Subscription, Tract 90, and the Long Argument Over Meaning

Subscription turned the Articles into a test rather than a description, and the test was contested for as long as it was enforced. Clergy signed at ordination and again on institution to a benefice, and for a long stretch of English history those who could not sign were shut out of the universities as well as of the ministry. Anglicans of markedly different convictions each found the wording bearable, which is at once why the settlement held and why it was attacked from both flanks.

The sharpest test came in 1841, when John Henry Newman published Tract 90, arguing that the Articles condemned particular abuses rather than Catholic doctrine as such, and could therefore be signed in good conscience by a clergyman who held a great deal that Rome held. The heads of Oxford houses censured the tract, the Tracts for the Times ceased with it, and Newman was received into the Roman church four years later. The episode fixed a question that has not gone away: whether the Articles are a Reformed confession that later readers softened, or a document drafted from the start in terms several parties could sign.

The Articles also travelled. The American Episcopal church adopted them in 1801, omitting the article on the authority of General Councils and rewriting the article on civil government for a republic with no established religion, and the Episcopal Church now prints them among its historical documents rather than as a subscription standard. Several provinces of the Anglican Communion have never required subscription at all. The Church of England itself now asks its clergy for a general Declaration of Assent, affirming loyalty to the inheritance of faith to which the Articles, the Book of Common Prayer and the Ordinal bear witness, rather than assent to each article in turn.