F,

GROUNDS FOR REMAINING

IN

THE ANGLICAN COMMUNION

& ILettet to a ?^igi)-=©i)utci) jfrtenti,

BY

FREDERICK WILLIAM FABER.

LONDON:
JAMES TOOVEY, 192, PICCADILLY.
M.DCCC.XLVl.

GROUNDS FOR REMAINING

THE ANGLICAN COMMUNION.

77, Caroline Street, Birmingham, Jan. 10, 1846.
My dear * * *
The author of Hawkstone tells us that a
Papist and an Evangelical are, in one most important
respect, very like each other without knowing it:
namely, that both of them mistake the proper* office
of a Christian teacher ; which, he says, is to deliver a
message ; and they say, is to save souls one by one. I
do not think he is at all singular in this view; for
when Catholics act upon their notion of Christian
teaching, and try to convert Protestants by urging
the unsafe condition of their souls, Anglicans are
apt to think it an unjustifiable, nay, downright
immoral, way of proceeding. Indeed, I remember
myself to have been struck, almost offended, with the
apparently selfish prominence which a man is to
give to his own soul, as guided by the Exercises of
S. Ignatius, with the stern way in which he simpli
fies the sinner's views of things, the boldness with
which he leaves to Divine Providence the adjustment
of difficulties rising out of a penitent's so acting, and
the positiveness with which he refuses to allow us to
legislate for anybody else's spiritual good, or even for
the honour of the Church, until we have first cared
for our own souls. The Oxford writer alluded to is

certainly most correct in what he asserts, so far as
Catholics are concerned; in all their practical and
devotional books they do give a prominence to the
salvation of single souls, which many Protestants find
it most difficult to understand, and which looks to
them like the unscrupulous proselytism of the Phari
sees. Anyhow I must brave the often-urged ob
jections, and take this line with you ; it was the one
simple, grave, and moving consideration which acted
upon myself; I left the Establishment because I felt
morally certain that I could not be saved, if I re
mained in it ; and what I want to show you is, that
you yourself, as a High-churchman, are in a position
of such doubt and difficulty regarding the " one thing
needful," that it is like resisting the call of God to
remain where you are upon the grounds you allege.
Your occupations will not, I grant, allow you to
search the Fathers for yourself, to do to them
what you inconsistently blame Dissenters for doing to
Scripture, to become deeply read in ecclesiastical his
tory, and the like ; for you that is out of the question.
Well — granted: — but, my dear friend, you have a
soul to save ; a soul for which, as though there were no
other soul in the world, Jesus shed His precious
Blood, and for which he founded His Church, and
enriched her with the treasures of His merits. One
then of two courses is open to you : you have not
leisure or means to become a theologian; it remains
therefore, either that you recognize some authority in
your Church, to which you are willing to bow, and
be quiet, or that you investigate your position for
yourself, with your own powers of mind and in con
stant prayer ; and if the result of that investigation is
to cast over you a horrible overwhelming doubt as to
whether you are not in a position most disadvan
tageous to your soul, then to act as a man would act
who cares for -nothing else but his soul, and submit to
the Catholic Church, in whose bosom you already
allow that you can save your soul without a doubt.

Does this seem an immoral way of putting the
question ? Of course, to hard controversialists it will
seem a very illogical way ; but that matters little to
you and me : you want to save your soul, and I want
to see you in the enjoyment of that spiritual peace
and happiness which God has so undeservedly be
stowed on me by putting me into the One True Fold.
Now, on your own showing, the first of these alterna
tives is not open to you ; you deny that any indivi
dual primate or bishop, or the whole Protestant
episcopal bench together, have any claim to be heard
when they dogmatize; nay more, you not only
question, but actually deny, their right to interpret
the prayer-book; and of the prayer-book itself you
speak as if it were imperfect, in many important
matters not so Catholic as it ought to be, and in some
grave respects rather to be endured as a trial than
anything else. Of course, I have nothing whatever to
do with the truth or falsehood of any one of these
propositions ; you make them yourself, and whatever
they are worth, they clearly show that the man who
propounds them recognizes in the Protestant Estab
lishment no dogmatizing authority to which he is
prepared to bow, should it happen to he at variance
with his own High-church opinions. This is enough
in the outset to raise a strong doubt as to the
propriety and honesty of your remaining where you
are: but, not to pursue this, you are clearly left,
with your avocations, to the second line which I
pointed out, — to investigate your position for your
self with your own powers of mind, and in constant
prayer ; and if the result of that investigation is to
cast over you a horrible overwhelming doubt as to
whether you are not in a position most disadvanta
geous to your soul, then to act as a man would act who
cares for nothing else but his soul.
And now let me say a few words on some of the
things which you bring forward in defence of your posi
tion. Whether taken singly or together, they certainly

form novel grounds of Church communion, and
grounds which an old Catholic would perhaps find it
difficult to understand, or to believe that they could
be honestly adduced : but, of course, the case is very
different with a mere convert like myself, for I know
how strong and cogent reasons may appear up to the
time when they fall away, like scales from the eyes ;
and it is hard to realize the process by which we
have been blinded so long, — a process which we are
then with pain and reluctance forced to characterize
as a spiritual delusion, from which God has merci
fully delivered our unworthiness.
I hope it will not sound to you as a mere form of
words, when I apologize before-hand for what will
seem rude and ill-natured language. The prominent
feelings in my mind are deep sorrow for you, as one
in peril of his soul, and under a very subtle yet fear
ful delusion ; and an affectionate yearning to see you
brought into the true light and true fold, together
with a daily strengthening conviction of the falsehood
of your position, and the absolute necessity of being
in communion with the Holy See. You must be pre
pared therefore for a style which will seem offensive,
bitter, sarcastic, and conceitedly dogmatical : you are
so deeply wedded to your present theories, that, speak
as I will, my language must seem all this to you,
and I shall be neither surprised nor vexed at your
calling it so. Indeed, I shall expect you to call it so ;
expect you perhaps to throw the letter down in indig
nation with what will almost of necessity appear the
odious, self-satisfied temper of the writer; and I may
anticipate this for the following reasons : first, I am,
in the language of controversy, a turn-coat and a
renegade, and the privilege of speaking is almost
denied to such an one ; and words which would give no
offence in the mouths of others, sound like insults in
his. Secondly, you are not a Catholic, and so can
hardly realize the positiveness with which Catholics
may speak, without any feeling of self-sufficiency,

when they have the Church on their side ; although it
is not too much to say that you speak with quite as
much assurance, and in quite as dogmatizing a tone,
of theories, not only rejected by the Catholic Church,
but by your own spiritual superiors and more than
three quarters of your communion. Thirdly, my ar
gument must be in a great measure a reductio ad absur-
dum, and this is in itself an ungracious form of dis
putation, but in the present case unavoidable ; for it
must be shown to you that the arguments by which
you keep yourself separated from the Catholic Church
must also keep Dissenters separated from you, and
heathen from the Gospel. Fourthly, to me as a
Catholic, many of the grounds you put forward for
remaining in the Anglican communion appear so
miserably profane and almost blasphemous, that, if
I did not use strong language to characterize them,
I should seem to be compromising the truth in a very
guilty way. And, lastly, I do confess to a great
and hopeful eagerness to see you brought by God's
grace out of a position which is rebellious to Christ's
Church, dishonest to your own communion, disobe
dient to your present superiors, and perilous to your
own salvation ; — brought out of all that dim, cloudy,
irreverent, superstitious mysticism, in which you are
now allowing your party-leaders to envelope you, into
that one true fold, wherein, after your conversion, the
light of God's Will will shine so clearly and so cheer-
ingly round you as to illuminate the past as well as
be a light to the present. Moreover, I trust that
this apology will have an increased claim on your
consideration, when I remind you that I am hardly
at all writing against what was ever my own posi
tion; I never could receive the theory of "holding
and not teaching Eoman doctrine;" it was repugnant
to my natural sense of honesty, as well as being a
real denial of the office of a Church, which is to teach,
ichat it holds ; I never held to Anglicanism by any of
those secret, mysterious tokens, the quotation of which

