Anglican Commemoration
Priest & Poet
March 29 · d. 1866
also known as John Keble the Poet, John Keble of Hursley
John Keble (1792-1866) was an English priest and poet, one of the founders of the Oxford Movement. He published The Christian Year anonymously in 1827, and it became the best-selling volume of verse of its century. On 14 July 1833 he preached the Assize Sermon at Oxford, published as National Apostasy, which John Henry Newman afterwards called the start of the movement. He declined preferment three times and spent thirty years as vicar of Hursley in Hampshire, where he is buried.
John Keble was taught at home, in a Gloucestershire vicarage, by his father. There was no school. The father was a country clergyman, vicar of Coln St. Aldwins, and he sat down with his two sons and taught them himself, and when John was fourteen Corpus Christi College, Oxford, elected him to a scholarship. At nineteen he was a Fellow of Oriel. By twenty he had won the university prizes for both the English and the Latin essays. He was ordained deacon on Trinity Sunday 1815 and priest the year after, and then he did a thing that men of that promise do not usually do: he went home. He served the small parishes of East Leach, Burthorpe and Southrop, curate to his own father, for about a hundred pounds a year.
In 1827 he published a book of poems, one for every Sunday and holy day of the Prayer Book year, and he published it without his name on it. It was called The Christian Year. His name got out anyway, and the book went through ninety-five editions while he was alive. The first poem in it, for Morning, carries the line the English-speaking church has sung ever since: "New every morning is the love / Our wakening and uprising prove." The last stanza of that same poem asks only this, "And help us, this and every day, / To live more nearly as we pray."
That is one voice. Here is the other. On 14 July 1833, before the judges of assize in the University Church of St Mary the Virgin, Keble preached on the conduct of Israel in asking for a king, and asked out loud whether his own nation was becoming alienated from God. Parliament had just cut the Irish bishoprics from twenty-two to twelve, and Keble did not think the question was about bishoprics. He thought it was about whether a nation could still claim to be part of Christ's Church while legislating for the Church as though it were not. "Should it ever happen (which God avert, but we cannot shut our eyes to the danger)," he said, "that the Apostolical Church should be forsaken, degraded, nay trampled on and despoiled by the State and people of England," then the faithful should not despair. He ended the sermon by telling them that whoever holds fast "is calmly, soberly, demonstrably, SURE, that, sooner or later, HIS WILL BE THE WINNING SIDE." The sermon was printed under the title National Apostasy. Thirty-one years later Newman wrote that he had ever kept that day as the start of the religious movement of 1833.
Movements make careers, and Keble refused his. The archdeaconry of Barbados was offered him in 1824 and he declined it on account of his father's weak health. The vicarage of Hursley fell vacant in 1829 and he declined that too, on the ground that he would not quit his father. The living of Paignton came in 1831, and the answer was the same. His father died in 1835. Keble married Charlotte Clarke that year, and in March 1836, at forty-three, he was instituted vicar of Hursley in Hampshire. He stayed thirty years. Daily services, confirmation classes, village schools, parish visiting. When the church needed rebuilding in 1848 he paid the six thousand pounds out of the profits of The Christian Year, so that the money the poems earned went into the walls of the parish where he said his prayers.
He did not stop working. He gave five years to editing Richard Hooker's Works, which stood as the standard text for half a century; he began the Library of the Fathers with Newman and Pusey and translated Irenaeus for it; he gave sixteen years to the writings of Bishop Thomas Wilson. In 1844, when Oxford censured William George Ward, Keble wrote in his defence, and the thing worth knowing about that is that the two men had never met.
Then in 1845 Newman went to Rome. It deeply troubled Keble, and Keble did not go. He stayed in the Church of England for the twenty-one years that were left to him, and he stayed at Hursley, and the friendship survived: eleven years after Keble's death a volume of his papers appeared carrying a letter about him from Newman, by then a cardinal. In 1864 Keble suffered a stroke. His wife was an invalid, and the winters at Torquay, Penzance and Bournemouth were taken for her sake, not his. He died at Bournemouth on 29 March 1866 after a week's illness and was buried in the churchyard at Hursley, near his sister Elizabeth. Charlotte was laid beside him six weeks later. He had asked for nothing more than to live more nearly as he prayed, and he was buried in the ground of the parish where he had done it.
Three times a better place was offered you, and three times you would have had to leave your father to take it. Keble said no three times, and the record of what he gave up is shorter than the record of what he did with the years he kept: a parish, a rebuilt church, a shelf of other men's books edited into usable form, one book of poems that outsold everything else of its century and is now mostly forgotten except for what people sing on Sunday mornings without knowing whose words they are. He asked to be helped to live more nearly as he prayed, which is a smaller request than most of us make and a harder one to keep. What have you declined lately, and was it for someone, or only from fear of the larger room?
