thing to show how much there is in common between
England and Rome, and quite another to argue that
there is no difference. Mr. Ward’s refusal
to allow a reasonable and a Catholic interpretation
to the doctrine of the Articles on Justification,
though such an understanding of it had not only been
maintained by Bishop Bull and the later orthodox divines,
but was impressed on all the popular books of devotion,
such as the Whole Duty of Man and Bishop Wilson’s
Sacra Privata; and along with this, the extreme
claim to hold compatible with the Articles the “whole
cycle of Roman doctrine,” introduced entirely
new conditions into the whole question. Non hoec
in foedera was the natural reflection of numbers
of those who most sympathised with the Tractarian
school. The English Church might have many shortcomings
and want many improvements; but after all she had
something to say for herself in her quarrel with Rome;
and the witness of experience for fifteen hundred years
must be not merely qualified and corrected, but absolutely
wiped out, if the allegation were to be accepted that
Rome was blameless in all that quarrel, and had no
part in bringing about the confusions of Christendom.
And this contention was more and more enforced in Mr.
Ward’s articles in the British Critic—enforced,
more effectively than by direct statement, by continual
and passing assumption and implication. They
were papers of considerable power and acuteness, and
of great earnestness in their constant appeal to the
moral criteria of truth; though Mr. Ward was not then
at his best as a writer, and they were in composition
heavy, diffuse, monotonous, and wearisome. But
the attitude of deep depreciation, steady, systematic,
unrelieved, in regard to that which ought, if acknowledged
at all, to deserve the highest reverence among all
things on earth, in regard to an institution which,
with whatever faults, he himself in words still recognised
as the Church of God, was an indefensible and an unwholesome
paradox. The analogy is a commonly accepted one
between the Church and the family. How could any
household go on in which there was at work an animus
of unceasing and relentless, though possibly too just
criticism, on its characteristic and perhaps serious
faults; and of comparisons, also possibly most just,
with the better ways of other families? It might
be the honest desire of reform and improvement; but
charity, patience, equitableness, are virtues of men
in society, as well as strict justice and the desire
of improvement. In the case of the family, such
action could only lead to daily misery and the wasting
and dying out of home affections. In the case
of a Church, it must come to the sundering of ties
which ought no longer to bind. Mr. Ward all along
insisted that there was no necessity for looking forward
to such an event. He wished to raise, purify,
reform the Church in which Providence had placed him;
utterly dissatisfied as he was with it, intellectually