and to the
enormities of the unprincipled Dioscorus, in order to be converted to
Rome!

Now let it be simply understood that I am not writing controversially,
but with the one object of relating things as they happened to me in the
course of my conversion. With this view I will quote a passage from the
account, which I gave in 1850, of my reasonings and feelings in 1839:

"It was difficult to make out how the Eutychians or Monophysites were
heretics, unless Protestants and Anglicans were heretics also; difficult
to find arguments against the Tridentine Fathers, which did not tell
against the Fathers of Chalcedon; difficult to condemn the Popes of the
sixteenth century, without condemning the Popes of the fifth. The drama
of religion, and the combat of truth and error, were ever one and the
same. The principles and proceedings of the Church now, were those of
the Church then; the principles and proceedings of heretics then, were
those of Protestants now. I found it so,--almost fearfully; there was an
awful similitude, more awful, because so silent and unimpassioned,
between the dead records of the past and the feverish chronicle of the
present. The shadow of the fifth century was on the sixteenth. It was
like a spirit rising from the troubled waters of the old world, with the
shape and lineaments of the new. The Church then, as now, might be
called peremptory and stern, resolute, overbearing, and relentless; and
heretics were shifting, changeable, reserved, and deceitful, ever
courting civil power, and never agreeing together, except by its aid;
and the civil power was ever aiming at comprehensions, trying to put the
invisible out of view, and substituting expediency for faith. What was
the use of continuing the controversy, or defending my position, if,
after all, I was forging arguments for Arius or Eutyches, and turning
devil's advocate against the much-enduring Athanasius and the majestic
Leo? Be my soul with the Saints! and shall I lift up my hand against
them? Sooner may my right hand forget her cunning, and wither outright,
as his who once stretched it out against a prophet of God! anathema to a
whole tribe of Cranmers, Ridleys, Latimers, and Jewels! perish the names
of Bramhall, Ussher, Taylor, Stillingfleet, and Barrow from the face of
the earth, ere I should do ought but fall at their feet in love and in
worship, whose image was continually before my eyes, and whose musical
words were ever in my ears and on m