The Oxford Movement | Page 8

"_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 a new and undefined
supremacy, not only in the general concerns of the world, but specially
in education. It was the day of Holland House. It was the time when a
Society of which Lord Brougham was the soul, and which comprised a
great number of important political and important scientific names, was
definitely formed for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge. Their labours
are hardly remembered now in the great changes for which they paved
the way; but the Society was the means of getting written and of
publishing at a cheap rate a number of original and excellent books on
science, biography, and history. It was the time of the _Library of
Useful Knowledge,_ and its companion, the _Library of Entertaining
Knowledge;_ of the _Penny Magazine,_ and its Church rival, the
_Saturday Magazine,_ of the _Penny Cyclopaedia,_ and _Lardner's
Cabinet Cyclopaedia,_ and _Murray's Family Library_: popular series,
which contained much of the work of the ablest men of the day, and
which, though for the most part superseded now, were full of interest
then. Another creation of this epoch, and an unmistakable indication of
its tendencies, was the British Association for the Advancement of
Science, which met for the first time at Oxford in June 1832, not

without a good deal of jealousy and misgiving, partly unreasonable,
partly not unfounded, among men in whose hearts the cause and
fortunes of religion were supreme.
Thus the time was ripe for great collisions of principles and aims; for
the decomposition of elements which had been hitherto united; for
sifting them out of their old combinations, and regrouping them
according to their more natural affinities. It was a time for the
formation and development of unexpected novelties in teaching and
practical effort. There was a great historic Church party, imperfectly
conscious of its position and responsibilities;[13] there was an active
but declining pietistic school, resting on a feeble intellectual basis and
narrow and meagre interpretations of Scripture, and strong only in its
circle of philanthropic work; there was, confronting both, a rising body
of inquisitive and, in some ways, menacing thought. To men deeply
interested in religion, the ground seemed confused and treacherous.
There was room, and there was a call, for new effort; but to find the
resources for it, it seemed necessary to cut down deep below the level
of what even good men accepted as the adequate expression of
Christianity, and its fit application to the conditions of the nineteenth
century. It came to pass that there were men who had the heart to make
this attempt. As was said at starting, the actual movement began in the
conviction that a great and sudden danger to the Church was at hand,
and that an unusual effort must be made to meet it. But if the occasion
was in a measure accidental, there was nothing haphazard or tentative
in the line chosen to encounter the danger. From the first it was
deliberately and distinctly taken. The choice of it was the result of
convictions which had been forming before the occasion came which
called on them. The religious ideas which governed the minds of those
who led the movement had been traced, in outline at least, firmly and
without faltering.
The movement had its spring in the consciences and character of its
leaders. To these men religion really meant the most awful and most
seriously personal thing on earth. It had not only a theological basis; it
had still more deeply a moral one. What that basis was is shown in a
variety of indications of ethical