The Tract went in detail through the Articles which were commonly looked upon as either anti-Catholic or anti-Roman.  It went through them with a dry logical way of interpretation, such as a professed theologian might use, who was accustomed to all the niceties of language and the distinctions of the science.  It was the way in which they would be likely to be examined and construed by a purely legal court.  The effect of it, doubtless, was like that produced on ordinary minds by the refinements of a subtle advocate, or by the judicial interpretation of an Act of Parliament which the judges do not like; and some of the interpretations undoubtedly seemed far-fetched and artificial.  Yet some of those which were pointed to at the time as flagrant instances of extravagant misinterpretation have now come to look different.  Nothing could exceed the scorn poured on the interpretation of the Twenty-second Article, that it condemns the “Roman” doctrine of Purgatory, but not all doctrine of purgatory as a place of gradual purification beyond death.  But in our days a school very far removed from Mr. Newman’s would require and would claim to make the same distinction.  And so with the interpretation of the “Sacrifices of Masses” in the same article.  It was the fashion in 1841 to see in this the condemnation of all doctrine of a sacrifice in the Eucharist; and when Mr. Newman confined the phrase to the gross abuses connected with the Mass, this was treated as an affront to common sense and honesty.  Since then we have become better acquainted with the language of the ancient liturgies—­, and no instructed theologian could now venture to treat Mr. Newman’s distinction as idle.  There was in fact nothing new in his distinctions on these two points.  They had already been made in two of the preceding Tracts, the reprint of Archbishop Ussher on Prayers for the Dead, and the Catena on the Eucharistie Sacrifice; and in both cases the distinctions were supported by a great mass of Anglican authority.[93]

But the Tract had sufficient novelty about it to account for most of the excitement which it caused.  Its dryness and negative curtness were provoking.  It was not a positive argument, it was not an appeal to authorities; it was a paring down of language, alleged in certain portions of the Articles to be somewhat loose, to its barest meaning; and to those to whom that language had always seemed to speak with fulness and decision, it seemed like sapping and undermining a cherished bulwark.  Then it seemed to ask for more liberty than the writer in his position at that time needed; and the object of such an indefinite claim, in order to remove, if possible, misunderstandings between two long-alienated branches of the Western Church, was one to excite in many minds profound horror and dismay.  That it maintained without flinching and as strongly as ever the position and the claim of the English Church was nothing to the purpose; the admission, both that Rome, though wrong, might not be as wrong as we thought her, and that the language of the Articles, though unquestionably condemnatory of much, was not condemnatory of as much as people thought, and might possibly be even harmonised with Roman authoritative language, was looked upon as incompatible with loyalty to the English Church.