e and Mr. Palmer. But they were bolder and keener spirits;
they pierced more deeply into the real condition and prospects of the
times; they were not disposed to smooth over and excuse what they
thought hollow and untrue, to put up with decorous compromises and
half-measures, to be patient towards apathy, negligence, or insolence.
They certainly had more in them of the temper of warfare. We know from
their own avowals that a great anger possessed them, that they were
indignant at the sacred idea of the Church being lost and smothered by
selfishness and stupidity; they were animated by the spirit which makes
men lose patience with abuses and their apologists, and gives them no
peace till they speak out. Mr. Newman felt that, though associations and
addresses might be very well, what the Church and the clergy and the
country wanted was plain speaking; and that plain speaking could not be
got by any papers put forth as joint manifestoes, or with the revision
and sanction of "safe" and "judicious" advisers. It was necessary to
write, and to write as each man felt: and he determined that each man
should write and speak for himself, though working in concert and
sympathy with others towards the supreme end--the cause and interests of
the Church.

And thus were born the _Tracts for the Times._[46] For a time Mr.
Palmer's line and Mr. Newman's line ran on side by side; but Mr.
Palmer's plan had soon done all that it could do, important as that was;
it gradually faded out of sight, and the attention of all who cared for,
or who feared or who hated the movement, was concentrated on the "Oxford
Tracts." They were the watchword and the symbol of an enterprise which
all soon felt to be a remarkable one--remarkable, if in nothing else, in
the form in which it was started. Great changes and movements have been
begun in various ways; in secret and underground communications, in
daring acts of self-devotion or violence, in the organisation of an
institution, in the persistent display of a particular temper and set of
habits, especially in the form of a stirring and enthralling eloquence,
in popular preaching, in fierce appeals to the passions. But though
tracts had become in later times familiar instruments of religious
action, they had, from the fashion of using them, become united in the
minds of many with rather disparaging associations. The pertinacity of
good ladies who pressed them on chance strangers, and who extolled their
effic