The Oxford Movement | Page 7

by gifts of flowing words or high-pitched rhetoric to those who
expected some demands to be made on them, so that these demands
were not too strict. Yet Evangelical religion had not been unfruitful,
especially in public results. It had led Howard and Elizabeth Fry to
assail the brutalities of the prisons. It had led Clarkson and Wilberforce
to overthrow the slave trade, and ultimately slavery itself. It had created
great Missionary Societies. It had given motive and impetus to
countless philanthropic schemes. What it failed in was the education
and development of character; and this was the result of the increasing
meagreness of its writing and preaching. There were still Evangelical
preachers of force and eloquence--Robert Hall, Edward Irving,
Chalmers, Jay of Bath--but they were not Churchmen. The circle of
themes dwelt on by this school in the Church was a contracted one, and
no one had found the way of enlarging it. It shrank, in its fear of mere
moralising, in its horror of the idea of merit or of the value of good
works, from coming into contact with the manifold realities of the spirit
of man: it never seemed to get beyond the "first beginnings" of
Christian teaching, the call to repent, the assurance of forgiveness: it
had nothing to say to the long and varied process of building up the
new life of truth and goodness: it was nervously afraid of departing
from the consecrated phrases of its school, and in the perpetual iteration
of them it lost hold of the meaning they may once have had. It too often
found its guarantee for faithfulness in jealous suspicions, and in fierce
bigotries, and at length it presented all the characteristics of an
exhausted teaching and a spent enthusiasm. Claiming to be exclusively
spiritual, fervent, unworldly, the sole announcer of the free grace of
God amid self-righteousness and sin, it had come, in fact, to be on very
easy terms with the world. Yet it kept its hold on numbers of
spiritually-minded persons, for in truth there seemed to be nothing
better for those who saw in the affections the main field of religion. But
even of these good men, the monotonous language sounded to all but
themselves inconceivably hollow and wearisome; and in the hands of
the average teachers of the school, the idea of religion was becoming
poor and thin and unreal.

But besides these two great parties, each of them claiming to represent
the authentic and unchanging mind of the Church, there were
independent thinkers who took their place with neither and criticised
both. Paley had still his disciples at Cambridge, or if not disciples, yet
representatives of his masculine but not very profound and reverent
way of thinking; and a critical school, represented by names afterwards
famous, Connop Thirlwall and Julius Hare, strongly influenced by
German speculation, both in theology and history, began to attract
attention. And at Cambridge was growing, slowly and out of sight, a
mind and an influence which were to be at once the counterpart and the
rival of the Oxford movement, its ally for a short moment, and then its
earnest and 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