minent a
share.'

[180] Parker, iii. pp. 434-5.

CHAPTER XI

THE TRACTARIAN CATASTROPHE

(_1841-1846_)

The movement of 1833 started out oL the anti-Roman feelings of the
Emancipation time. It was anti-Roman as much as it was
anti-sectarian and anti-erastian. It was to avert the danger of
people becoming Romanists from ignorance of church principles. This
was all changed in one important section of the party. The
fundamental conceptions were reversed. It was not the Roman church
but the English church that was put on its trial.... From this
point of view the object of the movement was no longer to elevate
and improve an independent English church, but to approximate it as
far as possible to what was assumed to be undeniable--the perfect
catholicity of Rome.--DEAN CHURCH.

The fall of Peel and the break-up of his party in the state coincided
pretty nearly with a hardly less memorable rupture in that rising party
in the church, with which Mr. Gladstone had more or less associated
himself almost from its beginning. Two main centres of authority and
leading in the land were thus at the same moment dislodged and
dispersed. A long struggle in secular concerns had come to a decisive
issue; and the longer struggle in religious concerns had reached a
critical and menacing stage. The reader will not wonder that two events
so far-reaching as the secession of Newman and the fall of Sir Robert,
coupled as these public events were with certain importunities of
domestic circumstance of which I shall have more to say by and by,
brought Mr. Gladstone to an epoch in his life of extreme perturbation.
Roughly it may be said to extend from 1845 to 1852.

At the time of his resignation in the beginning of 1845, he wrote to
Lord John Manners, then his colleague at Newark, a curious account of
his views on party life. Lord John was then acting with the Young
England group inspired by Disraeli, who has left a picture of them in
_Sybil_, the most far-seeing of all his novels.

_To Lord John Manners._

_Jan. 30, 1845._--You, I have no doubt, are disappointed as to the
working of a conservative government. And so should I be if I were
to estimate its results by a comparison with the anticipations
which, from a distance and in the abstract, I had once en