man might deal with
these as lawfully as another. Church history there was, fruitful in
interest, instruction, and warning; for it was the record of the long
struggle of the true idea of the Church against the false, and of the
fatal disappearance of the true before the forces of blindness and
wickedness.[7] Dr. Arnold's was a passionate attempt to place the true
idea in the light. Of the difficulties of his theory he made light
account. There was the vivid central truth which glowed through his soul
and quickened all his thoughts. He became its champion and militant
apostle. These doctrines, combined with his strong political liberalism,
made the Midlands hot for Dr. Arnold. But he liked the fighting, as he
thought, against the narrow and frightened orthodoxy round him. And he
was in the thick of this fighting when another set of ideas about the
Church--the ideas on which alone it seemed to a number of earnest and
anxious minds that the cause of the Church could be maintained--the
ideas which were the beginning of the Oxford movement, crossed his path.
It was the old orthodox tradition of the Church, with fresh life put
into it, which he flattered himself that he had so triumphantly
demolished. This intrusion of a despised rival to his own teaching about
the Church--teaching in which he believed with deep and fervent
conviction--profoundly irritated him; all the more that it came from men
who had been among his friends, and who, he thought, should have known
better.[8]

But neither Dr. Whately's nor Dr. Arnold's attempts to put the old
subject of the Church in a new light gained much hold on the public
mind. One was too abstract; the other too unhistorical and
revolutionary. Both in Oxford and in the country were men whose hearts
burned within them for something less speculative and vague, something
more reverent and less individual, more in sympathy with the inherited
spirit of the Church. It did not need much searching to find in the
facts and history of the Church ample evidence of principles distinct
and inspiring, which, however long latent, or overlaid by superficial
accretions, were as well fitted as they ever were to animate its
defenders in the struggle with the unfriendly opinion of the day. They
could not open their Prayer-Books, and think of what they read there,
without seeing that on the face of it the Church claimed to be something
very different from what it was assumed to be in the current
controvers