and most cherished in the elder’s religious convictions.  Keble attracted and moulded Froude:  he impressed Froude with his strong Churchmanship, his severity and reality of life, his poetry and high standard of scholarly excellence.  Froude learned from him to be anti-Erastian, anti-methodistical, anti-sentimental, and as strong in his hatred of the world, as contemptuous of popular approval, as any Methodist.  Yet all this might merely have made a strong impression, or formed one more marked school of doctrine, without the fierce energy which received it and which it inspired.  But Froude, in accepting Keble’s ideas, resolved to make them active, public, aggressive; and he found in Newman a colleague whose bold originality responded to his own.  Together they worked as tutors; together they worked when their tutorships came to an end; together they worked when thrown into companionship in their Mediterranean voyage in the winter of 1832 and the spring of 1833.  They came back, full of aspirations and anxieties which spurred them on; their thoughts had broken out in papers sent home from time to time to Rose’s British Magazine—­“Home Thoughts Abroad,” and the “Lyra Apostolica.”  Then came the meeting at Hadleigh, and the beginning of the Tracts.  Keble had given the inspiration, Froude had given the impulse; then Newman took up the work, and the impulse henceforward, and the direction, were his.

Doubtless, many thought and felt like them about the perils which beset the Church and religion.  Loyalty to the Church, belief in her divine mission, allegiance to her authority, readiness to do battle for her claims, were anything but extinct in her ministers and laity.  The elements were all about of sound and devoted Churchmanship.  Higher ideas of the Church than the popular and political notion of it, higher conceptions of Christian doctrine than those of the ordinary evangelical theology—­echoes of the meditations of a remarkable Irishman, Mr. Alexander Knox—­had in many quarters attracted attention in the works and sermons of his disciple.  Bishop Jebb, though it was not till the movement had taken shape that their full significance was realised.  Others besides Keble and Froude and Newman were seriously considering what could best be done to arrest the current which was running strong against the Church, and discussing schemes of resistance and defence.  Others were stirring up themselves and their brethren to meet the new emergencies, to respond to the new call.  Some of these were in communication with the Oriel men, and ultimately took part with them in organising vigorous measures.  But it was not till Mr. Newman made up his mind to force on the public mind, in a way which could not be evaded, the great article of the Creed—­“I believe one Catholic and Apostolic Church”—­that the movement began.  And for the first part of its course, it was concentrated at Oxford.  It was the direct result of the searchings of heart and the communings for seven years, from 1826 to 1833, of the three men who have been the subject of this chapter.