I cannot, then, without remonstrance, allow you to identify the doctrine of our Oxford friends in question, on the two subjects I have mentioned, with the present spirit or the prospective creed of Catholics; or to assume, as you do, that because they are thoroughgoing and relentless in their statements, therefore they are the harbingers of a new age, when to show a deference for Antiquity will be thought little else than a mistake.  For myself, hopeless as you consider it, I am not ashamed still to take my stand upon the Fathers, and do not mean to budge.  The history of their time is not yet an old almanac to me.  Of course I maintain the value and authority of the “Schola,” as one of the loci theologici; still I sympathise with Petavius in preferring to its “contentious and subtle theology” that “more elegant and fruitful teaching which is moulded after the image of erudite antiquity.”  The Fathers made me a Catholic, and I am not going to kick down the ladder by which I ascended into the Church.  It is a ladder quite as serviceable for that purpose now as it was twenty years ago.  Though I hold, as you remark, a process of development in Apostolic truth as time goes on, such development does not supersede the Fathers, but explains and completes them.

Is he right in saying that he is not responsible as a Roman Catholic for the extravagances that Dr. Pusey dwells upon?  He is, it seems to us, and he is not.  No doubt the Roman Catholic system is in practice a wide one, and he has a right, which we are glad to see that he is disposed to exercise, to maintain the claims of moderation and soberness, and to decline to submit his judgment to the fashionable theories of the hour.  A stand made for independence and good sense against the pressure of an exacting and overbearing dogmatism is a good thing for everybody, though made in a camp with which we have nothing to do.  He goes far enough, indeed, as it is.  Still, it is something that a great writer, of whose genius and religious feeling Englishmen will one day be even prouder than they are now, should disconnect himself from the extreme follies of his party, and attempt to represent what is the nobler and more elevated side of the system to which he has attached himself.  But it seems to us much more difficult for him to release his cause from complicity with the doctrines which he dislikes and fears.  We have no doubt that he is not alone, and that there are numbers of his English brethren who are provoked and ashamed at the self-complacent arrogance and childish folly shown in exaggerating and caricaturing doctrines which are, in the eyes of most Englishmen, extravagant enough in themselves.  But the question is whether he or the innovators represent the true character and tendencies of their religious system.  It must be remembered that with a jealous and touchy Government, like that of the Roman Church, which professes the duty and boasts of the power to put down all dangerous ideas and language, mere tolerance means much.  Dr. Newman speaks as an Englishman when he writes thus:—­