What Is Anglicanism? (Part 5)

The Ancient Roots

If Episode 4 was the Evangelicals out in the mines, this one is the Anglo-Catholics down in the slums. Candles and incense, yes, but also cholera and soup kitchens and priests who stayed when everyone else ran.

Here’s Episode 5.

The Priest Who Stayed

Picture the worst street in London in the 1860s. Down by the docks, in the east end, where families are packed ten to a room, where the drains run open in the street, and where every few years the cholera comes through and takes the children first. Respectable London does not come here. And when the sickness comes, anyone who can afford to get out, gets out.

But there is a priest who does not get out. His name might be Charles Lowder, or Alexander Mackonochie, or any of a handful of young men who made the same strange choice in those years. He has walked away from a comfortable life to come and live in this. He runs a soup kitchen, a school, a club for working men. And when the cholera comes, he stays. He goes house to house. He sits with the dying. He buries the dead that no one else will touch.

And then on Sunday, in a plain mission church in the middle of all that squalor, he does something that gets him called a fanatic, and a traitor, and a secret agent of the pope, and that eventually gets him dragged into an actual courtroom. He lights candles on the altar. He puts on beautiful robes. He swings a censer of incense. He bows low before the bread and the wine. Why? Because he believes, with everything in him, that the poorest and dirtiest and most forgotten people in England deserve the most beautiful worship in England. That the God who once came down into a stable has come down into this street too, and is truly present here, in the bread on this altar, for these people.

They threw stones at him in the early days. The authorities of his own church prosecuted him. And the people of the slum, who had every reason in the world to distrust a gentleman in strange robes, came to love him, because he stayed when everyone else ran.

That is where we are going today, and it is going to surprise you, because it is the high-church half of a story whose low-church half we just told. Last time the gospel went out to the coal miners in the open fields. This time it goes down into the slums, in candles and incense and soup. Same pulse. Opposite hands. And to understand how a priest ended up swinging incense over the cholera dead in the London docks, we have to go back to a single sermon, preached in Oxford thirty years earlier, that almost no one expected to start a revolution.

The Problem, from the Other Side

Welcome back. If you were with us last time, you watched the church get a jolt of warmth, the Evangelical revival, the new birth, the gospel felt in the chest and not just held in the head, carried out to end a slave trade. Today is the strange mirror of that. Because at almost the same moment in history, a different group entirely looked at the same comfortable, half-asleep Church of England and came to a completely different diagnosis. The Evangelicals thought the church had lost its warmth. These people thought it had lost its depth.

By the 1830s, to a lot of people, the Church of England had come to look less like a holy mystery and more like a branch of the British government. Bishops sat in Parliament. Church appointments were political favors. And in 1833 the government announced it was going to abolish ten bishoprics in Ireland with a stroke of the legislative pen, as casually as closing ten post offices, without so much as asking the church. To a young Oxford priest named John Keble, that was the last straw. It meant the nation now treated the church as just another government department, or, in his words, as merely one sect among many. The supernatural thing, the divine thing, was draining out of it.

So in July of 1833, Keble stood up in the university church in Oxford and preached a sermon he called National Apostasy. And his point was thunderous and simple. The church is not a creature of the state. It is a divine society, with its authority from heaven, and Parliament has no business treating it like furniture. A few days later he and a small band of Oxford men made a pledge to one another to defend two things: the apostolic succession, and the integrity of the Prayer Book. One of them, a young priest named Newman, would always say the movement was born that day.

And to spread the word they started publishing. Cheap little pamphlets, a few pennies each, called Tracts for the Times, ninety of them over eight years, hammering away at one big idea: that the Church of England needed to remember it was an ancient, catholic, apostolic church, and go back to its deepest roots. Because of those tracts, the whole movement got a nickname that stuck. The Tractarians.

This is our old pattern again, the one this whole series keeps circling. A church goes quiet and respectable and a little dead, and somebody reaches for the pulse. We have watched it happen through the beauty of holiness, and through the new birth in the open fields. Now watch it happen one more time, by going down to the ancient foundations.

Going Down to the Roots

So what did these Oxford men recover? Two great things, and the second one is what our slum priest went to court for.

