of England, in an old French cope. "What is the use," asked Pugin, "of
praying for the Church of England in that cope?" [11]

Of the three or four hundred Anglican clergymen who went over with Newman
in 1845, or some years later with Manning, on the decision in the Gorham
controversy, few were influenced in any assignable degree by poetic
motives. "As regards my friend's theory about my imaginative sympathies
having led me astray," writes Aubrey de Vere, "I may remark that they had
been repelled, not attracted, by what I thought an excess of ceremonial
in the churches and elsewhere when in Italy. . . . It seemed to me too
sensuous." [12] Indeed, at the outset of the movement it was not the
mediaeval Church, but the primitive Church, the Church of patristic
discipline and doctrine, that appealed to the Tractarians. It was the
Anglican Church of the seventeenth century, the Church of Andrewes and
Herbert and Ken, to which Keble sought to restore the "beauty of
holiness"; and those of the Oxford party who remained within the
establishment continued true to this ideal. "The Christian Year" is the
genuine descendant of George Herbert's "Temple" (1632). What impressed
Newman's imagination in the Roman Catholic Church was not so much the
romantic beauty of its rites and observances as its imposing unity and
authority. He wanted an authoritative standard in matters of belief, a
faith which had been held _semper et ubique et ab omnibus_. The English
Church was an Elizabethan compromise. It was Erastian, a creature of the
state, threatened by the Reform Bill of 1832, threatened by every liberal
wind of opinion. The Thirty-nine Articles meant this to one man and that
to another, and there was no court of final appeal to say what they
meant. Newman was a convert not of his imagination, but of his longing
for consistency and his desire to believe.

There is nothing romantic in either temper or style about Newman's poems,
all of which are devotional in subject, and one of which--"The Pillar of
the Cloud" ("Lead, Kindly Light") (1833)--is a favourite hymn in most
Protestant communions. The most ambitious of these is "The Dream of
Gerontius," a sort of mystery play which Sir Henry Taylor used to compare
with the "Divine Comedy." Indeed, none but Dante has more poignantly
expressed the purgatorial passion, the desire for pain, which makes the
spirits in the flames of purification unwilling to intermit their
torments even f