a part of that historic body which connects us with
the Apostles of our Lord. It had a strong and
consistent theory to oppose to its assailants; it had
much more to say for itself than the popular traditions
supposed. This was no new idea in Anglican divinity,
however ill it might sort with the current language
of Protestant controversy. But our old divines,
more easily satisfied than we with the course of things
at home under the protection of the Stuart kings,
and stung to bitter recrimination by the insults and
the unscrupulous political intrigues of Roman Catholic
agents, had exhausted the language of vituperation
against a great aggressive rival, which was threatening
everything that they held dear. They had damaged
their own character for fairness, and overlaid their
substantial grounds of objection and complaint, by
this unbalanced exaggeration. Mr. Newman, in
his study of these matters, early saw both the need
and the difficulty of discrimination in the Roman
controversy. It had to be waged, not as of old,
with penal legislation behind, but against adversaries
who could now make themselves listened to, and before
a public sufficiently robust in its Protestantism,
to look with amused interest on a dialectical triumph
of the Roman over the Anglican claims. Romanism,
he thought, was fatal both to his recent hopes for
the English Church, and to the honour and welfare
of Christianity at large. But in opposing it,
ground loosely taken of old must be carefully examined,
and if untenable, abandoned. Arguments which
proved too much, which availed against any Church
at all, must be given up. Popular objections,
arising from ignorance or misconception, must be reduced
to their true limits or laid aside. The controversy
was sure to be a real one, and nothing but what was
real and would stand scrutiny was worth anything in
it.
Mr. Newman had always been impressed with the greatness
of the Roman Church. Of old it had seemed to
him great with the greatness of Antichrist. Now
it seemed great with the strange weird greatness of
a wonderful mixed system, commanding from its extent
of sway and its imperial authority, complicated and
mysterious in its organisation and influence, in its
devotion and its superstitions, and surpassing every
other form of religion both in its good and its evil.[71]
What now presented itself to Mr. Newman’s thoughts,
instead of the old notion of a pure Church on one
side, and a corrupt Church on the other, sharply opposed
to one another, was the more reasonable supposition
of two great portions of the divided Church, each
with its realities of history and fact and character,
each with its special claims and excellences, each
with its special sins and corruptions, and neither
realising in practice and fact all it professed to
be on paper; each of which further, in the conflicts
of past days, had deeply, almost unpardonably, wronged
the other. The Church of England was in possession,
with its own call and its immense work to do, and