literary atmosphere of the tutor’s lecture-room, and the easy and gentlemanly and somewhat idle fellowship of the common-rooms.  It was the effort of men who had all the love of scholarship, and the feeling for it of the Oxford of their day, to add to this the habits of Christian students and the pursuit of Christian learning.  If all this was dangerous and uncongenial to Oxford, so much the worse for Oxford, with its great opportunities and great professions—­Dominus illuminatio mea.  But certainly this mark of moral purpose and moral force was so plain in the movement that the rulers of Oxford had no right to mistake it.  When the names come back to our minds of those who led and most represented the Tractarians, it must be a matter of surprise to any man who has not almost parted with the idea of Christian goodness, that this feature of the movement could escape or fail to impress those who had known well all their lives long what these leaders were.  But amid the clamour and the tell-tale gossip, and, it must be admitted, the folly round them, they missed it.  Perhaps they were bewildered.  But they must have the blame, the heavy blame, which belongs to all those who, when good is before them, do not recognise it according to its due measure.[100]

In the next place, the authorities attacked and condemned the Tractarian teaching at once violently and ignorantly, and in them ignorance of the ground on which the battle was fought was hardly pardonable.  Doubtless the Tractarian language was in many respects novel and strange.  But Oxford was not only a city of libraries, it was the home of what was especially accounted Church theology; and the Tractarian teaching, in its foundation and main outlines, had little but what ought to have been perfectly familiar to any one who chose to take the trouble to study the great Church of England writers.  To one who, like Dr. Routh of Magdalen, had gone below the surface, and was acquainted with the questions debated by those divines, there was nothing startling in what so alarmed his brethren, whether he agreed with it or not; and to him the indiscriminate charge of Popery meant nothing.  But Dr. Routh stood alone among his brother Heads in his knowledge of what English theology was.  To most of them it was an unexplored and misty region; some of the ablest, under the influence of Dr. Whately’s vigorous and scornful discipline, had learned to slight it.  But there it was.  Whether it was read or not, its great names were pronounced with honour, and quoted on occasion.  From Hooker to Van Mildert, there was an unbroken thread of common principles giving continuity to a line of Church teachers.  The Puritan line of doctrine, though it could claim much sanction among the divines of the Reformation—­the Latitudinarian idea, though it had the countenance of famous names and powerful intellects—­never could aspire to the special title of Church theology.  And the teaching which had that name, both in praise,