is now so fashionable among you ; and indeed that sub
tle mysticism, in which the Tractarian section of the
Protestant establishment has now taken a last and
fatal refuge, is quite a recent developement of a few
months' standing. So that it is by no means true
that I am altogether, or chiefly, writing against what
was but a short time since my own position. Still, I
do write as one who was three months ago an Anglican ;
as one who has spent many years of his life in hos
tility to Holy Church, for which he trusts God will
mercifully forgive him ; as one who now seems to him
self to have resisted earlier calls, for which he is deep
ly penitent ; as one who regards the position from
which his unworthiness has by grace been . rescued,
as a delusion which was keeping him from fulfilling
the true end of his being, the glory, of God and the
salvation of his soul ; and finally as one who has pub
licly spoken heretofore with childish bitterness against
Eome, of which ignorant vanity and sinful presump
tion he is now thoroughly ashamed; and, while he is
humbled by the recollection of it, embraces with joy
any opportunity of confessing it.
You may perhaps think it ungenerous of me to
play off party against party ,-Evangelicals against Trac
tarians, Anglo-catholics against Latitudinarians ; but
it is absolutely unavoidable. Your position actually
necessitates it ; we cannot stir a step this way or that
without stumbling over some of your internal subdi
visions ; and the inevitableness of this awkward and
unhandsome procedure is in itself no slight argument
against you, and I think those who candidly consider
it must feel it to be so. Why should it seem to you
so unnatural that those who have left you should feel
anything rather than loyalty and affection to a system,
or anything but kindly reminiscences of a dreadful posi
tion, which they were forced from by the simple fear of
everlasting ruin? Where do I owe my Christian alle
giance? Is it not to the Church of my Baptism?
And surely you at least cannot be so foolish as to sup-

9
pose that any one is baptized into any particular, in
sular, national or provincial part or branch of the
Church, or into anything short of the Catholic Church
of Christ. It is there my allegiance is due, and it is
there your allegiance is due also. A false system took
me from my Mother, as soon as I had either sense to
do overt acts of schism or wilfulness to commit a mortal
sin : that system nurtured me in hatred of the Holy
See; it nurtured me in false doctrine; it has had
the strength of my youth, and formed the character
of my mind, and educated me in strange neglect as
well of doctrinal instruction as of moral safeguards :
and now, do I owe allegiance to the Mother from
whose breasts I was torn, and whose face was so long
strange to me? or to her who tore me from her, and
usurped a name that was not hers, and whose fraud I
have discovered? No! I owe my allegiance to the
Church into which I was baptized, the Church where
in my old forefathers died, the Church where I can
help my later fathers who died away from her in their
helpless ignorance; and, like the stolen child who has
found his mother, her loving reception and the out
break, the happy outbreak, of his own instinct tell
him, and have told him, more truly than all the legal
proofs of parentage can do, that this, and this only,
is the true Mother who bore him years ago to God,
and welcomes him now, in a way that humbles him
most of all, — without suspicion, probation, or reproof.
1. You tell me that nearly all, if not all, the
difficulties of the Anglican position have been got
over by Anglican divines ; some by one writer, others
by others. Now this seems a strange sort of com
munion with a Church, — the possibility of safe com
munion by "getting over" difficulties: but let me
suggest one thing to you ; I am not writing a merely
controversial letter, and so do not intend to dispute
how far in each particular case Anglican divines have
got over this or that difficulty, a subject you may
perhaps feel differently about some day; but I would

10
ask you, if you are not guilty of the fallacy of divi
sion? Fortunately shrewd common sense is the best
logic in the world; and, therefore, though it may
sound strange to those unacquainted with the techni
calities of logic, to be told that a number of argu
ments may be bad when taken by themselves, which,
nevertheless, as united members of an argument, form
a most convincing cumulus ; yet common sense, and
the experience of criminal convictions in our law
courts, will surely make it appear anything but
absurd to say that the union and convergence of a num
ber of moral probabilities on one person at one time and
place, form a safer proof of guilt than even simpler
and more direct testimony. No one but a very igno
rant man, or a very inconsequent reasoner, thinks it
paradoxical in a lawyer when he says that he is far
better satisfied with a conviction upon a broad array
of circumstantial evidence, than with a verdict given
upon the direct swearing of a handful of witnesses, for
the simple reason that such a proof is more out of the
reach of the artifice of men. The cumulative argu
ment is the favourite legal method of proof, because
there is a peculiar satisfaction in it to honest minds,
which do not go to an investigation as to a mere
material of proof for a conviction fixed upon before
hand ; and it is this very cumulative argument which
the famous lectures on Komanism, that appeared a few
years ago, left almost, if not altogether, untouched.
The argument from history, as used in those lectures,
is convincing as to the adequacy of certain Anglican
objections in detail, but leaves the cumulative argu
ment as it found it. In fact the Anglican theory
finds history unmanageable, except in disjectis mem-
bris. If you can show, as you think you can, that
in one age the Catholic Church was in the unfortu
nate predicament A, in another age in the unfortu
nate predicament B, then in the unfortunate predica
ment C, nay, if you can show that at some time or
other (I am merely granting it for argument's sake)

11
the Catholic Church in successive misfortunes has
laboured under all the disadvantages of the Anglican
position, still you would have to show that she has
laboured under them all at once. Unless you show
this ; unless you show that the cumulus of distressing
difficulties, which you confess weighs heavy on the
Protestant Establishment now, has also at one and the
same time weighed heavy on the Catholic Church ; —
unless, I say, you show this, you do absolutely nothing
towards establishing a consoling parallel between Eng
lish Protestantism and some epoch of the Catholic
Church. When you have completed the Herculean
task of meeting and " getting over" the Anglican diffi
culties in detail, you have a task to commence more
Herculean still, of getting over the argument in
cumulo. It does not appear to me that you have
given this by any means a suflicient consideration;
and I confess that it did appear to me, when I con
sidered it, to go far towards settling the question.
2. But you say these difficulties are trials
sent from God for the strengthening of your faith,
and that impatience to get rid of them would be
sinful. It is true that in one sense all difficulties
are trials from Him ; yet there are difficulties brought
about oftentimes by our sins, or the sins of our
forefathers, which are to be endured patiently, and
still with all meek diligence to be removed if possible,
as perilous to the soul ; and when you speak of trials
from God, it is very necessary to distinguish. Indeed,
if you will allow me, I would venture to say, that of
late, quite of late, there has been among Anglicans
a random positive way of using God's Holy Name,
and of getting rid of arguments and objections by
referring them to Him, styling them Providential,
assigning them a divine office, explaining what mean
ing they have in His inscrutable counsels," running
away from proofs, and crying out everywhere, as if
they were seers, "A mystery, a mystery!" — which
sounds profane in the extreme. In truth, Protestant-

12
ism appears always to grow profane when it tries
to be reverent; for it produces only an uncouth
caricature, or at best an ungraceful slavishness. One
can hardly look into any High-church production
now, without being shocked at the maimer in which
the Holy Name is thrown up and down with a proud
parade of lowly reverence, as though it were some
mere implement of logic. It has come to be a phe
nomenon amidst the ever-varying grounds which High-
churchmen now put forward, and it is a very dis
tressing one, as distressing as it is artful. But I
would have you consider whether this theory of your
ecclesiastical difficulties being trials, under which it
is your duty to be quiescent, does not in reality
militate against all idea of a visible Church at all.
In religion there is indeed darkness to try us, but
there is also light to guide us ; and the darkness and
the light are each in their proper sphere : and is the
Visible Church, the Bride of Christ, the Pillar and
Ground of the Truth, the City on an Hill, the Candle
on the Candlestick, is it the darkness of religion, or its
light ? We are to have doubts and perplexities ; but
surely the Church is to support us under them,
not to be the very fountain of them. We are to be
cross-bearers ; but where are we ever led to be pre
pared for anything so terrible as that our Church is
to be our cross ? yet you acknowledge your Church to
be itself a very realizable cross to you : your light is
darkness; alas! that it should be so. But you may
say, it is not so much that the Church itself is dark
ness, as that your sins hinder you from discerning the
countenance of the Church. Certainly something does
hinder you, or you would discern the heavenly winning
countenance of the Saviour's Bride, where alone it is
displayed in its meek awfulaess. But a Catholic
would tell you, that to none is the countenance of the
Church more clear, for none so plain with its pitiful
inviting look, as the poor sinner. A Catholic would,
indeed, be shocked at the injury done to his Lord,

