The Text as Sacrament: Victorian Broad Church Philology

¹ Conybeare, W.J., ‘Church parties’, in Taylor, S., ed., From Cranmer to Davidson. A Church of England Miscellany (Woodbridge, 1999 ), 340.

² Gladstone, Compare’s conviction that Homer was a parallel, if inferior, ‘revelation’ to the Bible: Matthew, H.C.G., Gladstone 1809–1874 (Oxford, 1986), 153 .

³ Annan, N.G., ‘The intellectual aristocracy’, in Plumb, J.H., ed., Studies in Social History (1955 ), 241–87.

⁴ Maurice, F., Life and Letters of F.D. Maurice, 2 vols (1884 ) is the standard biography; but see also McClain, F.M., Maurice, Man and Moralist (1972 ); on Hare, see Distad, N.M., Guessing at Truth. The Life of Julius Charles Hare (1795-1855) (Shcphcrdstown, WV, 1979 ).

⁵ Bromley, J., The Man of Ten Talents. A Portrait of Richard Chevenix Trench (1959 ), leans heavily on Trench, M., Letters and Memorials of Richard Chevenix Trench, Archbishop (1888 ).

⁶ See Farrar, R., The Life of Frederic William Farrar (1904 ).

⁷ See Jenkyns, R., Dignity and Decadence: Victorian Art and the Classical Inheritance (1991 ).

⁸ Hare, J.C., in Hare, J.C. and Hare, A.W., Guesses at Truth, new edn (1866 ), 68.

⁹ Trench, R.C., The Fitness of Holy Scripture for Unfolding the Spiritual Life of Men (Cambridge, 1845 ), 13.

¹⁰ Brent, R., Liberal Anglican Politics (Oxford, 1987 ), 165–6.

¹¹ J.C Hare, in Hare and Hare, Cuesses at Truth, 149.

¹² Ibid., 160.

¹³ Distad, Guessing at Truth, 79. To this must be added Duncan Forbes’s account of the theories of history shared by the Church, Broad, in his The Liberal Anglican Idea of History (Cambridge, 1952 ).

¹⁴ J.C. Hare, in Hare and Hare, Guesses at Truth, 525.

¹⁵ Distad, Guessing at Truth, 79.

¹⁶ For a comparison of these two ‘schools’, see Brent, Liberal Anglican Politics, 144–83. Brent’s account of ‘Liberal Anglicans’ ultimately leans much more heavily on the ‘Noctics’ than it docs on the Trinity’ circle.

¹⁷ H. Aarsleff, The Study of Language: England (1983), 223–43.

¹⁸ Hare and Hare, Guesses at Truth, 97–149.

¹⁹ Maurice, F.D., The Conscience. Lectures on Casuistry (1868 ), esp. ch. 1, ‘On the word “I”’, 1–23.

²⁰ Farrar, F.W., Chapters on Language (1865 ), 3.

²¹ Ibid., 7.

²² See especially Farrar, F.W., Essay on the Origin of Language (1860 ), ch. I, ‘The Origin of Language’. Farrar, who knew Darwin and preached his funeral sermon, may have been influenced by the application of evolutionary theory to human development. See also idem, Families of Speech (1874).

²³ Trench, R.C., On the Study of Words, 6th edn (1855 ), 17.

²⁴ Ibid., 10.

²⁵ Ibid., 16–17.

²⁶ Farrar, F.W., The Inspiration of Holy Scripture. An Exercise for the Degree of B.D. (printed in London, nd; deposited with Cambridge University Library), 29.

²⁷ Trench, Fitness of Holy Scripture, 15.

²⁸ F.W. Farrar, The History of Interpretation (1886), xiii.

²⁹ Ibid., xix-xx.

³⁰ Trench, Fitness of Holy Scripture, 22.

³¹ Coulson, J., Neivman and the Common Tradition (Oxford, 1970 ). Ironically Maurice himself did not so regard Bacon, seeing him instead as much a Platonist as a forerunner of empiricism: see Maurice, F.D., Moral and Metaphysical Philosophy, 2 vols, new edn (1873 ), 2:215. As H. Aarsleff has pointed out, the identification of Bacon as an empiricist is essentially a late nineteenth-century view: From Locke to Saussure (1982), 126.

³² Coulson, Newman, 9. More recently ‘analytical’ or ‘scientific’ language has been recognized as itself metaphorical; see especially Soskice, J.M., Metaphor and Religious Language (Oxford, 1985 ).

