s was the appeal to
Antiquity; St. Leo had overset, in my own judgment, its force as the
special argument for Anglicanism; yet I was committed to Antiquity,
together with the whole Anglican school; what then was I to say, when
acute minds urged this or that application of it against the _Via
Media_? it was impossible that, in such circumstances, any answer could
be given which was not unsatisfactory, or any behaviour adopted which
was not mysterious. Again, sometimes in what I wrote I went just as far
as I saw, and could as little say more, as I could see what is below the
horizon; and therefore, when asked as to the consequences of what I had
said, I had no answer to give. Again, sometimes when I was asked,
whether certain conclusions did not follow from a certain principle, I
might not be able to tell at the moment, especially if the matter were
complicated; and for this reason, if for no other, because there is
great difference between a conclusion in the abstract and a conclusion
in the concrete, and because a conclusion may be modified in fact by a
conclusion from some opposite principle. Or it might so happen that my
head got simply confused, by the very strength of the logic which was
administered to me, and thus I gave my sanction to conclusions which
really were not mine; and when the report of those conclusions came
round to me through others, I had to unsay them. And then again, perhaps
I did not like to see men scared or scandalized by unfeeling logical
inferences, which would not have troubled them to the day of their
death, had they not been forced to recognize them. And then I felt
altogether the force of the maxim of St. Ambrose, "Non in dialectica
complacuit Deo salvum facere populum suum;"--I had a great dislike of
paper logic. For myself, it was not logic that carried me on; as well
might one say that the quicksilver in the barometer changes the weather.
It is the concrete being that reasons; pass a number of years, and I
find my mind in a new place; how? the whole man moves; paper logic is
but the record of it. All the logic in the world would not have made me
move faster towards Rome than I did; as well might you say that I have
arrived at the end of my journey, because I see the village church
before me, as venture to assert that the miles, over which my soul had
to pass before it got to Rome, could be annihilated, even though I had
been in possession of some far clearer view than I then had, that Ro