allegation that apart from this or that explanation, their general look, as regards later controversies, was visibly against, not only Roman doctrines or Roman abuses, but that whole system of principles and mode of viewing religion which he called Catholic.  They were, he said, patient of a Catholic meaning, but ambitious of a Protestant meaning; whatever their logic was, their rhetoric was Protestant.  It was just possible, but not more, for a Catholic to subscribe to them.  But they were the creation and the legacy of a bad age, and though they had not extinguished Catholic teaching and Catholic belief in the English Church, they had been a serious hindrance to it, and a support to its opponents.

This was going beyond the position of No. 90.  No. 90 had made light of the difficulties of the Articles.

That there are real difficulties to a Catholic Christian in the ecclesiastical position of our Church at this day, no one can deny; but the statements of the Articles are not in the number.  Our present scope is merely to show that, while our Prayer Book is acknowledged on all hands to be of Catholic origin, our Articles also—­the offspring of an uncatholic age—­are, through God’s good providence, to say the least, not uncatholic, and may be subscribed by those who aim at being Catholic in heart and doctrine.

Mr. Ward not only went beyond this position, but in the teeth of these statements; and he gave a new aspect and new issues to the whole controversy.  The Articles, to him, were a difficulty, which they were not to the writer of No. 90, or to Dr. Pusey, or to Mr. Keble.  To him they were not only the “offspring of an uncatholic age,” but in themselves uncatholic; and his answer to the charge of dishonest subscription was, not that the Articles “in their natural meaning are Catholic,"[109] but that the system of the English Church is a compromise between what is Catholic and what is Protestant, and that the Protestant parties in it are involved in even greater difficulties, in relation to subscription and use of its formularies, than the Catholic.  He admitted that he did evade the spirit, but accepted the “statements of the Articles,” maintaining that this was the intention of their original sanctioners.  With characteristic boldness, inventing a phrase which has become famous, he wrote:  “Our twelfth Article is as plain as words can make it on the Evangelical side; of course I think its natural meaning may be explained away, for I subscribe it myself in a non-natural sense":[110] but he showed that Evangelicals, high church Anglicans, and Latitudinarians were equally obliged to have recourse to explanations, which to all but themselves were unsatisfactory.