whom they condemned--of the impossibility of getting them to
imagine that Tractarians could be anything but fools or traitors--of
their hopeless blindness to any fact or any teaching to which they were
not accustomed. If the authorities could only have stopped to consider
whether after all they were not dealing with real thought and real wish
to do right, they might after all have disliked the movement, but they
would have seen that which would have kept them from violence. They
would not listen, they would not inquire, they would not consider. Could
such ignorance, could such wrong possibly be without mischievous
influence on those who were the victims of it, much more on friends and
disciples who knew and loved them? The Tractarians had been preaching
that the Church of England, with all its Protestant feeling and all its
Protestant acts and history, was yet, as it professed to be, part and
parcel of the great historic Catholic Church, which had framed the
Creeds, which had continued the Sacraments, which had preached and
taught out of the Bible, which had given us our immemorial prayers. They
had spared no pains to make out this great commonplace from history and
theology: nor had they spared pains, while insisting on this dominant
feature in the English Church, to draw strongly and broadly the lines
which distinguished it from Rome. Was it wonderful, when all guarding
and explanatory limitations were contemptuously tossed aside by
"all-daring ignorance," and all was lumped together in the
indiscriminate charge of "Romanising," that there should have been some
to take the authorities at their word? Was it wonderful when men were
told that the Church of England was no place for them, that they were
breaking their vows and violating solemn engagements by acting as its
ministers, and that in order to preserve the respect of honest men they
should leave it--that the question of change, far off as it had once
seemed, came within "measurable distance"? The generation to which they
belonged had been brought up with strong exhortations to be real, and to
hate shams; and now the question was forced on them whether it was not a
sham for the English Church to call itself Catholic; whether a body of
teaching which was denounced by its authorities, however it might look
on paper and be defended by learning, could be more than a plausible
literary hypothesis in contrast to the great working system of which the
head was Rome. When we