The first was the conviction that the church is a divine society. Not a club, not a department, not a national tradition of nice music and good manners, but a living body founded by Christ, with a real, supernatural authority that does not come from the state and cannot be taken away by it. And the proof of that, for them, was the apostolic succession. That phrase just means this: that the bishops of the church stand in an unbroken line, hands laid on heads laid on heads, going all the way back to the apostles and to Christ himself. So even if Parliament cut the church loose tomorrow, stripped it of every privilege, the church would still have a claim on you, because it is not England’s church. It is God’s.

And to ground that, they went back to the ancient church. Hard. They believed the cure for a thin, respectable, modern Christianity was to drink again from the oldest wells, the early church Fathers, the teachers of the first few centuries. They had a name for what they were reaching for: the ancient and undivided church. That word undivided. They meant the church of those first several centuries, before it had been torn apart, before East and West broke from each other, and long before the West shattered at the Reformation. Back when, in principle at least, there was simply one church. And their conviction was that the faith held in common by that early, undivided church is bedrock, the floor we are all still standing on.

And they did not just admire it, they did the work. Newman, Keble, Pusey and their friends launched a project to translate the Fathers into English, volume after volume, some four dozen in the end, so ordinary clergy could read them for themselves. And something here is easy to get wrong. This reach back to the early church was not some foreign Roman novelty smuggled into Anglicanism. We have watched it since the beginning, Jewel against Rome, and most of all the Caroline Divines of episode three, who reached back to the Fathers for the very beauty of holiness. The Tractarians were not inventing a new appeal. They were turning it all the way up, looking straight back to those men as their own grandparents.

But the movement reached back further than its grandparents, and not everything it found there was the early, undivided church. There was also a parallel set of enthusiasts, over at Cambridge, who had fallen in love with the Middle Ages, the soaring Gothic churches, the candles and vestments and incense, the whole look and feel we now picture as Anglo-Catholic. And do not hear medieval as a synonym for backward when I say that. Those were centuries of real faith and real thought, the age of the great cathedrals and of Thomas Aquinas. But this was no longer the ancient, undivided church that everyone could still stand on. This was the medieval West.

And here is where it got genuinely hard. Some of what came back, in that ceremonial and in the devotion underneath it, was exactly what the Reformers had cleared away on purpose, three centuries before, and for reasons they had been willing to die for. So this was never quite the smooth, seamless continuity its friends wanted it to be. It set off a fight, and the fight was real, because the question underneath it was real. Can you reach back to the ancient and the medieval church, and bring this much of it home, and still be the church of Cranmer and the Articles and the Prayer Book?

Some of them spent their whole lives saying yes, and they had a real argument for it. There was a church in England long before the Reformation, they pointed out, centuries of it. The English church did not begin in 1559. So who is to say the things stripped out in the fifteen hundreds cannot be Anglican too? Why should the church be frozen at the moment of its reforming? They were willing to live with the church half-resolved, catholic in much of its life and Protestant in its Articles, and call the whole thing home. And the most gifted of them tried to live there too, harder than anyone. And in the end he could not, and he left.

Grace You Can Touch

Now for that second recovery, the one our slum priest was willing to go to court for. The Tractarians put the sacraments back at the dead center of the Christian life. Baptism, and above all the Holy Communion, not as a nice symbol, or a fond memory, but as the beating heart of everything, the place where heaven touches earth and Christ actually gives himself to his people. A church that had let the Communion dwindle to a few times a year had, they believed, forgotten what it was for. So they brought it back to the center, weekly, even daily. And that part was not an innovation at all. It was Cranmer’s own wish, finally honored. The man who gave England the Prayer Book had longed for his people gathered often at the Lord’s table, and three centuries later these men were simply taking him at his word.¹

And something about that recovery is easy to miss in all the argument about ceremony. At its best it was the very opposite of earning. What they recovered was the conviction that grace is not only something that happens inside you, in the heart or the quiet of the soul, but something God hands you from outside yourself, in water and bread and wine.

Think of the baby at the font. That baby is not earning anything, not deciding anything, not contributing anything. Grace is simply being done to her, poured over her, while she does nothing but get wet and cry. It is grace you can touch, grace that comes at you from the outside, gift on top of gift.

And the Communion is the same, Christ giving himself to people who could never deserve it. That is why our slum priest believed the cholera-stricken poor deserved the most beautiful worship in England, precisely because they could earn none of it, and grace is free. That is the depth these men were reaching for, and it is grace all the way down.

