Occasional Papers: Selected from the Guardian, the Times, and the Saturday Review, 1846-1890, Vol. 2Church, R. W. (Richard William)
Religion
Occasional Papers: Selected from the Guardian, the Times, and the Saturday Review, 1846-1890, Vol. 2
Church, R. W. (Richard William)
Christianity; Church and state -- Great Britain; Great Britain -- Church history -- 19th century
He was an undergraduate at Brasenose at the height of the Oxford
movement. He was known there, so far as he was known at all, as a keen
partisan of the Evangelical school; and though no one then suspected
the power which was really in him, his party, not rich in men of
strength or promise, made the most of a recruit who showed ability and
entered heartily into their watchwords, and, it must be said, their
rancour. He was conspicuous among the young men of his standing for the
forwardness with which he took his side against "Tractarianism," and
the vehemence of his dislike of it, and for the almost ostentatious and
defiant prominence which he gave to the convictions and social habits
of his school He expressed his scorn and disgust at the "donnishness,"
the coldness, the routine, the want of heart, which was all that he
could see at Oxford out of the one small circle of his friends. He
despised the Oxford course of work, and would have nothing more to do
with it than he could help--as he lived to regret afterwards. Yet even
then he was in his tastes and the instinctive tendencies of his mind
above his party. He was an admiring reader of Wordsworth and Shelley;
he felt the strength of Aristotle and Plato; he is said to have
appreciated Mr. Newman's preaching, and to have gallantly defended what
he admired in him and his friends. His editor, indeed, Mr. Brooke,
appears to be a little divided and embarrassed, between his wish to
enforce Mr. Robertson's largeness of mind and heart, and his fear of
giving countenance to suspicions that he was ever so little inclined to
"High Churchism"; between his desire to show that Mr. Robertson
estimated the High Church leaders as much as an intelligent man ought,
and disliked their system as much as a sound-thinking Christian ought.
We should have thought that he need not be so solicitous to "set at
rest the question about Mr. Robertson's High Church tendencies." "I
hate High Churchism," was one of his latest declarations, when
professing his sympathy with individual High Churchmen. One thing,
however, is quite clear--that in his early life his partisanship was
thoroughgoing and unflinching enough to satisfy the fiercest and most
fanatical of their opponents. Such a representation as this is simply
misleading:--
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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