in
the world." He was far too much of a student and worker to be altogether
so worldly-minded as Browning represents him.

His chief interest for Englishmen is his connection with the Tractarian
Movement. The wish of his soul was to aid the Catholic Revival in
England, and with that end in view he visited England in 1835. Two years
before, the movement at Oxford, known as the Tractarian Movement had
begun. The opinions of the men in this movement were, as every one
knows, printed in a series of ninety tracts of which Newman wrote
twenty-four. It was an outgrowth of the conditions of the time. To sum
up in the words of Withrow,[3] "The Church of England had distinctly
lost ground as a directing and controlling force in the nation. The most
thoughtful and earnest minds in the Church felt the need of a great
religious awakening and an aggressive movement to regain its lost
influence." As Dean Church describes them, the two characteristic forms
of Christianity in the Church of England were the High Church, and the
Evangelicals, or Low Church." Of the former he says: "Its better
members were highly cultivated, benevolent men, intolerant of
irregularities both of doctrine and life, whose lives were governed by
an unostentatious but solid and unfaltering piety, ready to burst forth
on occasion into fervid devotion. Its worse members were jobbers and
hunters after preferment, pluralists who built fortunes and endowed
families out of the Church, or country gentlemen in orders, who rode to
hounds and shot and danced and farmed, and often did worse things."

FOOTNOTES:

[3] Religious Progress of the Century.

But at Oxford was a group of men of intense moral earnestness including
Newman, Pusey, Keble, Arnold, Maurice, Kingsley, and others, who began
an active propaganda of the new or revised doctrines of the Oxford
Movement.

"The success of the Tracts," says Molesworth, "was much greater, and the
outcry against them far louder and fiercer, than their authors had
expected. The Tracts were at first small and simple, but became large
and learned theological treatises. Changes, too, came over the views of
some of the writers. Doctrines which probably would have shocked them at
first were put forward with a recklessness which success had increased.
Alarm was excited, remonstrances stronger and stronger were addressed to
them. They were attacked as Romanizing in their tendency."

"The effect of such writing was two-fold[4]--the