tinising the course
of the Church as a whole, as if philosophically, as an historical
phenomenon, and observing the laws on which it was conducted. Hence
the sermon, or essay as it more truly is, is written in a dry and
unimpassioned way: it shows as little of human warmth of feeling, I
repeat, as a sermon of Bishop Butler's. Yet, under that calm exterior
there was a deep and keen sensitiveness, as I shall now proceed to
show.

3. If I mistake not, it was written with a secret thought about
myself. Every one preaches according to his frame of mind, at the
time of preaching. One heaviness especially oppressed me at that
season, which this writer, twenty years afterwards, has set himself
with a good will to renew: it arose from the sense of the base
calumnies which were thrown upon me on all sides. In this trouble of
mind I gained, while I reviewed the history of the Church, at once an
argument and a consolation. My argument was this: if I, who knew my
own innocence, was so blackened by party prejudice, perhaps those
high rulers and those servants of the Church, in the many ages which
intervened between the early Nicene times and the present, who were
laden with such grievous accusations, were innocent also; and this
reflection served to make me tender towards those great names of the
past, to whom weaknesses or crimes were imputed, and reconciled me to
difficulties in ecclesiastical proceedings, which there were no means
now of properly explaining. And the sympathy thus excited for them,
reacted on myself, and I found comfort in being able to put myself
under the shadow of those who had suffered as I was suffering, and
who seemed to promise me their recompense, since I had a fellowship
in their trial. In a letter to my bishop at the time of Tract 90,
part of which I have quoted, I said that I had ever tried to "keep
innocency;" and now two years had passed since then, and men were
louder and louder in heaping on me the very charges, which this
writer repeats out of my sermon, of "fraud and cunning," "craftiness
and deceitfulness," "double-dealing," "priestcraft," of being
"mysterious, dark, subtle, designing," when I was all the time
conscious to myself, in my degree, and after my measure, of
"sobriety, self-restraint, and control of word and feeling." I had
had experience how my past success had been imputed to "secret
management;" and how, when I had shown surprise at that success, that
surprise again was imputed t