And, as spoken by man to man in England in the nineteenth century, I consider them calculated to prejudice inquirers, to frighten the unlearned, to unsettle consciences, to provoke blasphemy, and to work the loss of souls.

Of course; it is what might be expected of him.  But Dr. Newman has often told us that we must take the consequences of our principles and theories, and here are some of the consequences which meet him; and, as he says, they “scare and confuse him.”  He boldly disavows them with no doubtful indignation.  But what other voice but his, of equal authority and weight, has been lifted up to speak the plain truth about them?  Why, if they are wrong, extravagant, dangerous, is his protest solitary?  His communion has never been wanting in jealousy of dangerous doctrines, and it is vain to urge that these things and things like them have been said in a corner.  The Holy Office is apt to detect mischief in small writers as well as great, even if these teachers were as insignificant as Dr. Newman would gladly make them.  Taken as a whole, and in connection with notorious facts, these statements are fair examples of manifest tendencies, which certainly are not on the decline.  And if a great and spreading popular cultus, encouraged and urged on beyond all former precedent, is in danger of being developed by its warmest and most confident advocates into something of which unreason is the lightest fault, is there not ground for interfering?  Doubtless Roman writers maybe quoted by Dr. Newman, who felt that there was a danger, and we are vaguely told about some checks given to one or two isolated extravagances, which, however, in spite of the checks, do not seem to be yet extinct.  But Allocutions and Encyclicals are not for errors of this kind.  Dr. Newman says that “it is wiser for the most part to leave these excesses to the gradual operation of public opinion,—­that is, to the opinion of educated and sober Catholics; and this seems to me the healthiest way of putting them down.”  We quite agree with him; but his own Church does not think so; and we want to see some evidence of a public opinion in it capable of putting them down.  As it is, he is reduced to say that “the line cannot be logically drawn between the teaching of the Fathers on the subject and our own;” an assertion which, if it were true, would be more likely to drag down one teaching than to prop up the other; he has to find reasons, and doubtless they are to be found thick as blackberries, for accounting for one extravagance, softening down another, declining to judge a third.  But in the meantime the “devotion” in its extreme form, far beyond what he would call the teaching of his Church, has its way; it maintains its ground; it becomes the mark of the bold, the advanced, the refined, as well as of the submissive and the crowd; it roots itself under the shelter of an authority which would stop it if it was wrong; it becomes “dominant”; it becomes at length part of that “mind of the living Church” which, we are told, it is heresy to impugn, treason to appeal from, and the extravagance of impertinent folly to talk of reforming.