Abstract
The pages of history reveal the lives of individuals, the rise of nations and of great movements, and we read them through, occasionally elevated by the heroism of some lofty soul, but more often borne down by the records of avarice, cruelty, and ambition, by tales of climbs to glory, and of falls to ruin. In the midst of all these narratives of futile struggle and of aimless retrogression, how gratifying to come upon, in the seat of intellectual life in England, a tide of intellect, a quickening of soul, a renaissance of devotion, rising like a great white dove over a sea of troubled waters, and giving promise of a return to the Ark of Peace. This white dove, the Oxford Movement, like Mary Frances Butts' "Water Lily" did not fall out of heaven, but grew up from the ooze of the river, from the radicalism and the banefulness of the French Revolution. This upward flight of thought, of will, of piety, was not of one individual only but of a significant group of friends, of fellow masters, of spiritual leaders, popular enough to turn the eyes of the world up to them, and influential enough to draw an army of disciples in their wake. Neither was it a sudden flight, followed by a precipitous fall, but a wide circling soar, continuing its majestic onward motions over the years since its inception to the present time, ever keeping revived in England the spirit of the great St. Augustine, ever swaying the Anglo-Catholic of the day as it swayed the Father of Anglo-Catholicism, and ever drawing the more clear-sighted of the Church in which it originated to the Church in which so many of its most luminous minds alighted and found rest.