eve, have just done a violent act: they have said that my
interpretation of the Articles is an _evasion_. Do not think that
this will pain me. You see, no _doctrine_ is censured, and my
shoulders shall manage to bear the charge. If you knew all, or were
here, you would see that I have asserted a great principle, and I
_ought_ to suffer for it:--that the Articles are to be interpreted,
not according to the meaning of the writers, but (as far as the
wording will admit) according to the sense of the Catholic Church."

Upon occasion of Tract 90 several Catholics wrote to me; I answered
one of my correspondents thus:--

"April 8.--You have no cause to be surprised at the discontinuance of
the Tracts. We feel no misgivings about it whatever, as if the cause
of what we hold to be Catholic truth would suffer thereby. My letter
to my Bishop has, I trust, had the effect of bringing the
preponderating _authority_ of the Church on our side. No stopping of
the Tracts can, humanly speaking, stop the spread of the opinions
which they have inculcated.

"The Tracts are not _suppressed_. No doctrine or principle has been
conceded by us, or condemned by authority. The Bishop has but said
that a certain Tract is 'objectionable,' no reason being stated. I
have no intention whatever of yielding any one point which I hold on
conviction; and that the authorities of the Church know full well."

In the summer of 1841, I found myself at Littlemore without any
harass or anxiety on my mind. I had determined to put aside all
controversy, and I set myself down to my translation of St.
Athanasius; but, between July and November, I received three blows
which broke me.

1. I had got but a little way in my work, when my trouble returned on
me. The ghost had come a second time. In the Arian History I found
the very same phenomenon, in a far bolder shape, which I had found in
the Monophysite. I had not observed it in 1832. Wonderful that this
should come upon me! I had not sought it out; I was reading and
writing in my own line of study, far from the controversies of the
day, on what is called a "metaphysical" subject; but I saw clearly,
that in the history of Arianism, the pure Arians were the
Protestants, the semi-Arians were the Anglicans, and that Rome now
was what it was. The truth lay, not with the _Via Media_, but in what
was called "the extreme party." As I am not writing a work of
controversy, I need not enlarge upon the argument; I have s