- Email: [email protected]
The letters and diaries of John Henry Newman
252
Book Reviews
4. G.D. O’Brien. Hegel on Reason and Hisrory (Chicago University Press. 1975). p. 53 et passim. 5. K. Liiwith, Mraningin History (Chicago: Phoenix. lYh7, first published lY4Y). p. 57.
The Letters and Diaries of John Henry Newman, Ian Ker and Thomas Gornall. S.J., eds. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 197%80), Vol. I, pp. xviii + 346; Vol. 11. pp. xx + 416; Vol. III, pp. xx + 344; Vol. IV, pp. xvi + 412. Church historians are indispensable if only to limit the intellectual excesses of theologians, and correct the tendencies of the Churches to develop their own mythologies. This mythmaking is not of course confined to the Churches; even scientists indulge in it, as they seem to have invented the story that Samuel Wilberforce insulted T.H. Huxley’s grandmother in Oxford in 1860. But Oxford is a place of myth and legend, and among its most enduring legends are those surrounding the Anglo-Catholic movement in the nineteenth-century Church of England, and the related cult of John Henry Newman. now the likely candidate for Roman canonisation, and the object of a powerful mythos christened ‘Newmania’ by David Newsome. It is the Newmanian or Newmaniac vision of the Oxford Movement which still pervades the historiography of the subject, through the enormous impact of Newman’s Apologia pro Vita sua, which is for all its odd literary shape and the purely historical interest of the conflict which produced it the finest of Victorian auto biographies, which will be read while our language endures. It is to be expected that Roman Catholics should see the Oxford Movement through Newman’s eyes, and that the Movement should end for them where it ended for Newman, in his submission to Rome in 1845. An historical accident has, however, imposed the Newmanian vision on Anglican historiography. Dean Richard Church’s The Oxford Movement remains the most attractive account of its subject, and has indeed been recently republished; and Church was not only one of Newman’s closest disciples to remain within the Church of England, but resumed contact with Newman after his conversion. Church was, moreover, the only one of Newman’s followers to inherit Newman’s exquisite literary sensibility and gift for writing magical prose. The last chapter of Church’s work, on the master’s submission to the pope, is called ‘The Catastrophe’, which was what it was to Church; and in the words of the Methodist Professor W.R. Ward, ‘the long agony of the party between the publication of Tract XC and the secessions of 1X45’ has been ‘transformed by the literary skill of Newman and Church into one of the most one-sided legends of English history’. The one-sidedness is a reflection of Newman’s point of view, a view not corrected by wider study, for as another Methodist historian, John Kent, remarked a decade ago, Tractarianism is ‘even now not very much worked over, for with Tractarianism it tends to be Newman all the way’. Other scholars have noted the difficulty of trying to persuade students to look at figures as important as Newman, even of the stature of Keble and Pusey. It is a
Book Reviews
253
tribute to the hold of the tradition that Professor Owen Chadwick, despite his full elucidation of the political background, still places two thirds of his chapter on the Oxford Movement under the heading ‘Newman at Oxford’. Any comparison of the volume of scholarship on Newman with that on any other Victorian Anglo-Catholic will only establish this point more securely. Newman studies have, however, done as little for understanding nineteenthcentury Roman Catholicism, being overwhelmingly the work of theologians interested in Newman’s theology and personality and not in the wider history. With one or two exceptions, they look at Newman not as a Victorian Catholic but as a contemporary theological guide, the inspiration of the Second Vatican Council, the consequences of which Newman would have heartily deplored. This unhistorical dimension exists even in a writer as interesting as John Coulson, whose work on the intellectual affinities of Newman and Coleridge affinities of which Newman was aware - is without any counterbalancing stress on the historical forces which kept the two men worlds apart. The worst vice of the theological approach is, however, that it produces partisans for whom Newman is never wrong. Thus when Newman is submitted to historical study, as in Meriol Trevor’s biography, it is assumed that the other great Victorian Cardinals, Wiseman, Manning and