The Reform of 1832 seemed to threaten the English Church with destruction.  Arnold in this year wrote ’The Church, as it now stands, no human power can save.’  The bishops were stunned and bewildered by the unexpected outbreak of popular hostility.  Old methods of defence were plainly useless; some new plan of campaign must be devised against the double assault of political radicalism and theological liberalism.  To Newman both alike were of the devil; theological liberalism especially was only specious infidelity.  He never had the slightest inkling that a deep religious earnestness and love of truth underlay the revolt against orthodox tradition.  His fighting instincts were aroused.  When Keble attributed the scheme for suppressing some Irish bishopries to ’national apostasy,’ he rushed to arms in defence of Church privileges and property.  In the first Tract (1833) he says: 

’A notion has gone abroad that the people can take away your power.  They think they have given it and can take it away.  They have been deluded into a notion that present palpable usefulness, produceable results, acceptableness to your flocks—­that these and such-like are the tests of your Divine commission.  Enlighten them in this matter.  Exalt our holy fathers the Bishops, as the representatives of the Apostles, and the Angels of the Churches, and magnify your office, as being ordained by them to take part in their ministry.’

That was the keynote of the whole Tractarian movement.  A weapon was needed to smite liberalism.  Nothing but a compact and powerful organisation could repel the foe.  God must have provided such an organisation:  a Divine society, certain of ultimate victory, must exist somewhere.  Newman and his friends hoped to find it in the Anglican Church; and such was the power of their contagious zeal and confident enthusiasm, that the immediate danger was actually staved off, and the Establishment was allowed a new lease of life.  But the national Church of England was not constituted to resist the national will, and the attempt to reorganise it on Catholic lines was fore-doomed to failure.  And so, since the assumption that a great institutional fighting Church must exist was never even questioned, when Anglicanism failed him there was no other refuge but Rome.

He was certainly more logical than his friends who remained behind.  Anglo-Catholicism has its theoretical basis in a definition of Catholicity which is repudiated by all other Catholics; its traditions are largely legendary.  But it is an eclectic system well suited to the English character, and the distorted view of history which Newman bequeathed to the party has enabled it to borrow much that is good from different sides, without any sense of inconsistency.  The idea of a Divine society has been and is the inspiration of thousands of ardent workers in the Anglican Church.  It lifted the religion of many Englishmen from the somewhat gross and bourgeois condition in which the