And thus were born the Tracts for the Times.[46] For a time Mr. Palmer’s line and Mr. Newman’s line ran on side by side; but Mr. Palmer’s plan had soon done all that it could do, important as that was; it gradually faded out of sight, and the attention of all who cared for, or who feared or who hated the movement, was concentrated on the “Oxford Tracts.”  They were the watchword and the symbol of an enterprise which all soon felt to be a remarkable one—­remarkable, if in nothing else, in the form in which it was started.  Great changes and movements have been begun in various ways; in secret and underground communications, in daring acts of self-devotion or violence, in the organisation of an institution, in the persistent display of a particular temper and set of habits, especially in the form of a stirring and enthralling eloquence, in popular preaching, in fierce appeals to the passions.  But though tracts had become in later times familiar instruments of religious action, they had, from the fashion of using them, become united in the minds of many with rather disparaging associations.  The pertinacity of good ladies who pressed them on chance strangers, and who extolled their efficacy as if it was that of a quack medicine, had lowered the general respect for them.  The last thing that could have been thought of was a great religions revolution set in motion by tracts and leaflets, and taking its character and name from them.

But the ring of these early Tracts was something very different from anything of the kind yet known in England.  They were clear, brief, stern appeals to conscience and reason, sparing of words, utterly without rhetoric, intense in purpose.  They were like the short, sharp, rapid utterances of men in pain and danger and pressing emergency.  The first one gave the keynote of the series.  Mr. Newman “had out of his own head begun the Tracts”:  he wrote the opening one in a mood which he has himself described.  He was in the “exultation of health restored and home regained”:  he felt, he says, an “exuberant and joyous energy which he never had before or since”; “his health and strength had come back to him with such a rebound” that some of his friends did not know him.  “I had the consciousness that I was employed in that work which I had been dreaming about, and which I felt to be so momentous and inspiring.  I had a supreme confidence in our cause; we were upholding that primitive Christianity which was delivered for all time by the early teachers of the Church, and which was registered and attested in the Anglican formularies and by the Anglican divines.  That ancient religion had well-nigh faded out of the land through the political changes of the last 150 years, and it must be restored.  It would be, in fact, a second Reformation—­a better Reformation, for it would return, not to the sixteenth century, but to the seventeenth.  No time was to be lost, for the Whigs had come to do their worst, and the rescue might come too late.