g-point, and for some time their
centre, in Oriel. The connection of the College with the Movement was
not in either case a mere accident; the Oxford Revival, at any rate,
was profoundly influenced by the personality of Newman, and Newman,
both by attraction and by repulsion, was largely what Oriel made him.
Among those who were with him at the College were Archbishop Whately,
whose Liberalism repelled him, Hawkins, the Provost, whose views on
"Tradition" began to modify the Evangelicalism in which he had been
brought up, Keble, whose /Christian Year/ did more for Church
teaching in England than countless sermons, Pusey, already famous for
his learning and his piety, who was to give his name to the Movement,
and, slightly later, Church, afterwards Dean of St. Paul's, the
historian of the Movement, and Samuel Wilberforce, who, as Bishop of
Oxford, was to show how profoundly it would increase the influence of
the English Church.
Such a combination of famous names at one time is hardly found in the
history of any other college, and it would be easy to add others
hardly less known, who were also members of the same body at that
famous time. Hero-worshippers can still see the rooms where these
great men lived, and the Common Room in which they met and argued, in
the days when Oxford did less teaching and had more time for talking
and for thinking than the busy, hurrying ways of the twentieth
century allow. But Oriel has many other associations besides those of
the Oxford Movement. Walter Raleigh, the most fascinating of
Elizabethans, was a student there, and probably in Oxford met the
great historian of travel and discovery, Richard Hakluyt (a Christ
Church man), whose influence did so much to bring home to Oxford the
wonders of the strange worlds beyond the seas. It was probably also
through his connection with Oriel that Raleigh made the acquaintance
of Harriot, who shared in his colonial ventures in Virginia, and who
became the historian of that foundation, so full of importance as the
beginning of the new England across the Atlantic. It was only fitting
that the Raleigh of the nineteenth century, Cecil John Rhodes, should
also be an Oriel man, who was never weary of acknowledging what he
owed to Oxford, and who showed his faith in her by his works. The
Rhodes' Foundation expends his millions in bringing scholars to
Oxford from the whole world; already its influence has been great
during its twenty years of existence; w
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