I NEWMAN THE MAN [I] ABOUT eighty-five years ago at slumberous old Oxford University a moral revolution occurred which stirred England to its depths and entailed consequences whose end is not yet. It took its rise with a group of men unlike enough in type of mind but at one in a common enthusiasm and singleness of purpose, who felt that the hour of regeneration had struck for the Church of England and who devoted themselves to the task with an ardor which religious enthusiasm never fails to kindle. Wherever they looked, they saw a great ecclesiastical organization long established by law and seated in majesty in every large center throughout the kingdom. It stood for British solidarity and British conservatism, and was as far removed from the challenge of men as the British constitution itself. It was as obvious as the dome of St. Paul's, as magnificent, as massive, as universally accepted, and seemingly as remote from the lives of the masses. Its livings appeared to be occupied chiefly by a complacent clergy who married and were given in marriage, who felt that the world was not an uncomfortable place to live in, and who reverenced the cult of respectability as something with which religion was bound by ties (by no means invisible) in an alliance which gave men a comfortable outlook upon this earthly existence as a presage of a no less comfortable one in the world to come. To such an attitude of mind a conception of primitive Christianity, with its fiery ardor and its hunger for the was based upon the support of the State and, should the hour come when the State deserted her, she could hope to command veneration and escape collapse only if Englishmen were convinced of her apostolic descent, not passively but militantly. To arouse such a conviction would accomplish many things: it would awaken Englishmen to the spiritual significance of a heritage they had forgotten to think of and consequently to prize; it would bring them to a realization of the purity and vitality of religious faith as embodied in a Church they affected to believe of divine origin, but treated as a merely human institution; it would, finally, as an aftermath of all this, rekindle the dormant fires of a faith such as they knew who cherished it in the days of its pristine vigor, and once again the vision of peace, which is the love of God, would be among men. To awaken the minds of Englishmen, to stir their hearts, to kindle in them such a religious fervor was a work to tax the genius of a very Loyola, but the group of eager Oxonians, who found the task a noble challenge, gave themselves up to it with an enthusiasm which for years smiled at all obstacles. If they could have been easily discouraged they had only to look about them at the divergencies of beliefs among the very leaders of the Anglican Church who often clashed on fundamentals, regarded vital matters. as of scant importance, and who were frequently doubtful in their own minds as to just what views they did entertain. But nothing daunted, they kept on their course, having before their eyes the new and no less pregnant purpose of unifying and solidifying belief so that shepherds no less than sheep might be as one. Thus was born the famous "Oxford Movement," one of the most significant spiritual reactions since the Religious Revolt of the sixteenth century. The movement could not remain inarticulate; it |