Ruskin, and of Emerson to follow, bore no known emblems of a Christian Crusade. The hour of latent dissatisfaction had crept up to flood-water mark. As we are well aware, no great movement springs full-armed from the brain of any local Jupiter; and this one was a birth, and only a birth, of 1833. For years previously, semi-active agitation, fed by the feeling all over the country, was quite patent and open. There was much popular stir and screaming, all making, no doubt, for righteousness and right ideas. The thinkers, the Universities, were far clearer as to what they did not mean, or wish, than as to what they did. ‘Newman and I are both so consequential,’ Froude writes in a leave-taking letter of 1832, ‘that we fear all sorts of things going wrong while we are away.’ It is perfectly true that these men did not create, but evoke, the religious spirit of their time. The Chinese narcissus bourgeons at a miraculous rate from a bulb a year old. The Platonic theory of individual knowledge should be extended to meet the case of nations: they, too, remember, and have rhythms which antedate the conscious life, and recur throughout it. We are always forgetting the commonplace that a spirit rather than intelligent persons with a polity, a law rather than its visible agencies, is the true operative force. Well-meaning students of the Movement have looked upon one name or another as the generating cause, whereas the real leader is ever nameless, like Odysseus in the cave of his baffled giant. There was ‘an unseen agitator,’ as Newman knew. His earliest friend of undergraduate days, whom he called, afterwards, _Princeps Apostolicorum_, was, for one, independently aware of it, as soon as events began. ‘… What a wonderful drama is going on,’ Mr. Bowden[144] writes, ‘if we could but trace it as a whole, and know the multiplied bearings of each varied scene upon our nation and our Church! However, we can see our own parts, and that must for the present suffice us.’ Newman confessed the same wide vision, writing later in that year to Froude: ‘I do verily believe a spirit is abroad at present, and we are but blind tools, not knowing whither we are going. I mean, a flame seems arising in so many places as to show no mortal incendiary is at work, though this man or that may have more influence in shaping the course, or modifying the nature of the flame.’