efore penal, they must be construed strictly; like
judicial decisions, they only ruled as much as was necessary, and in the
wide field of theology confined themselves to the points at issue at the
moment. And as a text-book for instruction, it was obvious that while on
some points they were precise and clear, on others they were vague and
imperfect. The first five Articles left no room for doubt. When the
compilers came to the controversies of their day, for all their strong
language, they left all kinds of questions unanswered. For instance,
they actually left unnoticed the primacy, and much more the
infallibility of the Pope. They condemned the "sacrifices of
Masses"--did they condemn the ancient and universal doctrine of a
Eucharistic sacrifice? They condemned the Romish doctrine of Purgatory,
with its popular tenet of material fire--did that exclude every doctrine
of purgation after death? They condemned Transubstantiation--did they
condemn the Real Presence? They condemned a great popular system--did
they condemn that of which it was a corruption and travesty? These
questions could not be foreclosed, unless on the assumption that there
was no doctrine on such points which could be called Catholic _except
the Roman_. The inquiry was not new; and divines so stoutly anti-Roman
as Dr. Hook and Mr. W. Palmer of Worcester had answered it substantially
in the same sense as Mr. Newman in No. 90.

[109] W.G. Ward, _The Ideal of a Christian Church_, p. 478.

[110] _The Ideal, etc._, p. 479.

[111] It is curious, and characteristic of the unhistorical quality of
Mr. Ward's mind, that his whole hostility should have been concentrated
on Luther and Lutheranism--on Luther, the enthusiastic, declamatory,
unsystematic denouncer of practical abuses, with his strong attachments
to portions of orthodoxy, rather than on Calvin, with his cold love of
power, and the iron consistency and strength of his logical
anti-Catholic system, which has really lived and moulded Protestantism,
while Lutheranism as a religion has passed into countless different
forms. Luther was to Calvin as Carlyle to J.S. Mill or Herbert Spencer;
he defied system. But Luther had burst into outrageous paradoxes, which
fastened on Mr. Ward's imagination.--Yet outrageous language is not
always the most dangerous. Nobody would really find a provocation to
sin, or an excuse for it, in Luther's _Pecca fortiter_ any more than in
Escobar's ridiculous casuistry. There may