OXFORD
371
OXFORD
High nor Low, but Broad"("Ed. Rev.", July, 1850).
In coarser but equally practical terms men said, "The
Church was grafted upon the State, and the State
would remain master." No ruling, in fact, of bishop
or convocation need be regarded by Anglicans, lay
or clerical, unless it implies, at all events tacitly, the
consent of the Crown, i. e., of Parliament.
So long as the State excluded Dissenters and Cath- olics from its offices, the system, in spite of the Great Rebellion, nay after the more truly disastrous Revolu- tion of 1(388, worked as well as could be expected. But in 1828 the Test Act was repealed; next year Catholic Emanciijation passed into law. In 1830 the French drove out their Bourbon dyna.sty ; Belgium threw off the yoke of Holland. In 1832 came the Reform Bill, which Tories construed into an attack on the Church. What would the Royal Supremacy mean if Parliament was no longer to be exclusively .Anglican? Lord Grey told the bishops to set their house in order; ten Irish bishoprics were suppressed. Arnold wrote in 1832, "The Church, as it now stands, no human power can save." Whateley thought it difficult to "preserve the Establishment from utter overthrow". Alexan- der Knox, a far-seeing Irish writer, said, "The old High Church race is worn out." The "Clapham sect" of Evangelicals, who came down from Calvin, and the "Clapton sect ", otherwise called High and Dry, who had no theology at all, divided "serious" people among them. Bishops were great persons who amassed wealth for their families, and who had at- tained to place and influence by servile offices or by editing Greek plays. In the presence of threatened revolution they sat helpless and bewildered. From them neither counsel nor aid was to be expected by earnest churchmen. Arnold would have brought in Dissenters by a "comprehension" which sacrificed dogma to individual judgment. Whateley protested against "that double usurpation, the interference of the Church in temporals, of the State in spirituals". A notable preacher and organizer. Dr. Hook, "first gave body and force to Church theology, not to be mistaken or ignored". But it was from Oxford, "the home of lost causes", always Cavalier at heart, still "debating its eternal Church question as in the days of Henry IV", that salvation came.
Oriel, once illustrated by Raleigh and Butler, was now the most distinguished college in the university. For some thirty years it had welcomed original think- ers, and among its fellows were, or had been, Cople- ston, Whateley, Hawkins, Davison, Keble, Arnold, Pusey, and Hurrell Froude. "This knot of Oriel men", says Pattison, "was distinctly the product of the French Revolution." Those among them who indulged in "free inquiry" were termed "Noetics"; they "called everything in question; they appealed to first principles, and disallowed authority in intel- lectual matters." The university, which Pattison describes as "a close clerical corporation", where all alike had sworn to the Prayer Book and Articles, had thus in its bosom a seed of "Liberalism", and was menaced by changes analogous to the greater revolu- tions in the State itself. Reaction came, as was to be expected, in the very college that had witnessed the provocation. Oxford, of all places, would surely be the last to accept French and democratic ideas.
John Keble (1792-186.5) was the leading fellow of Oriel. As a mere boy, he had carried off the highest honours of the university. In 1823 he became his father's curate at Fairford, and in 1827 he published "The Christian Year", a cycle of poems or meditations in verse, refined, soothing, and akin to George Her- bert's "The Temple", by their spiritual depth and devout attachment to the English Church. They have gone through innumerable editions. Keble, though a scholarly mind, had no grasp of metaphysics. ■ An ingrained conservative, he took over the doctrines, and lived on the recollection of the Laudian school.
Without ambition, he was inflexible, never open to
development, but gentle, shrewd, and saintly. His
convictions needed an Aaron to make them widely
effective; and he found a voice in his pupil, the
"bright and beautiful" Froude, whose short life
(1802-36) counts for much in the Oxford Movement.
Froude was the connecting link between Keble and
Newman. His friendship, at the moment when New-
man's Evangelical prejudices were fading and his in-
clination towards Liberalism had receiveil a sharp
check by "illness and bereavement", proved to be
the one thing needful to a temper which always
leaned on its associates, and which absorbed ideas
with the vivacity of genius. So the fusion came
about. Elsewhere (see Newman, John Henry) is
related the story of those earlier years in which, from
various sources, the future Tractarian leader gained
his knowledge of certain Catholic truths, one by one.
But their living unity and paramount authority were
borne in upon him by discu.ssions with Froude, whose
teacher was Keble. Froude, says Newman, "pro-
fessed openly his admiration for the Church of Rome,
and his hatred of the Reformers. He delighted in the
notion of an hierarchical system, of sacerdijl:il power,
and of full ecclesiastical liberty. He felt sccirn of the
maxim, 'the Bible and the Bible only is the religion
of Protestants' ; and he gloried in accepting tradition
as a main instrument of religious teaching. He had
a high severe idea of the intrinsic excellence of virgin-
ity. . . He delighted in thinking of the saints. . .
He embraced the principle of penance and mortifica-
tion. He had a deep devotion to the Real Presence
in which he had a firm faith. He was powerfully
drawn to the Medieval Church, but not to the Primi-
tive." ("Apol.", p. 24.)
These, remarkably enough, are characteristics of the later phases of the Movement, known as Ritual- ism, rather than of its beginning. Yet Newman's friendship with Froude goes back to 1826; they be- came very intimate after the rejection of Peel by the university in 1829; and the Roman tendencies, of which mention is made above, cannot but have told powerfully on the leader, when his hopes for Anglican- ism were shattered by the misfortunes of "Tract 90". Keble, on the other hand, had "a great dislike of Rome", as well as of "Dissent and Methodism". The first years of the revival were disfigured by a strong anti-Roman polemic, which Froude, on his death-bed, condemned as so much "cursing and swearing ' ' . But Newman had been as a youth ' ' most firmly convinced that the Pope was the Antichrist predicted by Daniel, St. Paul, and St. John." His imagination was stained by the effects of this doctrine as late as the year 1843. In consequence, his lan- guage towards the ancient Church only just fell short of the vituperation lavished on it by the Puritans themselves. The movement, therefore, started, not on Roman ground, but in a panic provoked by the alliance of O'Connell with the Whigs, of Dissenters with Benthamites, intent on destroying all religious establishments. How could they be resisted? New- man answers in his opening tract, adilressed to the clergy by one of themselves, a fellow-i)reshyter. "I fear", he tells them, "we have ncglrrtcd the real ground on which our authority is built , our Apo.stolical descent." And he made his appeal to the ordination service — in other words, to the Prayer Book and the sacramental system, of which the clergy were the Divinelv appointed ministers.
The first t hrce t racts are dated 9 Sept., 1833. New- man and I'Voude, after their voyage to the Mediter- ranean in Dec, 1832, had returned in the midst of an agitation in which they were speedily caught up. Keble's sermon — in itself not very striking — on "Na- tional Apo.stasy", had marked 14 July, 1833, as the birthday of a ".second Reformation". At Hadleigh, H. J. Rose and three other clergymen had met in con-
