went over to the Roman Church. The political
reaction was specifically Latin and Catholic.
In the lurid light of anarchy Rome seemed to have
a mission again. Divine right in the State must
be restored through the Church. The Catholic
apologetic saw the Revolution as only the logical conclusion
of the premises of the Reformation. The religious
revolt of the sixteenth century, the philosophical
revolt of the seventeenth, the political revolt of
the eighteenth, the social revolt of the nineteenth,
are all parts of one dreadful sequence. As the
Church lifted up the world after the first flood of
the barbarians, so must she again lift up the world
after the devastations made by the more terrible barbarians
of the eighteenth century. England had indeed
stood a little outside of the cyclone which had devastated
the world from Coronna to Moscow and from the Channel
to the Pyramids, but she had been exhausted in putting
down the revolution. Only God’s goodness
had preserved England. The logic of Puritanism
would have been the same. Indeed, in England the
State was weaker and worse than were the states upon
the Continent. For since 1688 it had been a popular
and constitutional monarchy. In Frederick William’s
phrase, its sovereign took his crown from the gutter.
The Church was through and through Erastian, a creature
of the State. Bishops were made by party representatives.
Acts like the Reform Bills, the course of the Government
in the matter of the Irish Church, were steps which
would surely bring England to the pass which France
had reached in 1789. The source of such acts
was wrong. It was with the people. It was
in men, not in God. It was in reason, not in authority.
It would be difficult to overstate the strength of
this reactionary sentiment in important circles in
England at the end of the third decade of the nineteenth
century.
THE OXFORD MOVEMENT
In so far as that complex of causes just alluded to
made of the Oxford Movement or the Catholic revival
a movement of life, ecclesiastical, social and political
as well, its history falls outside the purpose of
this book. We proposed to deal with the history
of thought. Reactionary movements have frequently
got on without much thought. They have left little
deposit of their own in the realm of ideas. Their
avowed principle has been that of recurrence to that
which has already been thought, of fidelity to ideas
which have long prevailed. This is the reason
why the conservatives have not a large place in such
a sketch as this. It is not that their writings
have not often been full of high learning and of the
subtlest of reasoning. It is only that the ideas
about which they reason do not belong to the history
of the nineteenth century. They belong, on the
earnest contention of the conservatives themselves—those
of Protestants, to the history of the Reformation—and
of Catholics, both Anglican and Roman, to the history
of the early or mediaeval Church.