no rewards for turning to think about something else, could divert such
men as Voltaire and Diderot from their alert and strenuous search after
such truth as could be vouchsafed to their imperfect lights. A
catastrophe followed, it is true, but the misfortunes which attended it
were due more to the champions of tradition and authority than to the
soldiers of emancipation. Even in the case of the latter, they were due
to an inadequate doctrine, and not at all either to their sense of the
necessity of free speculation and inquiry, or to the intrepidity with
which they obeyed the promptings of that ennobling sense.

Perhaps the latest attempt of a considerable kind to suppress the
political spirit in non-political concerns was the famous movement which
had its birth a generation ago among the gray quadrangles and ancient
gardens of Oxford, 'the sweet city with her dreaming spires,' where
there has ever been so much detachment from the world, alongside of the
coarsest and fiercest hunt after the grosser prizes of the world. No one
has much less sympathy with the direction of the tractarian revival than
the present writer, in whose Oxford days the star of Newman had set, and
the sun of Mill had risen in its stead. And it is needful to distinguish
the fervid and strong spirits with whom the revival began from the
mimics of our later day. No doubt the mere occasion of tractarianism was
political. Its leaders were alarmed at the designs imputed to the newly
reformed parliament of disestablishing the Anglican Church. They asked
themselves the question, which I will put in their own words (_Tract_
i.)--'Should the government of the country so far forget their God as to
cut off the Church, to deprive it of its temporal honours and substance,
on what will you rest the claims to respect and attention which you make
upon your flock? In answering this question they speedily found
themselves, as might have been expected, at the opposite pole of thought
from things political. The whole strength of their appeal to members of