in
popular teaching; but to others, in aftertimes, an ill-sounding phrase
of dislike, which summed up the weakness of the Anglican case. Yet it
only answered to the certain fact, that in the early and undivided
Church there was such a thing as authority, and there was no such thing
known as Infallibility. It was an appeal to the facts of history and
human nature against the logical exigencies of a theory. Men must
transcend the conditions of our experience if they want the certainty
which the theory of Infallibility speaks of.

There were especially two weak points in this view of Anglicanism. Mr.
Newman felt and admitted them, and of course they were forced on his
attention by controversialists on both sides; by the Ultra Protestant
school, whose modes of dealing with Scripture he had exposed with
merciless logic and by the now eager Roman disputants, of whom Dr.
Wiseman was the able and not over-scrupulous chief. The first of these
points was that the authority of the undivided Church, which Anglicanism
invoked, though it completely covered the great foundations of Christian
doctrine, our faith as to the nature of God, did not cover with equal
completeness other important points of controversy, such as those
raised at the Reformation as to the Sacraments, and the justification of
the sinner. The Anglican answer was that though the formal and conciliar
authority was not the same in each case, the patristic literature of the
time of the great councils, all that it took for granted and preserved
as current belief and practice, all that resulted from the questions and
debates of the time, formed a body of proof, which carried with it moral
evidence only short of authoritative definition, and was so regarded in
the Anglican formularies. These formularies implied the authority of the
Church to speak; and what was defined on this authority was based on
good evidence, though there were portions of its teaching which had even
better. The other point was more serious. "Your theory," was the
objection, "is nothing but a paper theory; it never was a reality; it
never can be. There may be an ideal halting-place, there is neither a
logical nor an actual one, between Romanism and the ordinary negations
of Protestantism." The answer to the challenge then was, "Let us see if
it cannot be realised. It has recognised foundations to build upon, and
the impediments and interruptions which have hindered it are well known.
Let us see if it