some thirty years ago! It was
directed, as any one who reads Dr. Newman's _Apology_[411] may see,
against what in one word may be called "Liberalism." Liberalism
prevailed; it was the appointed force to do the work of the hour; it was
necessary, it was inevitable that it should prevail. The Oxford movement
was broken, it failed; our wrecks are scattered on every shore:--

"Quae regio in terris nostri non plena laboris?"[412]

But what was it, this liberalism, as Dr. Newman saw it, and as it really
broke the Oxford movement? It was the great middle-class liberalism,
which had for the cardinal points of its belief the Reform Bill of
1832,[413] and local self-government, in politics; in the social sphere,
free-trade, unrestricted competition, and the making of large industrial
fortunes; in the religious sphere, the Dissidence of Dissent and the
Protestantism of the Protestant religion. I do not say that other and
more intelligent forces than this were not opposed to the Oxford
movement: but this was the force which really beat it; this was the
force which Dr. Newman felt himself fighting with; this was the force
which till only the other day seemed to be the paramount force in this
country, and to be in possession of the future; this was the force whose
achievements fill Mr. Lowe[414] with such inexpressible admiration, and
whose rule he was so horror-struck to see threatened. And where is this
great force of Philistinism now? It is thrust into the second rank, it
is become a power of yesterday, it has lost the future. A new power has
suddenly appeared, a power which it is impossible yet to judge fully,
but which is certainly a wholly different force from middle-class
liberalism; different in its cardinal points of belief, different in its
tendencies in every sphere. It loves and admires neither the legislation
of middle-class Parliaments, nor the local self-government of
middle-class vestries, nor the unrestricted competition of middle-class
industrialists, nor the dissidence of middle-class Dissent and the
Protestantism of middle-class Protestant religion. I am not now praising
this new force, or saying that its own ideals are better; all I say is,
that they are wholly different. And who will estimate how much the
currents of feeling created by Dr. Newman's movements, the keen desire
for beauty and sweetness which it nourished, the deep aversion it
manifested to the hardness and vulgarity of middle-class liberalism, t