KEBLE COLLEGE
“Keble College, near Rome”—A memorial of the author of the “Christian Year”—The ideals of the College—How far they have been realised—Diversified results of the experiment—The Bishop of London and Mr. Herbert Trench.
The last stage of our pilgrimage leads us away from Oxford to the flaming bricks of Keble, adjacent to the Parks. It was a Keble man who once presumed to address a letter to “Worcester College, near Oxford.” The reply, so the story continues, was addressed to “Keble College, near Rome,”—and did not go astray. And these things, of course, are an allegory.
How far the allegory is faithful—to what extent Rome and Keble are in spiritual proximity—is a debatable question which it shall be left to others to debate. The College may be regarded, at any rate, as a protest and a reaction: a sectarian excrescence upon an age which seemed to be beginning to be liberal. One may regard it, according to one’s point of view, either as a gaudy monument to a lost cause or as a gaudy temple erected to celebrate the renascence of a discredited idea.
KEBLE COLLEGE.
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Tractarianism seemed to have had its hour at Oxford. The secession of the Newmanites had induced many Anglican Catholics to ask themselves whether they were not living in a fool’s paradise. The Essayists and Reviewers—the Seven against Christ as the wit of the orthodox party styled them—had set men reconsidering their theological position. The tendency of the hour was to look forward instead of backward, to break down barriers instead of building them, and to get rid of formulæ instead of offering money prizes to those who would subscribe to them. And then came Keble, a “throwback,” as it were, announced by a flourish of Puseyite trumpets.
The College was founded by public subscription as a memorial of the author of the “Christian Year,” and was designed to combine plain living with High Church thinking. Self-denying ordinances were to be imposed in the cause of economy, and the advantages of the institution were to be confined to members of the Church of England. The central idea of the College, in short, was to be the government of members of the Church of England by members of the Church of England for the benefit of the Church of England. “It is hoped,” ran the appeal for help, “that it will prove, by God’s blessing, the loyal handmaid of our mother Church, to train up men who, not in the ministry only, but in the manifold callings of the Christian life, shall be steadfast in the faith.”
Such was the ideal; and it does not need to be proved that it was an ideal as narrow as it was lofty, reposing, not only upon piety, but also upon confusion of thought. Religion being a spiritual experience, and the Anglican Church being a branch of the Civil Service, it is only by loose thinkers that the two things can be treated as one and indivisible; and the implied proposition that Dissenters are poisonous is not a logical corollary of any exhortation to a devout and holy life. Loose thinking has, however, in this instance, proved a mainspring of generous giving, and has resulted in an endowment of learning which is not without value because it has concurrently endowed the speculative opinions and ritual practices of a particular school of thought. The endowment of learning for the exclusive benefit of Churchmen may not have much more raison d’être than the endowment of learning for the special benefit of albinoes, or vegetarians, or anti-tobacconists; but it is a vast deal better than no endowment of learning at all.
Whether the wisdom of the founders and benefactors of Keble has been justified of its children is a delicate question of which it would at present be premature to do more than lightly touch the fringe; but certain generalisations may be hazarded.
In the first place the economical advantages have not been so marked as to attract a class of men previously excluded from the University. In the second place the College has never been of the nature of a seminary, and its particular influences have been largely overshadowed by the general influences of the University itself. Keble men, that is to say, have been very much like other Oxford men; and the test of Churchmanship has not winnowed them to any really noticeable extent. Thought has, in effect, been as free there as elsewhere, in spite of the nominal restrictions of orthodox authority. Some of the men have thought as they were told to think, and others have thought for themselves—encouraged, in some instances, by unexpectedly latitudinarian dons. The wind has blown where it listed, with the usual diversified results.
There are those who would say that Keble at its best and most characteristic is represented by the present Bishop of London: a high-minded and popular prelate whose portraits—especially the portrait in which he is to be seen beaming benignantly beside his favourite crozier—are treasured by almost as many ladies as the portraits of Mr. George Alexander himself; a prelate also in such a continual hurry to do good that he too often gives the sober the impression of a man who speaks before he thinks. But Keble is also the College of Mr. Herbert Trench: a poet whose visions of the ultimate stand in no perceptible relation to the metaphysics of the Establishment, and who resembles the author of “The Christian Year” only in the accidental circumstance that some of his compositions have been set to music; and it might puzzle the trustees of Keble, as it would puzzle the writer of these pages, to find the intellectual common denominator of Dr. Winnington-Ingram and the manager of the Haymarket Theatre.