its poverty, it has dressed itself out in a maze
of words. We have no dread of it at all; we only fear what it may
lead to. It does not stand on intrenched ground, or make any pretence
to a position; it does but occupy the space between contending
powers, Catholic Truth and Rationalism. Then indeed will be the stern
encounter, when two real and living principles, simple, entire, and
consistent, one in the Church, the other out of it, at length rush
upon each other, contending not for names and words, or half-views,
but for elementary notions and distinctive moral characters."

Whether the ideas of the coming age upon religion were true or false,
they would be real. "In the present day," I said, "mistiness is the
mother of wisdom. A man who can set down half-a-dozen general
propositions, which escape from destroying one another only by being
diluted into truisms, who can hold the balance between opposites so
skilfully as to do without fulcrum or beam, who never enunciates a
truth without guarding himself against being supposed to exclude the
contradictory--who holds that Scripture is the only authority, yet
that the Church is to be deferred to, that faith only justifies, yet
that it does not justify without works, that grace does not depend on
the sacraments, yet is not given without them, that bishops are a
divine ordinance, yet those who have them not are in the same
religious condition as those who have--this is your safe man and the
hope of the Church; this is what the Church is said to want, not
party men, but sensible, temperate, sober, well-judging persons, to
guide it through the channel of no-meaning, between the Scylla and
Charybdis of Aye and No."

This state of things, however, I said, could not last, if men were to
read and think. They "will not keep standing in that very attitude
which you call sound Church-of-Englandism or orthodox Protestantism.
They cannot go on for ever standing on one leg, or sitting without a
chair, or walking with their feet tied, or grazing like Tityrus's
stags in the air. They will take one view or another, but it will be
a consistent view. It may be Liberalism, or Erastianism, or Popery,
or Catholicity; but it will be real."

I concluded the article by saying, that all who did not wish to be
"democratic, or pantheistic, or popish," must "look out for _some_
Via Media which will preserve us from what threatens, though it
cannot restore the dead. The spirit of Luther is dead; but