Oxford Movement

The movement, whose original devotees were mostly associated with the University of Oxford, argued for the reinstatement of some older Christian traditions of faith and their inclusion into Anglican liturgy and theology.

[2] John Keble criticised these proposals as "National Apostasy" in his Assize Sermon in Oxford in 1833, in which he denied the authority of the British Parliament to abolish several dioceses in Ireland.

Even if the Anglican Church were completely separated from the state, it could still claim the loyalty of Englishmen because it rested on divine authority and the principle of apostolic succession.

Tractarians argued for the inclusion of traditional aspects of liturgy from medieval religious practice, as they believed the church had become too "plain".

Newman's eventual reception into the Roman Catholic Church in 1845, followed by Henry Edward Manning in 1851, had a profound effect on the movement.

The Oxford Movement was criticised as being a mere "Romanising" tendency, but it began to influence the theory and practice of Anglicanism more broadly, spreading to cities such as Bristol during the 1840s-50s.

One of the results was the establishment of the Christian Social Union, of which a number of bishops were members, where issues such as the just wage, the system of property renting, infant mortality and industrial conditions were debated.

Gu Hongming, an early twentieth-century Chinese author, used the concept of the Oxford Movement to argue for a return to traditional Confucianism in China.

It was simply an impossibility that I could say any thing henceforth to good effect, when I had been posted up by the marshal on the buttery-hatch of every College of my University, after the manner of discommoned pastry-cooks, and when in every part of the country and every class of society, through every organ and opportunity of opinion, in newspapers, in periodicals, at meetings, in pulpits, at dinner-tables, in coffee-rooms, in railway carriages, I was denounced as a traitor who had laid his train and was detected in the very act of firing it against the time-honoured Establishment.

[10] Newman was one of a number of Anglican clergy who were received into the Roman Catholic Church during the 1840s who were either members of, or were influenced by, Tractarianism.