to assail the popular, prevalent, and dominant opinions, devotions, and doctrines of the Catholic Church with hostile criticism....  The presence and assistance of the Holy Ghost, which secures the Church within the sphere of faith and morals, invests it also with instincts and a discernment which preside over its worship and doctrines, its practices and customs.  We may be sure that whatever is prevalent in the Church, under the eye of its public authority, practised by the people, and not censured by its pastors, is at least conformable to faith and innocent as to morals.  Whosoever rises up to condemn such practices and opinions thereby convicts himself of the private spirit which is the root of heresy.  But if it be ill-advised to assail the mind of the Church, it is still more so to oppose its visible Head.  There can be no doubt that the Sovereign Pontiff has declared the same opinion as to the temporal power as that which is censured in others, and that he defined the Immaculate Conception, and that he believes in his own infallibility.  If these things be our reproach, we share it with the Vicar of Jesus Christ.  They are not our private opinions, nor the tenets of a school, but the mind of the Pontiff, as they were of his predecessors, as they will be of those who come after him.—­Archbishop Manning’s Pastoral, pp. 64-66, 1866.

To maintain his liberty against extreme opinions generally is one of Dr. Newman’s objects in writing his letter; the other is to state distinctly what he holds and what he does not hold, as regards the subject on which Dr. Pusey’s appeal has naturally made so deep an impression:—­

I do so, because you say, as I myself have said in former years, that “That vast system as to the Blessed Virgin ... to all of us has been the special crux of the Roman system” (p. 101).  Here, I say, as on other points, the Fathers are enough for me.  I do not wish to say more than they, and will not say less.  You, I know, will profess the same; and thus we can join issue on a clear and broad principle, and may hope to come to some intelligible result.  We are to have a treatise on the subject of Our Lady soon from the pen of the Most Rev. Prelate; but that cannot interfere with such a mere argument from the Fathers as that to which I shall confine myself here.  Nor, indeed, as regards that argument itself, do I profess to be offering you any new matter, any facts which have not been used by others,—­by great divines, as Petavius, by living writers, nay, by myself on other occasions.  I write afresh, nevertheless, and that for three reasons—­first, because I wish to contribute to the accurate statement and the full exposition of the argument in question; next, because I may gain a more patient hearing than has sometimes been granted to better men than myself; lastly, because there just now seems a call on me, under my circumstances, to avow plainly what I do and what I do not hold about