Thus had been started—­hurriedly perhaps, yet not without counting the cost—­a great enterprise, which had for its object to rouse the Church from its lethargy, and to strengthen and purify religion, by making it deeper and more real; and they who had put their hands to the plough were not to look back any more.  It was not a popular appeal; it addressed itself not to the many but to the few; it sought to inspire and to teach the teachers.  There was no thought as yet of acting on the middle classes, or on the ignorance and wretchedness of the great towns, though Newman had laid down that the Church must rest on the people, and Froude looked forward to colleges of unmarried priests as the true way to evangelise the crowds.  There was no display about this attempt, no eloquence, nothing attractive in the way of original speculation or sentimental interest.  It was suspicious, perhaps too suspicious, of the excitement and want of soberness, almost inevitable in strong appeals to the masses of mankind.  It brought no new doctrine, but professed to go back to what was obvious and old-fashioned and commonplace.  It taught people to think less of preaching than of what in an age of excitement were invidiously called forms—­of the sacraments and services of the Church.  It discouraged, even to the verge of an intended dryness, all that was showy, all that in thought or expression or manner it condemned under the name of “flash.”  It laid stress on the exercise of an inner and unseen self-discipline, and the cultivation of the less interesting virtues of industry, humility, self-distrust, and obedience.  If from its writers proceeded works which had impressed people—­a volume like the Christian Year, poems original in their force and their tenderness, like some of those in the Lyra Apostolica, sermons which arrested the hearers by their keenness and pathetic undertone—­the force of all this was not the result of literary ambition and effort, but the reflexion, unconscious, unsought, of thought and feeling that could not otherwise express itself, and that was thrown into moulds shaped by habitual refinement and cultivated taste.  It was from the first a movement from which, as much by instinct and temper as by deliberate intention, self-seeking in all its forms was excluded.  Those whom it influenced looked not for great things for themselves, nor thought of making a mark in the world.

The first year after the Hadleigh meeting (1834) passed uneventfully.  The various addresses in which Mr. Palmer was interested, the election and installation of the Duke of Wellington as Chancellor, the enthusiasm and hopes called forth by the occasion, were public and prominent matters.  The Tracts were steadily swelling in number; the busy distribution of them had ceased, and they had begun to excite interest and give rise to questions.  Mr. Palmer, who had never liked the Tracts, became more uneasy; yet he did not altogether refuse to contribute to them.