or Catholic Christianity has failed out of the world:  we are no more [Catholic] than they.  But this, public opinion has not for centuries, and does not now, realise or allow.  So no one can express in reality and detail a practical belief in their Catholicity, in their equality (setting one thing against another) with us as Christians, without being suspected of what such belief continually leads to—­disloyalty to the English Church.  Yet such belief is nevertheless well-grounded and right, and there is no great hope for the Church till it gains ground, soberly, powerfully, and apart from all low views of proselytising, or fear of danger.  What therefore the disadvantage of those among us who do not really deserve the imputation of Romanising may be meant for, is to break this practical belief to the English Church.  We may be silenced, but, without any wish to leave the English Church, we cannot give up the belief, that the Western Church under Rome is a true, living, venerable branch of the Christian Church.  There are dangers in such a belief, but they must be provided against, they do not affect the truth of the belief.

Such searchings of heart were necessarily rendered more severe and acute by Mr. Newman’s act.  There was no longer any respite; his dearest friends must choose between him and the English Church.  And the choice was made, by those who did not follow him, on a principle little honoured or believed in at the time on either side, Roman or Protestant; but a principle which in the long-run restored hope and energy to a cause which was supposed to be lost.  It was not the revival of the old Via Media; it was not the assertion of the superiority of the English Church; it was not a return to the old-fashioned and ungenerous methods of controversy with Rome—­one-sided in all cases, ignorant, coarse, unchristian in many.  It was not the proposal of a new theory of the Church—­its functions, authority and teaching, a counter-ideal to Mr. Ward’s imposing Ideal It was the resolute and serious appeal from brilliant logic, and keen sarcasm, and pathetic and impressive eloquence, to reality and experience, as well as to history, as to the positive and substantial characteristics of the traditional and actually existing English Church, shown not on paper but in work, and in spite of contradictory appearances and inconsistent elements; and along with this, an attempt to put in a fair and just light the comparative excellences and defects of other parts of Christendom, excellences to be ungrudgingly admitted, but not to be allowed to bar the recognition of defects.  The feeling which had often stirred, even when things looked at the worst, that Mr. Newman had dealt unequally and hardly with the English Church, returned with gathered strength.  The English Church was after all as well worth living in and fighting for as any other; it was not only in England that light and dark, in teaching and in life, were largely intermingled,