The Liverpool Standard and General Commercial Advertiser.
Liverpool, Merseyside, England, 1847-03-09 00:00:00

THE CONVERSIONS TO POPERY.

(From the Morning Herald.)
The progress and number of these conversions are
rapidly increasing. Yet Mr. Gresley writes letters to the
bishops to insist on it that " The real danger of the
Church of England is Puritanism." Puritanism may be
a very wrong thing, and it is not our purpose to offer any
defence of it. But'at least this is clear, that Puritanism
is not producing, just now, large secessions from the
Church. Tractarianism, however, has already taught,—
so a Tractarian journal boasts,—no fewer than seventy
clergymen within the last eighteen months,—that the
safety of their souls required them to abandon, as an un-
clean thing, the Church of their baptism,—the Church
which they had sworn to abide by till death!
The gravity and extent of this evil seem to require us
to examine it with some thought and (lire. To what,
then, are we to attribute this rapid flight of so many of
the youthful clergy from the Church of their fathers ?
There is not the slightest difficulty in giving a rational
account of the whole mischief.

About fourteen years ago, there came together in Ox-
ford three or four ardent, clever, but not well-informed
young men, who were driven, by their hatred of Radical-
ism, into a vehement and irrational degree of Toryism and
High-Churchism. Forgetting that the reverse of wrong
is seldom exactly right, they rushed beyond Waterland
and Van Mildert, Jackson and Hooker, into an ardent ad-
miration of the Non-jurors, and a perfect idolatry of
Laud.

In this state of mind, they began to look into Church
history. Very naturally, the Reformation disgusted them.
Freude, one of the most ardent among them, tells us, in
his published Diary,—" I hate the Reformation more
and more." " Jewell seems to me a sort of irreverent
Dissenter." He, Froude, very soon afterwards, took up
the cudgels in defence of Thomas a'Beckett, whom be
represented as a very martyr ! And Newman, his bosom
friend,—writing at that period,—described Hildebrand as
the greatest character in the whole compass of Church
history !
Half-a-dozen such men as these, filled with enthusi-
asm, and occupying posts of influence in one of our
universities, could not fail to make converts. And to do
so,—to form a party,—and gradually to " unprotestantise
the Church of England,"—became with them the main
end of their existence.

The real character of the evil was not understood by
churchmen generally. " Don't oppose them,--don't
write about them,—don't bring them into notice !" was
the language used by many. " Only leave them alone,
and the thing will die away of itself." Such was the ad-
vice often given. But nothing could be more mistaken.
The parties at work were able, and in earnest. They
persevered without awing, and such efforts could not fail
to produce results. Each year, therefore, found them
stronger than before ; and when, at last, the Senate of
Oxford was forced to take the matter in hand, it was
found that this little faction, of scarcely seven years
standing, already numbered five hundred Masters of
Arts !

But, meanwhile, a similar conspiracy had been formed
at Cambridge also. The mode of its operation there was
by a cultivation of church-architecture. Not content with
admiring the general outline of a fine old church, these
juvenile church-restorers must needs revive all the for-
gotten furniture of Popish times ; and stone altars, rood-
screens, piscinm, andmdilia, were studied, until the disci-
ples of Neale and Paley began to believe in a real sacri-
fice, veritable priests, and an altar whereon a victim was
still to be offered up. Such have been the delusions
which have led to what we now behold. And assuredly
neither chuichmen generally, nor the heads of the church
in particular, have shown themselves alive to the great-
ness of the danger.
Our bishops, as many of them doubtless remember with
sorrow, seemed to pride themselves, ten years ago, on
holding an even balance between the Tractarians and
their assailants. Most of our readers will remember the
last charge delivered at Oxford by the present Bishop of
Bath (then of Oxford), and some of the charges of the
Bishop of Exeter. These addresses contained cautions,
and even decided censures, on certain points ;—but these
were immediately followed by high encomums on " the
learning," " the Christian spirit, " the fervent piety" of
the Tractarian leaders ; so that the hearer was at a loss to
know whether the praise or the blame predominated.
Such has been the course of the last ten years, and now
we are beginning to see the fruit of this hesitating and
temporising system. Seienty of our.younger clergy per-
verted in the short space of eighteen months, and the
number of these perversions daily increasing ! Had a
knot of Arian and Socinian heretics, at either Oxford or
Cambridge, produced such a result, should we have seen
the quietness and apathy which now prevail ? Would our
prelates have rested in such peaceful calm ?—would the
visitors of our colleges have remained in a state of total
quiescence ?—would both Houses of Parliament have kept
the entirest silence ?