of what justice--literary, and personal--required, would have
induced us to undertake. The tone of intellectual disparagement
and moral rebuke which certain critics,--deceived by the shallowest
sophisms with which an unscrupulous writer could work on their
prepossessions and insult their understandings--have adopted towards
Mr. Newman made exposure necessary. The length to which our remarks
have extended requires apology. Evidence to character is necessarily
cumulative, and not easily compressible within narrow limits. Enough
has been said to show that there is not an art discreditable in
controversy, to which recourse is not freely had in the 'Eclipse of
Faith' and the Defence of it."
The reader must judge for himself whether this severe and terrible
sentence of the reviewer proceeds from ill-temper and personal
mortification, as the author of the Eclipse and its Defence
gratuitously lays down, or whether it was prompted by a sense of
justice, as he himself affirms.
[Footnote 1: The "Eclipse" had previously been noticed in the same
review, on the whole favourably, by a writer of evidently a different
religious school, and before I had exposed the evil arts of my
assailant.]
[Footnote 2: The authorship is since acknowledged by Mr. Henry Rogers,
in the title to his article on Bishop Butler in the "Encyclopaedia
Britannica."]
[Footnote 3: That is, my "discovery" that the writer of the "Eclipse
of Faith" grossly misquotes and misinterprets me.]
[Footnote 4: Page 225, he says, that each criticism "is quite worthy
of Mr. Newman's _friend_, defender and admirer;" assuming a fact, in
order to lower my defender's credit with his readers.]
[Footnote 5: As he puts "artful dodge" into quotation marks, his
readers will almost inevitably believe that this vulgar language is
mine. In the same spirit to speaks of me as "making merry" with a Book
Revelation; as if I had the slightest sympathy or share in the style
and tone which pervades the "Eclipse." But there is no end of such
things to be denounced.]
[Footnote 6: Italics in the original.]
[Footnote 7: In the ninth edition, p. 104, I find that to cover the
formal falsehood of these words, he adds: "what he calls his arguments
are assertions only," still withholding that which would confute him.]
[Footnote 8: I will here add, that this "stinking fly"--the
parenthesis ("in a certain stage of development")--was added merely
to avoid dogmatizing on the question,
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