apostasy,' he rushed to arms in defence of Church privileges and
property. In the first Tract (1833) he says:

'A notion has gone abroad that the people can take away your
power. They think they have given it and can take it away.
They have been deluded into a notion that present palpable
usefulness, produceable results, acceptableness to your
flocks--that these and such-like are the tests of your
Divine commission. Enlighten them in this matter. Exalt our
holy fathers the Bishops, as the representatives of the
Apostles, and the Angels of the Churches, and magnify your
office, as being ordained by them to take part in their
ministry.'

That was the keynote of the whole Tractarian movement. A weapon was
needed to smite liberalism. Nothing but a compact and powerful
organisation could repel the foe. God must have provided such an
organisation: a Divine society, certain of ultimate victory, must exist
somewhere. Newman and his friends hoped to find it in the Anglican
Church; and such was the power of their contagious zeal and confident
enthusiasm, that the immediate danger was actually staved off, and the
Establishment was allowed a new lease of life. But the national Church
of England was not constituted to resist the national will, and the
attempt to reorganise it on Catholic lines was fore-doomed to failure.
And so, since the assumption that a great institutional fighting Church
_must_ exist was never even questioned, when Anglicanism failed him
there was no other refuge but Rome.

He was certainly more logical than his friends who remained behind.
Anglo-Catholicism has its theoretical basis in a definition of
Catholicity which is repudiated by all other Catholics; its traditions
are largely legendary. But it is an eclectic system well suited to the
English character, and the distorted view of history which Newman
bequeathed to the party has enabled it to borrow much that is good from
different sides, without any sense of inconsistency. The idea of a
Divine society has been and is the inspiration of thousands of ardent
workers in the Anglican Church. It lifted the religion of many
Englishmen from the somewhat gross and bourgeois condition in which the
movement found it, to a pure and unworldly idealism. And, unlike most
other religious revivals, especially in this country, it has remained
remarkably free from unhealthy emotionalism and hysterics. The social
atmospher