383. Oxford or Tractarian Movement (1)
The Oxford movement stimulated religious feelings. It was strong protest against the materialism and utilitarianism of the Victorian age. Oxford movement was basically a movement for religious reform, also known as Tractarian movement or Anglo Catholic Revival. It is called Oxford because some Oxford professors and scholars were the force at the back of it. The Oxford movement sprang mainly from the conditions that arose in England as a result of the demand of equal treatment by the non-conformists on the one hand and by the Roman Catholics on the other. This movement had nothing to do with politics. The aim of the Oxford movement was to restore the dignity, purity and zeal of church. It also aimed to protect the church from the encroachment of the state as threatened by the Whig reform Bill of 1832. Gates writes that Oxford movement was in its essence an attempt to reconstruct the English Church in harmony with the romantic (mediaeval) ideal. The Oxford movement stressed the absurdity of examining the Church and its teachings in the light of reasons. It put special emphasis on faith as something super rat ional.
John Keble was the real founder of the Oxford movement but Newman was the chief protagonist of the movement. John Keble gave the emotional atmosphere of the movement and Newman provided its dialectics.
Newman broke away from the old evangelical traditions and threw himself whole heartedly into the Tractarian Movement and set to work upon the tracts of the Time – his own tract XC appeared in 1841. He dreamed of a free and powerful Church and wanted to return to the spirit of the middle ages. He believed that this reform could be accomplished by Anglicanism i.e. the Church of England based on a compromise but after the publication of Newman’s final tract in 1841, a storm of criticism aroused as a result of which Newman lost his position at Oxford. Af ter a period of hesitation, he joined the Roman Catholic Church in 1845 and became a cardinal in 1879. After Newman, the movement was led by Rusey but it became less controversial and theoretical and more practical.