Project Canterbury

The Oxford Movement
Twelve Years 1833-1845

by R. W .Church, M.A., D.C.L.,
Sometime Dean of St Paul's, and Fellow of Oriel College, Oxford

London: Macmillan & Co. 1894

Transcribed by The Revd R D Hacking
AD 2003


CHAPTER XIX
THE CATASTROPHE

THE events of February were a great shock. The routine of Oxford had been broken as it had never been broken by the fiercest strifes before. Condemnations had been before passed on opinions, and even on persons. But to see an eminent man, of blameless life, a fellow of one of the first among the Colleges, solemnly deprived of his degree and all that the degree carried with it, and that on a charge in which bad faith and treachery were combined with alleged heresy, was a novel experience, where the kindnesses of daily companionship and social intercourse still asserted themselves as paramount to official ideas of position. And when, besides this, people realised what more had been attempted, and by how narrow a chance a still heavier blow had been averted from one towards whom so many hearts warmed, how narrowly a yoke had been escaped which would have seemed to subject all religious thought in the University to the caprice or the blind zeal of a partisan official, the sense of relief was mixed with the still present memory of a desperate peril. And then came the question as to what was to come next. That the old policy of the Board would be revived and pursued when the end of the Proctors' year delivered it from their inconvenient presence, was soon understood to be out of the question. The very violence of the measures attempted had its reaction, which stopped anything further. The opponents of Tractarianism, Orthodox and Liberal, were for the moment gorged with their success. What men waited to see was the effect on the party of the movement; how it would influence the advanced portion of it; how it would influence the little company who had looked on in silence from their retirement at Littlemore. The more serious aspect of recent events was succeeded for the moment by a certain comic contrast, created by Mr. Ward's engagement to be married, which was announced within a week of his degradation, and which gave the common-rooms something to smile at after the strain and excitement of the scene in the Theatre. But that passed, and the graver outlook of the situation occupied men's thoughts.

There was a widespread feeling of insecurity. Friends did not know of friends, how their minds were working, how they might go. Anxious letters passed, the writers not daring to say too much, or reveal too much alarm. And yet there was still some hope that at least with the great leader matters were not desperate. To his own friends he gave warning; he had already done so in a way to leave little to expect but at last to lose him; he spoke of resigning his fellowship in October, though he wished to defer this till the following June; but nothing final had been said publicly. Even at the last it was only anticipated by some that he would retire into lay communion. But that silence was awful and ominous. He showed no signs of being affected by what had passed in Oxford. He privately thanked the Proctors for saving him from what would have distressed him; but he made no comments on the measures themselves. Still it could not but be a climax of everything as far as Oxford was concerned. And he was a man who saw signs in such events.

