ost
grave and important, was long a great difficulty in the way of
attempting to identify the Roman Church, absolutely and exclusively,
with the Primitive Church. The study of antiquity indisposed him,
indeed, more and more to the existing system of the English Church; its
claims to model itself on the purity and simplicity of the Early Church
seemed to him, in the light of its documents, and still more of the
facts of history and life, more and more questionable. But modern Rome
was just as distant from the Early Church though it preserved many
ancient features, lost or unvalued by England. Still, Rome was not the
same thing as the Early Church; and Mr. Newman ultimately sought a way
out of his difficulty--and indeed there was no other--in the famous
doctrine of Development. But when the difficulty about _Apostolicity_
was thus provided for, then the force of the great vision of the
Catholic Church came upon him, unchecked and irresistible. That was a
thing present, visible, undeniable as a fact of nature; that was a thing
at once old and new; it belonged as truly, as manifestly, to the recent
and modern world of democracy and science, as it did to the Middle Ages
and the Fathers, to the world of Gregory and Innocent, to the world of
Athanasius and Augustine. The majesty, the vastness of an imperial
polity, outlasting all states and kingdoms, all social changes and
political revolutions, answered at once to the promises of the
prophecies, and to the antecedent idea of the universal kingdom of God.
Before this great idea, embodied in concrete form, and not a paper
doctrine, partial scandals and abuses seemed to sink into
insignificance. Objections seemed petty and ignoble; the pretence of
rival systems impertinent and absurd. He resented almost with impatience
anything in the way of theory or explanation which seemed to him narrow,
technical, dialectical. He would look at nothing but what had on it the
mark of greatness and largeness which befitted the awful subject, and
was worthy of arresting the eye and attention of an ecclesiastical
statesman, alive to mighty interests, compared to which even the most
serious human affairs were dwarfed and obscured. But all this was
gradual in coming. His recognition of the claims of the English Church,
faulty and imperfect as he thought it, did not give way suddenly and at
once. It survived the rude shock of 1839, From first to almost the last
she was owned as his "mother"--owned in