Page 19 - Alumni Horae: Vol. 93, No. 3 Spring 2013

Methodists, Quakers, and Baptists to hold political office
without first becoming nominal Anglicans. A similar act
passed in the following year opened the political door to
Roman Catholics. This meant that non-Anglican voices
might be heard in church appointments.
Alarmed by the Church of England’s vulnerability to
political manipulation, the young Oxonians sought other
models. They championed a church that was holy, cath-
olic, and apostolic – that is, a church that claimed to be
the earthly church established by Jesus Christ, deriv-
ing its authority from the continuity of its sacramental
practices. Except for a brief period during the reign of
Charles I, the English reformers had cast the shadow
of Roman Catholicism over the church of late antiquity
and the Middle Ages. It was this church, the church of
the church fathers, the great monastic communities and
the early saints that the Oxford Movement as it came
to be known now embraced. Through a series of tracts,
the Movement’s leader, John Henry Newman, and his
colleagues drew sharper and sharper distinctions
between their theological positions and those of their
evangelical opponents.
By the early 1840s, the tracts of the Oxford Movement
were being read in Boston. They found a receptive audi-
ence among those who had already championed the
holiness of beauty in the American church, among them
George C. Shattuck Jr. Shattuck had converted from
Unitarianism to the Episcopal Church after his marriage
to Nancy Brune in 1840. He and his wife worshipped at
Trinity Church in Boston. Trinity’s rector, Manton East-
burn, was also the bishop of Massachusetts and a staunch
the church was named the Protestant Episcopal Church.
Furnishings tended to be simple and crosses few. Prayer
books showed wear in the sections for Morning Prayer
and Evening Prayer, but the pages containing Holy Com-
munion were little thumbed.
In the early nineteenth century, a new generation of
Episcopalians, less afraid than their parents of being
labeled Tories, began to rediscover
and reassert the holiness of beauty.
Flowers were placed on the
altars of their churches
and crosses were given
prominence. Holy Com-
munion was celebrated
regularly. Even these
modest measures, which
are now standard practices
in mainstream Episcopal churches,
created a backlash among evangelical
low churchmen. Events in England would
soon deepen this divide.
At Oxford in the late eighteen-twenties, a
small group of young Church of England clergy
developed a radically new vision for Anglicanism.
Political events contributed to the urgency of their
spiritual program. Since the Reformation, the ruling
monarch was considered the temporal head of the
Church of England and it was through acts of Parli-
ament that ecclesiastical appointments were made.
But the composition of Parliament was changing.
A parliamentary act of 1828 enabled dissenters, e.g.,
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