The Tractarians' Political Rhetoric

On; Sunday 14 July 1833, John Keble, Professor of Poetry at the University of Oxford,1 preached a sermon entitled "National Apostasy" in the Church of St Mary the Virgin, the primary venue for academic sermons, religious lectures, and other expressions of the university's spiritual life. The sermon is remembered now largely because John Henry Newman, who was vicar of St Mary's at the time,2 regarded it as the beginning of the Oxford Movement. Generally regarded as stretching from 1833 to Newman's conversion to Rome in 1845, the movement was an effort to return the Church of England to her historic roots, as expressed in the writings of the church fathers3 and the seventeenth-century theologians known as the Caroline Divines.4 The doctrinal elements of the movement-those concerned with proper belief5-were expressed in the Tracts for the Times, a series of ninety-one pamphlets and treatises that inspired some to label the movement tractarianism and its adherents tractarians. Its practical emphases-the dimension concerned with proper conduct-appeared in the ten volumes of Plain Sermons, by Contnbutors to the "Tracts for the Times" (London, 1839-48). Politics was not a dominant concern, but both publications did give some attention to the social order in general and the relationship between the church and the civil powers in particular.6 Not everyone would agree with Newman's assertion that 14 July marked "the start of the religious movement of 1833."7 Among Keble's contemporaries, for example, J. B. Mozley8 saw "National Apostasy" as the "exordium of a great revolution,"9 while Thomas Keble, the younger brother who read the sermon before it was delivered, is reported to have said only that John "should read in a quick and lively manner and he should be sure to wear his spectacles."10 Since then, one of Newman's few defenders has been John R. Griffin, who published several pieces in the 1970s and 1980s about the "radical" nature of the sermon;11 several others have challenged Newman's claim, sometimes going so far as to dismiss it as a "myth."ia Other studies suggest that the issue has yet to be decided: one scholar has noted that some Victorians saw the sermon as a "counter-attack" against Parliament's interference in the Church's affairs;13 another has called it "something of a non-event";14 and a third appears to take a kind of middle ground, granting it only a "highly symbolic" place "in the beginnings of the Oxford Movement."15 Choosing "National Apostasy" as a starting point may be historically convenient; it does provide a specific point of reference, much as the publication of Lyrical Ballads did for English Romanticism16 and the "shot heard round the world" did for the American Revolution.17 It is not rhetorically accurate, however, for the sermon did not call for the audience to embrace any theological or political agenda. In fact, Keble warned his audience that "Public concerns, ecclesiastical or civil, will prove ruinous indeed to those, who permit them to occupy all their care and thoughts."18 The sermon was essentially conservative in all regards, not radical or revolutionary as other critics have maintained. A more accurate assessment has been offered by Perry Butler, who wrote the article on Keble for the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Butler contends that it was actually the preface to "National Apostasy," written on 22 July and somewhat "more pointed" than the sermon itself, that "played a part in stirring concerned churchmen into action."19 In other words, it was what Keble prepared for the press, not what he wrote for the pulpit, that was truly revolutionary. The sermon, then, may not mark the genesis of the Oxford Movement, but it does make a useful starting point in a study of the tractarians' political beliefs and rhetorical strategies. Newman, Keble, and E. B. Pusey20 published a number of works on the relationship between church and state, and they did so while working in the midst of different circumstances and while playing different roles. …