ABSTRACT
THE Oxford of 1851 was no longer the Oxford of Newman and Keble. The Oxford Movement had been smitten almost to death by the secession of its leader in 1845. Though it ultimately revived, and its influence spread throughout the country with far-reaching results, for the time being it had sustained a crushing blow. Newman's impelling figure no longer made men turn to gaze at him, as he hurried along the Oxford streets. The spell was broken, and his university knew him no more. A new school of liberalism, brought in by men fresh from Arnold's influence at Rugby, began to dominate intellectual thought. Critical inquiry into so far unquestioned articles of faith was beginning to replace the old doctrinal battles. Of these younger and advanced thinkers at Oxford, Richard Congreve, Fellow and tutor of Wadham College, was chief; Wadham—known mainly as a college of quiet reading men with evangelical predilections—and which by the irony of fate had been approved by John Bridges’ parents as “ safe ”. This term might rightly apply to the warden and sub-warden, whom the undergraduates disposed of as fossils, but Congreve was a man of the world, a wide traveller, a student of movements and politics, and a brilliant teacher, who could not but influence his pupils deeply. He gradually drew their minds towards French thought and philosophy, at that time, and throughout the Mid-Victorian era, unappreciated, almost ignored. Carlyle had exalted German metaphysics to the exclusion of the great thinkers who had heralded the Revolution in France, and placed their country in the forefront of Europe's civilization. Educated Englishmen, who might be conversant with the theories of Kant or Hegel, would be totally ignorant of the claim of Diderot, Turgot, or Condorcet, and the name of Comte, their great successor, still living, would be unknown to them. Congreve became the apostle in Oxford of Comte's system of philosophy, and in Bridges he found a spirit ready to be awakened to the teaching which attempted to combine rationalism with deep spiritual values, and to set up a standard of life that appealed to the austerity in the young man's nature, an austerity which in other times and circumstances might have been stirred by the flame of the monastic ideal.
