later Roman Church.  And in the general result, and in all important matters, the comparison became more and more fatally disadvantageous to the English Church.  In the perplexing condition of Christendom, it had just enough good and promise to justify those who had been brought up in it remaining where they were, as long as they saw any prospect of improving it, and till they were driven out.  That was a duty—­uncomfortable and thankless as it was, and open to any amount of misconstruction and misrepresentation—­which they owed to their brethren, and to the Lord of the Church.  But it involved plain speaking and its consequences; and Mr. Ward never shrank from either.

Most people, looking back, would probably agree, whatever their general judgment on these matters, and whatever they may think of Mr. Ward’s case, that he was, at the time at least, the most unpersuasive of writers.  Considering his great acuteness, and the frequent originality of his remarks—­considering, further, his moral earnestness, and the place which the moral aspects of things occupy in his thoughts, this is remarkable; but so it is.  In the first place, in dealing with these eventful questions, which came home with such awful force to thousands of awakened minds and consciences, full of hope and full of fear, there was an entire and ostentatious want of sympathy with all that was characteristically English in matters of religion.  This arose partly from his deep dislike to habits, very marked in Englishmen, but not peculiar to them, of self-satisfaction and national self-glorification; but it drove him into a welcoming of opposite foreign ways, of which he really knew little, except superficially.  Next, his boundless confidence in the accuracy of his logical processes led him to habits of extreme and absolute statement, which to those who did not agree with him, and also to some who did, bore on their face the character of over-statement, exaggeration, extravagance, not redeemed by an occasional and somewhat ostentatious candour, often at the expense of his own side and in favour of opponents to whom he could afford to be frank.  And further, while to the English Church he was merciless in the searching severity of his judgment, he seemed to be blind to the whole condition of things to which she, as well as her rival, had for the last three centuries been subjected, and in which she had played a part at least as important for Christian faith as that sustained by any portion of Christendom; blind to all her special and characteristic excellences, where these did not fit the pattern of the continental types (obviously, in countless instances, matters of national and local character and habits); blind to the enormous difficulties in which the political game of her Roman opponents had placed her; blind to the fact that, judged with the same adverse bias and prepossessions, the same unsparing rigour, the same refusal to give real weight to what was good, on the ground that it was mixed with something lower,