would be like
removing the hub from the wheel, the key-stone from the arch, the
trunk from the tree, the foundation from the house. For, in each case
the result must mean confusion. If such a result could ever have been
doubted in the past, it can surely be doubted no longer. The sad
experience of the past three hundred years speaks more eloquently than
any words; and its verdict is conclusive. It proves two things beyond
dispute. The _first_ is, that even the largest and most heterogeneous
body of men may be easily united and kept together, if they can all be
brought to recognise and obey one supreme authority; and the _second_
is, that, even a small and homogeneous body of men will soon divide
and split up into sections, if they cannot be brought to recognise
such an authority.

Further, any one looking out over the face of Christendom, with an
unprejudiced eye, for the realisation of that unity which Christ
promised to affix to his Church as an infallible sign of authenticity,
will find it in the Catholic Communion, but certainly nowhere
else--least of all in the Church of England.

"What," asks a well-known writer in unfeigned astonishment, "what
opinion is not held within the Established Church? Were not Dr.
Wilberforce and Dr. Colenso, Dr. Hamilton and Dr. Baring equally
Bishops of the Church of England? Were not Dr. Pusey and Mr. Jowett
at the same time her professors; Father Ignatius and Mr. Bellew her
ministers; Archdeacon Denison and Dr. M'Neile her distinguished
ornaments and preachers? Yet their religions differed almost as widely
as Buddhism from Calvinism, or the philosophy of Aristotle from that
of Martin Tupper." If a Catholic priest were to teach a single
heretical doctrine, he would be at once cashiered, and turned out of
the Church. But "if an Anglican minister must resign because his
opinions are at variance with some other Anglican minister, every soul
of them would have to retire, from the Archbishop of Canterbury down
to the last licentiate of Durham or St. Bees".

As surely as infallibility is the essential prerogative of a divinely
constituted Teaching Church, so surely can it exist only in that
institution which alone has always claimed it, both as her gift by
promise and the sole explanation of her triumphs and her perpetuity.
It would be the idlest of dreams to search for it in a fractional part
of a modern community, like the Church of England, which had always
disowned and scoffed at it