and representatives of the apostles by successive transmission of the prerogative of being so; every link in the chain being known from St. Paul to our present metropolitans."* Some of the opponents of Dr. Pusey and of his friends have expressed their surprise, that the doctrines in question should emanate from Oxford. Nothing, however, could be, in our opinion, less a matter of astonishment. Oxford was founded in the palmiest days of the Papal supremacy. The University was confirmed by Papal authority, and received such privileges as the See of Rome claimed the power to confer. It was mentioned in the constitutions published by Clement V., after the Council of Vienne, A. D. 1311, in company with Paris, Bologna and Salamanca. It was ordained that schools should be erected, and that all prelates and ecclesiastical corporations in England, Wales, Scotland and Ireland should be taxed for the maintenance of professors at Oxford. Matthew of Paris ranked Oxford as an ecclesiastical school next to Paris, and called it the foundation of the Roman Catholic church. It is well known that this University has retained many of the features of the times of its foundation. The dust of centuries is accumulated on its walls. It has steadily resisted all innovations. It adhered with deathlike tenacity to the schoolman's logic, to the trivium and quadrivium of the good old days of Aquinas and Scotus. It is the University which had Laud for a chancellor, which hated the Puritans, which denounced, in unmeasured terms, the late Reform Bill, which, on all occasions, takes, as by instinct, the highest tory ground, which was ready to impale Dr. Hampden for his liberal opinions, which, in short, in the language of a late writer," has experienced but few symptoms of that revival which has been manifested at Cambridge." The Fellows of both Universities are by statute unmarried men. Perhaps this is a necessary regulation. Families could not be maintained on the foundations. We do not complain of the exclusion of married incumbents. We simply state that the regulation must have certain moral effects. Oxford is a cloistered establishment. It is shut out, in a great measure, from the social world. Its learned doctors necessarily sympathize with the tenets of " ancient Christianity," in respect to the * Tracts for the Times, No. 7. The statute at Trinity College, Dublin, requiring the celibacy of the Fellows, has been repealed during the past year. in greater purity of the virgin state. We do not deny to the Cyprians and Basils of Oxford unimpeachable morality, tenderness of conscience, and a delicate shrinking from every moral contamination. Yet having resided long in a University which has been fixed to her moorings almost a thousand years; conversant with the dim and shadowy past; reminded at every corner and every leaf of the statute-book of a venerable antiquity; cut off, in a great degree, from the charms of social life and the living world; it is not strange that such men should idolize the fathers, and cling to the apostolical succession, and speak tenderly of monks and nuns, and advocate the re-introduction of fasts and vigils, and prayers for the dead, and cry out against the degenerate and stirring times in which they are called to live and toil. The movement is, in part, owing to the place where the movers live. Who would look for an apologist of celibacy in London, or an earnest defender of the divine right at Manchester or Sheffield ?* Poetry has had something to do with the new movement. Prof. Keble, one of the principal tractators, is a genuine child of song. His "Christian Year" was, in one sense, a precursor of the Tracts. It strowed the way with the sweetest flowers of poesy. It burnished the apostolical chain to a wonderful brightness. It intermingled and hallowed the usages of the church with the most delicate affections of the heart, and the most musical cadences of the voice. It almost beguiled the stern nonconformist into a love for the feasts and the fasts of the usurping church. As we read the soothing and mellow verses of Keble, our affections flow, involuntarily, towards the objects of his passionate admiration. We cannot stop to analyze the sentiment which is couched beneath the delicious strain. It seems like Vandalism to hunt for heresy amid the flowers scattered along by one so gentle and so loving. With the poet, we can hardly forbear to loathe every thing which would interrupt the strains of melody that seem to have been caught near heaven's door. At the same time, it must be acknowledged that the volume contains not a little in which a zealous Papist would most cordially sympathize. Witness the following: "Ave Maria! Thou whose name All but adoring love may claim, * Dr. Hook, we are aware, has a large congregation at Leeds, but Dr. Hook is a bustling man, and is not a true Oxford celibate. Yet may we reach thy shrine; The poetry of Wordsworth is not wholly free from expressions of the same general tenor with many in the Christian Year.† The general spirit is strikingly congenial with the tendencies of some of the writers of the Oxford Tracts. The poetry is meditative, calm, soothing, peaceful, utterly unallied to the noisy, forward, assuming spirit of the present times. It loves the past. Its voices linger and quiver among the Gothic aisles and towers and arches of the old cathedrals. It is full of ecclesiastical sympathies and recollections. One of the prominent effects of the immortal Excursion is to hallow in the reader's mind the observances of the church of England, and, in no small degree, of the church of Rome, for the English ritual is a transcript, in many respects, of that used by the earlier communion. The poet does not stop with the present life; in the Church-yard among the Mountains, we are carried forward to the life beyond the grave. Our dearest hopes are indissolubly linked with the solemn words of the prayer-book, words imperishably