The movement had its spring in the consciences and character of its leaders.  To these men religion really meant the most awful and most seriously personal thing on earth.  It had not only a theological basis; it had still more deeply a moral one.  What that basis was is shown in a variety of indications of ethical temper and habits, before the movement, in those who afterwards directed it.  The Christian Year was published in 1827, and tells us distinctly by what kind of standard Mr. Keble moulded his judgment and aims.  What Mr. Keble’s influence and teaching did, in training an apt pupil to deep and severe views of truth and duty, is to be seen in the records of purpose and self-discipline, often so painful, but always so lofty and sincere, of Mr. Hurrell Froude’s journal.  But these indications are most forcibly given in Mr. Newman’s earliest preaching.  As tutor at Oriel, Mr. Newman had made what efforts he could, sometimes disturbing to the authorities, to raise the standard of conduct and feeling among his pupils.  When he became a parish priest, his preaching took a singularly practical and plain-spoken character.  The first sermon of the series, a typical sermon, “Holiness necessary for future Blessedness,” a sermon which has made many readers grave when they laid it down, was written in 1826, before he came to St. Mary’s; and as he began he continued.  No sermons, except those which his great opposite, Dr. Arnold, was preaching at Rugby, had appealed to conscience with such directness and force.  A passionate and sustained earnestness after a high moral rule, seriously realised in conduct, is the dominant character of these sermons.  They showed the strong reaction against slackness of fibre in the religious life; against the poverty, softness; restlessness, worldliness, the blunted and impaired sense of truth, which reigned with little check in the recognised fashions of professing Christianity; the want of depth both of thought and feeling; the strange blindness to the real sternness, nay the austerity, of the New Testament.  Out of this ground the movement grew.  Even more than a theological reform, it was a protest against the loose unreality of ordinary religious morality.  In the first stage of the movement, moral earnestness and enthusiasm gave its impulse to theological interest and zeal.

FOOTNOTES: 

[2] The suppression of the Irish bishoprics.  Palmer, Narrative (1883), pp. 44, 101.  Maurice, Life, i. 180.

[3] “The Church, as it now stands, no human power can save” (Arnold to Tyler, June 1832. Life, i. 326).  “Nothing, as it seems to me, can save the Church but an union with the Dissenters; now they are leagued with the antichristian party, and no merely internal reforms will satisfy them” (Arnold to Whately, January 1833, i. 348).  He afterwards thought this exaggerated (Life, i. 336).  “The Church has been for one hundred