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Updated: June 11, 2025
Confidence in their prospects as a party might have been impaired in the Tractarians; but confidence in their principles; confidence that they had rightly interpreted the spirit, the claims, and the duties of the English Church, confidence that devotion to its cause was the call of God, whatever might happen to their own fortunes, this confidence was unshaken by the catastrophe of February.
Men of this kind, men of high character and weight in Oxford, found much to dislike and regret in the Tractarians.
The designation adhered to a group of which Stanley was himself a type. They were not bound together in a party. They had no ecclesiastical end in view. They were of a common spirit. It was not the spirit of evangelicalism. Still less was it that of the Tractarians. It was that which Robertson had manifested. It aimed to hold the faith with an open mind in all the intellectual movement of the age.
It saw greater hopes in the present and the future than the Tractarians. It disliked their reverence for the past and the received as inconsistent with what seemed evidence of the providential order of great and fruitful change. It could not enter into their discipline of character, and shrank from it as antiquated, unnatural, and narrow.
But that which nourished and strengthened impatience, exaggeration of language and views, scorn of things as they were, intolerance of everything moderate, both in men and in words, was the consciousness with which every man got up in the morning and passed the day, of the bitter hostility of those foremost in place in Oxford of their incompetence to judge fairly of their incapacity to apprehend what was high and earnest in those whom they condemned of the impossibility of getting them to imagine that Tractarians could be anything but fools or traitors of their hopeless blindness to any fact or any teaching to which they were not accustomed.
The impulse given by Newman and the Tractarians had spent itself, though not without enormous and permanent results within the life of the nation; and now it was the turn of that Liberal reaction and recoil which had effaced Newman's work in Oxford, yet had been itself wandering for years without a spiritual home.
Hampden's views was so widely shared, and though the majority which voted against him was a very mixed one, and contained some who hoped that the next time they were called to vote it might be against the Tractarians, yet the leaders of the movement had undertaken the responsibility, conspicuously and almost alone, of pointing out definitely and argumentatively the objections to Dr.
Old scores between Orthodox, Evangelicals, and Liberals were wiped out, and the Tractarians were left to bear alone the odium of the "persecution" of Dr. Hampden. It must be said that they showed no signs of caring for it. But the Roman controversy was looming in earnest, and it was idle to expect to keep it long out of sight.
The Bishops could not have anything to do with the Tractarians without deeply offending the Evangelicals. The result was that, for the present, the Bishops held aloof. They let the movement run on by itself.
Keble was the associate of Hurrell Froude, Newman Pusey and the other great Tractarians. A sermon which he preached before the University of Oxford was regarded by Newman as the beginning of the movement. He contributed to the Tracts for the Times, though as a controversialist he was never powerful, sweetness not strength being the characteristic of his mind.
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