It was inevitable that the events of the end of 1844 and the beginning of 1845 should bring with them a great crisis in the development of religious opinion, in the relations of its different forms to one another, and further, in the thoughts of many minds as to their personal position, their duty, and their prospects. There had been such a crisis in 1841 at the publication of No. 90. After the discussions which followed that tract, Anglican theology could never be quite the same that it had been before. It was made to feel the sense of some grave wants, which, however they might be supplied in the future, could no longer be unnoticed or uncared for. And individuals, amid the strife of tongues, had felt, some strongly and practically, but a much larger number dimly and reluctantly, the possibility, unwelcome to most, but not without interest to others, of having to face the strange and at one time inconceivable task of revising the very foundations of their religion. And such a revision had since that time been going on more or less actively in many minds; in some cases with very decisive results. But after the explosion caused by Mr. Ward's book, a crisis of a much more grave and wide-reaching sort had arrived. To ordinary lookers-on it naturally seemed that a shattering and decisive blow had been struck at the Tractarian party and their cause; struck, indeed, formally and officially, only at its extravagances, but struck, none the less, virtually, at the premisses which led to these extravagances, and at the party, which, while disapproving them, shrank, with whatever motives,--policy, generosity, or secret sympathy, --from joining in the condemnation of them. It was more than a defeat, it was a rout, in which they were driven and chased headlong from the field; a wreck in which their boasts and hopes of the last few years met the fate which wise men had always anticipated. Oxford repudiated them. Their theories, their controversial successes, their learned arguments, their appeals to the imagination, all seemed to go down, and to be swept away like chaff, before the breath of straightforward common sense and honesty. Henceforth there was a badge affixed to them and all who belonged to them, a badge of suspicion and discredit, and even shame, which bade men beware of them, an overthrow under which it seemed wonderful that they could raise their heads or expect a hearing. It is true, that to those who looked below the surface, the overthrow might have seemed almost too showy and theatrical to be quite all that it was generally thought to be. There had been too much passion, and too little looking forward to the next steps, in the proceedings of the victors. There was too much blindness to weak points of their own position, too much forgetfulness of the wise generosity of cautious warfare. The victory was easy to win; the next moment it was quite obvious that they did not know what to do with it, and Were at their wits' end to understand what it meant. And the defeated party, though defeated signally and conspicuously in the sight of the Church and the country, had in it too large a proportion of the serious and able men of the University, with too clear and high a purpose, and too distinct a sense of the strength and reality of their ground, to be in as disadvantageous a condition as from a distance might be imagined. A closer view would have discovered how much sympathy there was for their objects and for their main principles in many who greatly disapproved of much in the recent course and tendency of the movement. It might have been seen how the unwise measures of the Heads had awakened convictions among many who were not naturally on their side, that it was necessary both on the ground of justice and policy to arrest all extreme measures, and to give a breathing time to the minority. Confidence in their prospects as a party might have been impaired in the Tractarians; but confidence in their principles, confidence that they bad rightly interpreted the spirit, the claims, and the duties of the English Church, confidence that devotion to its cause was the call of God, whatever might happen to their own fortunes, this confidence was unshaken by the catastrophe of February.

But that crisis had another important result, not much noticed then, but one which made itself abundantly evident in the times that followed. The decisive breach between the old parties in the Church, both Orthodox and Evangelical, and the new party of the movement, with the violent and apparently irretrievable discomfiture of the latter as the rising force in Oxford, opened the way and cleared the ground for the formation and the power of a third school of opinion, which was to be the most formidable rival of the Tractarians, and whose leaders were eventually to succeed where the Tractarians had failed, in becoming the masters and the reformers of the University. Liberalism had hitherto been represented in Oxford in forms which though respectable from intellectual vigour were unattractive, sometimes even repulsive. They were dry, cold, supercilious, critical; they wanted enthusiasm; they were out of sympathy with religion and the religious temper and aims. They played, without knowing it, on the edge of the most dangerous questions. The older Oxford Liberals were either intellectually aristocratic, dissecting the inaccuracies or showing up the paralogisms of the current orthodoxy, or they were poor in character, Liberals from the zest of sneering and mocking at what was received and established, or from the convenience of getting rid of strict and troublesome rules of life. They patronised Dissenters; they gave Whig votes; they made free, in a mild way, with the pet conventions and prejudices of Tories and High Churchmen. There was nothing inspiring in them, however much men might respect their correct and sincere lives. But a younger set of men brought, mainly from Rugby and Arnold's teaching, a new kind of Liberalism. It was much bolder and more independent than the older forms, less inclined to put up with the traditional, more searching and inquisitive in its methods, more suspicious and daring in its criticism ; but it was much larger in its views and its sympathies, and, above all, it was imaginative, it was enthusiastic, and, without much of the devotional temper, it was penetrated by a sense of the reality and seriousness of religion. It saw greater hopes in the present and the future than the Tractarians. It disliked their reverence for the past and the received as inconsistent with what seemed evidence of the providential order of great and fruitful change. It could not enter into their discipline of character, and shrank from it as antiquated, unnatural, and narrow.

