Some of the Hadleigh friends would probably have been content to go on in this course, raising and keeping alive a strong feeling in favour of things as they were, creating a general sympathy with the Church, and confidence in the peculiar excellency of its wise and sober institutions, sedulously but cautiously endeavouring to correct popular mistakes about them, and to diffuse a sounder knowledge and a sounder tone of religious feeling.  This is what Mr. H.J.  Rose would have wished, only he felt that he could not insure the “ten or fifteen years” which he wanted to work this gradual change.  Both he and Mr. Palmer would have made London, to use a military term, their base of operations.  The Oriel men, on the other hand, thought that “Universities are the natural centres of intellectual movements”; they were for working more spontaneously in the freedom of independent study; they had little faith in organisation; “living movements,” they said, “do not come of committees.”  But at Hadleigh it was settled that there was writing to be done, in some way or other; and on this, divergence of opinion soon showed itself, both as to the matter and the tone of what was to be written.

For the writers of real force, the men of genius, were the three Oriel men, with less experience, at that time, with less extensive learning, than Mr. Rose and Mr. Palmer.  But they were bolder and keener spirits; they pierced more deeply into the real condition and prospects of the times; they were not disposed to smooth over and excuse what they thought hollow and untrue, to put up with decorous compromises and half-measures, to be patient towards apathy, negligence, or insolence.  They certainly had more in them of the temper of warfare.  We know from their own avowals that a great anger possessed them, that they were indignant at the sacred idea of the Church being lost and smothered by selfishness and stupidity; they were animated by the spirit which makes men lose patience with abuses and their apologists, and gives them no peace till they speak out.  Mr. Newman felt that, though associations and addresses might be very well, what the Church and the clergy and the country wanted was plain speaking; and that plain speaking could not be got by any papers put forth as joint manifestoes, or with the revision and sanction of “safe” and “judicious” advisers.  It was necessary to write, and to write as each man felt:  and he determined that each man should write and speak for himself, though working in concert and sympathy with others towards the supreme end—­the cause and interests of the Church.