he
other. The Church of England was in possession, with its own call and
its immense work to do, and striving to do it. Whatever the Church of
Rome was abroad, it was here an intruder and a disturber. That to his
mind was the fact and the true position of things; and this ought to
govern the character and course of controversy. The true line was not to
denounce and abuse wholesale, not to attack with any argument, good or
bad, not to deny or ignore what was solid in the Roman ground, and good
and elevated in the Roman system, but admitting all that fairly ought to
be admitted, to bring into prominence, not for mere polemical
denunciation, but for grave and reasonable and judicial condemnation,
all that was extravagant and arrogant in Roman assumptions, and all that
was base, corrupt, and unchristian in the popular religion, which, with
all its claims to infallibility and authority, Rome not only permitted
but encouraged. For us to condemn Rome wholesale, as was ordinarily the
fashion, even in respectable writers, was as wrong, as unfair, as
unprofitable to the cause of truth and Christianity, as the Roman
charges against us were felt by us to be ignorant and unjust. Rome
professes like England to continue the constitution, doctrine,
traditions, and spirit of the ancient and undivided Church: and so far
as she does so--and she does so in a great degree--we can have no
quarrel with her. But in a great degree also, she does this only in
profession and as a theory: she claims the witness and suffrage of
antiquity, but she interprets it at her own convenience and by her own
authority. We cannot claim exemption from mistakes, from deviations from
our own standard and principles, any more than Rome; but while she
remains as she is, and makes the monstrous claims of infallibility and
supremacy, there is nothing for English Churchmen but to resist her.
Union is impossible. Submission is impossible. What we have to beware of
for our own sake, as well as for our cause, are false arguments, unreal
objections, ignorant allegations. There is enough on the very surface,
in her audacious assertions and high-handed changes, for popular
arguments against her, without having recourse to exaggeration and
falsehood; she may be a very faulty Church, without being Babylon and
Antichrist. And in the higher forms of argument, there is abundance in
those provinces of ancient theology and ecclesiastical history and law,
which Protestant controvers