But these younger Liberals were interested in the Tractarian innovators, and, in a degree, sympathised with them as a party of movement who had had the courage to risk and sacrifice much for an unworldly end. And they felt that their own opportunity was come when all the parties which claimed to represent the orthodoxy of the English Church appeared to have broken for good with one another, and when their differences had thrown so much doubt and disparagement on so important and revered a symbol of orthodoxy as the Thirty-nine Articles. They looked on partly with amusement, partly with serious anxiety, at the dispute; they discriminated with impartiality between the strong and the weak points in the arguments on both sides: and they enforced with the same impartiality on both of them the reasons, arising out of the difficulties in which each party was involved, for new and large measures, for a policy of forbearance and toleration. They inflicted on the beaten side, sometimes with more ingenuity than fairness, the lesson that the "wheel had tome round full circle" with them; that they were but reaping as they themselves had sown:--but now that there seemed little more to fear from the Tractarians, the victorious authorities were the power which the Liberals had to keep in check. They used their influence, such as it was (and it was not then what it was afterwards), to protect the weaker party. It was a favourite boast of Dean Stanley's in after-times, that the intervention of the Liberals had saved the Tractarians from complete disaster. It is quite true that the younger Liberals disapproved the continuance of harsh measures, and some of them exerted themselves against such measures. They did so in many ways and for various reasons; from consistency, from feelings of personal kindness, from a sense of justice, from a sense of interest--some in a frank and generous spirit, others with contemptuous indifference. But the debt of the Tractarians to their Liberal friends in 1845 was not so great as Dean Stanley, thinking of the Liberal party as what it had ultimately grown to be, supposed to be the case. The Liberals of his school were then still a little flock: a very distinguished and a very earnest set of men, but too young and too few as yet to hold the balance in such a contest. The Tractarians were saved by what they were and what they had done, and could do, themselves. But it is also true, that out of these feuds and discords, the Liberal party which was to be dominant in Oxford took its rise, soon to astonish old-fashioned Heads of Houses with new and deep forms of doubt more audacious than Tractarianism, and ultimately to overthrow not only the victorious authorities, but the ancient position of the Church, and to recast from top to bottom the institutions of the University. The 13th of February was not only the final defeat and conclusion of the first stage of the movement. It was the birthday of the modern Liberalism of Oxford.

But it was also a crisis in the history of many lives. From that moment, the decision of a number of good and able men, who had once promised to be among the most valuable servants of the English Church, became clear. If it were doubtful before, in many cases, whether they would stay with her, the doubt existed no longer. It was now only a question of time when they would break the tie and renounce their old allegiance. In the bitter, and in many cases agonising struggle which they had gone through as to their duty to God and conscience, a sign seemed now to be given them which they could not mistake. They were invited, on one side, to come; they were told, sternly and scornfully, on the other, to go. They could no longer be accused of impatience if they brought their doubts to an end, and made up their minds that their call was to submit to the claims of Rome, that their place was in its communion.

Yet there was a pause. It was no secret what was coming. But men lingered. It was not till the summer that the first drops of the storm began to fall. Then through the autumn and the next year, friends, whose names and forms were familiar in Oxford, one by one disappeared and were lost to it. Fellowships, livings, curacies, intended careers, were given up. Mr. Ward went. Mr. Capes, who had long followed Mr. Ward's line, and had spent his private means to build a church near Bridgewater, went also. Mr. Oakeley resigned Margaret Chapel and went. Mr. Ambrose St. John, Mr. Coffin, Mr. Dalgairns, Mr. Faber, Mr. T. Meyrick, Mr. Albany Christie, Mr. R. Simpson of Oriel, were received in various places and various ways, and in the next year, Mr. J. S. Northcote, Mr. J. B. Morris, Mr. G. Ryder, Mr. David Lewis. On the 3rd of October 1845 Mr. Newman requested the Provost of Oriel to remove his name from the books of the College and University, but without giving any reason. The 6th of October is the date of the "Advertisement" to the work which had occupied Mr. Newman through the year--the Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine. On the 8th he was, as he has told us in the Apologia, received by Father Dominic, the Passionist. To the "Advertisement" are subjoined the following words:

Postscript.--Since the above was written the Author has joined the Catholic Church. It was his intention and wish to have carried his volume through the press before deciding finally on this step. But when he got some way in the printing, he recognised in himself a conviction of the truth of the conclusion, to which the discussion leads, so clear as to preclude further deliberation. Shortly afterwards circumstances gave him the opportunity of acting on it, and he felt that he had no warrant for refusing to act on it.

