ad at least brought argument, learning, and
even philosophy of a sort, to break up the narrow and frigid conventions
of reigning system in church and college, in pulpits and professorial
chairs. They had made the church ashamed of the evil of her ways, they
had determined that spirit of improvement from within 'which, if this
sect-ridden country is ever really to be taught, must proceed _pari
passu_ with assault from without.'[90]

One of the ablest of the Oxford writers talking of the non-jurors,
remarks how very few of the movements that are attended with a certain
romance, and thus bias us for a time in their favour, will stand full
examination; they so often reveal some gross offence against common
sense.[91] Want of common sense is not the particular impression left by
the Tractarians, after we have put aside the plausible dialectic and
winning periods of the leader, and proceed to look at the effect, not on
their general honesty but on their intellectual integrity, of their most
peculiar situation and the methods which they believed that situation to
impose. Nobody will be so presumptuous or uncharitable as to deny that
among the divines of the Oxford movement were men as pure in soul, as
fervid lovers of truth, as this world ever possessed. On the other hand
it would be nothing short of a miracle in human nature, if all that
dreadful tangle of economies and reserves, so largely practised and for
a long time so insidiously defended, did not familiarise a vein of
subtlety, a tendency to play fast and loose with words, a perilous
disposition to regard the non-natural sense of language as if it were
just as good as the natural, a willingness to be satisfied with a bare
and rigid logical consistency of expression, without respect to the
interpretation that was sure to be put upon that expression by the
hearer and the reader. The strain of their position in all these
respects made Newman and his allies no exemplary school. Their example
has been, perhaps rightly, held to account for something that was often
under the evil name of sophistry suspected and disliked in Mr. Gladstone
himself, in his speeches, his writings, and even in his public acts.

MISCHIEVOUS EFFECTS OF OXFORD ENTANGLEMENTS

It is true that to the impartial eye Newman is no worse than teachers in
antagonistic sects; he is, for instance, no subtler than Maurice. The
theologian who strove so hard in the name of anglican unity to develop
all