iams saying
that he had no plan of reading for the approaching vacation, Keble said,
"I am going to leave Oxford for good. Suppose you come and read with me.
The Provost has asked me to take Wilberforce, and I declined; but if you
would come, you would be companions." Keble was going down to Southrop,
a little curacy near his father's; there Williams joined him, with two
more--Robert Wilberforce and R.H. Froude; and there the Long Vacation of
1823 was spent, and Isaac Williams's character and course determined.
"It was this very trivial accident, this short walk of a few yards, and
a few words spoken, which was the turning-point of my life. If a
merciful God had miraculously interposed to arrest my course, I could
not have had a stronger assurance of His presence than I always had in
looking back to that day." It determined Isaac Williams's character,
and it determined for good and all his theological position. He had
before him all day long in John Keble a spectacle which was absolutely
new to him. Ambitious as a rising and successful scholar at college, he
saw a man, looked up to and wondered at by every one, absolutely without
pride and without ambition. He saw the most distinguished academic of
his day, to whom every prospect was open, retiring from Oxford in the
height of his fame to bury himself with a few hundreds of
Gloucestershire peasants in a miserable curacy. He saw this man caring
for and respecting the ignorant and poor as much as others respected the
great and the learned. He saw this man, who had made what the world
would call so great a sacrifice, apparently unconscious that he had made
any sacrifice at all, gay, unceremonious, bright, full of play as a boy,
ready with his pupils for any exercise, mental or muscular--for a hard
ride, or a crabbed bit of Aeschylus, or a logic fence with disputatious
and paradoxical undergraduates, giving and taking on even ground. These
pupils saw one, the depth of whose religion none could doubt, "always
endeavouring to do them good as it were unknown to themselves and in
secret, and ever avoiding that his kindness should be felt and
acknowledged"; showing in the whole course of daily life the purity of
Christian love, and taking the utmost pains to make no profession or
show of it. This unostentatious and undemonstrative religion--so frank,
so generous in all its ways--was to Isaac Williams "quite a new world."
It turned his mind in upon itself in the deepest reverence,