Page:Oxford men and their colleges.djvu/494

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PARAPET MAGDALEN CHURCH.— Mackenzie and Pugin.

XX.— KEBLE COLLEGE.

JHIS College was opened in 1870, having been raised by subscription as a memorial to the Rev. John Keble. There were, indeed, other causes which contributed to its foundation. Ever since 1845 there had been a growing wish among many in Oxford that an academical education should be made more economical and thereby more accessible to the sons of poorer parents. In that year a power- ful body of petitioners, including such representative names as those of the Duke of Westminster, Lord Ashley, Lord Carnarvon, Sidney Herbert, W. E. Gladstone, S. Wilberforce, G. Moberley, A. C. Tait, laid an address before the Hebdomadal Board, urging that though much had been done in late years for the diffusion of civil and spiritual knowledge, especially by the institution of schools for the lower and middle classes, and for the sons of the poorer clergy and others at Marlborough and at Fleetwood, yet that there was a great chasm between these schools and the ministry. They therefore pleaded that this chasm should be filled by making academical education accessible at a lower cost, either by the addition of new departments to existing colleges or, if necessary, by the foundation of new collegiate bodies. This petition produced no immediate result, but the design was constantly before those interested in the work of the ministry, and in 1865 an informal meeting of graduates was held in Oriel College to consider the best means by which this object could be secured ; and as one outcome of the meeting, a committee reported in favour of building a new Hall, by private subscription, where, by a more economical arrange- ment of the buildings, and by an extension of the principle of a common meal from dinner to all meals, it might be possible to reproduce all the advantages of College life at a less extragavant expense. Mean- while, a strong movement was growing in the Liberal party in Parliament, the aim of which was to throw open all the endowments of the older Colleges to everyone, irrespective of religious belief, and to make these Colleges no longer necessarily places of Church education. The Tests Act was not yet passed, but its principles were in the air and Churchmen were anxious to provide by fresh effort a new College

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where education might be still in the hands of Churchmen. It was at such a moment that the death of John Keble (on March 16, 1866) supplied the opportunity of carrying these two wishes into effect. He had been Fellow and Tutor of Oriel College for many years, Professor of Poetry in the University 1832-41, and had taken active interest in academical life until the last, having seen and approved of the report of the Committee referred to above. Moreover he was the first of the leading Tractarians who passed away, and the memorial to him naturally became the chief memorial of the Tractarian movement : for it was he more than any one other man who had given the impulse to that movement. His Christian Year had deepened the tone of spiritual life and raised the sense of the ideal of the Church before the move- ment began : he had inspired Hurrell Froude, Robert Wilberforce, and Isaac Williams, and through them Newman and Pusey, with his own imaginative conception of the spiritual character of the Church : he had in 1833 given the signal for a protest against the encroachments of the State by his sermon on National Apostasy : his character had been one of the strongest bonds between the champions of the Church at that time: and after Newman's secession in 1845 he, with Dr. Pusey, had been the steadying power which had kept many loyal to the Church of Christ in England. Consequently the appeal for sub- scriptions met with a ready response: Dr. Pusey threw himself heartily into the scheme, and it was due to him more than to any one other that the scheme was so speedily successful. In the words of the promoters " The College was intended to be a heart- felt and national tribute of affection and admiration to the memory of one of the most eminent and religious writers whom the Church of England has ever produced, one whose holy example was perhaps even a greater power for good than his Christian Year : secondly, to meet the great need now so generally felt of some form of University Extension which may include a large portion of persons at present debarred through want of means from its full benefits : while thirdly it is hoped 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

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