een all along, most firm in the
belief himself that a Romish sermon it is; and this is the point on
which I wish specially to insist. It is for this cause that I made
the above extract from his pamphlet, not merely in order to answer
him, though, when I had made it, I could not pass by the attack on me
which it contains. I shall notice his charges one by one by and by;
but I have made this extract here in order to insist and to dwell on
this phenomenon--viz. that he does consider it an undeniable fact,
that the sermon is "Romish,"--meaning by "Romish" not "savouring of
Romish doctrine" merely, but "the work of a real Romanist, of a
conscious Romanist." This belief it is which leads him to be so
severe on me, for now calling it "Protestant." He thinks that,
whether I have committed any logical self-contradiction or not, I am
very well aware that, when I wrote it, I ought to have been
elsewhere, that I was a conscious Romanist, teaching Romanism;--or if
he does not believe this himself, he wishes others to think so, which
comes to the same thing; certainly I prefer to consider that he
thinks so himself, but, if he likes the other hypothesis better, he
is welcome to it.

He believes then so firmly that the sermon was a "Romish Sermon,"
that he pointedly takes it for granted, before he has adduced a
syllable of proof of the matter of fact. He _starts_ by saying that
it is a fact to be "remembered." "It _must_ be _remembered always_,"
he says, "that it is not a Protestant, but a Romish Sermon," (p. 8).
Its Romish parentage is a great truth for the memory, not a thesis
for inquiry. Merely to refer his readers to the sermon is, he
considers, to secure them on his side. Hence it is that, in his
letter of January 18, he said to me, "It seems to me, that, by
_referring_ publicly to the Sermon on which my allegations are
founded, I have given every one _an opportunity of judging of their
injustice_," that is, an opportunity of seeing that they are
transparently just. The notion of there being a _Via Media_, held all
along by a large party in the Anglican Church, and now at least not
less than at any former time, is too subtle for his intellect.
Accordingly, he thinks it was an allowable figure of speech--not
more, I suppose, than an "hyperbole"--when referring to a sermon of
the Vicar of St. Mary's in the magazine, to say that it was the
writing of a Roman priest; and as to serious arguments to prove the
point, why, they may ind