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 investigations which may be endlessly diversified, does intellect
properly come in and give its help? For come in somewhere, of course it
must; and the conspicuous dominance of the intellectual element in Mr.
Ward's treatment of the subject is palpable on the face of it. His
attempt is to make out a theory of the reasonableness of unproducible;
because unanalysed, reasons; reasons which, though the individual cannot
state them, may be as real and as legitimately active as the obscure
rays of the spectrum. But though the discussion in Mr. Ward's hands was
suggestive of much, though he might expose the superciliousness of
Whately or the shallowness of Mr. Goode, and show himself no unequal
antagonist to Mr. J.S. Mill, it left great difficulties unanswered, and
it had too much the appearance of being directed to a particular end,
that of guarding the Catholic view of a popular religion from formidable
objections.
The moral side of religion had been from the first a prominent subject
in the teaching of the movement Its protests had been earnest and
constant against intellectual self-sufficiency, and the notion that mere
shrewdness and cleverness were competent judges of Christian truth, or
that soundness of judgment in religious matters was compatible with
arrogance or an imperfect moral standard; and it revolted against the
conventional and inconsistent severity of Puritanism, which was shocked
at dancing but indulged freely in good dinners, and was ostentatious in
using the phrases of spiritual life and in marking a separation from the
world, while it surrounded itself with all the luxuries of modern
inventiveness. But this moral teaching was confined to the statement of
principles, and it was carried out in actual life with the utmost
dislike of display and with a shrinking from strong professions. The
motto of Froude's _Remains_, which embodied his characteristic temper,
was an expression of the feeling of the school:
Se sub serenis vultibus
Austera virtus occulit:
Timet videri, ne suum,
Dum prodit, amittat decus,[117]
The heroic strictness and self-denial of the early Church were the
objects of admiration, as what ought to be the standard of Christians;
but people did not yet like to talk much about attempts to copy them.
Such a book as the _Church of the Fathers_ brought out with great force
and great sympathy the ascetic temper and the value put on celibacy in
the early days, and it made a deep impression; but nothing was yet
formulated as characteristic and accepted doctrine.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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