The Tractarians and Education

Extract

The significant date, October 9th, 1845, recalls a crisis in the religious development of an individual, and through him in the religious history of England. But it has also a significance in quite another sphere, since it marks the end of an epoch in university history: with the repression of the Tractarian Movement Laudian Oxford finally ceased to be. Newman realised his defeat in his campaign on behalf of dogmatic religion, and recognised his conquerors. ‘The men who had driven me from Oxford,’ he admits in the Apologia, ‘ were distinctly the Liberals.’ And again: ‘I found no fault with the Liberals; they had beaten me in a fair field.’ With this Matthew Arnold agrees; but he, while admitting that other and more intelligent forces were arrayed against the Movement, less politely characterises the liberalism on which it broke as ‘middle-class liberalism.’ The effects of the Movement persisted in the country at large; but the Movement itself could no longer be properly regarded as peculiarly the Oxford Movement. As for Oxford itself, Mark Pattison observed that, if he had gone to sleep in 1845, and been awakened in 1850, he would have found himself in a new world. For the time being the University abandoned its previous interest in theological controversies, and directed its attention upon itself and its specific function, upon the educational demands of the age and its own response to them. The inevitable liberal reaction, as soon as it gathered force, and this soon happened, rudely thrust aside as irrelevant all the debatable issues that had made life uncomfortable during the past decade, and forced to the front the solitary question of University reform. Theology gave place to education, as the absorbing topic of the day.