Sermon at Oxford, in 1833, he gave utterance to his grief and to his alarm for the Church in a discourse which he subsequently published with the title of "National Apostasy." Dr. Newman says, in his "Apologia," that he has ever considered and kept the day of the publication of that sermon as the start of the religious movement of 1833. It would be folly to impeach this statement of one so intimately acquainted with the origin of the agitation of which he soon became the recognized leader. We must, therefore, concur with the opinion of Sir J. T. Coleridge in regarding John Keble as its true and primary author. John Keble's sermon could not have become the germ of an excitement which made the Church of England rock to and fro like a fabric shaken by an earthquake but for the disturbed state of the public mind and the sad spiritual condition of that Church. She had been blind to the great opportunity to renew her spiritual life, and to gain an imperishable hold on the middle and poorer classes, offered her when John Wesley stirred the heart of England. That great man's love for the Church inclined him to turn the spiritual tides which flowed through his influence into channels adapted to raise her into a genuinely reformed Church. But she rejected him, and he created Methodism. That rejection on her part was followed by the growth of a formalism that threatened to reduce her to the condition of the Church in Sardis when the divine Head of the Church said to her, "Thou hast a name that thou livest, and art dead." True, there were a faithful few among her clergy known as Evangelicals, who had caught the spirit of Methodism, of Leigh Richmond, of Cecil, of Newton, etc., and who toiled as earnestly for souls as the prevailing formalism in Episcopalian circles would permit. But these men held very liberal ecclesiastical theories, which were offensive to men of HighChurch proclivities, who regarded them, not as friends, but as enemies of the Church. Froude illustrates their estimate of such with the fact, that in his brother's family the evangelical clergy were spoken of as "fellows who turned up the whites. of their eyes and said, 'Lawd."" Hence, when a few men at Oxford, like Keble, Newman, Hurrell Froude, Pusey, Rose, Palmer, etc., turned their attention to the prevailing condition of the National Church, and noted her general contemptuous indifference to the spiritual side of religion, the growth of

outspoken unbelief, and particularly the increasing irreverence for Church forms, and the rise of a disposition to favor the disestablishment of the Church, they began to look upon the Established Church as "a ship in danger of being scuttled and sunk" under the "combined attacks of liberal unbelievers, rationalists, Dissenters of every variety, and parties and schools in the Church who also had their future." To ward off this threatening catastrophe they thought it "necessary to believe more," to aim at giving the Church "a more catholic form and manner;" in a word, while retaining her general forms, to introduce into her life what Keble called "primitive notions regarding apostolical succession," etc. The et cetera contained, either germinally or in process of active development, their Sacramentalism, their priestly conception of the ministerial office, the confessional, absolution, the mass, symbolical vestments, and, in the cases of Newman, a few of his personal disciples, and a small band of somewhat noted clergymen, departure into the Papal Church. These, with the claim, asserted in an address of Tractarian laymen to the Archbishop of Canterbury, "that the consecration of the State by the public maintenance of the Christian religion is the paramount duty of a Christian people," were the doginas which, if made dominant in the Church, would clothe her in robes of beauty, make her "comely as Jerusalem," "and terrible as an army with banners."

Keble's relation to the Tractarian agitation now became that of an active promoter of the movement. He followed up his Assize Sermon with a proposition to form an association to promote the circulation of the notions aforesaid, by means of tracts. This proposal he urged on his personal friends, both by correspondence and conversation. The result was, that the Rev. W. Palmer and Hurrell Froude, meeting in the Common Room of Oriel, resolved to form such an association. This resolution they communicated to Keble, Rose, and Percival. Newman was not in England at the time, and was not present, therefore, at the first meeting of these friends, at Hadleigh, in 1833. Other conferences were held at Oriel shortly after, at which Newman was present. The first result of these interviews was a circular sent to all parts of England, in the autumn of that year, defining the objects of a proposed association to "maintain pure and inviolate the doctrines, the services, and

the discipline of the Church . . . and to afford Churchmen an opportunity . . . of co-operating together on a large scale."

The excited state of the popular mind at that critical period is made obvious by the fact that, in the following February, seven thousand clergymen signed an address to the Archbishop of Canterbury, pledging their support to the primate in carrying into effect such reforms as would "tend to revive the discipline of ancient times." In still more forcible terms 250,000 lay heads of families also addressed the archbishop, declaring their adherence to the sentiments of the clerical address. Both these addresses were counterblasts from the Church, called forth, not by the circular alone, but chiefly by the hostility of High-Churchmen to those Parliamentary measures which had made Dissenters, Roman Catholics, and Churchmen political equals.

