Oxford Movement

“ The routine of Oxford had been broken as it had never been broken by the fiercest strifes before. Condemnations had been before passed on opinions, and even on persons. But to see an eminent man, of blameless life, a fellow of one of the first among the Colleges, solemnly deprived of his degree and all that the degree carried with it, and that on a charge in which bad faith and treachery were combined with alleged heresy, was a novel experience, where the kindnesses of daily companionship and social intercourse still asserted themselves as paramount to official ideas of position. ”

“ Look at the course of the great movement which shook Oxford to its centre some thirty years ago! It was directed, as any one who reads Dr. Newman's Apology [411] may see, against what in one word may be called "Liberalism." Liberalism prevailed; it was the appointed force to do the work of the hour; it was necessary, it was inevitable that it should prevail. The Oxford movement was broken, it failed; our wrecks are scattered on every shore:—
"Quæ regio in terris nostri non plena laboris?" ”

“ People who refer to “the Oxford Movement” imply that Oxford only moved once; and those quaint people who say that “A is quite the gentleman” imply both the doubtful proposition that there is only one gentleman in the world, and the indubitably false proposition that he is that man. ”

“ The most amusing, the most tolerant man in Oxford, he had round him perpetually some of the cleverest and brightest scholars and thinkers of the place; and where he was, there was debate, cross-questioning, pushing inferences, starting alarming problems, beating out ideas, trying the stuff and mettle of mental capacity. Not always with real knowledge, or a real sense of fact, but always rapid and impetuous, taking in the whole dialectical chess-board at a glance, he gave no quarter, and a man found himself in a perilous corner before he perceived the drift of the game ”

“ And it won and lost, as a champion of English theology and religion, a man of genius, whose name is among the illustrious names of his age, a name which will always be connected with modern Oxford, and is likely to be long remembered wherever the English language is studied.
We are sometimes told that enough has been written about the Oxford Movement, and that the world is rather tired of the subject. A good deal has certainly been both said and written about it, and more is probably still to come ”

“ Newman like a soldier to his comrade, and him the most splendid and boldest of warriors. Each mind caught fire from the other, till the high enthusiasm of the one was quenched in an early death.
Shortly after this friendship began, the course of events also began which finally gave birth to the Oxford movement. The break-up of parties caused by the Roman Catholic emancipation was followed by the French and Belgian revolutions of 1830, and these changes gave a fresh stimulus to all the reforming parties in England—Whigs, Radicals, and liberal religionists. ”

“ The decisive breach between the old parties in the Church, both Orthodox and Evangelical, and the new party of the movement, with the violent and apparently irretrievable discomfiture of the latter as the rising force in Oxford, opened the way and cleared the ground for the formation and the power of a third school of opinion, which was to be the most formidable rival of the Tractarians, and whose leaders were eventually to succeed where the Tractarians had failed, in becoming the masters and the reformers of the University. ”

“ And at length they found themselves going along with the outside current of uninstructed and ignoble prejudice, in a settled and pronounced dislike, which took for granted that all was wrong in the movement, which admitted any ill-natured surmise and foolish misrepresentation, and really allowed itself to acquiesce in the belief that men so well known in Oxford, once so admired and honoured, had sunk down to deliberate corrupters of the truth, and palterers with their own intellects and consciences. ”

“ But it behoved them also to become acquainted with so striking a phenomenon as this; to judge it by what it appealed to—the learning of English divines, the standard of a high and generous moral rule; to recognise its aims at least, with equity and sympathy, if some of its methods and arguments seemed questionable. The men of the movement were not mere hostile innovators; they were fighting for what the University and its chiefs held dear and sacred, the privileges and safety of the Church. It was the natural part of the heads of the University to act as moderators ”

“ The Oxford movement was not only one of the most important in the religious history of England, but so many famous men were conspicuous in it that it had a remarkable personal, as well as historic interest. ”

“ Character of the ‘Oxford Movement’ The great Neo-Catholic Revival of the nineteenth century is so intimately identified with Oxford that it came to be widely known as the ‘Oxford Movement.’ It was less important than Methodism in its purely moral aspect, since it was far less popular and practical, leaving no such profound impression upon the religious life of the nation. ”

“ It was an honest attempt to raise Oxford life, which by all evidence needed raising, to something more laborious and something more religious, to something more worthy of the great Christian foundations of Oxford than the rivalry of colleges and of the schools, the mere literary atmosphere of the tutor's lecture-room, and the easy and gentlemanly and somewhat idle fellowship of the common-rooms. It was the effort of men who had all the love of scholarship, and the feeling for it of the Oxford of their day, to add to this the habits of Christian students and the pursuit of Christian learning. ”

“ Oxford claimed to be eminently the guardian of "true religion and sound learning"; and therefore it was eminently the place where religion should be recalled to its purity and strength, and also the place where there ought to be the most vigilant jealousy against the perversions and corruptions of religion, Oxford was a place where every one knew his neighbour, and measured him, and was more or less friendly or repellent; where the customs of life brought men together every day and all day, in converse or discussion ”

“ And these feelings passed from individuals into parties; the small factions of a limited area. Men struck blows and loved and hated in those days in Oxford as they hardly did on the wider stage of London politics or general religious controversy. ”

“ But certainly this mark of moral purpose and moral force was so plain in the movement that the rulers of Oxford had no right to mistake it. When the names come back to our minds of those who led and most represented the Tractarians, it must be a matter of surprise to any man who has not almost parted with the idea of Christian goodness, that this feature of the movement could escape or fail to impress those who had known well all their lives long what these leaders were. ”

