In this sense, at least, the Tract was received and condemned by ...

In this sense, at least, the Tract was received and condemned by the Heads of Houses, and the Tractarians stigmatized as Romanists without the courage of their convictions.

And by 1843, when Newman left St. Mary's, Protestantism was beginning to work almost hysterically even on sober English opinion, which, having accepted Catholic emancipation as the completion of the Union, was now challenged by O'Connell to regard it as the basis of disruption to be achieved, if need be, at the price of civil war.

Deviations of doctrine, like novelties of observance, were watched by ten thousand critical eyes; the Hampden controversy and the-Gorham controversy were followed as attentively as any debate in Parliament, and, far away in Borneo, Rajah Brooke wrote home to his mother that he had not had much time for theology, but he had composed an answer to Tract XC. The decision of Pope Pius IX to revive the Roman Hierarchy in England was answered with an outburst of frenzy of which the Tractarian clergy were almost as much the objects as the Papists themselves. But to the new Englishman of the late forties and fifties, a travelled man bred up on Carlyle and Tennyson and the romantic classics, the world was a far more interesting place than it had been to

those late Augustans,

imprisoned in their island, among who Evangelicalism struck root, and his religion conformed to the awakening of his senses.

The theology of Oxford he still viewed with distrust: at sisterhoods and processions he frowned with dark suspicion. Insensibly, however, the Tractarian influence was affecting his notions of public worship.

...next: >>