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