13
the denial of the very chief office of His Church, by a
theory which teaches that the sinner's home is no
longer the sinner's sure safety, because it may turn
out that sinners, and truly penitent striving souls
also, cannot see the Church, or cannot tell it when
they see it. Surely all this teaching is but invented
to serve a purpose ; and that purpose is not the conso
lation of sinners, it is not the cheering and guiding
of earnest penitents, it is not an illustration of the
communion of saints ; for it destroys the very essence
of a visible Church, and involves the most ultra
vagaries of Puritanism.
And, if it were not profane in the extreme to
bandy about such solemn words, it would not be dif
ficult to retort at some length the argument from
Providence; and as probably every convert feels that
the act was less his own than overruled for him, he
might fairly claim to style his almost constrained
escape from Anglicanism, as surely not less Provi
dential than your voluntary remaining in it. 0
melancholy proof of the need of Catholic safeguards
to preserve true reverence! What once seemed an
awe-inspiring protest against the wild carelessness
of other Protestants, now degenerates itself into a
rash and reckless habit of commenting on the hidden
tracks of Providence, a fixing, selecting, defining,
naming, sorting, and labelling the ways which the
Holy Spirit shall go, and the ways He shall abstain
from going; and, as with the fanatic votaries of
George Fox, the provisions and tokens of the Writ
ten Word, (to say nothing of stern tradition, that
sober, stedfast guide,) are abandoned for a super
natural extra-regular dispensation, which you first
invent as a mere hypothesis to account for a fact, a
mere evasion of the humbling common-place account
which Christendom gives of that fact; and then you
profanely venture to assert that you are placed under
it by God. Speak of the Eucharist, or the media
torial throne of the Deipara, and you shrink with a re-

14
verence, which I must now call affected, from Catho
lic systematizing of doctrine ; and yet you leap head
long into Protestant systematizing of Providence, and
then carry out with cold method and blind pertina
city what you first rushed into desperately, as a
pitchy cloud that would hide S. Peter's chair from
your unwilling eyes.
3. But, you say, you have not tried all the means
of grace which your present position affords, and it
would be wrong for you to abandon it, until you have
done so. What strikes me at once as suspicious
about this argument is, that it is equally applicable
to a Jew, a Mahometan, or an idolater. No heathen,
who by God's Holy Spirit has obeyed the dictates of
his conscience in the middle of his darkness, ever acts
up quite to what he might do even in his disadvanta
geous position; the unity of the Godhead involves
more than the best Mahometan ever performs: the
Methodist class-meeting affords means of humiliation,
of affectionate counsel, and of spiritual direction, which
are not always, or often, to be found in the Establish
ment ; and not the best of Methodists ever makes full
use of them, and till he does, on your theory, it would
be immoral in the rector of the parish to urge him to
join the Establishment. The good Methodist has just
as little notion that he is in a state of schism, as you
have that you are, both of you being equally so; and
I very much question whether any Methodist has any
thing like such strong doubts of his position as you
have of yours. On your principle, no one ever could
be converted from falsehood to truth ; for it is hardly
conceivable that there should be in the world a false
position, in which more moral helps are not vouch
safed than any one lives up to, or makes full use of :
so that I really cannot admit the cogency of your
reason. The Saints, as well as the old proverb, tell
us, that to gain a certain height, we must aim far
higher ; and in a similar way, in order to make a full
use of the lower means of grace open to one in your

15
position, it may be needful for you to have those
higher and more numerous means open to you in the
Catholic Church. You may be actually unable to
use what you retained at the Reformation, for the very
want of what you threw away.
But suppose that it should be your duty to make
use of all the means of grace you have, which you
will remind me is rather a different thing from living
up to them; suppose that you go to confession when
you can find either a minister willing to hear confes
sions, or one whom you would trust as competent;
suppose you can afford to travel to them, and the
poor are to do the best they can without confession
in nine hundred and ninety-nine cases out of a thou
sand ; suppose you have complete faith in the absolu
tion, the validity of which is denied by three quarters
of Christendom, together with your favourite Greek
schismatics, with all Protestant bodies out of the
Anglican Establishment, and certainly more than three
quarters of the clergy and laity within it; suppose all
this forms only one of the many difficulties you have
"got over," and you feel, as assuredly by God's mercy
you will feel, the wonderful moral advantages of fre
quent confession, and its wholesome effect upon your
spirits and general tone of mind, — how do you go on
sustaining your spiritual life? Is it as a private
Christian, by means afforded you by your Church,
by teaching authorized by her, by ascetic practices
which she countenances and puts under the arbitra
tion of your confessor? No: with regard to yourself
it is partly, — I say only partly, because the unrealities
of ecclesiology (which is a bargaining to have the
prettinesses of Popery without its worship, or its
doctrine, or its strictness) have no great hold on you,
— partly in the pleasurable emotions caused by church
adornment in a parish where the people do not be
lieve in the Sacrifice or Real Presence ; and still more
by reading the lives of Catholic Saints, by translations
of Jesuit spiritual writers, by adaptations of Catholic

lo
services, (why adapted, if you are a Catholic and in
the Catholic Church?) by particular Roman devotions,
such as that to the Sacred Heart of Jesus, the very
name of which is offensive to Protestants, who ex
plicitly or implicitly reject the full doctrine of the
Incarnation, and so shrink with offence from such
devotions; by secret invocations of the Saints, or,
when less courageous, a timid scrupulous oret, which
is supposed to evade the wrongfulness of or a. These
are your private means for growing in grace ; and if,
my dear friend, you have a proper scruple of leaving
the Anglican Establishment till you have tried all her
means of grace, ought you not to have a scruple in
using secret devotions and ascetical practices, which
cannot be openly taught, and which are alien to the
spirit of your communion? Are you not living two
lives, an Anglican and a Roman ? Are you not mixing
religions ? are you allowing the religion you profess to
be a rule over you, as you ought to do ? Are you not
picking and choosing, your own pope, your own bishop,
your own spiritual director? Are you not more like an
Eclectic than a Catholic? In a word, do you not regard
all these as at your feet, beneath you, subjects for
the operations and dissections of your eclectic tastes;
and is not this simple Protestantism? In truth, there
is no such thing as ultra-Protestantism ; ali Protestant
ism is equally ultra, and private judgment is hardly
ever carried to such a practical extent as among those
who make the greatest show of eschewing it. You
will say, this is the language of a renegade; be it so;
I do not want to avoid a hard name ; the question is,
Is it true? Depend upon it, that, when a crisis is
moving so quickly as at present, any attempt to patch
your spiritual garment with the purple patches of
Roman devotions will make the rent worse ; I mean,
that if you are not soon a Catholic, you will soon be a
Rationalist. If you are honest in saying that you
cannot leave the Anglican Establishment till you have
tried all her means of grace, I do think the same

17
honesty calls upon you to keep simply, obediently,
and contentedly to her means of grace, and not to run
into debt with Rome.
Indeed, like other false systems, when the rough
test of an extreme case comes, Tractarianism is now
being dragged towards two opposite courses, against
which it is vainly struggling; yet forward it must
go,^ or backward, into consistency. An eminent
writer and parish priest expresses the most vehement
indignation with the touching confession made by
one of his friends, that Roman prayers had won his
brother from the Anglican Church. The unscrupu
lous consistency of his hard Anglicanism, led him to
see that there could be no such thing as rightful se
cession from one non-communicating branch of the
Church to another; it was schism', or full Roman
claims were true. You shrink from calling us schism
atics, yet you will not admit the other part of
the alternative. So, in like manner, it is an un
doubted fact that something is drawing persons away
from you to an extent, and in a manner, quite un
precedented since the Reformation; the work is so
various, and of such a kind, as that no merely com
mon cause is a satisfactory explanation of it. Either,
then, it is the work of the Good Spirit, or it is the
work of the Evil Spirit; downright Anglicans, who
stick at no amount of censoriousness or anathema,
with a perfect intellectual consistency adopt the lat
ter opinion ; you, startled at the unamiable conclusion,
still have not the consistency to see God's Hand, and
humble yourselves to it. Yet there can be no mid
dle term in the matter. Turn which way you will,
it must be either into the Roman Church or into an
undisguised Protestantism. There is a pressure upon
your party which must split it, driving some on
wards, and others backwards; the atmosphere has
become such that gentle and devotional inconsis
tencies can no longer live and breathe in it. You
are feeling, in your place and in your measure, the
£

