e University
legislation, indeed, to which it led was poor and petty, doing small and
annoying things, because the University rulers dared not commit
themselves to definite charges. But, in the first place, the provocation
was great on the part of the Government in putting into the chief
theological chair an unwelcome man who could only save his orthodoxy by
making his speculations mean next to nothing--whose _prima facie_
unguarded and startling statements were resolved into truisms put in a
grand and obscure form. And in the next place, it was assumed in those
days to be the most natural and obvious thing in the world to condemn
unsound doctrine, and to exclude unsound teachers. The principle was
accepted as indisputable, however slack might have been in recent times
the application of it. That it was accepted, not on one side only, but
on all, was soon to be shown by the subsequent course of events. No one
suffered more severely and more persistently from its application than
the Tractarians; no one was more ready to apply it to them than Dr.
Hampden with his friends; no one approved and encouraged its vigorous
enforcement against them more than Dr. Whately. The idle distinction set
up, that they were not merely unsound but dishonest, was a mere insolent
pretext to save trouble in argument, and to heighten the charge against
them; no one could seriously doubt that they wrote in good faith as much
as Dr. Whately or Dr. Faussett. But unless acts like Dr. Pusey's
suspension, and the long proscription that went on for years after it,
were mere instances of vindictive retaliation, the reproach of
persecution must be shared by all parties then, and by none more than by
the party which in general terms most denounced it. Those who think the
Hampden agitation unique in its injustice ought to ask themselves what
their party would have done if at any time between 1836 and 1843 Mr.
Newman had been placed in Dr. Hampden's seat.

People in our days mean by religious persecution what happens when the
same sort of repressive policy is applied to a religious party as is
applied to vaccination recusants, or to the "Peculiar People." All
religious persecution, from the days of Socrates, has taken a legal
form, and justified itself on legal grounds. It is the action of
authority, or of strong social judgments backed by authority, against a
set of opinions, or the expression of them in word or act--usually
innovating opinions, but not b