remained Fellows and attached members of the College, it did nothing to reduce the spread of their influence in Common Room, and indirectly, in College generally, but rather tended to increase it, by opposition. Lastly, and most important of all, it dealt a blow to the intellectual prestige of the College, from which it never recovered during Hawkins’s long reign.’
From ‘The Oxford Counter-Reformation’ in ‘Short Studies on Great Subjects.’ Series IV. By James Anthony Froude. London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1883.
[By the kind permission of Miss Froude and of Messrs. Longmans.]
‘… The last forty or fifty years will be memorable hereafter in the history of English opinion. The number of those who recollect the beginnings of the Oxford Revival is shrinking fast; and such of us as survive may usefully note down their personal recollections as a contribution, so far as it goes, to the general narrative. It is pleasant, too, to recall the figures of those who played the chief parts in the drama. If they had not been men of ability, they could not have produced the revolution that was brought about by them. Their personal characters were singularly interesting. Two of them were distinctly men of real genius. My own brother was, at starting, the foremost of the party; the flame, therefore, naturally burnt hot in my own immediate environment. The phrases and formulas of Anglo-Catholicism had become household words in our family, before I understood coherently what the stir and tumult was about.
‘We fancy that we are free agents. We are conscious of what we do; we are not conscious of the causes which make us do it; and therefore we imagine that the cause is in ourselves. The Oxford leaders believed that they were fighting against the spirit of the age. They were themselves most completely the creatures of their age. It was one of those periods when conservative England had been seized with a passion for reform. Parliament was to be reformed; the municipal institutions were to be reformed; there was to be an
end of monopolies and privileges. The Constitution was to be cut in pieces and boiled in the Benthamite caldron, from which it was to emerge in immortal youth. In a reformed State there needed a reformed Church. My brother and his friends abhorred Bentham and all his works. The Establishment, in its existing state, was too weak to do battle with the new enemy. Protestantism was the chrysalis of Liberalism. The Church, therefore, was to be unprotestantised. The Reformation, my brother said, “was a bad setting of a broken limb.” The limb needed breaking a second time, and then it would be equal to its business.
‘My brother exaggerated the danger, and underestimated the strength, which existing institutions and customs possess, so long as they are left undisturbed. Before he and his friends undertook the process of reconstruction, the Church was perhaps in the healthiest condition which it had ever known…. The average English incumbent of fifty years ago was a man of private fortune, the younger brother of the landlord perhaps, and holding the family living; or it might be the landlord himself, his advowson being part of the estate. His professional duties were his services on Sunday, funerals and weddings on week-days, and visits, when needed, among the sick. In other respects he lived like his neighbours, distinguished from them only by a black coat and white neckcloth, and greater watchfulness over his words and actions. He farmed his own glebe; he kept horses; he shot and hunted moderately, and mixed in general society. He was generally a magistrate; he attended public meetings, and his education enabled him to take a leading part in county business. His wife and daughters looked after the poor, taught in the Sunday school, and managed the penny clubs and clothing clubs. He himself was spoken of in the parish as “the master,” the person who was responsible for keeping order there, and who knew how to keep it. The labourers and the farmers looked up to him. The family in the “great house” could not look down upon him. If he was poor, it was still his pride to bring up his sons as gentlemen; and economies were cheerfully submitted to at home to give them a start in life at the University, or in the Army or Navy.
‘Our own household was a fair representative of the order. My father was Rector of the parish. He was Archdeacon, he was Justice of the Peace. He had a moderate fortune of his own, consisting chiefly in land, and he belonged, therefore, to the “landed interest.” Most of the magistrates’ work of the neighbourhood passed through his hands. If anything was amiss, it was his advice which was most sought after; and I remember his being called upon to lay a troublesome ghost. In his younger days, he had been a hard rider across country. His children knew him as a continually busy, useful man of the world, a learned and cultivated antiquary, and an accomplished artist. My brothers and I were excellently educated, and were sent to School and College. Our spiritual lessons did not go beyond the Catechism. We were told that our business in life was to work, and to make an honourable position for ourselves. About doctrine, Evangelical or Catholic, I do not think that in my early boyhood I ever heard a single word, in Church or out of it. The institution had drifted into the condition of what I should call moral health. It did not instruct us in mysteries, it did not teach us to make religion a special object of our thoughts; it taught us to use religion as a light by which to see our way along the road of duty. Without the sun, our eyes would be of no use to us; but if we look at the sun we are simply dazzled, and can see neither it nor anything else. It is precisely the same with theological speculations. If the beacon lamp is shining, a man of healthy mind will not discuss the composition of the flame. Enough if it shows him how to steer, and keep clear of shoals and breakers. To this conception of the thing we had practically arrived. Doctrinal controversies were sleeping. People went to Church because they liked it, because they knew that they ought to go, and because it was the custom. They had received the Creeds from their fathers, and doubts about them had never crossed their minds. Christianity had wrought itself into the constitution of their natures. It was a necessary part of the existing order of the universe, as little to be debated about as the movements of the planets or the changes of the seasons.
‘Such the Church of England was, in the country districts,