18
same pressure which is acting on all Protestantism
throughout the world: Rome and Unbelief are the
two vortices round which and into wliich all other
modes of opinion are visibly edging, in more or less
quickening circles. It is a sight to make those
breathless who have a care for their fellow-men.
Of course it is a very natural thing to say that
arguments, which appear very feeble, overstrained,
and far-fetched, may nevertheless be very legitimate
when they are urged as grounds, not for leaving,
but for remaining in the position where Providence
has placed you. You start, as it were, with a weighty
presumption on your side; the outward course of
things which was not your making, nor overruled by
you, is with you ; you start from it as your standing-
point : it forms, so to speak, a continual supplement
and succour to arguments which you allow may be,
many of them, inconclusive and non-natural; they
become natural because they are defences of your
natural and actual position. I think all this is very
fair — up to a certain point ; but when you say that
you owe no duties, except to your actual position,
you are urging your plea to an extent which is un
reasonable, and may be reduced to an absurdity.
For here, as elsewhere, your arguments are equally
available to a Brahmin, or a Mahometan ; it is a
mere claim of the principle of hereditary religion,
not to exercise its legitimate influence, but to swal
low up all other principles whatever. You have al
ways duties to truth, and in those duties is necessa
rily involved at least an attentive inspection of what
claims to be truth; an inspection, of course varying
in degree and duration according to your engage
ments in life. Moreover, your duty to your actual
position involves to no little extent a fair and dili
gent review of other positions; when, not the mere
seeking of a self-willed intellect, but the outward cir
cumstances of the Church or world force such other
positions upon your notice. And in your case, to

19
say that you have no duties towards Rome, and that
you are not bound to reconsider your grounds of se
paration from her, can surely only be the language of
an irritated mind impatient of the unclearness of its
own views. It is not exaggerating the importance
of recent circumstances, to say that they lay an
obligation of conscience on every High-churchman to
ascertain his objective and substantive grounds for
remaining where he is; and it matters little whether
he takes the line of ascertaining what substantive
grounds he has for clinging to Anglican communion,
or what substantive grounds he has for remaining
separate from the Church of Rome : the duty is to
ascertain that he has such grounds for one or the
other ; and though, historically speaking, the last is the
fairest way, — I would rather he should take the first
than the last, because in that way truth is looked
at first, and so the matter is ended sooner. Such a
review of first principles is in itself, not the mere fret
of intellect or of otiose enquiry, but, in the most
solemn sense of the word, conscientious action ; for
outward circumstances force it on a man as a purely
practical question, the most momentous which his life
is ever likely to bring before him. And can you say
you have no duties to Rome? Does not your past
active hostility to her involve you in present duties
to her? You are living on Roman books, on Roman
devotional practices, on Roman ascetical usages, on
Roman lendings which your own communion counts
unlawful loans ; and your shy and furtive behaviour
with them seems to reveal an awkward suspicion
that you may not be altogether dealing fairly ; mean
while, the ease, the quiet, the wealth, the homesteads,
the respectability of the Establishment is yours ; you
are uniting the temporalities of established Protest
ants with the spiritualities of depressed Catholics;
and yet, "you have no duties towards Rome!" I
do not mean it only as a sneer when I ask you to
b 2

20
refer that question to the Protestant bishop of your
diocese, and abide by his reply.
4. Here you suddenly shift your ground and take
up a new position ; you are first on the right hand,
and then on the left, so that it is difficult to know
on which side to expect you. Some complain of
the diversity of roads by which men find their way
to Rome, as though there were in that diversity another
ground for holding back ; while others, more thought
ful, consider that diversity as in itself no slight mark
of the divinity of Roman claims. But not only do
members of your own little party differ from each
other, but you differ from yourself continually ; your
reasons might almost safely be left to eat each other
up, and leave your Protestantism more a negation
than ever it was before, if it were not far better that
Aaron's rod should turn serpent, and eat them up for
your own sake, before they have had time to devour
each other. You now tell me that you are overawed
by the grandeurs of the Church, that you acknowledge
the superior sanctity of her system, but that the
nearer you seem to approach to communion with her,
the more you feel your own unworthiness of that
communion ; you say that one thing at least is plain,
that, for such unworthy and useless persons as yourself,
you have no business to sigh after the spiritual riches
of the Roman system, or to leave the Church where
God's Providence has placed you. Now, so far as the
argument from Providence is concerned, if you object
to the application of it to Jews and Mahometans as
not being in any sense Christians, it is at least appli
cable to Methodists, Baptists, Ranters, and the like.
I quite admit that there is great cogency in the prin
ciple of hereditary religion; but of course it is not the
only principle which is to be allowed for in deciding
a question of this sort. And here I cannot forbear
saying something which will apply, as well to the
extravagant extent to which some would push the
principle of hereditary religion, as to the false delusive

21
show of humility, which such language as that about
your being unworthy to be in communion with the
Roman Church carries upon the face of it : it is this
— -that it is anything but safe for Anglicans to draw
principles of action from the blessed Saints of the
Roman Church. Such principles were meant for the
Communion in which the Saints were formed; they
were intended to find their sphere of action amid
checks, counterweights, and safeguards, which you
cannot have; their action, to be safe, must be under
the constant pressure of authority; they were fitted
for a system of things quite alien from the Anglican
system, and in that system may easily be, and in
truth often are, extravagant, mischievous, and false, —
not of course in themselves, but through combination
with what they find around them. It is even with
principles of ascetical theology, as with the symbolism
of church decoration : what more touchingly instruct
ive, the handmaid of dogmatic teaching as well as
the very wings of prayer, than such symbolism in the
Catholic Church ; and what more unreal, when osten
tatiously divorced from doctrine, than the querulous
ecclesiology of the Protestant Establishment ? What is
safe, and holy, and elevating in the Catholic Church
may in a sect be dangerous, immoral, and debasing,
or it may be, as with ecclesiology, simply puerile.
You fancy it a humble line to take, to say you are not
worthy of Catholic communion ; surely so intrinsically
proud is such language, that you cannot wonder
Catholics should deem it a plain temptation of the
devil. In your position, to submit to the Catholic Church
involves no inconsiderable humiliation; you will
forego a position of influence over others; your
mental powers will be thought enfeebled; you are
placed in the humbling case of one who has retracted
much that he was once positive about ; you are termed
renegade, and such like things. By your conversion
you become nobody; and this is so immensely advan-

22
tageous to spiritual growth, that the Evil One dreads
it of all things. You have gained a standing for your
self ; and when you say you are unworthy to come
down from your isolated eminence, however true and
right the opinion may be for other reasons, at all
events it is not an act of the particular virtue of
humility. When Catholics endeavour to convert you,
it is no flattering call: they look upon you as one
gone very far astray, and who is fortifying his false
position with secret and hardly conscious pride ; they
call upon him, not to adopt certain theological views
which his learning renders him competent to receive,
not to join them as though his adherence to their
communion were a matter of importance to any one
but himself, not as though some great work were to
be done in which he was honourably asked to take
part ; — they call upon him just as they call on the
poor Birmingham factory boy, to save his soul, to
come out of falsehood into truth, out of darkness into
light, to reconcile himself with God, to make his
peace with the offended Church, to seek her pardon
and absolution from his excommunication on his
bended knees. It is, indeed, a call of love; it is any
thing but a call of flattery. This is the humiliation
of which you pronounce yourself unworthy. Alas!
who is not unworthy of being washed in the Precious
Blood ; who is not unworthy of the unspeakable gift
of salvation? Yet is it humility to reject this? is it
humility to criticize the gracious offer of Him who
offers Himself to all, and to say it never ought to be
offered to you, or at least accepted by you, because of
your un worthiness, that is, of your very need of the
offer? A Catholic does not call upon you to leave
one " branch" of the Church to join another; he calls
you as out of the Church; he calls you out of a
state of excommunicated schism and daily developing
heresy to be a penitent in the One True Fold of
Christ. When, I would ask you, did this theory
of " Branch " Churches begin, for it is strange-