Cullen. are condemned by Newman’s opinion of them. It is notorious that Newman’s relations with Wiseman and Cullen were strained, and that his stance towards Manning was one of undeclared war. It is equally notorious that because of the unhappy history of the Manning papers, Manning’s side of the story has never been told; and we have yet to be presented with an historical work on Newman which is as critical as it is appreciative, which is ready to consider Newman as an historical figure, and not as a saint and genius raised up sub specie aeternatis, without a setting in place or time. There is, however, one aspect of Newman studies which even the most hardened anti-Newmaniac can only welcome: the continuing appearance of the beautifully edited and printed series of Newman’s Letters and Diaries. with their supporting scholarly annotation, which makes them so useful a source of information on nineteenth-century English Roman Catholicism. The twentyone volumes of Newman’s Roman Catholic life appeared between 1961 and 1976 under the editorship of a member of Newman’s Oratory, the great and good Charles Stephen Dessain, who died just before the publication of the final volume. Some of Newman’s Anglican correspondence was published by Anne Mozley in 1891. but though the Oratory archive has been often quarried since, the world has had to wait to read it all. It is, therefore, a publishing event of the first importance that the first four of the ten volumes containing the letters of Newman’s Anglican life have now appeared, describing in the most revealing detail his progress from Calvinist convert to Anglo-Catholic. and opening the most intimate of window-views into his soul. That intensely personal quest begins in the Letters and Diaries at the childhood house at Ham, which Newman ‘dreamed about when a school boy as if it was Paradise’. It continues through his Evangelical conversion, under the direction of his schoolteacher mentor the Reverend Walter Mayers, whom we find recommending for the young Newman’s theological self-improvement
254
Book Reviews
“Bugg on Regeneration”, a work as to style very inelegant, but it is said, not to be compared with any thing, since the days of Locke, for sound conclusive reasoning’. It is especially interesting to discover Mayers inculcating the principle of reserve in communicating religious knowledge to unbelievers (see his letter to Newman of 16 June 1817) which was later to be thought a mark of Tractarianism. Aspirations to do religious good mingle with the scholarly ambitions of the future student of church history: ‘0 who is worthy to succeed our Gibbon!. . . may he be a better man!’ Chroniclers of academic Oxford will find indispensable Newman’s programme of reading for his disastrous Finals examinations in classical literature and philosophy and mathematics, and despite the painful record of that failure, there is a youthful glow about the early letters when Newman’s opinions were only half-formed and all his world was young. Nowhere is this liveliness more enjoyable than in the vivid concreteness of Newman’s descriptions. as of his first dinner in Trinity: Fish, flesh and fowl, beautiful salmon, haunches of mutton, lamb etc and fine, very fine (to my taste) strong beer, served up on old pewter plates, and mis-shapen earthenware jugs. Tell Mama there are gooseberry, raspberry, and apricot pies. The passing of time can even lend an interest to the cost of college crockery (‘Wash hands Bason Chamber Pott and Yewer 2.6’) and (despite his hostility to student drunkenness) his wine bills (‘12 Best Port - 3.18 --‘). There is also pleasure in discovering the minor activities which relieve the gloomy impression given by the earnest John’s pious otherworldliness, and by the embarrassments of his father’s failure in business and of his own paralysing shyness. These diversions include his juvenile poetry, his love of Waverley and of the violin, his attendance at Buckland’s famous pioneering geology lectures, even the later-repented indulgence of writing two comic songs for a West End farce. Most of his early correspondence is with his family, his adored mother and sisters, and his atheist black sheep brother Charles, and in his letters of anxious expostulation to Charles he anticipates the philosophical argument of the University Sermons and the Grammar ofAssent that irreligion is ‘a fault of the heart, not of the intellect’. The private letters are interwoven with Newman’s memoranda from a later period on the events of his life, and with other documents of a more public character: his French and