roused the mind to prayer, and only through prayer and life was it
known to be truth. The Oxford men did not affirm, that which helps
men to be saints must be true. But they had much sympathy with the
proposition, and would probably have agreed that it contained more
than a seed of truth. And in this modified sense, it is right to see the
Oxford Movement as an impulse of the heart and the conscience, not
an inquiry of the head. Certainly the principal changes which it
brought in English life were changes in the mode of worship, or in the
understanding of sanctity, or in the consequent methods of religious
practice; and the changes of theological or philosophical thinking were
by comparison less far-reaching.

Though the leaders were not so extreme in their antagonism to
Reason as their opponents sometimes believed, the Oxford Movement
was one part of that great swing of opinion against Reason as the Age
of Reason had understood it and used it. Through Europe ran the re-
action against the aridity of common sense, against the pride of ration-
alism. There is little in common, of religion, between Keble and
Goethe, between Pusey and Victor Hugo. The scepticisms of Hume
and Kant, the romantic poets or novelists, the new historians, the shock
of Robespierre and the temple of reason, the evangelical or pietistic
theologians, the desire to justify the past and to value tradition and
history in the face of the critical cuts of rationalism -- the revolt against
Reason and "enlightenment" cannot rightly be seen in terms of a few
simple forces. But the Oxford Movement was part of this reaction.
They wanted to find a place for the poetic or the aesthetic judgment;
their hymnody shared in the feelings and evocations of the romantic
poets; they wished to find a place and value for historical tradition,
against the irreverent or sacrilegious hands of critical revolutionaries
for whom no antiquity was sacred; they suspected the reason of com-
mon sense as shallow; they wanted to justify order and authority in
Church as well as State.

It is safe to say that the Movement would not have taken the form
which it took without the impetus of ecclesiastical and secular politics.
For example, one characteristic doctrine of the Oxford men was that
high doctrine of the episcopal and priestly ministry which is usually
described in the phrase apostolic succession. This high doctrine of the
ministry was lent power in Church and State because in 1833 dissent
from the Church of England and Ireland seemed more potent than at

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