fectly familiar to any one who chose to take
the trouble to study the great Church of England writers. To one who,
like Dr. Routh of Magdalen, had gone below the surface, and was
acquainted with the questions debated by those divines, there was
nothing startling in what so alarmed his brethren, whether he agreed
with it or not; and to him the indiscriminate charge of Popery meant
nothing. But Dr. Routh stood alone among his brother Heads in his
knowledge of what English theology was. To most of them it was an
unexplored and misty region; some of the ablest, under the influence of
Dr. Whately's vigorous and scornful discipline, had learned to slight
it. But there it was. Whether it was read or not, its great names were
pronounced with honour, and quoted on occasion. From Hooker to Van
Mildert, there was an unbroken thread of common principles giving
continuity to a line of Church teachers. The Puritan line of doctrine,
though it could claim much sanction among the divines of the
Reformation--the Latitudinarian idea, though it had the countenance of
famous names and powerful intellects--never could aspire to the special
title of Church theology. And the teaching which had that name, both in
praise, and often in dispraise, as technical, scholastic, unspiritual,
transcendental, nay, even Popish, countenanced the Tractarians. They
were sneered at for their ponderous _Catenae_ of authorities; but on the
ground on which this debate raged, the appeal was a pertinent and solid
one. Yet to High Church Oxford and its rulers, all this was strange
doctrine. Proof and quotation might lie before their eyes, but their
minds still ran in one groove, and they could not realise what they saw.
The words meant no harm in the venerable folio; they meant perilous
heresy in the modern Tract. When the authorities had to judge of the
questions raised by the movement, they were unprovided with the adequate
knowledge; and this was knowledge which they ought to have possessed for
its own sake, as doctors of the Theological Faculty of the University.

And it was not only for their want of learning, manifest all through the
controversy, that they were to blame. Their most telling charge against
the Tractarians, which was embodied in the censure of No. 90, was the
charge of dishonesty. The charge is a very handy one against opponents,
and it may rest on good grounds; but those who think right to make it
ought, both as a matter of policy and as a matter