And yet, there is one honest cost worth naming, because it is the one place I’d push back. In recovering so vividly the grace that comes through the sacraments, some of them grew wary of the plainest grace of all, the freeing word Cranmer had fought and bled for, that we are put right with God by faith alone, before we have done one holy thing or received one sacrament. Their worry was not silly. They had seen that grace go cheap, presumed on, asked nothing of. But the cure for cheap grace was never less grace. And a Christian who lives on the Comfortable Words, or on Amazing Grace, feels that one loosening, even while grateful for everything else they recovered.

Newman Goes to Rome

John Henry Newman was, by most accounts, the most luminous mind the Church of England produced in that century, and one of the great preachers in its whole history. From the pulpit of the university church in Oxford he preached so quietly and so piercingly that men remembered single sentences for the rest of their lives, and arranged their whole week around hearing him. He gave the movement its theology, its confidence, and much of its beauty. If you wanted one person to stand for everything the Oxford men recovered, it would be him.

Which is what makes what happened so hard. Newman had built the grand theory of Anglicanism as the via media, the middle way, catholic but not Roman, reformed but not Protestant. And in 1841 he set out to prove it could hold, in the last and most explosive of the tracts, Tract 90. He took the Thirty-Nine Articles, the Reformation-era statement written precisely to fix the church as Protestant. And he argued that even they could be read in line with much of Roman Catholic teaching. It was the whole project at full stretch: the attempt to show that you could hold all of this catholic depth and still sit honestly inside the church’s own Protestant formularies. And it is exactly there that the project broke. The bishops condemned it, the university condemned it, and Newman himself, watching his own argument strain against the plain words of the Articles, began slowly and in agony to doubt the whole thing.

Others could live with that tension, a church catholic in its heart and Protestant on paper, never fully resolved. Newman could not. The longer he stared at his via media the more it looked to him like a beautiful fiction, a halfway house he could not make himself live in. In October of 1845 he was received into the Roman Catholic Church. He would become a cardinal, and much later, a saint.

I want to be as fair to him as we were to the Puritans and the Methodists who, in their own ways, also walked away. He was no traitor and no coward. He was a man of staggering integrity who followed the truth, at the cost of nearly everything, friends and position and his whole world, to where he was convinced it actually lived. We can grieve the loss and still honor the conscience. He is the great high-church leaver, as the Methodists were the great low-church ones. Someone always goes, in this story, and it is one of its quiet heartbreaks. And the church he left was poorer for it, because the gift he carried out the door, that piercing, week-shaping preaching, was one of the very things this church most needs to keep.

The Movement Goes to the Slums

But the movement did not leave with Newman.

When Newman went to Rome, two men were left holding it together, and one of them had shown, years before, exactly what he thought mattered. The first was Edward Pusey, a quiet, learned, grieving Oxford professor, so central that for a while the whole movement was nicknamed after him, Puseyism. The second was John Keble, the man who had lit the fuse in the first place with that sermon back in 1833.

And Keble was famous long before any of it. He was the author of a book of devotional poems so beloved that Victorian families kept it on the shelf right next to the Bible, The Christian Year, which ran through edition after edition and made him a household name. He had already turned down a comfortable post pressed on him by the bishop who called him the most eminently good man in the church. And then, in 1836, with the tracts still coming off the press, he did the most un-Newman thing imaginable. He went to a country parish called Hursley, where he stayed for the last thirty years of his life. He taught at the village school. He held daily services. He visited his people with his Bible in his hand.

If that pattern sounds familiar, it should, because we have met this man before in a different century. He is an heir of George Herbert from episode three, the poet-priest who chooses the small, rooted, hidden life on purpose and finds God waiting in it. Where Newman’s brilliance carried him out to Rome, Keble’s quiet faithfulness kept him in, an Anglican to the last, until they buried him at Hursley and the whole village wore black.

And here is what the next generation did that neither Oxford nor Cambridge had done alone. The Oxford men were plain in their worship, Newman in a surplice, Pusey wary of ceremony. The Cambridge men loved the beauty and kept it in their churches. It was their heirs who married Oxford’s theology to Cambridge’s beauty, took the doctrine of the sacrament and gave it a body you could see and smell, and carried the whole thing into the streets.

