en dropped from it all the damnatory part of the
opinions taught by the evangelical school; not only as regards the
Roman catholic religion, but also as to heretics and heathens;
nonconformists and presbyterians I think that I always let off
pretty easily....

III

INFLUENCE OF FRIENDS AND BOOKS

The Tractarian movement is by this time one of the most familiar
chapters in our history, and it has had singular good fortune in being
told by three masters of the most winning, graphic, and melodious
English prose of the century to which the tale belongs.[88] Whether we
call it by the ill name of Oxford counter-reformation or the friendlier
name of catholic revival, it remains a striking landmark in the varied
motions of English religious thought and feeling for the three-quarters
of a century since the still unfinished journey first began. In its
early stages, the movement was exclusively theological. Philanthropic
reform still remained with the evangelical school that so powerfully
helped to sweep away the slave trade, cleansed the prisons, and aided in
humanising the criminal law. It was they who 'helped to form a
conscience, if not a heart, in the callous bosom of English politics,'
while the very foremost of the Oxford divines was scouting the fine talk
about black men, because they 'concentrated in themselves all the
whiggery, dissent, cant, and abomination that had been ranged on their
side.'[89] Nor can we forget that Shaftesbury, the leader in that
beneficent crusade of human mercy and national wisdom which ended in the
deliverance of women and children in mines and factories, was also a
leader of the evangelical party.

The Tractarian movement, as all know, opened, among other sources, in
antagonism to utilitarian liberalism. Yet J. S. Mill, the oracle of
rationalistic liberalism in Oxford and other places in the following
generation, had always much to say for the Tractarians. He used to tell
us that the Oxford theologians had done for England something like what
Guizot, Villemain, Michelet, Cousin had done a little earlier for
France; they had opened, broadened, deepened the issues and meanings of
European history; they had reminded us that history is European; that it
is quite unintelligible if treated as merely local. He would say,
moreover, that thought should recognise thought and mind always welcome
mind; and the Oxford men h