but go on awhile, and you will
come to a deep chasm across the path, which makes real approximation
impossible." And I urged in addition, that many Anglican divines had
been accused of Popery, yet had died in their Anglicanism;--now, the
ecclesiastical principles which I professed, they had professed also;
and the judgment against Rome which they had formed, I had formed
also. Whatever faults then the Anglican system might have, and
however boldly I might point them out, anyhow that system was not
vulnerable on the side of Rome, and might be mended in spite of her.
In that very agreement of the two forms of faith, close as it might
seem, would really be found, on examination, the elements and
principles of an essential discordance.

It was with this supreme persuasion on my mind that I fancied that
there could be no rashness in giving to the world in fullest measure
the teaching and the writings of the Fathers. I thought that the
Church of England was substantially founded upon them. I did not know
all that the Fathers had said, but I felt that, even when their
tenets happened to differ from the Anglican, no harm could come of
reporting them. I said out what I was clear they had said; I spoke
vaguely and imperfectly, of what I thought they said, or what some
of them had said. Anyhow, no harm could come of bending the crooked
stick the other way, in the process of straightening it; it was
impossible to break it. If there was anything in the Fathers of a
startling character, it would be only for a time; it would admit of
explanation; it could not lead to Rome. I express this view of the
matter in a passage of the preface to the first volume, which I
edited, of the Library of the Fathers. Speaking of the strangeness at
first sight, presented to the Anglican mind, of some of their
principles and opinions, I bid the reader go forward hopefully, and
not indulge his criticism till he knows more about them, than he will
learn at the outset. "Since the evil," I say, "is in the nature of
the case itself, we can do no more than have patience, and recommend
patience to others, and, with the racer in the Tragedy, look forward
steadily and hopefully to the _event_, [greek: to telei pistin pheron],
when, as we trust, all that is inharmonious and anomalous in the
details, will at length be practically smoothed."

Such was the position, such the defences, such the tactics, by which
I thought that it was both incumbent on us, and possi