1.  The rapidity with which the movement had grown, showing that some deep need had long been obscurely felt, which the movement promised to meet,[78] had been too great to be altogether wholesome.  When we compare what was commonly received before 1833, in teaching, in habits of life, in the ordinary assumptions of history, in the ideas and modes of worship, public and private—­the almost sacramental conception of preaching, the neglect of the common prayer of the Prayer Book, the slight regard to the sacraments—­with what the teaching of the Tracts and their writers had impressed for good and all, five years later, on numbers of earnest people, the change seems astonishing.  The change was a beneficial one and it was a permanent one.  The minds which it affected, it affected profoundly.  Still it was but a short time, for young minds especially, to have come to a decision on great and debated questions.  There was the possibility, the danger, of men having been captivated and carried away by the excitement and interest of the time; of not having looked all round and thought out the difficulties before them; of having embraced opinions without sufficiently knowing their grounds or counting the cost or considering the consequences.  There was the danger of precipitate judgment, of ill-balanced and disproportionate views of what was true and all-important.  There was an inevitable feverishness in the way in which the movement was begun, in the way in which it went on.  Those affected by it were themselves surprised at the swiftness of the pace.  When a cause so great and so sacred seemed thus to be flourishing, and carrying along with it men’s assent and sympathies, it was hardly wonderful that there should often be exaggeration, impatience at resistance, scant consideration for the slowness or the scruples or the alarms of others.  Eager and sanguine men talked as if their work was accomplished, when in truth it was but beginning.  No one gave more serious warnings against this and other dangers than the leaders; and their warnings were needed.[79]

2.  Another mistake, akin to the last, was the frequent forgetfulness of the apostolic maxim, “All things are lawful for me, but all things are not expedient.”  In what almost amounted to a revolution in many of the religious ideas of the time, it was especially important to keep distinct the great central truths, the restoration of which to their proper place justified and made it necessary, and the many subordinate points allied with them and naturally following from them, which yet were not necessary to their establishment or acceptance.  But it was on these subordinate points that the interest of a certain number of followers of the movement was fastened.  Conclusions which they had a perfect right to come to, practices innocent and edifying to themselves, but of secondary account, began to be thrust forward into prominence, whether or not these instances of self-will really helped the common cause, whether or not they gave a handle to ill-nature and ill-will.  Suspicion must always have attached to such a movement as this; but a great deal of it was provoked by indiscreet defiance, which was rather glad to provoke it.