immediate or
more attractive, have thrown into the background what is severed from us
by the interval of half a century. Still that movement had a good deal
to do with what is going on in everyday life among us now; and feelings
both of hostility to it, and of sympathy with it, are still lively and
keen among those to whom religion is a serious subject, and even among
some who are neutral in the questions which it raised, but who find in
it a study of thought and character. I myself doubt whether the interest
of it is so exhausted as is sometimes assumed. If it is, these pages
will soon find their appropriate resting-place. But I venture to present
them, because, though a good many judgments upon the movement have been
put forth, they have come mostly from those who have been more or less
avowedly opposed to it.[1] The men of most account among those who were
attracted by it and represented it have, with one illustrious exception,
passed away. A survivor of the generation which it stirred so deeply may
not have much that is new to tell about it. He may not be able to affect
much the judgment which will finally be accepted about it. But the fact
is not unimportant, that a number of able and earnest men, men who both
intellectually and morally would have been counted at the moment as part
of the promise of the coming time, were fascinated and absorbed by it.
It turned and governed their lives, lifting them out of custom and
convention to efforts after something higher, something worthier of what
they were. It seemed worth while to exhibit the course of the movement
as it looked to these men--as it seemed to them viewed from the inside.
My excuse for adding to so much that has been already written is, that I
was familiar with many of the chief actors in the movement. And I do not
like that the remembrance of friends and associates, men of singular
purity of life and purpose, who raised the tone of living round them,
and by their example, if not by their ideas, recalled both Oxford and
the Church to a truer sense of their responsibilities, should, because
no one would take the trouble to put things on record, "pass away like a
dream."

The following pages were, for the most part, written, and put into
printed shape, in 1884 and 1885. Since they were written, books have
appeared, some of them important ones, going over most of the same
ground; while yet more volumes may be expected. We have had ingenious
theories of the gen