So the reality of what had been so long and often so lightly talked about by those who dared it, provoked it, or hoped for it, had come indeed; and a considerable portion of English society learned what it was to be novices in a religious system, hitherto not only alien and unknown, but dreaded, or else to have lost friends and relatives, who were suddenly transformed into severe and uncompromising opponents, speaking in unfamiliar terms, and sharply estranged in sympathies and rules of life. Some of them, especially those who had caught the spirit of their leader, began life anew, took their position as humble learners in the Roman Schools, and made the most absolute sacrifice of a whole lifetime that man can make. To others the change came and was accepted as an emancipation, not only from the bonds of Anglicanism, but from the obligations of orders and priestly vows and devotion. In some cases, where they were married, there was no help for it. But in almost all cases there was a great surrender of what English life has to offer to those brought up in it. Of the defeated party, those who remained had much to think about, between grief at the breaking of old ties, and the loss of dear friends, and perplexities about their own position. The anxiety, the sorrow at differing and parting, seem now almost extravagant and unintelligible. There are those who sneer at the "distress" of that time. There had not been the same suffering, the same estrangement, when Churchmen turned dissenters, like Bulteel and Baptist Noel. But the movement had raised the whole scale of feeling about religious matters so high, the questions were felt to be so momentous, the stake and the issue so precious, the "Loss and Gain" so immense, that to differ on such subjects was the differing on the greatest things which men could differ about. But in a time of distress, of which few analogous situations in our days can give the measure, the leaders stood firm. Dr. Pusey, Mr. Keble, Mr. Marriott accepted, with unshaken faith in the cause of the English Church, the terrible separation. They submitted to the blow--submitted to the reproach of having been associates of those who had betrayed hopes and done so much mischief; submitted to the charge of inconsistency, insincerity, cowardice; but they did not flinch. Their unshrinking attitude was a new point of departure for those who believed in the Catholic foundation of the English Church.

Among those deeply affected by these changes, there were many who had been absolutely uninfluenced by the strong Roman current. They had recognised many good things in the Roman Church; they were fully alive to many shortcomings in the English Church; but the possibility of submission to the Roman claims had never been a question with them. A typical example of such minds was Mr. Isaac Williams, a pupil of Mr. Keble, an intimate friend of Mr. Newman, a man of simple and saintly life, with heart and soul steeped in the ancient theology of undivided Christendom, and for that very reason untempted by the newer principles and fashions of Rome. There were numbers who thought like him; but there were others also, who were forced in afresh upon themselves, and who had to ask themselves why they stayed, when a teacher, to whom they had looked up as they had to Mr. Newman, and into whose confidence they had been admitted, thought it his duty to go. With some the ultimate, though delayed, decision was to follow him. With others, the old and fair praejudicium against the claims of Rome, which had always asserted itself even against the stringent logic of Mr. Ward and the deep and subtle ideas of Mr. Newman, became, when closed with, and tested face to face in the light of fact and history, the settled conviction of life. Some extracts from contemporary papers, real records of the private perplexities and troubles actually felt at the time, may illustrate what was passing in the minds of some whom knowledge and love of Mr. Newman failed to make his followers in his ultimate step. The first extract belongs to some years before, but it is part of the same train of thinking.

As to myself, I am getting into a very unsettled state as to aims and prospects. I mean that as things are going on, a man does not know where he is going to; one cannot imagine what state of things to look forward to; in what way, and under what circumstances, one's coming life--if it does come--is to be spent; what is to become of one. I cannot at all imagine myself a convert; but how am I likely, in the probable state of things, to be able to serve as an English clergyman? Shall I ever get Priest's orders? Shall I be able to continue always serving? What is one's line to be; what ought to be one's aims; or can one have any?

The storm is not yet come: how it may come, and how soon it may blow over, and what it may leave behind, is doubtful; but some sort of crisis, I think, must come before things settle. With the Bishops against us, and Puritanism aggressive, we may see strange things before the end.

When the "storm" had at length come, though before its final violence, the same writer continues:

The present hopeless check and weight to our party--what has for the time absolutely crushed us--is the total loss of confidence arising from the strong tendency, no longer to be dissembled or explained away, among many of us to Rome. I see no chance of our recovery, or getting our heads above water from this, at least in England, for years to come. And it is a check which will one day be far greater than it is now. Under the circumstances--having not the most distant thought of leaving the English Church myself; and yet having no means of escaping the very natural suspicion of Romanising without giving up my best friends and the most saint-like men in England--how am I to view my position? What am I witnessing to? What, if need be, is one to suffer for? A man has no leaning towards Rome, does not feel, as others do, the strength of her exclusive claims to allegiance, the perfection of her system, its right so to overbalance all the good found in ours as to make ours absolutely untrustworthy for a Christian to rest in, notwithstanding all circumstances of habit, position, and national character; has such doubts on the Roman theory of the Church, the Ultramontane, and such instincts not only against many of their popular religious customs and practical ways of going on, but against their principles of belief (e.g. divine faith = relics), as to repel him from any wish to sacrifice his own communion for theirs; yet withal, and without any great right on his part to complain, is set down as a man who may any day, and certainly will some day, go over; and he has no lawful means of removing the suspicion:--why is it tarn'i to submit to this?

