vast reading, and often with impressive eloquence,
with the same subject; and his profound sympathy and
faith had been shared and reflected by a great poet.
What Coleridge and Wordsworth had put in the forefront
of their speculations and poetry, as the object of
their profoundest interest, and of their highest hopes
for mankind, might, of course, fail to appear in the
same light to others; but it could not fail, in those
days at least, to attract attention, as a matter of
grave and well-founded importance. Coleridge’s
theories of the Church were his own, and were very
wide of theories recognised by any of those who had
to deal practically with the question, and who were
influenced, in one way or another, by the traditional
doctrines of theologians. But Coleridge had lifted
the subject to a very high level. He had taken
the simple but all-important step of viewing the Church
in its spiritual character as first and foremost and
above all things essentially a religious society of
divine institution, not dependent on the creation
or will of man, or on the privileges and honours which
man might think fit to assign to it; and he had undoubtedly
familiarised the minds of many with this way of regarding
it, however imperfect, or cloudy, or unpractical they
might find the development of his ideas, and his deductions
from them. And in Oxford the questions which had
stirred the friends at Hadleigh had stirred others
also, and had waked up various responses. Whately’s
acute mind had not missed these questions, and had
given original if insufficient answers to them.
Blanco White knew only too well their bearing and
importance, and had laboured, not without success,
to leave behind him his own impress on the way in which
they should be dealt with. Dr. Hampden, the man
in Oxford best acquainted with Aristotle’s works
and with the scholastic philosophy, had thrown Christian
doctrines into a philosophical calculus which seemed
to leave them little better than the inventions of
men. On the other hand, a brilliant scholar,
whose after-career was strangely full of great successes
and deplorable disasters, William Sewell of Exeter
College, had opened, in a way new to Oxford, the wealth
and magnificence of Plato; and his thoughts had been
dazzled by seeming to find in the truths and facts
of the Christian Church the counterpart and realisation
of the grandest of Plato’s imaginations.
The subjects treated with such dogmatic severity and
such impetuous earnestness in the Tracts were, in
one shape or another, in all men’s minds, when
these Tracts broke on the University and English society
with their peremptory call to men “to take their
side.”