rmany, and Pusey in ecclesiastical England, were equally
forced, if they would not lose Christianity altogether, to renounce
Protestantism, and to base their philosophy upon sacerdotal authority and
ecclesiastical tradition. That Schlegel became a Romanist at Cologne, and
Dr Pusey an Anglo-Catholic at Oxford, does not affect the kinship. Both,
to escape from the anarchy of Protestant individualism, (as it was felt by
them,) were obliged to assert not merely Christianity, but a
hierarchy--not merely the Bible, but an authoritative interpretation of
the Bible; and both found, or seemed to find, that authoritative
interpretation and exorcism of doubt there, where alone in their
circumstances, and intellectually constituted as they were, it was to be
found. Dr Pusey did not become a Papist like Frederick Schlegel, for two
plain reasons--first, because he was an Englishman, second, because he
was an English churchman. The authority which he sought for lay at his
door; why should he travel to Rome for it? Archbishop Laud had taught
apostolical succession before--Dr Pusey might teach it again. But this
convenient prop of Popery without the Pope was not prepared for Frederick
Schlegel. There was no Episcopal church, no Oxford in Germany, into whose
bosom he could throw himself, and find relief from the agony of religious
doubt. He was a German, moreover, and a philosopher. To his searching eye
and circumspective wariness, the general basis of tradition which might
satisfy a Pusey, though sufficiently broad, did not appear sure enough.
To his lofty architectural imagination a hierarchical aristocracy,
untopped by a hierarchical monarch, did not appear sufficiently sublime.
To his all-comprehending and all-combining historical sympathies, a
Christian priesthood, with Cyprian, Augustine, and Jerome, but without
Hildebrand, Innocent, and Boniface, would have presented the appearance
of a fair landscape, with a black yawning chasm in the middle, into which
whoever looked shuddered. Therefore Frederick Schlegel, spurning all half
measures, inglorious compromises, and vain attempts to reconcile the
irreconcilable, vaulted himself at once, with a bold leap, into the
central point of sacerdotal Christianity. The obstacles that would have
deterred ordinary minds had no effect on him. All points of detail were
sunk in the over-whelming importance of the general question.
Transubstantiation or consubstantiation, conception, maculate or
immac