Blessed Newman: "Children of the Movement of 1833, Come Home!"

Reading a number of items and discussions around the blogs of late I came across an interesting quotation from Blessed John Henry Newman. It was an interesting piece based upon his address to Anglicans concerning the audience of his 'Anglican Difficulties'. It was not, according to Newman, the National Church in England but those within the Movement of Anglo-Catholicism. That is very telling for today's Anglicans within that Movement who are deciding their futures in or out of the National Church. Newman writes,

the Lectures on the "Position of Catholics" have nothing to do with the Church of England, as such; they are directed against the Protestant or Ultra-Protestant Tradition on the subject of Catholicism since the time of Queen Elizabeth, in which parties indeed in the Church of England have largely participated, but which cannot be confused with Anglican teaching itself. Much less can that Tradition be confused with the doctrine of the Laudian or of the Tractarian School. I owe nothing to Protestantism; and I spoke against it even when I was an Anglican, as well as in these Catholic Lectures. If I spoke in them against the Church Established, it was because, and so far as, at the time when they were delivered the stablishment took a violent part against the Catholic Church, on the basis of the Protestant Tradition. Moreover, I had never as an Anglican been a lover of the actual Establishment; Hurrell Froude's Remains, in which it is called an "incubus" and "Upas Tree," will stand in evidence, as for him, so for me; for I was one of the {398} Editors. What I said even as an Anglican, it is not strange that I said when I was not. Indeed I have been milder in my thoughts of the Establishment ever since I have been a Catholic than before, and for an obvious reason;—when I was an Anglican, I
viewed it as repressing a higher doctrine than its own; and now I view it as keeping out a lower and more dangerous.

Then as to my Lectures on Anglican Difficulties. Neither were these formally directed against the National Church. They were addressed to the "Children of the Movement of 1833," to impress upon them, that, whatever was the case with others, their duty at least was to become Catholics, since catholicism was the real scope and issue of that Movement. "There is but one thing," I say, "that forces me to speak ... It will be a miserable thing for you and for me, if I have been instrumental in bringing you but half-way, if I have co-operated in removing your invincible ignorance, but am able to do no more."—p. 5. Such being the drift of the Volume, the reasoning directed against the Church of England goes no further than this, that it had no claims whatever on such of its members as were proceeding onwards with the Movement into the Catholic Church.