These friends were all devoted Churchmen, but, as has been said, each had his marked character, not only as a man but as a Churchman.  The most important among them was as yet the least prominent.  Two of them were men of learning, acquainted with the great world of London, and who, with all their zeal, had some of the caution which comes of such experience.  At the time, the most conspicuous was Mr. Hugh James Rose.

Mr. Rose was a man whose name and whose influence, as his friends thought, have been overshadowed and overlooked in the popular view of the Church revival.  It owed to him, they held, not only its first impulse, but all that was best and most hopeful in it; and when it lost him, it lost its wisest and ablest guide and inspirer.  It is certainly true that when that revival began he was a much more distinguished and important person than any of the other persons interested in it.  As far as could be seen at the time, he was the most accomplished divine and teacher in the English Church.  He was a really learned man.  He had the intellect and energy and literary skill to use his learning.  He was a man of singularly elevated and religious character; he had something of the eye and temper of a statesman, and he had already a high position.  He was profoundly loyal to the Church, and keenly interested in whatever affected its condition and its fortunes.  As early as 1825 he had in some lectures at Cambridge called the attention of English Churchmen to the state of religious thought and speculation in Germany, and to the mischiefs likely to react on English theology from the rationalising temper and methods which had supplanted the old Lutheran teaching; and this had led to a sharp controversy with Mr. Pusey, as he was then, who thought that Mr. Rose[41] had both exaggerated the fact itself and had not adequately given the historical account of it.  He had the prudence, but not the backwardness, of a man of large knowledge, and considerable experience of the world.  More alive to difficulties and dangers than his younger associates, he showed his courage and his unselfish earnestness in his frank sympathy with them, daring and outspoken as they were, and in his willingness to share with them the risks of an undertaking of which no one knew better than he what were likely to be the difficulties.  He certainly was a person who might be expected to have a chief part in directing anything with which he was connected.  His countenance and his indirect influence were very important elements, both in the stirring of thought which led to the Hadleigh resolutions, and in giving its form to what was then decided upon.  But his action in the movement was impeded by his failure in health, and cut short by his early death, January 1839.  How he would have influenced the course of things if he had lived, it is not now easy to say.  He must have been reckoned with as one of the chiefs.  He would have been opposed to anything that really tended towards Rome.  But there is no reason to