substantial
reality in his sharpest distinctions, his capacity for taking trouble,
his serious and strong sense of the debt involved in the possession of
intellectual power--all this would have made him eminent, whatever the
times in which he lived.

But the times in which we live and what they bring with them mould most
of us; and the times shaped the course of the Provost of Oriel, and
turned his activity into a channel of obstinate and prolonged
antagonism, of resistance and protest, most conscientious but most
uncompromising, against two great successive movements, both of which
he condemned as unbalanced and recoiled from as revolutionary--the
Tractarian first, and then the Liberal movement in Oxford. Of the
former, it is not perhaps too much to say that he was in Oxford, at
least, the ablest and most hurtful opponent. From his counsels, from
his guarded and measured attacks, from the power given him by a partial
agreement against popular fallacies with parts of its views, from his
severe and unflinching determination, it received its heaviest blows
and suffered its greatest losses. He detested what he held to be its
anti-Liberal temper, and its dogmatic assertions; he resented its
taking out of his hands a province of theology which he and Whately had
made their own, that relating to the Church; he thought its tone of
feeling and its imaginative and poetical side exaggerated or childish;
and he could not conceive of its position except as involving palpable
dishonesty. No one probably guided with such clear and self-possessed
purpose that policy of extreme measures, which contributed to bring
about, if it did not itself cause, the break-up of 1845. Then succeeded
the great Liberal tide with its demands for extensive and immediate
change, its anti-ecclesiastical spirit, its scarcely disguised
scepticism, its daring philosophical and critical enterprises. By
degrees it became clear that the impatience and intolerance which had
purged the University of so many Churchmen had, after all, left the
Church movement itself untouched, to assume by degrees proportions
scarcely dreamed of when it began; but that what the defeat of the
Tractarians really had done was, to leave the University at the mercy
of Liberals to whom what had been called Liberalism in the days of
Whately was mere blind and stagnant Conservatism.

One war was no sooner over than the Provost of Oriel found another even
more formidable on his hands. The