wn sense of propriety, and without being
challenged on the point? After the sentence which I have been
quoting, and another like it, he coolly passes on to Tract 90! Blot
_sixteen_; but I shall dwell on it awhile, for its own sake.

Now I have been bringing out my mind in this volume on every subject
which has come before me; and therefore I am bound to state plainly
what I feel and have felt, since I was a Catholic, about the Anglican
Church. I said, in a former page, that, on my conversion, I was not
conscious of any change in me of thought or feeling, as regards
matters of doctrine; this, however, was not the case as regards some
matters of fact, and, unwilling as I am to give offence to religious
Anglicans, I am bound to confess that I felt a great change in my
view of the Church of England. I cannot tell how soon there came on
me--but very soon--an extreme astonishment that I had ever imagined
it to be a portion of the Catholic Church. For the first time, I
looked at it from without, and (as I should myself say) saw it as it
was. Forthwith I could not get myself to see in it anything else,
than what I had so long fearfully suspected, from as far back as
1836--a mere national institution. As if my eyes were suddenly
opened, so I saw it--spontaneously, apart from any definite act of
reason or any argument; and so I have seen it ever since. I suppose,
the main cause of this lay in the contrast which was presented to me
by the Catholic Church. Then I recognised at once a reality which was
quite a new thing with me. Then I was sensible that I was not making
for myself a Church by an effort of thought; I needed not to make
an act of faith in her; I had not painfully to force myself into a
position, but my mind fell back upon itself in relaxation and in
peace, and I gazed at her almost passively as a great objective fact.
I looked at her;--at her rites, her ceremonial, and her precepts; and
I said, "This _is_ a religion;" and then, when I looked back upon the
poor Anglican Church, for which I had laboured so hard, and upon all
that appertained to it, and thought of our various attempts to dress
it up doctrinally and esthetically, it seemed to me to be the veriest
of nonentities. Vanity of vanities, all is vanity! How can I make a
record of what passed within me, without seeming to be satirical? But
I speak plain, serious words. As people call me credulous for
acknowledging Catholic claims, so they call me satirical for