Christopher Dawson

“The Oxford Movement, however, brought a new element into the religious life of the nineteenth century. It stood above all for the preservation of the spiritual identity of Christianity, and represents an attempt to restore the Catholic conception of an objective supernatural order and the Catholic idea of divine authority within the boundaries of the Established Church of Protestant England. It was by Newman that these principles were most clearly realized, and through him that they received their full intellectual formulation, but in spite of the differences of character and mentality between the leaders of the Movement, Newman, Keble, Froude and Pusey were all in complete agreement on this fundamental issue. They all stood for Authority and Tradition against Liberalism, for Supematuralism against Rationalism and Naturalism. The fundamental note of the Oxford Movement was its anti-modernism. It is true that they began on the political ground — in a protest against the secularization of the modem State and its claim to interfere with the rights of the Church. But almost at once the conflict became an internal one between the opposing forces in the Church of England — not, however, between High Church and Low Church, between Catholic and Evangelical, but between religious Traditionalism and religious Liberalism. In fact, the first great battle that the Tractarians fought — that against Dr. Hampden — was one in which they had the support of the Evangelicals.”
― Christopher Dawson, The spirit of the Oxford movement,