ould
show just as much deflection from the ideal as the English. Indeed, he
would have done a great service--people would have been far more
disposed to attend to his really interesting, and, to English readers,
novel, proofs of the moral and devotional character of the Roman popular
discipline, if he had not been so unfair on the English: if he had not
ignored the plain fact that just such a picture as he gave of the
English Church, as failing in required notes, might be found of the
Roman before the Reformation, say in the writings of Gerson, and in our
own days in those of Rosmini. Mr. Ward, if any one, appealed to fair
judgment; and to this fair judgment he presented allegations on the face
of them violent and monstrous. The English Church, according to him, was
in the anomalous position of being "gifted with the power of dispensing
sacramental grace,"[114] and yet, at the same time, "_wholly destitute_
of external notes, and _wholly indefensible_ as to her position, by
external, historical, ecclesiastical arguments": and he for his part
declares, correcting Mr. Newman, who speaks of "outward notes as partly
gone and partly going," that he is "_wholly unable_ to discern the
outward notes of which Mr. Newman speaks, during any part of the last
three hundred years." He might as well have said at once that she did
not exist, if the outward aspects of a Church--orders, creeds,
sacraments, and, in some degree at any rate, preaching and witnessing
for righteousness--are not some of the "outward notes" of a Church.
"Should the pure light of the Gospel be ever restored to _this benighted
land_,"[115] he writes, at the beginning, as the last extract was
written at the end, of his controversial career at Oxford. Is not such
writing as if he wished to emulate in a reverse sense the folly and
falsehood of those who spoke of English Protestants having a monopoly
of the Gospel? He was unpersuasive, he irritated and repelled, in spite
of his wish to be fair and candid, in spite of having so much to teach,
in spite of such vigour of statement and argument, because on the face
of all his writings he was so extravagantly one-sided, so incapable of
an equitable view, so much a slave to the unreality of extremes.

FOOTNOTES:

[107] Cf. T. Mozley, _Reminiscences_, vol. ii. p. 5.

[108] In dealing with the Articles either as a test or as a text-book,
this question was manifestly both an honest and a reasonable one. As a
test, and ther