The Oxford Movement claimed to be, and was, a revival of the principles of Anglo-Catholicism, which had not been left without witness for any long period since the Reformation.  The continuity is certain, as is the continuity of the Ritualism of our day with the Tractarianism of seventy years ago; but the development has been rapid, especially in the last thirty years.  Those who can remember the High Churchmen of Pusey’s generation, or their disciples who in many country parsonages preserved the faith of their Tractarian teachers whole and undefiled, must be struck by the divergence between the principles which they then heard passionately maintained, and those which the younger generation, who use their name and enjoy their credit, avow to be their own.

In the Tractarians the Nonjurors seemed to have come to life again, and one might easily find enthusiastic Jacobites among them.  Unlike their successors, they showed no sympathy with political Radicalism.  Their love for and loyalty to the English Church, which found melodious expression in Keble’s poetry, were intense.  They were not hostile to Evangelicalism within the Church, until the ultra-Protestant party declared war against them; but they viewed Dissent with scorn and abhorrence.  They would gladly have excluded Nonconformists from any status in the Universities, and opposed any measures intended to conciliate their prejudices or remove their disabilities.  Archdeacon Denison, in his sturdy opposition to the ‘conscience clause’ in Church schools, was a typical representative of the old High Church party.  But still more bitter was their animosity against religious Liberalism.  Even after the feud with the Evangelicals had developed into open war, Pusey was ready to join with Lord Shaftesbury and his party in united anathemas against the authors of ‘Essays and Reviews.’  The beginnings of Old Testament criticism evoked an outburst of fury almost unparalleled.  When Bishop Gray, of Cape Town, solemnly ‘excommunicated’ Bishop Colenso, of Natal, and enjoined the faithful to ’treat him as a heathen man and a publican,’ for exposing the unhistorical character of portions of the Pentateuch, he became a hero with the whole High Church party, and even the more liberal among the bishops were cowed by the tempest of feeling which the case aroused.  In the same period, many Oxford men can remember Bishop Wilberforce’s attack upon Darwinism, and, somewhat later, Dean Burgon’s University sermon which ended with the stirring peroration:  Leave me my ancestors in Paradise, and I leave you yours in the Zoological Gardens!’ From the same pulpit Liddon, a little before his death, uttered a pathetic remonstrance against the course which his younger disciples were taking about inspiration and tradition.