tholics. There was violent commotion in
Oxford. Keble and Newman strenuously opposed the measure. In 1830 there
was revolution in France. In England the Whigs had come into power.
Newman's mind was excited in the last degree. 'The vital question,' he
says, 'is this, how are we to keep the Church of England from being
liberalised?' At the end of 1832 Newman and Froude went abroad together.
On this journey, as he lay becalmed in the straits of Bonifacio, he
wrote his immortal hymn, 'Lead, Kindly Light.' He came home assured that
he had a work to do. Keble's Assize Sermon on the _National Apostasy_,
preached in July 1833, on the Sunday after Newman's return to Oxford,
kindled the conflagration which had been long preparing. Newman
conceived the idea of the _Tracts for the Times_ as a means of
expressing the feelings and propagating the opinions which deeply moved
him. 'From the first,' he says, 'my battle was with liberalism. By
liberalism I mean the anti-dogmatic principle. Secondly, my aim was the
assertion of the visible Church with sacraments and rites and definite
religious teaching on the foundation of dogma; and thirdly, the
assertion of the Anglican Church as opposed to the Church of Rome.'
Newman grew greatly in personal influence. His afternoon sermons at St.
Mary's exerted spiritual power. They deserved so to do. Here he was at
his best. All of his strength and little of his weakness shows. His
insight, his subtility, his pathos, his love of souls, his marvellous
play of dramatic as well as of spiritual faculty, are in evidence. Keble
and Pusey were busying themselves with the historical aspects of the
question. Pusey began the _Library of the Fathers_, the most elaborate
literary monument of the movement. Nothing could be more amazing than
the uncritical quality of the whole performance. The first check to the
movement came in 1838, when the Bishop of Oxford animadverted upon the
_Tracts_. Newman professed his willingness to stop them. The Bishop did
not insist. Newman's own thought moved rapidly onward in the only course
which was still open to it.

Newman had been bred in the deepest reverence for Scripture. In a sense
that reverence never left him, though it changed its form. He saw that
it was absurd to appeal to the Bible in the old way as an infallible
source of doctrine. How could truth be infallibly conveyed in defective
and fallible expressions? Newman's own studies in criticism, by no means
profound,