ty. It seems as if
this encouraged the Hebdomadal Board to a move, which would be felt as a
blow against the Tractarians, and which, as an act of reparation to Dr.
Hampden, would give satisfaction to the ablest section of their own
supporters, the theological Liberals. They proposed to repeal the
disqualification which had been imposed on Dr. Hampden in 1836. But they
had miscalculated. It was too evidently a move to take advantage of the
recent Tractarian discomfiture to whitewash Dr. Hampden's Liberalism.
The proposal, and the way in which it was made, roused a strong feeling
among the residents; a request to withdraw it received the signatures
not only of moderate Anglicans and independent men, like Mr. Francis
Faber of Magdalen, Mr. Sewell, the Greswells, and Mr. W. Palmer of
Worcester, but of Mr. Tait of Balliol, and Mr. Golightly. Dr. Hampden's
own attitude did not help it. There was great want of dignity in his
ostentatious profession of orthodoxy and attachment to the Articles, in
his emphatic adoption of Evangelical phraseology, and in his unmeasured
denunciation of his opponents, and especially of those whom he viewed as
most responsible for the censure of 1836--the "Tractarians" or
"Romanisers." And the difficulty with those who had passed and who now
proposed to withdraw the censure, was that Dr. Hampden persistently and
loudly declared that he had nothing to retract, and retracted nothing;
and if it was right to pass it in 1836, it would not be right to
withdraw it in 1842. At the last moment, Mr. Tait and Mr. Piers
Claughton of University made an attempt to get something from Dr.
Hampden which might pass as a withdrawal of what was supposed to be
dangerous in his Bampton Lectures; and there were some even among Mr.
Newman's friends, who, disliking from the first the form of the censure,
might have found in such a withdrawal a reason for voting for its
repeal. But Dr. Hampden was obdurate. The measure was pressed, and in
June it was thrown out in Convocation by a majority of three to
two[103]--the same proportion, though in smaller numbers, as in the vote
against Mr. Williams. The measure was not an honest one on the part of
the Hebdomadal Board, and deserved to be defeated. Among the pamphlets
which the discussion produced, two by Mr. James Mozley gave early
evidence, by their force of statement and their trenchant logic, of the
power with which he was to take part in the questions which agitated the
Univer