The Tractarian Movement, however, which issued, on the one hand, in the
going over of Newman to the Church of Rome and, on the other, in a great
revival of Catholic principles within the Anglican Church itself, stands
in a far larger setting. It was not merely an English or insular
movement. It was a wave from a continental flood. On its own showing it
was not merely an ecclesiastical movement. It had political and social
aims as well. There was a universal European reaction against the
Enlightenment and the Revolution. That reaction was not simple, but
complex. It was a revolt of the conservative spirit from the new ideals
which had been suddenly translated into portentous realities. It was
marked everywhere by hatred of the eighteenth century with all its ways
and works. On the one side we have the revolutionary thesis, the rights
of man, the authority of reason, the watchwords liberty, equality,
fraternity. On the other side stood forth those who were prepared to
assert the meaning of community, the continuity of history, spiritual as
well as civil authority as the basis of order, and order as the
condition of the highest good. In literature the tendency appears as
romanticism, in politics as legitimism, in religion as ultramontanism.
Le Maistre with his _L'Eglise gallicane du Pape_; Chateaubriand with his
_Genie du Christianisme_; Lamennais with his _Essai sur l'Indifference
en Matiere, de Religion_, were, from 1820 to 1860, the exponents of a
view which has had prodigious consequences for France and Italy. The
romantic movement arose outside of Catholicism. It was impersonated in
Herder. Friedrich Schlegel, Werner and others went over to the Roman
Church. The political reaction was specifically Latin and Catholic. In
the lurid light of anarchy Rome seemed to have a mission again. Divine
right in the State must be restored through the Church. The Catholic
apologetic saw the Revolution as only the logical conclusion of the
premises of the Reformation. The religious revolt of the sixteenth
century, the philosophical revolt of the seventeenth, the political
revolt of the eighteenth, the social revolt of the nineteenth, are all
parts of one dreadful sequence. As the Church lifted up the world after
the first flood of the barbarians, so must she again lift up the world
after the devastations made by the more terrible barbarians of the
eighteenth century. England had indeed stood a little outside of the
cyclone which had de