[51] Recollections of Oxford, by G.V.  Cox, p. 278.

CHAPTER VIII

SUBSCRIPTION AT MATRICULATION AND ADMISSION OF DISSENTERS

“Depend upon it,” an earnest High Churchman of the Joshua Watson type had said to one of Mr. Newman’s friends, who was a link between the old Churchmanship and the new—­“depend upon it, the day will come when those great doctrines” connected with the Church, “now buried, will be brought out to the light of the day, and then the effect will be quite fearful."[52] With the publication of the Tracts for the Times, and the excitement caused by them, the day had come.

Their unflinching and severe proclamation of Church principles and Church doctrines coincided with a state of feeling and opinion in the country, in which two very different tendencies might be observed.  They fell on the public mind just when one of these tendencies would help them, and the other be fiercely hostile.  On the one hand, the issue of the political controversy with the Roman Catholics, their triumph all along the line, and the now scarcely disguised contempt shown by their political representatives for the pledges and explanations on which their relief was supposed to have been conceded, had left the public mind sore, angry, and suspicious.  Orthodox and Evangelicals were alike alarmed and indignant; and the Evangelicals, always doctrinally jealous of Popery, and of anything “unsound” in that direction, had been roused to increased irritation by the proceedings of the Reformation Society, which had made it its business to hold meetings and discussions all over the country, where fervid and sometimes eloquent and able Irishmen, like Mr. E. Tottenham, afterwards of Laura Chapel, Bath, had argued and declaimed, with Roman text-books in hand, on such questions as the Right of Private Judgment, the Rule of Faith, and the articles of the Tridentine Creed—­not always with the effect which they intended on those who heard them, with whom their arguments, and those which they elicited from their opponents, sometimes left behind uncomfortable misgivings, and questions even more serious than the controversy itself.  On the other hand, in quarters quite unconnected with the recognised religious schools, interest had been independently and strongly awakened in the minds of theologians and philosophical thinkers, in regard to the idea, history, and relations to society of the Christian Church.  In Ireland, a recluse, who was the centre of a small knot of earnest friends, a man of deep piety and great freedom and originality of mind, Mr. Alexander Knox, had been led, partly, it may be, by his intimacy with John Wesley, to think out for himself the character and true constitution of the Church, and the nature of the doctrines which it was commissioned to teach.  In England, another recluse, of splendid genius and wayward humour, had dealt in his own way, with far-reaching insight, with