perious call of duty, attempt
what I have set myself to do. It is both to head and heart an extreme
trial, thus to analyze what has so long gone by, and to bring out the
results of that examination. I have done various bold things in my life:
this is the boldest: and, were I not sure I should after all succeed in
my object, it would be madness to set about it.

* * * * *

In the spring of 1839 my position in the Anglican Church was at its
height. I had supreme confidence in my controversial _status_, and I had
a great and still growing success, in recommending it to others. I had
in the foregoing autumn been somewhat sore at the Bishop's Charge, but I
have a letter which shows that all annoyance had passed from my mind. In
January, if I recollect aright, in order to meet the popular clamour
against myself and others, and to satisfy the Bishop, I had collected
into one all the strong things which they, and especially I, had said
against the Church of Rome, in order to their insertion among the
advertisements appended to our publications. Conscious as I was that my
opinions in religion were not gained, as the world said, from Roman
sources, but were, on the contrary, the birth of my own mind and of the
circumstances in which I had been placed, I had a scorn of the
imputations which were heaped upon me. It was true that I held a large
bold system of religion, very unlike the Protestantism of the day, but
it was the concentration and adjustment of the statements of great
Anglican authorities, and I had as much right to hold it, as the
Evangelical, and more right than the Liberal party could show, for
asserting their own respective doctrines. As I declared on occasion of
Tract 90, I claimed, in behalf of who would in the Anglican Church, the
right of holding with Bramhall a comprecation with the Saints, and the
Mass all but Transubstantiation with Andrewes, or with Hooker that
Transubstantiation itself is not a point for Churches to part communion
upon, or with Hammond that a General Council, truly such, never did,
never shall err in a matter of faith, or with Bull that man had in
paradise and lost on the fall, a supernatural habit of grace, or with
Thorndike that penance is a propitiation for post-baptismal sin, or with
Pearson that the all-powerful name of Jesus is no otherwise given than
in the Catholic Church. "Two can play at that," was often in my mouth,
when men of Protestant sentiments