ment of my Bishop. I did not care much for the Bench
of Bishops, except as they might be the voice of my Church: nor should I
have cared much for a Provincial Council; nor for a Diocesan Synod
presided over by my Bishop; all these matters seemed to me to be _jure
ecclesiastico_, but what to me was _jure divino_ was the voice of my
Bishop in his own person. My own Bishop was my Pope; I knew no other;
the successor of the Apostles, the Vicar of Christ. This was but a
practical exhibition of the Anglican theory of Church Government, as I
had already drawn it out myself, after various Anglican Divines. This
continued all through my course; when at length, in 1845, I wrote to
Bishop Wiseman, in whose Vicariate I found myself, to announce my
conversion, I could find nothing better to say to him than that I would
obey the Pope as I had obeyed my own Bishop in the Anglican Church. My
duty to him was my point of honour; his disapprobation was the one thing
which I could not bear. I believe it to have been a generous and honest
feeling; and in consequence I was rewarded by having all my time for
ecclesiastical superior a man, whom, had I had a choice, I should have
preferred, out and out, to any other Bishop on the Bench, and for whose
memory I have a special affection. Dr. Bagot--a man of noble mind, and
as kind-hearted and as considerate as he was noble. He ever sympathized
with me in my trials which followed; it was my own fault, that I was not
brought into more familiar personal relations with him, than it was my
happiness to be. May his name be ever blessed!

And now in concluding my remarks on the second point on which my
confidence rested, I repeat that here again I have no retractation to
announce as to its main outline. While I am now as clear in my
acceptance of the principle of dogma, as I was in 1833 and 1816, so
again I am now as firm in my belief of a visible Church, of the
authority of Bishops, of the grace of the sacraments, of the religious
worth of works of penance, as I was in 1833. I have added Articles to my
Creed; but the old ones, which I then held with a divine faith, remain.

3. But now, as to the third point on which I stood in 1833, and which I
have utterly renounced and trampled upon since,--my then view of the
Church of Rome;--I will speak about it as exactly as I can. When I was
young, as I have said already, and after I was grown up, I thought the
Pope to be Antichrist. At Christmas 1824-5 I preache