23
sounding language? Are all the Churches branch
Churches ? Is there no trunk Church ? If there is, which
is it? If it be the Roman, a "branch" cut off, solemnly
sawed away by the teeth of an excommunication,
need not boast' much of its branchship. I must
insist, also, that when Anglicans talk of Branch-
Churches, they are bound to add, what is the very
distinctive part of their theory, the fatal epithet " non-
communicating." To illustrate how the same thing
may present itself to another mind, I have leave from
a friend to quote here a passage from one of his
letters to an Anglican clergyman who was in doubt.
"As to your Branch-Church theory, if it is not a
mere fallacy, there must be, as F. says, a Trunk-
Church somewhere. Either you suppose the Branches
to grow on an invisible Trunk, and so make the
illustration void, by using ' Branch ' of the visible
and ' Trunk ' of the invisible Church ; or else there
can be no Branches, except those of the One
Visible Church. For it is idle to say in this case,
' Analogies must not be pressed too far ;' for analogies
are often our only way of representing the truth, and
that reality which answers most exactly to them is the
reality. Thus the sun gives out light, and in it
heat; and as such is used as a type of the Trinity.
But, supposing this type an authorized one,. who in this
world would think of saying that the doctrine that
all Three Persons are Divine does not answer better to
it than the Macedonian theory that the Father and the
Son, and not the Spirit, are God? The true doetrine
is that which is a key to the types, and fits all the
wards of them. In the same way the Roman doctrine
of the Church is a key to the analogy of a tree and
its branches : your theory of Branch Churches is not.
Catholics in England are a branch of the visible
trunk in Rome; but Anglicaus are a branch of an
invisible trunk (which is not the invisible counter
part of the visible trunk but) a pure creation of
their own fancy, unwarranted either by Scripture or

24
Tradition." No! this sound of humility is but an
echo of pride ; and this glowing poetical praise of
the majesty of the Catholic Church is anything but
grateful to Catholic ears, as little grateful as it
is to the ears of your Evangelical and Dissenting
brethren. Leave to German infidels elaborate eulo
gies of the medieval Church; the evil spirits bear
reluctant witness to Him whose Bride the Church
is, and recognize the presence of His Apostle. The
Catholic Church asks not, wishes not, nay, rather
puts from her, your ostentatious tribute of high-flown
words ; she asks an alms of you, the alms of your poor
perishing soul.
5. But you have not yet quite exhausted your
arguments from humility. Pray do not think that I
say this in any scornful or sarcastic spirit, or that I
should consider it otherwise than very wicked to
treat with levity the real humility of a doubting and
perplexed mind : but indeed you must allow me to
remind you, that there is no virtue which the devil
counterfeits more frequently or more successfully than
humility, neither is there any virtue the counterfeits
of which are more mischievous ; and many persons of
all parties have remarked a secret pride in the
demeanour of those who hold what is now your posi
tion, and was but a while ago in great measure, though
not entirely, my own. Many of the arguments put
forward by Anglo-catholics implicitly claim to sit in
judgment on others, even on whole Churches ; and many
more imply a right to see for themselves with their own
intellect the whole creed of a Church in Scripture or
the Fathers, a claim most consistent in Evangelicals
and Dissenters, but ridiculously inconsistent in a High-
churchman. Indeed, everywhere the sheer Protest
antism of High-churchmanship becomes daily more
obvious and unmistakeable. When a man, whose
tenets cause him to have formulas of humility for
ever on his tongue, puts forwards with a quiet, un
suspicious pertinacity the most arrogant claims and

25
arguments, for which he has not (as Catholics have)
his own Church as his voucher, but rather the con
trary, one must suspect the self-styled humility whence
all this proceeds. I am not speaking of such men aS
Mr. Bennett; he is a good, honest, thorough-going
Donatist, like Mr. Palmer of Worcester College : he has
a Church on paper, which he calls the English Church ;
it is the model Church of Christendom, and we are all
to form ourselves, or reform ourselves, upon it. Bid
ding good-bye to history, this is quite intelligible,
and as an intellectual theory holds water uncommonly
well, and the arrogance of its claims flows logically
from the premisses: it is the theory that is proud,
not the consistent supporters of it. But Tractarian
ism, while it is a great deal better than this tru
culent Anglicanism, because it has a much stronger
devotional instinct about it, is, because of that in
stinct, much less intellectually consistent, and much
more liable to self-deceit and spiritual delusion.
But I have not yet named your ground for remaining
in the Anglican communion, which has given rise to
these remarks : it is this, — you say you think it more
safe and humble to wait till such and such men
— naming three — join the Roman Church.
Now, my dear friend, observe; you actually put
this forward as a ground for remaining in the An
glican communion : nothing short of that. And can
it really be that this is a ground whereon a reason
able accountable Catholic Christian holds communion
with his Church? If this is not that calling man
" master," which is condemned by our Lord, and
which is such an especial note of an uncatholic spirit,
I do not know at what the words can be aimed.
Whatever may be God's purposes upon the men you
name, it is no business of ours to enquire ; whether
they may be detained where they are for the good of
others, as well as for the chastisement of sin, (a pain
ful theory which some have propounded,) surely it is
at once presumptuous and uncharitable to form any

26
opinion at all. Whence, but from self comes the
choice which has raised these men arbitrarily to such
a pontificate over your own judgment, as that all
personal responsibility, all separate accountableness
to God, are actually merged in your submission to
the unofficial authority of three men, who do not
wholly agree with one another, and who for three
years have been more or less manifestly shifting their
ground, and that more than once? Who, but self,
elected for their leaders men more than half pro
scribed by the spiritual rulers of the communion to
which they belong, and who are wished away by the
earnest yearnings of more than half their clerical
brethren ? This is surely the merest Protestantism,
and not the humblest form of that many-sided he
resy. It may be a ground for your remaining in
communion with your own notions and with the au
thorities of your own choosing, but it can be no ground
for your remaining in communion with the Anglican
Establishment. If there be such a thing as the Church
of England ; if, in the absence of a formal Convocation,
common sense may for all practical purposes arrive
at her judgment through the charges of bishops,
the interferences of archdeacons, the insurgency of
laymen, the decisions of academical bodies, the bind
ing uncontradicted sentences of archiepiscopal courts,
and the loudly expressed impatience of public feeling
almost everywhere ; — I would ask you, do you think
the two Convocations of Canterbury and York would
allow you to maintain as a ground for communion
with them, the abidance in the Establishment of the
persons you name? Nay, do you not think that those
very men would be themselves proscribed and silenced
by the public authority of the Convocations ?
But you will say that the fact of Convocation
not being allowed to meet is Providential ; alas !
here we have the Sacred Interference once again.
Do you forget that chastisements are Providential ;
that the " evil in a city " is Providential ? Or is

27
your own perpetual interpretation of Providence
to overrule, as a guide of life, all the principles of
moral theology, of probable prudence, of Scripture
rules? Here we meet again with that element of
Puritanism which blends so strangely with your
High-churchmanship. Let me put a case: A re
vered author (whose name I will not write, and
to whom I allude only with a very wistful affec
tion and gratitude,) claimed for himself and his
friends to say nothing against any Roman doctrine,
but to be in suspense about them; this was a
kind of term of remaining in the Anglican com
munion: on this the Record newspaper justly re
marked, that, so far as that ground went, he was
remaining on a ground, which if any young man
were known to hold, not a bishop on the bench, high
or low, would admit him to orders. Now, is not your
ground of waiting till such and such others go, just as
untenable, just as illegitimate ? But you quote
Athanasius contra mundum, and so goes the bench of
Protestant bishops to the four winds of heaven. Well,
but is this humble? Are you sure that you and
yours put together weigh an Athanasius? Are you
quite confident that Athanasius would have been
with you just now? Indeed, I have a very shrewd
suspicion that we should have seen him with a Popish
chasuble over his shoulders, rather than an Oxford or
a Cambridge hood.
Can you still think this ground a humble one?
but perhaps you do still think it a safe one. Apply
it to an infidel, or, which is less startling, to
a pious Dissenter. If this ground be a safe one,
then it is wrong for any Dissenter ever to join
the Establishment, and your right to urge him to
do so is extremely questionable. The more really
humble a man gets, the more must he perceive the
excellencies of others as well as his own demerits ; so
that he is constantly approaching to the genuine and
habitual conviction of the Saints, that he is the chief

