isis of a much
more grave and wide-reaching sort had arrived. To ordinary lookers-on it
naturally seemed that a shattering and decisive blow had been struck at
the Tractarian party and their cause; struck, indeed, formally and
officially, only at its extravagances, but struck, none the less,
virtually, at the premisses which led to these extravagances, and at the
party, which, while disapproving them, shrank, with whatever
motives,--policy, generosity, or secret sympathy,--from joining in the
condemnation of them. It was more than a defeat, it was a rout, in which
they were driven and chased headlong from the field; a wreck in which
their boasts and hopes of the last few years met the fate which wise men
had always anticipated. Oxford repudiated them. Their theories, their
controversial successes, their learned arguments, their appeals to the
imagination, all seemed to go down, and to be swept away like chaff,
before the breath of straightforward common sense and honesty.
Henceforth there was a badge affixed to them and all who belonged to
them, a badge of suspicion and discredit, and even shame, which bade men
beware of them, an overthrow under which it seemed wonderful that they
could raise their heads or expect a hearing. It is true, that to those
who looked below the surface, the overthrow might have seemed almost too
showy and theatrical to be quite all that it was generally thought to
be. There had been too much passion, and too little looking forward to
the next steps, in the proceedings of the victors. There was too much
blindness to weak points of their own position, too much forgetfulness
of the wise generosity of cautious warfare. The victory was easy to win;
the next moment it was quite obvious that they did not know what to do
with it, and were at their wits' end to understand what it meant. And
the defeated party, though defeated signally and conspicuously in the
sight of the Church and the country, had in it too large a proportion of
the serious and able men of the University, with too clear and high a
purpose, and too distinct a sense of the strength and reality of their
ground, to be in as disadvantageous a condition as from a distance might
be imagined. A closer view would have discovered how much sympathy there
was for their objects and for their main principles in many who greatly
disapproved of much in the recent course and tendency of the movement.
It might have been seen how the unwise measures of t