Thus a great and momentous change had come over the movement, over its action and prospects.  It had started in a heroic effort to save the English Church.  The claims, the blessings, the divinity of the English Church, as a true branch of Catholic Christendom, had been assumed as the foundation of all that was felt and said and attempted.  The English Church was the one object to which English Christians were called upon to turn their thoughts.  Its spirit animated the Christian Year, and the teaching of those whom the Christian Year represented.  Its interests were what called forth the zeal and the indignation recorded in Froude’s Remains.  No one seriously thought of Rome, except as a hopelessly corrupt system, though it had some good and Catholic things, which it was Christian and honest to recognise.  The movement of 1833 started out of the Anti-Roman feelings of the Emancipation time.  It was Anti-Roman as much as it was Anti-Sectarian and Anti-Erastian.  It was to avert the danger of people becoming Romanists from ignorance of Church principles.  This was all changed in one important section of the party.  The fundamental conceptions and assumptions were reversed.  It was not the Roman Church, but the English Church, which was put on its trial; it was not the Roman Church, but the English, which was to be, if possible, apologised for, perhaps borne with for a time, but which was to be regarded as deeply fallen, holding an untenable position, and incomparably, unpardonably, below both the standard and the practical system of the Roman Church.  From this point of view the object of the movement was no longer to elevate and improve an independent English Church, but to approximate it as far as possible to what was assumed to be undeniable—­the perfect Catholicity of Rome.  More almost than ideas and assumptions, the tone of feeling changed.  It had been, towards the English Church, affectionate, enthusiastic, reverential, hopeful.  It became contemptuous, critical, intolerant, hostile with the hostility not merely of alienation but disgust This was not of course the work of a moment, but it was of very rapid growth.  “How I hate these Anglicans!” was the expression of one of the younger men of this section, an intemperate and insolent specimen of it.  It did not represent the tone or the language of the leader to whom the advanced section deferred, vexed as he often was with the course of his own thoughts, and irritated and impatient at the course of things without.  But it expressed but too truly the difference between 1833 and 1840.

FOOTNOTES: 

[73] See Sermons on Subjects of the Day, 1843.

CHAPTER XIII

THE AUTHORITIES AND THE MOVEMENT

While the movement was making itself felt as a moral force, without a parallel in Oxford for more than two centuries, and was impressing deeply and permanently some of the most promising men in the rising generation in the University, what was the attitude of the University authorities?  What was the attitude of the Bishops?