The Oxford Movement and Jane Eyre :: Jane Eyre Essays

The Oxford Movement and Jane Eyre The Victorian period from the mid to fresh 1800s was a time of internal religious turmoil for England. In the Anglican church service there were many different groups competing to define the doctrine and design of the national religion. The church was politically divided in three world(a) categories following the gamey church, which was the around conservative the Middle, or Broad Church, which was much broad and the Low Church, which was the Evangelical wing of the Anglican Church. Within the High Church there were also differences of opinion on the true personality of the Church as a whole. It is from this conservative branch of the Anglican Church where the men of theOxford Movement came. The Oxford Movement began as a movement to correct the Church of England in 1833. The name is taken from the Oxford University fellows who led the movement. Among these men were illusion Keble, Edward Pusey and John Henry Newman. All of them were ext remely loyal to the Anglican Church and were concerned with the governments interference in its affairs. They also were worried about the liberal tendencies of the Evangelicals as a threat to the Church. The Oxford movement thought that they needed to occur the Church back to the true church of the fourth century AD drawing on the patristic writings of St. Augustine, St. Jerome and St. Bernard, their aim was to revive the ritual and mysticism of the early church. The Oxford Movements beginning is usually associated with July 14, 1833, which was the date John Keble gave his discourse on National Apostasy. But, more importantly the movement took its roots with the military issue of the Tracts for the Times by Newman, the first of which was published September 9, 1833, and the last, Tract 90, in 1841. The Tracts meant to remind the English to understand the church as an independent body, not as an appendage to the state. The Tractarians wanted the movement to offer a compromise bet ween Roman Catholicism and Evangelicalism. The Anglicans were distrustful of the Catholic tendency because of the forcefulness of the Pope. On the other hand, they did not embrace the evangelical doctrine of customary damnation. The Oxford Movement and its leaders had the best intentions to reform the Church, but it seems to have been most successful in the way it pursued faith as an appetency of the heart and conscience not an inquiry of the head (Chadwick 12).