But he felt, as all deep minds must feel, that it is easier to overthrow the Roman theory of Church authority than to replace it by another, equally complete and commanding, and more unassailable.  He was quite alive to the difficulties of the Anglican position; but he was a disciple in the school of Bishop Butler, and had learned as a first principle to recognise the limitations of human knowledge, and the unphilosophical folly of trying to round off into finished and pretentious schemes our fragmentary yet certain notices of our own condition and of God’s dealings with it.  He followed his teacher in insisting on the reality and importance of moral evidence as opposed to demonstrative proof; and he followed the great Anglican divines in asserting that there was a true authority, varying in its degrees, in the historic Church; that on the most fundamental points of religion this authority was trustworthy and supreme; that on many other questions it was clear and weighty, though it could not decide everything.  This view of the “prophetical office of the Church” had the dialectical disadvantage of appearing to be a compromise, to many minds a fatal disadvantage.  It got the name of the Via Media; a satisfactory one to practical men like Dr. Hook, to whom it recommended itself for use in popular teaching; but to others, in aftertimes, an ill-sounding phrase of dislike, which summed up the weakness of the Anglican case.  Yet it only answered to the certain fact, that in the early and undivided Church there was such a thing as authority, and there was no such thing known as Infallibility.  It was an appeal to the facts of history and human nature against the logical exigencies of a theory.  Men must transcend the conditions of our experience if they want the certainty which the theory of Infallibility speaks of.

There were especially two weak points in this view of Anglicanism.  Mr. Newman felt and admitted them, and of course they were forced on his attention by controversialists on both sides; by the Ultra Protestant school, whose modes of dealing with Scripture he had exposed with merciless logic and by the now eager Roman disputants, of whom Dr. Wiseman was the able and not over-scrupulous chief.  The first of these points was that the authority of the undivided Church, which Anglicanism invoked, though it completely covered the great foundations of Christian doctrine, our faith as to the nature of God, did not cover with equal completeness other important points of controversy, such as those raised at the Reformation as to the Sacraments, and the justification of the sinner.  The Anglican answer was that though the formal and conciliar authority was not the same in each case, the patristic literature of the time of the great councils, all that it took for granted and preserved as current belief and practice, all that resulted from the questions and debates of the time, formed a body of proof, which carried with it moral evidence only