of himself, he dwelt upon it as an original element, and read in its presence an indication of its being the will of God that the stream should turn its flow towards the gulf to which he himself had unawares, it may be, directed its waters.  Those who remember how at this time he was followed will know how easily such a result might follow his own incipient change.  Those who can still remember how many often involuntarily caught his peculiar intonation—­so distinctively singular, and therefore so attractive in himself and so repulsive in his copyists —­will understand how the altering fashion of the leader’s thoughts was appropriated with the same unconscious fidelity.

One other cause acted powerfully on him and on them to give this bias to the movement, and that was the bitterness and invectives of the Liberal party.  Dr. Newman repeatedly reminds us that it was the Liberals who drove him from Oxford.  The four tutors—­the after course of one of whom, at least, was destined to display so remarkable a Nemesis—­and the pack who followed them turned by their ceaseless baying the noble hart who led the rest towards this evil covert.  He and they heard incessantly that they were Papists in disguise:  men dishonoured by professing one thing and holding another; until they began to doubt their own fidelity, and in that doubt was death.  Nor was this all.  The Liberals ever (as is their wont), most illiberal to those who differ from them, began to use direct academic persecution; until, in self-distrust and very weariness, the great soul began to abandon the warfare it had waged inwardly against its own inclinations and the fascinations of its enemy, and to yield the first defences to the foe.  It will remain written, as Dr. Newman’s deliberate judgment, that it was the Liberals who forced him from Oxford.  How far, if he had not taken that step, he might have again shaken off the errors which were growing on him—­how far therefore in driving him from Oxford they drove him finally to Rome—­man can never know.

In the new light thrown upon it from the pages of the “Apologia,” we see with more distinctness than was ever shown before, how greatly this tendency to Rome, which at last led astray so many of the masters of the party, was infused into it by the single influence of Dr. Newman himself.  We do not believe that, in spite of his startling speeches, the bias towards Rome was at all as strong even in H. Froude himself.  Let his last letter witness for him:—­“If,” he says, “I was to assign my reasons for belonging to the Church of England in preference to any other religious community, it would be simply this, that she has retained an apostolical clergy, and enacts no sinful terms of communion; whereas, on the other hand, the Romanists, though retaining an apostolical clergy, do exact sinful terms of communion."[1] This was the tone of the movement until it was changed in Dr. Newman.  We believe that in tracing this out we shall be using these pages entirely as their