the Roman Church would show just as much deflection from the ideal as the English.  Indeed, he would have done a great service—­people would have been far more disposed to attend to his really interesting, and, to English readers, novel, proofs of the moral and devotional character of the Roman popular discipline, if he had not been so unfair on the English:  if he had not ignored the plain fact that just such a picture as he gave of the English Church, as failing in required notes, might be found of the Roman before the Reformation, say in the writings of Gerson, and in our own days in those of Rosmini.  Mr. Ward, if any one, appealed to fair judgment; and to this fair judgment he presented allegations on the face of them violent and monstrous.  The English Church, according to him, was in the anomalous position of being “gifted with the power of dispensing sacramental grace,"[114] and yet, at the same time, “wholly destitute of external notes, and wholly indefensible as to her position, by external, historical, ecclesiastical arguments”:  and he for his part declares, correcting Mr. Newman, who speaks of “outward notes as partly gone and partly going,” that he is “wholly unable to discern the outward notes of which Mr. Newman speaks, during any part of the last three hundred years.”  He might as well have said at once that she did not exist, if the outward aspects of a Church—­orders, creeds, sacraments, and, in some degree at any rate, preaching and witnessing for righteousness—­are not some of the “outward notes” of a Church.  “Should the pure light of the Gospel be ever restored to this benighted land,"[115] he writes, at the beginning, as the last extract was written at the end, of his controversial career at Oxford.  Is not such writing as if he wished to emulate in a reverse sense the folly and falsehood of those who spoke of English Protestants having a monopoly of the Gospel?  He was unpersuasive, he irritated and repelled, in spite of his wish to be fair and candid, in spite of having so much to teach, in spite of such vigour of statement and argument, because on the face of all his writings he was so extravagantly one-sided, so incapable of an equitable view, so much a slave to the unreality of extremes.

FOOTNOTES: 

[107] Cf.  T. Mozley, Reminiscences, vol. ii. p. 5.

[108] In dealing with the Articles either as a test or as a text-book, this question was manifestly both an honest and a reasonable one.  As a test, and therefore 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