What is known of Keble comes overwhelmingly from one witness: the article by John Henry Overton in the Dictionary of National Biography, written in 1892, twenty-six years after Keble's death, by a clerical historian of his own churchmanship. It supplies the birth date, the education, every examinership, every refused preferment, the institution to Hursley, the death and the burial, and the reasons given for all of them. Behind it stands Sir John Taylor Coleridge's Memoir of 1869, written by a lifelong friend with the family's sanction, which is almost certainly where most of the reported private sentiment originates. Alongside these sit Keble's own printed works, which are numerous and public: the sermon of 1833, the seven Tracts for the Times the DNB assigns to him (numbers 4, 13, 52, 54, 57, 60 and 89), The Christian Year, the Hooker, the Wilson.
A few points are unsettled and are best stated as such. The double first is certain; the year (1811 or 1810) and the subjects are not. The marriage to Charlotte Clarke took place in 1835, and a Gloucestershire newspaper notice of 17 October that year reports it as already accomplished, but no day is recorded in the sources consulted here. The publication date of his Oxford poetry lectures is given as 1841 by the DNB and 1844 elsewhere.
The larger question concerns the sermon. That 14 July 1833 was the beginning of the Oxford Movement is a claim made by Newman in the Apologia Pro Vita Sua of 1864, thirty-one years after the fact, in a book written to explain his own departure for Rome. R. W. Church, himself sympathetic to the movement, repeated it, and it has been the standard account ever since. Three modern historians have pressed against it: Owen Chadwick observed that Pusey's own copy of the sermon lay unread among his papers at his death decades later, F. L. Cross questioned the dating, and the literary historian Kirstie Blair has argued that the sermon's fame is largely a retrospective effect of Newman's own framing. Nothing in Keble's text claims any such role for itself; the sermon never names the Irish Act, the government, or Ireland. None of this touches Keble's importance, which rests on a body of work and thirty years of parish ministry. It does mean the single-spark account of the movement is Newman's account, and should be attributed to him rather than reported as a fact of 1833.
Keble was never canonised, and the devotion that grew up around him took an unusual shape: buildings rather than relics. There are no miracles claimed at his grave, no shrine, no pilgrimage, and no movement of his remains. He has lain at Hursley since 1866.
Within six weeks of his death a meeting at Lambeth Palace resolved to raise a fund for a college at Oxford, to give at a moderate cost an education in strict fidelity to the Church of England. The foundation stone of Keble College was laid on 25 April 1868, chosen because it was St Mark's Day and Keble's own birthday; the college opened to thirty students in 1870, and its chapel, William Butterfield's, opened on St Mark's Day in 1876. Thomas Woolner's bust of Keble stands in the baptistery of Westminster Abbey. Smaller memorials mark the places of his life: a chapel at St Peter's, Bournemouth, where he worshipped in his last illness, a church bearing his name at Mill Hill, a bridge over the Leach near the parishes of his first curacy, a bench above Sidmouth.
Two churches keep his day, on two dates and two principles. The Episcopal Church commemorates him on 29 March, the day he died, as "John Keble, Priest and Poet, 1866." The Church of England keeps him on 14 July, the anniversary of the Assize Sermon, as "John Keble, Priest, Tractarian, Poet, 1866." One remembers the death of a priest, the other the beginning of a movement. Commontide follows 29 March.
Keble's principal works are in print and in the public domain. National Apostasy, the Assize Sermon of 14 July 1833, supplies the quotations here on the alienation of a nation from God, on the Apostolical Church "forsaken, degraded, nay trampled on and despoiled," and the closing assurance that "HIS WILL BE THE WINNING SIDE"; it was published as a pamphlet in 1833 and reprinted in Sermons, Academical and Occasional (1847), and is transcribed in full at Project Canterbury (anglicanhistory.org/keble/keble1.html), where the sermon runs as one continuous text without internal divisions. The verse quoted, "New every morning is the love" and "And help us, this and every day, / To live more nearly as we pray," is from the poem for Morning, the first in [The Christian Year](work:the-christian-year) (1827); the text used here is the Cassell edition of 1887 edited by Henry Morley, at Project Gutenberg (ebook 4272), with the caution that its printing of the poem for Evening carries a misreading, "You" for "Yon," corrected in the Internet Archive's printing (archive.org, christianyearth00kebl). Newman's sentence on 14 July 1833 is from chapter one of the Apologia Pro Vita Sua (1864), at newmanreader.org. For the life, the indispensable article is John Henry Overton's in the Dictionary of National Biography (1885-1900), at Wikisource, supplemented by Sir John Taylor Coleridge's A Memoir of the Rev. John Keble, M.A., late vicar of Hursley (1869; the Internet Archive holds an 1874 printing). Keble's papers are at Keble College, Oxford (Keble MSS, 1806-66), with further correspondence at Lambeth Palace Library, the Bodleian, Hampshire Archives, the British Library and the Birmingham Oratory.
British (Received Pronunciation): Gloucestershire /ˈɡlɒs.tər.ʃər/
Almighty God, you gave your servant John Keble special gifts of grace to understand and teach the truth revealed in Christ Jesus: Grant that by this teaching we may know you, the one true God, and Jesus Christ whom you have sent; who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.
Readings for a Teacher of the Faith
Proverbs 3:13–26Psalm 119:89–1061 John 1:1–10Matthew 13:47–52