close union between them. I considered that each See and
Diocese might be compared to a crystal, and that each was similar to the
rest, and that the sum total of them all was only a collection of
crystals. The unity of the Church lay, not in its being a polity, but in
its being a family, a race, coming down by apostolical descent from its
first founders and bishops. And I considered this truth brought out,
beyond the possibility of dispute, in the Epistles of St. Ignatius, in
which the Bishop is represented as the one supreme authority in the
Church, that is, in his own place, with no one above him, except as, for
the sake of ecclesiastical order and expedience, arrangements had been
made by which one was put over or under another. So much for our own
claim to Catholicity, which was so perversely appropriated by our
opponents to themselves:--on the other hand, as to our special strong
point, Antiquity, while, of course, by means of it, we were able to
condemn most emphatically the novel claim of Rome to domineer over other
Churches, which were in truth her equals, further than that, we thereby
especially convicted her of the intolerable offence of having added to
the Faith. This was the critical head of accusation urged against her by
the Anglican disputant; and as he referred to St. Ignatius in proof that
he himself was a true Catholic, in spite of being separated from Rome,
so he triumphantly referred to the Treatise of Vincentius of Lerins upon
the "Quod semper, quod ubique, quod ab omnibus," in proof that the
controversialists of Rome, in spite of their possession of the Catholic
name, were separated in their creed from the Apostolical and primitive
faith.

Of course those controversialists had their own mode of answering him,
with which I am not concerned in this place; here I am only concerned
with the issue itself, between the one party and the other--Antiquity
_versus_ Catholicity.

Now I will proceed to illustrate what I have been saying of the _status_
of the controversy, as it presented itself to my mind, by extracts from
my writings of the dates of 1836, 1840, and 1841. And I introduce them
with a remark, which especially applies to the paper, from which I shall
quote first, of the date of 1836. That paper appeared in the March and
April numbers of the British Magazine of that year, and was entitled
"Home Thoughts Abroad." Now it will be found, that, in the discussion
which it contains, as in various other