their connection. And further I am persuaded that were
he not spellbound and entranced, he could not fail to see the gross
moral incoherence of the parts of his two statements; and that were
I upon the terms which would warrant it, I should feel it my duty,
at a time when as now, _summa res agitur_, to tell him so, after
having, however, tried my own views by reference to some other
mind, for instance to your own. But surely it will be said that his
'committing himself again' was simply a deliberate protestation of
what he knew to be untrue. I have no doubt of his having proceeded
honestly; no doubt that he can show it; but I say that those two
letters are quite enough to condemn a man in whom one has no
[Greek: pistis ethike]: much more then one whom a great majority of the
community regard with prejudice and deep suspicion.... With regard
to your own feelings believe me that I enter into them; and indeed
our communications have now for many years been too warm, free, and
confiding to make it necessary for me, as I trust, to say what a
resource and privilege it is to me to take counsel with you upon
those absorbing subjects and upon the fortunes of the church; to
which I desire to feel with you that life, strength, and all means
and faculties, ought freely to be devoted, and indeed from such
devotion alone can they derive anything of true value.[189]

WARD'S _IDEAL_

The next blow was struck in the summer of 1844 by Ward's _Ideal of a
Christian Church_, which had the remarkable effect of harassing and
afflicting all the three high camps--the historical anglicans, the
Puseyites and moderate tractarians, and finally the Newmanites and
moderate Romanisers.[190] The writer was one of the most powerful
dialecticians of the day, defiant, aggressive, implacable in his
logic, unflinching in any stand that he chose to take; the
master-representative of tactics and a temper like those to which Laud
and Strafford gave the pungent name of Thorough. It was not its
theology, still less its history, that made his book the signal for the
explosion; it was his audacious proclamation that the whole cycle of
Roman doctrine was gradually possessing numbers of English churchmen,
and that he himself, a clergyman in orders and holding his fellowship on
the tenure of church subscription, had in so subscribing to th