which every man got up in the morning and passed the day, of the bitter hostility of those foremost in place in Oxford—­of their incompetence to judge fairly—­of their incapacity to apprehend what was high and earnest in those whom they condemned—­of the impossibility of getting them to imagine that Tractarians could be anything but fools or traitors—­of their hopeless blindness to any fact or any teaching to which they were not accustomed.  If the authorities could only have stopped to consider whether after all they were not dealing with real thought and real wish to do right, they might after all have disliked the movement, but they would have seen that which would have kept them from violence.  They would not listen, they would not inquire, they would not consider.  Could such ignorance, could such wrong possibly be without mischievous influence on those who were the victims of it, much more on friends and disciples who knew and loved them?  The Tractarians had been preaching that the Church of England, with all its Protestant feeling and all its Protestant acts and history, was yet, as it professed to be, part and parcel of the great historic Catholic Church, which had framed the Creeds, which had continued the Sacraments, which had preached and taught out of the Bible, which had given us our immemorial prayers.  They had spared no pains to make out this great commonplace from history and theology:  nor had they spared pains, while insisting on this dominant feature in the English Church, to draw strongly and broadly the lines which distinguished it from Rome.  Was it wonderful, when all guarding and explanatory limitations were contemptuously tossed aside by “all-daring ignorance,” and all was lumped together in the indiscriminate charge of “Romanising,” that there should have been some to take the authorities at their word?  Was it wonderful when men were told that the Church of England was no place for them, that they were breaking their vows and violating solemn engagements by acting as its ministers, and that in order to preserve the respect of honest men they should leave it—­that the question of change, far off as it had once seemed, came within “measurable distance”?  The generation to which they belonged had been brought up with strong exhortations to be real, and to hate shams; and now the question was forced on them whether it was not a sham for the English Church to call itself Catholic; whether a body of teaching which was denounced by its authorities, however it might look on paper and be defended by learning, could be more than a plausible literary hypothesis in contrast to the great working system of which the head was Rome.  When we consider the singular and anomalous position on any theory, including the Roman, of the English Church; with what great differences its various features and elements have been prominent at different times; how largely its history has been marked by contradictory facts and appearances; and how hard it is for any one to