accidents that must always eat the edges of any systematic
circumference, it may still be said that the Utilitarians held the fort.

Of the Oxford Movement what remains most strongly in the Victorian Epoch
centres round the challenge of Newman, its one great literary man. But
the movement as a whole had been of great significance in the very
genesis and make up of the society: yet that significance is not quite
easy immediately to define. It was certainly not æsthetic ritualism;
scarcely one of the Oxford High Churchmen was what we should call a
Ritualist. It was certainly not a conscious reaching out towards Rome:
except on a Roman Catholic theory which might explain all our unrests by
that dim desire. It knew little of Europe, it knew nothing of Ireland,
to which any merely Roman Catholic revulsion would obviously have
turned. In the first instance, I think, the more it is studied, the more
it would appear that it was a movement of mere religion as such. It was
not so much a taste for Catholic dogma, but simply a hunger for dogma.
For dogma means the serious satisfaction of the mind. Dogma does not
mean the absence of thought, but the end of thought. It was a revolt
against the Victorian spirit in one particular aspect of it; which may
roughly be called (in a cosy and domestic Victorian metaphor) having
your cake and eating it too. It saw that the solid and serious
Victorians were fundamentally frivolous--because they were
fundamentally inconsistent.

A man making the confession of any creed worth ten minutes' intelligent
talk, is always a man who gains something and gives up something. So
long as he does both he can create: for he is making an outline and a
shape. Mahomet created, when he forbade wine but allowed five wives: he
created a very big thing, which we have still to deal with. The first
French Republic created, when it affirmed property and abolished