archings of heart were necessarily rendered more severe and acute
by Mr. Newman's act. There was no longer any respite; his dearest
friends must choose between him and the English Church. And the choice
was made, by those who did not follow him, on a principle little
honoured or believed in at the time on either side, Roman or
Protestant; but a principle which in the long-run restored hope and
energy to a cause which was supposed to be lost. It was not the revival
of the old _Via Media_; it was not the assertion of the superiority of
the English Church; it was not a return to the old-fashioned and
ungenerous methods of controversy with Rome--one-sided in all cases,
ignorant, coarse, unchristian in many. It was not the proposal of a new
theory of the Church--its functions, authority and teaching, a
counter-ideal to Mr. Ward's imposing _Ideal_ It was the resolute and
serious appeal from brilliant logic, and keen sarcasm, and pathetic and
impressive eloquence, to reality and experience, as well as to history,
as to the positive and substantial characteristics of the traditional
and actually existing English Church, shown not on paper but in work,
and in spite of contradictory appearances and inconsistent elements; and
along with this, an attempt to put in a fair and just light the
comparative excellences and defects of other parts of Christendom,
excellences to be ungrudgingly admitted, but not to be allowed to bar
the recognition of defects. The feeling which had often stirred, even
when things looked at the worst, that Mr. Newman had dealt unequally and
hardly with the English Church, returned with gathered strength. The
English Church was after all as well worth living in and fighting for as
any other; it was not only in England that light and dark, in teaching
and in life, were largely intermingled, and the mixture had to be
largely allowed for. We had our Sparta, a noble, if a rough and an
incomplete one; patiently to do our best for it was better than leaving
it to its fate, in obedience to signs and reasonings which the heat of
strife might well make delusive. It was one hopeful token, that boasting
had to be put away from us for a long time to come. In these days of
stress and sorrow were laid the beginnings of a school, whose main
purpose was to see things as they are; which had learned by experience
to distrust unqualified admiration and unqualified disparagement;
determined not to be blinded even by genius to plai