered into new friendships with other men of varying ages from whom he would learn and with whom he would share his own ideas and beliefs.
In addition to Edward Pusey, at Oriel College Newman became friends with other High Church Anglicans. In particular, John Keble and Richard Hurrell Froude occupied a special place in this stage of Newman’s spiritual and religious development. They came from social and religious backgrounds that were very different from Newman’s Protestant middle-class London. Both played a key role in shaping Newman’s theological and religious ideas and, ultimately, the beginnings of the Oxford Movement.
John Keble was the son of a Gloucestershire clergyman who had educated both his sons at home and then sent them to Oxford. John won the highest distinctions at the university: a double-first at Corpus Christi, the Prizes for the Bachelor’s Latin and English Essays, and a coveted Fellowship at Oriel. This promising star carried his honors without ostentation and surprised all when, in 1823, he left the university to become a curate in his father’s country parish and work among the poor.
Just like his father, Keble adhered closely to the doctrines and devotions prescribed in the Book of Common Prayer and disliked the teaching and practices of the Evangelicals. Like most wealthy families, he held an intense loyalty to the Church of England and to the Tory Party in government.
Keble was not ambitious for material gain and was content with being a good country parson while caring for his elderly father. He was a humble man with disdain for outward displays of emotions. As a curate, he maintained his literary interests in Greek and Roman literature and wrote poetry that, for a long time, he kept to himself and closest friends. His reserved manner prevented him from being a leader, but he was a loyal friend and adviser to Newman, the rising party leader.
Keble and Newman met at Oxford. Keble, although still a young man, was nine years older than Newman and already highly respected. For a short time, they coincided as Fellows at Oriel, but it took almost a decade for them to become friends. Keble and Froude harbored a superficial dislike for Newman because of his Evangelical and liberal background.
Upon leaving Oriel, Keble invited some of his students to study under him during the Long Vacation. He took Froude along with two other talented students, Robert Wilberforce and Isaac Williams. In 1824, Froude obtained a double-second-class in Classics and Mathematics and, in 1826, he was elected a Fellow at Oriel. The following year, Froude became a Tutor along with Robert Wilberforce. There, at Oriel, in close proximity with Newman, Froude saw beyond his earlier prejudice and quickly established a friendship with Newman. Soon afterward, Froude acted as a catalyst for the friendship between his teacher and his new friend. Froude later wrote that facilitating this friendship was the greatest deed that he had ever done.
Richard Hurrell Froude was two years younger than Newman and the eldest son of Archdeacon Robert Hurrell Froude, the wealthy rector of a parish in Dartington, Devonshire. Keble and Froude had opposite, yet congenial temperaments. The first was serene and scholarly; the latter restless, pugnacious, and playful. Although Froude also hated any sign of pretense, he was mischievous and arrogant, and Newman later described him as “an Englishman to the backbone.” His conversations were full of wit and irony; he was persistent and impertinent in his arguments, unsatisfied with evasions. He had a youthful zest for life, characterized by a passion for sailing and horseback riding. His English love for the concrete was expressed in a keen interest for details of mechanics, hydrostatics, and astronomy.
The character and interests of Newman and Froude were also quite different but somewhat more compatible than those of Keble and Froude. The former two were controversialist and energetic by nature. Froude seems to have stirred the fighting trait in Newman, a contentious spirit evident even in his childhood days at home. Froude moved him to speak out and take action. He tested Newman’s arguments and further sharpened Newman’s wit.
Although playful and seemingly inconsiderate, Froude was also a deeply spiritual and prayerful Anglican. Charles Lloyd, later Bishop of Oxford, taught Froude that the Book of Common Prayer embodied the medieval and primitive devotion still found in the Roman service books. Lloyd set on the minds of his pupils, including Newman, the historical connection between the pre-Reformation and the modern.
Froude’s beliefs and religious practices are disclosed in his journal notes and letters published under the title Remains of the Late Rev. Richard Hurrell Froude. These writings were published after his premature death in 1836. The Remains are a two-volume set of journal entries, occasional thoughts, and sermons. Through the journal entries that span the years 1826 to 1827, the seriousness and sincerity with which Froude pursued virtue and piety shine.
