t condemned in the Articles, for Roman dogma
which was condemned; and 2, Roman dogma, which was not condemned in
the Articles, for dominant error which was. If they went further than
this, I had nothing more to say to them.

A further motive which I had for my attempt, was the desire to
ascertain the ultimate points of contrariety between the Roman and
Anglican creeds, and to make them as few as possible. I thought that
each creed was obscured and misrepresented by a dominant
circumambient "Popery" and "Protestantism."

The main thesis then of my essay was this:--the Articles do not
oppose Catholic teaching; they but partially oppose Roman dogma; they
for the most part oppose the dominant errors of Rome. And the problem
was to draw the line as to what they allowed and what they condemned.

Such being the object which I had in view, what were my prospects of
widening and defining their meaning? The prospect was encouraging;
there was no doubt at all of the elasticity of the Articles: to take
a palmary instance, the seventeenth was assumed by one party to be
Lutheran, by another Calvinistic, though the two interpretations were
contradictory to each other; why then should not other Articles be
drawn up with a vagueness of an equally intense character? I wanted
to ascertain what was the limit of that elasticity in the direction
of Roman dogma. But next, I had a way of inquiry of my own, which I
state without defending. I instanced it afterwards in my Essay on
Doctrinal Development. That work, I believe, I have not read since I
published it, and I doubt not at all that I have made many mistakes
in it;--partly, from my ignorance of the details of doctrine, as the
Church of Rome holds them, but partly from my impatience to clear as
large a range for the _principle_ of doctrinal development (waiving
the question of historical _fact_) as was consistent with the strict
apostolicity and identity of the Catholic Creed. In like manner, as
regards the 39 Articles, my method of inquiry was to leap _in medias
res_. I wished to institute an inquiry how far, in critical fairness,
the text _could_ be opened; I was aiming far more at ascertaining
what a man who subscribed it might hold than what he must, so that my
conclusions were negative rather than positive. It was but a first
essay. And I made it with the full recognition and consciousness,
which I had already expressed in my Prophetical Office, as regards
the _Via Media_, that I w