Jeremy Bentham's Church of Englandism and Its Catechism Examined gets a passing mention in Newman's Loss and Gain, so I went back and re-read it, and, holy moly, I had blocked out how much of an unhinged, lunatic, nearly eight-hundred-page rant it is. Bentham has a besetting sin in which he will often not provide any arguments for his position, merely classifying things in tendentious ways, and yet clearly thinks he is providing an argument by doing so; he also often, when he does deign to give an argument, clearly thinks he is speaking in a plain, literal way, when in reality load-bearing parts of his arguments almost always depend on metaphors and analogies. Church of Englandism takes both of these Benthamite traits and exponentializes them. But I also looked into some of the critial responses to the work, and they are sometimes a delight. The very best is the review in The British Critic for November 1818, which begins:
We have been very credibly informed, that Mr. Jeremy Bentham is an original thinker; and we are not inclined to doubt the assertion. We feel certain that he is a most profound thinker; for in many a part of this work before us, we have run out every fathom of our critical line, without once being fortunate enough to sound the bottom of a meaning. Words, as we have been taught, or so many signs and symbols of mental conceptions; and as we have no other means by which we can determine the quantity of such conceptions, unless through the medium of these signs and symbols, it is no unfair deduction, if we assert that unintelligible speaking is a proof of equally unintelligible thinking; in other words, that a man who writes in hieroglyphics, conceives in rebusses. Or to put the proposition in terms which Mr. Jeremy Bentham himself will not deny, unless, (which is not probable,) he supposes there can be any other authority equal to his own, "uncognoscibility being the end; indistinctness, voluminousness, confusion, and uncertainty, are so many means," Pref. xxxvii. We know not how we can put our readers more completely in possession of the present work (except excip; for where mischief is to be done this writer can speak plainly enough) than by the above appropriate quotation.
Mr. Jeremy Bentham is known to his own coterie of petty sophists and political quacks, as the author of a variety of treatises, more or less closely printed, published or unpublished, out of print, or waste paper, of which a "list hastily and imperfectly collected," is subjoined in his new volume. He has employed himself, at divers times, on morals, legislation, hard-labour, usury, mad-houses, taxation, special juries, perjury, economy, and parliamentary reform; and his depth of knowledge on each subject is said by those who have read his works, to be co-extensive with its variety -- a fact which we will not take upon ourselves to dispute, as we have no means of denying it. Moreover, he lives in a cock-loft, looking into the bird-cage walk; and as he cannot always make his countrymen understand the English, in which he thinks, he has occasionally employed a most respectable foreigner, to do it into French, for the benefit of our neighbours across the water.
From this slight sketch of the nature of Mr. Jeremy Bentham's lucubrations, our readers of course will be prepared for the impossibility of our attempting to present them with any detailed analysis of the contents of the work before us. As a literary phaenomenon it must always be regarded with curiosity; for except the lobster-cracking Bedlamite, we recollect no professed lunatic whose hallucinations have been published under his own immediate inspection; and they related more to physical than to moral effects....
The British Critic also had an association with Newman, although that came later. It was founded in 1793 by a bunch of High Church Anglicans who wanted to counteract ideas from the French Revolution and a public forum for discussing conservative Anglican ecclesiology. In the early 1810s, it was bought by Joshua Watson, the philanthropist, and Henry Handley Norris, the theologian, who were both key figures in the so-called Hackney Phalanx, a loosely strutured High-Church Tory group that was more actively engaged in reform and activism. (The review above is from this period.) For financial reasons, it combined with another review in 1826 to become officially The British Critic, Quarterly Theological Review, and Ecclesiastical Record. In the 1830s, it was having significant financial difficulties, and in 1836, Newman made a deal with Joshua Watson and the then-editor, James Shergold Boone, to provide them with authors who would write a portion of the review entirely for free. This led to The British Critic being a major vehicle for the Oxford Movement, and was arguably a more important, and perhaps more successful, and certainly less self-destructive, part of the Movement than Tracts for the Times. Nonetheless, Boone and Newman couldn't really agree on editorial matters, with the result that he resigned in 1837, to be replaced by Samuel Roffey Maitland, who soon after resigned. For all his many admirable qualities, including being famously sweet-tempered, it is a consistent feature of Newman's career that he was difficult to work with, in the paradoxical way that you would expect someone affable, headstrong, and arguably oversensitive to be. After Maitland, first Newman and then, in 1841, Thomas Mozley became editors, and the dominant editorial view of the review became rather bellicose, used less often to give a general High Church voice and more often for polemic about internal disputes in the broader High Church movement, and eventually came to an end in 1843.
