he Heads had
awakened convictions among many who were not naturally on their side,
that it was necessary both on the ground of justice and policy to arrest
all extreme measures, and to give a breathing time to the minority.
Confidence in their prospects as a party might have been impaired in the
Tractarians; but confidence in their principles; confidence that they
had rightly interpreted the spirit, the claims, and the duties of the
English Church, confidence that devotion to its cause was the call of
God, whatever might happen to their own fortunes, this confidence was
unshaken by the catastrophe of February.

But that crisis had another important result, not much noticed then, but
one which made itself abundantly evident in the times that followed. The
decisive breach between the old parties in the Church, both Orthodox and
Evangelical, and the new party of the movement, with the violent and
apparently irretrievable discomfiture of the latter as the rising force
in Oxford, opened the way and cleared the ground for the formation and
the power of a third school of opinion, which was to be the most
formidable rival of the Tractarians, and whose leaders were eventually
to succeed where the Tractarians had failed, in becoming the masters and
the reformers of the University. Liberalism had hitherto been
represented in Oxford in forms which though respectable from
intellectual vigour were unattractive, sometimes even repulsive. They
were dry, cold, supercilious, critical; they wanted enthusiasm; they
were out of sympathy with religion and the religious temper and aims.
They played, without knowing it, on the edge of the most dangerous
questions. The older Oxford Liberals were either intellectually
aristocratic, dissecting the inaccuracies or showing up the paralogisms
of the current orthodoxy, or they were poor in character, Liberals from
the zest of sneering and mocking at what was received and established,
or from the convenience of getting rid of strict and troublesome rules
of life. They patronised Dissenters; they gave Whig votes; they made
free, in a mild way, with the pet conventions and prejudices of Tories
and High Churchmen. There was nothing inspiring in them, however much
men might respect their correct and sincere lives. But a younger set of
men brought, mainly from Rugby and Arnold's teaching, a new kind of
Liberalism. It was much bolder and more independent than the older
forms, less inclined to put up with th