acy as if it was that of a quack medicine, had lowered the general
respect for them. The last thing that could have been thought of was a
great religions revolution set in motion by tracts and leaflets, and
taking its character and name from them.

But the ring of these early Tracts was something very different from
anything of the kind yet known in England. They were clear, brief, stern
appeals to conscience and reason, sparing of words, utterly without
rhetoric, intense in purpose. They were like the short, sharp, rapid
utterances of men in pain and danger and pressing emergency. The first
one gave the keynote of the series. Mr. Newman "had out of his own head
begun the Tracts": he wrote the opening one in a mood which he has
himself described. He was in the "exultation of health restored and home
regained": he felt, he says, an "exuberant and joyous energy which he
never had before or since"; "his health and strength had come back to
him with such a rebound" that some of his friends did not know him. "I
had the consciousness that I was employed in that work which I had been
dreaming about, and which I felt to be so momentous and inspiring. I had
a supreme confidence in our cause; we were upholding that primitive
Christianity which was delivered for all time by the early teachers of
the Church, and which was registered and attested in the Anglican
formularies and by the Anglican divines. That ancient religion had
well-nigh faded out of the land through the political changes of the
last 150 years, and it must be restored. It would be, in fact, a second
Reformation--a better Reformation, for it would return, not to the
sixteenth century, but to the seventeenth. No time was to be lost, for
the Whigs had come to do their worst, and the rescue might come too
late. Bishoprics were already in course of suppression; Church property
was in course of confiscation; sees would be soon receiving unsuitable
occupants. We knew enough to begin preaching, and there was no one else
to preach. I felt," he goes on,[47] with a characteristic recollection
of his own experience when he started on his voyage with Froude in the
_Hermes_, "as on a vessel, which first gets under weigh, and then clears
out the deck, and stores away luggage and live stock into their proper
receptacles." The first three Tracts bear the date of 9th September
1833. They were the first public utterance of the movement. The opening
words of this famous series deserve t