ABSTRACT
The Tractarian movement began, according to John Henry Newman, Vicar of St Mary's Church, Oxford, with an assize sermon preached in that church on 'National Apostasy' in July 1833 by John Keble, who was soon to be Professor of Poetry in the University. Among the Tractarians there was gradually arising a party which tended more and more to submission to the Roman Catholic Church, prominent among these newcomers being W. G. Ward, a fellow of Balliol College. The destruction of the Tractarian movement at Oxford had deprived it of its chance of securing its aims in the University. There was a weariness with religious strife, and the obsolete condition of the University had been revealed. As for the man who had done so much to make and break the movement, the elusive and puzzling Newman, an early post-Tractarian theologian, J. B. Mozley, writing just after Newman's secession, accurately divined the weak part of his career in the Church of England.
