The politics of Tract Number 1 and the Old High Church vision

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

The rallying cry of Tract Number 1, authored by Newman and published on 9th September 1833, holds a special place in Tractarian historiography.  Here was refreshing catholic clarity after the (at best) uncertain trumpet of the Hanoverian Church.  Following what Newman would later call "the last miserable century", this was the recovery of the catholic vision of priesthood based upon "the doctrine of APOSTOLICAL SUCCESSION", in place of those hopelessly worldly Hanoverian parsons dependent upon "birth ... education ... wealth ... connexions".

This suggestion would have come as something of a surprise to those listening 17 years earlier to John Hume Spry's Bampton Lectures, Christian Unity Doctrinally and Historically Considered.  Spry - member of the Hackney Phalanx, rector of Marylebone, 'high and dry' - was a thoroughly Hanoverian parson.  His second lecture, however, was a robust reminder that the Hanoverian High Church tradition, no less than the rather excited Newman in September 1833, understood - in the words of Tract 1 - "the real ground on which our authority is built,— OUR APOSTOLICAL DESCENT".  Spry's second lecture was entitled 'The Christian Priesthood' and asserted in similar fashion:

That the Church, from the first, possessed a form of government of its own, in its origin and its object independent of the civil institutions of the countries, in which it existed, is a matter of fact; to be proved, as all facts are, by reference to authentic history. That this form of government was originally established under divine direction, and that it was administered by persons, whom Christ himself authorised to exercise it; that these persons, acting under the same guidance, appointed their assistants and successors in the ministry, expressly enjoining them to consecrate others.

Newman in Tract 1 pointed to the dominical words from John 20:22-23, used at the Ordination of Priests, as exemplifying both the divine institution of "the Christian Ministry" and apostolic succession.  This is also what Spry sees in the dominical words:

No form of words can be conceived capable of impressing our minds with a higher idea of apostolic authority than this commission, which constitutes them, not only the pastors and teachers, but the lawgivers and judges of that Church, which they were to found ... the authority, with which the ministers of his word were invested, was not temporary, but permanent; that it was not granted to the Apostles only, to enable them to build the Church, but to their successors also, throughout all ages, that they might up hold and preserve the edifice entrusted to their care.

For Newman, the dominical commission bestowed the authority "the power to bind and to loose, to administer the Sacraments, and to preach".  This too was Spry's understanding of ministerial authority:

In addition to this judicial authority, they performed all the offices of the priesthood; preaching, baptizing, administering the Lord 's Supper, and offering up the common devotions of the disciples in their public congregations.

Newman emphasised that the right of bishops to ordain was dependent upon apostolic succession: "He could not give what he had never received".  Spry was no less explicit:

There is not however, it may be confidently affirmed, any historical fact, capable of more complete authentication than this; that the Apostles appointed a superior order of men in the Church, to whom alone, among other peculiar privileges, was committed the power of continuing their own succession, and that of the other members of the priesthood.

Because ordination was "a divine ordinance", Newman declared "it must be necessary". This too was Spry's claim:

shall we suppose, that an hierarchy, confessedly of apostolic origin , received as such by the whole Church for fifteen hundred years, and considered as essential, not only to its welfare, but to its very existence, as a divinely constituted society.

"Hitherto you have been upheld by your birth, your education, your wealth, your connexions."  Newman's words in Tract 1 suggest that from the outset Tractarians were engaged in promoting an inherently flawed view of their predecessors.  Why?  This was due to the catastrophic experience of 1828-32, the undoing of the Anglican Constitution.  As J.C.D. Clark states, "the effect of the measures of 1828-32 was to open the floodgates to a deluge of Whig-radical reforms aimed against the characteristic institutions of the ancien regime ... Above all, Whig and radical attack focussed on the Church". Thus, in Tract 1, Newman would lament:

A notion has gone abroad, that they can take away your power. They think they have given and can take it away. They think it lies in the Church property, and they know that they have politically the power to confiscate that property. They have been deluded into a notion that present palpable usefulness, produceable results, acceptableness to your flocks, that these and such like are the test of your Divine commission ... To remain neuter much longer will be itself to take a part. Choose your side; since side you shortly must, with one or other party, even though you do nothing. Fear to be of those, whose line is decided for them by chance circumstances, and who may perchance find themselves with the enemies of CHRIST, while they think but to remove themselves from worldly politics. Such abstinence is impossible in troublous times.

The contrast with Spry, writing over a decade before the dismantling of the Anglican Constitution, is stark.  Spry says of the Church of England:

Not only has she been enabled to “keep that which was committed to her trust;" to preserve her scriptural doctrine, her holy worship, her episcopal constitution; but, while misery and unhappiness have prevailed around her, she has rejoiced in the temporal prosperity, as well as the spiritual edification, of her children.

Later in his seventh and eighth lectures, Spry will sound some alarm concerning "the progress of popular delusion", "the growing evil with which we have to contend", "this general indifference", but could nevertheless affirm:

from external attacks she has comparatively little to apprehend.

The difference between Spry's Bampton Lectures and Newman's Tract 1 was self-evidently not doctrinal.  Newman's implication that his predecessors in the Hanoverian Church justified their ministry in Erastian terms was self-serving nonsense.  It was, rather, the collapse of the Anglican Constitution which separated Tract 1 from Spry's Bampton Lectures.  Even while acknowledging growing threats, Spry could yet refer to "our venerable establishment".  Newman could not.  While Spry deployed robust doctrinal affirmation of the apostolic succession to justify establishment and "temporal prosperity", Newman - like Keble, a Tory profoundly shocked by the events of 1828-32 - invoked the same doctrine against the Whig regime, as "Government and Country so far forget their God as to cast off the Church".

Tract Number 1, then, can be seen not as an expression of 'catholic revival' but as the deployment of well-established and broadly accepted High Church doctrine against a particular set of political circumstances.  In other words, it - no less than the Hanoverian High Church tradition - was grounded in political and constitutional experience.  Slightly more provocatively, we might even suggest that it was a thoroughly reactionary response which would lead to a retreat into sectarian verities, abandoning state and commonwealth to utilitarian forces rather than seeking to reconstruct a classically Anglican vision of the Church enabling state and commonwealth to be ordered towards the Good, the True and the Beautiful.  In its shock at recent political events, Tract Number 1 forgot what Spry had described as "the decent splendour of our national establishment".