. No doubt the mere occasion of tractarianism was
political. Its leaders were alarmed at the designs imputed to the newly
reformed parliament of disestablishing the Anglican Church. They asked
themselves the question, which I will put in their own words (_Tract_
i.)--'Should the government of the country so far forget their God as to
cut off the Church, to deprive it of its temporal honours and substance,
on what will you rest the claims to respect and attention which you make
upon your flock? In answering this question they speedily found
themselves, as might have been expected, at the opposite pole of thought
from things political. The whole strength of their appeal to members of
the Church lay in men's weariness of the high and dry optimism, which
presents the existing order of things as the noblest possible, and the
undisturbed way of the majority as the way of salvation. Apostolical
succession and Sacramentalism may not have been in themselves
progressive ideas. The spirit which welcomed them had at least the
virtue of taking away from Caesar the things that are not Caesar's.

Glaring as were the intellectual faults of the Oxford movement, it was
at any rate a recognition in a very forcible way of the doctrine that
spiritual matters are not to be settled by the dicta of a political
council. It acknowledged that a man is answerable at his own peril for
having found or lost the truth. It was a warning that he must reckon
with a judge who will not account the _status quo_, nor the convenience
of a cabinet, a good plea for indolent acquiescence in theological
error. It ended, in the case of its most vigorous champions, in a final
and deliberate putting out of the eyes of the understanding. The last
act of assertion of personal responsibility was a headlong acceptance of
the responsibility of tradition and the Church. This was deplorable
enough. But apart from other advantages incidental to the tractarian
movement, such as the attention which it was the means of drawing to
history and the organic connection between present and past, it had, we
repeat, the merit of being an effective protest against what may be
called the House of Commons' view of human life--a view excellent in its
place, but most blighting and dwarfing out of it. It was, what every
sincere uprising of the better spirit in men and women must always be,
an effective protest against the leaden tyranny of the man of the world
and the so-called practical per