On July 14, the day of the storming of the feudal Bastille, came the formal start of another revolution which had a quieter, but no less ominous foot. Mr. Keble mounted the pulpit stair of S. Mary-the-Virgin’s at Oxford, and preached his memorable Assize Sermon, which went to press under its title of _National Apostasy_. It served as a bugle to let men know that the work of recapturing Faith for England had begun, and that ‘things have come to the pretty pass’ (in Lord Melbourne’s celebrated expression), ‘that religion is to invade the sphere of private life!’ There had been long preliminary agitation, and much personal consciousness, especially on Newman’s part and on Froude’s, of ‘a work to do in England.’ Secular authority was on the eve of abolishing in Ireland ten Bishoprics, which, in that country at least, it is not pretended that it had not created. But there could be no guarantee whatever that secular authority, so gorged, would be sated; and operations in England being only too likely, it was time for the objectors to rise. Besides, the general change effected during 1832-3, in the relations of Church and State, was the most disheartening or enraging thing in the world to the sentinels at Oxford, according to individual mood. Up to then, ‘spiritual cases were referred by the Sovereign to the Court of Delegates, which contained a majority of spiritual persons. But in those years, the final appeal was transferred, by Act of Parliament, from the Court of Delegates to, first, the Privy Council, and then a Committee formed from it.’[143] In that bondage, a worthy legacy from the ‘unidea’d’ reign of William IV., the Church of England stood, and stands. Things had been bad enough before. Already Hurrell had cried out in private: ‘The Church can never right itself without a blow-up.’ This was more sanguine than Dr. Arnold’s simultaneous jeremiad, and quite as loyal. ‘The Church as it now stands,’ he said, ‘no human power can save.’ But now Froude’s song is: ‘If the State would but kick us off!’ caught from Lamennais and the great democrat-Ultramontane agitation in France. The wish is translated into the weighty and telling pages of the long essay which stands first in his _Remains_, and which he wrote in 1833. _More suo_, he uses in it all the original documents which he can lay his hands on, and furthers his argument by italicisation and capitalisation of leading words and phrases. Ambrose Phillipps de Lisle once remarked that the step of throwing off the supremacy of the State had been dreamed of, in England, only by the Nonjurors, and ‘the first authors of the _Tracts for the Times_.’ Has it not been dreamed of ever since? The deification of a Privy Council was the occasion, not the cause, of the High Anglican onset, itself but one movement of several against the intrenchments of British materialism, but distinct from them all, inasmuch as Scott and Coleridge, riding just before, with the armed protest of Carlyle, of