me with these good men in London,--some of them men of
the highest principle, and far from influenced by what we used to call
Erastianism,--was to put down the Tracts. I, as their editor, and mainly
their author, was of course willing to give way. Keble and Froude
advocated their continuance strongly, and were angry with me for
consenting to stop them. Mr. Palmer shared the anxiety of his own
friends; and, kind as were his thoughts of us, he still not unnaturally
felt, for reasons of his own, some fidget and nervousness at the course
which his Oriel friends were taking. Froude, for whom he had a real
liking, took a high tone in his project of measures for dealing with
bishops and clergy, which must have shocked and scandalized him
considerably. As for me, there was matter enough in the early Tracts to
give him equal disgust; and doubtless I much tasked his generosity, when
he had to defend me, whether against the London dignitaries or the
country clergy. Oriel, from the time of Dr. Copleston to Dr. Hampden,
had had a name far and wide for liberality of thought; it had received a
formal recognition from the Edinburgh Review, if my memory serves me
truly, as the school of speculative philosophy in England; and on one
occasion, in 1833, when I presented myself, with some of the first
papers of the Movement, to a country clergyman in Northamptonshire, he
paused awhile, and then, eyeing me with significance, asked "Whether
Whately was at the bottom of them?"

Mr. Perceval wrote to me in support of the judgment of Mr. Palmer and
the dignitaries. I replied in a letter, which he afterwards published.
"As to the Tracts," I said to him (I quote my own words from his
Pamphlet), "every one has his own taste. You object to some things,
another to others. If we altered to please every one, the effect would
be spoiled. They were not intended as symbols _e cathedra_ but as the
expression of individual minds; and individuals, feeling strongly, while
on the one hand, they are incidentally faulty in mode or language, are
still peculiarly effective. No great work was done by a system; whereas
systems rise out of individual exertions. Luther was an individual. The
very faults of an individual excite attention; he loses, but his cause
(if good and he powerful-minded) gains. This is the way of things; we
promote truth by a self-sacrifice."

The visit which I made to the Northamptonshire Rector was only one of a
series of similar expedients,