Forward Movements of the Last Half Century (Paperback)

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER II THE OXFORD MOVEMENT TOWARD HOLINESS There is one modern contribution both to the literature and the life of holiness which is attracting, as it deserves, wider attention than any other single development in this direction; and the whole history connected with it becomes correspondingly important. Its results have already a far wider range, and forecast a much broader future, than most of us realize. One who was as well qualified to supply the earlier records as any other, and who recently passed away from earth at an age past three score and ten, has given his calm judgment on " The genesis of the Oxford movement for the promotion of holiness." We give it a place here, for he was intimately, and from the beginning, both an actor in, and an observer of, what he here puts on record. The spiritual history of the coming decades in England can be predicted largely from the spiritual currents among the younger men of the universities. The " High Church " or " Puseyite" tidal wave was rightly called " the Oxford movement." The " evangelical impulse," given mainly by Charles Simeon, was similarly called " the Cambridge movement." Succeeding, or parallel to this last, was a radical highly Calvinistic impulse through the unorganized body called " the Plymouth Brethren." In the well-known book, " The Fairchild Family," by Mrs. Sherwood, one may find the evangelical teaching pressed to its extreme and least attractive forms, and in the numerous and widely circulated publications of the " PlymouthBrethren " will be found the teaching of the strongest doctrines as to implicit literal " obedience to the Word," or Scripture, combined with strictest Calvinistic statements as to the forensic condition of the believer, as an unalterable complete state of grace. The influence of t...