gainst suggestions for considering the differences between ourselves
and the foreign Churches with a view to their adjustment." (I meant
in the way of negotiation, conference, agitation, or the like.) "Our
business is with ourselves,--to make ourselves more holy, more
self-denying, more primitive, more worthy of our high calling. To be
anxious for a composition of differences is to begin at the end.
Political reconciliations are but outward and hollow, and fallacious.
And till Roman Catholics renounce political efforts, and manifest in
their public measures the light of holiness and truth, perpetual war
is our only prospect."

According to this theory, a religious body is part of the One
Catholic and Apostolic Church, if it has the succession and the creed
of the apostles, with the note of holiness of life; and there is much
in such a view to approve itself to the direct common sense and
practical habits of an Englishman. However, with events consequent
upon Tract 90, I sunk my theory to a lower level. What could be said
in apology, when the bishops and the people of my Church, not only
did not suffer, but actually rejected primitive Catholic doctrine,
and tried to eject from their communion all who held it? after the
Bishops' charges? after the Jerusalem "abomination?" Well, this could
be said; still we were not nothing: we could not be as if we never
had been a Church; we were "Samaria." This then was that lower level
on which I placed myself, and all who felt with me, at the end of
1841.

To bring out this view was the purpose of four sermons preached at
St. Mary's in December of that year. Hitherto I had not introduced
the exciting topics of the day into the pulpit; on this occasion
I did. I did so, for the moment was urgent; there was great
unsettlement of mind among us, in consequence of those same events
which had unsettled me. One special anxiety, very obvious, which was
coming on me now, was, that what was "one man's meat was another
man's poison." I had said even of Tract 90, "It was addressed to one
set of persons, and has been used and commented on by another;" still
more was it true now, that whatever I wrote for the service of those
whom I knew to be in trouble of mind, would become on the one hand
matter of suspicion and slander in the mouths of my opponents, and of
distress and surprise to those on the other hand, who had no
difficulties of faith at all. Accordingly, when I published
these four sermon