In the
same year in which he took up his Sussex curacy, the Tracts for
the Times had begun to appear at Oxford. The 'Oxford Movement',
in fact, had started on its course. The phrase is still familiar;
but its meaning has become somewhat obscured both by the lapse of
time and the intrinsic ambiguity of the subjects connected with
it. Let us borrow for a moment the wings of Historic Imagination,
and, hovering lightly over the Oxford of the thirties, take a
rapid bird's-eye view.
For many generations the Church of England had slept the sleep of
the...comfortable. The sullen murmurings of dissent, the loud
battle-cry of Revolution, had hardly disturbed her slumbers.
Portly divines subscribed with a sigh or a smile to the Thirty-
nine Articles, sank quietly into easy living, rode gaily to
hounds of a morning as gentlemen should, and, as gentlemen
should, carried their two bottles of an evening. To be in the
Church was in fact simply to pursue one of those professions
which Nature and Society had decided were proper to gentlemen and
gentlemen alone. The fervours of piety, the zeal of Apostolic
charity, the enthusiasm of self-renunciation-- these things were
all very well in their way and in their place; but their place
was certainly not the Church of England. Gentlemen were neither
fervid nor zealous, and above all they were not enthusiastic.
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