However little sympathy we Englishmen have with Rome, the Western Churches under Rome are really living and holy branches of the Church Catholic; corruptions they may have, so may we; but putting these aside, they are Catholic Christians, or Catholic Christianity has failed out of the world: we are no more [Catholic] than they. But this, public opinion has not for centuries, and does not now, realise or allow. So no one can express in reality and detail a practical belief in their Catholicity, in their equality (setting one thing against another) with us as Christians, without being suspected of what such belief continually leads to--disloyalty to the English Church. Yet such belief is nevertheless well-grounded and right, and there is no great hope for the Church till it gains ground, soberly, powerfully, and apart from all low views of proselytising, or fear of danger. What therefore the disadvantage of those among us who do not really deserve the imputation of Romanising may be meant for, is to break this practical belief to the English Church. We may be silenced, but, without any wish to leave the English Church, we cannot give up the belief; that the Western Church under Rome is a true, living, venerable branch of the Christian Church. There are dangers in such a belief; but they must be provided against, they do not affect the truth of the belief.

Such searchings of heart were necessarily rendered more severe and acute by Mr. Newman's act. There was no longer any respite; his dearest friends must choose between him and the English Church. And the choice was made, by those who did not follow him, on a principle little honoured or believed in at the time on either side, Roman or Protestant; but a principle which in the long-run restored hope and energy to a cause which was supposed to be lost. It was not the revival of the old Via Media; it was not the assertion of the superiority of the English Church; it was not a return to the old-fashioned and ungenerous methods of controversy with Rome--one-sided in all cases, ignorant, coarse, unchristian in many. It was not the proposal of a new theory of the Church--its functions, authority, and teaching, a counter-ideal to Mr. Ward's imposing Ideal. It was the resolute and serious appeal from brilliant logic, and keen sarcasm, and pathetic and impressive eloquence, to reality and experience, as well as to history, as to the positive and substantial characteristics of the traditional and actually existing English Church, shown not on paper but in work, and in spite of contradictory appearances and inconsistent elements; and along with this, an attempt to put in a fair and just light the comparative excellences and defects of other parts of Christendom, excellences to be ungrudgingly admitted, but not to be allowed to bar the recognition of defects. The feeling which had often stirred, even when things looked at the worst, that Mr. Newman had dealt unequally and hardly with the English Church, returned with gathered strength. The English Church was after all as well worth living in and fighting for as any other; it was not only in England that light and dark, in teaching and in life, were largely intermingled, 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.

To take leave of Mr. Newman (he writes on the morrow of the event), is a heavy task., His step was not unforeseen; but when it is come those who knew him feel the fact as a real change within them--feel as if they were entering upon a fresh stage of their own life. May that very change turn to their profit, and discipline them by its hardness! It may do so if they will use it so. Let nobody complain; a time must come, sooner or later, in every one s life, when he has to part with advantages, connexions, supports, consolations, that he has had hitherto, and face a new state of things. Every one knows that he is not always to have all that he has now: he says to himself; "What shall I do when this or that stay, or connexion, is gone?" and the answer is, "That he will do without it.". . . The time comes when this is taken away; and then the mind is left alone, and is thrown back upon itself; as the expression is. But no religious mind tolerates the notion of being really thrown upon itself; this is only to say in other words, that it is thrown back upon God. . . . Secret mental consolations, whether of innocent self-flattery or reposing confidence, are over; a more real and graver life begins--a firmer, harder disinterestedness, able to go on its course by itself. Let them see in the change a call to greater earnestness, sincerer simplicity, and more solid manliness. What were weaknesses before will be sins now.

