But the experience of the present ‘developments’ of Oxford teaching may serve to show us how infinitely perilous is this course; and how fearfully, both outraged reason and outraged faith will avenge the wrongs done them by their alienation and disjunction.  Those results, indeed, we predicted in 1843; before a single leader of the Oxford school had gone over to Rome, and before any tendencies to the opposite extreme of Scepticism had manifested themselves.  We then affirmed that, on the one hand, those who were contending for the corruptions of the fourth century could not possibly find footing there, but must inevitably seek their ultimate resting place in Rome—­a prediction which has been too amply fulfilled; and that, on the other, the extravagant pretensions put forth on behalf of an uninquiring faith, and the desperate assertion that the ‘evidence for Christianity’ was no stronger than that for ‘Church Principles,’ must, by reaction, lead on to an outbreak of infidelity.  That prophecy, too, has been to the letter accomplished.  We then said,—­

“We have seen it recently asserted by some of the Oxford school that there is as much reason for rejecting the most essential doctrines of Christianity—­nay Christianity itself—­as for rejecting their “church principles.”  That, in short, we have as much reason for being infidels as for rejecting the doctrine of Apostolical succession!  What other effect such reasoning can have than that of compelling men to believe that there is nothing between infidelity and popery, and of urging them to make a selection between the two, we know not ....  Indeed, we fully expect that, as a reaction of the present extravagancies, of the revival of obsolete superstition, we shall have ere long to fight over again the battle with a modified form of infidelity, as now with a modified form of popery.  Thus, probably, for some time to come, will the human mind continue to oscillate between the extremes of error; but with a diminished are at each vibration; until truth shall at last prevail, and compel it to repose in the centre."*

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* Oxford Tract School, Ed. Rev., April, 1843. ____

The offensive displays of self-sufficiency and flippancy, of ignorance and presumption, found in the productions of the apostles of the new infidelity of Oxford, (of which we shall have a few words to say by-and-by) are the natural and instructive, though most painful, result of attempting to give predominance to one principle of our nature, where two or more are designed reciprocally to guard and check each other; and such results must ever follow such attempts.  The excellence of man—­so complexly constituted is his nature—­must consist in the harmonious action and proper balance of all the constituents of that nature; the equilibrium he sighs for must be the result of the combined action of forces operating in different directions; of his reason, his faith, his appetites, his affections,