the young churchman which it is easier to remember than to analyze. A feeling of Church unity and of corporate Church life gradually took the place of the anxious and often selfish individualism that was then the prevailing characteristic of the more earnest and religious minds of the time. It began to

be felt that the Church of England was not merely the religious organization that supplied the spiritual needs of the passing age and generation; it had its own splendid history; it was a part and branch of the great primitive and Apostolic Church; its ministers drew their long line in unbroken succession from him, and such as him, on whom the Lord had built his Church; all that fellowship that the isolated spirit had dimly and almost hopelessly longed for was brought near; the unconsciously lost had at last become realized and found.

These feelings were not by any means confined to the young. Though the effect of the "Christian Year," and of the views of which it was an exponent (for these things were then "in the air''), was principally observable in the young, yet it was perfectly clear that the greater portion of the old-fashioned High Church party were affected by the new teaching. It has been far too commonly assumed that the High Church party of fifty years ago were utterly inert and unsympathetic. This was certainly not the case in the provinces. Church life was no doubt low and feeble, the professional had almost entirely taken the place of the spiritual. Intercommunion was very limited, except through four-o'clock dinner parties and slowly circulating book-clubs; still in every neighborhood there were quiet and thoughtful men who read the Caroline divines, and on whose study-tables books even of the strain of Walton's Polyglot were to be found far more frequently than in these days of high pressure and self-styled enlightenment. All this honorable body of men seemed to awaken as out of a long sleep, and to welcome the new thoughts and new stirrings of Church life of which the "Christian Year" was the earliest exponent. The Church of England was felt to have a history, and to reach backward to that pure and primitive Church on which it claimed to base its principles and practice. This Church realization soon showed itself in the quiet and honorable body of men of whom we are speaking-these High and

Dry, as they are commonly styled by the somewhat assumptive churchmen of our own times. Sunday-schools began to reflect a little higher teaching; the old parish church became something more to the higher spirits of the place than the monument of a past, with which the present had neither sympathy nor conection; the sacraments were slowly felt to be something more than prescribed rites; the Church at large a little more than a mere establishment. The old-fashioned High Church party were the first silently to welcome, and even, to a certain degree, to assimilate the new teaching, and when, four or five years later, the "Tracts for the Times" finally broke the spell of apathy and establishmentarian routine, there were found many in every diocese who were ready to welcome the revival of Church principles, and, as we have already termed it, the Church-realization which these remarkable papers so strikingly called out. The seed fell to a great degree on partially prepared ground. The same thoughts that found their exquisite and harmonious expression in the "Christian Year" had been for some time silently rising in many and true hearts, and, by the nature of the case, pre-eminently in the old historic High Church party, the genuine sons of the Reformation, and the truest, because, historically considered, the most lineal representatives of the Church of England. We say not this in any derogation of the other great party of the Church. The Evangelical party, by the blessing of the Holy Ghost, had almost exclusively, in the past fifty years, sustained the holy and blessed work of the revivification of the Church of England. They had brought back life; they had made salvation to be felt as something real and individual; they had rendered the Redeemer's own vital words as to personal conversion a deep subjective conviction and reality; they had been as the life-bearing wind that had swept over the dry bones of the valley-all this they had been, and may they be forever blessed, and honored for this work; but representatives of the Church of England in its historical aspects they never had been, nor indeed ever cared or claimed to be. The historical representatives of the Church of England were then, whatever they may have become in the future, that old High Church party-moderate, loyal, and staunchly anti-Ro

manist-that, at the time we are now considering, were at last awakening from their long slumber, and preparing, hardly consciously, again to take their place in the history and developments of the national Church.

