RESPECTFULLY OFFERED TO
INDIVIDUAL RESIDENT CLERGYMEN OF THE UNIVERSITY,
IN BEHALF OF
THE CHURCH MISSIONARY SOCIETY,
BY
A MASTER OF ARTS,
1830.
(Not published, but sent to a certain number of residents.)
I WROTE the following Letter and circulated it in the University in February, 1830, at a time when I was one of the secretaries of the Oxford Branch of the Church Missionary Society. At that time I was on the whole Protestant in doctrine, with a growing disposition towards what is called the High Church. I had for many years greatly esteemed the Church Missionary Society, but thought it ought to be under the Bishops. I had made inquiries with a view to the possibility of my becoming one of its missionaries.
My object then in this Letter was at once to enlarge the circle of subscribers to the Society, and to direct and strengthen the influence of the University and thereby of the Anglican hierarchy, upon it. And with this view I urged that the Society itself, by its rules, did actually pledge itself to welcome that influence which I thought so necessary for it, and I considered it a great mistake in the mass of the clergy not to accept a position so frankly offered to them.
My Letter, however, gave great offence to the leading members of its Oxford Branch, to which I belonged; and at the next Annual Meeting, consisting mainly of junior members of the University, Dr. Symons of Wadham in the chair, they unanimously voted another, I forget who, into the office I held.
I did not leave the Association till, I think, four years afterwards, having in the meantime preached and had a collection in St. Mary’s Church for it. On that occasion I recollect mentioning the “good man,” (as I called him with great sincerity,) Dr. Wilson of Queen’s, afterwards Canon of Winchester, a Calvinist by reputation, who introduced the Society to Oxford.
July, 1883.—This incident has been the occasion of much misrepresentation, and to prevent permanent mistakes I am obliged to add as follows:—
Four years ago, on Mr. L., a friend of mine, saying of me in a periodical of name, that there were various false stories in circulation about the part I played towards certain evangelical bodies (for instance at the time when I was secretary to the Bible Society, an office which I never held), a correspondent of the editor wrote to him to say that what Mr. L. treated “as an amusing myth,” was an affair in which he (the writer) “was a personal actor;” that “if I denied that I was ever a secretary to the Bible Society, the denial must have been barely that I was secretary in the year 1826,” whereas he (the writer) spoke of 1829 and 1830; that “when” the secretary “presented his Report” I “moved 254 amendments” to it; that “the number of emendations” (he repeated) “was 254,” though “Mr. L. made it 250;” that “they were designed to transform the evangelical style of the Report into one which was “perhaps better;” that “meanwhile I had written” and circulated “a most hostile tract” or letter; and that, at the Annual Meeting that followed, it was carried unanimously “that the Rev. J. H. Newman should be no longer secretary.”
The two main points in this uncalled-for and unfounded contradiction to Mr. L.’s statement which I think it necessary to deny, are first, that the occurrence which my assailant writes about took place in the Bible Society, whereas it took place in the Church Missionary Society, as the pamphlet which follows sufficiently shows; and next, that I moved 254 amendments to the secretary’s Annual Report.
1. As to the first charge, it does but involve a question of memory, and is important only so far as it bears upon the general trustworthiness whether of Mr. L.’s account, or of the one contradictory to it. Now I deny that I ever was secretary to any Bible Society. I was indeed a member of the Oxford Branch, and spoke at two Annual Meetings, but I know I never was secretary to it, and never spoke or wrote against it. All that I recollect of my two speeches is, that Dr. Shuttleworth, afterwards Bishop of Chichester, said of one of them that it was the only good one delivered at the meeting. This my own denial would be enough, but in addition to it, it is pleasant to me to be able to say that Mr. L.’s opponent himself on second thoughts had the candour in a subsequent letter to withdraw what he had so strongly asserted in his first. He writes, “If Cardinal Newman means that the Letter or Tract to which I referred was directed to the question, not of the Bible Society, but of the Church Missionary Society, I am sure that his memory is likely to be better than mine; he scores a line under the words which I have printed in italics. He proceeds, “In fact I never had a copy of the Tract; I only read it at the time.”
2. Secondly, as to the question of “amendments moved” by me, which he says ran to the number of 254, his using elsewhere the word “emendations” instead of what he calls “amendments,” seems to explain the difficulty of the wonderful number to which they ran. Not one “amendment” did I “move,” as far as I remember or believe; but it is very likely, from what he says, that at a preliminary meeting the intended Annual Report was read to the Committee, of whom I was one; and, though I recollect nothing about it now, perhaps or probably I objected to the conventional Evangelical phraseology in which it was drawn up, and the friends of its author on counting up my proposed “emendations” of style, found 254 words affected by my criticism. I am sure there was no moving, voting, and dividing upon them. If this explanation will not hold, I can give no other; anyhow, in the received meaning of the word, the notion of 254 amendments is absurd.
I am glad that in my lifetime so wholesale a charge has been made and refuted.
P.S.—The following letter to me from Mr. [Archdeacon] R. I. Wilberforce under the early date of Oct. 2, 1828, will illustrate my pamphlet. It shows that my criticism on the Church Missionary Society was that of others also, in the years during which I made it, and that I was doing nothing unreasonable or unfair in attempting to make the Society’s obedience to Episcopal authority a fact as well as a profession. Mr. Woodruff, I believe, was one of the chief officials of the Society in 1828.
Oct. 2, 1828.—I have just seen Woodruff here, who tells me that the only objection to such a rule as [Provost] Hawkins seemed to desiderate in the Church Missionary Society was, that it would seem to imply that such a principle was not what they had acted on hitherto. But they had always acted upon the general rule of conforming to the laws of the Church, and have therefore conceived that their missionaries would, of course, be under Episcopal authority. Is there any law of the kind you mention in the Propagation Society?—R. I. W.
What Dr. Hawkins and I, not to say Mr. R. I. Wilberforce, felt in 1828 and 1830, Mr. Hope Scott independently of us felt in 1837. This appears from a passage in the (unpublished) memoir of him, on which the Editor observes, “It is remarkable that, in the year 1830 Mr. Newman, as the Secretary of the Oxford Association of the Church Missionary Society, had already printed and circulated a pamphlet in the University, in behalf of this very subordination which Mr. Hope in 1837 advocated,” vol. i. p. 120.