can argument, during my course of
reading in the summer of 1839, I began to look about, as I have said,
for some ground which might supply a controversial basis for my need.
The difficulty in question had affected my view both of Antiquity and
Catholicity; for, while the history of St. Leo showed me that the
deliberate and eventual consent of the great body of the Church ratified
a doctrinal decision as a part of revealed truth, it also showed that
the rule of Antiquity was not infringed, though a doctrine had not been
publicly recognized as so revealed, till centuries after the time of the
Apostles. Thus, whereas the Creeds tell us that the Church is One, Holy,
Catholic, and Apostolic, I could not prove that the Anglican communion
was an integral part of the One Church, on the ground of its teaching
being Apostolic or Catholic, without reasoning in favour of what are
commonly called the Roman corruptions; and I could not defend our
separation from Rome and her faith without using arguments prejudicial
to those great doctrines concerning our Lord, which are the very
foundation of the Christian religion. The Via Media was an impossible
idea; it was what I had called "standing on one leg;" and it was
necessary, if my old issue of the controversy was to be retained, to go
further either one way or the other.

Accordingly, I abandoned that old ground and took another. I
deliberately quitted the old Anglican ground as untenable; though I did
not do so all at once, but as I became more and more convinced of the
state of the case. The Jerusalem Bishopric was the ultimate condemnation
of the old theory of the Via Media:--if its establishment did nothing
else, at least it demolished the sacredness of diocesan rights. If
England could be in Palestine, Rome might be in England. But its bearing
upon the controversy, as I have shown in the foregoing chapter, was much
more serious than this technical ground. From that time the Anglican
Church was, in my mind, either not a normal portion of that One Church
to which the promises were made, or at least in an abnormal state; and
from that time I said boldly (as I did in my Protest, and as indeed I
had even intimated in my Letter to the Bishop of Oxford), that the
Church in which I found myself had no claim on me, except on condition
of its being a portion of the One Catholic Communion, and that that
condition must ever be borne in mind as a practical matter, and had to
be distinctly prov