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Need I say that I am speaking of John Keble? The first time that I was in a room with him was on occasion of my election to a fellowship at Oriel, when I was sent for into the Tower, to shake hands with the provost and fellows. How is that hour fixed in my memory after the changes of forty-two years, forty-two this very day on which I write!
The publication of The Christian Year, however, which immediately followed, probably did more for the Movement and for the spiritual life of England than any office-holding could have done; and in 1831, Keble, being elected Professor of Poetry, distinguished himself almost as much in criticism as he had already done in poetry.
Hurrell Froude brought us together about 1828; it is one of the sayings preserved in his "Remains" "Do you know the story of the murderer who had done one good thing in his life? Well, if I was ever asked what good thing I had ever done, I should say I had brought Keble and Newman to understand each other." For ten years he was Professor of Poetry at Oxford.
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. Doubtless, many thought and felt like them about the perils which beset the Church and religion.
It is not necessary, and scarcely becoming, to praise a book which has already become one of the classics of the language. When the general tone of religious literature was so nerveless and impotent, as it was at that time, Keble struck an original note and woke up in the hearts of thousands a new music, the music of a school, long unknown in England.
Life of Cardinal Manning. A. W. Hutton. Cardinal Manning. J. E. C. Bodley. Cardinal Manning and Other Essays. F. W. Cornish. The English Church in the Nineteenth Century. Dean Church. The Oxford Movement. Sir J. T. Coleridge. Memoir of the Rev. John Keble. Hurrell Froude. Remains. Cardinal Newman. Letters and Correspondence in the English Church. Apologia pro Vita Sua. Wilfrid Ward.
I am really sorry for it, and somewhat troubled in mind. 'The occasional notices of Mr. and Mrs. Keble in your letters, and the full account of him and her as their end drew nigh, is very touching. How much, how very much there is that I should like to ask him now! How I could sit at his feet and listen to him!
But in all that he did and wrote he aimed at being true at all costs and in the very depths of his heart; and though, in his words, we may wish sometimes for what we should feel to be more natural and healthy in tone, we never can doubt that we are in the presence of one who shrank from all conscious unreality like poison. From Keble, or, it may be said, from the Kebles, he received his theology.
We need to stand beside Calvary and see the price that was paid there for human life. John Keble, the poet-preacher of the English Church, said that the salvation of one soul is worth more than the framing of the Magna Charta of a thousand worlds.
I know nothing of the Keble family, not even how they were related to him, so that my interest in Hursley is connected with him only. Yet it will always be a hallowed spot in the memory of English Churchmen. You will hear the various rumours as to who is to write his life, &c. Let me know what is worth knowing about it. 'Kohimarama.
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