guage new to
the popular mind or the "religious world," it was not new--at least it
ought not to have been new--to orthodox Churchmen, with opportunities of
study and acquainted with our best divinity. If their temper was eager
and enthusiastic, they alleged the presence of a great and perilous
crisis. Their appeal was mainly not to the general public, but to the
sober and the learned; to those to whom was entrusted the formation of
faith and character in the future clergy of the Church; to those who
were responsible for the discipline and moral tone of the first
University of Christendom, and who held their conspicuous position on
the understanding of that responsibility. It behoved the heads of the
University to be cautious, even to be suspicious; movements might be
hollow or dangerous things. But it behoved them also to become
acquainted with so striking a phenomenon as this; to judge it by what it
appealed to--the learning of English divines, the standard of a high and
generous moral rule; to recognise its aims at least, with equity and
sympathy, if some of its methods and arguments seemed questionable. The
men of the movement were not mere hostile innovators; they were fighting
for what the University and its chiefs held dear and sacred, the
privileges and safety of the Church. It was the natural part of the
heads of the University to act as moderators; at any rate, to have
shown, with whatever reserve, that they appreciated what they needed
time to judge of. But while on the one side there was burning and
devouring earnestness, and that power of conviction which doubles the
strength of the strong, there was on the other a serene ignoring of all
that was going on, worthy of a set of dignified French _abbes_ on the
eve of the Revolution. This sublime or imbecile security was
occasionally interrupted by bursts of irritation at some fresh piece of
Tractarian oddness or audacity, or at some strange story which made its
way from the gossip of common rooms to the society of the Heads of
Houses. And there was always ready a stick to beat the offenders;
everything could be called Popish. But for the most part they looked on,
with smiles, with jokes, sometimes with scolding.[74] Thus the men who
by their place ought to have been able to gauge and control the
movement, who might have been expected to meet half-way a serious
attempt to brace up the religious and moral tone of the place, so
incalculably important in days confes