stian in the ecclesiastical position of
our Church at this day, no one can deny; but the statements of the
Articles are not in the number, and it may be right at the present
moment to insist upon this.

When met by the objection that the ideas of the framers of the Articles
were well known, and that it was notorious that they had meant to put an
insuperable barrier between the English Church and everything that
savoured of Rome, the writer replied that the actual English Church
received the Articles not from them but from a much later authority,
that we are bound by their words not by their private sentiments either
as theologians or ecclesiastical politicians, and that in fact they had
intended the Articles to comprehend a great body of their countrymen,
who would have been driven away by any extreme and anti-Catholic
declarations even against Rome. The temper of compromise is
characteristic of the English as contrasted with the foreign
Reformation. It is visible, not only in the Articles, but in the polity
of the English Church, which clung so obstinately to the continuity and
forms of the ancient hierarchical system, it is visible in the
sacramental offices of the Prayer Book, which left so much out to
satisfy the Protestants, and left so much in to satisfy the Catholics.

The Tract went in detail through the Articles which were commonly looked
upon as either anti-Catholic or anti-Roman. It went through them with a
dry logical way of interpretation, such as a professed theologian might
use, who was accustomed to all the niceties of language and the
distinctions of the science. It was the way in which they would be
likely to be examined and construed by a purely legal court. The effect
of it, doubtless, was like that produced on ordinary minds by the
refinements of a subtle advocate, or by the judicial interpretation of
an Act of Parliament which the judges do not like; and some of the
interpretations undoubtedly seemed far-fetched and artificial. Yet some
of those which were pointed to at the time as flagrant instances of
extravagant misinterpretation have now come to look different. Nothing
could exceed the scorn poured on the interpretation of the Twenty-second
Article, that it condemns the "_Roman_" doctrine of Purgatory, but not
_all_ doctrine of purgatory as a place of gradual purification beyond
death. But in our days a school very far removed from Mr. Newman's would
require and would claim to make the s