enthusiasts who crowded the Via Media, and who never presumed to argue, except against the propriety of arguing at all.”  There was a good deal of foolish sneering at reason; there was a good deal of silly bravado about not caring whether the avowed grounds of opinions taken up were strong or feeble.  It was not merely the assent of a learner to his teacher, of a mind without means of instruction to the belief which it has inherited, or of one new to the ways and conditions of life to the unproved assertions and opinions of one to whom experience had given an open and sure eye.  It was a positive carelessness, almost accounted meritorious, to inquire and think, when their leaders called them to do so.  “The Gospel of Christ is not a matter of mere argument.”  It is not, indeed, when it comes in its full reality, in half a hundred different ways, known and unsearchable, felt and unfelt, moral and intellectual, on the awakened and quickened soul.  But the wildest fanatic can take the same words into his mouth.  Their true meaning was variously and abundantly illustrated, especially in Mr. Newman’s sermons.  Still, the adequate, the emphatic warning against their early abuse was hardly pressed on the public opinion and sentiment of the party of the movement with the force which really was requisite.  To the end there were men who took up their belief avowedly on insufficient and precarious grounds, glorying in the venturesomeness of their faith and courage, and justifying their temper of mind and their intellectual attitude by alleging misinterpreted language of their wiser and deeper teachers.  A recoil from Whately’s hard and barren dialectics, a sympathy with many tender and refined natures which the movement had touched, made the leaders patient with intellectual feebleness when it was joined with real goodness and Christian temper; but this also sometimes made them less impatient than they might well have been with that curious form of conceit and affectation which veils itself under an intended and supposed humility, a supposed distrust of self and its own powers.

Another difficult matter, not altogether successfully managed—­at least from the original point of view of the movement, and of those who saw in it a great effort for the good of the English Church—­was the treatment of the Roman controversy.  The general line which the leaders proposed to take was the one which was worthy of Christian and truth-loving teachers.  They took a new departure; and it was not less just than it was brave, when, recognising to the full the overwhelming reasons why “we should not be Romanists,” they refused to take up the popular and easy method of regarding the Roman Church as apostate and antichristian; and declined to commit themselves to the vulgar and indiscriminate abuse of it which was the discreditable legacy of the old days of controversy.  They did what all the world was loudly professing to do, they looked facts in the face; they found, as any one would