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
Newman had dealt unequally and
hardly with the English Church, returned with gathered strength. The
English Church was after all as well worth living in and fighting for as
any other; it was not only in England that light and dark, in teaching
and in life, were largely intermingled, and the mixture had to be
largely allowed for. We had our Sparta, a noble, if a rough and an
incomplete one; patiently to do our best for it was better than leaving
it to its fate, in obedience to signs and reasonings which the heat of
strife might well make delusive. It was one hopeful token, that boasting
had to be put away from us for a long time to come. In these days of
stress and sorrow were laid the beginnings of a school, whose main
purpose was to see things as they are; which had learned by experience
to distrust unqualified admiration and unqualified disparagement;
determined not to be blinded even by genius to plain certainties; not
afraid to honour all that is great and beneficent in Rome, not afraid
with English frankness to criticise freely at home; but not to be won
over, in one case, by the good things, to condone and accept the bad
things; and not deterred, in the other, from service, from love, from
self-sacrifice, by the presence of much to regret and to resist.
All this new sense of independence, arising from the sense of having
been left almost desolate by the disappearance of a great stay and light
in men's daily life, led to various and different results. In some
minds, after a certain trial, it actually led men back to that Romeward
tendency from which they had at first recoiled. In others, the break-up
of the movement under such a chief led them on, more or less, and some
very far, into a career of speculative Liberalism like that of Mr.
Blanco White, the publication of whose biography coincided with Mr.
Newman's change. In many others, especially in London and the towns, it
led to new and increasing efforts to popularise in various ways--through
preaching, organisation, greater attention to the meaning, the
solemnities, and the fitnesses of worship--the ideas of the Church
movement. Dr. Pusey and Mr. Keble were still the recognised chiefs of
the continued yet remodelled movement. It had its quarterly organ, the
_Christian Remembrancer_, which had taken the place of the old _British
Critic_ in the autumn of 1844. A number of able Cambridge men had thrown
their knowledge and thoroughness of work into the _Ecclesiologist_.
There were newspapers--the _English Churchman_, and, starting in 1846
from small and difficult beginnings, in the face of long discouragement
and at times despair, the _Guardian_. One mind of great and rare power,
though only recognised for what he was much later in his life, one
undaunted heart, undismayed, almost undepressed, so that those who knew
not its inner fires thought him cold and stoical, had lifted itself
above the wreck at Oxford. The shock which had cowed and almost crushed
some of Mr.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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