ch. But it involved plain speaking
and its consequences; and Mr. Ward never shrank from either.

Most people, looking back, would probably agree, whatever their general
judgment on these matters, and whatever they may think of Mr. Ward's
case, that he was, at the time at least, the most unpersuasive of
writers. Considering his great acuteness, and the frequent originality
of his remarks--considering, further, his moral earnestness, and the
place which the moral aspects of things occupy in his thoughts, this is
remarkable; but so it is. In the first place, in dealing with these
eventful questions, which came home with such awful force to thousands
of awakened minds and consciences, full of hope and full of fear, there
was an entire and ostentatious want of sympathy with all that was
characteristically English in matters of religion. This arose partly
from his deep dislike to habits, very marked in Englishmen, but not
peculiar to them, of self-satisfaction and national self-glorification;
but it drove him into a welcoming of opposite foreign ways, of which he
really knew little, except superficially. Next, his boundless confidence
in the accuracy of his logical processes led him to habits of extreme
and absolute statement, which to those who did not agree with him, and
also to some who did, bore on their face the character of
over-statement, exaggeration, extravagance, not redeemed by an
occasional and somewhat ostentatious candour, often at the expense of
his own side and in favour of opponents to whom he could afford to be
frank. And further, while to the English Church he was merciless in the
searching severity of his judgment, he seemed to be blind to the whole
condition of things to which she, as well as her rival, had for the last
three centuries been subjected, and in which she had played a part at
least as important for Christian faith as that sustained by any portion
of Christendom; blind to all her special and characteristic excellences,
where these did not fit the pattern of the continental types (obviously,
in countless instances, matters of national and local character and
habits); blind to the enormous difficulties in which the political game
of her Roman opponents had placed her; blind to the fact that, judged
with the same adverse bias and prepossessions, the same unsparing
rigour, the same refusal to give real weight to what was good, on the
ground that it was mixed with something lower, the Roman Church w