not to the taste of all of them.  As the movement developed, besides that it would seem to them extravagant and violent, they would be perplexed by its doctrine.  It took strong ground for the Church; but it did so in the teeth of religious opinions and prejudices, which were popular and intolerant.  For a moment the Bishops were in a difficulty; on the one hand, no one for generations had so exalted the office of a Bishop as the Tractarians; no one had claimed for it so high and sacred an origin; no one had urged with such practical earnestness the duty of Churchmen to recognise and maintain the unique authority of the Episcopate against its despisers or oppressors.  On the other hand, this was just the time when the Evangelical party, after long disfavour, was beginning to gain recognition, for the sake of its past earnestness and good works, with men in power, and with ecclesiastical authorities of a different and hitherto hostile school; and in the Tractarian movement the Evangelical party saw from the first its natural enemy.  The Bishops could not have anything to do with the Tractarians without deeply offending the Evangelicals.  The result was that, for the present, the Bishops held aloof.  They let the movement run on by itself.  Sharp sarcasms, worldly-wise predictions, kind messages of approval, kind cautions, passed from mouth to mouth, or in private correspondence from high quarters, which showed that the movement was watched.  But for some time the authorities spoke neither good nor bad of it publicly.  In his Charge at the close of 1836, Bishop Phillpotts spoke in clear and unfaltering language—­language remarkable for its bold decision—­of the necessity of setting forth the true idea of the Church and the sacraments; but he was silent about the call of the same kind which had come from Oxford.  It would have been well if the other Bishops later on, in their charges, had followed his example.  The Bishop of Oxford, in his Charge of 1838, referred to the movement in balanced terms of praise and warning.  The first who condemned the movement was the Bishop of Chester, J. Bird Sumner; in a later Charge he came to describe it as the work of Satan; in 1838 he only denounced the “undermining of the foundations of our Protestant Church by men who dwell within her walls,” and the bad faith of those “who sit in the Reformers’ seat, and traduce the Reformation.”

These were grave mistakes on the part of those who were responsible for the government of the University and the Church.  They treated as absurd, mischievous, and at length traitorous, an effort, than which nothing could be more sincere, to serve the Church, to place its claims on adequate grounds, to elevate the standard of duty in its clergy, and in all its members.  To have missed the aim of the movement and to have been occupied and irritated by obnoxious details and vulgar suspicions was a blunder which gave the measure of those who made it, and led to great evils.  They alienated those who wished for nothing better than to help them in their true work.  Their “unkindness” was felt to be, in Bacon’s phrase,[77] injuriae potentiorum.  But on the side of the party of the movement there were mistakes also.