This whole company shared the feelings which even yet, after so many years and in such altered circumstances, break forth from Dr. Newman like the rumblings and smoke of a long extinct volcano, in such utterances as this:  “The new Bill for the suppression of the Irish Sees was in prospect, and had filled my mind.  I had fierce thoughts against the Liberals.  It was the success of the Liberal cause which fretted me inwardly.  I became fierce against its instruments and its manifestations.  A French vessel was at Algiers; I would not even look at the tricolor” (97).  This was the temper of the whole band.  Most of these men appear in Dr. Newman’s pages; and from their common earnestness and various endowments a mighty band they were.

* * * * *

Here then was the band which have accomplished so much; which have failed in so much; which have added a new party-name to our vocabulary; which have furnished materials for every scribbling or declaiming political Protestant, from the writer of the Durham Letter down to Mr. Whalley and Mr. Harper; which aided so greatly in reawakening the dormant energies of the English Church; which carried over to the ranks of her most deadly opponent some of the ablest and most devoted of her sons.  The language of these pages has never varied concerning this movement.  We have always admitted its many excellences—­we have always lamented its evils.  As long ago as in 1839, whilst we protested openly and fully against what we termed at the time the “strange and lamentable” publication of Mr. Froude’s “Remains,"[1] we declared our hope that “the publication of the Oxford Tracts was a very seasonable and valuable contribution to the cause both of the Church and the State.”  And in 1846, even after so many of our hopes had faded away, we yet spoke in the same tone of “this religious movement in our Church,” as one “from which, however clouded be the present aspect, we doubt not that great blessings have resulted and will result, unless we forfeit them by neglect or wilful abuse."[2]

[1] “Quarterly Review,” vol. lxiii, p. 551. [2] Ibid., vol. lxxviii, p. 24.

The history of the progress of the movement lies scattered through these pages.  All that we can collect concerning its first intention confirms absolutely Mr. Perceval’s Statements, 1843, that it was begun for two leading objects:  “first, the firm and practical maintenance of the doctrine of the apostolical succession.... secondly, the preservation in its integrity of the Christian doctrine in our Prayerbooks."[1] Its unity of action was shaken by the first entrance of doubts into its leader’s mind.  His retirement from it tended directly to break it up as an actual party.  But it would be a monstrous error to suppose that the influence of this movement was extinguished when its conductors were dispersed as a party.  So far from it, the system of the Church of England took in all the more freely the elements of truth which it had all along