tection of the
Stuart kings, and stung to bitter recrimination by the insults and the
unscrupulous political intrigues of Roman Catholic agents, had exhausted
the language of vituperation against a great aggressive rival, which was
threatening everything that they held dear. They had damaged their own
character for fairness, and overlaid their substantial grounds of
objection and complaint, by this unbalanced exaggeration. Mr. Newman, in
his study of these matters, early saw both the need and the difficulty
of discrimination in the Roman controversy. It had to be waged, not as
of old, with penal legislation behind, but against adversaries who
could now make themselves listened to, and before a public sufficiently
robust in its Protestantism, to look with amused interest on a
dialectical triumph of the Roman over the Anglican claims. Romanism, he
thought, was fatal both to his recent hopes for the English Church, and
to the honour and welfare of Christianity at large. But in opposing it,
ground loosely taken of old must be carefully examined, and if
untenable, abandoned. Arguments which proved too much, which availed
against any Church at all, must be given up. Popular objections, arising
from ignorance or misconception, must be reduced to their true limits or
laid aside. The controversy was sure to be a real one, and nothing but
what was real and would stand scrutiny was worth anything in it.

Mr. Newman had always been impressed with the greatness of the Roman
Church. Of old it had seemed to him great with the greatness of
Antichrist. Now it seemed great with the strange weird greatness of a
wonderful mixed system, commanding from its extent of sway and its
imperial authority, complicated and mysterious in its organisation and
influence, in its devotion and its superstitions, and surpassing every
other form of religion both in its good and its evil.[71] What now
presented itself to Mr. Newman's thoughts, instead of the old notion of
a pure Church on one side, and a corrupt Church on the other, sharply
opposed to one another, was the more reasonable supposition of two great
portions of the divided Church, each with its realities of history and
fact and character, each with its special claims and excellences, each
with its special sins and corruptions, and neither realising in practice
and fact all it professed to be on paper; each of which further, in the
conflicts of past days, had deeply, almost unpardonably, wronged t