in the mistake; or if a man
said to me, "You tried to gain me over to your party, intending to
take me with you to Rome, but you did not succeed," I can give him
the lie, and lay down an assertion of my own as firm and as exact as
his, that not from the time that I was first unsettled, did I ever
attempt to gain any one over to myself or to my Romanizing opinions,
and that it is only his own coxcombical fancy which has bred such a
thought in him: but my imagination is at a loss in presence of those
vague charges, which have commonly been brought against me, charges,
which are made up of impressions, and understandings, and inferences,
and hearsay, and surmises. Accordingly, I shall not make the attempt,
for, in doing so, I should be dealing blows in the air; what I shall
attempt is to state what I know of myself and what I recollect, and
leave its application to others.

While I had confidence in the _Via Media_, and thought that nothing
could overset it, I did not mind laying down large principles, which
I saw would go further than was commonly perceived. I considered that
to make the _Via Media_ concrete and substantive, it must be much
more than it was in outline; that the Anglican Church must have a
ceremonial, a ritual, and a fulness of doctrine and devotion, which
it had not at present, if it were to compete with the Roman Church
with any prospect of success. Such additions would not remove it from
its proper basis, but would merely strengthen and beautify it: such,
for instance, would be confraternities, particular devotions,
reverence for the Blessed Virgin, prayers for the dead, beautiful
churches, rich offerings to them and in them, monastic houses, and
many other observances and institutions, which I used to say belonged
to us as much as to Rome, though Rome had appropriated them, and
boasted of them, by reason of our having let them slip from us. The
principle, on which all this turned, is brought out in one of the
letters I published on occasion of Tract 90. "The age is moving,"
I said, "towards something; and most unhappily the one religious
communion among us, which has of late years been practically in
possession of this something, is the Church of Rome. She alone, amid
all the errors and evils of her practical system, has given free
scope to the feelings of awe, mystery, tenderness, reverence,
devotedness, and other feelings which may be especially called
Catholic. The question then is, whether we shal