From 1829, when Richard Whately published his critical review of convict transportation, he succeeded in shifting the debate to a new level of intellectual seriousness. Whately's views were congruent with those of other Liberal Anglican who attempted to find a pathway between the secular Utilitarians on the one hand, and the birth of the Oxford movement and its radical swing to tradition on the other. Whately championed rational solutions to social problems and his views on transportation were enthusiastically taken up by the Radical Whigs, such as Molesworth, for the much more strongly expressed condemnation of transportation by the Select Committee which he chaired. Molesworth skilfully manipulated witnesses to the Select Committee, including Anglican, Presbyterian and Catholic clergy, to bolster support for the abolition of convict transportation to New South Wales. This was to continue a campaign which had been initiated by Jeremy Bentham but which had not succeeded, in part because of doubts by mainstream politicians about the religious implications of what seemed to be a godless solution to a moral problem.