The tracts, so famous for a time, but now lost in the limbo of oblivion, were already in the field. Only four-of the ninety which ultimately composed the series are attributed to Keble by his biographer. Both he and his associates wrote as their individual tastes and judgments suggested, without mutual supervision or restraint. After originating the movement, Keble naturally yielded its leadership to the more acute and practical mind of his friend Newman. Nature had not endowed him with the qualities necessary to leadership. He was too shy, too much in love with seclusion, too fond of living, as Mozley puts it, "in a calm, sweet atmosphere of his own;" too lacking in power to debate with men who held opinions opposite to his own. Mozley says: "He very soon lost his temper in discussion; . . . there was really no getting on with Keble without entire agreement, that is, submission." Besides these constitutional disqualifications, he was intellectually unfitted to guide a great practical movement. Froude says, not unjustly, that "he was not far-seeing; his mind moved in the groove of a single order of ideas. He could not place himself in the position of persons who disagreed with him, and thus he could not see the strong points of their arguments. . . . Circumstances independent of himself could alone have raised him into a leader of a party. For the more delicate functions of such an office he was constitutionally unfit."

On the other hand, Newman was a born leader of men. FOURTH SERIES, VOL. XXXV.—32

Despite the vagueness of his ideas, his acknowledged indisposition to the textual study of Holy Writ, his conceit that every event, good or ill, was a special voice from Providence calling him to action, and his fanatical belief that all his public movements, including his renunciation of Protestantism and connection with the Papal Church, were directed by "special inspiration," he had many great qualities. He was an original thinker, an observer of men, an omnivorous reader, and his mind ranged over every field of thought. He was gifted with a wonderfully impressive personality. His belief in his theological creed

was so real that none who heard him could either doubt his sincerity, or his indifference to the good or evil consequences which might come to him because of his utterances. In fact, he thought and spoke like one who neither knew nor cared whither his creed might lead him. Hence both his writings. and preaching "pierced into the heart and mind, and there remained." Add to these qualities an uncommon degree of gentleness, and a power to always say something real and worth thinking of in conversation, and it is easy to see why this remarkable man, and not John Keble who started the movement, soon became its acknowledged leader. Had the poet stood at its helm, it would not have developed its tendency toward Romanism so quickly as it did under Newman's direction, because the poet, unlike Newman, was governed more by his intuitions and feelings than by the logic of principles. Nevertheless, the principles of the High-Church party do logically lead to Rome; but whether that party, influenced by worldly considerations and national traditions, will ignore, as Keble did, the logic of its principles and be content with the Church of England deformed into an image of Rome without its pope, or whether it will finally secede to Rome itself, it were folly to predict.

Keble's father died in 1835. This event was followed by his acceptance, a few months later, of the living of Hursley, and by his marriage. The quiet of this desirable parish and its pastoral duties delighted him. His hours of leisure he spent in working on the "Library of the Fathers," then in course of publication at the Tractarian press. But this delicious quiet was disturbed, in 1841, by the publication of Tract No. 90, written by his friend Newman. This famous tract fell like a bomb on

the National Church. Its explosion shook the Church and alarmed the nation. Its purpose was to show that the Thirtynine Articles of the Church of England were not opposed to those dogmas and practices of the Roman Catholic Church which English Protestantism had long ago discarded; but which the High-Church party was trying to revive within its pale. "It was written," says Froude, that its author "might see whether the Church of England would tolerate Catholic doctrine." Its arguments were not easy to answer, since those articles were originally molded with a design to make the bridge from Romanism to Protestantism wide enough to permit all, except the most conscientious and bigoted Romanists, to cross from the one to the other. The wide-spread, violent storm which arose was England's reply to Newman's problem. It told him she would not as yet tolerate a Romanized Established Church. Oxford, notwithstanding the great influence of the Tractarians in her colleges, gave voice to that response by publicly censuring the tract.

Keble acted a manly part during this excitement. He had read and approved the tract before it was printed. This prior approval, instead of concealing, as he might, he openly avowed, as did his friend Pusey also. These men did nobly when they volunteered to share its odium with its author. Four years later, Newman, faithful to its principles, went over to the Papal Church, claiming that he "had reached a strong intellectual conviction that the Roman Catholic system and Christianity were convertible terms," and that his "submission of mind and heart to Rome" was given him by special revelation, and that he found in her infallible doctrinal authority a repose of faith he could not otherwise attain. Was Keble inconsistent or cowardly when he refused to follow his friend and leader to Rome? Neither. He believed in the dogmas of Newman's tract, consequently he wished to introduce certain Papal usages into the English Church, not however to lead her back to the Roman Church, but to practices which he had persuaded himself were sanctioned by the ancient Roman Church before her division into the Eastern and Western Churches. Keble had misled himself by using the writings of the early Fathers as the lights by which he studied the primitive Church. Had he viewed her in the clear light of Scripture, he would have been,