hatever to the matters in hand. I observe with comfort, or at least
with complacency, that on the strength of a couple of hours' talk, at a
time when I was thinking chiefly of the weatherings of slate you were
good enough to show me above Goat's Water, you would have ventured to
baptize me in the little lake--as not a goat, but a sheep. The best I
can be sure of, myself, is that I am no wolf, and have never aspired to
the dignity even of a Dog of the Lord.

You told me, if I remember rightly, that one of the members of the
original meeting denounced me as an arch-heretic[170]--meaning,
doubtless, an arch-pagan; for a heretic, or sect-maker, is of all terms
of reproach the last that can be used of me. And I think he should have
been answered that it was precisely as an arch-pagan that I ventured to
request a more intelligible and more unanimous account of the Christian
Gospel from its preachers.

251. If anything in the Letters offended those of you who hold me a
brother, surely it had been best to tell me between ourselves, or to
tell it to the Church, or to let me be Anathema Maranatha in peace,--in
any case, I must at present so abide, correcting only the mistakes about
myself which have led to graver ones about the things I wanted to speak
of.[171]

The most singular one, perhaps, in all the Letters is that of Mr.
Wanstall's, that I do not attach enough weight to antiquity. I have only
come upon the sentence to-day (29th May), but my reply to it is partly
written already, with reference to the wishes of some other of your
correspondents to know more of my reasons for finding fault with the
English Liturgy.

252. If people are taught to use the Liturgy rightly and reverently, it
will bring them all good; and for some thirty years of my life I used to
read it always through to my servant and myself, if we had no Protestant
church to go to, in Alpine or Italian villages. One can always tacitly
pray of it what one wants, and let the rest pass. But, as I have grown
older, and watched the decline in the Christian faith of all nations, I
have got more and more suspicious of the effect of this particular form
of words on the truthfulness of the English mind (now fast becoming a
salt which has lost his savor, and is fit only to be trodden underfoot
of men). And during the last ten years, in which my position at Oxford
has compelled me to examine what authority there was for the code of
prayer, of which the University is n