Occasional Papers eBook

Richard William Church
This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 447 pages of information about Occasional Papers.

Occasional Papers eBook

Richard William Church
This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 447 pages of information about Occasional Papers.
intellect on questions and in methods outside the customary line of University studies and prejudices; but the men were too powerful, and their work too genuine and effective, and too much in harmony with the temper and tendencies of the time, to be stopped by impertinence and obstructiveness.  Dr. Hawkins was one of those who made the Oriel Common-room a place of keen discussion and brilliant conversation, and, for those days, of bold speculation; while the College itself reflected something of the vigour and accomplishments of the Common-room.  Dr. Newman, in the Apologia, has told us, in touching terms of acknowledgment, what Dr. Hawkins was when, fifty years ago, the two minds first came into close contact, and what intellectual services he believed Dr. Hawkins had rendered him.  He tells us, too, how Dr. Hawkins had profoundly impressed him by a work in which, with characteristic independence and guarded caution equally characteristic, he cuts across popular prejudices and confusions of thought, and shows himself original in discerning and stating an obvious truth which had escaped other people—­his work on Unauthoritative Tradition.  His logical acuteness, his habits of disciplined accuracy, abhorrent and impatient of all looseness of thinking and expression, his conscientious efforts after substantial reality in his sharpest distinctions, his capacity for taking trouble, his serious and strong sense of the debt involved in the possession of intellectual power—­all this would have made him eminent, whatever the times in which he lived.

But the times in which we live and what they bring with them mould most of us; and the times shaped the course of the Provost of Oriel, and turned his activity into a channel of obstinate and prolonged antagonism, of resistance and protest, most conscientious but most uncompromising, against two great successive movements, both of which he condemned as unbalanced and recoiled from as revolutionary—­the Tractarian first, and then the Liberal movement in Oxford.  Of the former, it is not perhaps too much to say that he was in Oxford, at least, the ablest and most hurtful opponent.  From his counsels, from his guarded and measured attacks, from the power given him by a partial agreement against popular fallacies with parts of its views, from his severe and unflinching determination, it received its heaviest blows and suffered its greatest losses.  He detested what he held to be its anti-Liberal temper, and its dogmatic assertions; he resented its taking out of his hands a province of theology which he and Whately had made their own, that relating to the Church; he thought its tone of feeling and its imaginative and poetical side exaggerated or childish; and he could not conceive of its position except as involving palpable dishonesty.  No one probably guided with such clear and self-possessed purpose that policy of extreme measures, which contributed to bring about, if it did not itself cause, the break-up of 1845. 

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