Latin exercises, his first Latin oration as a proud young Fellow of Oriel, which was nothing less to him than a society of the immortals, and the papers relating to his rebuilding of St. Clement’s Church as its busy curate. Above all, there is the record of the often painful process of his religious self-exploration in the course of his pastoral activity among the poor. as he found that the Calvinist black-andwhite view of human nature did not work in a parish, and discovered the High Church doctrine of ministry and sacrament as the all-essential alternative. There is a quickening pace to events in the second volume of the Letters, which deals with Newman’s brief flirtation with Liberalism and then his decisive repudiation of it as the fountainhead of every modern heresy. This is the theme running through a succession of private griefs and public conflicts: his collapse
255
Book Reviews
as an examiner in the Schools; his favourite sister Mary’s premature death (arousing ‘those indefinite vague and withal subtle feelings which quite pierce the soul and make it sick’); his opposition to Catholic Emancipation and to Sir Robert Peel’s re-election as the University’s M.P. and to the 1830 Revolution (‘The French are an awful people’) and to the new Whig administration (‘vile vermin’); his row in Oriel over his pastoral conception of the collegiate tutorial system. The Oxford politics of a tight ecclesiastical corporation are interwoven with the network of deepening friendships from which the Oxford Movement was to grow, with Froude and Keble and Pusey and the Wilberforces; and with those new affections went the parting from other friends, the repudiation of former mentors tarred with Liberalism, Blanc0 White, Richard Whately and Edward Iiawkins. The main theme of volume three of the Letters and Diaries is Newman’s Mediterranean journey of 1832-3 to Malta, Southern Italy and Sicily. where he had the near-fatal illness which confirmed him in his sense of mission, and wrote some of the poems of the Lyra Aposrolica, among them ‘Lead, Kindly Light’ whiie becalmed in the Straits of Bonifacio. In volume four, on Newman’s return to England, the battle against Liberalism is joined with a vengeance in the opening salvoes of the Oxford Movement, the first of the Tracts for the Times. These letters have an aggressive and self-confident note, and also embody the quest for the right Anglican Catholic ethos (a word which the Tractarians brought into English usage), even while they built up a new High Church position against its multifarious Protestant and Popish and infidel foes. The literary importance of the letters lies in the intensity of the experience which they describe in brilliant and musical language. Thus Newman wrote on the ‘strange richness’ of the Devon countryside in July: The rocks blush into every variety of colour - the trees and fields are emeralds, and the cottages are rubies. A beztle I picked up at Torquay was as green and gold as the stone it lay on. . . . The exuberance of the grass and foliage is oppressive, as
if one had not room to breathe.
. .
Newman’s heightened perceptions of places as of people is, however, of the essence of the drama of his story, and of the clash between ideals of supernatural significance, in the wars of the presiding genii Zocorum of Oxford and Geneva and Rome, and of the new Anti-Christs, as Newman saw them, of his time. For Englishmen the issues were of more than wordly importance, with the destiny of Church and nation at stake, and the salvation of countless souls. The editors of the correspondence have wisely included a good many letters to Newman, and a great body of biographical, bibliographical and historical information about him, building on the researches (to name only a few recent writers quoted in these volumes) of Thomas Sheridan, Timothy Stunt and Louis Alien. In doing so, the editors have laid the firm foundation for all future Newman scholarship, and have provided a comprehensive commentary and work of reference for the study of nineteenth-century religious history. It will now be easier to assess Newman himself as one and only one of the actors in the major spiritual movements of the age. For it is by restoring the setting in which
256
Book
Reviews
Newman lived and died that the Newman scholar will escape Newmania, which is the principal obstacle remaining to a true and just judgement on the man and the ideals which moved his world. Sheridan University
Gilley
of Durham
Evangelical Theology 1833-1856. A Response to Tractarianism, (London: Marshall Morgan and Scott), f6.95.
