The Oxford Movement eBook

Richard William Church
This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 377 pages of information about The Oxford Movement.

The Oxford Movement eBook

Richard William Church
This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 377 pages of information about The Oxford Movement.
disclosed; its love of secret and crooked methods, its indifference to knowledge, its disingenuous professions, its deliberate concealments, its holding doctrines and its pursuit of aims which it dared not avow, its disciplina arcani, its conspiracies, its Jesuitical spirit.  All this kind of abuse was flung plentifully on the party as the controversy became warm; and it mainly justified itself by the Tract on “Reserve.”  The Tract was in many ways a beautiful and suggestive essay, full of deep and original thoughts, though composed in that spirit of the recluse which was characteristic of the writer, and which is in strong contrast with the energetic temper of to-day.[83] But it could well have been spared at the moment, and it certainly offered itself to an unfortunate use.  The suspiciousness which so innocently it helped to awaken and confirm was never again allayed.

FOOTNOTES: 

[74] Fifty years ago there was much greater contrast than now between old and young.  There was more outward respect for the authorities, and among the younger men, graduates and undergraduates, more inward amusement at foibles and eccentricities.  There still lingered the survivals of a more old-fashioned type of University life and character, which, quite apart from the movements of religious opinion, provoked those [Greek:  neanieumata idioton eis tous archontas],[75] impertinences of irresponsible juniors towards superiors, which Wordsworth, speaking of a yet earlier time, remembered at Cambridge—­

  “In serious mood, but oftener, I confess,
  With playful zest of fancy, did we note
  (How could we less?) the manners and the ways
  Of those who lived distinguished by the badge
  Of good or ill report; or those with whom
  By frame of Academic discipline
  We were perforce connected, men whose sway
  And known authority of office served
  To set our minds on edge, and did no more. 
  Nor wanted we rich pastime of this kind,
  Found everywhere, but chiefly in the ring
  Of the grave Elders, men unsecured, grotesque
  In character, tricked out like aged trees
  Which through the lapse of their infirmity
  Give ready place to any random seed
  That chooses to be reared upon their trunks.”

  Prelude, bk. iii.

[75] Plat. R.P. iii. 390.

[76] Tracts for the Times, No. 1, 9th September 1833.

[77] An Advertisement touching the Controversies of the Church of England: printed in the Resuscitatio, p. 138 (ed. 1671).

[78] See Mr. Newman’s article, “The State of Religious Parties,” in the British Critic, April 1839, reprinted in his Essays Historical and Critical, 1871, Vol. 1., essay vi.

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The Oxford Movement from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.