For, though the answer, in broad outline, was simple enough and derived its power from its very simplicity, it had to be worked out in detail under conditions of extreme present difficulty through a mass of complicated and, often, self-contradictory historical material. The present difficulties were given by the tangled constitution of the Church of England, the ambiguities of her Articles and formularies, the presence – within the same body – of powerful parties bitterly opposed to the new movement. The historical difficulties were given by the very causes which had produced the present difficulties – the war of influences from the Reformation onwards; and, to go farther back than this, by the long period during which the Church of England had been one with the Church of Rome. To what point, then, must the new reformers go back? The obvious answer might seem to be: to Christ and the New Testament. That was, in effect, the Evangelical answer. But, to the Tractarians, it was, obviously, the wrong answer. Christ had commissioned the apostles, but He had not provided them with a ready-made church. The formation of the church had been a gradual process – necessarily so, while the faith gradually possessed the Roman Empire. But, it had not been a haphazard, undirected process. The promise of the Father had been with the apostles and, after them, with the saints and fathers of the early church. The Holy Ghost had dictated the pattern of the divine society. It was, then, to the earliest centuries of Christianity, while the church was still one and undivided, before the first fatal schism of East and West had begun to develop, that Newman and his companions turned for the rediscovery of that divine pattern, still, as they held, preserved by God’s providence, more truly than elsewhere, in the Church of England. In the clumsy language of her Articles of Religion, “Holy Scripture containeth all things necessary to salvation.” But, this could not mean, as the Low Churchmen maintained, that the things necessary to salvation lay open on the face of Scripture to man’s unaided intelligence; still less could it mean that the services and sacraments of the church were unnecessary to salvation. The Word of God needed authoritative interpretation. And this interpretation was to be found in the writings, not only of the apostles, but of the early Christian fathers, and in the decisions of the Ecumenical Councils of the church, held at intervals from the fourth to the seventh centuries.
From: Oxford Apostles: A Character Study of the Oxford Movement by Geoffrey Faber; 2nd edition (Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1936 [1933]), pp. 322-323.
Geoffrey Cust Faber (1889-1961) was the founder of the Faber and Faber publishing house (1929) and its president until his death. He was also a published poet, novelist, and historian (along with the quoted work, he also published a well-received biography of Benjamin Jowett). He was a descendent of Frederick Faber (1814-1863), who was involved in the early days of the Oxford Movement.
