The period of the visible expansion of Catholicism in England which began with the Oxford Movement and the Irish Immigration may be considered to have closed with the nineteenth century. Through the converts the Church entered the professional and upper middle-classes, and through the Irish began to leaven the new industrial masses. But tho old English Catholics, though a minority in the Catholic population and despite the many changes introduced by elements foreign to their tradition, possessed the national stubbornness and power of assimilation; they preserved their type, remained the nucleus of the developing and extending temporal life of the revived Church, and largely determined its character. Ullathorne was perhaps the most representative Catholic figure of the period: by the time of his death, the Church was assuming its present form, was already an established institution in the national life, no longer an obscure sect but ranking among the four or five great religious bodies in the country. Since then the effort has been one of consolidation; the various elements in the Church have become more and more unified—partly as the result of time, partly of prudent government; a Catholic middle-class has emerged; internal organization has been perfected—education, the press, religious and cultural institutions; so that now the Church presents the spectacle of a going concern, well-run and secure, somewhat mysterious and exclusive to the outsider, a compact homogeneous body, with every appearance of being well-established, perhaps even entrenched.

But the more excellent a human tradition, the more marked is the tendency to become a privilege and a preserve.