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
anything that really tended towards Rome. But there is no reason to
think that he would have shrunk from any step only because it was bold.
He had sympathy for courage and genius, and he had knowledge and
authority which would have commanded respect for his judgment and
opinion. But it is too much to say either that the movement could not
have been without him, or that it was specially his design and plan, or
that he alone could have given the impulse which led to it; though it
seemed at one time as if he was to be its leader and chief. Certainly he
was the most valuable and the most loyal of its early auxiliaries.
Another coadjutor, whose part at the time also seemed rather that of a
chief, was Mr. William Palmer, of Worcester College. He had been
educated at Trinity College, Dublin, but he had transferred his home to
Oxford, both in the University and the city. He was a man of exact and
scholastic mind, well equipped at all points in controversial theology,
strong in clear theories and precise definitions, familiar with
objections current in the schools and with the answers to them, and well
versed in all the questions, arguments, and authorities belonging to the
great debate with Rome. He had definite and well-arranged ideas about
the nature and office of the Church; and, from his study of the Roman
controversy, he had at command the distinctions necessary to
discriminate between things which popular views confused, and to protect
the doctrines characteristic of the Church from being identified with
Romanism. Especially he had given great attention to the public
devotional language and forms of the Church, and had produced by far the
best book in the English language on the history and significance of the
offices of the English Church--the _Origines Liturgicae_, published at
the University Press in 1832. It was a book to give a man authority with
divines and scholars; and among those with whom at this time he acted no
one had so compact and defensible a theory, even if it was somewhat
rigid and technical, of the peculiar constitution of the English Church
as Mr. Palmer. With the deepest belief in this theory, he saw great
dangers threatening, partly from general ignorance and looseness of
thought, partly from antagonistic ideas and principles only too distinct
and too popular; and he threw all his learning and zeal on the side of
those who, like himself, were alive to those dangers, and were prepared
for a great effort to counteract them.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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