In the early nineteenth century, many of the
clergymen of the
Church of England, particularly those in high office, saw themselves as
latitudinarian (liberal). Conversely, many clergy in the parishes were
Evangelicals, as a result of the revival led by
John Wesley. Alongside this, the universities became the breeding ground for a movement to restore liturgical and devotional customs which
borrowed deeply from traditions before the
English Reformation, as well as from contemporary
Catholic traditions. The immediate impetus for the Tractarian movement was a perceived attack by the
reforming Whig administration on
established churches of the United Kingdom. The
Irish Church Temporalities Bill (1833) provided for the merging of dioceses and provinces of the
Church of Ireland and the elimination of
vestry assessment (
church rates or "parish cess", which allowed vestries, i.e. the local ecclesiastical government of a parish, to tax the entire population), a grievance in the
Tithe War. Some politicians and clergy (including a number of
Whigs) feared this as a preliminary to similar attacks on the Church of England, leading eventually to
disestablishment and loss of its endowments.
John Keble criticised these proposals as "
National Apostasy" in his
Assize Sermon in Oxford in 1833, in which he denied the authority of the
British Parliament to abolish
dioceses in Ireland. The
Gorham Case, in which
secular courts overruled an ecclesiastical court over a priest with unorthodox views on the efficacy of
infant baptism, was also deeply unsettling. Keble,
Edward Bouverie Pusey, Newman, and others began to publish a series known as
Tracts for the Times, which called the Church of England to return to the ways of the ancient and undivided church in matters of doctrine, liturgy and devotion. With a wide distribution and a price in pennies, the Tracts succeeded in drawing attention to the views of the Oxford Movement on points of doctrine, but also to its overall approach. The Tractarians postulated the
Branch Theory, which states that Anglicanism, along with
Eastern Orthodoxy and Catholicism, form three "branches" of the historic pre-
schism Catholic Church. Tractarians argued for the inclusion of traditional aspects of liturgy from medieval religious practice, as they believed the church had become too "plain". In the final tract, "
Tract 90", Newman argued that the doctrines of the Catholic Church, as defined by the
Council of Trent, were compatible with the
Thirty-Nine Articles of the 16th-century Church of England. Newman's eventual reception into the Catholic Church in 1845, followed by
Henry Edward Manning in 1851, had a profound effect on the movement, calling into question the
via media between
Low Church Anglicanism and Catholicism. ==Publications==