that anything so strange could really be true and sound.  And at length they found themselves going along with the outside current of uninstructed and ignoble prejudice, in a settled and pronounced dislike, which took for granted that all was wrong in the movement, which admitted any ill-natured surmise and foolish misrepresentation, and really allowed itself to acquiesce in the belief that men so well known in Oxford, once so admired and honoured, had sunk down to deliberate corrupters of the truth, and palterers with their own intellects and consciences.  It came in a few years to be understood on both sides, that the authorities were in direct antagonism to the movement; and though their efforts in opposition to it were feeble and petty, it went on under the dead weight of official University disapproval.  It would have been a great thing for the English Church—­though it is hard to see how, things being as they were, it could have come about—­if the movement had gone on, at least with the friendly interest, if not with the support, of the University rulers.  Instead of that, after the first two or three years there was one long and bitter fight in Oxford, with the anger on one side created by the belief of vague but growing dangers, and a sense of incapacity in resisting them, and with deep resentment at injustice and stupidity on the other.

The Bishops were farther from the immediate scene of the movement, and besides, had other things to think of.  Three or four of them might be considered theologians—­Archbishop Howley, Phillpotts of Exeter, Kaye of Lincoln, Marsh of Peterborough.  Two or three belonged to the Evangelical school, Ryder of Lichfield, and the two Sumners at Winchester and Chester.  The most prominent among them, and next to the Bishop of Exeter the ablest, alive to the real dangers of the Church, anxious to infuse vigour into its work, and busy with plans for extending its influence, was Blomfield, Bishop of London.  But Blomfield was not at his best as a divine, and, for a man of his unquestionable power, singularly unsure of his own mind.  He knew, in fact, that when the questions raised by the Tracts came before him he was unqualified to deal with them; he was no better furnished by thought or knowledge or habits to judge of them than the average Bishop of the time, appointed, as was so often the case, for political or personal reasons.  At the first start of the movement, the Bishops not unnaturally waited to see what would come of it.  It was indeed an effort in favour of the Church, but it was in irresponsible hands, begun by men whose words were strong and vehement and of unusual sound, and who, while they called on the clergy to rally round their fathers the Bishops, did not shrink from wishing for the Bishops the fortunes of the early days:  “we could not wish them a more blessed termination of their course than the spoiling of their goods and martyrdom."[76] It may reasonably be supposed that such good wishes were