and often in dispraise, as technical, scholastic, unspiritual, transcendental, nay, even Popish, countenanced the Tractarians.  They were sneered at for their ponderous Catenae of authorities; but on the ground on which this debate raged, the appeal was a pertinent and solid one.  Yet to High Church Oxford and its rulers, all this was strange doctrine.  Proof and quotation might lie before their eyes, but their minds still ran in one groove, and they could not realise what they saw.  The words meant no harm in the venerable folio; they meant perilous heresy in the modern Tract.  When the authorities had to judge of the questions raised by the movement, they were unprovided with the adequate knowledge; and this was knowledge which they ought to have possessed for its own sake, as doctors of the Theological Faculty of the University.

And it was not only for their want of learning, manifest all through the controversy, that they were to blame.  Their most telling charge against the Tractarians, which was embodied in the censure of No. 90, was the charge of dishonesty.  The charge is a very handy one against opponents, and it may rest on good grounds; but those who think right to make it ought, both as a matter of policy and as a matter of conscience, to be quite assured of their own position.  The Articles are a public, common document.  It is the differing interpretations of a common document which create political and religious parties; and only shallowness and prejudice will impute to an opponent dishonesty without strong and clear reason.  Mr. Newman’s interpretation in No. 90,—­new, not in claiming for the Articles a Catholic meaning, but in limiting, though it does not deny, their anti-Roman scope, was fairly open to criticism.  It might be taken as a challenge, and as a challenge might have to be met.  But it would have been both fair and wise in the Heads, before proceeding to unusual extremities, to have shown that they had fully considered their own theological doctrines in relation to the Church formularies.  They all had obvious difficulties, and in some cases formidable ones.  The majority of them were what would have been called in older controversial days frank Arminians, shutting their eyes by force of custom to the look of some of the Articles, which, if of Lutheran origin, had been claimed from the first by Calvinists.  The Evangelicals had long confessed difficulties, at least, in the Baptismal Service and the Visitation Office; while the men most loud in denunciation of dishonesty were the divines of Whately’s school, who had been undermining the authority of all creeds and articles, and had never been tired of proclaiming their dislike of that solemn Athanasian Creed to which Prayer Book and Articles alike bound them.  Men with these difficulties daily before them had no right to ignore them.  Doubtless they all had their explanations which they bona fide believed in.  But what was there that excluded