and revered a symbol of orthodoxy as the Thirty-nine Articles.  They looked on partly with amusement, partly with serious anxiety, at the dispute; they discriminated with impartiality between the strong and the weak points in the arguments on both sides:  and they enforced with the same impartiality on both of them the reasons, arising out of the difficulties in which each party was involved, for new and large measures, for a policy of forbearance and toleration.  They inflicted on the beaten side, sometimes with more ingenuity than fairness, the lesson that the “wheel had come round full circle” with them; that they were but reaping as they themselves had sown:—­but now that there seemed little more to fear from the Tractarians, the victorious authorities were the power which the Liberals had to keep in check.  They used their influence, such as it was (and it was not then what it was afterwards), to protect the weaker party.  It was a favourite boast of Dean Stanley’s in after-times, that the intervention of the Liberals had saved the Tractarians from complete disaster.  It is quite true that the younger Liberals disapproved the continuance of harsh measures, and some of them exerted themselves against such measures.  They did so in many ways and for various reasons; from consistency, from feelings of personal kindness, from a sense of justice, from a sense of interest—­some in a frank and generous spirit, others with contemptuous indifference.  But the debt of the Tractarians to their Liberal friends in 1845 was not so great as Dean Stanley, thinking of the Liberal party as what it had ultimately grown to be, supposed to be the case.  The Liberals of his school were then still a little flock:  a very distinguished and a very earnest set of men, but too young and too few as yet to hold the balance in such a contest.  The Tractarians were saved by what they were and what they had done, and could do, themselves.  But it is also true, that out of these feuds and discords, the Liberal party which was to be dominant in Oxford took its rise, soon to astonish old-fashioned Heads of Houses with new and deep forms of doubt more audacious than Tractarianism, and ultimately to overthrow not only the victorious authorities, but the ancient position of the Church, and to recast from top to bottom the institutions of the University.  The 13th of February was not only the final defeat and conclusion of the first stage of the movement.  It was the birthday of the modern Liberalism of Oxford.

But it was also a crisis in the history of many lives.  From that moment, the decision of a number of good and able men, who had once promised to be among the most valuable servants of the English Church, became clear.  If it were doubtful before, in many cases, whether they would stay with her, the doubt existed no longer.  It was now only a question of time when they would break the tie and renounce their old allegiance.  In the bitter, and in many cases agonising struggle which they had gone through as to their duty to God and conscience, a sign seemed now to be given them which they could not mistake.  They were invited, on one side, to come; they were told sternly and scornfully, on the other, to go.  They could no longer be accused of impatience if they brought their doubts to an end, and made up their minds that their call was to submit to the claims of Rome, that their place was in its communion.