the compilers came to the controversies of their day, for all their strong language, they left all kinds of questions unanswered.  For instance, they actually left unnoticed the primacy, and much more the infallibility of the Pope.  They condemned the “sacrifices of Masses”—­did they condemn the ancient and universal doctrine of a Eucharistic sacrifice?  They condemned the Romish doctrine of Purgatory, with its popular tenet of material fire—­did that exclude every doctrine of purgation after death?  They condemned Transubstantiation—­did they condemn the Real Presence?  They condemned a great popular system—­did they condemn that of which it was a corruption and travesty?  These questions could not be foreclosed, unless on the assumption that there was no doctrine on such points which could be called Catholic except the Roman.  The inquiry was not new; and divines so stoutly anti-Roman as Dr. Hook and Mr. W. Palmer of Worcester had answered it substantially in the same sense as Mr. Newman in No. 90.

[109] W.G.  Ward, The Ideal of a Christian Church, p. 478.

[110] The Ideal, etc., p. 479.

[111] It is curious, and characteristic of the unhistorical quality of Mr. Ward’s mind, that his whole hostility should have been concentrated on Luther and Lutheranism—­on Luther, the enthusiastic, declamatory, unsystematic denouncer of practical abuses, with his strong attachments to portions of orthodoxy, rather than on Calvin, with his cold love of power, and the iron consistency and strength of his logical anti-Catholic system, which has really lived and moulded Protestantism, while Lutheranism as a religion has passed into countless different forms.  Luther was to Calvin as Carlyle to J.S.  Mill or Herbert Spencer; he defied system.  But Luther had burst into outrageous paradoxes, which fastened on Mr. Ward’s imagination.—­Yet outrageous language is not always the most dangerous.  Nobody would really find a provocation to sin, or an excuse for it, in Luther’s Pecca fortiter any more than in Escobar’s ridiculous casuistry.  There may be much more mischief in the delicate unrealities of a fashionable preacher, or in many a smooth sentimental treatise on the religious affections.

[112] The Ideal, etc., pp. 587, 305.

[113] Ibid. p. 305.

[114] Ideal, p 286.

[115] British Critic October 1841, p. 340.

CHAPTER XVIII

THE IDEAL OF A CHRISTIAN CHURCH

No. 90, with the explanations of it given by Mr. Newman and the other leaders of the movement, might have raised an important and not very easy question, but one in no way different from the general character of the matters in debate in the theological controversy of the time.  But No. 90, with the comments on it of Mr. Ward, was quite another matter, and finally broke up the party of the movement.  It was one