At Oxford it was that of contemptuous indifference, passing into helpless and passionate hostility.  There is no sadder passage to be found in the history of Oxford than the behaviour and policy of the heads of this great Christian University towards the religious movement which was stirring the interest, the hopes, the fears of Oxford.  The movement was, for its first years at least, a loyal and earnest effort to serve the cause of the Church.  Its objects were clear and reasonable; it aimed at creating a sincere and intelligent zeal for the Church, and at making the Church itself worthy of the great position which her friends claimed for her.  Its leaders were men well known in the University, in the first rank in point of ability and character; men of learning, who knew what they were talking about; men of religious and pure, if also severe lives.  They were not men merely of speculation and criticism, but men ready to forego anything, to devote everything for the practical work of elevating religious thought and life.  All this did not necessarily make their purposes and attempts wise and good; but it did entitle them to respectful attention.  If they spoke language new to the popular mind or the “religious world,” it was not new—­at least it ought not to have been new—­to orthodox Churchmen, with opportunities of study and acquainted with our best divinity.  If their temper was eager and enthusiastic, they alleged the presence of a great and perilous crisis.  Their appeal was mainly not to the general public, but to the sober and the learned; to those to whom was entrusted the formation of faith and character in the future clergy of the Church; to those who were responsible for the discipline and moral tone of the first University of Christendom, and who held their conspicuous position on the understanding of that responsibility.  It behoved the heads of the University to be cautious, even to be suspicious; movements might be hollow or dangerous things.  But it behoved them also to become acquainted with so striking a phenomenon as this; to judge it by what it appealed to—­the learning of English divines, the standard of a high and generous moral rule; to recognise its aims at least, with equity and sympathy, if some of its methods and arguments seemed questionable.  The men of the movement were not mere hostile innovators; they were fighting for what the University and its chiefs held dear and sacred, the privileges and safety of the Church.  It was the natural part of the heads of the University to act as moderators; at any rate, to have shown, with whatever reserve, that they appreciated what they needed time to judge of.  But while on the one side there was burning and devouring earnestness, and that power of conviction which doubles the strength of the strong, there was on the other a serene ignoring of all that was going on, worthy of a set of dignified French abbes on the eve of the Revolution.  This sublime or imbecile security