itself to be." I added, of course, that it
would be an absurdity to suppose such tempers of mind desirable in
themselves. The corrector of the press bore these strong epithets
till he got to "more fierce," and then he put in the margin a
_query_. In the very first page of the first Tract, I said of the
bishops, that, "black event though it would be for the country, yet
we could not wish them a more blessed termination of their course,
than the spoiling of their goods and martyrdom." In consequence of a
passage in my work upon the Arian History, a Northern dignitary wrote
to accuse me of wishing to re-establish the blood and torture of the
Inquisition. Contrasting heretics and heresiarchs, I had said, "The
latter should meet with no mercy; he assumes the office of the
Tempter, and, so far forth as his error goes, must be dealt with by
the competent authority, as if he were embodied evil. To spare him is
a false and dangerous pity. It is to endanger the souls of thousands,
and it is uncharitable towards himself." I cannot deny that this is a
very fierce passage; but Arius was banished, not burned; and it is
only fair to myself to say that neither at this, nor any other time
of my life, not even when I was fiercest, could I have even cut off a
Puritan's ears, and I think the sight of a Spanish _auto-da-fe_ would
have been the death of me. Again, when one of my friends, of liberal
and evangelical opinions, wrote to expostulate with me on the course
I was taking, I said that we would ride over him and his, as Othniel
prevailed over Chushan-rishathaim, king of Mesopotamia. Again, I
would have no dealings with my brother, and I put my conduct upon a
syllogism. I said, "St. Paul bids us avoid those who cause divisions;
you cause divisions: therefore I must avoid you." I dissuaded a lady
from attending the marriage of a sister who had seceded from the
Anglican Church. No wonder that Blanco White, who had known me under
such different circumstances, now hearing the general course that I
was taking, was amazed at the change which he recognised in me. He
speaks bitterly and unfairly of me in his letters contemporaneously
with the first years of the Movement; but in 1839, when looking back,
he uses terms of me, which it would be hardly modest in me to quote,
were it not that what he says of me in praise is but part of a whole
account of me. He says: "In this party [the anti-Peel, in 1829] I
found, to my great surprise, my dear friend