associated with the sublime cadence of the faithful poet. The same remarks, in a certain degree, are applicable to his great contemporaries, Southey and Coleridge. All have contributed, in no slight measure, to awaken a fondness for antiquity, a reverence for the noble army of martyrs, an undying attachment to what is time-worn and venerable in the church. We can trace an intimate acquaintance with their works in some of the Oxford theologians. There is a grace and a freshness in the style, a rhythm in the periods, a delicacy and a thoughtfulness in the observations, and a correspondence in the spirit, which prove that the prose writers have sat at the * See the whole hymn, entitled, The Annunciation of the Blessed Virgin Mary, p. 315, of the 1st American edition of Keble's Christian Year. We refer to such passages as the following, which happily are rare: "And when the pure And consecrating element hath cleansed The original stain, the child is there received feet of the poets. We think that this is apparent in some of the productions of Pusey, Newman and Keble. It has been affirmed by some, who would rather apologize and palliate than abet and defend the Oxford views, that the aim of the authors is mainly to pave the way for a separation of the church from the state. It is supposed, that they have become disgusted with the unholy and unnatural alliance, that they loathe the impurities which it introduces into the most sacred things, that they dread the spoliations actual and threatened of a whig administration, who will go as far as they dare in reforming the church, and that feeling little hope that kings and queens and parliaments will become true and hearty defenders of the faith, they choose to abandon the connection altogether. Rather than be subjected to the supervision of the friend of the Hon. Mrs. Norton and of his compeers, rather than be supplied with prelates by ministers who neither fear God nor love the church, they prefer to stand on their own independent ground, leaning on the Everlasting Hills for support, and looking to no earthly Head. * We doubt, however, whether these apologists can make out their charitable supposition. The writers of the Tracts do, indeed, advert to the mischiefs of state interference; sometimes with a strong and indignant voice. But this is not the great object of the publications. It is a subordinate affair, and but rarely adverted to, and never directly advocated. The authors state, and we have no doubt honestly, that the Tracts were published with the object of contributing something towards the practical revival of doctrines, which, though held by the great divines of the English church, at present have become obsolete with the majority of her members. The practical evils which are the subject of reiterated complaint, are the neglect of the daily service; the desecration of festivals; the eucharist *Thus in Tract No. 12, it is asserted and proved, that the church is treated far more arbitrarily, and is more completely at the mercy of the chance-government of the day, than ever Englishmen were under the worst tyranny of the worst times. It is stated, that the three acts of election, confirmation and consecration, instead of being rendered more efficient checks than formerly, are now so arranged as to offer the least possible hinderance to the most exceptionable appointments of a godless ministry. scantily administered; insubordination practised in all ranks of the church; orders and offices imperfectly developed, etc. We see no reason as yet to conclude that any party in the established church are meditating a disruption of the ties which connect the spiritual to the temporal power. With respect to the progress of the Oxford doctrines at the present moment, we have but a word to say. At the date of our last advices, about five volumes had been published, including ninety numbers. The topics discussed are, in general, like those exhibited in the earlier part of the series. The periodical publications do not devote, we perceive, quite so much space to the controversy as they did in the primary stage of it. Possibly the zeal of the combatants is somewhat abated. An exception to this remark must be made, however, in relation to Mr. Isaac Taylor. This vigorous writer entered the lists about twelve months ago. The immediate intention of his researches was to lay open the real condition, moral, spiritual and ecclesiastical, of the ancient church. Instead, however, of carrying forward a multifarious inquiry concerning twenty topics of early opinion and practice, Mr. Taylor selected, in the first instance, the subject of celibacy, a subject, as he remarks, of an intrinsically important kind; one that has intimate alliances with the entire ecclesiastical system of antiquity, touching on the principles whence sprang the most ancient notions concerning the mysterious properties of the sacraments, the position and power of the clergy, and the fundamental doctrines of justification and sanctification. The sum of the whole discussion is this: That the notions and practices connected with the doctrine of the superlative merit of religious celibacy, were, at once, the causes and the effects of errors in theology, of perverted moral sentiments, of superstitious usages, of hierarchical usurpations; and that they furnish us with a criterion for estimating the general value of ancient Christianity; and, in a word, afford reason enough for regarding, if not with jealousy, at least with extreme caution, any attempt to induce the modern church to imitate the ancient church. Mr. Taylor buckles on his armor with all confidence. We are not sure but that there is an unnecessary protrusion of his qualifications for the work which he has undertaken, and of his determination to do it thoroughly, and as no other man in England (for his language implies almost that) can do it. A little more modesty might have been becoming. There are other |