The Oxford Movement One Hundred Years After

THE UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO QUARTERLY THE OXFORD MOVEMENT ONE HUNDRED YEARS AFTER* D. L. MuRRAY The centenary of the Oxford Movement last July fell upon a nation that had only the dimmest recollection of what it was that was being celebrated. The bewildered respect of the newspaper reporters detailed to attend the gorgeous ceremonies organized by the Anglo-Catholic Congress in the open-~ir stadium at Shepherd's Bush in West London was significant. They stood astounded by unimagined religious pageantry, and confusedly wished that, like the great military tattoos at Aldershot, it was self-explanatory, or could be somehow related to the national life. Meanwhile, as was to be expected, the co1npact body within the Church of England that still follows the inspiration of Newman, Pusey, Keble, and the Oxford Tracts, poured forth a flood of pamphlets, panegyrics, and memorial studies-which were read by those who already khew what was to be found in them. Nor were there wanting manifestos from the opposite ecclesiastical camp, from the standardbearers of that unrelenting Protestantism which is compensated for its weakness within the English Church by its capacity to sweep the nation at large at any moment of crisis. What would ·have been most instructive was what was hardest to find, some genuinely representative expression of the mind o(modern England towards that *The Oxford Apostles, by Geoffery Faber, Faber and Faber (The Ryerson Press, $4.50). · The Tractarian Movement, 1833NJ8~5, by the Rt. Revd. E. A. Knox, D.D., Putnam (McClelland and Stewart). Northern Catholicism, edited by N. P. Williams, D.D., and Charles Harris, D.D., The Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge (General Board of Religious Education, Toronto, $2.25). The Oxford Movement, by Shane Leslie, Burns Oates and Washbourne, 5s. I IO REVIEWS element contributed to the national tradition .by the Oxford Tractarians a hundred years ago. The .four volumes that we have selected from a much larger heap fairly represent these various sections of opinion. Northern Catholicism is the latest, most scholarly, and niost authoritative exposition of the standpoint of "Anglo-Catholicism." Mr. -Shane Leslie, though he will always be a franc-tireur, gives in a highly individual style, cotuscating with Irish ·wit and provocativeness , the point of view of the convert -from Anglicanism to Rome. Bishop E. A. Knox, that formidable veteran, who, after retiring from the See of Manchester, emerged lately from his retreat to withstand and to conquer by the aid of parliament the whole official Church bent upon a revision of the Prayer Book in a mildly Tractarian direction, represents the unbending Protestant standpoint in its most eloquent, learned, and cultured form. And Mr. - Geoffery Faber, whose great-uncle, Frederick Faber, the hymn-writer and founder of Bromp- -ton Oratory, was one of the most glittering of the stars that fell with Newman-from the Anglican heaven-for what does Mr. Faber stand? The modern verdict? We had better defer the question for the moment. Those who hold the comforting belief that the fires of odium theologicum have burnt very low in these days may well rub their eyes when they read, on the very :{irst pages of Bishop Knox's book, his defence of Queen El~zabeth (against Macaulay) for her !refusal to grant liberty, even of private·worship, to the Roman Catholics of her reign. But Bishop Knox, who -passed his student-days in an Oxford through the streets of which there still moved the venerable figures of some of the chief Tractarians and their chief opponents, who was himself the irresponsive ~ubject of the appeals of the aged Dr. Pusey, writes of the III THE UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO QUARTERLY movement with deep knowledge, if with a perfect lack of sympathy. He performs, too, a very useful service by setting it against its historical background, and showing it for what it was, a ripple in the great wave of the Cath-·olic revival that washed the continent of Europe after Waterloo, a revival of which Chateaubriand, De Maistre, Lamennais, Montalembert, Manzoni, Mohler are among the thinkers whose influence can be traced in varying degrees among the Tractarians. Nor were there wanting English influences that prepared the ground for what was...