Teaching, ministering the word, was a thing of divine appointment, but
not so the mode of exercising it, either as to persons, forms, or
methods. Sacraments there were, signs and pledges of divine love and
help, in every action of life, in every sight of nature, and eminently
two most touching ones, recommended to Christians by the Redeemer
Himself; but except as a matter of mere order, one man might deal with
these as lawfully as another. Church history there was, fruitful in
interest, instruction, and warning; for it was the record of the long
struggle of the true idea of the Church against the false, and of the
fatal disappearance of the true before the forces of blindness and
wickedness.[7] Dr. Arnold's was a passionate attempt to place the true
idea in the light. Of the difficulties of his theory he made light
account. There was the vivid central truth which glowed through his soul
and quickened all his thoughts. He became its champion and militant
apostle. These doctrines, combined with his strong political liberalism,
made the Midlands hot for Dr. Arnold. But he liked the fighting, as he
thought, against the narrow and frightened orthodoxy round him. And he
was in the thick of this fighting when another set of ideas about the
Church--the ideas on which alone it seemed to a number of earnest and
anxious minds that the cause of the Church could be maintained--the
ideas which were the beginning of the Oxford movement, crossed his path.
It was the old orthodox tradition of the Church, with fresh life put
into it, which he flattered himself that he had so triumphantly
demolished. This intrusion of a despised rival to his own teaching about
the Church--teaching in which he believed with deep and fervent
conviction--profoundly irritated him; all the more that it came from men
who had been among his friends, and who, he thought, should have known
better.[8]

But neither Dr. Whately's nor Dr. Arnold's attempts to put the old