Many of the journal entries were detailed notes on personal faults with specific resolutions for progressing in virtue. For instance, some record his inattentiveness at the chapel services, quickness to criticize the follies of others, vanity, pride, and oversensitivity to small injuries. Froude determined to avoid idleness, useless conversations, and any ostentation. With the goal of having purity of intention in his actions, he fought the desire to make a good impression on others and to act out of selfish motives.
Concerning his practice of daily attendance to morning and evening prayers, he wrote in October of 1826: “Somehow I feel that I go to chapel more to pass away the time than from love of God; and the little that I do is attributable to the same motive.”2 For that reason, he resolved to try to be indifferent to others’ praise or censure of his actions.
Only upon reading Froude’s diaries did Newman and other friends discover that he had practiced many unnoticed acts of self-denial by which he sought to master himself and, above all, to please God. In addition to fighting against his faults, he set for himself other ascetical goals, such as waking up at six in the morning, sleeping on the floor, keeping rigorous fasts, reducing expenses in order to increase almsgiving and assisting in the Church’s worship. While keeping these religious practices and pursuing such high moral standards, Froude also fought the accompanying temptation to spiritual pride. Years later, Newman and his friends imitated some of Froude’s same practices at Littlemore, a hamlet just outside Oxford.
With his religious mind and high moral standards, it is understandable that Froude supported the position of Newman, his friend and Senior Tutor, on the reform of the tutoring system at Oriel. Froude and Robert Wilberforce agreed with Newman that Tutors should form the character and religious temper of the undergraduates, instead of having a purely academic role. In 1828, both junior Tutors stood by Newman in a drawn-out battle against Hawkins, Provost at Oriel. That same year, Froude left Oriel and, the following year, was ordained an Anglican clergyman.
Just as in the development of spiritual matters, so too did Froude’s political and ecclesiastical views have a gradual influence on Newman. In the early 1830s, Froude expressed great indignation for the reforming parties in England—the Whigs, the Radicals, and liberal religionists—but when the Tory Party’s authority failed, he condemned the government’s betrayal of the Established Church and labeled himself a “radical.” Froude was very vocal with his friend in both religious and political matters, but he did not know how to persuade and attract the following of a larger group. In the end, however, his genuine friendship and conversations had the effect of inciting others, especially Newman, into action.
Although Froude was accused of Romanizing or supporting the Roman Catholic Church, he, in fact, was a loyal supporter of the Church of England. He maintained the teaching of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century bishops, known as the Caroline Divines and the Non-Jurors. The latter were a group of bishops and noblemen who did not accept the succession of William of Orange and his wife Mary to the throne of England after the Glorious Revolution of 1688. Froude accepted Whately’s idea of the Church of England as the one, historic, and uninterrupted Church, which was a great sacred corporate body, separate from the State. Froude filled in the internal elements that Whately had left undefined: the liturgy prescribed by the Book of Common Prayer and the theology of the Caroline Divines.
Froude decried some serious faults in the Anglican Church at the start of the nineteenth century. He lamented the acceptance of the State’s control over the Church and its clergy, low standard of spiritual life, weak discipline, and poor religious instruction. These complaints were coupled with praise of the good principles and practices of the Roman Church, such as Episcopal authority, worship of the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist, and frequent celebration of the Lord’s Supper with Holy Communion. These doctrines and practices were either ignored, or looked at with prejudice by the majority of Englishmen, who had accepted a thoroughly Protestant Church.
Froude’s sharp criticism of the Church of England was an important lesson for Newman, who was gradually beginning to understand Anglicanism’s Catholic heritage. Over some years’ time, Newman came to accept Froude’s view of the Roman Church as being neither the one true Church nor the Antichrist. Eventually, however, Newman’s logical reasoning led him to go further than his friend to conclude that Roman Catholicism alone was able to safeguard the truths that they sought to defend.
Richard Church, who met Newman in 1836, the year Froude died, compared Froude to Blaise Pascal for the great mental qualities of both men. They shared a great love for the Church and moral self-discipline, and both sadly died at an early age. Richard Church, later a Fellow of Oriel and a devoted friend to Newman, commented many years afterward that Froude, drawing from all he had learned from Keble, had a significant influence on Newman at a critical point. Thus, according to Church, it might well be said that Keble was at the origin of the Oxford Movement (1833)—a truth that Newman admitted in his Apologia. Church explained that Froude resolved to make Keble’s ideas active, public, and aggressive.3 Church offered the following summary: “Keble had given the inspiration, Froude had given the impulse; then Newman took up the work, and the impulse henceforth, and the direction, were his.”4 Despite the truth in this statement, it should be noted that Froude was more than a receptacle for Keble’s ideas. Froude had a deep sense of the historical continuity in the Catholic Church and the richness of its medieval practices. He had an active and independent mind, which led him to doctrinal conclusions that Keble did not accept.
