But, in spite of all this, Newman offered and Isaac Williams accepted the curacy of St. Mary’s.  “Things at Oxford [1830-32] at that time were very dull.”  “Froude and I seemed entirely alone, with Newman only secretly, as it were, beginning to sympathise.  I became at once very much attached to Newman, won by his kindness and delighted by his good and wonderful qualities; and he proposed that I should be his curate at St. Mary’s....  I can remember a strong feeling of difference I first felt on acting together with him from what I had been accustomed to:  that he was in the habit of looking for effect, and for what was sensibly effective, which from the Bisley and Fairford School I had been long habituated to avoid; but to do one’s duty in faith and leave it to God, and that all the more earnestly, because there were no sympathies from without to answer.  There was a felt but unexpressed difference of this kind, but perhaps it became afterwards harmonised as we acted together."[29]

Thus early, among those most closely united, there appeared the beginnings of those different currents which became so divergent as time went on.  Isaac Williams, dear as he was to Newman, and returning to the full Newman’s affection, yet represented from the first the views of what Williams spoke of as the “Bisley and Fairford School,” which, though sympathising and co-operating with the movement, was never quite easy about it, and was not sparing of its criticism on the stir and agitation of the Tracts.

Isaac Williams threw himself heartily into the early stages of the movement; in his poetry into its imaginative and poetical side, and also into its practical and self-denying side.  But he would have been quite content with its silent working, and its apparent want of visible success.  He would have been quite content with preaching simple homely sermons on the obvious but hard duties of daily life, and not seeing much come of them; with finding a slow abatement of the self-indulgent habits of university life, with keeping Fridays, with less wine in common room.  The Bisley maxims bade men to be very stiff and uncompromising in their witness and in their duties, but to make no show and expect no recognition or immediate fruit, and to be silent under misconstruction.  But his was not a mind which realised great possibilities of change in the inherited ways of the English Church.  The spirit of change, so keenly discerned by Newman, as being both certain and capable of being turned to good account as well as bad, to him was unintelligible or bad.  More reality, more severity and consistency, deeper habits of self-discipline on the accepted lines of English Church orthodoxy, would have satisfied him as the aim of the movement, as it undoubtedly was a large part of its aim; though with Froude and Newman it also aimed at a widening of ideas, of interests and sympathies, beyond what had been common in the English Church.

In the history of the movement Isaac Williams took a forward part in two of its events, with one of which his connexion was most natural, with the other grotesquely and ludicrously incongruous.  The one was the plan and starting of the series of Plain Sermons in 1839, to which not only the Kebles, Williams, and Copeland contributed their volumes, but also Newman and Dr. Pusey.  Isaac Williams has left the following account of his share in the work.