warning. The
first who condemned the movement was the Bishop of Chester, J. Bird
Sumner; in a later Charge he came to describe it as the work of Satan;
in 1838 he only denounced the "undermining of the foundations of our
Protestant Church by men who dwell within her walls," and the bad faith
of those "who sit in the Reformers' seat, and traduce the Reformation."

These were grave mistakes on the part of those who were responsible for
the government of the University and the Church. They treated as absurd,
mischievous, and at length traitorous, an effort, than which nothing
could be more sincere, to serve the Church, to place its claims on
adequate grounds, to elevate the standard of duty in its clergy, and in
all its members. To have missed the aim of the movement and to have been
occupied and irritated by obnoxious details and vulgar suspicions was a
blunder which gave the measure of those who made it, and led to great
evils. They alienated those who wished for nothing better than to help
them in their true work. Their "unkindness" was felt to be, in Bacon's
phrase,[77] _injuriae potentiorum_. But on the side of the party of the
movement there were mistakes also.

1. The rapidity with which the movement had grown, showing that some
deep need had long been obscurely felt, which the movement promised to
meet,[78] had been too great to be altogether wholesome. When we compare
what was commonly received before 1833, in teaching, in habits of life,
in the ordinary assumptions of history, in the ideas and modes of
worship, public and private--the almost sacramental conception of
preaching, the neglect of the common prayer of the Prayer Book, the
slight regard to the sacraments--with what the teaching of the Tracts
and their writers had impressed for good and all, five years later, on
numbers of earnest people, the change seems astonishing. The change was
a beneficial one and it was a permanent one. The minds which it
affected, it affected profoundly. Still it was but a short time, for
young minds especially, to have come to a decision on great and debated
questions. There was the possibility, the danger, of men having been
captivated and carried away by the excitement and interest of the time;
of not having looked all round and thought out the difficulties before
them; of having embraced opinions without sufficiently knowing their
grounds or counting the cost or considering the consequences. There was
the danger of precipit