hesitations, yet moving with unconscious self-will unwaveringly to a destined goal, he had qualities which could attract and fascinate, but none that could have constituted him a true leader, or a master-mind in a great religious movement. What happened was what must have happened. He drifted whither the incompleteness of his mental grasp and the passive obstinacy of his self-will must of necessity have landed him. He had no flag of strenuous and unalterable convictions to hoist before the eyes of men. His mind and his mood would have led him round every point of the compass, had not his sentimental wilfulness driven him into the refuge of that asylum whose assurances he resolved to take for true. These three-Pusey, Newman, and Keble-will always hold a peculiar and foremost position in the story of the Oxford Movement; but it does not follow that there were not men of equal earnestness, and equal if not greater intellectual force, who contributed solid and indispensable assistance. Indeed, it is probably true that the men whose contributions to theology, are likely to grow in esteem were not the men who held foremost rank as leaders of the movement. We think, for example, that Palmer made more valuable additions to English theology than either Pusey or Newman. In point of brain-power Ward was more than the equal of Pusey or Keble. Others might be mentioned; but, after all has been said, the position of the Triumvirs remains unshaken. They exerted an influence unlike that of others; they perhaps embodied more markedly than others the typical character of the movement Among a great number of men of varying ability, education, and zeal, all united in one great purpose, these three caught the public imagination, as certain peaks in a mountain range, not necessarily loftier than their fellows, catch and reflect the rays of the sun. They stood more fully in the light than their associates, but without their associates they would have lacked weight and conspicuousness. Round them gathered those who were united by common sympathies and principles. Their principles led them at times into positions which appeared to jeopardize their moral sincerity, but which more truly illustrated their intellectual attitude. The calm reflection of later times has entirely acquiesced in a respectful regard for their sincerity; but it belongs to the same calm spirit to estimate their intellectual position. They were men of cultivated minds, scholarly attainments, and many of them also of studious habits; but they had very little scientific training the age was perhaps not favourable to this--and very little scientific aptitude. They They had a knowledge, but a limited and partial one, of history: they were deficient, singularly deficient, in historic instinct. It is astonishing to observe the undiscerning and omnivorous fashion in which they devoured ecclesiastical history. There was no light and shade in their appreciation. The authority of any one who might be called a father of the Church was sufficient. There was no attempt to balance the relative values among ancient and patristic authorities. Dr. Pusey in his sermon on the Absolution of the Penitent cites St. Pacian with a simple and unquestioning reverence. The historic tact was lacking. There was much erudition; there was anxious thought; there was a portentous marshalling of authorities; there was a good show of syllogistic method: but the writers wrote as though Bacon had never lived. Newman's logic was keen, but it proceeded on premisses which were precarious. The hasty adoption of theories, followed by the inexorable application of logical methods, displayed a power of argument which deceived the unwary, and a lack of judgment which astonished the thoughtful. The great mass, who are not accustomed to strict analysis and inductive process, were dazzled and confused. They felt that there was something wrong, but they could not tell where. The fault lay where it so often does lie. Theories were strained to apply to cases indiscriminately. Circumstances were disregarded which made the application of these theories impossible. Life is too complicated to admit of the violent application of certain theories to all its departments. The principle which explains the circulation of our blood does not explain the processes of our minds. Mr. Babbage applied mathematical tests to the Athanasian Creed, and fondly believed that he had reduced it to an absurdity. It did not seem to occur to him that the formal self-contradiction in this creed was so obvious that the application of a mathematical test must be absurd. In a similar fashion at Oxford visionary or ideal theories were adopted; and arguments based on these were pressed to their utmost strength. Newman heard two sermons preached on the same day in the same church for the same object. The preachers contradicted one another. He wrote to the Committee of the Society under whose auspices the preachers had been sent. It shocked him that opposing views should be made public. Something must be wrong when the harmony of the Church could be thus broken. It did not appear to occur to him that opposition of this kind may be only presentations of truth from different standpoints and may be beneficial. He had his theory of Church harmony and Church unity. The phenomenon phenomenon of opposed opinions disturbed him because it contradicted his theory. Whately pointed out to him the conception of the corporate life of the Church. It was a new theory to him. He did not treat it as one side of truth merely. It became for the moment the whole truth-it was a premiss available in every argument. Logic is summoned to give her aid; and logic triumphs over reason. He was a son of scholasticism rather than a child of the nineteenth century. The attempt to subject facts to an insufficient theory is apt to awaken a revolt against the very idea of law, and even to call forth a denial of the possibility of any rational explanation of the facts in question. And the only result that can emerge will be an unprofitable controversy between those who would solve the difficulty by means of an inadequate principle, and those who maintain that it cannot be solved on any principle whatever, or, in other words, that we must be content with a faith that cannot rationally be justified.' The new Master of Balliol, when he wrote thus, probably had no thought of the Tractarian controversy, but the words convey a caution which theologians may well take to heart, and which is enforced by the history of the Tractarian movement. The leaders were