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.
often bitter enemy.  In spite of the dominant teaching identified with the name of Mr. Simeon, Frederic Maurice, with John Sterling and other members of the Apostles’ Club, was feeling for something truer and nobler than the conventionalities of the religious world.[12] In Oxford, mostly in a different way, more dry, more dialectical, and, perhaps it may be said, more sober, definite, and ambitious of clearness, the same spirit was at work.  There was a certain drift towards Dissent among the warmer spirits.  Under the leading of Whately, questions were asked about what was supposed to be beyond dispute with both Churchmen and Evangelicals.  Current phrases, the keynotes of many a sermon, were fearlessly taken to pieces.  Men were challenged to examine the meaning of their words.  They were cautioned or ridiculed as the case might be, on the score of “confusion of thought” and “inaccuracy of mind”; they were convicted of great logical sins, ignoratio elenchi, or undistributed middle terms; and bold theories began to make their appearance about religious principles and teaching, which did not easily accommodate themselves to popular conceptions.  In very different ways and degrees, Davison, Copleston, Whately, Hawkins, Milman, and not least, a brilliant naturalised Spaniard who sowed the seeds of doubt around him, Blanco White, had broken through a number of accepted opinions, and had presented some startling ideas to men who had thought that all religious questions lay between the orthodoxy of Lambeth and the orthodoxy of Clapham and Islington.  And thus the foundation was laid, at least, at Oxford of what was then called the Liberal School of Theology.  Its theories and paradoxes, then commonly associated with the “Noetic” character of one college, Oriel, were thought startling and venturesome when discussed in steady-going common-rooms and country parsonages; but they were still cautious and old-fashioned compared with what was to come after them.  The distance is indeed great between those early disturbers of lecture-rooms and University pulpits, and their successors.

While this was going on within the Church, there was a great movement of thought going on in the country.  It was the time when Bentham’s utilitarianism had at length made its way into prominence and importance.  It had gained a hold on a number of powerful minds in society and political life.  It was threatening to become the dominant and popular philosophy.  It began, in some ways beneficially, to affect and even control legislation.  It made desperate attempts to take possession of the whole province of morals.  It forced those who saw through its mischief, who hated and feared it, to seek a reason, and a solid and strong one, for the faith which was in them as to the reality of conscience and the mysterious distinction between right and wrong.  And it entered into a close alliance with science, which was beginning to assert its claims, since then risen so high, to

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The Oxford Movement from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.