ssociation between catholic principles and the church
of England would be miserably weakened; and those who at all sympathised
with the Tracts would be placed in the position of aliens, corporally
within the pale, but in spirit estranged or outcast. If the church
should be thus broken up, there would be no space for catholicity
between the rival pretensions of an ultra-protestantised or
decatholicised English church, and the communion of Rome. 'Miserable
choice!' These and other arguments are strongly pressed (December 3,
1841) in favour of an amicable compromise, in a letter addressed to his
close friend Frederic Rogers. In the same letter Mr. Gladstone says that
he cannot profess to understand or to have studied the Tracts on
Reserve.[183] He 'partakes perhaps in the popular prejudice against
them.' Anybody can now see in the coolness of distant time that it was
these writings on Reserve that roused not merely prejudice but fury in
the public mind--a fury that without either justice or logic extended
from hatred of Romanisers to members of the church of Rome itself. It
affected for the worse the feeling between England and Ireland, for in
those days to be ultra-protestant was to be anti-Irish; and it greatly
aggravated, first the storm about the Maynooth grant in 1845, and then
the far wilder storm about the papal aggression six years later.

THE JERUSALEM BISHOPRIC

Further fuel for excitement was supplied the same year (1841) in a
fantastic project by which a bishop, appointed alternately by Great
Britain and Prussia and with his headquarters at Jerusalem, was to take
charge through a somewhat miscellaneous region, of any German
protestants or members of the church of England or anybody else who
might be disposed to accept his authority. The scheme stirred much
enthusiasm in the religious world, but it deepened alarm among the more
logical of the high churchmen. Ashley and the evangelicals were keen for
it as the blessed beginning of a restoration of Israel, and the king of
Prussia hoped to gain over the Lutherans and others of his subjects by
this side-door into true episcopacy. Politics were not absent, and some
hoped that England might find in the new protestant church such an
instrument in those uncomfortable regions, as Russia possessed in the
Greek church and France in the Latin. Dr. Arnold was delighted at the
thought that the new church at Jerusalem would comprehend persons using
diffe