And that is where our slum priest finally comes back into focus, because this movement revived things the country had not seen since the Reformation. Back in Oxford, Pusey helped refound religious orders, monks and nuns both, and among the women who led them was Priscilla Lydia Sellon, who took gentlewomen down into the cholera slums and never recovered. It was often these sisters who went straight into the worst of it, first in when the cholera hit and last to leave, nursing the wards no one else would enter, holding the hand of a dying dockworker whose own family had fled the room. They asked for nothing, and most of their names never made the histories at all. But the poor of those parishes knew them, and buried them with more grief than they gave the bishops. And a wave of young priests took the whole vision, the beauty, the sacrament, the daily Communion, the candles and the incense, and they did not take it to fashionable parishes. They took it to the worst slums in England. They believed that the dignity of beautiful worship belonged first to the people with no dignity left, and they backed it up with soup kitchens and schools and clothing funds.

And they knew exactly what they were doing. The Oxford men had written tracts, and a dockworker was never going to read a tract. But he could see. He could smell. He could kneel in a room full of candlelight and know, without a single word, that something worth everything was happening here. Beauty was how the gospel reached the people the books could never reach.

And they preached. Not down to the poor but straight at them, the same piercing, soul-searching preaching Newman had been famous for, now aimed at dockworkers and washerwomen instead of Oxford dons. It went to the slums.

So set the two episodes side by side. Last episode, the Evangelicals took their grace out of the church and into Parliament and broke a slave empire. This episode, the Anglo-Catholics took their grace out of the church and into the slums and stayed with the dying. The low church reached the lost through the open field. The high church reached them through the altar. It is the same living faith, reaching into the whole of life, the same pulse in two completely different chests.

The ceremony these priests loved horrified a lot of their fellow Anglicans, who saw it as Rome creeping back in. And their objection was not only about incense. Underneath it was a real theological claim, that this ceremonial carried doctrine with it, a sacrifice offered again on the altar, an adoration of the bread and the wine, the very things the Reformers had died refusing. They were not wrong that something was being brought back. That was the whole argument.

This touched old wounds, and it still does. There were riots. There were lawsuits. Parliament eventually passed a law to regulate worship, and a few of these priests were sent to prison over how they conducted a church service. Mackonochie, from our cold open, was hounded through the courts for years and called the martyr of St Alban’s.

And I do not want to pick a side in that fight. There was a Bishop of London at the time, a Low Church man who disliked the ritual intensely, and even he is remembered for admitting that he could not help admiring what these priests were doing for the poor, the light they carried into hard and troubled lives, and only wishing they would calm down about the candles. That is the fairest summary I know. One side saw holy beauty offered to the forgotten. The other saw doctrine the Reformation had bled to be rid of, coming back in through the side door. Both were sincere.

Grace All the Way Down

So stand back with me, because we have arrived somewhere, and you can see the whole shape now.

We started this series with one man, Cranmer, and one inheritance, carried in prayer and preaching and theology. And we have watched that one church get pulled, again and again, in what look like opposite directions. A wide settlement with room to disagree. The beauty of holiness. The warmth of the new birth. And now the ancient depths of the sacrament and the Fathers. And here, at the end of the nineteenth century, all of those are still in the building. The low church that wants the gospel preached and felt. The high church that wants the ancient sacramental depth. The broad church that wants room for honest questions. Three streams, sometimes glaring at each other across the aisle, and all of them, somehow, still one church. We have spent real time now with two of them, the low and the high, the warmed heart and the ancient roots. The third, the broad church, the party that trusts the open and questioning mind, we have only glimpsed in passing. It is the one we turn to next.

And every single one of them, at its best, was doing the same thing. Reaching for the pulse. Refusing to let Christianity settle into a respectable, comfortable hum. The Evangelical in the field and the Anglo-Catholic at the slum altar would have argued furiously about almost everything. But they were blood relatives, because both of them looked at a sleepy church and said, no, there is a living God here, and a living faith, and I am going to go find the heartbeat. Cranmer’s three gifts all came through it. The prayer, now carried in a richer, more sacramental worship. The preaching, still on fire, in a low-church field and a high-church pulpit alike. And the theology, gone down into the ancient Fathers.

