CHURCH POLITICS AND CHURCH PROSPECTS.
The writers who so complacently talk of the Church movement of 1833 as a phase long past and forgotten, of the religious and social progress of England, are every day convicted of egregious self-deception. No doubt the movement has gone through many changes since the publication of Tract No. I. It was an 'Oxford' movement; now Cambridge seems asserting itself as a centre of orthodox Church life. It was a 'Tractarian' movement, but the Tracts were extinguished more than twenty years since. It was the 'Newmania,' and it is full twenty years since Dr. Newman was with us. It was 'Puseyism,' but it is long since Dr. Pusey has appeared in the attitude of continuous public leadership, although at the present moment much ante ora virôm.
What, however, it was at the first, and what it continues to be down to the day on which we are writing, is a movement having, as its motive power, a deeper recognition than has for many generations existed among us, on the one hand, of a visible universal Church, and of sacramental ordinances, as the logically necessary correlative, 'through the ages all along,' in that Church, of the Incarnation; and on the other, of the Church of England, as fulfilling, within its limits, the idea of such a Church, and as supplying those sacraments. If this view of Christianity (no matter for the argument whether true or false in itself) stands out conspicuously and in greater prominence throughout the 'Establishment,' and if it shapes the actions, the language, and the writings of members of that Establishment to an incalculably greater degree than it did before 1833, then the movement which came to maturity during that year has not died out, as Latitudinarian optimists would like to prove. We can understand the neologian expressing his contempt for the Church system, or the Puritan banning it; we can understand the Romanist, specially if he be a divert, treating the manifestations of such a system in the English Church as deleterious and dangerous hallucinations; but we cannot understand one of these men shutting his eyes to 'Anglicanism,' so called, having revealed itself in England as a