28
of sinners. Thus every advance which the Methodist,
or the Ranter, or the Independent makes in moral
goodness and spiritual growth removes him further
and further from the reception of what you consider
to be truth, namely, the Protestant Establishment;
for he daily sees more and more persons remaining in his
communion who are far better than himself, and he
daily feels it more and more humble and safe to wait
till they join the Establishment before he takes so grave
a step. I really do not see why he is not quite as
much at liberty to argue thus to the rector of his
parish, as you are to the Catholic priest who calls
upon you to abjure your heresy, and be reconciled to
the Holy Church of God : indeed, you yourself think
a great deal better of the Methodist's position than
Catholics do of yours : and he has two clear advan
tages over you; first, because he has no doubts about
his position ; and secondly, because he is at peace with
his own communion, and not in a state of half-out
lawry from it. You will have to give account for
your own soul, for your own bearing or forbearing,
for the vincibleness or invincibleness of your own
ignorance, for your own dealing with God's call, not
for the behaviour of those whom you have elected
as your guides. And again — are you quite sure
that you are on the same doctrinal standpoint as
those whom you quote? Are you not in some matters
much more Roman than they are? Have you not
already surrendered in your own mind some of those
grounds for remaining in the Anglican communion, on
which they are not at all shaken yet? And if so,
have you any right to have a vicarious confidence in
Anglicanism ; that is, to use as your own iheir confi
dence, which is built upon foundations you have
already subverted in yourself? To deny a man's
premisses and swear by his conclusion is not the best
possible logic, unless you have better premisses to show.
You must not overlook this in considering the matter.
But what is the real humility in this particular

29
subject of which we are speaking? It is to obey
God's call ; not to dictate to Him who is worthy of
His call ; not to stifle doubts which are all but con
victions, perhaps as near to convictions as you can
arrive at, separated from and excommunicated by the
Catholic Church ; not, I say, to stifle doubts because
others, whose doubts are fewer, weaker, or different, have
confidence in their position. If you are less learned, less
holy, than those you quote, would it not be more in ac
cordance, I do not say with His invariable rule, but
with God's ordinary mode whereby He mostly vouch
safes to call the unworthy first. If you are aiming at the
heroic humility of the Saints, (a thing as perilous to
try after as it is impossible to gain for you as a
schismatic,) you might rather feel a call to be a proof
of your unworthiness, or anyhow most strongly to
deepen your sense of that unworthiness. I would
venture to say, that if the abidance in the Protestant
Church of a few good men whom you quote is really
a ground for your remaining in the same communion,
then matters have come to such a pass that you have
had a call, a call as plain as you are likely to have,
and plainer than any of us who have been in schism
deserve to have.
I have heard of some of you claiming an in
ward call, and saying that you shall wait till you
hear that in your soul. Once more the irreverence of
Puritanism appears ! What sense have you of your
own unworthiness, what real humility, to claim an in
ward call, part of the heritage of the Saints? God
may vouchsafe it truly ; but to claim it, to say you
will wait for it, is presumption indeed. But not only is
this claim of an inward call irreverent and unhumble,
but it is also most inconsistent. You who revel in mys
tery, who rejoice in indefinite half-lights, who prefer
obscure tracks of Providence interpreted by yourself
to the plainer dictates of casuistry or the outward
marks of the Church, who do this almost to the sub
version of dogmatic system, are surely inconsistent

30
in waiting for an unmistakeable inward call. Of late
we are beginning to learn how profane and irreverent
Romanism is : why this new method of attack, new
or at least freshly reiterated? because of the instinct
of self-defence in Protestantism : High-churchmanship
under the guidance of desperately perplexed minds is
rapidly being condensed into a wild system of mys
tical irreverence.
6. What I have said against your remaining in
the Anglican communion because certain others do so,
whose living example wins you to stay, applies with
increased force to your quoting as a token of the
Catholicity of your Church the fact that in times past
she produced Laud and Andrewes. Waiving the
question whether she is the same Church as she was
then, though she may have the same dead letter of
formularies, I think the fact of the Roman Church
having produced S. Francis of Sales, and S. Philip
Neri, and S. Charles Borromeo, since the Reformation,
is a much stronger argument for joining her com
munion than the other is for staying away. But
there are one or two points which you do not seem to
have considered with regard to Laud and Andrewes.
First of all, they were in positions of authority, and
had power, locally and temporarily, to hold down and
keep out of sight abuses, the natural growth of
Anglicanism, which you have no control over; they
taught without bishops' charges dealing heavy blows
upon them with triennial visitations; even Laud
carried matters with a high hand, almost till the
catastrophe came. Now all this, bishops themselves
and the crown on their side, would hinder the pres
sure of that anguish which you confess you feel at
being overborne by the unmanageable corruptions of
an intricate and unwieldy state-Church ; and which
anguish may be one means of bringing your wounded
spirit to see, that if the Catholic Church is the shelter,
and the home, and the quiet harbour, and the tend
ing mother, and the kindly disciplinarian of those

31
who love God and would do penance for their sins,
the Babel where you now are, with its division of
tongues, is not that Catholic Church.
Secondly, the Anglican system was almost untried;
the doctrines of Hooker you are ready to admit were
not a developement of, but a deflection from, the
principles of the Reformation; Cranmer would have
burnt him for his Fifth Book, the chart of Angli
canism. Anglicanism proper dates from Hooker ; its
cradle was amidst the multitudinous gibbets of Eliza
beth; it grew in the hands of the Stuart divines
under the ample shadow of the prerogative, while
the eager knife of the Star-Chamber gleamed about
the ears, tongues, and noses, of fractious recusants :
the history of primitive Anglicanism just reverses
the history of primitive Christianity ; it grew up in
the favour of the great, and the persecution of the
Rebellion came; the Church grew up despite the
hatred of the great, and then came the rest and
shelter in Constantine's accession. Thus, anyhow,
when Laud and Andrewes lived, the Anglican
system was untried; it was not known how it
could adapt itself to new circumstances, cope with
new difficulties, deal with schism, be a pillar and
ground of the truth against heresy, maintain intact
the full doctrine of the Incarnation, that article " of a
standing or a falling Church ;" all was prospect then,
there was no retrospect ; no retrospect but deliverance
from Edward VI. and the influence of Frankfort.
But now, what think you of the Anglican system?
Is it as hopeful as of old? Is the Fifth Book of
Hooker as complete a nostrum as it was? Schism,
heresy, Erastianism, manufacturing population, colo
nies, Ireland, Popery, Pantheism, — how does Angli
canism fare now? Where is its manly struggle? It
has all the wealth, and the dignity, and the power,
the churches, the colleges, the schools, and the ines
timable vigorous privileges ofthe CathedraVictorice, —
we have a right to expect wonders from it; where are

32
its daily triumphs? Around the very stoves of its
carpeted vestries it is being beaten continually. The
Unions, those hideous architectural phenomena which
horrify you so much, are either because of the Angli
can Establishment, or in spite of it; I think the
former, but it matters little which ; the tale they tell
either way is but a sore commentary on the glories of
the Reformation, and the marriage of the clergy.
Thirdly, consider, what would have been a most
moving consideration to Laud, that in those days
Continental Protestantism had not glaringly deve
loped into deadly heresy and awful unbelief, as it
has done before our very eyes ; while here and
there, like the intermittent rising of the caldron
before it boils, tokens of the same miserable develope
ment are manifest in the Anglican communion, be
ginning in what you fancy is its safeguard, — the
episcopate. The gentility of the episcopate subserves
manifold uses, but it will not stand in the stead of its
divinity. Fourthly, consider, what would have been a most
moving consideration to Andrewes, that the great
reform of the holy council of Trent had not come
into operation ; which, in the quiet way wherewith
all legitimate movements work, has so reinforced the
Catholic Church with spiritual vigour. S. John of
God, S. Francis of Paula, S. Pascal Baylon, S.
Felix de Cantalicio, S. Philip Neri, S. Louis Gon-
zaga, S. Jerom Emiliani, S. Ignatius, S. Cajetan,
S. Thomas of Villanova, S. Francis Borgia, S. Teresa,
S. Peter of Alcantara, S. Charles Borromeo, S.
Andrew Avellino, S. Stanislas Kostka, S. John of
the Cross, S. Francis Xavier, S. Francis of Sales,
S. John Francis Regis, S. Camillus of Lellis, S.
Vincent of Paul, S. Jane Frances de Chantal, with
other names which you venerate, were, from Henry
VIII. to William III, the produce, or rather some
selected produce, of the Roman Church, and in no
little measure, of what is called Tridentine morality ;

