ving it and
publishing it.

But there was more than this meant in the words which I used:--first,
I will freely confess, indeed I said it some pages back, that I was
angry with the Anglican divines. I thought they had taken me in; I
had read the Fathers with their eyes; I had sometimes trusted their
quotations or their reasonings; and from reliance on them, I had used
words or made statements, which properly I ought rigidly to have
examined myself. I had exercised more faith than criticism in the
matter. This did not imply any broad misstatements on my part,
arising from reliance on their authority, but it implied carelessness
in matters of detail. And this of course was a fault.

But there was a far deeper reason for my saying what I said in this
matter, on which I have not hitherto touched; and it was this:--The
most oppressive thought, in the whole process of my change of
opinion, was the clear anticipation, verified by the event, that it
would issue in the triumph of Liberalism. Against the Anti-dogmatic
principle I had thrown my whole mind; yet now I was doing more than
any one else could do, to promote it. I was one of those who had kept
it at bay in Oxford for so many years; and thus my very retirement
was its triumph. The men who had driven me from Oxford were
distinctly the Liberals; it was they who had opened the attack upon
Tract 90, and it was they who would gain a second benefit, if I went
on to retire from the Anglican Church. But this was not all. As I
have already said, there are but two alternatives, the way to Rome,
and the way to Atheism: Anglicanism is the halfway house on the one
side, and Liberalism is the halfway house on the other. How many men
were there, as I knew full well, who would not follow me now in my
advance from Anglicanism to Rome, but would at once leave Anglicanism
and me for the Liberal camp. It is not at all easy (humanly speaking)
to wind up an Englishman to a dogmatic level. I had done so in a good
measure, in the case both of young men and of laymen, the Anglican
_Via Media_ being the representative of dogma. The dogmatic and the
Anglican principle were one, as I had taught them; but I was breaking
the _Via Media_ to pieces, and would not dogmatic faith altogether be
broken up, in the minds of a great number, by the demolition of the
_Via Media_? Oh! how unhappy this made me! I heard once from an
eyewitness the account of a poor sailor whose legs were shattered by
a ball, in