22d April 1842, a year after No. 90,
"much quieter and more resigned than we were, and are remarkably
desirous of building up a position, and proving that the English theory
is tenable, or rather the English state of things. If the Bishops would
leave us alone, the fever would subside."

He wanted, when all other parties were claiming room for their
speculations, to claim room for his own preference for ancient doctrine.
He wished to make out that no branch of the Church had authoritatively
committed itself to language which was hopelessly and fatally
irreconcilable with Christian truth. But he claimed nothing but what he
could maintain to be fairly within the authorised formularies of the
English Church. He courted inquiry, he courted argument. If his claim
seemed a new one, if his avowed leaning to ancient and Catholic views
seemed to make him more tolerant than had been customary, not to Roman
abuses, but to Roman authoritative language, it was part of the more
accurate and the more temperate and charitable thought of our day
compared with past times. It was part of the same change which has
brought Church opinions from the unmitigated Calvinism of the Lambeth
Articles to what the authorities of those days would have denounced,
without a doubt, as Arminianism. Hooker was gravely and seriously
accused to the Council for saying that a Papist could be saved, and had
some difficulty to clear himself; it was as natural then as it is
amazing now.[91]

But with this sincere loyalty to the English Church, as he believed it
to be, there was, no doubt, in the background the haunting and
disquieting misgiving that the attempt to connect more closely the
modern Church with the ancient, and this widened theology in a direction
which had been hitherto specially and jealously barred, was putting the
English Church on its trial. Would it bear it? Would it respond to the
call to rise to a higher and wider type of doctrine, to a higher
standard of life? Would it justify what Mr. Newman had placed in the
forefront among the notes of the true Church, the note of Sanctity?
Would the _Via Media_ make up for its incompleteness as a theory by
developing into reality and fruitfulness of actual results? Would the
Church bear to be told of its defaults? Would it allow to the
maintainers of Catholic and Anglican principles the liberty which
others claimed, and which by large and powerful bodies of opinion was
denied to Anglicans? Or would it