logical processes led him to habits of extreme and absolute statement, which to those who did not agree with him, and also to some who did, bore on their face the character of over-statement, exaggeration, extravagance, not redeemed by an occasional and somewhat ostentatious candour, often at the expense of his own side and in favour of opponents to whom he could afford to be frank. And further, while to the English Church he was merciless in the searching severity of his judgment, he seemed to be blind to the whole condition of things to which she, as well as her rival, had for the last three centuries been subjected, and in which she had played a part at least as important for Christian faith as that sustained by any portion of Christendom; blind to all her special and characteristic excellences, where these did not fit the pattern of the continental types (obviously, in countless instances, matters of national and local character and habits); blind to the enormous difficulties in which the political game of her Roman opponents had placed her; blind to the fact that, judged with the same adverse bias and prepossessions, the same unsparing rigour, the same refusal to give real weight to what was good, on the ground that it was mixed with something lower, the Roman Church would show just as much deflection from the ideal as the English. Indeed, he would have done a great service-people would have been far more disposed to attend to his really interesting, and, to English readers, novel, proofs of the moral and devotional character of the Roman popular discipline, if he had not been so unfair on the English: if he had not ignored the plain fact that just such a picture as he gave of the English Church, as failing in required notes, might be found of the Roman before the Re

formation, say in the writings of Gerson, and in our own days in those of Rosmini Mr. Ward, I any one.. appealed to fair judgment; and to this fair Fudgment he presented allegations on the face of them violent and monstrous. The English Church, according to him, was in the anomalous position of being "gifted with the power of dispensing sacramental grace."

yet, at the same time, wholly destitue of external notes, and a killy indefensible, as to her position by external, historical, ecclesiastical arguments": and, be for his part declares, correcting Ma. Newman, who speaks of "outward notes as partly gone and partly going," that he is ally unable to discern the outward notes of which Mr. Newman speaks, during any part of the last three hundred years." He might as well have said at once that she did not exist, if the outward aspects of a Church-orders, creeds, sacraments, and, in some degree at any rate, preaching and witnessing for righteousness—are not some of the "outward notes" of a Church. Should the -Should the pure light of the Gospel be ever restored to this benighted land,” he writes, at the beginning, as the last extract was written at the end, of his controversial career at Oxford. Is not such writing as if he wished to emulate in a reverse sense the folly and falsehood of those who spoke of English Protestants having a monopoly of the Gospel? He was unpersuasive, he irritated and repelled, in spite of his wish to be fair and candid, in spite of having so much to teach, in spite of such vigour of statement and argument, because on the face of all his writings he was so extravagantly one-sided, so incapable of an equitable view, so much a slave to the unreality of extremes.

1 Ideal, p. 286.

2 British Critic, October 1841, p. 340.

CHAPTER XVIII

THE IDEAL OF A CHRISTIAN CHURCH

No. 90, with the explanations of it given by Mr. Newman and the other leaders of the movement, might have raised an important and not very easy question, but one in no way different from the general character of the matters in debate in the theological controversy of the time. But No. 90, with the comments on it of Mr. Ward, was quite another matter, and finally broke up the party of the movement. It was one thing to show how much there is in common between England and Rome, and quite another to argue that there is no difference. Mr. Ward's refusal to allow a reasonable and a Catholic interpretation to the doctrine of the Articles on Justification, though such an understanding of it had not only been maintained by Bishop Bull and the later orthodox divines, but was impressed on all the popular books of devotion, such as the Whole Duty of Man and Bishop Wilson's Sacra Privata; and along with this, the extreme claim to hold compatible with the Articles the "whole cycle of Roman doctrine," introduced entirely new conditions into the whole question. Non hæc in fœdera was the natural reflection of numbers of those who most sympathised with the Tractarian school. The English Church

might have many shortcomings and want many improvements; but after all she had something to say for herself in her quarrel with Rome; and the witness of experience for fifteen hundred years must be not merely qualified and corrected, but absolutely wiped out, if the allegation were to be accepted that Rome was blameless in all that quarrel, and had no part in bringing about the confusions of Christendom. And this contention was more and more enforced in Mr. Ward's articles in the British Critic-enforced, more effectively than by direct statement, by continual and passing assumption and implication. They were papers of considerable power and acuteness, and of great earnestness in their constant appeal to the moral criteria of truth; though Mr. Ward was not then at his best as a writer, and they were in composition heavy, diffuse, monotonous, and wearisome. But the attitude of deep depreciation, steady, systematic, unrelieved, in regard to that which ought, if acknowledged at all, to deserve the highest reverence among all things on earth, in regard to an institution which, with whatever faults, he himself in words still recognised as the Church of God, was an indefensible and an unwholesome paradox. The analogy is a commonly accepted one between the Church and the family. How could any household go on in which there was at work an animus of unceasing and relentless, though possibly too just criticism, on its characteristic and perhaps serious faults; and of comparisons, also possibly most just, with the better ways of other families? It might be the honest desire of reform and improvement; but charity, patience, equitableness are virtues of men in society, as well as strict justice and the desire of improvement. In the case of the family,

such action could only lead to daily misery and the wasting and dying out of home affections. In the case of a Church, it must come to the sundering of ties which ought no longer to bind. Mr. Ward all along insisted that there was no necessity for looking forward to such an event. He wished to raise, purify, reform the Church in which Providence had placed him; utterly dissatisfied as he was with it, intellectually and morally, convinced more and more that it was wrong, dismally, fearfully wrong, it was his duty, he thought, to abide in it without looking to consequences; but it was also his duty to shake the faith of any one he could in its present claims and working, and to hold up an incomparably purer model of truth and holiness. That his purpose was what he considered real reform, there is no reason to doubt, though he chose to shut his eyes to what must come of it. The position was an unnatural one, but he had great faith in his own well-fenced logical creations, and defied the objections of a homelier common sense. He was not content to wait in silence the slow and sad changes of old convictions, the painful decay and disappearance of long-cherished ties. His mind was too active, restless, unreserved. To the last he persisted in forcing on the world, professedly to influence it, really to defy it, the most violent assertions which he could formulate of the most paradoxical claims on friends and opponents which had ever been made.

Mr. Ward's influence was felt also in another way: though here it is not easy to measure the degree of its force. He was in the habit of appealing to Mr. Newman to pronounce on the soundness of his principles and inferences, with the view of getting Mr. Newman's sanction for them against more timid or more dissatis