ure and
necessary tendency, they sink below atheism itself.... A religious
person who shall be sufficiently clear-headed to understand the meaning
of words, is warranted in rejecting Lutheranism on the very same grounds
which would induce him to reject atheism, viz. as being the
contradiction of truths which he feels on most certain grounds to be
first principles.[112]

There is nothing which he looks back on with so much satisfaction in his
writings as on this, that he has "ventured to characterise that hateful
and fearful type of Antichrist in terms not wholly inadequate to its
prodigious demerits."[113]

Mr. Ward had started with a very definite idea of the Church and of its
notes and tests. It was obvious that the Anglican Church--and so, it was
thought, the Roman--failed to satisfy these notes in their completeness;
but it seemed, at least at first, to satisfy some of them, and to do
this so remarkably, and in such strong contrast to other religious
bodies, that in England at all events it seemed the true representative
and branch of the Church Catholic; and the duty of adhering to it and
serving it was fully recognised, even by those who most felt its
apparent departure from the more Catholic principles and temper
preserved in many points by the Roman Church. From this point of view
Mr. Ward avowedly began. But the position gradually gave way before his
relentless and dissolving logic. The whole course of his writing in the
_British Critic_ may be said to have consisted in a prolonged and
disparaging comparison of the English Church, in theory, in doctrine, in
moral and devotional temper, in discipline of character, in education,
in its public and authoritative tone in regard to social, political, and
moral questions, and in the type and standard of its clergy, with those
of the Catholic Church, which to him was represented by the mediaeval
and later Roman Church. And in the general result, and in all important
matters, the comparison became more and more fatally disadvantageous to
the English Church. In the perplexing condition of Christendom, it had
just enough good and promise to justify those who had been brought up in
it remaining where they were, as long as they saw any prospect of
improving it, and till they were driven out. That was a
duty--uncomfortable and thankless as it was, and open to any amount of
misconstruction and misrepresentation--which they owed to their
brethren, and to the Lord of the Chur