"The true and primary author of it" (the Tractarian movement), we read in the _Apologia_, "as is usual with great motive powers, was out of sight.... Need I say that I am speaking of John Keble?" The statement is strictly true. Froude never would have been the man he was but for his daily and hourly intercourse with Keble; and Froude brought to bear upon Newman's mind, at a critical period of its development, Keble's ideas and feelings about religion and the Church, Keble's reality of thought and purpose, Keble's transparent and saintly simplicity. And Froude, as we know from a well-known saying of his,[17] brought Keble and Newman to understand one another, when the elder man was shy and suspicious of the younger, and the younger, though full of veneration for the elder, was hardly yet in full sympathy with what was most characteristic and most cherished in the elder's religious convictions. Keble attracted and moulded Froude: he impressed Froude with his strong Churchmanship, his severity and reality of life, his poetry and high standard of scholarly excellence. Froude learned from him to be anti-Erastian, anti-methodistical, anti-sentimental, and as strong in his hatred of the world, as contemptuous of popular approval, as any Methodist. Yet all this might merely have made a strong impression, or formed one more marked school of doctrine, without the fierce energy which received it and which it inspired. But Froude, in accepting Keble's ideas, resolved to make them active, public, aggressive; and he found in Newman a colleague whose bold originality responded to his own. Together they worked as tutors; together they worked when their tutorships came to an end; together they worked when thrown into companionship in their Mediterranean voyage in the winter of 1832 and the spring of 1833. They came back, full of aspirations and anxieties which spurred them on; their thoughts had broken out in papers sent home from time to time to Rose's _British Magazine_--"Home Thoughts Abroad," and the "Lyra Apostolica." Then came the meeting at Hadleigh, and the beginning of the Tracts. Keble had given the inspiration, Froude had given the impulse; then Newman took up the work, and the impulse henceforward, and the direction, were his.
Suburbs Report
The Oxford Movement — Part 16
2026-11-16 02:09:29 · The Daily Ledger
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