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Church was framed". But he appeared to be an in-
novator and, in that excited season, a traitor. The
Pliilistinos held hini bound by his own cords; Eras-
tians or Evangelicals, they well knew that his bishop
would not shield him from attack. Four leading tu-
tors, egged on by the fanatical Golightly, and includ-
ing A. C. Tait, afterwards Archbishop of Canterbury,
demanded the writer's name and charged him with
dangerous tendencies. The hebdomadal board now
retorted on Newman the "persecution" dealt out to
Hampden. They would not wait even twelve hours
for his defence. They resolved on 15 March, that
"modes of interpretation such as are suggested in the
said Tract, evading rather than explaining the sense of
the Thirty-nine .Vrticles, and reconciling subscription
to them with the adoption of cri'ors, which they were
designed to coimtcract, defeat the object, and are in-
consistent with the due observance of the above men-
tioni>d Statutes."
This anathema was posted up on every buttery hatrli, or public board, of the colleges, as a warning to imdiTgrailuates. Newman acknowledged his author- ship ill a touching letter, perhaps too humble; and a war of pamphlets broke out. Keble, Palmer, and Pusey stood up for the tract, though Pusey could not bring himself to approve of its method uncondition- ally. But Ward, with great effect, hurled back the charge of "insincerity" on those who made it. How could Whateley and Hampden use the services for bap- tism, visitation of the sick, or ordination, all dead against their acknowledged principles? But neither did Ward follow Newman. Later on, he described the articles as "patient of a Catholic but ambitious of a Protestant meaning". Whatever their logic, their rhetoric was undoubtedly Protestant. For himself, in subscribing them, he renounced no Roman doctrine. This, like all Ward's proceedings, was pouring oil on fire. Newman had made the mis- take of handling an explosive matter without precaution, in the dry legal fashion of an ad- vocate, instead of using his incomparable gift of lan- guage to persuade and convince. His refinements were pilloried as "Jesuitism", and his motive was de- clared to be treason. An "immense commotion" fol- lowed. The "Apologia" describes it, "In every part of the country, and every class of society, through every organ and opportunity of opinion, in newspapers, in periodicals, at meetings, in pulpits, at dinner-tables, in coffee-rooms, in railway-carriages, I was denounced as a traitor who had laid his train, and was detected in the \-ery act of firing it against the time-honoured Es- tal)lishnicnt." His place in the movement was gone.
He would not withdraw the tract; he reiterated its arguments in a Letter to Dr. Jelf ; but at his bishop's request he brought the series to an end, addressmg him in a strikingly beautiful pamphlet, which severed Ins own connexion with the party he had led. He re- tired to Littlemore; and there, he says, "between July and November I received three blows that broke me". First, in translating St. Athana.sius, he came on the Via Media once more; but it was that of the heretical Semi-Arians. Second, the bishops, contrary to an • "understanding" given him, began to charge vio- lently, as of set purpose, against "Tract 90", which they accused of Romanizing and dishonesty. Last came the unholy alliance between England and Prus- sia by which an .\nglican Bishop was appointed at Jerusalem over a flock comprising, it would appear, not only Lutherans but Dru.ses and other heretics. The "Confession of Augsburg" was to be their stand- ard. Now, "if England could be in Palestine, Rome might be in England." The Anglican Church might have the Apostolical Succession; so had the Monophy- sites; but such acts led Newman to suspect that since the sixteenth century it had never been a Church at all.
Now then he was a "pure Protestant", held baok
from Rome simply by its apparent errors and idola-
tries. Or were these but developments, after all, of
the primitive type and really true to it? He had con-
verted Ward by saying that "the Church of the Fa-
thers might be corrupted into Popery, never into
Protestantism". Did not living institutions unflergo
changes by a law of their being that realized their na-
ture more perfectly? and was the Roman Church an in-
stance? At Littlemore the great book was to be com-
posed "On the Development of Christian Doctrine",
which viewed this problem in the light of history and
philosophy. Newman resigned St. Mary's in Sept.,
1843. He waited two years in lay communion before
submitting to Rome, and fought every step of the
journey. Meanwhile the movement went on. Its
"acknowledged leader" according to Dean Stanley
was now W. G. Ward. On pure Anglicans a strong in-
fluence was exerted by J. B. Mozley, Newman's
brother-in-law. Keble, who was at odds with his
bishop, vacated the chair of poetry; and the Tracta-
rian candidate, Isaac Williams, was defeated in Jan.,
1842. Williams had innocently roused slumbering
animosities by his "Tract SO", on "Reserve in com-
municating religious knowledge", a wariiiii;;, .is (■\(t
since. Low Church partisans have maintained, ili:i( the
Establishment was to be secretly indoctnnateil with
"Romish errors". The heads of houses now pro])osed
to repeal their censure of 1836 on Hampden, though he
withdrew not a line of his Hampton Lectures. It was
too much. Convocation threw out the measure by a
majority of three to two. Hampden, by way of re-
venge, turned the formal examination of a Puseyite,
MacmuUen of Corpus, for the B.D. into a deinaiul for
assent to propositions which, as he well knew. Mac-
muUen could not sign. The vice-chancellor backed up
Hampden; but the Delegates reverserl that iniquitous
judgment and gave the candidate his degree. The
spirit of faction was mounting high. Young men's tes-
timonials for orders were refused by their colleges. A
statute was brought up in Feb., 1844, to place the
granting of all divinity degrees under a board in con-
junction with the vice-chancellor, which would mean
the exclusion from them of Tractarians. This, indeed,
was rejected by 341 votes to 21. But Newman had
said a year earlier, that the authorities were bent on
exerting their "more than military power" to put
down Catholicism. R. W. Church calls them "an ir-
responsible and incompetent oligarchy ' ' . Their chiefs
were such as Hawkins, Symons, and Cardwell, bitterly
opposed to the movement all through. As Newman
had retired, they struck at Pusey; and by a scandalous
inquisition of "the six doctors" they suspended him,
without hearing a word of his defence, from preaching
for two years, 2 June, 1843. His crime consisted in a
moderate Anglican sermon on the Holy Eucharist.
Espionage, delation, quarrels between heads and tutors, rejection of Puseyites standing for fellowships, and a heated suspicion as though a second Popish Plot were in the air, made of this time at O.xford a drama which Dean Church likens to the Greek faction-fights described by Thucydides. The situation could not last. A crisis might have been avoided by good sense on the part of the bishops outside, and the ruling pow- ers within the university. It was precipitated by W. G. Ward. Ejected from his lectureship at Balliol, he wrote violent articles between 1841 and 1843 in the "British Critic", no longer in Newman's hands. His conversation was a combat; his words of scorn for Anglican doctrines and dignitaries flew round the col- leges. In 1843 Palmer of Worcester in his dreary "Narrative of Events" objected strongly to Ward's "Romanizing" tendencies. The "British Critic" just then came to an end. Ward began a pamphlet in re- ply; it swelled to 600 pages, and in the summer of 1844 burst on an irritated public as "The Ideal of a Chris- tian Church."
Its method was simple. The writer identified all
