'The end of our ministry is to promote the glory of God': an 1826 episcopal charge and Tract Number 1

Now then let me come at once to the subject which leads me to address you. Should the Government and Country so far forget their GOD as to cast off the Church, to deprive it of its temporal honours and substance, on what will you rest the claim of respect and attention which you make upon your flocks? Hitherto you have been upheld by your birth, your education, your wealth, your connexions; should these secular advantages cease, on what must CHRIST'S Ministers depend? 

With these words, published on 9th September 1833, did Tracts for the Times begin. In the first of the Tracts, John Henry Newman painted a picture of a Church of England corrupted by the Georgian era. Its clergy were dependent, we are told, on "birth ... education ... wealth ... connexions". He issued a trumpet call to the parsons of the Georgian Church, "to draw you forth from those pleasant retreats" and that "idle habit" of relying upon "that secular respectability, or cultivation, or polish, or learning, or rank". Instead, Newman proclaimed, the clergy of the Church of England needed to be reminded that at ordination "you were made Ministers of CHRIST'S Church", that this was "your Divine commission".

The Tractarian dismissal of Georgian Anglicanism began here, with Tract Number 1. This shaped perhaps the single most influential claim of Tractarian historiography (shared, ironically, by many Anglican evangelicals): without the Tractarians (or the evangelicals), the Church of England would have continued to languish, its clergy dependent upon "secular respectability" to understand and underpin their ministry.

Seven years before Tract Number 1, in August 1826, Thomas Burgess, Bishop of Salisbury, was delivering the charge to his clergy in Salisbury Cathedral, during his primary visitation of the diocese. It was the last years of the Georgian era. Newman's trumpet call had not been sounded. Surely it must be the case, therefore, that the proceedings confirmed that the Church of England and its clergy were reliant on "birth ... education ... wealth ... connexions", understanding their ministry as resting upon what Newman dismissed as "their temporal distinctions".

The words of Bishop Burgess to his clergy revealed otherwise. He explicitly set forth a clear understanding of the divine commission of clergy:

Days of serious recollection (such as this, if rightly used, may be,) which bring us "to the law and to the testimony," to a faithful comparison of ourselves with our duties, of profession with principle, of the engagements, by which we solemnly bound ourselves at our Ordination, with the fulfilment of our promises, are calculated to answer the best of purposes. If we feel a conviction, that the end of our ministry is to promote the glory of God, and the salvation of mankind, we shall need no other consideration to impress us with a deep sense of the importance of our ministry, and the weight of our responsibility. We shall see at once that the glory of God will be most effectually promoted by the due discharge of our duties ...

Burgess was, in many ways, a typical late Georgian bishop. He was no evangelical (as will become clear later in the charge). Nor was there any sense in which his words were unusual or unexpected. This typical late Georgian bishop reminded his clergy of the solemn covenant and commission of ordination; of God's glory and the salvation of humanity being the purpose of the ordained ministry; of this underpinning the significance of the ordained ministry in the Church's life; of the minister's duties being concerned with God's glory.

Against this background, Newman's words in Tract Number 1 can be seen to be not a trumpet call but, rather, a partisan, self-serving justification for what would become Tractarianism. To create an identity for itself and to differentiate itself from the High Church tradition, Newman and Tractarianism needed the claims of Tract Number 1. It needed to be the case that the Georgian Church had little (if any) meaningful sense of the "Divine commission" of ordained ministers so that the Tractarians could be those who rescued the Church of England from Georgian somnolence. 

Bishop Burgess, however, reminds us that it was not so. That very Georgian scene in Salisbury Cathedral in August 1826 testifies to a spiritually vibrant understanding of ordained ministry - a state of affairs Newman and the Tractarians had to deny.