Peter
Toon
Protestant anti-intellectualism is now a worldwide influence, and is especially strong in the United States, as the leaders of the Moral Majority breathe hot down the necks of American politicians. Teachers of religious subjects in British universities have a longer familiarity with the Evangelical thought police, through contact with pupils who have the deepest suspicions of their academic studies. These suspicions have a long history, and can be traced back to the beginnings of modern heart religion and to Wesley’s disparaging remarks about the British Museum. More specifically, this defensiveness is thought to have been induced by the mid-Victorian challenge to Biblical literalism from biology and biblical criticism. Yet the full account of that challenge only became clear at a popular level around 1860, while the emergence of militant Evangelicalism can be dated much earlier. to the 182Os, in the new revivalism and a spate of millenarian heresies and the liberal repudiation of Calvinist ethics. It can therefore, be argued that after 1820, a balanced Protestant orthodoxy showed signs of failure, as the Evangelical centre ceased to hold and loosed anarchy upon the world. One prominent aspect of this newly militant Protestantism was a more pronounced hostility to Rome. and after 1833. to the popish-minded Tractarian or Oxford Movement of Catholic revival in the Church of England. Peter Toon has now written an exhaustive survey of the voluminous literature produced by the Evangelical Anglicans against the Tractarians, and is to be warmly congratulated upon having summarised so many dry, dull books and rediscovered their importance for their day. Dr. Toon has divided his volume into two parts, the first a survey of the theological controversies against the wider historical landscape, the second a more thorough exposition of the major theological themes. This makes necessary some repetition of material, but it otherwise works well enough. allowing Dr. Toon the double luxury of division first by chronology, then by theme. Chronologically, he divides Evangelical attitudes to the Tractarians into periods of increasing hostility. Thematically, he makes an equally careful discrimination among the shades of Evangelical opinion. from a radical Protestantism close to Dissent, to the other extreme near to older High Church positions. On the onl: hand. Dr. Toon retells the story of the war in tracts and court rooms over baptismal regeneration: on the other, he expounds the range of Evangelical attitudes on the issue, from baptism as a conditional instrument of regeneration to the identification of
Book Reviews
4. G.D. O’Brien. Hegel on Reason and Hisrory (Chicago University Press. 1975). p. 53 et passim. 5. K. Liiwith, Mraningin History (Chicago: Phoenix. lYh7, first published lY4Y). p. 57.
The Letters and Diaries of John Henry Newman, Ian Ker and Thomas Gornall. S.J., eds. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 197%80), Vol. I, pp. xviii + 346; Vol. 11. pp. xx + 416; Vol. III, pp. xx + 344; Vol. IV, pp. xvi + 412. Church historians are indispensable if only to limit the intellectual excesses of theologians, and correct the tendencies of the Churches to develop their own mythologies. This mythmaking is not of course confined to the Churches; even scientists indulge in it, as they seem to have invented the story that Samuel Wilberforce insulted T.H. Huxley’s grandmother in Oxford in 1860. But Oxford is a place of myth and legend, and among its most enduring legends are those surrounding the Anglo-Catholic movement in the nineteenth-century Church of England, and the related cult of John Henry Newman. now the likely candidate for Roman canonisation, and the object of a powerful mythos christened ‘Newmania’ by David Newsome. It is the Newmanian or Newmaniac vision of the Oxford Movement which still pervades the historiography of the subject, through the enormous impact of Newman’s Apologia pro Vita sua, which is for all its odd literary shape and the purely historical interest of the conflict which produced it the finest of Victorian auto biographies, which will be read while our language endures. It is to be expected that Roman Catholics should see the Oxford Movement through Newman’s eyes, and that the Movement should end for them where it ended for Newman, in his submission to Rome in 1845. An historical accident has, however, imposed the Newmanian vision on Anglican historiography. Dean Richard Church’s The Oxford Movement remains the most attractive account of its subject, and has indeed been recently republished; and Church was not only one of Newman’s closest disciples to remain within the Church of England, but resumed contact with Newman after his conversion. Church was, moreover, the only one of Newman’s followers to inherit Newman’s exquisite literary sensibility and gift for writing magical prose. The last chapter of Church’s work, on the master’s