This week, I am featuring John Keble (pronounced KEE-ble), 1792-1866, a 19th century Anglican priest and professor of poetry at Oxford. In 1833, he preached a sermon titled, National Apostasy. In it:

Keble addressed two quesions: How can one tell when a Christ nation has alienated itself from God, and what should faithful Christians do when that happens? Look at several things, he said: indifference to the religious life of others, failure to instruct children, casual tolerance of unbelief, disregard of voluntary oaths, and “disrespect to the successors of the apostles.” [One can only imagine what Keble would think about what is happening today in England and America.]

Keble’s sermon was the opening shot of the Oxford Movement, so called because its leaders were associated with Oxford University. It is also called the Tractarian Movement because it spread, initially, through the publication and distribution of tracts. These Tracts for the Times took the debate out of Oxford’s ivory towers and into the parishes. At the heart of the debate was the nature of the church. The Tractarians said the church was created and commissioned by God, and is accountable to God (Richard H. Schmidt, Glorious Companions: Five Centuries of Anglican Spirituality, p. 176)

The Oxford Movement signaled a rebirth of Anglo-Catholicism, a high-church movement within the Anglican Church, and this week’s selection will focus on Keble’s writings about the nature of the Church.

From the sermon National Apostasy:

The point really to be considered is whether, according to the coolest estimate, the fashionable liberality of this generation be not ascribable, in a great measure, to the same temper which led the Jews voluntarily to set about degrading themselves to a level with the idolatrous Gentiles. And if it be true anywhere that such enactments are forced on the legislature by public opinion, is apostasy too hard a word to describe the temper of that nation?

–John Keble