The Oxford Movement

On 14 July 1833 John Keble preached the assize sermon at St Mary’s in Oxford (Newman, Apologia ch. 1, p. 35) (Keble, National Apostasy heading). He asked by what signs a nation that had counted itself part of Christ’s church might be judged to be turning from God, and whether apostasy was too hard a word for a people that threw off the church’s restraint (Keble, National Apostasy introduction and part 1). Churchmen, he said, should answer with intercession and remonstrance and should go on obeying the state (Keble, National Apostasy part 2). R. W. Church, who lived in Oxford through these years, connects the sermon with the government’s suppression of ten Irish bishoprics (Church, The Oxford Movement ch. 6). John Henry Newman wrote that he always kept the day as the start of the movement (Newman, Apologia ch. 1, p. 35).

That September Newman began, on his own initiative, a series of Tracts for the Times (Newman, Apologia ch. 2, pp. 40–41) (Church, The Oxford Movement ch. 6). The first asks the clergy on what they will rest their authority if the state casts the church off, and answers that it rests on their “apostolical descent”: the bishops who ordained them stand in succession from the apostles (Tracts for the Times Tract 1). Edward Bouverie Pusey, a professor and canon of Christ Church, contributed a tract on fasting dated 21 December 1833, and Newman says that he gave the movement “a position and a name” (Newman, Apologia ch. 2, pp. 60–62).

Tract 90, dated 1841, turned to the Thirty-nine Articles of the Elizabethan Settlement. Newman argued that they were “not uncatholic” and could be signed by those who aimed at being “catholic in heart and doctrine” (Tracts for the Times Tract 90, introduction), and that they should be taken in the most catholic sense they would admit (Tracts for the Times Tract 90, conclusion). Church quotes the resolution of 15 March 1841 in which the heads of the Oxford colleges declared that such interpretations were “evading rather than explaining the sense” of the Articles (Church, The Oxford Movement ch. 14). Newman agreed to stop the Tracts, and he says that for three years one bishop after another spoke against him in their charges (Newman, Apologia ch. 3, pp. 137–140). Pusey’s Life prints the sentence of 2 June 1843 by which the vice-chancellor suspended him from preaching in the university for two years after a sermon on the Eucharist (Liddon, Life of Pusey vol. 2, ch. 29).

On 8 October 1845 Newman wrote from Littlemore that he meant to ask a Passionist priest that night for admission into “the One Fold of Christ” (Newman, Apologia ch. 4, pp. 234–235). Pusey stayed: his Life says that the claim of the catholic church, which called Newman to submit to Rome, kept Pusey steadfast in the Anglican communion, and that the work the three friends had begun had “changed the whole aspect of the English Church” (Liddon, Life of Pusey vol. 4, ch. 5).