reasons for believing in Christ’s absolute perfection. ("Defence,” p. 220.) I opened my chapter (chapter VII.) above with a distinct avowal of my wish to confine the perusal of it to a very limited circle.  Mr. Rogers (acting, it seems, on the old principle, that whatever one’s enemy deprecates, is a good) instantly pounces on the chapter, avows that “if infidelity could be ruined, such imprudencies[17] would go far to ruin it,” p. 22; and because he believes that it will be “unspeakably[18] painful” to the orthodox for whom I do not intend it, he prints the greater part of it in an Appendix, and expresses his regret that he cannot publish “every syllable of it,” p. 22.  Such is his tender regard for the feeling of his co-religionists.

My defender in the “Prospective Review” wound up as follows (x. p. 227):—­

“And now we have concluded our painful task, which nothing but a feeling of what justice—­literary, and personal—­required, would have induced us to undertake.  The tone of intellectual disparagement and moral rebuke which certain critics,—­deceived by the shallowest sophisms with which an unscrupulous writer could work on their prepossessions and insult their understandings—­have adopted towards Mr. Newman made exposure necessary.  The length to which our remarks have extended requires apology.  Evidence to character is necessarily cumulative, and not easily compressible within narrow limits.  Enough has been said to show that there is not an art discreditable in controversy, to which recourse is not freely had in the ’Eclipse of Faith’ and the Defence of it.”

The reader must judge for himself whether this severe and terrible sentence of the reviewer proceeds from ill-temper and personal mortification, as the author of the Eclipse and its Defence gratuitously lays down, or whether it was prompted by a sense of justice, as he himself affirms.

[Footnote 1:  The “Eclipse” had previously been noticed in the same review, on the whole favourably, by a writer of evidently a different religious school, and before I had exposed the evil arts of my assailant.]

[Footnote 2:  The authorship is since acknowledged by Mr. Henry Rogers, in the title to his article on Bishop Butler in the “Encyclopaedia Britannica.”]

[Footnote 3:  That is, my “discovery” that the writer of the “Eclipse of Faith” grossly misquotes and misinterprets me.]

[Footnote 4:  Page 225, he says, that each criticism “is quite worthy of Mr. Newman’s friend, defender and admirer;” assuming a fact, in order to lower my defender’s credit with his readers.]

[Footnote 5:  As he puts “artful dodge” into quotation marks, his readers will almost inevitably believe that this vulgar language is mine.  In the same spirit to speaks of me as “making merry” with a Book Revelation; as if I had the slightest sympathy or share in the style and tone which pervades the “Eclipse.”  But there is no end of such things to be denounced.]