Galilean dust! The revival of religion with which our century began was therefore a return to sanity. It would have been another form of madness but for the reality and divinity of the Lord of life and glory. The noblest spirits of our time have not been rainbow-chasers. Shaftesbury battling with the greed of English capitalists and the prejudice of English statesmen, Denison wasting away in the London slums, Livingstone hunting the lost sheep in the wilds of Africa, Gallaudet thinking out speech for the dumb, Fliedner with his ministries of mercy, Florence Nightingale aflame for righteousness and helpfulness, Frances Willard with her vision of the nobler home-these fought under the standard and in the presence of a Christ that stood, as Stephen saw him, at the right hand of God. For them, to live was Christ. They ap plied to him the one conclusive test. They followed him whithersoever he led. The one necessary requirement indispensable for apprehending him they had, the faith that works by love.

sense, must be always for the One discovers; thousands can

Knowledge, in the strictest few. Faith is for the many. believe. The modern world is too busy for each man to examine the foundations of his creed. But in the modern world knowledge is power; the supreme test of truth is experiment. "Jesus lives," the first disciples said. "Silver and gold we have none, but, Crippled Humanity, in the name of Jesus of Nazareth stand up and walk!" "Jesus lives," we keep on saying. But where is our power? ple answer, that can be tested easily. rise up and walk!

If he lives, the peoBid the modern world

Charles J. Little

ART. III.-THE OXFORD MOVEMENT AND ITS

LEADERS.

WILLIAM LAUD, Archbishop of Canterbury under Charles the First, was condemned by an ordinance of Parliament, and suffered decapitation on Tower Hill on January 10, 1645. He met his doom with perfect composure and quiet dignity. His policy as a prelate had been characterized by reckless courage and the temerity with which he threw himself across the religious instincts of his time. He defended the extreme doctrines of the Stuart monarchy, and associated them with a type of churchmanship which proved to be, in the sequel, the precursor of the Oxford movement. The Laudian temper has been the bane of the Anglican Church from his day until now. This unhappy defect largely caused the ruin of the Establishment which followed his administration. In the eighteenth century it subserved the practical rejection of the evangelical revival, and during our own times its prevalence has enabled the temporary triumph of the followers of Pusey, Newman, and Froude.

The period immediately preceding the issue of Tracts for the Times did not promise any revival of those principles for which Laud had laid down his life. The two predominant schools of the "High Churchmen" and the "Evangelicals " were unsatisfactory in their hold upon the life of the State and of the universities. The High Churchmen were looked upon as teaching a mere morality, even at the best, and, at the worst, as allies and servants of an unfriendly world. The Evangelicals had insisted upon the beginnings of Christian teaching with so much fervor that they had neglected its higher development and, specifically, its ethics. The guarantees of faithfulness to doctrine were too often found in jealous suspicions and fierce bigotries. The religious world at large was too conventional; men were afraid of principles; they shrank from the suspicion of enthusiasm; their utterances were full of self-complacency. The great evangelists of the Church, the Wesleys and their coadjutors, beneath the direct guidance of God, had built up sister Churches whose progress

astonished the world, and whose existence was a standing contradiction of the basal claims of the parent body. A wave of political liberalism swept over Europe, and was strongly felt in England. During 1825-30 the orthodox political traditions of Anglicanism, as a State Church, underwent severe examination and incurred several defeats. Ten of the Irish episcopates were abolished, and the bishops of the English Church were sternly commanded by Earl Grey to set their house in order. This sudden onslaught greatly disconcerted the leaders of the Church. They, as a rule, were too halfhearted and too shallow to meet it with any vigor. The Evangelical party, whose theology and life had been profoundly affected by the Methodist revival, was now in the second or third generation, and had lost its strength and aim. In the controversies which followed the beginning of the Oxford movement the Evangelicals were no match for antagonists who were in deadly earnest, and who put them to shame by their zeal and courage. In the beginning of the century there was growing, slowly and out of sight, a type of manhood of rare culture and great gifts, destined to precipitate the impend ing reconstruction. In the ultimate, as we now see, the two schools--that founded in Cambridge by Maurice, Sterling, and other members of the Apostles' Club, and the one at Oxford, led by Newman, Pusey, and their associates have reacted upon each other, and with gratifying results.

