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.
and the mixture had to be largely allowed for.  We had our Sparta, a noble, if a rough and an incomplete one; patiently to do our best for it was better than leaving it to its fate, in obedience to signs and reasonings which the heat of strife might well make delusive.  It was one hopeful token, that boasting had to be put away from us for a long time to come.  In these days of stress and sorrow were laid the beginnings of a school, whose main purpose was to see things as they are; which had learned by experience to distrust unqualified admiration and unqualified disparagement; determined not to be blinded even by genius to plain certainties; not afraid to honour all that is great and beneficent in Rome, not afraid with English frankness to criticise freely at home; but not to be won over, in one case, by the good things, to condone and accept the bad things; and not deterred, in the other, from service, from love, from self-sacrifice, by the presence of much to regret and to resist.

All this new sense of independence, arising from the sense of having been left almost desolate by the disappearance of a great stay and light in men’s daily life, led to various and different results.  In some minds, after a certain trial, it actually led men back to that Romeward tendency from which they had at first recoiled.  In others, the break-up of the movement under such a chief led them on, more or less, and some very far, into a career of speculative Liberalism like that of Mr. Blanco White, the publication of whose biography coincided with Mr. Newman’s change.  In many others, especially in London and the towns, it led to new and increasing efforts to popularise in various ways—­through preaching, organisation, greater attention to the meaning, the solemnities, and the fitnesses of worship—­the ideas of the Church movement.  Dr. Pusey and Mr. Keble were still the recognised chiefs of the continued yet remodelled movement.  It had its quarterly organ, the Christian Remembrancer, which had taken the place of the old British Critic in the autumn of 1844.  A number of able Cambridge men had thrown their knowledge and thoroughness of work into the Ecclesiologist.  There were newspapers—­the English Churchman, and, starting in 1846 from small and difficult beginnings, in the face of long discouragement and at times despair, the Guardian.  One mind of great and rare power, though only recognised for what he was much later in his life, one undaunted heart, undismayed, almost undepressed, so that those who knew not its inner fires thought him cold and stoical, had lifted itself above the wreck at Oxford.  The shock which had cowed and almost crushed some of Mr. Newman’s friends roused and fired Mr. James Mozley.

Copyrights
Project Gutenberg
The Oxford Movement from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.