CHAPTER XIX

THE CATASTROPHE

THE events of February were a great shock. The routine of Oxford had been broken as it had never been broken by the fiercest strifes before. Condemnations had been before passed on opinions, and even on persons. But to see an eminent man, of blameless life, a fellow of one of the first among the Colleges, solemnly deprived of his degree and all that the degree carried with it, and that on a charge in which bad faith and treachery were combined with alleged heresy, was a novel experience, where the kindnesses of daily companionship and social intercourse still asserted themselves as paramount to official ideas of position. And when, besides this, people realised what more had been attempted, and by how narrow a chance a still heavier blow had been averted from one towards whom so many hearts warmed, how narrowly a yoke had been escaped which would have seemed to subject all religious thought in the University to the caprice or the blind zeal of a partisan official, the sense of relief was mixed with the still present memory of a desperate peril. And then came the question as to That the old policy of the Board would be revived and pursued when the end of

what was to come next.

the Proctors' year delivered it from their inconvenient presence, was soon understood to be out of the question. The very violence of the measures attempted had its reaction, which stopped anything further. The opponents of Tractarianism, Orthodox and Liberal, were for the moment gorged with their success. What men waited to see was the effect on the party of the movement; how it would influence the advanced portion of it; how it would influence the little company who had looked on in silence from their retirement at Littlemore. The more serious aspect of recent events was succeeded for the moment by a certain comic contrast, created by Mr. Ward's engagement to be married, which was announced within a week of his degradation, and which gave the commonrooms something to smile at after the strain and excitement of the scene in the Theatre. But that passed, and the graver outlook of the situation occupied men's thoughts.

There was a widespread feeling of insecurity. Friends did not know of friends, how their minds were working, how they might go. Anxious letters passed, the writers not daring to say too much, or reveal too much alarm. And yet there was still some hope that at least with the great leader matters were not desperate. To his own friends he gave warning; he had already done so in a way to leave little to expect but at last to lose him; he spoke of resigning his fellowship in October, though he wished to defer this till the following June; but nothing final had been said publicly. Even at the last it was only anticipated by some that he would retire into lay communion. But that silence was awful and ominous. He showed no signs of being affected by what had passed in Oxford. He

privately thanked the Proctors for saving him from what would have distressed him; but he made no comments on the measures themselves. Still it could not but be a climax of everything as far as Oxford was concerned. And he was a man who saw signs in such

events.

It was inevitable that the events of the end of 1844 and the beginning of 1845 should bring with them a great crisis in the development of religious opinion, in the relations of its different forms to one another, and further, in the thoughts of many minds as to their personal position, their duty, and their prospects. There had been such a crisis in 1841 at the publication of No. 90. After the discussions which followed that tract, Anglican theology could never be quite the same that it had been before. It was made to feel the sense of some grave wants, which, however they might be supplied in the future, could no longer be unnoticed or uncared for. And individuals, amid the strife of tongues, had felt, some strongly and practically, but a much larger number dimly and reluctantly, the possibility, unwelcome to most, but not without interest to others, of having to face the strange and at one time inconceivable task of revising the very foundations of their religion. And such a revision had since that time been going on more or less actively in many minds; in some cases with very decisive results. But after the explosion caused by Mr. Ward's book, a crisis of a much more grave and wide-reaching sort had arrived. To ordinary lookers-on it naturally seemed that a shattering and decisive blow had been struck at the Tractarian party and their cause; struck, indeed, formally and officially, only at its extravagances, but struck, none the less, virtually, at the

premisses which led to these extravagances, and at the party, which, while disapproving them, shrank, with whatever motives,-policy, generosity, or secret sympathy,—from joining in the condemnation of them. It was more than a defeat, it was a rout, in which they were driven and chased headlong from the field; a wreck in which their boasts and hopes of the last few years met the fate which wise men had always anticipated. Oxford repudiated them. Their theories, their controversial successes, their learned arguments, their appeals to the imagination, all seemed to go down, and to be swept away like chaff, before the breath of straightforward common sense and honesty. Henceforth there was a badge affixed to them and all who belonged to them, a badge of suspicion and discredit, and even shame, which bade men beware of them, an overthrow under which it seemed wonderful that they could raise their heads or expect a hearing. It is true, that to those who looked below the surface, the overthrow might have seemed almost too showy and theatrical to be quite all that it was generally thought to be. There had been too much passion, and too little looking forward to the next steps, in the proceedings of the victors. There was too much blindness to weak points of their own position, too much forgetfulness of the wise generosity of cautious warfare. The victory was easy to win; the next moment it was quite obvious that they did not know what to do with it, and were at their wits' end to understand what it meant. And the defeated party, though defeated signally and conspicuously in the sight of the Church and the country, had in it too large a proportion of the serious and able men of the University, with too clear and high a purpose, and

too distinct a sense of the strength and reality of their ground, to be in as disadvantageous a condition as from a distance might be imagined. A closer view would have discovered how much sympathy there was for their objects and for their main principles in many who greatly disapproved of much in the recent course and tendency of the movement. It might have been seen how the unwise measures of the Heads had awakened convictions among many who were not naturally on their side, that it was necessary both on the ground of justice and policy to arrest all extreme measures, and to give a breathing time to the minority. 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.

But that crisis had another important result, not much noticed then, but one which made itself abundantly evident in the times that followed. The decisive breach between the old parties in the Church, both Orthodox and Evangelical, and the new party of the movement, with the violent and apparently irretrievable discomfiture of the latter as the rising force in Oxford, opened the way and cleared the ground for the formation and the power of a third school of opinion, which was to be the most formidable rival of the Tractarians, and whose leaders were eventually to succeed where the Tractarians had failed, in becoming the masters and the reformers of the University. Liberalism had hitherto been represented in Oxford in forms.

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