rom the
associations and the affections of half a lifetime.

The final break with the English Church was with much heat and
bitterness; and both sides knew too much each of the other to warrant
the language used on each side. The English Church had received too
much loyal and invaluable service from him in teaching and example to
have insulted him, as many of its chief authorities did, with the
charges of dishonesty and bad faith; his persecutors forgot that a
little effort on his part might, if he had been what they called him,
and had really been a traitor, have formed a large and compact party,
whose secession might have caused fatal damage. And he, too, knew too
much of the better side of English religious life to justify the fierce
invective and sarcasm with which he assailed for a time the English
Church as a mere system of comfortable and self-deceiving worldliness.

But as time went over him in his new position two things made
themselves felt. One was, that though there was a New Testament life,
lived in the Roman Church with conspicuous truth and reality, yet the
Roman Church, like the English, was administered and governed by
men--men with passions and faults, men of mixed characters--who had,
like their English contemporaries and rivals, ends and rules of action
not exactly like those of the New Testament. The Roman Church had to
accept, as much as the English, the modern conditions of social and
political life, however different in outward look from those of the
Sermon on the Mount. The other was the increasing sense that the
civilisation of the West was as a whole, and notwithstanding grievous
drawbacks, part of God's providential government, a noble and
beneficent thing, ministering graciously to man's peace and order,
which Christians ought to recognise as a blessing of their times such
as their fathers had not, for which they ought to be thankful, and
which, if they were wise, they would put to what, in his phrase, was an
"Apostolical" use. In one of the angelical hymns in the _Dream of
Gerontius_, he dwells on the Divine goodness which led men to found "a
household and a fatherland, a city and a state" with an earnestness of
sympathy, recalling the enumeration of the achievements of human
thought and hand, and the arts of civil and social life--[Greek: kai
phthegma kai aenemoen phronaema kai astynomous orgas]--dwelt on so
fondly by Aeschylus and Sophocles.

The force with which these two things made