It is worth our while to observe this, because fear and passion are not the surest guides to truth, and the rule of contraries is not the rule of wisdom.  Other men have been indignant against the peculiar evils of their own time, and from their strong impression of these have seemed to lose sight of its good points; but Mr. Newman and his friends appear to hate the nineteenth century for its own sake, and to proscribe all belonging to it, whether good or bad, simply because it does belong to it.—­This diseased state of mind is well shown by the immediate occasion of the organization of their party.  Mr. Perceval tells us that it was the Act for the dissolution of some of the Irish bishoprics, passed in 1833, winch first made the authors of the Tracts resolve to commence their publication.  Mr. Perceval himself cannot even now speak of that Act temperately; he calls it “a wanton act of sacrilege,” “a monstrous act,” “an outrage upon the Church;” and his friends, it may be presumed, spoke of it at the time in language at least equally vehement.  Now, I am not expressing any opinion upon the justice or expediency of that Act; it was opposed by many good men, and its merits or demerits were fairly open to discussion; but would any fair and sensible person speak of it with such extreme abhorrence as it excited in the minds of Mr. Perceval and his friends?  The Act deprived the Church of no portion of its property; it simply ordered a different distribution of it, with the avowed object on the part of its framers of saving the Church from the odium and the danger of exacting Church Rates from the Roman Catholics.  It did nothing more than what, according to the constitution of the Churches of England and Ireland, was beyond all question within its lawful authority to do.  The King’s supremacy and the sovereignty of Parliament may be good or bad, but they are undoubted facts in the constitution of the Church of England, and have been so for nearly three hundred years.  I repeat that I am stating no opinion as to the merits of the Irish Church Act of 1833; I only contend, that no man of sound judgment would regard it as “a monstrous act,” or as “a wanton sacrilege.”  It bore upon it no marks of flagrant tyranny:  nor did it restrain the worship of the Church, nor corrupt its faith, nor command or encourage anything injurious to men’s souls in practice.  Luther was indignant at the sale of indulgences; and his horror at the selling Church pardons for money was, by God’s blessing, the occasion of the Reformation.  The occasion of the new counter-reformation was the abolition of a certain number of bishoprics, that their revenues might be applied solely to church purposes; and that the Church might so be saved from a scandal and a danger.  The difference of the exciting cause of the two movements gives the measure of the difference between the Reformation of 1517, and the views and objects of Mr. Newman and his friends.