of Tractarianism, Orthodox and Liberal, were for the moment gorged with their success.  What men waited to see was the effect on the party of the movement; how it would influence the advanced portion of it; how it would influence the little company who had looked on in silence from their retirement at Littlemore.  The more serious aspect of recent events was succeeded for the moment by a certain comic contrast, created by Mr. Ward’s engagement to be married, which was announced within a week of his degradation, and which gave the common-rooms something to smile at after the strain and excitement of the scene in the Theatre.  But that passed, and the graver outlook of the situation occupied men’s thoughts.

There was a widespread feeling of insecurity.  Friends did not know of friends, how their minds were working, how they might go.  Anxious letters passed, the writers not daring to say too much, or reveal too much alarm.  And yet there was still some hope that at least with the great leader matters were not desperate.  To his own friends he gave warning; he had already done so in a way to leave little to expect but at last to lose him; he spoke of resigning his fellowship in October, though he wished to defer this till the following June; but nothing final had been said publicly.  Even at the last it was only anticipated by some that he would retire into lay communion.  But that silence was awful and ominous.  He showed no signs of being affected by what had passed in Oxford.  He privately thanked the Proctors for saving him from what would have distressed him; but he made no comments on the measures themselves.  Still it could not but be a climax of everything as far as Oxford was concerned.  And he was a man who saw signs in such events.

It was inevitable that the events of the end of 1844 and the beginning of 1845 should bring with them a great crisis in the development of religious opinion, in the relations of its different forms to one another, and further, in the thoughts of many minds as to their personal position, their duty, and their prospects.  There had been such a crisis in 1841 at the publication of No. 90.  After the discussions which followed that tract, Anglican theology could never be quite the same that it had been before.  It was made to feel the sense of some grave wants, which, however they might be supplied in the future, could no longer be unnoticed or uncared for.  And individuals, amid the strife of tongues, had felt, some strongly and practically, but a much larger number dimly and reluctantly, the possibility, unwelcome to most, but not without interest to others, of having to face the strange and at one time inconceivable task of revising the very foundations of their religion.  And such a revision had since that time been going on more or less actively in many minds; in some cases with very decisive results.  But after the explosion caused by Mr. Ward’s book, a crisis of a much more grave and wide-reaching sort had arrived.  To ordinary