SOURCE: "The Background of the Movement," in Faith and Revolt: Studies in the Literary Influence of the Oxford Movement, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1970, pp. 9-29.

In the following essay, Chapman contends that the Oxford Movement emerged in an environment of intense religious controversy between Anglicanism and Roman Catholicism in England.

The temptation to contain human complexities in simple images is nowhere stronger than in matters of religion. The churchgoing Victorian, puritan and fundamentalist, is an image that has resisted the revaluation of nineteenth-century society more successfully than most. In popular estimation that society existed in an age of faith, to be viewed with nostalgia, contempt or indifference according to the presuppositions of the modern observer. The image may contain as much truth and as much error as most generalizations. The religious temper of the Victorians showed itself in protest and revolt as well as in acceptance.

That religion penetrated...