lf with a good will
to renew: it arose from the sense of the base calumnies which were
heaped upon me on all sides. It is worth observing that this Sermon is
exactly contemporaneous with the report spread by a Bishop (_vid. supr._
p. 181), that I had advised a clergyman converted to Catholicism to
retain his Living. This report was in circulation in February 1843, and
my Sermon was preached on the 19th. In the trouble of mind into which I
was thrown by such calumnies as this, I gained, while I reviewed the
history of the Church, at once an argument and a consolation. My
argument was this: if I, who knew my own innocence, was so blackened by
party prejudice, perhaps those high rulers and those servants of the
Church, in the many ages which intervened between the early Nicene times
and the present, who were laden with such grievous accusations, were
innocent also; and this reflection served to make me tender towards
those great names of the past, to whom weaknesses or crimes were
imputed, and reconciled me to difficulties in ecclesiastical
proceedings, which there were no means now of properly explaining. And
the sympathy thus excited for them, re-acted on myself, and I found
comfort in being able to put myself under the shadow of those who had
suffered as I was suffering, and who seemed to promise me their
recompense, since I had a fellowship in their trial. In a letter to my
Bishop at the time of Tract 90, part of which I have quoted, I said that
I had ever tried to "keep innocency;" and now two years had passed since
then, and men were louder and louder in heaping on me the very charges,
which this Writer repeats out of my Sermon, of "fraud and cunning,"
"craftiness and deceitfulness," "double-dealing," "priestcraft," of
being "mysterious, dark, subtle, designing," when I was all the time
conscious to myself, in my degree, and after my measure, of "sobriety,
self-restraint, and control of word and feeling." I had had experience
how my past success had been imputed to "secret management;" and how,
when I had shown surprise at that success, that surprise again was
imputed to "deceit;" and how my honest heartfelt submission to authority
had been called, as it was called in a Bishop's charge abroad, "mystic
humility;" and how my silence was called an "hypocrisy;" and my
faithfulness to my clerical engagements a secret correspondence with the
enemy. And I found a way of destroying my sensitiveness about these
things which ja