Perhaps the latest attempt of a considerable kind to suppress the political spirit in non-political concerns was the famous movement which had its birth a generation ago among the gray quadrangles and ancient gardens of Oxford, 'the sweet city with her dreaming spires,' where there has ever been so much detachment from the world, alongside of the coarsest and fiercest hunt after the grosser prizes of the world. No one has much less sympathy with the direction of the tractarian revival than the present writer, in whose Oxford days the star of Newman had set, and the sun of Mill had risen in its stead. And it is needful to distinguish the fervid and strong spirits with whom the revival began from the mimics of our later day. No doubt the mere occasion of tractarianism was political. Its leaders were alarmed at the designs imputed to the newly reformed parliament of disestablishing the Anglican Church. They asked themselves the question, which I will put in their own words (_Tract_ i.)--'Should the government of the country so far forget their God as to cut off the Church, to deprive it of its temporal honours and substance, on what will you rest the claims to respect and attention which you make upon your flock? In answering this question they speedily found themselves, as might have been expected, at the opposite pole of thought from things political. The whole strength of their appeal to members of the Church lay in men's weariness of the high and dry optimism, which presents the existing order of things as the noblest possible, and the undisturbed way of the majority as the way of salvation. Apostolical succession and Sacramentalism may not have been in themselves progressive ideas. The spirit which welcomed them had at least the virtue of taking away from Caesar the things that are not Caesar's.