submission to the pope, is called ‘The Catastrophe’, which was what it was to Church; and in the words of the Methodist Professor W.R. Ward, ‘the long agony of the party between the publication of Tract XC and the secessions of 1X45’ has been ‘transformed by the literary skill of Newman and Church into one of the most one-sided legends of English history’. The one-sidedness is a reflection of Newman’s point of view, a view not corrected by wider study, for as another Methodist historian, John Kent, remarked a decade ago, Tractarianism is ‘even now not very much worked over, for with Tractarianism it tends to be Newman all the way’. Other scholars have noted the difficulty of trying to persuade students to look at figures as important as Newman, even of the stature of Keble and Pusey. It is a
Book Reviews
253
tribute to the hold of the tradition that Professor Owen Chadwick, despite his full elucidation of the political background, still places two thirds of his chapter on the Oxford Movement under the heading ‘Newman at Oxford’. Any comparison of the volume of scholarship on Newman with that on any other Victorian Anglo-Catholic will only establish this point more securely. Newman studies have, however, done as little for understanding nineteenthcentury Roman Catholicism, being overwhelmingly the work of theologians interested in Newman’s theology and personality and not in the wider history. With one or two exceptions, they look at Newman not as a Victorian Catholic but as a contemporary theological guide, the inspiration of the Second Vatican Council, the consequences of which Newman would have heartily deplored. This unhistorical dimension exists even in a writer as interesting as John Coulson, whose work on the intellectual affinities of Newman and Coleridge affinities of which Newman was aware - is without any counterbalancing stress on the historical forces which kept the two men worlds apart. The worst vice of the theological approach is, however, that it produces partisans for whom Newman is never wrong. Thus when Newman is submitted to historical study, as in Meriol Trevor’s biography, it is assumed that the other great Victorian Cardinals, Wiseman, Manning and Cullen. are condemned by Newman’s opinion of them. It is notorious that Newman’s relations with Wiseman and Cullen were strained, and that his stance towards Manning was one of undeclared war. It is equally notorious that because of the unhappy history of the Manning papers, Manning’s side of the story has never been told; and we have yet to be presented with an historical work on Newman which is as critical as it is appreciative, which is ready to consider Newman as an historical figure, and not as a saint and genius raised up sub specie aeternatis, without a setting in place or time. There is, however, one aspect of Newman studies which even the most hardened anti-Newmaniac can only welcome: the continuing appearance of the beautifully edited and printed series of Newman’s Letters and Diaries. with their supporting scholarly annotation, which makes them so useful a source of information on nineteenth-century English Roman Catholicism. The twentyone volumes of Newman’s Roman Catholic life appeared between 1961 and 1976 under the editorship of a member of Newman’s Oratory, the great and good Charles Stephen Dessain, who died just before the publication of the final volume. Some of Newman’s Anglican correspondence was published by Anne Mozley in 1891. but though the Oratory archive has been often quarried since, the world has had to wait to read it all. It is, therefore, a publishing event of the first importance that the first four of the ten volumes containing the letters of Newman’s Anglican life have now appeared, describing in the most revealing detail his progress from Calvinist convert to Anglo-Catholic. and opening the most intimate of window-views into his soul. That intensely personal quest begins in the Letters and Diaries at the childhood house at Ham, which Newman ‘dreamed about when a school boy as if it was Paradise’. It continues through his Evangelical conversion, under the direction of his schoolteacher mentor the Reverend Walter Mayers, whom we find recommending for the young Newman’s theological self-improvement
254
Book Reviews
