“It seemed at this time (about 1838-39) as if Oxford, from the strength of principle shown there (and an almost unanimous and concentrated energy), was becoming a rallying point for the whole kingdom:  but I watched from the beginning and saw greater dangers among ourselves than those from without; which I endeavoured to obviate by publishing the Plain Sermons. [Plain Sermons, by contributors to the Tracts for the Times, 1st Series, January 1839.] I attempted in vain to get the Kebles to publish, in order to keep pace with Newman, and so maintain a more practical turn in the movement.  I remember C. Cornish (C.L.  Cornish, Fellow and Tutor of Exeter) coming to me and saying as we walked in Trinity Gardens, ’People are a little afraid of being carried away by Newman’s brilliancy; they want more of the steady sobriety of the Kebles infused into the movement to keep us safe; we have so much sail and want ballast.’  And the effect of the publication of the Plain Sermons was at the time very quieting.  In first undertaking the Plain Sermons, I had no encouragement from any one, not even from John Keble; acquiescence was all that I could gain.  But I have heard J.K. mention a saying of Judge Coleridge, long before the Tracts were thought of:  ’If you want to propagate your opinions you should lend your sermons; the clergy would then preach them, and adopt your opinions.’  Now this has been the effect of the publication of the Plain Sermons.”

Isaac Williams, if any man, represented in the movement the moderate and unobtrusive way of religious teaching.  But it was his curious fate to be dragged into the front ranks of the fray, and to be singled out as almost the most wicked and dangerous of the Tractarians.  He had the strange fortune to produce the first of the Tracts[30] which was by itself held up to popular indignation as embodying all the mischief of the series and the secret aims of the movement.  The Tract had another effect.  It made Williams the object of the first great Tractarian battle in the University, the contest for the Poetry Professorship:  the first decisive and open trial of strength, and the first Tractarian defeat.  The contest, even more than the result, distressed him greatly; and the course of things in the movement itself aggravated his distress.  His general distrust of intellectual restlessness had now passed into the special and too well grounded fear that the movement, in some of its most prominent representatives, was going definitely in the direction of Rome.  A new generation was rising into influence, to whom the old Church watchwords and maxims, the old Church habits of mind, the old Church convictions, had completely lost their force, and were become almost objects of dislike and scorn; and for this change Newman’s approval and countenance were freely and not very scrupulously quoted.  Williams’s relation to him had long been a curious mixture of the most affectionate attachment and intimacy with growing distrust and sense of divergence.  Newman was now giving more and more distinct warning that he was likely to go where Williams could not follow him, and the pain on both sides was growing.  But things moved fast, and at length the strain broke.