“ In its genesis, the Oxford Movement threw up great men, very great men, men of considerable intellectual power and a most profound spirituality; it is not to be expected, perhaps, that such giants should appear again, and in their absence lesser men may possibly mistake the symbol for the thing symbolised, and so fall into the error of formalism. ”

“ A distinctively English party grew up, both in Oxford and away from it, strong in eminent names, in proportion as Roman sympathies showed themselves. These men were, in any fair judgment, as free from Romanising as any of their accusers; but they made their appeal for patience and fair judgment in vain. If only the rulers could have had patience:—but patience is a difficult virtue in the presence of what seem pressing dangers. ”

“ Perhaps the latest attempt of a considerable kind to suppress the political spirit in non-political concerns was the famous movement which had its birth a generation ago among the gray quadrangles and ancient gardens of Oxford, 'the sweet city with her dreaming spires,' where there has ever been so much detachment from the world, alongside of the coarsest and fiercest hunt after the grosser prizes of the world. ”

“ The direct male line of descent lay in another direction; and its next most important stage was determined by the same causes which almost at the middle of the century or a little before brought about Præ-Raphaelitism in art. Both of these were closely connected with the set of events called the Oxford Movement, about which much has been written, but of which the far-reaching significance, not merely in religion but in literature, politics, art, and almost things in general, has never yet been fully estimated. ”

“ The men who acted thus were good and conscientious men, who thought themselves in the presence of a great danger. It is only fair to remember this. But it is also impossible to be fair to the party of the movement without remembering this deplorable failure in consistency, in justice, in temper, in charity, on the part of those in power in the University. The drift towards Rome had not yet become an unmanageable rush ”

“ They were dry, cold, supercilious, critical; they wanted enthusiasm; they were out of sympathy with religion and the religious temper and aims. They played, without knowing it, on the edge of the most dangerous questions. The older Oxford Liberals were either intellectually aristocratic, dissecting the inaccuracies or showing up the paralogisms of the current orthodoxy, or they were poor in character, Liberals from the zest of sneering and mocking at what was received and established, or from the convenience of getting rid of strict and troublesome rules of life. They patronised Dissenters ”

“ The assaults of Methodism upon religious apathy in high places had been more in the nature of guerilla warfare; those of ‘Tractarianism,’ as it came to be called, assumed the character of a well-organised campaign.
A reaction against the rising tide of Liberalism
Whatever may have been the aims of its leaders, [Pg 205] the Oxford Movement was in truth a reaction, and its real origin must be sought in political rather than in ecclesiastical causes. The question of Catholic Emancipation, which had been stifled at the Union, was revived in 1812 and fiercely debated for the next seventeen years. ”

“ Oxford had reached the height of its prosperity in the fourteenth century. Then the Black Death, the decadence of the Friars, the French Wars, the withdrawal of foreign students and the severance of the ties between English and foreign Universities, commenced a decay which was accelerated by the decline of the ecclesiastical monopoly of learning, by the Wycliffite movement and, later, by the Wars of the Roses. ”

“ It is hardly too much to say that wherever men spoke seriously of the grounds and prospects of religion, in Oxford, or in Vacation reading-parties, in their walks and social meetings, in their studies or in common-room, the "Tractarian" doctrines, whether assented to or laughed at, deplored or fiercely denounced, were sure to come to the front. ”

“ Our Church is not at one with itself, there is no denying it." That was at first the disaster before him. His thought for himself began to turn, not to Rome, but to a new life without office and authority, but still within the English Church. "You see, if things come to the worst, I should turn brother of charity in London." And he began to prepare for a move from Oxford, from St. Mary's, from his fellowship. He bought land at Littlemore, and began to plant. ”

“ If the men who ruled the University had wished to disgust and alienate the Masters of Arts, and especially the younger ones who were coming forward into power and influence, they could not have done better. The chronic jealousy and distrust of the time were deepened. And all this was aggravated by what went on in private. A system of espionage, whisperings, backbitings, and miserable tittle-tattle, sometimes of the most slanderous or the most ridiculous kind, was set going all over Oxford. Never in Oxford, before or since, were busybodies more truculent or more unscrupulous. ”

“ It was, undoubtedly, a great miscalculation, such as men of keen and far-reaching genius sometimes make. They mistake the strength and set of the tide; they imagine that minds round them are going as fast as their own. We can see, looking back, that such an interpretation of the Articles, with the view then taken of them in Oxford as the theological text-book, and in the condition of men's minds, could not but be a great shock.
And what seemed to give a sinister significance to No. 90 was that, as has been said, a strong current was beginning to set in the direction of Rome. ”

“ The social atmosphere of Oxford, always alien to mawkish sentiment, penetrated the whole movement, and maintained in it for many years a certain sanity and dignity which, while they doubtless prevented it from spreading widely in the middle class, made the Tractarians respected by men of taste and education. ”

“ No one ought now to affect, as some people used to affect at the time, that the question was of secondary importance, and turned mainly on the special fitness of the Thirty-nine Articles to be offered for the proof of a young man's belief. It was a much more critical question. It was really, however disguised, the question, asked then for the first time, and since finally decided, whether Oxford was to continue to be a school of the Church of England; and it also involved the wider question, what part belief in definite religion should have in higher education. ”

“ It was such writing and such preaching as had certainly never been seen on the Roman side before, at least in England. Whether it was adapted to its professed purpose may perhaps be doubted; but the men who went certainly lost none of their vigour as controversialists or their culture as scholars. Not to speak of Mr. Newman, such men as Mr. Oakeley, Mr. Ward, Mr. Faber, and Mr. Dalgairns more than fulfilled in the great world of London their reputation at Oxford. This was all in prospect before the eyes of those who had elected to cast in their lot with the English Church. ”