“Bugg on Regeneration”, a work as to style very inelegant, but it is said, not to be compared with any thing, since the days of Locke, for sound conclusive reasoning’. It is especially interesting to discover Mayers inculcating the principle of reserve in communicating religious knowledge to unbelievers (see his letter to Newman of 16 June 1817) which was later to be thought a mark of Tractarianism. Aspirations to do religious good mingle with the scholarly ambitions of the future student of church history: ‘0 who is worthy to succeed our Gibbon!. . . may he be a better man!’ Chroniclers of academic Oxford will find indispensable Newman’s programme of reading for his disastrous Finals examinations in classical literature and philosophy and mathematics, and despite the painful record of that failure, there is a youthful glow about the early letters when Newman’s opinions were only half-formed and all his world was young. Nowhere is this liveliness more enjoyable than in the vivid concreteness of Newman’s descriptions. as of his first dinner in Trinity: Fish, flesh and fowl, beautiful salmon, haunches of mutton, lamb etc and fine, very fine (to my taste) strong beer, served up on old pewter plates, and mis-shapen earthenware jugs. Tell Mama there are gooseberry, raspberry, and apricot pies. The passing of time can even lend an interest to the cost of college crockery (‘Wash hands Bason Chamber Pott and Yewer 2.6’) and (despite his hostility to student drunkenness) his wine bills (‘12 Best Port - 3.18 --‘). There is also pleasure in discovering the minor activities which relieve the gloomy impression given by the earnest John’s pious otherworldliness, and by the embarrassments of his father’s failure in business and of his own paralysing shyness. These diversions include his juvenile poetry, his love of Waverley and of the violin, his attendance at Buckland’s famous pioneering geology lectures, even the later-repented indulgence of writing two comic songs for a West End farce. Most of his early correspondence is with his family, his adored mother and sisters, and his atheist black sheep brother Charles, and in his letters of anxious expostulation to Charles he anticipates the philosophical argument of the University Sermons and the Grammar ofAssent that irreligion is ‘a fault of the heart, not of the intellect’. The private letters are interwoven with Newman’s memoranda from a later period on the events of his life, and with other documents of a more public character: his French and Latin exercises, his first Latin oration as a proud young Fellow of Oriel, which was nothing less to him than a society of the immortals, and the papers relating to his rebuilding of St. Clement’s Church as its busy curate. Above all, there is the record of the often painful process of his religious self-exploration in the course of his pastoral activity among the poor. as he found that the Calvinist black-andwhite view of human nature did not work in a parish, and discovered the High Church doctrine of ministry and sacrament as the all-essential alternative. There is a quickening pace to events in the second volume of the Letters, which deals with Newman’s brief flirtation with Liberalism and then his decisive repudiation of it as the fountainhead of every modern heresy. This is the theme running through a succession of private griefs and public conflicts: his collapse
255
Book Reviews
as an examiner in the Schools; his favourite sister Mary’s premature death (arousing ‘those indefinite vague and withal subtle feelings which quite pierce the soul and make it sick’); his opposition to Catholic Emancipation and to Sir Robert Peel’s re-election as the University’s M.P. and to the 1830 Revolution (‘The French are an awful people’) and to the new Whig administration (‘vile vermin’); his row in Oriel over his pastoral conception of the collegiate tutorial system. The Oxford politics of a tight ecclesiastical corporation are interwoven with the network of deepening friendships from which the Oxford Movement was to grow, with Froude and Keble and Pusey and the Wilberforces; and with those new affections went the parting from other friends, the repudiation of former mentors tarred with Liberalism, Blanc0 White, Richard Whately and Edward Iiawkins. The main theme of volume three of the Letters and Diaries is Newman’s Mediterranean journey of 1832-3 to Malta, Southern Italy and Sicily. where he had the near-fatal illness which confirmed him in his sense of mission, and wrote some of the poems of the Lyra Aposrolica, among them ‘Lead, Kindly Light’ whiie becalmed in the Straits of Bonifacio. In volume four, on Newman’s return to England, the battle against Liberalism is joined with a vengeance in the opening salvoes of the Oxford Movement, the first of the Tracts for the Times. These letters have an aggressive and self-confident note, and also embody the quest for the right Anglican Catholic ethos (a word which the Tractarians brought into English usage), even while they built up a new High Church position against its multifarious Protestant and Popish and infidel foes. The literary importance of the letters lies in the intensity of the experience which they describe in brilliant and musical language. Thus Newman wrote on the ‘strange richness’ of the Devon countryside in July: The rocks blush into every variety of colour - the trees and fields are emeralds, and the cottages are rubies. A beztle I picked up at Torquay was as green and gold as the stone it lay on. . . . The exuberance of the grass and foliage is oppressive, as
if one had not room to breathe.
