What is true is, that the whole state of religion, and the whole aspect of Christianity in the world, had come to seem to him portentously strange and anomalous.  No theory would take in and suit all the facts, which the certainties of history and experience presented.  Neither in England, nor in Rome, and much less anywhere else, did the old, to which all appealed, agree with the new; it might agree variously in this point or in that, in others there were contrarieties which it was vain to reconcile.  Facts were against the English claim to be a Catholic Church—­how could Catholicity be shut up in one island?  How could England assert its continuity of doctrine?  Facts were against the Roman claim to be an infallible, and a perfect, and the whole Church—­how could that be perfect which was marked in the face of day with enormous and undeniable corruptions?  How could that be infallible which was irreconcilable with ancient teaching?  How could that be the whole Church, which, to say nothing of the break-up in the West, ignored, as if it had no existence, the ancient and uninterrupted Eastern Church?  Theory after theory came up, and was tried, and was found wanting.  Each had much to say for itself, its strong points, its superiority over its rivals in dealing with the difficulties of the case, its plausibilities and its imaginative attractions.  But all had their tender spot, and flinched when they were touched in earnest.  In the confusions and sins and divisions of the last fifteen centuries, profound disorganisation had fastened on the Western Church.  Christendom was not, could not be pretended to be, what it had been in the fourth century; and whichever way men looked the reasons were not hard to see.  The first and characteristic feeling of the movement, one which Mr. Newman had done so much to deepen, was that of shame and humiliation at the disorder at home, as well as in every part of the Church.  It was not in Rome only, or in England only; it was everywhere.  What had been peculiar to Anglicanism among all its rivals, was that it had emphatically and without reserve confessed it.

With this view of the dislocation and the sins of the Church, he could at once with perfect consistency recognise the shortcomings of the English branch of the Church, and yet believe and maintain that it was a true and living branch.  The English fragment was not what it should be, was indeed much that it should not be; the same could be said of the Roman, though in different respects.  This, as he himself reminds us, was no new thing to his mind when the unsettlement of 1839 began.  “At the end of 1835, or the beginning of 1836, I had the whole state of the question before me, on which, to my mind, the decision between the Churches depended.”  It did not, he says, depend on the claims of the Pope, as centre of unity; “it turned on the Faith of the Church”; “there was a contrariety of claims between the Roman and Anglican religions”; and up to 1839, with the full weight of Roman arguments recognised, with the full consciousness of Anglican disadvantages, he yet spoke clearly for Anglicanism.  Even when misgivings became serious, the balance still inclined without question the old way.  He hardly spoke stronger in 1834 than he did in 1841, after No. 90.