going along with the outside
current of uninstructed and ignoble prejudice, in a settled and
pronounced dislike, which took for granted that all was wrong in the
movement, which admitted any ill-natured surmise and foolish
misrepresentation, and really allowed itself to acquiesce in the belief
that men so well known in Oxford, once so admired and honoured, had sunk
down to deliberate corrupters of the truth, and palterers with their own
intellects and consciences. It came in a few years to be understood on
both sides, that the authorities were in direct antagonism to the
movement; and though their efforts in opposition to it were feeble and
petty, it went on under the dead weight of official University
disapproval. It would have been a great thing for the English
Church--though it is hard to see how, things being as they were, it
could have come about--if the movement had gone on, at least with the
friendly interest, if not with the support, of the University rulers.
Instead of that, after the first two or three years there was one long
and bitter fight in Oxford, with the anger on one side created by the
belief of vague but growing dangers, and a sense of incapacity in
resisting them, and with deep resentment at injustice and stupidity on
the other.

The Bishops were farther from the immediate scene of the movement, and
besides, had other things to think of. Three or four of them might be
considered theologians--Archbishop Howley, Phillpotts of Exeter, Kaye of
Lincoln, Marsh of Peterborough. Two or three belonged to the Evangelical
school, Ryder of Lichfield, and the two Sumners at Winchester and
Chester. The most prominent among them, and next to the Bishop of Exeter
the ablest, alive to the real dangers of the Church, anxious to infuse
vigour into its work, and busy with plans for extending its influence,
was Blomfield, Bishop of London. But Blomfield was not at his best as a
divine, and, for a man of his unquestionable power, singularly unsure of
his own mind. He knew, in fact, that when the questions raised by the
Tracts came before him he was unqualified to deal with them; he was no
better furnished by thought or knowledge or habits to judge of them than
the average Bishop of the time, appointed, as was so often the case, for
political or personal reasons. At the first start of the movement, the
Bishops not unnaturally waited to see what would come of it. It was
indeed an effort in favour of the Church, but it was