THE stage on which what is called the Oxford Movement ran
through its course had a special character of its own, unlike the cir-
cumstances in which other religious efforts had done their work. The
scene of Jansenism had been a great capital, a brilliant society, the
precincts of a court, the cells of a convent, the studies and libraries of
the doctors of the Sorbonne, the council chambers of the Vatican.

The scene of this new Movement was as like as it could be in our
modern world to a Greek πόλις or an Italian self-centered city of the
Middle Ages. Oxford stood by itself in its meadows by the rivers,
having its relations with all England, but, like its sister at Cambridge,
living a life of its own, unlike that of any other spot in England, with
its privileged powers and exemptions from the general law, with its
special mode of government and police, its usages and tastes and tradi-
tions, and even costumes which the rest of England looked at from
outside, much interested but much puzzled, or knew only by transient
visits. And Oxford was as proud and jealous of its own ways as Athens
or Florence, and like them it had its quaint fashions of polity; its demo-
cratic Convocation and its oligarchy; its social ranks; its discipline,
severe in theory, and usually lax in fact; its self-governed bodies and
corporations within itself; its faculties and colleges, like the guilds
and "arts" of Florence; its internal rivalries and discords; its "sets"
and factions. Like these, too, it professed a special recognition of
the supremacy of religion; it claimed to be a home of worship and
religious training, -- Dominus illuminatio mea, -- a claim too often
falsified in the habits and tempers of life.

DEAN CHURCH: The Oxford Movement; pp. 159-160.

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