All were angry at the appointment; all were agreed that something ought to be done to hinder the mischief of it.  In this matter Mr. Newman and his friends were absolutely at one with everybody round them, with those who were soon to be their implacable opponents.  Whatever deeper view they might have of the evil which had been done by the appointment, and however much graver and more permanent their objections to it, they were responsible only as the whole University was responsible for what was done against Dr. Hampden.  It was convenient afterwards to single them out, and to throw this responsibility and the odium of it on them alone; and when they came under the popular ban, it was forgotten that Dr. Gilbert, the Principal of Brasenose, Dr. Symons, the Warden of Wadham, Dr. Faussett, afterwards the denouncer of Dr. Pusey, Mr. Vaughan Thomas, and Mr. Hill of St. Edmund Hall, were quite as forward at the time as Dr. Pusey and Mr. Newman in protesting against Dr. Hampden, and in the steps to make their protest effective.  Mr. Palmer, in his Narrative,[57] anxious to dissociate himself from the movement under Mr. Newman’s influence, has perhaps underrated the part taken by Mr. Newman and Dr. Pusey; for they, any rate, did most of the argumentative work.  But as far as personal action goes, it is true, as he says, that the “movement against Dr. Hampden was not guided by the Tract writers.”  “The condemnation of Dr. Hampden, then, was not carried by the Tract writers; it was carried by the independent body of the University.  The fact is that, had those writers taken any leading part, the measure would have been a failure, for the number of their friends at that time was a very small proportion to the University at large, and there was a general feeling of distrust in the soundness of their views.”

We are a long way from those days in time, and still more in habits and sentiment; and a manifold and varied experience has taught most of us some lessons against impatience and violent measures.  But if we put ourselves back equitably into the ways of thinking prevalent then, the excitement about Dr. Hampden will not seem so unreasonable or so unjustifiable as it is sometimes assumed to be.  The University legislation, indeed, to which it led was poor and petty, doing small and annoying things, because the University rulers dared not commit themselves to definite charges.  But, in the first place, the provocation was great on the part of the Government in putting into the chief theological chair an unwelcome man who could only save his orthodoxy by making his speculations mean next to nothing—­whose prima facie unguarded and startling statements were resolved into truisms put in a grand and obscure form.  And in the next place, it was assumed in those days to be the most natural and obvious thing in the world to condemn unsound doctrine, and to exclude unsound teachers.  The principle was accepted as indisputable, however