It is, we are persuaded, an utter mistake to refer the commencement of the great movement we are now considering simply to Oxford and the "Tracts for the Times." The principles of which these Tracts were to a great extent the expressions had been showing themselves for at least ten years. before, among quiet spirits, and in the almost unconscious. aspirations of those silent hopers and thinkers who were realizing that their mother Church had a life and a historygrand and chivalrous as that of any local Church-in the long annals of the past. To them the "Christian Year" spoke as with the voice of the Church they loved so well. Part of its meaning and message they understood and realized; the other part they understood not, or at least only fully appreciated after many days. What they understood and felt in their inmost soul was that revelation of the Church, its oneness and its continuity, which reminded each English churchman that he belonged to the mystical body of Christ by virtue of his membership with a local community that had been. formed and founded by Apostolic men, if not by Apostles themselves, scarcely more, it may be, than a generation after the Lord had left the earth he came to save. This they realized; this they recognized as the expression of their longgathering heart persuasions; this they soon carried out in life and practice. What they understood not was the deeper and more esoteric teaching which, as Dr. Newman rightly reminds us, is certainly to be recognized in the "Christian Year"-that which, for want of a better expression, we may call its sacramental teaching-the teaching that material phenomena are alike the types and instruments of real things unseen, and that the outward is often the appointed channel and vehicle of the inward and the divine. This doctrine, which certainly may be felt, if not traced in almost every deeper page of the sympathetic volume, was not appreciated at the time of which we are now speaking. Nay, it may be doubted whether it was consciously realized by the sweet singer himself. It was

a latent element in the spiritual influences of the time, but it was not brought out with any degree of distinctness, and under any practical aspects, till several, even many, years afterwards. A whole generation intervened between the date of the publication of the "Christian Year" and that of the very differently received treatise on Eucharistical Adoration.

Bearing this very certain truth in our minds, viz., that the germs of the great movement were already in many souls, even before the appearance of the "Christian Year," we may now proceed to trace its more distinct growth and development. Let it not be forgotten that Dr. Newman himself has always spoken of Keble as the true and primary author of the movement. And even this authorship must be limited to a first expression of what many of the old High Church party were beginning to feel already mingling with their higher hopes and aspirations.

We now pass over five or six years fruitful in development, and signal for the various and momentous changes, general and political, which they had borne with them to the Church and realm of England. The great Reform agitation had unsettled men's minds; the bill for the suppression of several bishoprics in the Irish Church was passing Parliament; the danger of still greater changes was by many deemed to be imminent; fears, perhaps to a great degree exaggerated, and even unreasonable, as to attempts to liberalize the whole Church were everywhere in the air. If the Church was to be saved, it was now or never that a supreme effort was to be made. And it was made. A few earnest and ardent men, of whom Dr. Newman was the representative-the presbyter who in the first Tract says that he must speak-combined together, and in September, 1833, the "Tracts for the Times," "by members of the University of Oxford," announced that the effort had commenced. They at once announced the nature of their undertaking. It was no less than to stem the tide of liberalism, or, rather, to demonstrate, if the tide did overwhelm the establishment and deprive the Church of "its temporal honors and substance," that the English churchman had the apostolical descent and apostolical succession (both these expressions occur in the first Tract) whereon to rely, and that, resting on these,

it was now for him manfully to bear his part in the conflict. The main principle on which he was to act is so strangely antithetical to that on which the so-called churchman acts now, that it is worth while transcribing the words, if only to show how utterly untenable is the claim of the modern Ritualist to be a true descendant of the loyal and obedient men who were now speaking to the Church by these memorable papers. "Exalt our Holy Fathers the Bishops, as representatives of the Apostles, and the Angels of the Churches," was the advice of the author of the first Tract; "disobey and vilify them," is the counsel of the modern Ritualist, when they act or speak contrary to your own opinions and your own interpretation of the formularies of the Church.

II. Into the various questions and controversies which these powerful Tracts called forth it is not our object to enter in the present article, as we are concerned rather with the evolution of the germinal thoughts than with the mere controversial history. We may, however, here pause carefully to analyze what we know, from the leading author himself, to have been the three leading principles which were in the minds of the writers when the Tracts first made their appearance.

First, The principle of definite dogmatic teaching generally, as opposed to the liberal opinions which we learn (from a narrative published ten years afterwards) were everywhere current, and were beginning deeply to infect the Church itself. "Pamphlets," says Mr. Palmer in his Narrative (Lond., 1843), "were in wide circulation recommending the abolition of the creeds (at least in public worship), and especially urging the expulsion of the Athanasian Creed, the removal of all mention of the Blessed Trinity, of the doctrine of baptismal regeneration, of the practice of absolution. In fact, there was not a single stone of the sacred edifice of the Church which was not examined, shaken, undermined, by a meddling curiosity." It was to meet this serious state of things that the first principle was tacitly laid down as that which was to influence and dominate the whole. Liberalism could only be met by fixed and definite teaching; loose opinion by formulated truth and by dogma.

Secondly, Definite teaching, especially in reference to the