that of England in the nineteenth? . . . And
what was I to gain by all this? . . . For the sake of what was I to
strain logic and conscience? To believe myself a member of the same
body with all the Christian nations of the earth?--to be able to
hail the Frenchman, the Italian, the Spaniard, as a brother--to have
hopes even of the German and the Swede . . . if not in this life,
still in the life to come? No . . . to be able still to sit apart
from all Christendom in the exclusive pride of insular Pharisaism;
to claim for the modern littleness of England the infallibility
which I denied to the primaeval mother of Christendom, not to
enlarge my communion to the Catholic, but excommunicate, to all
practical purposes, over and above the Catholics, all other
Protestants except my own sect . . . or rather, in practice, except
my own party in my own sect. . . . And this was believing in one
Catholic and Apostolic church! . . . this was to be my share of the
communion of saints! And these were the theories which were to
satisfy a soul which longed for a kingdom of God on earth, which
felt that unless the highest of His promises are a mythic dream,
there must be some system on the earth commissioned to fulfil those
promises; some authority divinely appointed to regenerate, and rule,
and guide the lives of men, and the destinies of nations; who must
go mad, unless he finds that history is not a dreary aimless
procession of lost spirits descending into the pit, or that the
salvation of millions does not depend on an obscure and controverted
hair's breadth of ecclesiastic law.

'I have tried them both, Lancelot, and found them wanting; and now
but one road remains. . . . Home, to the fountain-head; to the
mother of all the churches whose fancied cruelty to her children can
no more destroy her motherhood, than their confest rebellion can. .
. . Shall I not hear her voice, when she, and she alone cries to
me, "I have authority and commission from the King of kings to
regenerate the world. History is a chaos, only because mankind has
been ever rebelling against me, its lawful ruler . . . and yet not a
chaos . . . for I still stand, and grow rooted on the rock of ages,
and under my boughs are fowl of every wing. I alone have been and
am consistent, progressive, expansive, welcoming every race, and
intellect and character into its proper place in my great organism .
. . meeting alike the w