And what seemed to give a sinister significance to No. 90 was that, as has been said, a strong current was beginning to set in the direction of Rome.  It was not yet of the nature, nor of the force, which was imagined.  The authorities suspected it where it was not.  They accepted any contemptible bit of gossip collected by ignorance or ill-nature as a proof of it.  The constitutional frankness of Englishmen in finding fault with what is their own—­disgust at pompous glorification—­scepticism as to our insular claims against all the rest of Christendom to be exactly right, to be alone, “pure and apostolic”; real increase and enlargement of knowledge, theological and historical; criticism on portions of our Reformation history; admiration for characters in mediaeval times; eagerness, over-generous it might be, to admit and repair wrong to an opponent unjustly accused; all were set down together with other more unequivocal signs as “leanings to Rome.”  It was clear that there was a current setting towards Rome; but it was as clear that there was a much stronger current in the party as a whole, setting in the opposite direction.  To those who chose to see and to distinguish, the love, the passionate loyalty of the bulk of the Tractarians to the English Church was as evident and unquestionable as any public fact could be.  At this time there was no reason to call in question the strong assurances given by the writer of No. 90 himself of his yet unshaken faith in the English Church.  But all these important features of the movement—­witnessing, indeed, to deep searchings of heart, but to a genuine desire to serve the English Church—­were overlooked in the one overwhelming fear which had taken possession of the authorities.  Alarming symptoms of a disposition to acknowledge and even exaggerate the claims and the attractions of the Roman system were indeed apparent.  No doubt there were reasons for disquiet and anxiety.  But the test of manliness and wisdom, in the face of such reasons, is how men measure their proportion, and how they meet the danger.

The Heads saw a real danger before them; but they met it in a wrong and unworthy way.  They committed two great errors.  In the first place, like the Jesuits in their quarrel with Portroyal and the Jansenists, they entirely failed to recognise the moral elevation and religious purpose of the men whom they opposed.  There was that before them which it was to their deep discredit that they did not see.  The movement, whatever else it was, or whatever else it became, was in its first stages a movement for deeper religion, for a more real and earnest self-discipline, for a loftier morality, for more genuine self-devotion to a serious life, than had ever been seen in Oxford.  It was an honest attempt to raise Oxford life, which by all evidence needed raising, to something more laborious and something more religious, to something more worthy of the great Christian foundations of Oxford than the rivalry of colleges and of the schools, the mere