y tongue!"

Hardly had I brought my course of reading to a close, when the Dublin
Review of that same August was put into my hands, by friends who were
more favourable to the cause of Rome than I was myself. There was an
article in it on the "Anglican Claim" by Dr. Wiseman. This was about the
middle of September. It was on the Donatists, with an application to
Anglicanism. I read it, and did not see much in it. The Donatist
controversy was known to me for some years, as has appeared already. The
case was not parallel to that of the Anglican Church. St. Augustine in
Africa wrote against the Donatists in Africa. They were a furious party
who made a schism within the African Church, and not beyond its limits.
It was a case of Altar against Altar, of two occupants of the same See,
as that between the Non-jurors in England and the Established Church;
not the case of one Church against another, as of Rome against the
Oriental Monophysites. But my friend, an anxiously religious man, now,
as then, very dear to me, a Protestant still, pointed out the palmary
words of St. Augustine, which were contained in one of the extracts made
in the Review, and which had escaped my observation. "Securus judicat
orbis terrarum." He repeated these words again and again, and, when he
was gone, they kept ringing in my ears. "Securus judicat orbis
terrarum;" they were words which went beyond the occasion of the
Donatists: they applied to that of the Monophysites. They gave a cogency
to the Article, which had escaped me at first. They decided
ecclesiastical questions on a simpler rule than that of Antiquity; nay,
St. Augustine was one of the prime oracles of Antiquity; here then
Antiquity was deciding against itself. What a light was hereby thrown
upon every controversy in the Church! not that, for the moment, the
multitude may not falter in their judgment,--not that, in the Arian
hurricane, Sees more than can be numbered did not bend before its fury,
and fall off from St. Athanasius,--not that the crowd of Oriental
Bishops did not need to be sustained during the contest by the voice and
the eye of St. Leo; but that the deliberate judgment, in which the whole
Church at length rests and acquiesces, is an infallible prescription and
a final sentence against such portions of it as protest and secede. Who
can account for the impressions which are made on him? For a mere
sentence, the words of St. Augustine, struck me with a power which I
never had fel