the bread and brake it,
And what the Word did make it,
That I believe and take it,'

is a splendid specimen of ingenious mystification on the _vexata questio_
of transubstantiation,--I question whether Charles James Bloomfield,
Bishop of London, could have returned a more confused and unmeaning
response,--died for his Roman Catholic tendencies. To this day England
remembers who it was, with red, swollen face, and brown apparel, and
collar with a spot of blood on it, made his maiden speech in Parliament
by indignantly informing the House that Dr. Alabaster had preached flat
Popery at St. Paul's, and in our own day Mr. Gorham has failed in
obtaining a legal decision against the Roman Catholic doctrine of
baptismal regeneration. The mistake is, in supposing that the Church as
by law established is Low Church. If it were so, then, of course, out
ought to go the whole crop of Puseyite priests, in spite of the tears and
hysterics of female piety. On the contrary, the Church of England is
like the happy family in Trafalgar-square. Beasts of the most opposite
description there dwell together in peace and unity. Dogs and cats there
sleep side by side. In the prospect of a common maintenance natural
enmities are forgotten. Conformity is impossible. I cannot use my
brother's words with his exact meaning. I must put my own interpretation
on the creeds and articles to which I subscribe, and so long as the State
Church is a chaotic mass of heterogeneous materials--so long as it has no
definite voice, nor law--so long as bishop clashes with bishop, and at
times with himself,--for we may have here a Puseyite, there an
Evangelical, here a fox-hunting divine,--there must be everywhere
heart-burning and scandal, and the degradation of Christianity itself.
But, exclaims my vehement red-faced Saxon friend, you are making Papists
by letting the Puseyites remain. I don't know that. Papacy is alien to
human nature, or it is not. If it is not, you cannot get rid of it. If
cut down to-day, it will sprout up again to-morrow. It springs from a
tendency, I take it, in the human heart. In a mild form, that tendency
gently blooms as Puseyism. A cold in one man may, by means of gruel, be
removed in a week. In another man, it may deepen into deadly decline.
Puseyism may retain as many in the English Church as it may send to Rome.
Your Low Churchman may say the Puseyite has no business in the Church at
all. Well, the other ma