circumstances.
Of this we shall see more by and by.

Throughout the years of Sir Robert Peel's government, Mr. Gladstone had
been keenly intent upon the progress of religious affairs at Oxford.
'From 1841 till the beginning of 1845,' he says in a fragmentary note,
'I continued a hardworking official man, but with a decided predominance
of religious over secular interests. Although I had little of direct
connection with Oxford and its teachers, I was regarded in common fame
as tarred with their brush; and I was not so blind as to be unaware that
for the clergy this meant not yet indeed prosecution, but proscription
and exclusion from advancement by either party in the state, and for
laymen a vague and indeterminate prejudice with serious doubts how far
persons infected in this particular manner could have any real capacity
for affairs. Sir Robert Peel must, I think, have exercised much
self-denial when he put me in his cabinet in 1843.' The movement that
began in 1833 had by the opening of the next decade revealed startling
tendencies, and its first stage was now slowly but unmistakeably passing
into the second. Mr. Gladstone has told us[182] how he stood at this
hour of crisis; how strongly he believed that the church of England
would hold her ground, and even revive the allegiance not only of the
masses, but of those large and powerful nonconforming bodies who were
supposed to exist only as a consequence of the neglect of its duties by
the national church. He has told us also how little he foresaw the
second phase of the Oxford movement--the break-up of a distinguished and
imposing generation of clergy; 'the spectacle of some of the most
gifted sons reared by Oxford for the service of the church of England,
hurling at her head the hottest bolts of the Vatican; and along with
this strange deflexion on one side, a not less convulsive rationalist
movement on the other,--all ending in contention and estrangement, and
in suspicions worse than either, because less accessible and more
intractable.'

II

The landmarks of the Tractarian story are familiar, and I do not ask the
reader in any detail to retrace them. The publication of Froude's
_Remains_ was the first flagrant beacon lighting the path of divergence
from the lines of historical high churchmen in an essentially
anti-protestant direction. Mr. Gladstone read the first instalment of
this book (1838) 'with repeated regrets.' Then