122 MANUAL OF INSTRUCTION 



tion from the established Church. The object of 

 3.11 their efforts was to infuse new warmth and 

 earnestness, and to reach the great masses of the 

 people v;ho were ignorant of the Gospel. It is to 

 be ever lamented that their work was needed, and 

 that their followers have cut loose from the Church 

 to which these men were so strongly attached. 

 The movement inaugurated by the Wesleys would 

 hardly have taken place, had the Church been as 

 warmly in earnest as she is to-day. The date of 

 the rise of Methodism is 1739. 



Another movement, also beginning at Oxford, 

 about 1833, and having at once, and through all 

 the years since, a great influence upon the English 

 Church, is known as the Tractarian movement. 

 Certain professors at Oxford, among them Drs. 

 Pusey and Newman, and others well known through- 

 out England, united in publishing a number of 

 tracts upon topics connected with the faith and 

 practice of the Church. Their object, they declared, 

 was to show that the Church of England was op- 

 posed equally to the views of the Papacy and to 

 those of the ultra-Protestants. They labored partic- 

 ularly to interpret the thirty-nine Articles in such 

 a way that they would lose their distinctively Pro- 

 testant character, and, as was said, be more in 

 accordance with the spirit of the primitive ages. 



These tracts excited great commotion, and led 

 to controversies and trials. Many of the Bishops 



