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
In the case of the family, such action could only lead to
daily misery and the wasting and dying out of home affections. In the
case of a Church, it must come to the sundering of ties which ought no
longer to bind. Mr. Ward all along insisted that there was no necessity
for looking forward to such an event. He wished to raise, purify, reform
the Church in which Providence had placed him; utterly dissatisfied as
he was with it, intellectually and morally, convinced more and more that
it was wrong, dismally, fearfully wrong, it was his duty, he thought, to
abide in it without looking to consequences; but it was also his duty to
shake the faith of any one he could in its present claims and working,
and to hold up an incomparably purer model of truth and holiness. That
his purpose was what he considered real reform, there is no reason to
doubt, though he chose to shut his eyes to what must come of it. The
position was an unnatural one, but he had great faith in his own
well-fenced logical creations, and defied the objections of a homelier
common sense. He was not content to wait in silence the slow and sad
changes of old convictions, the painful decay and disappearance of
long-cherished ties. His mind was too active, restless, unreserved. To
the last he persisted in forcing on the world, professedly to influence
it, really to defy it, the most violent assertions which he could
formulate of the most paradoxical claims on friends and opponents which
had ever been made.
Mr. Ward's influence was felt also in another way; though here it is not
easy to measure the degree of its force. He was in the habit of
appealing to Mr. Newman to pronounce on the soundness of his principles
and inferences, with the view of getting Mr. Newman's sanction for them
against more timid or more dissatisfied friends; and he would come down
with great glee on objectors to some new and startling position, with
the reply, "Newman says so," Every one knows from the _Apologia_ what
was Mr. Newman's state of mind after 1841--a state of perplexity,
distress, anxiety; he was moving undoubtedly in one direction, but
moving slowly, painfully, reluctantly, intermittently, with views
sometimes clear, sometimes clouded, of that terribly complicated
problem, the answer to which was full of such consequences to himself
and to others. No one ever felt more keenly that it was no mere affair
of dexterous or brilliant logic; if logic could have settled it, the
question would never have arisen. But in this fevered state, with mind,
soul, heart all torn and distracted by the tremendous responsibilities
pressing on him, wishing above everything to be quiet, to be silent, at
least not to speak except at his own times and when he saw the
occasion, he had, besides bearing his own difficulties, to return
off-hand and at the moment some response to questions which he had not
framed, which he did not care for, on which he felt no call to
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