l elevation and religious purpose
of the men whom they opposed. There was that before them which it was to
their deep discredit that they did not see. The movement, whatever else
it was, or whatever else it became, was in its first stages a movement
for deeper religion, for a more real and earnest self-discipline, for a
loftier morality, for more genuine self-devotion to a serious life, than
had ever been seen in Oxford. It was an honest attempt to raise Oxford
life, which by all evidence needed raising, to something more laborious
and something more religious, to something more worthy of the great
Christian foundations of Oxford than the rivalry of colleges and of the
schools, the mere literary atmosphere of the tutor's lecture-room, and
the easy and gentlemanly and somewhat idle fellowship of the
common-rooms. It was the effort of men who had all the love of
scholarship, and the feeling for it of the Oxford of their day, to add
to this the habits of Christian students and the pursuit of Christian
learning. If all this was dangerous and uncongenial to Oxford, so much
the worse for Oxford, with its great opportunities and great
professions--_Dominus illuminatio mea_. But certainly this mark of moral
purpose and moral force was so plain in the movement that the rulers of
Oxford had no right to mistake it. When the names come back to our minds
of those who led and most represented the Tractarians, it must be a
matter of surprise to any man who has not almost parted with the idea of
Christian goodness, that this feature of the movement could escape or
fail to impress those who had known well all their lives long what these
leaders were. But amid the clamour and the tell-tale gossip, and, it
must be admitted, the folly round them, they missed it. Perhaps they
were bewildered. But they must have the blame, the heavy blame, which
belongs to all those who, when good is before them, do not recognise it
according to its due measure.[100]

In the next place, the authorities attacked and condemned the
Tractarian teaching at once violently and ignorantly, and in them
ignorance of the ground on which the battle was fought was hardly
pardonable. Doubtless the Tractarian language was in many respects novel
and strange. But Oxford was not only a city of libraries, it was the
home of what was especially accounted Church theology; and the
Tractarian teaching, in its foundation and main outlines, had little but
what ought to have been per