of many of Newman’s associates; of Hurrell Froude, e.g., and of Ward.  When Pugin came to Oxford in 1840 to superintend some building at Balliol, he saw folio copies of St. Buenaventura and Aquinas’ “Summa Theologiae” lying on Ward’s table, and exclaimed, “What an extraordinary thing that so glorious a man as Ward should be living in a room without mullions to the windows!” This being reported to Ward, he asked, “What are mullions?  I never heard of them.”  Ward cared nothing about rood-screens and lancet windows; Newman and Faber preferred the Palladian architecture to the Gothic.[10] Pugin, on the other hand, who had been actually converted to the Roman Church through his enthusiasm for pointed architecture; and who, when asked to dinner, stipulated for Gothic puddings, for which he enclosed designs, was greatly distressed at the carelessness about such matters which he found at Oxford.  A certain Dr. Cox was going to pray for the conversion of England, in an old French cope.  “What is the use,” asked Pugin, “of praying for the Church of England in that cope?” [11]

Of the three or four hundred Anglican clergymen who went over with Newman in 1845, or some years later with Manning, on the decision in the Gorham controversy, few were influenced in any assignable degree by poetic motives.  “As regards my friend’s theory about my imaginative sympathies having led me astray,” writes Aubrey de Vere, “I may remark that they had been repelled, not attracted, by what I thought an excess of ceremonial in the churches and elsewhere when in Italy. . . .  It seemed to me too sensuous.” [12] Indeed, at the outset of the movement it was not the mediaeval Church, but the primitive Church, the Church of patristic discipline and doctrine, that appealed to the Tractarians.  It was the Anglican Church of the seventeenth century, the Church of Andrewes and Herbert and Ken, to which Keble sought to restore the “beauty of holiness”; and those of the Oxford party who remained within the establishment continued true to this ideal.  “The Christian Year” is the genuine descendant of George Herbert’s “Temple” (1632).  What impressed Newman’s imagination in the Roman Catholic Church was not so much the romantic beauty of its rites and observances as its imposing unity and authority.  He wanted an authoritative standard in matters of belief, a faith which had been held semper et ubique et ab omnibus.  The English Church was an Elizabethan compromise.  It was Erastian, a creature of the state, threatened by the Reform Bill of 1832, threatened by every liberal wind of opinion.  The Thirty-nine Articles meant this to one man and that to another, and there was no court of final appeal to say what they meant.  Newman was a convert not of his imagination, but of his longing for consistency and his desire to believe.