Page 165 - DENG402_HISTORY_OF_ENGLISH_LITERATURE

History of English Literature Gowher Ahmad Naik, Lovely Professional University

Notes Unit 21: The Victorian Age (Oxford Movement)

CONTENTS

Objectives
Introduction
21.1 Anti-Rationalism
21.2 Anti-Erastianism
21.3 The History of the Movement
21.4 The Literary Aspect of the Movement
21.5 Summary
21.6 Keywords
21.7 Review Questions
21.8 Further Readings

Objectives

After studying this unit, you will be able to:
Define romantic.
Describe anti-rationalism and anti-erastianism.
Explain the history of the movement.
Define the literary aspect of the movement.

Introduction
One only Way to life:
One faith, deliver’d once for all;
One holy Band, endow’d with Heaven’s high call;
One earnest, endless strife:
This is the Church, the Eternal framed of old.

These lines from a poem by John Keble give us some help to answer the question as to what the
Oxford movement was about. This Movement was, fundamentally, religious in nature, and one of
its aims was to rehabilitate the dignity of the Church and to deliver it from the grasp of secular
authority.
But that was only one of the manifold issues which the Movement dealt with. Some other issues
may also be mentioned here. One of them was the growing strength of Liberalism in religion and
politics. The protagonists of this movement came forward to combat tooth and nail all such
Liberalism as appeared in the Church as Latitudinarianism. The Oxford movement had nothing to
do with politics, but it favoured Conservatism or Toryism (of course, in religion). As W. H. Hutton
points out in The Cambridge History of English Literature, Vol. XII, it “was certainly not a Tory
movement, but it was opposed to liberalism in all its aspects. To the philosophy of conservatism
the Oxford leaders were much indebted.” Further, the Movement was opposed to rationalism in
matters concerned with the Church. The Victorian age witnessed a rapid and tremendous expansion
of physical science and even more than in the eighteenth century (the age of prose and reason)
there was a temptation in the nineteenth to put religion to the test of rational scientific examination.
T. H. Huxley, for instance, became an agnostic after failing to be convinced of the truth of
Christianity, considered rationally and scientifically. The Oxford movement stressed the absurdity

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