enth centuries reflected.

The drama of religion and the combat of truth and error were ever one
and the same; the principles of the Roman Church now were those of the
Church then; the principles of heretics then were those of Protestants
now; there was an awful similitude. Be my soul with the saints! In the
same month the words of St. Augustine were pointed out to me, _"Securus
judicat orbis terrarum";_ they struck me with a power which I had never
felt from any words before; the theory of the "Via Media" was absolutely
pulverised.

In the summer of 1841, in retirement at Littlemore, I received three
blows which broke me. First, in the history of the Arians I found the
same phenomena which I had found in the Monophysites: the pure Arians
were the Protestants, the semi-Arians were the Anglicans, and Rome now
was what it was then. Secondly, the bishops, one after another, began to
charge against me in a formal, determinate movement. Third, it was
proposed by Anglican authorities to establish an Anglican bishopric in
Jerusalem--a step which amounted to a formal denial that the Anglican
Church was a branch of the Catholic Church, and to a formal assertion
that the Anglican was a Protestant Church. The Jerusalem bishopric
brought me to the beginning of the end.

From the end of 1841 I was on my death-bed, as regards my membership of
the Anglican Church, though at the time I became aware of it only by
degrees. A death-bed has scarcely a history; it is a tedious decline,
with seasons of rallying and seasons of falling back. My position at
first was this: I had given up my place in the movement in the spring of
1841, but I could not give up my duties towards the many and various
minds who had been brought into it by me; I expected gradually to fall
back into lay communion; I never contemplated leaving the Church of
England; I could not hold office in its service if I were not allowed to
hold the Catholic sense of the Articles; I could not go to Rome while
she suffered honours to be paid to the Blessed Virgin and the saints
which I thought in my conscience to be incompatible with the supreme
glory of the One, Infinite and Eternal; I desired a union with Rome
under conditions, Church with Church; I called Littlemore my Torres
Vedras, and thought that some day we might advance again within the
Anglican Church; I kept back all persons who were disposed to go to Rome
with all my might.

The "Via Media" was now an impossible ide