nce or even in Germany. The nation having had
its Revolution in the seventeenth century escaped that of the
eighteenth. Still the country was exhausted in the conflict against
Napoleon. Commercial, industrial and social problems agitated it. The
Church slumbered. For a time the liberal thought of England found
utterance mainly through the poets. By the decade of the thirties
movement had begun. The opinions of the Noetics in Oriel College,
Oxford, now seem distinctly mild. They were sufficient to awaken Newman
and Pusey, Froude, Keble, and the rest. Then followed the most
significant ecclesiastical movement which the Church of England in the
nineteenth century has seen, the Oxford or Tractarian movement, as it
has been called. There was conscious recurrence of a mind like that of
Newman to the Catholic position. He had never been able to conceive
religion in any other terms than those of dogma, or the Christian
assurance on any other basis than that of external authority. Nothing
could be franker than the antagonism of the movement, from its
inception, to the liberal spirit of the age. By inner logic Newman found
himself at last in the Roman Church. Yet the Anglo-Catholic movement is
to-day overwhelmingly in the ascendant in the English Church. The Broad
Churchmen of the middle of the century have had few successors. It is
the High Church which stands over against the great mass of the
dissenting churches which, taken in the large, can hardly be said to be
theologically more liberal than itself. It is the High Church which has
showed Franciscanlike devotion in the problems of social readjustment
which England to-day presents. It has shown in some part of its
constituency a power of assimilation of new philosophical, critical and
scientific views, which makes all comparison of it with the Roman Church
misleading. And yet it remains in its own consciousness Catholic to the
core.

In America also the vigour of onset of the liberalising forces at the
beginning of this century tended to provoke reaction. The alarm with
which the defection of so considerable a portion of the Puritan Church
was viewed gave coherence to the opposition. There were those who
devoutly held that the hope of religion lay in its further
liberalisation. Equally there were those who deeply felt that the
deliverance lay in resistance to liberalisation. One of the concrete
effects of the division of the churches was the separation of the
education of th