“As for the English Church, surely she has notes enough, ’the signs of an Apostle in all patience, and signs and wonders and mighty deeds.’  She has the note of possession, the note of freedom from party-titles; the note of life, a tough life and a vigorous; she has ancient descent, unbroken continuance, agreement in doctrine with the ancient Church.  Those of Bellarmine’s Notes, which she certainly has not, are intercommunion with Christendom, the glory of miracles, and the prophetical light, but the question is, whether she has not enough of Divinity about her to satisfy her sister Churches on their own principles, that she is one body with them.”

  This may be sufficient to show my feelings towards my Church, as far
  as Statements on paper can show them.

How earnestly, how sincerely he clung to the English Church, even after he describes himself on his “death-bed,” no one can doubt.  The charm of the Apologia is the perfect candour with which he records fluctuations which to many are inconceivable and unintelligible, the different and sometimes opposite and irreconcilable states of mind through which he passed, with no attempt to make one fit into another.  It is clear, from what he tells us, that his words in 1839 were not his last words as an Anglican to Anglicans.  With whatever troubles of mind, he strove to be a loyal and faithful Anglican long after that.  He spoke as an Anglican.  He fought for Anglicanism.  The theory, as he says, may have gone by the board, in the intellectual storms raised by the histories of the Monophysites and Donatists.  “By these great words of the ancient father—­Securus judicat orbis terrarum”—­the theory of the Via Media was “absolutely pulverised.”  He was “sore,” as he says in 1840, “about the great Anglican divines, as if they had taken me in, and made me say strong things against Rome, which facts did not justify."[89] Yes, he felt, as other men do not feel, the weak points of even a strong argument, the exaggerations and unfairness of controversialists on his own side, the consciousness that you cannot have things in fact, or in theory, or in reasoning, smoothly and exactly as it would be convenient, and as you would like to have them.  But his conclusion, on the whole, was unshaken.  There was enough, and amply enough, in the English Church to bind him to its allegiance, to satisfy him of its truth and its life, enough in the Roman to warn him away.  In the confusions of Christendom, in the strong and obstinate differences of schools and parties in the English Church, he, living in days of inquiry and criticism, claimed to take and recommend a theological position on many controverted questions, which many might think a new one, and which might not be exactly that occupied by any existing school or party.[90] “We are all,” he writes to an intimate friend on 22d April 1842, a year after No. 90, “much quieter and more resigned than we were, and are remarkably desirous of building up a position, and proving that the English theory is tenable, or rather the English state of things.  If the Bishops would leave us alone, the fever would subside.”