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ENGLAND mented by voluntary subscriptions. A certain number of these priests sought and found work on the English Mission. By far the greater part of them returned home when Napoleon had concluded his Concordat with the Holy See and reestablished Christian worship in France. Of those who remained a few were irreconcilably dissatisfied with the new ecclesiastical arrangements in their country. They were known as Blanchardists, from their leader Blanchard, and were a source of much annoyance to the vicars Apostolic. The heroic Milner was especially prominent in combating them, and in asserting the rights of the Holy See. That strenuous champion of orthodoxy had, at the same time, to contend with Catholics of his own nationality. The spirit which had animated the Catholic Committee and the Cisalpine Club was by no means extinct, and led to the formation, in 1808, of what was called a "Select Board" which professed as its object the organization of an association for "the general advantage of the Catholic body". That "general advantage" turned out to be the further removal of Catholic disabilities, and the price which the Select Board was prepared to pay for such removal was the vesting in the Crown of an effectual negative upon the appointment of Catholic bishops—commonly called the Veto. The Irish episcopate unanimously opposed this arrangement, and passed a vote of thanks to Dr. Milner for his "apostolic constancy" in withstanding it. On April 30, 1813, Grattan brought forward a Catholic relief bill in the House of Commons, which substantially provided for the Veto. It was thrown out on the third reading. Eight years later a similar bill passed the House of Cowmons, but was rejected by the House of Lords. Of the eventual emancipation of Catholics Dr. Milner had no doubt. Twelve years before his death, which took place in 1826, he assured the pope that it was certain to come. But he would not purchase it by the slightest sacrifice of Catholic principle. In 1826 a declaration was put forward by all the vicars Apostolic of England explanatory of various articles of the Catholic Faith greatly misunderstood by many Protestants. It was widely read and doubtless helped to remove prejudice. In the same year Sidney Smith published his masterly "Letter on the Catholic Question". Not, however, till March, 1829, was the long desired boon conceded to Catholics. It was wrung, so to speak, from statesmen who had always opposed it. The Clare election convinced Peel and the Duke of Wellington, who were then in power, that the settlement of the Irish question was a political necessity. The duke reminded the House of Lords that when the Irish Rebellion of 1798 had been suppressed the Legislative Union had been proposed in the next year mainly for the purpose of introducing this very measure of concession, and not obscurely intimated his opinion that further to refuse it must lead to civil war. This relief bill passed both Houses by large majorities. The king's consent was reluctantly given, and the Emancipation Act became law. It should be noted that before the passing of the Emancipation Act the friction of which we have been obliged to speak, between certain prominent members of the Catholic laity and the vicars Apostolic, was virtually at an end. The Cisalpine Club still existed; but, as Monsignor Ward remarks (Catholic London A Century Ago, p. 38), "there was very little Cisalpinism in it". This was largely due to the personal influence of Dr. Poynter, Vicar Apostolic of the London District, whose gentleness and meekness triumphed where the fiery zeal of Milner failed.

When the nineteenth century opened, the Catholics of Great Britain were, to quote Cardinal Newman's words, "a gens lucifuga, found in corners and alleys and cellars and the house tops, or in the recesses of the country". Their chapels were few and far between, and were purposely placed in quarters where they were unlikely to attract observation. It was common to locate them in mews, and in their exterior they were hardly distinguishable from the adjoining stables. George Eliot has well remarked in Felix Holt, "Till the agitation about the Catholics in '29, rural Englishmen had hardly known more of Catholics than of the fossil mammoths." Their political emancipation was the beginning of a great change in their social condition. "The steps were higher that men took"; their ostracism began to pass away. Moreover, the reaction which had followed the French Revolution had told in favor of Catholicism even in England. Chateaubriand 's "Genie du christianisme" had a world-wide influence, and some of the historical novels of Sir Walter Scott, however deficient in accuracy, presented a much kinder view of the ancient faith than had been commonly taken in Protestant countries. In the history of the Catholic Church in England since 1829 two events require special notice. One was the rise of what is called "The Oxford Movement". Cardinal Newman used to date that movement from the year 1833, when Keble preached at Oxford his famous assize sermon on "National Apostasy". But indeed it was simply the bodying-forth of tendencies which had been long in the air. The old notion of the medieval period as "a millennium of darkness" had passed away; and from the contemplation of its masterpieces in architecture and painting men proceeded to study its intellectual and spiritual life. They were also led to investigate, in the light of facts and first principles, the claims of Anglicanism. No doubt the "Lectures on the History and Structure of the Prayer Book of the Church of England" delivered by Dr. Lloyd, the Regius Professor of Divinity at Oxford, set many of his hearers thinking, Newman among them. But the object of the leaders of the Oxford Movement at its beginning was not to examine, but to defend, the Anglican Church. This was the intention of the "Tracts for the Times", begun in 1833. It is not here possible, or indeed necessary, to follow the course of the movement, which, as it went on, departed ever more and more widely from the standards—even the highest—of Anglicanism, and approximated ever more and more closely to the Catholic ideal. It culminated in the famous "Tract XC", the theme of which was that the Thirty-nine Articles were susceptible of a Catholic interpretation and could be accepted by one who held all the dogmas of the Council of Trent. Of course the movement greatly interested Catholics, and by no one was it more closely and anxiously followed than by Dr. Wiseman, who had made the acquaintance of Newman and Froude upon the occasion of their visiting Rome in 1833. In September, 1840, Wiseman arrived at Oscott from Rome—where almost all his previous life had been spent—to take up his residence as president of that college and Vicar Apostolic of the Midland District. He felt from the day of his arrival there, as he wrote in a memorandum eight years afterwards, that a new era had commenced in England. To help forward that era was the end to which his great gifts and his large heart were utterly devoted. The majority of hereditary English Catholics were much prejudiced against the Tractarians. Dr. Lingard warned Bishop Wiseman not to trust them. Dr. Griffiths, the Vicar Apostolic of the London District, used similar language. But Wiseman did trust them. He held that Catholic principles, if honestly entertained, must lead to the Catholic Church, and he fully believed in the honesty of Newman and Newman's followers. How Newman was influenced by a paper of his on the Donatists, published in the Dublin Review in 1839, is well known. The Oxford Movement had been directed to the impossible aim of unprotestantizing the Anglican Church. Newman and many of his friends came gradually to see that the aim was impossible. The kindly light which they had so faithfully followed step by step led them on to Rome.