33
and, could that have been before the eyes of Andrewes
as it is before yours, you might not have had his
name to quote as you quote it now. Weigh well
these four things, and see if you can really, putting
its intrinsic untenableness out of sight, consider,
as a ground for remaining with the Protestant Estab
lishment, two divines of the sixteenth and seven
teenth centuries, whose names are cast out as evil
by the majority of Anglicans in the nineteenth.
7. You must excuse me if I allude now to a
suspicion which has crossed my mind, and which
after all may be doing you a wrong. It is intimately
connected with the subject we have just been speak
ing of. Is not your reluctance to become a Catholic
connected with some idea you have of political
changes, effected by the youth of the rising genera
tion, which will restore the feelings of personal loyalty
to the sovereign for which England was once so
famous, revive the fallen aristocracy, and bring back
so much at least of Jacobitism as was generous,
lofty-minded, and self-devoting? Do you not feel
that a Church must, after the failure of previous
experiments, be the chief engine of this ; and inas
much as the Protestant Establishment has de facto
possession of the cathedrals, sees, and universities
ready at hand, whereas a change of religion will at
least peril those old Catholic endowments, have you
not a fear lest by becoming a Catholic you, so far
forth, give up these beautiful day-dreams of your
enthusiastic politics ? I know how easy it has been,
and is, to heap biting ridicule upon these airy
citadels, — these schemes for young England to carry old
England, like pious iEneas, safely out of the conflagra
tion ofthe nineteenth century ; butlam far from wishing
to do so. I confess that to me everything in these
days which has an appearance of damping enthusiasm
is prima facie objectionable. Of course, the par
ticular glories of England, which you wish to bring
back, are self-chosen; and, to my taste, the England
c

34
of Augustin and Cuthbert, of Wilfrid and Boniface,
and the canonized builders of the Norman abbeys, is
a more delectable object than the England of Laud
and Andrewes, of Herbert and Sancroft.
Neither would it be hard for me to show you that
any hope materially to better the condition of the poor,
or recover the nation from its debasing selfishness, and
money-making fever, and daily spreading unbelief, is,
independent of the Holy Roman Church, the wildest
of all delusions. There are no weapons in Angli
canism, a poor, barren, narrow ungenerous, selfish sys
tem of unhelpful nationalism, by which you can achieve
any such glorious work as that you look forward to. It
would not be hard to show that the Protestant Estab
lishment is the very thing which dwarfs all greatness
amongst us ; but to take this line with you would be
quite at variance with the temper in which this
letter is written. I write to you in affectionate
anxiety about your soul: it may seem no grand or
lofty or poetical view to take ; but, after all, poetry
and poetical aspirations are very contemptible when
weighed against a man's soul. Your salvation is
what you must care for first. You can do no good
for any one, till you have cared for your soul; and
young persons may even go through much self-denial
in carrying out plans of high poetical beneficence,
and yet be most unpleasing*to God, most useless, nay,
most mischievous to their country. The romance of
youthful beneficence may be quite as far from holy
charity as the sour philanthropy of an encyclopedist ;
and I should be sad at heart indeed if I thought that
poetry, and romance, and Jacobite hopes were more to
you than your poor perishing soul, and so, more than
the Seven Sacred Bloodsheddings, and the Five Be
nignant Wounds, and the Three and Thirty Years.
Indeed, I hear and see enough to tell me how little
humble and saintlike conformity to God's sweet
adorable Will there is in all this political epos; I
know how good men, made and meant for better

35
things, are sacrificing their souls, foregoing spiritual
advancement, killing devotional aspirations, quitting
strictnesses, while they aim at an uncertain good
in an uncertain way; for, to them, practically to
realize a dream of chivalry is more than to be
a fruit of Christ's dear awful Passion. This is
that distressing unreality of High-church politics,
which is the hand-maid of Protestant ecclesiology.
Both are caricatures of Catholic things; both are
exotics in Protestantism, and are so far from being
able to accomplish the work which they put before
themselves, namely, to unprotestantize the Establish
ment, that they themselves are but new developements
of the Protestant temper and will; Protestantism
taking refuge in aesthetics, because men are begin
ning to discern its native ugliness.
It would indeed be mournful to me, were you to
fall a victim to this poor empty unsubstantial poetry ;
if it is not almost prostituting the name of poetry, to
give it to such an essential untruthfulness. Be con
formed to the Will of God; be sure that what He
wills of you is care for your soul ; seek first the king
dom of God and His justice, and then, and not till
then, shall you be told what use He will make of you
in any of His larger plans for your neighbour, your
country, or the Church. Do your best, but do it in
His way ; and then, whatever comes of poor England,
be conformed to His blessed Will: rejoice in His
dominion over you ; rejoice in the vivid sense which
He will give you that you are not your own, and
that you cannot do what you will with yourself.
His dominion over you must be your delicice: lay
this to heart, the stern, simple, unpoetical, divine
claim of the One Thing needful ; all else is smoke
and vapour, and sinful vanity. The world's chivalry is
the puerility of self-will; money-making is more
innocent, because it is more common-place ; it is more
innocent, because it is more gross, and so less likely
to take people in, and frustrate higher vocations. c 2

30
Do not think that I am selfishly dead to high or
noble plans for political amendment; far from it:
only I would have to do with them, certainly in a
less ostentatious, but in a more truthful, and so more
helpful, way. Every good Catholic, mindful of our
Blessed Lord's promises about unity and the fulfil
ment of them in ages of faith, will of course deeply
grieve over this fair island, with her beautiful abbeys,
lying to his eye, in miserable perverse schism and posi
tive asserted heresy ; and he will grieve the more, if he
has been himself but recently pardoned the guilt of his
rebellion against God's Church, and the galling load of
Christendom's excommunication mercifully taken from
off him. He will pray for peace, and ensue it in
such ways as are legitimate for him, ways that must
perforce seem vehement and wrong to those who do
not realize their rebellion or its guilt. It will be a
weariness of mind to him, spite of his own undeserved
enjoyment of Catholic privileges ; it will be not un-
frequently a wringing of the heart, to adjust and re
adjust in each particular case, where his opinion is
asked, (for elsewhere charity has but one judgment,)
the qualification oi vincible or invincible to the ignorance
which keeps those whom he loves and admires, from
a full surrender of themselves to the Roman obedience.
In proportion as he is an affectionate and patriotic
man, so, more or less heavily, will the separation of
England from Catholic unity press upon him.
Surely then on you this burden should lie more
heavily still ; for you are the minority, the handful,
the corner beyond sea, and divided against yourselves,
subdivided amongst yourselves, either boasting of
your position, or distrusting it, or not caring about
it one way or the other. If the angel of England
were permitted to tell you what it is that your coun
try most needs at your hands, most imploringly asks
of you, it would be that you should first look to your
own soul, and reconcile yourself with God and His
offended Church : and once a Catholic, once a subject

37
of S. Peter's Chair, once in the helpful communion of
the old English Saints, once humbly seeking the Will
of God where you can find obedience, the sole safe
expression of His Will, then, dark as the prospect
may seem, there is enough in it to sustain and cheer,
and, when we have been listless for a while, to set
us to hard work again, right well contented if thank-
lessness be our worst wages, for assuredly a better
quittance were above our best deserts.
England wants Saints, far more than it wants
statesmen ; and a communion where you cannot prac
tise obedience, (except it be to heresy in high places,)
how shall it make Saints? 0 miserable communion
with nothing and with nobody, — not with the Saints,
for it holds not to the power that canonized them ;
it may not speak to them in Catholic invocations ; it
may not touch them in the homage of their relics ;
its children may not teach their doctrines, write their
lives, or put Saint before their names without con
demnation from the majority of their brethren — not
with Catholic Christendom, for it is cut off there
from, — not with the schismatical Greeks, for its chil
dren and its tenets are annually anathematized by
them, and its bishop and his consecrators held in
deserved abhorrence by them, at the very Sepulchre
of the Lord — not with the sister Establishment of
Scotland, peevishly cherishing the lifeless and ques
tionable Catholicism of its old communion service —
not with the daughter Establishment of America,
which has thrown off the Athanasian creed and pu
rified the Te Deum — not with its Protestant com
peers of Berlin and Geneva, of Copenhagen and Am
sterdam ! 0 communion with nothing and with
nobody, daily breeding new elements of subdivision,
fierce, intolerant, and persecuting, how different is its
unhelpful bondage from the kindly servitude of Ca
tholic obedience !
8. Of course I may very naturally expect that this
strong language will remind you of another of your

