Oxford, the Oxford of the past, has many faults; and she has heavily paid for them in defeat, in isolation, in want of hold upon the modern world.  Yet we in Oxford, brought up amidst the beauty and sweetness of that beautiful place, have not failed to seize one truth,—­the truth that beauty and sweetness are essential characters of a complete human perfection.  When I insist on this, I am all in the faith and tradition of Oxford.  I say boldly that this our sentiment for beauty and sweetness, our sentiment against hideousness and rawness, has been at the bottom of our attachment to so many beaten causes, of our opposition to so many triumphant movements.  And the sentiment is true, and has never been wholly defeated, and has shown its power even in its defeat.  We have not won our political battles, we have not carried our main points, we have not stopped our adversaries’ advance, we have not marched victoriously with the modern world; but we have told silently upon the mind of the country, we have prepared currents of feeling which sap our adversaries’ position when it seems gained, we have kept up our own communications with the future.  Look at the course of the great movement which shook Oxford to its centre some thirty years ago!  It was directed, as any one who reads Dr. Newman’s Apology[411] may see, against what in one word may be called “Liberalism.”  Liberalism prevailed; it was the appointed force to do the work of the hour; it was necessary, it was inevitable that it should prevail.  The Oxford movement was broken, it failed; our wrecks are scattered on every shore:—­

  “Quae regio in terris nostri non plena laboris?"[412]

But what was it, this liberalism, as Dr. Newman saw it, and as it really broke the Oxford movement?  It was the great middle-class liberalism, which had for the cardinal points of its belief the Reform Bill of 1832,[413] and local self-government, in politics; in the social sphere, free-trade, unrestricted competition, and the making of large industrial fortunes; in the religious sphere, the Dissidence of Dissent and the Protestantism of the Protestant religion.  I do not say that other and more intelligent forces than this were not opposed to the Oxford movement:  but this was the force which really beat it; this was the force which Dr. Newman felt himself fighting with; this was the force which till only the other day seemed to be the paramount force in this country, and to be in possession of the future; this was the force whose achievements fill Mr. Lowe[414] with such inexpressible admiration, and whose rule he was so horror-struck to see threatened.  And where is this great force of Philistinism now?  It is thrust into the second rank, it is become a power of yesterday, it has lost the future.  A new power has suddenly appeared, a power which it is impossible yet to judge fully, but which is certainly a wholly different force from middle-class liberalism; different in its cardinal