self-satisfaction did not know, and did not care to know, of real Christian life in the Church of Rome.  He dared to admit that much that was popularly held to be Popish was ancient, Catholic, edifying; he dared to warn Churchmen that the loose unsifted imputations, so securely hazarded against Rome, were both discreditable and dangerous.  All this, from one whose condemnation of Rome was decisive and severe, was novel.  The attempt, both in its spirit and its ability, was not unworthy of being part of the general effort to raise the standard of thought and teaching in the English Church.  It recalled men from slovenly prejudices to the study of the real facts of the living world.  It narrowed the front of battle, but it strengthened it enormously.  The volume on Romanism and Popular Protestantism is not an exhaustive survey of the controversy with Rome or of the theory of the Church.  There are great portions of the subject, both theological and historical, which it did not fall within the scope of the book to touch.  It was unsystematic and incomplete.  But so far as its argument extended, it almost formed an epoch in this kind of controversial writing.  It showed the command of a man of learning over all the technical points and minutiae of a question highly scholastical in its conceptions and its customary treatment, and it presented this question in its bearings and consequences on life and practice with the freedom and breadth of the most vigorous popular writing.  The indictment against Rome was no vague or general one.  It was one of those arguments which cut the ground from under a great established structure of reasonings and proofs.  And its conclusions, clear and measured, but stern, were the more impressive, because they came from one who did not disguise his feeling that there was much in what was preserved in the Roman system to admire and to learn from.

The point which he chose for his assault was indeed the key of the Roman position—­the doctrine of Infallibility.  He was naturally led to this side of the question by the stress which the movement had laid on the idea of the Church as the witness and teacher of revealed truth:  and the immediate challenge given by the critics or opponents of the movement was, how to distinguish this lofty idea of the Church, with its claim to authority, if it was at all substantial, from the imposing and consistent theory of Romanism.  He urged against the Roman claim of Infallibility two leading objections.  One was the way in which the assumed infallibility of the present Church was made to override and supersede, in fact, what in words was so ostentatiously put forward, the historical evidence of antiquity to doctrine, expressed by the phrase, the “consent of the Fathers.”  The other objection was the inherent contradiction of the notion of infallibility to the conditions of human reception of teaching and knowledge, and its practical uselessness as an assurance of truth, its partly delusive, partly mischievous, working.