s in the conflict, and the
counter-influences which drew them hither and thither. But the facts are
as they are; and even then a calmer temper was possible to those who
willed it; and in the heat of the strife there were men among the
authorities, as well as in the unpopular party, who kept their balance,
while others lost it.

Undoubtedly the publication of No. 90 was the occasion of the aggravated
form which dissension took, and not unnaturally. Yet it was anything but
what it was taken to mean by the authorities, an intentional move in
favour of Rome. It was intended to reconcile a large and growing class
of minds, penetrated and disgusted with the ignorance and injustice of
much of the current controversial assumptions against Rome, to a larger
and more defensible view of the position of the English Church. And this
was done by calling attention to that which was not now for the first
time observed--to the loose and unguarded mode of speaking visible in
the later controversial Articles, and to the contrast between them and
the technical and precise theology of the first five Articles. The
Articles need not mean all which they were supposed popularly to mean
against what was Catholic in Roman doctrine. This was urged in simple
good faith; it was but the necessary assumption of all who held with the
Catholic theology, which the Tractarians all along maintained that they
had a right to teach; it left plenty of ground of difference with
unreformed and usurping Rome. And we know that the storm which No. 90
raised took the writer by surprise. He did not expect that he should
give such deep offence. But if he thought of the effect on one set of
minds, he forgot the probable effect on another; and he forgot, or
under-estimated, the effect not only of the things said, but of the way
in which they were said.[99] No. 90 was a surprise, in the state of
ordinary theological knowledge at the time. It was a strong thing to say
that the Articles left a great deal of formal Roman language untouched;
but to work this out in dry, bald, technical logic, on the face of it,
narrow in scope, often merely ingenious, was even a greater
stumbling-block. It was, undoubtedly, a great miscalculation, such as
men of keen and far-reaching genius sometimes make. They mistake the
strength and set of the tide; they imagine that minds round them are
going as fast as their own. We can see, looking back, that such an
interpretation of the Articles, wit