Let us now consider those names which have right to be mentioned in the Oxford movement, a movement which, notwithstanding its deterrents-and their name is legion-is the most remarkable religious event of the nineteenth century. John Keble, the son of a rural clergyman and a scholar, poet, and saint, was born at Fairford Rectory, Gloucestershire, in 1792. He left Oxford in 1823, carrying with him the greatest honors of the university. His retirement was voluntary and singularly unselfish; he felt himself bound to the work of the ministry, and for this end he cheerfully gave up the most brilliant pros pects of an academic career. Keble was not intended, however, to be the leader of a far-reaching and revolutionary change. He mistrusted popular effort and excitement. His temper enabled him to forego preferment with ease, and even

pleasure. His "soul was like a star and dwelt apart" from the haunts of the throng. But he was peerless in his influence upon men for the molding of their characters and the inspiration of their purposes. Archbishop Whately's pupil, Newman, did not respond with more alacrity to his tutor's masterly guidance in the use of language than did the young men whom Keble controlled in their use of life. There were with him three Oxford students reading for their degree in the long vacation of 1823, Robert Wilberforce, Isaac Williams, and Richard Hurrell Froude. He won for all time the veneration and love of this little circle. But in Froude he won more, for Froude became Keble's disciple, taking all he had to communicate, and because of his highly tempered intellect and his determination he reacted on his master, carrying him forward to still bolder enterprises and becoming their champion and mouthpiece. Newman wrote of Keble: "He is the first man in Oxford. Isaac Williams tells us that a short walk with him and a few words spoken marked the turning point in his life." Hurrell Froude declared: "Where Keble was donnishness and humbug would be no more in college, nor the pride of talent, nor secular ambition." But, like all the Tractarians, Keble's willful ignorance of sister Churches bred even in his generous nature a profound dislike for what he calls "dissent." He shared the attitude of Newman, who once refused to marry an unbaptized woman; and this disposition has shown itself in so many unfortunate arrogances that it mitigates the usefulness of these men to the Church catholic. In it they were true children of William Laud.

The devotional poetry of Keble has been read the world over, and innumerable multitudes thank God for so precious a gift to the Churches. But who remembers Hugh James Rose? Yet he, more than Keble, gave shape and tendency to the earlier phases of the Oxford movement. Dean Burgon, in his Lives of Twelve Good Men, describes him as "the re storer of the old paths." He was young-forty-three years of age-when death overtook him, yet there is but one opinion concerning his success as a public teacher. Those who have bestowed attention on such matters will not be surprised that Hugh Rose's public reading of Scripture—an act which Hooker

14-FIFTH SERIES, VOL. XV.

in a famous place declares to be "preaching"-partook of a most weighty and impressive character. Says Burgon:

A very competent judge once assured me that his reading of the fiftythird of Isaiah in a village church in Sussex so affected him that, at the end of many years, he was able to recall his grand intonation and the solemnity with which he delivered those awful words. Something similar the same friend related to me concerning the way he had heard Mr. Rose read the parable of the Prodigal Son. . . The subject of impressive reading having once cropped up in Exeter College common room (we were a small party sitting round the fire after dinner), I mentioned the substance of what immediately precedes, when one of the fellows (the Rev. Henry Low), to the surprise of us all, in the quaintest manner and with no little emotion thrust out his legs on the hearth rug and, with an ejaculation expressive of his entire assent to what I had been saying, broke out somewhat as follows: "Never heard him read but once, and shall never forget it as long as I live. It was the Ten Commandments. Never heard anything like it. Never!". . . I remarked to the speaker that it is difficult to read the Ten Commandments with any special propriety, and asked him what it was that had so struck him. "O," exclaimed Low, "it was as if Mr. Rose had been personally commissioned to deliver the decalogue to the congregation!"

On July 25, 1833, Mr. Rose called together a number of clergymen to Hadleigh Rectory to consult upon the condition of the Church. There was a great fear that the recreated Parliament elected by the Reform bill would imperil her political privileges and prestige. The bishops were overwhelmed with pamphlets demanding change and the liberalizing of the institutions of Anglicanism. Four men were present at the Hadleigh conference, Rose and William Palmer being the leaders. Froude also was there, but Keble and Newman were both absent. The news of this gathering spread far and wide, and when controversy assumed a bitter tone it became customary to refer to it as the Hadleigh conspiracy. It is doubtful, however, if any direct result justified such an appellation. Rose died seven years later, after a long and wearying illness; had he lived he must have been reckoned with as one of the chiefs of the movement, utterly opposed to its later Romeward tendencies, and the one man in every way fitted to have prevented that disaster, could he have prevailed against the logic of the case.

Dean Church, in speaking of Richard Hurrell Froude,