³³ Maurice, F.D., Thoughts on the Rule of Conscientious Subscription (Oxford, 1845 ), 12–13; see also Ramsey, I.T., On Being Sure in Religion (1963 ), 48–90 (quotation at 67).

³⁴ See Morris, J.N., ‘A social doctrine of the Trinity?A reappraisal of F.D. Maurice on eternal life’, Anglican and Episcopal History, 69 (2000 ), 73–100.

³⁵ Maurice, F.D., The Friendship of Books (1893 ), 25–7.

³⁶ John Locke, Essay on Human Understanding, 3.2.1, quoted in Harris, R. and Taylor, T.J., Landmarks in Linguistic Thought. 1. The Western Tradition from Socrates to Saussure, 2nd edn (1997 ), 126. The title of Maurice’s lecture may have been a deliberate echo of the title of the third book of Locke’s Essay, ‘Of Words’.

³⁷ Maurice, Friendship, 26. Maurice almost certainly misunderstood Locke, failing to take account of his defence of innate capacities; see Wolterstorff, N., John Locke and the Ethics of Belief (Cambridge, 1996 ), and Sell, A.P.F., John Locke and the Eighteenth-Century Divines (Cardiff, 1997 ).

³⁸ Tooke, in his Epea pteroenta, or, The diversions of Purley (1786, 1798; modern edn, 1993) was widely assumed to have developed Locke’s ideas about language into a compact system of theoretical linguistics; see C. Bewley and D. Bewley, Cattleman Radical: a Life of John Home Tooke, 1736–1812 (1998).

³⁹ Maurice, Friendship, 39.

⁴⁰ Ibid., 40.

⁴¹ Ibid., 42–4.

⁴² Ibid., 44–5.

⁴³ Ibid., 45.

⁴⁴ Modern applications of the Platonic idea of a scale of ascent include Austin Farrer’s ‘doctrine of the cone’ in The Glass of Vision (Glasgow, 1948), 19–30, though Maurice would not have accepted Farrer’s implicit sharp contrast between nature and supernature.

⁴⁵ Maurice, Friendship, 265.

⁴⁶ Maurice, Conseience, 14.

⁴⁷ For John Wolf, Maurice saw revelation as ‘self-authenticating’: Wolf, W.J., ‘Frederick Dcnison Maurice’, in Wolf, W.J., Booty, J.E., and Thomas, O.C., The Spirit of Anglicanism: Hooker, Maurice and Temple (Edinburgh, 1982 ), 78.

⁴⁸ Maurice, F.D., The Patriarchs and Lawgivers of the Old Testament (2nd edn, 1855 ), 333.

⁴⁹ Maurice, F.D., The Kingdom of Christ, or Hints to a Quaker respecting the Principles, Constitution and Ordinances of the Catholic Church, 2 vols (4th edn, 1891 ), 2:178.

⁵⁰ ‘[When] our pride is taken down … then once again may He speak to us out of the Book, and make us understand that He is the centre of that unity to us which all our schemes and theories about the Bible have been seeking to dissolve’: Maurice, F.D., The Acts of the Apostles (1894 ), 280.

⁵¹ Maurice, F.D., Sequel to the Inquiry, What is Revelation? (1860 ), 15.

⁵² London, King’s College Archive, Box 5037-M4-R: F.D. Maurice to Sara Coleridge, 1 March 1844.

⁵³ See Aarsleff, Study of Language: England.

⁵⁴ Maurice, F.D., Theological Essays, 3rd edn (1881 ), 396.

⁵⁵ The pertinent text, in addition to the Theological Essays, is Maurice, F.D., The Word ‘Eternal’ and the Punishment of the Wicked (Cambridge, 1853 ). See also Morris, ‘A social doctrine’, 80–1.

⁵⁶ Aarsleff, Study of Language: England, 73.

⁵⁷ Ibid., 127.

⁵⁸ See Sanders, C.R., Coleridge and the Broad Church Movement (Durham, NC, 1942 ) and Vidler, A.R., F.D. Maurice and Company. Nineteenth-Century Studies (1966 ).

⁵⁹ Farrar, History of Interpretation, 422.

⁶⁰ Proceedings of the Philological Society, 1 (1844), i.

⁶¹ Ibid., 1–5.