severity, and to a desperate effort to expel the disturbing innovators—­among them some of the first men in Oxford in character and ability—­from their places in the University.[98] In order to do justice on each side at this distance of time, we are bound to make allowance—­both for the alarm and the mistaken violence of the authorities, and for the disaffection, the irritation, the strange methods which grew up in the worried and suspected party—­for the difficulties which beset both sides in the conflict, and the counter-influences which drew them hither and thither.  But the facts are as they are; and even then a calmer temper was possible to those who willed it; and in the heat of the strife there were men among the authorities, as well as in the unpopular party, who kept their balance, while others lost it.

Undoubtedly the publication of No. 90 was the occasion of the aggravated form which dissension took, and not unnaturally.  Yet it was anything but what it was taken to mean by the authorities, an intentional move in favour of Rome.  It was intended to reconcile a large and growing class of minds, penetrated and disgusted with the ignorance and injustice of much of the current controversial assumptions against Rome, to a larger and more defensible view of the position of the English Church.  And this was done by calling attention to that which was not now for the first time observed—­to the loose and unguarded mode of speaking visible in the later controversial Articles, and to the contrast between them and the technical and precise theology of the first five Articles.  The Articles need not mean all which they were supposed popularly to mean against what was Catholic in Roman doctrine.  This was urged in simple good faith; it was but the necessary assumption of all who held with the Catholic theology, which the Tractarians all along maintained that they had a right to teach; it left plenty of ground of difference with unreformed and usurping Rome.  And we know that the storm which No. 90 raised took the writer by surprise.  He did not expect that he should give such deep offence.  But if he thought of the effect on one set of minds, he forgot the probable effect on another; and he forgot, or under-estimated, the effect not only of the things said, but of the way in which they were said.[99] No. 90 was a surprise, in the state of ordinary theological knowledge at the time.  It was a strong thing to say that the Articles left a great deal of formal Roman language untouched; but to work this out in dry, bald, technical logic, on the face of it, narrow in scope, often merely ingenious, was even a greater stumbling-block.  It was, undoubtedly, a great miscalculation, such as men of keen and far-reaching genius sometimes make.  They mistake the strength and set of the tide; they imagine that minds round them are going as fast as their own.  We can see, looking back, that such an interpretation of the Articles, with the view then taken of them in Oxford as the theological text-book, and in the condition of men’s minds, could not but be a great shock.