The Christian Year
Keble, John, 1792-1866
English
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Below is a summary of The Christian Year
THE CHRISTIAN YEAR
INTRODUCTION.
John Keble, two years older than his friend Dr. Arnold of Rugby,
three years older than Thomas Carlyle, and nine years older than
John Henry Newman, was born in 1792, at Fairford in Gloucestershire.
He was born in his father's parsonage, and educated at home by his
father till he went to college. His father then entered him at his
own college at Oxford, Corpus Christi. Thoroughly trained, Keble
obtained high reputation at his University for character and
scholarship, and became a Fellow of Oriel. After some years he gave
up work in the University, though he could not divest himself of a
large influence there for good, returned home to his old father, who
required help in his ministry, and undertook for his the duty of two
little curacies. The father lived on to the age of ninety. John
Keble's love for God and his devotion to the Church had often been
expressed in verse. On days which the Church specially celebrated,
he had from time to time written short poems to utter from the heart
his own devout sense of their spiritual use and meaning. As the
number of these poems increased, the desire rose to follow in like
manner the while course of the Christian Year as it was marked for
the people by the sequence of church services, which had been
arranged to bring in due order before the minds of Christian
worshippers all the foundations of their faith, and all the elements
of a religious life. A book of poems, breathing faith and worship
at all points, and in all attitudes of heavenward contemplation,
within the circle of the Christian Year, would, he hoped, restore in
many minds to many a benumbed form life and energy.
In 1825, while the poems of the Christian Year were gradually being
shaped into a single work, a brother became able to relieve John
Keble in that pious care for which his father had drawn him away
from a great University career, and he then went to a curacy at
Hursley, four or five miles from Winchester.
In 1827--when its author's age was thirty-five--"The Christian Year"
was published. Like George Herbert, whose equal he was in piety
though not in power, Keble was joined to the Church in fullest
sympathy with all its ordinances, and desired to quicken worship by
putting into each part of the ritual a life that might pass into and
raise the life of man. The spirit of true religion, with a power
beyond that of any earthly feuds and controversies, binds together
those in whom it really lives. Setting aside all smaller questions
of the relative value of different earthly means to the attainment
of a life hidden with Christ in God, Christians of all forms who are
one in spirit have found help from "John Keble's Christian Year, and
think of its guileless author with kindly affection. Within five-
and-twenty years of its publication, a hundred thousand copies had
been sold. The book is still diffused so widely, in editions of all
forms, that it may yet go on, until the circle of the years shall be
no more, living and making live.
Four years after "The Christian Year appeared, Keble was appointed
(in 1831) to the usual five years' tenure of the Poetry
Professorship at Oxford. Two years after he had been appointed
Poetry Professor, he preached the Assize Sermon, and took for his
theme "National Apostasy." John Henry Newman, who had obtained his
Fellowship at Oriel some years before the publication of "The
Christian Year," and was twenty-six years old when it appeared,
received from it a strong impulse towards the endeavour to revive
the spirit of the Church by restoring life and soul to all her
ordinances, and even to the minutest detail of her ritual. The deep
respect felt for the author of "The Christian Year" gave power to
the sermon of 1833 upon National Apostasy, and made it the starting-
point of the Oxford movement known as Tractarian, from the issue of
tracts through which its promoters sought to stir life in the clergy
and the people; known also as Puseyite because it received help at
the end of the year 1833 from Dr. Pusey, who was of like age with J.
H. Newman, and then Regius Professor of Hebrew. There was a danger,
which some then foresaw, in the nature of this endeavour to put life
into the Church; but we all now recognise the purity of Christian
zeal that prompted the attempt to make dead forms of ceremonial glow
again with spiritual fire, and serve as aids to the recovery of
light and warmth in our devotions.
It was in 1833 that Keble, by one earnest sermon, with a pure life
at the back of it, and this book that had prepared the way, gave the
direct impulse to an Oxford movement for the reformation of the
Church. The movement then began. But Keble went back to his curacy
at Hursley. Two years afterwards the curate became vicar, and then
Keble married. His after-life continued innocent and happy. He and
his wife died within two months of each other, in the came year,
1866. He had taken part with his friends at Oxford by writing five
of their Tracts, publishing a few sermons that laboured towards the
same end, and editing a "Library of the Fathers." In 1847 he
produced another volume of poems, "Lyra Innocentium," which
associated doctrines of the Church with the lives of children, whom
he loved, though his own marriage was childless.
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