crusade gave him enormous and explosive influence on Merseyside." Roman Catholicism and the Anglo-Catholics In the simplest terms, the doctrines and the rituals peculiar to the Anglo-Catholics were considered, by Evangelicals such as M‘Neile, to be a blatant violations of the promise that all of the Anglican clergy routinely made: viz., to adhere to the forms of service as specified in the Book of Common Prayer – in particular, to what it demanded and what it disallowed – and to adhere to the "Thirty-Nine Articles of Religion". For M‘Neile, Roman Catholicism endangered "Britain’s providential mission to defend and propagate reformed Christianity": this "providential mission" was a mission of "nationalism" – a concept "contain[ing] an inherent conviction of objective national superiority" – rather than one of "patriotism" (Wolffe, 1991, pp. 308–309). The Roman Catholic Relief Act, enacted in 1829 principally to avert the threat of religious civil war in Ireland, abolished many of the restrictions on Roman Catholics that had operated in the United Kingdom for more than a century. This distressed many Anglicans such as M‘Neile, who were already fighting against the influence of Anglo-Catholics in the Church of England. "As the Tractarian movement in the Church of England developed, M‘Neile became one of its most zealous opponents and the most conspicuous leader of the evangelical party. In 1840, he published Lectures on the Church of England and in 1846 (the year after John Henry Newman's secession to Rome), The Church and the Churches, in which he maintained with much dialectical skill the evangelical doctrine of the "invisible Church" in opposition to the teaching of Newman and Pusey" (McNeile, 1911, p. 265). In April 1845, when speaking in the House of Commons on the Maynooth Endowment Bill, Thomas Macaulay characterized M‘Neile as "the most powerful representative of uncompromising Protestant opinion in the country" (McNeile, 1911, p. 265). Politician In a political speech in 1834, M‘Neile expressed his opinion on the oft-expressed view that clerics should stand aside from politics: "It was said that ministers of religion should not mingle in politics; but God, when he made the minister, did not unmake the citizen." A "big, impetuous, eloquent Irishman with a marvellously attractive personality and a magnificent voice", he had a considerable influence on the developing religious and political life of Liverpool: In 1835, M‘Neile entered a long dispute, in which he was eventually successful, with the Liverpool corporation, which had