compromise between what is Catholic and what is Protestant, and that
the Protestant parties in it are involved in even greater difficulties,
in relation to subscription and use of its formularies, than the
Catholic. He admitted that he _did_ evade the spirit, but accepted the
"statements of the Articles," maintaining that this was the intention of
their original sanctioners. With characteristic boldness, inventing a
phrase which has become famous, he wrote: "Our twelfth Article is as
plain as words can make it on the Evangelical side; of course I think
its natural meaning may be explained away, for I subscribe it myself in
a non-natural sense":[110] but he showed that Evangelicals, high church
Anglicans, and Latitudinarians were equally obliged to have recourse to
explanations, which to all but themselves were unsatisfactory.

But he went a step beyond this. Hitherto the distinction had been
uniformly insisted upon between what was Catholic and what was Roman;
between what was witnessed to by the primitive and the undivided Church,
and what had been developed beyond that in the Schools, and by the
definitions and decisions of Rome, and in the enormous mass of its
post-Reformation theology, at once so comprehensive, and so minute in
application. This distinction was the foundation of what was,
characteristically, Anglican theology, from Hooker downwards. This
distinction, at least for all important purposes, Mr. Ward gradually
gave up. It was to a certain degree recognised in his early controversy
about No. 90; but it gradually grew fainter till at last it avowedly
disappeared. The Anglican writers had drawn their ideas and their
inspiration from the Fathers; the Fathers lived long ago, and the
teaching drawn from them, however spiritual and lofty, wanted the modern
look, and seemed to recognise insufficiently modern needs. The Roman
applications of the same principles were definite and practical, and Mr.
Ward's mind, essentially one of his own century, and little alive to
what touched more imaginative and sensitive minds, turned at once to
Roman sources for the interpretation of what was Catholic. In the
_British Critic_, and still more in the remarkable volume in which his
Oxford controversies culminated, the substitution of _Roman_ for the old
conception of _Catholic_ appears, and the absolute identification of
Roman with Catholic. Roman authorities become more and more the measure
and rule of what is Catholic. They