. .
Newman’s heightened perceptions of places as of people is, however, of the essence of the drama of his story, and of the clash between ideals of supernatural significance, in the wars of the presiding genii Zocorum of Oxford and Geneva and Rome, and of the new Anti-Christs, as Newman saw them, of his time. For Englishmen the issues were of more than wordly importance, with the destiny of Church and nation at stake, and the salvation of countless souls. The editors of the correspondence have wisely included a good many letters to Newman, and a great body of biographical, bibliographical and historical information about him, building on the researches (to name only a few recent writers quoted in these volumes) of Thomas Sheridan, Timothy Stunt and Louis Alien. In doing so, the editors have laid the firm foundation for all future Newman scholarship, and have provided a comprehensive commentary and work of reference for the study of nineteenth-century religious history. It will now be easier to assess Newman himself as one and only one of the actors in the major spiritual movements of the age. For it is by restoring the setting in which
256
Book
Reviews
Newman lived and died that the Newman scholar will escape Newmania, which is the principal obstacle remaining to a true and just judgement on the man and the ideals which moved his world. Sheridan University
Gilley
of Durham
Evangelical Theology 1833-1856. A Response to Tractarianism, (London: Marshall Morgan and Scott), f6.95.
Peter
Toon
Protestant anti-intellectualism is now a worldwide influence, and is especially strong in the United States, as the leaders of the Moral Majority breathe hot down the necks of American politicians. Teachers of religious subjects in British universities have a longer familiarity with the Evangelical thought police, through contact with pupils who have the deepest suspicions of their academic studies. These suspicions have a long history, and can be traced back to the beginnings of modern heart religion and to Wesley’s disparaging remarks about the British Museum. More specifically, this defensiveness is thought to have been induced by the mid-Victorian challenge to Biblical literalism from biology and biblical criticism. Yet the full account of that challenge only became clear at a popular level around 1860, while the emergence of militant Evangelicalism can be dated much earlier. to the 182Os, in the new revivalism and a spate of millenarian heresies and the liberal repudiation of Calvinist ethics. It can therefore, be argued that after 1820, a balanced Protestant orthodoxy showed signs of failure, as the Evangelical centre ceased to hold and loosed anarchy upon the world. One prominent aspect of this newly militant Protestantism was a more pronounced hostility to Rome. and after 1833. to the popish-minded Tractarian or Oxford Movement of Catholic revival in the Church of England. Peter Toon has now written an exhaustive survey of the voluminous literature produced by the Evangelical Anglicans against the Tractarians, and is to be warmly congratulated upon having summarised so many dry, dull books and rediscovered their importance for their day. Dr. Toon has divided his volume into two parts, the first a survey of the theological controversies against the wider historical landscape, the second a more thorough exposition of the major theological themes. This makes necessary some repetition of material, but it otherwise works well enough. allowing Dr. Toon the double luxury of division first by chronology, then by theme. Chronologically, he divides Evangelical attitudes to the Tractarians into periods of increasing hostility. Thematically, he makes an equally careful discrimination among the shades of Evangelical opinion. from a radical Protestantism close to Dissent, to the other extreme near to older High Church positions. On the onl: hand. Dr. Toon retells the story of the war in tracts and court rooms over baptismal regeneration: on the other, he expounds the range of Evangelical attitudes on the issue, from baptism as a conditional instrument of regeneration to the identification of