What was it he said
afterwards? there was something else, I know. I recollect; that the
Catholic Church was in ruins, had broken to pieces. What a paradox!
who'll believe that but he? I declare I am so vexed I don't know what to
be at." He jumped up and began walking to and fro. "But all this is
because the Bishops won't interfere; one can't say it, that's the worst,
but they are at the bottom of the evil. They have but to put out their
little finger and enforce the Rubrics, and then the whole controversy
would be at an end.... I knew there was something else, yes! He said we
need not fast! But Cambridge men are always peculiar, they always have
some whim or other; he ought to have been at Oxford, and we should have
made a man of him. He has many good points, but he runs theories, and
rides hobbies, and drives consequences, to death."

Here he was interrupted by his clerk, who told him that John Tims had
taken his oath that his wife should not be churched before the
congregation, and was half-minded to take his infant to the Methodists
for baptism; and his thoughts took a different direction.

CHAPTER XIX.

The winter had been on the whole dry and pleasant, but in February and
March the rains were so profuse, and the winds so high, that Bateman saw
very little of either Charles or Willis. He did not abandon his designs
on the latter, but it was an anxious question how best to conduct them.
As to Campbell, he was resolved to exclude him from any participation in
them; but he hesitated about Reding. He had found him far less
definitely Roman than he expected, and he conjectured that, by making
him his confidant and employing him against Willis, he really might
succeed in giving him an Anglican direction. Accordingly, he told him of
his anxiety to restore Willis to "the Church of his baptism;" and not
discouraged by Charles's advice to let well alone, for he might succeed
in drawing him from Rome without reclaiming him to Anglicanism, the
weather having improved, he asked the two to dinner on one of the later
Sundays in Lent. He determined to make a field-day of it; and, with that
view, he carefully got up some of the most popular works against the
Church of Rome. After much thought he determined to direct his attack on
some of the "practical evils," as he considered them, of "Romanism;" as
being more easy of proof than points of doctrine and history, in which,
too, for what he knew, Willis might by this time be