Part 1. The meaning function of patience and humility -- Common things to speak of the meaning of patience and humility in the nineteenth-century British imagination -- From virtue to duty the Victorian application of patience and humility to social and intellectual life -- Part 2. The eighteenth century -- Character and morality in eighteenth-century British thought -- The utility of virtue -- Patience, utility and revolution -- Part 3. Oxford -- Oxford and the age of reform -- The Oxford movement faith and obedience in a tumultuous and shifting world -- Faith and reason in Newman's university sermons -- The Hampden affair : divergent paths out of a spiritual wilderness -- Thomas Arnold confronts the "Oxford malignants" -- The Tamworth letters : virtue and science -- Tract go and the trial of patience in the Church of England
Summary
"In A Sincere and Teachable Heart : Self-Denying Virtue in British Intellectual Life, 1736-1859, Richard Bellon demonstrates that respectability and authority in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Britain were not grounded foremost in ideas or specialist skills but in the self-denying virtues of patience and humility. Three case studies clarify this relationship between intellectual standards and practical moral duty. The first shows that the Victorians adapted a universal conception of sainthood to the responsibilities specific to class, gender, social rank, and vocation. The second illustrates how these ideals of self-discipline achieved their form and cultural vigor by analyzing the eighteenth-century moral philosophy of Joseph Butler, John Wesley, Samuel Johnson, and William Paley. The final reinterprets conflict between the liberal Anglican Noetics and the conservative Oxford Movement as a clash over the means of developing habits of self-denial"--Provided by publisher
