The Oxford Movement in the 1830s prompted some formidable theological scholarship which profoundly affected the lives and personalities of many Oxford-educated Church of England clergymen, not a few of whom combined deeply scholarly lives with successful parish ministries. This essay examines the lives of two such men, Canon T.F. Simmons, a parish priest in Yorkshire for some thirty years, and Bishop Mandell Creighton, much of whose scholarly writing was produced in a remote Northumberland parish before his return to Cambridge and London. By the end of the century such learned clergymen were becoming a rarity in the Church of England.

This article examines an account by William Grant Broughton, describing a journey made in 1845 to the south of his Diocese of Australia. It was published by English supporters, describing the impossibly large area of his responsibility and pleading for a subdivision of his diocese. Broughton wanted to overcome ignorance of Australia, to thank his supporters for money and manpower, and to demonstrate that his work as a bishop was not just a state appointed official, but as a spiritual Father-in-God in apostolic succession from Christ. Broughton was inspired by the Oxford Movement. Broughton met influential colonists and inspired support in his vision of church buildings where the Gospel might be preached and the sacraments of the Church of England celebrated with a dignity to inspire and attract the flock. Broughton knew the 1836 decision of the Government to give state aid to all major Christian denominations undermined the claim of the Church of England to have inherited established legal status the church enjoyed in England. Broughton’s heroic efforts form an inspiring Anglican heritage. The article concludes that by the time of his death in 1853 his church was but one denomination in a spiritually plural, and secular, society.

This article examines the way one nineteenth-century clergyman of the Church of England in Australia, William Gore, was influenced by the Oxford Movement. Gore was the incumbent of the parish of All Saints Church, North Parramatta in Sydney. He implemented liturgical practices valued by the Oxford Movement, including wearing a surplice to preach rather than a Geneva gown, reading the Offertory sentences in the service of Holy Communion in the Book of Common Prayer, celebrating the Holy Communion on the saints days set in the Prayer Book and placing a cross on the holy table. He was supported by his bishop, William Grant Broughton. The reaction from parishioners was surprise, shock and opposition and he was branded as a ‘Puseyite’. This article uses local primary material, including press reports of parish meetings, to describe the reactions of parishioners in parish meetings against Gore’s liturgical uses. Gore’s activities are assessed as an important early example of the Oxford Movement’s influence in the Church of England in Australia. Gore’s practices, discussed in the public domain, provide evidence that the Oxford Movement was beginning to transform the nineteenth-century liturgical worship of the Church of England in Australia.

This study traces the way in which a typical Elizabethan Reformed Protestant became something slightly different during a ministerial career prematurely terminated by death in his forties, and what he became in the centuries that followed. It explains the background of divided theologies in the national Church of Elizabethan and Jacobean England, the emergence of ‘avant-garde conformism’, and the way in which Hooker was used by opposing sides to justify their positions, particularly after the Restoration of 1660, when the term ‘Anglicanism’ first becomes fully appropriate for the life and thought of the Church of England. As the Church moved from national monopoly to established status, Hooker became of use in different ways to both Tories and Whigs, though in the nineteenth century the Oxford Movement largely monopolised his memory. His views on the construction of authority may still help Anglicanism find its theological way forward.

The origins of the term consensus fidelium lie in the rhetorical tropes of pagans who exhorted unity between friends and within cities – tropes supporting the hierarchy of imperial elites. The earliest Christians adapted this language for the same purpose within churches: to speak of unity and lay involvement in support of Church hierarchy. After the Reformation, Church of England writers used this rhetoric to enforce conformity to church polity and morality. The Tractarians and their successors employed a rhetorical ‘voice of the laity’ as a bolster for episcopal power. While the early twentieth century saw some in the Church of England and Anglican Communion use this same rhetoric to bring the laity into actual decision-making processes, the rhetoric of recent statements by the Communion has left power firmly with bishops.

The first silent preached retreat in the Anglican Communion was held in 1858. The exercise quickly aroused suspicions because it appeared to be dangerously close to Roman Catholic practice. Based upon original printed sources, this paper reviews arguments put forward during the next ten years by three advocates of the led retreat, to counter such fears. Far from being part of a Roman plot, they claimed that the retreats were an expression of a fundamental spiritual principle, which was not limited to any particular denomination and party.