ognised the
hold I had over young men. Of late years I have read and heard that
they even imitated me in various ways. I was quite unconscious of it,
and I think my immediate friends knew too well how disgusted I should
be at the news, to have the heart to tell me. I felt great impatience
at our being called a party, and would not allow that we were. I had
a lounging, free-and-easy way of carrying things on. I exercised no
sufficient censorship upon the Tracts. I did not confine them to the
writings of such persons as agreed in all things with myself; and, as
to my own Tracts, I printed on them a notice to the effect, that any
one who pleased, might make what use he would of them, and reprint
them with alterations if he chose, under the conviction that their
main scope could not be damaged by such a process. It was the same
afterwards, as regards other publications. For two years I furnished
a certain number of sheets for the _British Critic_ from myself and
my friends, while a gentleman was editor, a man of splendid talent,
who, however, was scarcely an acquaintance of mine, and had no
sympathy with the Tracts. When I was Editor myself, from 1838 to
1841, in my very first number, I suffered to appear a critique
unfavourable to my work on Justification, which had been published a
few months before, from a feeling of propriety, because I had put the
book into the hands of the writer who so handled it. Afterwards I
suffered an article against the Jesuits to appear in it, of which I
did not like the tone. When I had to provide a curate for my new
church at Littlemore, I engaged a friend, by no fault of his, who,
before he entered into his charge, preached a sermon, either in
depreciation of baptismal regeneration, or of Dr. Pusey's view of it.
I showed a similar easiness as to the editors who helped me in the
separate volumes of Fleury's Church History; they were able, learned,
and excellent men, but their after history has shown, how little my
choice of them was influenced by any notion I could have had of any
intimate agreement of opinion between them and myself. I shall have
to make the same remark in its place concerning the Lives of the
English Saints, which subsequently appeared. All this may seem
inconsistent with what I have said of my fierceness. I am not bound
to account for it; but there have been men before me, fierce in act,
yet tolerant and moderate in their reasonings; at least, so I read
history. However, s