With the October term 1895, there opened a year of remarkable blessing and promise. So far as could be judged, a rather large number of freshmen who were already convinced Christians came up to Oxford than in any other October in the previous twenty-five years. This was accountable mainly to the work of Scripture Unions at school, the Children's Special Service Missions, and the Universities' Camps for boys. They had all helped, under God, to bring boys while still at school into a faith in Christ as their Lord and Saviour. There was certainly no doubt as to their sense of relationship to God, and that sense of responsibility that goes with it. These young men soon made their mark in the University, for their consciousness of conversion endowed them with the capacity for leadership.
Many of them would seem shockingly narrow minded to their contemporaries. To many of their friends they were just 'impossible people' difficult if not impossible to live with by reason of their excessive exuberance in evangelistic pursuits, their puritan rigidity, and the strictness of their self-discipline. But they were giants. They were daring. They were somehow inspired. It was said of them at the time that they were 'ready to die for God'. "We were prigs and smugs, we really were," says W. E. S. Holland who was one of them, "but Archbishop Lang always said that we were much the livest group in Oxford when he was a don."
As Miss Constance
Padwick tells us in her biography of Temple
Gairdner, "These narrow, young desperadoes had some claim to the term '
pauperes Christi', for in the evangelistic fury in which they lived every possible penny had to be saved from personal expenditure to buy a Bible or pay for a fraction of a missionary. When Willie Holland bought a luncheon-basket at a railway station at the end of term it was felt that he had all but given away his cause. A sandwich and a glass of milk was lunch enough for one who might save the rest of the luncheon-basket price for evangelistic funds." The time seemed ripe for one of the turbulent winds of God: for one of those movements that reveal afresh the desperate foolhardiness of the Christian life.
These undergraduates found their centre of gravity in the O.I.C.C.U., the Oxford Inter-Collegiate Christian Union. The spiritual power-house to which they migrated annually to be re-inspired was the
Keswick Convention which was held every summer. Here they caught afresh the vision of an Oxford won for Christ, and a world won for Christ as a necessary corollary. They were full of enthusiasm. When, a few years ago, there was dragged up from the bottom of the Thames along the Chelsea Embankment the barnacled old Chelsea bell, which from time immemorial had guided the river traffic in time of fog, a typical eighteenth century inscription was revealed. It read: 'God save the King, and down with enthusiasm.' This might well have referred to those crude and tasteless evangelicals who, on returning from
Keswick, would walk down Oxford High Street, twenty of them arm-in-arm, singing at the tops of their voices to a totally undistinguished tune,
"It is better to shout than to doubt,
It is better to rise than to fall,
It is better to let glory out,
Than to have no glory at all."
The crude words struggled up to heaven past the twisted columns of St Mary's, past the carved front of All Souls, past Queen Anne, in whose days approved religion was more decent and composed, with less resemblance to intoxication. These men were bold. They had the strength of their convictions. And if news reached them of a new conversion, or of some striking success on the part of a missionary, they would not hesitate, shout in chorus one long, full-
throated 'Hallelujah' - even in the middle of the Broad! Strange to think that this was the early environment of men who today are leaders of the Church of this country.
...These undergraduates were not content to study together and make their own devotions. They had a lively and aggressive concern for other people's souls. They could not keep the Gospel to themselves: it was meant for everyone, and everyone must therefore be given at least the opportunity for acceptance or rejection. An instance typical of their own missionary zeal occurred in this way. It was proposed to hold a mission to the University. The wheels of preparation were set in motion, and began to revolve - slowly. The crucial question was, as always, who should be invited to lead it. By a spontaneous and unanimous decision these men agreed that no outsider was required for he present. They would be their own missioners in their own colleges.
(G Ian F Thomson, "The Oxford Pastorate")
