other in our language. Indeed John Keble's professed purpose was to exhibit the soothing tendency of the Prayer Book, and that this purpose was accomplished with rare skill and beauty, who can doubt? The curious thing is that the volume achieved so much beyond what its author aimed at; and that this was so is an emphatic testimony to the needs of the age in which he wrote. The high and dry school had little to offer in satisfaction of spiritual aspirations. In place of living bread-panis virus et vitalis-it had nothing to set before the hungry soul but the stone of theological petrifactions. Evangelicalism was in its decadence. It was perishing of intellectual inanition. Beginning, in Apostolic wise, with “the foolishness of preaching," it had ended unapostolically in the preaching of foolishness. Its divinity was confined to a few isolated dogmas, which, torn from their place in systematic theology, had no enduring principle of life. For scholarship it had unctuous pulpit platitudes; for philosophy, the deliramenta of apocalyptic tea-tables. From art it turned away with comminatory references to "texts" in Exodus and Leviticus. To those who like John Henry Newman had made trial of it, and had found it wanting, and to those who like Hurrell Froude had never been drawn by it from conventional orthodoxy, the Christian Year came as "a new music, the music of a school long unknown in England, when the general tone of CHAP. II.] "THE CHRISTIAN YEAR." 65 religious literature was so nerveless and impotent." Cardinal Newman judges that the two main intellectual truths which it brought home to him were the principle of sacramentalism and the doctrine as to certitude which he had already learned from Butler. Such was the influence of the Christian Year. Cardinal Newman reckons it the original bond of those who were to become the leaders of the Oxford movement, the formal start of which he dates from Mr. Keble's once famous discourse on National Apostacy, preached at St. Mary's in 1833. It was in that year that Cardinal Newman began, "out of his own head,” the series of papers from which the movement received its truest and most characteristic name of Tractarian. There can be no room for doubt that its chief springs of action are to be found in the Tracts for the Times, and in those Oxford Sermons, which, as their recent editor says, produced "a living effect" upon their hearers. The importance of the part played in the movement by Cardinal Newman admits of an easy test. Is it possible to conceive of it without him? We can conceive of it without the two Kebles, without Isaac Williams, without Dr. Pusey, who did not join it until 1836. They are, if we may so speak, of its accidents; Cardinal Newman is of its essence. It grew, indeed, out of the occult sympathies of 1 Apologia, p. 18. F kindred minds, and was the issue of manifold causes, long working according to their own laws. But the objective form which it assumed was due, principally, to Cardinal Newman's supreme confidence, irresistible earnestness, absolute fearlessness, and to the unique personal influence which accompanied, and in part sprang from, these endowments. The specific danger, as it was judged, which supplied the occasion for its initiation was the Bill for the suppression of certain Irish Bishoprics. But this measure was an occasion merely. To Cardinal Newman, since at the age of fourteen he first looked into Voltaire and Hume, the primary fact of the age had been what he denominates Liberalism, by which term, as he explained upon a memorable occasion, he means "the doctrine that there is no positive truth in religion, but that one creed is as good as another." To this he sought to oppose the principle of dogma-from the first until now the basis of his religion. He endeavoured to meet the new spirit with a definite religious teaching as to a visible Church, the kingdom in this world of a present though invisible King, a great supernatural fact among men, represented in this country by the Anglican establishment, and speaking through its formularies and the living voice of its episcopate, and to him, as to each man 1 See his address delivered in the Palazzo della Pigna, upon the reception of the biglietto announcing his elevation to the Cardinalate. CHAP. II] THE ESSENCE OF TRACTARIANISM. 67 in particular, through his own bishop, to whom he looked up as "the successor of the Apostles, the Vicar of Christ." And so he tells us [The Oxford] movement started on the ground of maintaining ecclesiastical authority, as opposed to the Erastianism of the State. It exhibited the Church as the one earthly object of religious loyalty and veneration, the source of all spiritual power and jurisdiction, and the channel of all grace. It represented it to be the interest, as well as the duty, of Churchmen, the bond of peace and the secret of strength, to submit their judgment in all things to her decision. And it taught that this divinely founded Church was realised and brought into effect, in our country, in the National Establishment, which was the outward form or development of a continuous dynasty and hereditary power which descended from the Apostles. It gave, then, to that Establishment, in its officers, its laws, its usages, and its worship, that devotion and obedience which are correlative to the very idea of the Church. It set up on high the bench of Bishops and the Book of Common Prayer as the authority to which it was itself to bow, with which it was to cow and overpower an Erastian State. 2 Such, according to Cardinal Newman, was the "clear, unvarying line of thought" upon which the movement of 1833 proceeded, and a careful study of the documents in which its history is to be traced amply confirms, if confirmation is wanted, the correctness of this view. The progress of Tractarianism, from Tract 1 to Tract 90, was the natural growth, the logical development, of the idea of submission to ecclesiastical authority. It was progress leading ever further from the historical position, the first principles, of the Church of 1 Apologia, p. 51. 2 Anglican Difficulties, vol. i. p. 130. England, as by law established. The enterprise in which the Tractarians were engaged was, unconsciously to themselves, an attempt to transform the character of the Anglican communion, to undo the work of the Reformation, to reverse the traditions of three centuries. "Unconsciously to themselves,” indeed. Nor need we wonder at their unconsciousness. It is, as Clough asks— us." 1 What do we see? Each man a space No man may see more. "If we would ascertain |