fain to be consistent and rigorous in their logic. Herein lay their strength; but herein also lay their weakness. Their logic avenged itself upon its authors. Logic triumphed, but it was logic gone mad. Logic is like fire-it needs to be used with judgment: it needs to be supplied with fitting fuel. Otherwise men must walk in the sparks that they have kindled. The movement has been variously regarded. In the minds of some the very mention of it awakens an enthusiasm like that which Germans feel when Gravelotte and Sedan are spoken of. They see in it the dawn of a noble day of English church life. Pusey, Newman, and Keble are venerable names to them. They cherish them with the same veneration that the Moravian cherishes the name of Zinzendorf and the true German that of Martin Luther. To such the biography of Dr. Pusey is more than a biography. It is a record and a demonstration. It is the chronicle of the heroic days of a religious enthusiasm. It is the declaration of those truths which are salient truths in their eyes. But all are not of this mind. In the view of others, the movement was retrograde. The glance backward which the Oxford leaders counselled was the Eurydice glance of death. It * Caird, Evolution of Religion,' vol. i. p. 6. was was worse, it was the look which became first a fascinated gaze and a petrifying influence; for the backward look was a look into the Medusa face of Rome. To others again the movement was a troublesome disturbance of a very wholesome state of things. The Church was in a condition of moral health. It taught religion as an available light upon the path of life. It wisely avoided instructing people in mysteries. The movement came as a disturbing and harmful one. It provoked scepticism in its endeavour to combat unbelief. But for the Oxford Movement scepticism might have continued a harmless. speculation of a few philosophers.' The truth is that no movement is wholly good or wholly bad. The evil is ever mingled with the good. The extreme logical development of a movement must not be confounded with its legitimate value or its real meaning. When men are fighting against real or imaginary foes, they must not be taken to mean all they say, or be held responsible for the strictly necessary deduction from their utterances. In times of intellectual excitement men are rhetorical, not logical. The extreme men of the movement often exhibit its logical tendency; but all men fortunately are not extreme; and there is a practical recoil from theoretical logic which visits the minds of the wise. Having said thus much, it is fair to say that there is a kind of logical extreme which represents the possibilities of the movement. There is a sky-line towards which all men who are going up a hill are travelling, though few may have the courage to reach it. Every road leads from one parish to another, but it is not every pedestrian who forsakes his own parish and domiciles in the next. There is a high-water mark, towards which every tide must rise, but every tide does not touch it. The belief in the inward witness of the Spirit may lead to the most fantastic conceptions, and find its outcome in the wild extravagances and delirious misdeeds of the Anabaptists. The belief in the existence of an external voice of authority on earth may lead to the fond dream of an unerring Church and find its resting-place in the outrageous claims of Roman infallibility. Just as the Evangelical movement, which was a worship of the Spirit, has as its extreme border the excitement of hysterical revivalism, so the Oxford Movement had on its ultimate frontier the Church of Rome. The National Church always embraced in its fold men who were more Catholic than Protestant, and other men who were more Protestant than Catholic. These men represented the two wings of the Church of England, * Froude, Oxford Counter-Reformation.' Short Studies, 4th series, p. 252. one are one of which lay on the Romeward side of Geneva though not necessarily at Rome, and the other on the Geneva side of Rome though not necessarily at Geneva. The effect of the Oxford Movement was to strengthen the wing which we may call the Eastward wing, and to make it take up ground on the Romeward side of its former position. Some excellent men angry when the trend of the Oxford Movement is described as Romeward; but in the nature of the case it could not be otherwise. It is unfair to say that the movement was nothing but a Romeward movement. Still more is it unjust to describe it as designedly such; but to deny that there was such a tendency in it seems to us to be impossible to those who consider the principles of the movement, and seems also to be contradicted by historical facts. In Mr. Ward's view and in Mr. Froude's view the movement had this tendency. The former, in writing of the Catholic Revival, describes the movement as the revival of principles which led naturally to Rome. Mr. Froude tells us that his friends argued, 'You see where reason leads you. You see what has come of the Reformation. If you do not believe in the Church Catholic and Apostolic, you have no right to believe in God-and the Church Catholic is the Church of Rome."* Of course this was mistaken and feeble argument. It was a kind of reasoning which we should have thought could not impose upon a child. But it illustrates how the rump of a party will insist on a virulent and violent logic which renounces common sense, and gains its power by erecting into a kind of major premiss some principle which only has value among a number of other principles of equal importance. It exemplifies how the disregard of some aspects of truth gives to others an air of portentous importance. When a part is worshipped as if it were the whole, it is not to be wondered at that the part is soon argued to be greater than the whole. A truth lifted up to a throne by itself, and labelled as The Truth, gains a fictitious sovereignty; it stupefies men of imaginative temperament; it paralyses the intellects of men who have not accustomed themselves to more comprehensive inductive methods. There may be resistant and contradictory facts, but so much the worse for the facts. The area of vision is narrowed: the eye-plate of prepossession (so easy to adjust, so difficult to get rid of) is affixed to the telescope: every star which does not come within the immediate field of vision is declared to be valueless or even nonexistent. Logic then can pursue her riotous and victorious way. We have rejected private judgment, but it is by an adroit, Froude, Short Studies, 4th series, p. 332. resolute, |