The Oxford Movement; Twelve Years, 1833-1845Church, R. W. (Richard William)
Religion
The Oxford Movement; Twelve Years, 1833-1845
Church, R. W. (Richard William)
Oxford movement
the Memorial; or they were to be marked as showing their disloyalty to
it. The subscription was successful. The Memorial was set up, and stood,
a derisive though unofficial sign of the judgment of the University
against them.
But the "Memorial" made little difference to the progress of the
movement. It was an indication of hostility in reserve, but this was
all; it formed an ornament to the city, but failed as a religious and
effective protest. Up to the spring of 1839, Anglicanism, placed on an
intellectual basin by Mr. Newman, developed practically in different
ways by Dr. Pusey and Dr. Hook, sanctioned in theory by divines who
represented the old divinity of the English Church, like Bishop
Phillpotts and Mr. H.J. Rose, could speak with confident and hopeful
voice. It might well seem that it was on its way to win over the coming
generations of the English clergy. It had on its side all that gives
interest and power to a cause,--thought, force of character, unselfish
earnestness; it had unity of idea and agreement in purpose, and was
cemented by the bonds of warm affection and common sympathies. It had
the promise of a nobler religion, as energetic and as spiritual as
Puritanism and Wesleyanism, while it drew its inspiration, its canons of
doctrine, its moral standards, from purer and more venerable
sources;--from communion, not with individual teachers and partial
traditions, but with the consenting teaching and authoritative documents
of the continuous Catholic Church.
Anglicanism was agreed, up to this time--the summer of 1839--as to its
general principles. Charges of an inclination to Roman views had been
promptly and stoutly met; nor was there really anything but the
ignorance or ill-feeling of the accusers to throw doubt on the sincerity
of these disavowals. The deepest and strongest mind in the movement was
satisfied; and his steadiness of conviction could be appealed to if his
followers talked wildly and rashly. He had kept one unwavering path; he
had not shrunk from facing with fearless honesty the real living array
of reasons which the most serious Roman advocates could put forward.
With a frankness new in controversy, he had not been afraid to state
them with a force which few of his opponents could have put forth. With
an eye ever open to that supreme Judge of all our controversies, who
listens to them on His throne on high, he had with conscientious
fairness admitted what he saw to be good and just on the side of his
adversaries, conceded what in the confused wrangle of conflicting claims
he judged ought to be conceded. But after all admissions and all
concessions, the comparative strength of his own case appeared all the
more undeniable. He had stripped it of its weaknesses, its incumbrances,
its falsehoods; and it did not seem the weaker for being presented in
its real aspect and on its real grounds. People felt that he had gone to
the bottom of the question as no one had yet dared to do. He was yet
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