vastated the world from Coronna to Moscow and from
the Channel to the Pyramids, but she had been exhausted in putting down
the revolution. Only God's goodness had preserved England. The logic of
Puritanism would have been the same. Indeed, in England the State was
weaker and worse than were the states upon the Continent. For since 1688
it had been a popular and constitutional monarchy. In Frederick
William's phrase, its sovereign took his crown from the gutter. The
Church was through and through Erastian, a creature of the State.
Bishops were made by party representatives. Acts like the Reform Bills,
the course of the Government in the matter of the Irish Church, were
steps which would surely bring England to the pass which France had
reached in 1789. The source of such acts was wrong. It was with the
people. It was in men, not in God. It was in reason, not in authority.
It would be difficult to overstate the strength of this reactionary
sentiment in important circles in England at the end of the third decade
of the nineteenth century.

THE OXFORD MOVEMENT

In so far as that complex of causes just alluded to made of the Oxford
Movement or the Catholic revival a movement of life, ecclesiastical,
social and political as well, its history falls outside the purpose of
this book. We proposed to deal with the history of thought. Reactionary
movements have frequently got on without much thought. They have left
little deposit of their own in the realm of ideas. Their avowed
principle has been that of recurrence to that which has already been
thought, of fidelity to ideas which have long prevailed. This is the
reason why the conservatives have not a large place in such a sketch as
this. It is not that their writings have not often been full of high
learning and of the subtlest of reasoning. It is only that the ideas
about which they reason do not belong to the history of the nineteenth
century. They belong, on the earnest contention of the conservatives
themselves--those of Protestants, to the history of the Reformation--and
of Catholics, both Anglican and Roman, to the history of the early or
mediaeval Church.

Nevertheless, when with passionate conviction a great man, taking the
reactionary course, thinks the problem through again from his own point
of view, then we have a real phenomenon in the history of contemporary
thought. When such an one wrestles before God to give reason to himself
and to his fellows for the fai