And here is the part to say plainly. Most of what those priests were mocked and jailed for has simply become the church. The weekly Communion. The reverence. The sense that grace is not only spoken to you but handed to you, something you can touch. You will find all of it now in parishes of every stripe, including ones that would never in a hundred years call themselves Anglo-Catholic.

And the plainest proof is one you have sung. The same instinct that sent these men down into the Fathers sent them down into the church’s oldest songs. One of them, John Mason Neale, hauled a thousand years of Latin and Greek hymns into English so gently the seams never show. O come, O come, Emmanuel. All glory, laud, and honour. That is this movement, in your mouth, every Advent and every Palm Sunday. And when the church gathered its songs into one great book, the two traditions that gave it the most were this one and the Methodists. Even the songbook is a big tent.

And then they gave it away to everyone, including the people still arguing with them. That is not a small thing to receive.

Empty Hands

Underneath all of it, under the candles and the incense and the ancient words, was the thing this whole series keeps coming home to. Grace. Not grace you reach up and take. Grace handed down, from the outside, into hands that could not earn it. That was the whole scandal of it, and the slum priest understood it better than his accusers ever did. He carried the most beautiful worship in England down to the people with the least claim on anything, the dockworkers, the washerwomen, the families ten to a room, the children the cholera was about to take. And when they asked him why, why spend gold and music and incense on people the whole world had written off, the answer was the gospel itself. Because they could earn none of it. Because that is exactly who grace is for.

So picture him one last time. Not in the courtroom where they tried him, and not under the stones they threw. Picture him in the worst street in London, in a plain mission church with candles on the altar, putting a piece of bread into the open hands of a dying woman who has nothing left, who cannot pay for it, who cannot even clean herself up first, and telling her that this, this, is the body of Christ, given for her. That is what they went to court for. That is what the candles were always about. Not beauty you climb up to. Beauty poured out, on the people who could never reach it, by a God who came all the way down.

And do not stand outside that picture either, as though it belonged only to her. We come to that same altar exactly as she did, with nothing in our hands, because that is the only way anyone has ever come. However high we have climbed or how far we reckon we have fallen, not one of us can buy what is handed to us there. We can only kneel down beside her, with our hands as empty as hers, and be given it. She knew that. It is the one thing the dying always know, and the one thing the rest of us spend our whole lives trying to forget.

And that grace did not stop at the slum, or at any altar in England. It was about to do the most unlikely thing of all. It was about to get loose in the whole world.

Next time, we meet that third stream at last. While the Evangelicals were out in the open fields and the Anglo-Catholics were down in the slums, a third group looked at the same church and decided that what it most needed was not warmth and not depth, but honesty. The nerve to face the hard new questions of the modern age without flinching and without lying. They are the broad church, the party of the believing mind, and they carry the worst reputation of the three, and, at their best, they deserve far better than it. We will meet them, and a bishop who would not lie to the man across his table even when the truth cost him everything. And then, at the very last, we will follow the whole story to where it finally comes to rest.

Thanks for listening. I’m glad you’re here.

John Keble, engraving after a portrait drawing by George Richmond, 1844. Keble College, Oxford. John Henry Newman, by George Richmond, chalk, 1844, NPG 1065 © National Portrait Gallery, London. Edward Bouverie Pusey, Rosa Corder, 1875, Keble College, Oxford. Art UK. Alexander Mackonochie, Vanity Fair, 31 December 1870, chromolithograph after Carlo Pellegrini ("Ape").

For Alexander Mackonochie, drawn for Vanity Fair in December 1870. The line printed beneath it read: “He makes religion a tragedy, and the movements of his muscles a solemn ceremony.”

Look at what the mockery goes after. Not his theology. His body. The artist drew him at prayer, eyes down, hands folded, and made the drawing itself the punchline. The magazine and the priest agreed entirely about what was happening in that church. They disagreed only about whether it was holy or ridiculous.

He was already being hauled through the courts when this was drawn. It went on for the rest of his ministry.

1. One place they did innovate, and I think overcorrected. Some of them ranked the Communion so far above everything else that the sermon became almost preparatory, which goes past Cranmer, whose Prayer Book holds word and sacrament together. But look at what they inherited, preaching in every parish and Communion four times a year, and the overstatement makes sense, because they threw their whole weight at the neglected side. The irony is that the men talking down the sermon were some of the finest preachers in England, Newman first among them.