h nativity.

For to many of those who profess to follow him he is already a
hesitating and too cautious leader, and they fret under his coldness
towards the millinery of the altar, and writhe under his refusal to
accept the strange miracle of Transubstantiation--a miracle which, he
has explained, I understand, demands a reversal of itself to account for
the change which takes place in digestion. If they were rid of his
restraining hand, if they felt they could trust themselves without his
intellectual championship, these Boishevists of sacerdotalism, these
enthusiasts for the tyranny of an absolute Authority, these episcopalian
asserters of the Apostolical Succession who delight in flouting and
defying and insulting their bishops, would soon lose in the follies of
excess the last vestiges of English respect for the once glorious and
honourable Oxford Movement.

If any man think that I bear too hardly on these very positive
protagonists of Latin Christianity, let him read the Anglican chapters
in _A Spiritual AEneid_. Father Knox was once a member of this party and
something of a disciple of Dr. Gore, who, however, always regretted his
"mediaeval" theology.

A member of this party, marching indeed at its head and its one voice in
these degenerate days to which men of intelligence pay the smallest
attention, Bishop Gore has lost the great influence he once exercised,
or began to exercise, on the national life, a moral and spiritual
influence which might at this time have been well-nigh supreme if the
main body of the nation had not unfortunately lost its interest for the
man in its contempt for, or rather its indifference to, the party to
which he consents to belong.

But for the singular beauty of his spiritual life, one would be tempted
to set him up as an example of Coleridge's grave warning, "He, who
begins by loving Christianity better than Truth, will proceed by loving
his own Sect or Church better than Christianity, and end in loving
himself better than all."

I find him in these late days no nearer to Rome, not an inch nearer,
than in the days of his early manhood, but absolutely convinced that
Christ founded a Church and instituted the two chief sacraments. He will
sacrifice nothing in this respect. His whole mind, which is a very
different thing from his whole spirit, leans towards authority, order,
and coherence. He must have an organised society of believers, believers
in the creeds, and he must have an