Transcribed from the 1887 Cassell & Company edition byDavid Price,
CASSELL’S NATIONALLIBRARY.
THE
CHRISTIAN YEAR
BY
THE REV. JOHN KEBLE.
CASSELL & COMPANY, Limited:
LONDON, PARIS, NEWYORK & MELBOURNE.
1887.
INTRODUCTION.
John Keble, two years older thanhis friend Dr. Arnold of Rugby, three years older than ThomasCarlyle, and nine years older than John Henry Newman, was born in1792, at Fairford in Gloucestershire. He was born in hisfather’s parsonage, and educated at home by his father tillhe went to college. His father then entered him at his owncollege at Oxford, Corpus Christi. Thoroughly trained,Keble obtained high reputation at his University for characterand scholarship, and became a Fellow of Oriel. After someyears he gave up work in the University, though he could notdivest himself of a large influence there for good, returned hometo his old father, who required help in his ministry, andundertook for his the duty of two little curacies. Thefather lived on to the age of ninety. John Keble’slove for God and his devotion to the Church had often beenexpressed in verse. On days which the Church speciallycelebrated, he had from time to time written short poems to utterfrom the heart his own devout sense of their spiritual use andmeaning. As the number of these poems increased, the desirerose to follow in like manner the while course of the ChristianYear as it was marked for the people by the sequence of churchservices, which had been arranged to bring in due order beforethe minds of Christian worshippers all the foundations of theirfaith, and all the elements of a religious life. A book ofpoems, breathing faith and worship at all points, and in allattitudes of heavenward contemplation, within the circle of theChristian Year, would, he hoped, restore in many minds to many abenumbed form life and energy.
In 1825, while the poems of the Christian Year were graduallybeing shaped into a single work, a brother became able to relieveJohn Keble in that pious care for which his father had drawn himaway from a great University career, and he then went to a curacyat Hursley, four or five miles from Winchester.
In 1827—when its author’s age wasthirty-five—“The Christian Year” waspublished. Like George Herbert, whose equal he was in pietythough not in power, Keble was joined to the Church in fullestsympathy with all its ordinances, and desired to quicken worshipby putting into each part of the ritual a life that might passinto and raise the life of man. The spirit of truereligion, with a power beyond that of any earthly feuds andcontroversies, binds together those in whom it reallylives. Setting aside all smaller questions of the relativevalue of different earthly means to the attainment of a lifehidden with Christ in God, Christians of all forms who are one inspirit have found help