historical, philosophical, and religious elements which they
summed up in the idea of the Church. This idea of the Church, as
Pattison truly says, and as men so far removed from sympathy with dogma
as J. S. Mill always admitted, 'was a widening of the horizon.' In
another place (_Mind_, i. 83-88) the Rector shows the stages of
speculation in Oxford during the present century. From 1800 or 1810 to
1830 the break-up of the old lethargy took the form of a vague
intellectualism; free movement, but blind groping out of the mists of
insular prejudice in which reaction against the French Revolution had
wrapped us. Then came the second period from 1830 to 1845. Tractarianism
was primarily a religious movement; it was a revival of the Church
spirit which had been dormant since the expiry of Jacobitism at the
accession of George III. But it rested on a conception, however
imperfect, of universal history; and it even sought a basis for belief
in a philosophic exposition of the principle of authority.

Pattison, like most of the superior minds then at Oxford, was not only
attracted, but thoroughly overmastered by this great tide of thought. He
worked at the Lives of the Saints, paid a visit to the cloisters at
Littlemore, and was one of Newman's closest disciples, though he thinks
it possible that Newman even then, with that curious instinct which so
often marks the religious soul, had a scent of his latent rationalism.
A female cousin, who eventually went over to Rome, counted for something
among the influences that drove him into 'frantic Puseyism.' When the
great secession came in 1845 Pattison somehow held back and was saved
for a further development. Though he appeared to all intents and
purposes as much of a Catholic at heart as Newman or any of them, it was
probably his constitutional incapacity for heroic and decisive courses
that made him, according to the Oxford legend, miss the omnibus. The
first notion of the Church had expanded itself beyond the limits of the
Anglican Communion, and been transformed into the wider idea of the
Catholic Church. This in time underwent a further expansion.

Now the idea of the Catholic Church is only a mode of conceiving
the dealings of divine Providence with the whole race of mankind.
Reflection on the history and condition of humanity, taken as a
whole, gradually convinced me that this theory of the relation of
all living beings to the Supreme Being was too narro