and to make them as few as possible. I thought that each creed
was obscured and misrepresented by a dominant circumambient "Popery" and
"Protestantism."

The main thesis then of my Essay was this:--the Articles do not oppose
Catholic teaching; they but partially oppose Roman dogma; they for the
most part oppose the dominant errors of Rome. And the problem was, as I
have said, to draw the line as to what they allowed and what they
condemned.

Such being the object which I had in view, what were my prospects of
widening and of defining their meaning? The prospect was encouraging;
there was no doubt at all of the elasticity of the Articles: to take a
palmary instance, the seventeenth was assumed by one party to be
Lutheran, by another Calvinistic, though the two interpretations were
contradictory of each other; why then should not other Articles be drawn
up with a vagueness of an equally intense character? I wanted to
ascertain what was the limit of that elasticity in the direction of
Roman dogma. But next, I had a way of inquiry of my own, which I state
without defending. I instanced it afterwards in my Essay on Doctrinal
Development. That work, I believe, I have not read since I published it,
and I do not doubt at all I have made many mistakes in it;--partly, from
my ignorance of the details of doctrine, as the Church of Rome holds
them, but partly from my impatience to clear as large a range for the
_principle_ of doctrinal Development (waiving the question of historical
_fact_) as was consistent with the strict Apostolicity and identity of
the Catholic Creed. In like manner, as regards the 39 Articles, my
method of inquiry was to leap _in medias res_. I wished to institute an
inquiry how far, in critical fairness, the text _could_ be opened; I was
aiming far more at ascertaining what a man who subscribed it might hold
than what he must, so that my conclusions were negative rather than
positive. It was but a first essay. And I made it with the full
recognition and consciousness, which I had already expressed in my
Prophetical Office, as regards the _Via Media_, that I was making only
"a first approximation to the required solution;"--"a series of
illustrations supplying hints for the removal" of a difficulty, and with
full acknowledgment "that in minor points, whether in question of fact
or of judgment, there was room for difference or error of opinion," and
that I "should not be ashamed to own a mistake, if it were p