The question which the Tract had opened, what the Articles meant and to what men were bound by accepting them, was a most legitimate one for discussion; and it was most natural also that any one should hesitate to answer it as the Tract answered it.  But it was distinctly a question for discussion.  It was not so easy for any of the parties in the Church to give a clear and consistent answer, as that the matter ought at once to have been carried out of the region of discussion.  The Articles were the Articles of a Church which had seen as great differences as those between the Church of Edward VI and the Church of the Restoration.  Take them broadly as the condemnation—­strong but loose in expression, as, for instance, in the language on the “five, commonly called Sacraments”—­of a powerful and well-known antagonist system, and there was no difficulty about them.  But take them as scientific and accurate and precise enunciations of a systematic theology, and difficulties begin at once, with every one who does not hold the special and well-marked doctrines of the age when the German and Swiss authorities ruled supreme.  The course of events from that day to this has shown more than once, in surprising and even startling examples, how much those who at the time least thought that they needed such strict construing of the language of the Articles, and were fierce in denouncing the “kind of interpretation” said to be claimed in No. 90, have since found that they require a good deal more elasticity of reading than even it asked for.  The “whirligig of time” was thought to have brought “its revenges,” when Mr. Newman, who had called for the exercise of authority against Dr. Hampden, found himself, five years afterwards, under the ban of the same authority.  The difference between Mr. Newman’s case and Dr. Hampden’s, both as to the alleged offence and the position of the men, was considerable.  But the “whirligig of time” brought about even stranger “revenges,” when not only Mr. Gorham and Mr. H.B.  Wilson in their own defence, but the tribunals which had to decide on their cases, carried the strictness of reading and the latitude of interpretation, quite as far, to say the least, as anything in No. 90.

Unhappily Tract 90 was met at Oxford, not with argument, but with panic and wrath.[94] There is always a sting in every charge, to which other parts of it seem subordinate.  No. 90 was charged of course with false doctrine, with false history, and with false reasoning; but the emphatic part of the charge, the short and easy method which dispensed from the necessity of theological examination and argument, was that it was dishonest and immoral.  Professors of Divinity, and accomplished scholars, such as there were in Oxford, might very well have considered it an occasion to dispute both the general principle of the Tract, if it was so dangerous, and the illustrations, in the abundance of which the writer had so frankly thrown open his position to searching