The Formation of ‘Parties’

Abstract

The reactions to changes in society typified by Newman and Arnold’s differing ecclesiastical visions continued to exercise members of the Church of England as the century progressed. The immense significance of the Tractarian revival has meant that much of the subsequent history of the Church of England has been the story of ‘Anglo-Catholicism’ and the various reactions to this movement. This has even been seen as a normative framework by which the Church’s fortunes should be evaluated. Bertrand Russell once said jokingly that his own Whig family believed that history started with the Reform Act of 1832, and at times a similar attitude has been taken, in some cases unwittingly, by historians of the Church of England who see Keble’s ‘Assize Sermon’ of 1833 in a similar light. The rise of the constellation of divines who stood in the Tractarian and later Anglo-Catholic tradition has to some extent been used to cast what preceded it into the gloom of worldliness and lack of spiritual impact in a manner similar to some Protestant histories of the Reformation which until recently denigrated the spirituality and achievements of the pre-Reformation Church. Thus, as Frances Knight has observed, Anglo-Catholicism and its various forms have been interpreted as that which saved the Church of England for the nation in the century after 1833.¹

Labels are devices for saving talkative persons the trouble of thinking.

Morley, J., Nineteenth-Century Essays, ed. Stansky, P. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970), 36, quoted in Turner, F.M. (1993d), 36