The Oxford Movement
At Oxford, in 1833, writes K. Theodore Hoppen, a group of earnest reformers set out to infuse new spiritual life into the Established Church.
The early nineteenth century was not a happy period for the Church of England. The quiescent latitudinarianism that had dominated the eighteenth century, and discouraged theological disputes because they occasioned a disturbance in the calm waters of ecclesiastical inaction, was at last recognized as an inadequate defence against contemporary rationalist and utilitarian assaults upon the Church.
The remnants of the old ‘high and dry’ party had relapsed into a state of intellectual torpidity, and the non-juring tradition, which, through its high conception of the Church as a spiritual society, might have brought about a measure of religious regeneration, had gradually disappeared by process of absorption into the establishment.
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