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