But he went a step beyond this.  Hitherto the distinction had been uniformly insisted upon between what was Catholic and what was Roman; between what was witnessed to by the primitive and the undivided Church, and what had been developed beyond that in the Schools, and by the definitions and decisions of Rome, and in the enormous mass of its post-Reformation theology, at once so comprehensive, and so minute in application.  This distinction was the foundation of what was, characteristically, Anglican theology, from Hooker downwards.  This distinction, at least for all important purposes, Mr. Ward gradually gave up.  It was to a certain degree recognised in his early controversy about No. 90; but it gradually grew fainter till at last it avowedly disappeared.  The Anglican writers had drawn their ideas and their inspiration from the Fathers; the Fathers lived long ago, and the teaching drawn from them, however spiritual and lofty, wanted the modern look, and seemed to recognise insufficiently modern needs.  The Roman applications of the same principles were definite and practical, and Mr. Ward’s mind, essentially one of his own century, and little alive to what touched more imaginative and sensitive minds, turned at once to Roman sources for the interpretation of what was Catholic.  In the British Critic, and still more in the remarkable volume in which his Oxford controversies culminated, the substitution of Roman for the old conception of Catholic appears, and the absolute identification of Roman with Catholic.  Roman authorities become more and more the measure and rule of what is Catholic.  They belong to the present in a way in which the older fountains of teaching do not; in the recognised teaching of the Latin Church, they have taken their place and superseded them.

It was characteristic of Mr. Ward that his chief quarrel with the Articles was not about the Sacraments, not about their language on alleged Roman errors, but about the doctrine of grace, the relation of the soul of man to the law, the forgiveness, the holiness of God,—­the doctrine, that is, in all its bearings, of justification.  Mr. Newman had examined this doctrine and the various language held about it with great care, very firmly but very temperately, and had attempted to reconcile with each other all but the extreme Lutheran statements.  It was, he said, among really religious men, a question of words.  He had recognised the faulty state of things in the pre-Reformation Church, the faulty ideas about forgiveness, merit, grace, and works, from which the Protestant language was a reaction, natural, if often excessive; and in the English authoritative form of this language, he had found nothing but what was perfectly capable of a sound and true meaning.  From the first, Mr. Ward’s judgment was far more severe than this.  To him, the whole structure of the Articles on Justification and the doctrines connected with it seemed based on the Lutheran theory, and for this