Besides these two new Anglican friends, there was another, Isaac Williams, who was born in Wales in 1802. Williams attended Harrow, where he mastered Latin composition and literature, and, from there, went to Trinity College. Upon winning a Latin prize at Oxford, Williams gained Keble’s attention and accepted an invitation to study under him during the Long Vacation of 1823. Like Froude, Williams learned from Keble’s spiritual traits and orthodoxy. He became a clergyman and began his pastoral work under John Keble’s brother, Thomas Keble, vicar of the parish of Bisley, a town in Gloucestershire. After two years Williams returned to Oxford to be a Tutor at his college. It was then that Froude, who had become an intimate friend of Newman, introduced them to each other.
Williams was pleased to meet Newman and recognized his genuine benevolence, but he did not accept the emphasis that Newman gave to the intellect as the guide for life. At this time, Newman was no longer an Evangelical and was distancing himself from Whately’s rationalism; he was looking with admiration to the religious ideals of Keble and Froude. In 1830, Newman offered Williams the curacy of St. Mary’s, and, despite his misgivings toward Newman, the Trinity Fellow accepted. He was a loyal curate and rendered a great service by taking care of Newman’s parish during an extended trip in Europe that Newman took with Froude at the start of December 1832.
Unlike Keble and Froude, Williams was not an influence on Newman’s religious ideas. Williams differed greatly from Newman in his desire to avoid public controversy. He wished to limit himself to doing his duty and practicing greater self-discipline and religious piety. Despite these differences Williams was still a collaborator at the initial stages of the Oxford Movement. Williams later criticized the stir made by the Tracts of the Times, the initial vehicle for the Oxford Movement. In 1839, he proposed a plan for a series of Plain Sermons that would include contributions by the Kebles, Copeland, Pusey, Newman, and himself. By publishing the teachings of other members of the Oxford Movement, he wanted to provide some counterweight to Newman’s approach to the religious condition of the Church.
Ironically, Williams wrote the Tract that first stirred popular indignation, Tract 80, on Reserve in Communicating Religious Knowledge. Sometime after its publication, a battle ensued at the university over Williams’s contest for the professorship in Poetry. This was, in the words of Church, “the first decisive and open trial of strength and the first Tractarians defeat.”5
Williams, a moderate Anglican, was distrustful of the intellectual focus of the Movement and its leanings toward Rome. Under this strain, his ties with Newman soon broke. In 1842, Williams moved to the parish of his brother-in-law and spent his life writing devotional commentaries. He suffered from chronic and debilitating asthma and died in 1865. Before he died, Newman traveled to visit him and the two friends met once again.
Newman’s new Anglican friendships, especially those with Keble and Froude, signaled a new period in his religious life. Keble and Froude introduced Newman into a deeper understanding of the spiritual nature of the Church. They made him aware of its history and its ecclesial authority. Froude was instrumental in breaking Newman’s prejudice and opposition to the Roman Catholic Church. Both men, but especially Froude, moved Newman to denounce abuses committed by the government against the Roman Catholic Church. Newman shared with both men a deep friendship that originated with their common desire for renewal in the Anglican Church, and they grew in mutual respect, affection, and concern for each other. As would be expected, not all of Newman’s friendships with other Anglicans connected with Oxford had a major influence on him, or them. This was the case with Williams, Samuel Rickards, and Simeon Lloyd Pope. These clergymen did not have Newman’s urgency for reform. With the help of his friends, Froude and Robert Wilberforce, both Fellows at Oriel, Newman began a spiritual and doctrinal renewal of the undergraduates at his college.
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1Apo., 16.
2Richard Hurrell Froude, Remains of the Late Reverend Richard Hurrell Froude, Vol. I, ed. John Henry Newman (London: J, G & F Rivington, 1838), 28.
3Richard William Church, The Oxford Movement (London: Macmillan & Co., 1894) 28.
4Ibid., 29.
5Church, The Oxford Movement, 57.