came the blaze kindled by
Tract Ninety (1841). This, in the language of its author and his
friends, was the famous attempt to clear the Articles from the glosses
encrusting them like barnacles, and to bring out the old catholic truth
that man had done his worst to disfigure and to mutilate, and yet in
spite of all man's endeavour it was in the Articles still. Mr.
Gladstone, as we have seen, regarded Tract Ninety with uneasy doubts as
to its drift, its intentions, the way in which the church and the world
would take it. 'This No. Ninety of _Tracts for the Times_ which I read
by desire of Sir R. Inglis,' he writes to Lord Lyttelton, 'is like a
repetition of the publication of Froude's _Remains_, and Newman has
again burned his fingers. The most serious feature in the tract to my
mind is that, doubtless with very honest intentions and with his mind
turned for the moment so entirely towards those inclined to defection,
and therefore occupying _their_ point of view exclusively, he has in
writing it placed himself quite outside the church of England in point
of spirit and sympathy. As far as regards the proposition for which he
intended mainly to argue, I believe not only that he is right, but that
it is an a b c truth, almost a truism of the reign of Elizabeth, namely
that the authoritative documents of the church of England were not meant
to bind _all_ men to every opinion of their authors, and particularly
that they intended to deal as gently with prepossessions thought to look
towards Rome, as the necessity of securing a certain amount of
reformation would allow. Certainly also the terms in which Newman
characterises the present state of the church of England in his
introduction are calculated to give both pain and alarm; and the whole
aspect of the tract is like the assumption of a new position.'

TRACTARIAN LANDMARKS

Next followed the truly singular struggle for the university chair of
poetry at the end of the same year, between a no-popery candidate and a
Puseyite. Seldom surely has the service of the muses been pressed into
so alien a debate. Mr. Gladstone was cut to the heart at the prospect of
a sentence in the shape of a vote for this professorship, passed by the
university of Oxford 'upon all that congeries of opinions which the rude
popular notion associates with the _Tracts for the Times_.' Such a
sentence would be a disavowal by the university of catholic principles
in the gross; the a