ppealed, agree with the new; it might agree variously in this point
or in that, in others there were contrarieties which it was vain to
reconcile. Facts were against the English claim to be a Catholic
Church--how could Catholicity be shut up in one island? How could
England assert its continuity of doctrine? Facts were against the Roman
claim to be an infallible, and a perfect, and the whole Church--how
could that be perfect which was marked in the face of day with enormous
and undeniable corruptions? How could that be infallible which was
irreconcilable with ancient teaching? How could that be the whole
Church, which, to say nothing of the break-up in the West, ignored, as
if it had no existence, the ancient and uninterrupted Eastern Church?
Theory after theory came up, and was tried, and was found wanting. Each
had much to say for itself, its strong points, its superiority over its
rivals in dealing with the difficulties of the case, its plausibilities
and its imaginative attractions. But all had their tender spot, and
flinched when they were touched in earnest. In the confusions and sins
and divisions of the last fifteen centuries, profound disorganisation
had fastened on the Western Church. Christendom was not, could not be
pretended to be, what it had been in the fourth century; and whichever
way men looked the reasons were not hard to see. The first and
characteristic feeling of the movement, one which Mr. Newman had done so
much to deepen, was that of shame and humiliation at the disorder at
home, as well as in every part of the Church. It was not in Rome only,
or in England only; it was everywhere. What had been peculiar to
Anglicanism among all its rivals, was that it had emphatically and
without reserve confessed it.

With this view of the dislocation and the sins of the Church, he could
at once with perfect consistency recognise the shortcomings of the
English branch of the Church, and yet believe and maintain that it was
a true and living branch. The English fragment was not what it should
be, was indeed much that it should not be; the same could be said of the
Roman, though in different respects. This, as he himself reminds us, was
no new thing to his mind when the unsettlement of 1839 began. "At the
end of 1835, or the beginning of 1836, I had the whole state of the
question before me, on which, to my mind, the decision between the
Churches depended." It did not, he says, depend on the claims of the
Pope,