e traditional, more searching and
inquisitive in its methods, more suspicious and daring in its criticism;
but it was much larger in its views and its sympathies, and, above all,
it was imaginative, it was enthusiastic, and, without much of the
devotional temper, it was penetrated by a sense of the reality and
seriousness of religion. It saw greater hopes in the present and the
future than the Tractarians. It disliked their reverence for the past
and the received as inconsistent with what seemed evidence of the
providential order of great and fruitful change. It could not enter into
their discipline of character, and shrank from it as antiquated,
unnatural, and narrow. But these younger Liberals were interested in the
Tractarian innovators, and, in a degree, sympathised with them as a
party of movement who had had the courage to risk and sacrifice much for
an unworldly end. And they felt that their own opportunity was come
when all the parties which claimed to represent the orthodoxy of the
English Church appeared to have broken for good with one another, and
when their differences had thrown so much doubt and disparagement on so
important and revered a symbol of orthodoxy as the Thirty-nine Articles.
They looked on partly with amusement, partly with serious anxiety, at
the dispute; they discriminated with impartiality between the strong and
the weak points in the arguments on both sides: and they enforced with
the same impartiality on both of them the reasons, arising out of the
difficulties in which each party was involved, for new and large
measures, for a policy of forbearance and toleration. They inflicted on
the beaten side, sometimes with more ingenuity than fairness, the lesson
that the "wheel had come round full circle" with them; that they were
but reaping as they themselves had sown:--but now that there seemed
little more to fear from the Tractarians, the victorious authorities
were the power which the Liberals had to keep in check. They used their
influence, such as it was (and it was not then what it was afterwards),
to protect the weaker party. It was a favourite boast of Dean Stanley's
in after-times, that the intervention of the Liberals had saved the
Tractarians from complete disaster. It is quite true that the younger
Liberals disapproved the continuance of harsh measures, and some of them
exerted themselves against such measures. They did so in many ways and
for various reasons; from consistency, from f