THE CHRISTIAN GUARDIAN, AND CHURCH OF ENGLAND MAGAZINE. JANUARY, 1843. THE OXFORD MEMORIAL OF CRANMER, RIDLEY, AND LATYMER. THESE are days of contention; but even contention is better than lethargy. Time was, when, in this same Oxford, the strange occurrence of four or five students being found engaged in reading the Bible with social prayer, caused a perfect ferment of astonishment. Those were the days when one country gentleman could, without shame, send to another, an invitation, to dine and get drunk.'* Those days are gone, and we hope, and believe, that we shall see nothing like them in England again. Satan's policy is entirely changed. The reign of dull and stupid vice is at an end, at least so far as the educated classes of the people are concerned ;—the Whitfields, and Romaines, and Rowland Hills, and Simeons, have awakened the national conscience; and now that the tempter finds a tide running in favour of religion,' he instantly adapts his devices to the occasion; and is quite willing that his disciples shall be religious' also. Hence, in lieu of the circulating-library trash which formed the bulk of the literature of the last century, we have now, in the very foreground, a competition between the true, and the false, theology. Parker Societies' are reviving the doctrines of the Reformation;- AngloCatholic Libraries are disinterring the heresies of Bull and the Nonjurors. A knot of semi-papists at Cambridge are striving to bring rood-lofts' and credence-tables' again into fashion; while £7000 has been raised at Oxford to build a monument to the memory of the men who, three centuries since, cleared the old rood-lofts and credence-tables out of our churches. This circumstance is the most pleasing one,—we had almost said, the only pleasing one,-connected with the University of Oxford of late years. The moment is certainly a remarkable one, for raising a JANUARY, 1843. * Vide Sidney's Life of Sir Richard Hill. B monument to Cranmer and Ridley,-when some of the leading men in Oxford, carrying with them, we fear, the bulk of the students,are rapidly renouncing every truth which the Reformers asserted, and resuscitating every error and corruption which they strove to expel and destroy. It is hardly needful to add, that this monument has been raised without the least assistance from the Tractarian party. It was under a combination of feelings, religious, personal, and patriotic, that a meeting was held at Oxford, Nov. 17, 1838, and a resolution passed, that the best mode of testifying a grateful admiration of the pious martyrs, would be the erection of a monumental structure, in which architecture and sculpture should combine to record the fact of their preferring the endurance of a most cruel death to a sacrifice of principle;' and all were invited to contribute to the work who revered those devoted servants of God, who loved the cause for which they were content to die, and who were mindful of the blessings of that Protestant Reformed religion which, by the instrumentality of their lives and deaths, was at length, under God's good providence, established by law.' But, though the motives and purposes of the undertaking had been so ably represented in this address, nothing was settled as to the nature of the intended memorial till the general meeting of subscribers, Jan. 31, 1839, when it was resolved (in substance) that a church should be built near the place where the martyrs suffered, and that it should be made commemorative chiefly by external decorations of their faith and fortitude, and of the cause and occasion of their sufferings. Every effort was subsequently made by the Committee to carry this resolution into effect; but no site could be any where obtained within such a radius from their place of martyrdom as could in any sense be called near it, that place being in the centre of the city, and densely covered and surrounded by houses to a very great distance on every side. Under this impossibility of building a church anywhere near the spot,' another general meeting was held March 5, 1840, when it was further resolved, That (as the most appropriate method of carrying out the spirit of the resolution of the public meeting held Jan. 31, 1839,) a monumental structure should be erected at the northern extremity of St. Mary Magdalene churchyard, in connexion with the rebuilding and enlarging the northern side of that church, so as to be capable of containing about the same number of persons as it was proposed to accommodate in a separate church or chapel; the aisle to be called the Martyrs' Aisle, and be made commemorative of them, their acts and sufferings, chiefly by external decorations.' It is to be observed of this resolution, that it did no more than change the mode of accomplishing the great ends which were proposed to be effected by a martyrium, or martyrs'-memorial-church. It was intended from the first, that the monument to the memory of the martyrs should be coupled and combined with another of a higher and holier nature; that is, a monument to the glory of God, and in grateful commemoration of his servants.' It was not to be a monument simply expressive of the veneration which the subscribers felt for the martyrs themselves; nor of their admiration of those Christian graces which adorned their lives, and carried them through their fiery trial, and enabled them, from the midst of the |