The Oxford Movement | Page 9

indications are most forcibly given in Mr. Newman's earliest preaching. As tutor at Oriel, Mr. Newman had made what efforts he could, sometimes disturbing to the authorities, to raise the standard of conduct and feeling among his pupils. When he became a parish priest, his preaching took a singularly practical and plain-spoken character. The first sermon of the series, a typical sermon, "Holiness necessary for future Blessedness," a sermon which has made many readers grave when they laid it down, was written in 1826, before he came to St. Mary's; and as he began he continued. No sermons, except those which his great opposite, Dr. Arnold, was preaching at Rugby, had appealed to conscience with such directness and force. A passionate and sustained earnestness after a high moral rule, seriously realised in conduct, is the dominant character of these sermons. They showed the strong reaction against slackness of fibre in the religious life; against the poverty, softness; restlessness, worldliness, the blunted and impaired sense of truth, which reigned with little check in the recognised fashions of professing Christianity; the want of depth both of thought and feeling; the strange blindness to the real sternness, nay the austerity, of the New Testament. Out of this ground the movement grew. Even more than a theological reform, it was a protest against the loose unreality of ordinary religious morality. In the first stage of the movement, moral earnestness and enthusiasm gave its impulse to theological interest and zeal.
FOOTNOTES:
[2] The suppression of the Irish bishoprics. Palmer, Narrative (1883), pp. 44, 101. Maurice, Life, i. 180.
[3] "The Church, as it now stands, no human power can save" (Arnold to Tyler, June 1832. _Life,_ i. 326). "Nothing, as it seems to me, can save the Church but an union with the Dissenters; now they are leagued with the antichristian party, and no merely internal reforms will satisfy them" (Arnold to Whately, January 1833, i. 348). He afterwards thought this exaggerated (_Life,_ i. 336). "The Church has been for one hundred years without any government, and in such a stormy season it will not go on much longer without a rudder" (Whately to Bp. Copleston, July 1832. Life, i, 167). "If such an arrangement of the Executive Government is completed, it will be a difficult, but great and glorious feat for your Lordship's ministry to preserve the establishment from utter overthrow" (Whately to Lord Grey, May 1832. Life, i. 156). It is remarkable that Dean Stanley should have been satisfied with ascribing to the movement an "origin _entirely political_" and should have seen a proof of this "thoroughly political origin" in Newman's observing the date of Mr. Keble's sermon "National Apostasy" as the birthday of the movement, _Edin. Rev._ April 1880, pp. 309, 310.
[4] Readers of Wordsworth will remember the account of Mr. R. Walker (Notes to the "River Duddon").
[5] Compare Life of Whately (ed. 1866), i. 52, 68.
[6] Arnold to W. Smith, Life, i. 356-358; ii. 32.
[7] Life, i. 225 sqq.
[8] "I am vexed to find how much hopeless bigotry lingers in minds, ??��???? ��?��?o?1?????�� ��??????��" (Arnold to Whately, Sept. 1832. _Life,_ i. 331; ii. 3-7).
[9] St. Bartholomew's Day
[10] "The mere barren orthodoxy which, from all that I can hear, is characteristic of Oxford." Maurice in 1829 (_Life,_ i. 103). In 1832 he speaks of his "high endeavours to rouse Oxford from its lethargy having so signally failed" (i. 143).
[11] Abbey and Overton, _English Church in the Eighteenth Century,_ ii. 180, 204.
[12] _V._ Maurice, _Life,_ i. 108-111; Trench's _Letters;_ Carlyle's Sterling.
[13] "In what concerns the Established Church, the House of Commons seems to feel no other principle than that of vulgar policy. The old High Church race is worn out." Alex. Knox (June 1816), i. 54.

CHAPTER II
THE BEGINNING OF THE MOVEMENT--JOHN KEBLE
Long before the Oxford movement was thought of, or had any definite shape, a number of its characteristic principles and ideas had taken strong hold of the mind of a man of great ability and great seriousness, who, after a brilliant career at Oxford as student and tutor, had exchanged the University for a humble country cure. John Keble, by some years the senior, but the college friend and intimate of Arnold, was the son of a Gloucestershire country clergyman of strong character and considerable scholarship. He taught and educated his two sons at home, and then sent them to Oxford, where both of them made their mark, and the elder, John, a mere boy when he first appeared at his college, Corpus, carried off almost everything that the University could give in the way of distinction. He won a double first; he won the Latin and English Essays in the same year; and he won what was the still greater honour of an Oriel Fellowship. His honours were borne with meekness and simplicity; to