the sole supremacy of Scripture; and it was no less natural to associate
the blessings of their imagined golden age with its avowed reverence for
the Church. If they appealed only to Scripture, they echoed the language
of men whom they abhorred; if they exalted the Church and Christian
antiquity, they sympathised with a period which they were resolved to
love. Their theological writings from the very beginning have too
plainly shown in this respect the force both of their sympathies and
their antipathies.

Thus previously disposed, and in their sense or apprehension of the evil
of their own times already flying as it were for refuge to the system of
times past, they were overtaken by the political storm of 1831, and the
two following years. That storm rattled loudly, and alarmed many who had
viewed the gathering of the clouds with hope and pleasure; no wonder,
then, if it produced a stormy effect upon those who viewed it as a mere
calamity, an evil monster bred out of an evil time, and fraught with
nothing but mischief. Farther, the government of the country was now,
for the first time for many years, in the hands of men who admired the
spirit of the age, nearly as much as Mr. Newman and his friends abhorred
it. Thus all things seemed combined against them: the spirit of the
period which they so hated was riding as it were upon the whirlwind;
they knew not where its violence might burst; and the government of the
country was, as they thought, driving wildly before it, without
attempting to moderate its fury. Already they were inclined to recognise
the signs of a national apostasy.

But from this point they have themselves written their own history.--Mr.
Percival's letter to the editor of the Irish Ecclesiastical Journal,
which was reprinted in the Oxford Herald of January 80, 1841, is really
a document of the highest value. It acquaints us, from the very best