"A new stage has begun. Let no one complain":--this, the expression of individual feeling, represents pretty accurately the temper into which the Church party settled when the first shock was over. They knew that henceforward they had difficult times before them. They knew that they must work under suspicion, even under proscription. They knew that they must expect to see men among themselves perplexed, unsettled, swept away by the influences which had affected Mr. Newman, and still more by the precedent of his example. They knew that they must be prepared to lose friends and fellow-helpers, and to lose them sometimes unexpectedly and suddenly, as the wont was so often at this time. Above all, they knew that they had a new form of antagonism to reckon with, harder than any they had yet encountered. It had the peculiar sad bitterness which belongs to civil war, when men's foes are they of their own households--the bitterness arising out of interrupted intimacy and affection. Neither side could be held blameless; the charge from the one of betrayal and desertion was answered by the charge from the other of insincerity and faithlessness to conscience, and by natural but not always very fair attempts to proselytise; and undoubtedly, the English Church, and those who adhered to it, had, for some years after 1845, to hear from the lips of old friends the most cruel and merciless invectives which knowledge of her weak points, wit, argumentative power, eloquence, and the triumphant exultation at once of deliverance and superiority could frame. It was such writing and such preaching as had certainly never been seen on the Roman side before, at least in England. Whether it was adapted to its professed purpose may perhaps be doubted; but the men who went certainly lost none of their vigour as controversialists or their culture as scholars. Not to speak of Mr. Newman, such men as Mr. Oakeley, Mr. Ward, Mr. Faber, and Mr. Dalgairns more than fulfilled in the great world of London their reputation at Oxford. This was all in prospect before the eyes of those who had elected to cast in their lot with the English Church. It was not an encouraging position. The old enthusiastic sanguineness had been effectually quenched. Their Liberal critics and their Liberal friends have hardly yet ceased to remind them how sorry a figure they cut in the eyes of men of the world, and in the eyes of men of bold and effective thinking. The "poor Puseyites" are spoken of in tones half of pity and half of sneer. Their part seemed played out. There seemed nothing more to make them of importance. They had not succeeded in Catholicising the English Church; they had not even shaken it by a wide secession. Henceforth they were only marked men. All that could be said for them was, that at the worst, they did not lose heart. They had not forgotten the lessons of their earlier time.

It is not my purpose to pursue farther the course of the movement. All the world knows that it was not, in fact, killed or even much arrested by the shock of 1845. But after 1845, its field was at least as much out of Oxford as in it. As long as Mr. Newman remained, Oxford was necessarily its centre, necessarily, even after he had seemed to withdraw from it. When he left his place vacant, the direction of it was not removed from Oxford, but it was largely shared by men in London and the country. It ceased to be strongly and prominently Academical. No one indeed held such a position as Dr. Pusey's and Mr. Keble's; but though Dr. Pusey continued to be a great power at Oxford, he now became every day a much greater power outside of it; while Mr. Keble was now less than ever an Academic, and became more and more closely connected with men out of Oxford, his friends in London and his neighbours at Hursley and Winchester. The cause which Mr. Newman had given up in despair was found to be deeply interesting in ever new parts of the country: and it passed gradually into the hands of new leaders more widely acquainted with English society. It passed into the hands of the Wilberforces, and Archdeacon Manning; of Mr. Bennett, Mr. Dodsworth, Mr. W. Scott, Dr. Irons, Mr. E. Hawkins, and Mr. Upton Richards in London. It had the sympathy and counsels of men of weight, or men who were rising into eminence and importance--some of the Judges, Mr. Gladstone, Mr. Roundell Palmer, Mr. Frederic Rogers, Mr. Mountague Bernard, Mr. Hope Scott (as he afterwards was), Mr. Badeley, and a brilliant recruit from Cambridge, Mr. Beresford Hope. It attracted the sympathy of another boast of Cambridge, the great Bishop of New Zealand, and his friend Mr. Whytehead. Those times were the link between what we are now, so changed in many ways, and the original impulse given at Oxford; but to those times I am as much of an outsider as most of the foremost in them were outsiders to Oxford in the earlier days. Those times are almost more important than the history of the movement; for, besides vindicating it, they carried on its work to achievements and successes which, even in the most sanguine days of "Tractarianism," had not presented themselves to men's minds, much less to their hopes. But that story must be told by others.

"Show thy servants thy work, and their children thy glory."


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