which every man got up in the morning and passed the
day, of the bitter hostility of those foremost in
place in Oxford—of their incompetence to
judge fairly—of their incapacity to apprehend
what was high and earnest in those whom they condemned—of
the impossibility of getting them to imagine that
Tractarians could be anything but fools or traitors—of
their hopeless blindness to any fact or any teaching
to which they were not accustomed. If the authorities
could only have stopped to consider whether after
all they were not dealing with real thought and real
wish to do right, they might after all have disliked
the movement, but they would have seen that which
would have kept them from violence. They would
not listen, they would not inquire, they would not
consider. Could such ignorance, could such wrong
possibly be without mischievous influence on those
who were the victims of it, much more on friends and
disciples who knew and loved them? The Tractarians
had been preaching that the Church of England, with
all its Protestant feeling and all its Protestant
acts and history, was yet, as it professed to be, part
and parcel of the great historic Catholic Church,
which had framed the Creeds, which had continued the
Sacraments, which had preached and taught out of the
Bible, which had given us our immemorial prayers.
They had spared no pains to make out this great commonplace
from history and theology: nor had they spared
pains, while insisting on this dominant feature in
the English Church, to draw strongly and broadly the
lines which distinguished it from Rome. Was it
wonderful, when all guarding and explanatory limitations
were contemptuously tossed aside by “all-daring
ignorance,” and all was lumped together in the
indiscriminate charge of “Romanising,”
that there should have been some to take the authorities
at their word? Was it wonderful when men were
told that the Church of England was no place for them,
that they were breaking their vows and violating solemn
engagements by acting as its ministers, and that in
order to preserve the respect of honest men they should
leave it—that the question of change, far
off as it had once seemed, came within “measurable
distance”? The generation to which they
belonged had been brought up with strong exhortations
to be real, and to hate shams; and now the question
was forced on them whether it was not a sham for the
English Church to call itself Catholic; whether a body
of teaching which was denounced by its authorities,
however it might look on paper and be defended by
learning, could be more than a plausible literary
hypothesis in contrast to the great working system
of which the head was Rome. When we consider
the singular and anomalous position on any theory,
including the Roman, of the English Church; with what
great differences its various features and elements
have been prominent at different times; how largely
its history has been marked by contradictory facts
and appearances; and how hard it is for any one to