striving to do it.  Whatever the Church of Rome was abroad, it was here an intruder and a disturber.  That to his mind was the fact and the true position of things; and this ought to govern the character and course of controversy.  The true line was not to denounce and abuse wholesale, not to attack with any argument, good or bad, not to deny or ignore what was solid in the Roman ground, and good and elevated in the Roman system, but admitting all that fairly ought to be admitted, to bring into prominence, not for mere polemical denunciation, but for grave and reasonable and judicial condemnation, all that was extravagant and arrogant in Roman assumptions, and all that was base, corrupt, and unchristian in the popular religion, which, with all its claims to infallibility and authority, Rome not only permitted but encouraged.  For us to condemn Rome wholesale, as was ordinarily the fashion, even in respectable writers, was as wrong, as unfair, as unprofitable to the cause of truth and Christianity, as the Roman charges against us were felt by us to be ignorant and unjust.  Rome professes like England to continue the constitution, doctrine, traditions, and spirit of the ancient and undivided Church:  and so far as she does so—­and she does so in a great degree—­we can have no quarrel with her.  But in a great degree also, she does this only in profession and as a theory:  she claims the witness and suffrage of antiquity, but she interprets it at her own convenience and by her own authority.  We cannot claim exemption from mistakes, from deviations from our own standard and principles, any more than Rome; but while she remains as she is, and makes the monstrous claims of infallibility and supremacy, there is nothing for English Churchmen but to resist her.  Union is impossible.  Submission is impossible.  What we have to beware of for our own sake, as well as for our cause, are false arguments, unreal objections, ignorant allegations.  There is enough on the very surface, in her audacious assertions and high-handed changes, for popular arguments against her, without having recourse to exaggeration and falsehood; she may be a very faulty Church, without being Babylon and Antichrist.  And in the higher forms of argument, there is abundance in those provinces of ancient theology and ecclesiastical history and law, which Protestant controversialists have commonly surrendered and left open to their opponents, to supply a more telling weapon than any which these controversialists have used.

This line, though substantially involved in the theory of our most learned divines, from Andrewes to Wake, was new in its moderation and reasonable caution; in its abstention from insult and vague abuse, in its recognition of the prima facie strength of much of the Roman case, in its fearless attempt, in defiance of the deepest prejudices, to face the facts and conditions of the question.  Mr. Newman dared to know and to acknowledge much that our insular