38
grounds for remaining in the Anglican communion,
viz. the temper and behaviour of the converts to
the Roman Church. This is certainly a marvellous
reason to adduce ; the bad behaviour of some fifty or
sixty " idle straws and sapless trees," as they are
called, who have passed from you, casts a reflection
upon their old position, which is to serve you as a
note of the Church. If we can help it, we will not
lay you under such an immense obligation of grati
tude to us for furnishing you with what you are so
eagerly and hopelessly seeking — a note to know your
Church by. Surely so grave a matter must be set
tled otherwise than thus: it is easy to discern the
temper and offending epithets of a renegade's style;
but take care, my dear friend, you are not giving
yourself a nickname before-hand. Wait a while : you
cannot by any act of imagination put yourself in the
position of a convert ; but other acts, steered by God's
sweet mercy, may put you there almost in spite of
yourself, and the change that comes about in that
conversion will astonish you not a little. Acts, which
you may feel infallibly certain before-hand are posi
tively sinful, will then look like the doings of mere
duty ; and sinister motives and wrong tempers, con
sidered to be certainly attendant upon such acts, may
be found never to have existed at all, and to have
been most alien to the whole disposition of the agent.
But let me be as brief as may be on this head, be
cause it is indirectly defending myself, a duty which
a man feels at no time more distasteful than when
he is very happy and very calm ; yet there is a great
deal to be said, and which must be said, as you rest
so much upon this as a ground for remaining where
you are. Let then the poor guilty converts be heard.
You urge as another ground for your abiding a Pro
testant, your dislike of the manners and tone of feel
ing among the English Catholics, not converts ; on
this ground I shall not touch : the memory and the
actual pressure, for so may I call it, of diligent kind-

39
ness, of tenderest support, of unwearied offices, of self-
denying hospitality, of spiritual guidance, of number
less indescribable acts of affectionate solicitude, of un
suspecting love which looks as if earthly motives
could not cleave to it, is too strong for me to do more
than to throw such an accusation off as I would a
loathsome creature, such a miserable slander does it
seem to me. I quote it here, merely to illustrate to
yourself the inconsistency of your present position:
a little while ago we were told you were not worthy
of the Church; now comes a charge, which, whether
it be against old Catholics or converts, pretty plainly
intimates your more real opinion to be, that the
Church is not worthy of you. I will leave the old
Catholics to take care of themselves, merely express
ing an ardent hope that you may some day experience
the delighted surprise of a convert at entering into
such a communion of fraternal offices, of venerated
examples and of winning friends, that it looks to him
like a new world all the while hidden from him here
tofore, yet close to him, in his own country, and over
the threshold of which grace has now drawn him.
Again: you put forward your grounds for re
maining in the Anglican communion as grounds prin
cipally of humility ; yet in this last ground you put
yourself forward as the judge of some fifty or sixty
men, some of whom were but a little while ago
the objects of your loudly expressed veneration, (for
admiration would be too cold a word,) and who since
their conversion have been almost entirely with
drawn from your view or cognizance, except through
vague distorted rumours, gratuitous suppositions,
or the fact that they have assisted in bringing
others to the same place, whither, at all risks
and any cost, desperate fear for the safety of
their souls drove themselves. Am I (putting the
truth or falsehood of the charges out of the question)
am I to consider this as another developement of—
Anglican humility? If you urge me to take your

40
grounds, not singly, but in cumulo, they will make
an odd piece of patchwork ; and, when we have given
them the solemn title of " Grounds for remaining in the
Anglican communion," we shall have given them as
undescriptive a name as can well be conceived.
But now let us glance at the crying immoralities
of the converts! Wherein does it consist? " They
try to seduce others, from that branch of the Church
in which God's Providence has placed them, into the
Roman branch." Now, of course, before you charge
an individual with immorality, you should endeavour
to put yourself in his position ; and, if you find that
his religious belief entails this very line of conduct upon
him as an act of duty, the immorality will not be
peculiar to converts, but to all who hold or ever
have held that belief; and it is rather the system
which you should condemn than the individual, who
must come before you, not so much as personally
immoral, as a deluded victim to that system ; and
anyhow, old Catholics as well as converts come under
this count of the indictment. If you condemn me
personally, and mean to confine yourself to a personal
condemnation, you must pick out (the materials are
abundant enough) something separable from the
Church to which I belong ; otherwise it is rather the
Church than myself whom you accuse. But indeed
your charge begs the whole question. I should
think that in almost every conceivable case it would be
wrong to seduce any one to leave the branch (if I really
understand the word, or theory of non-communicating
branch Churches) of the Church in which he was
placed, to join another branch; and very wrong to
have made such a change myself. But here is the
whole point at issue : I left the Anglican Establish
ment for no reasons short of these, — that I became
convinced, with sufficient clearness to make acting
upon it imperative, of what I now see clearly and
indubitably by the light of faith and the teaching of
the Church, that the Protestant Establishment is

41
no Church at all, but "a schismatical body, in
heresy, and without the grace of the Sacraments,
whatever grace may be conferred with the celebration
of ordinances according to the faith of those who
assist at them in invincible ignorance. If I believed
your premiss, namely, that the Establishment is a
branch of the Church, then I would grant your con
clusion that to try to convert you was wrong, or, to
use simpler language, very absurd, there being nothing
to convert you to, except a stricter life. If I am in
error, be it so ; only you must grant that, believing
as I do, I cannot act otherwise than I do. I be
lieve you in great danger of losing your soul ; can
I do less than strain every nerve to call you out of
that peril ? I look back with trembling to my former
position ; can I do less than try to move you from it ?
I feel such a spiritual peace and happiness as I
hever knew before; can I do less than try to make
those I love participate therein? I feel deeply grate-
' ful to God for His mercy in rescuing me from the
meshes of a false position ; can I do less for Him than
strive to cooperate with His grace in the conversion
of others ?
How very inconsistent then, I had almost said how
stupid, is it to admit that the act of secession may
have been an act of duty, but that to take up a
position of active hostility to the Establishment is
shocking and immoral! Were not a conviction of
falsehood, of danger, of enmity to God's Church, of
guilty schism, of possible and probable participation
in heresy, all manifestly involved in the act of seces
sion? And, if so, were not as well future hostility, as
vehement dislike, involved also in that act? Let
this tell as an argument against the morality of
Catholicism, if you like ; but do not take your own
premisses for infallible, and then judge the morality of
my conduct as if I held your conclusion, which I
deliberately reject, and have rejected by what is to be
in all likelihood the most solemn act of my life and

42
responsible probation. How can a Catholic do other
wise than work actively against the Establishment ?
and how can I act otherwise than any other Ca
tholic, if I once submit to the Catholic Church, and
subject myself to the yoke of her obedience? Surely,
all this is the most unreasonable of cavilling. But
you ask me if there is not infidelity enough in Eng
land, against which we may wage common war with
you? I answer, that of that the Catholic Church
must be a better judge than I am ; and, if she decides
on attacking the Establishment, I, being no longer in
the enjoyment of my Protestant liberty as you are,
cannot criticise her decision, or do anything but act
as she prefers. Here, as elsewhere, you forcibly
place me in your own position, and then judge of my
. moral conduct by the rule of your own; this is
neither humble nor fair.
But let me answer your question directly. There
is quite infidelity enough in England to occupy any
one, and schism enough too, and heresy enough too; •
and I believe you will find few large towns in which
the Catholic Church is not making far better head
against infidelity than the state-Church is making.
But it is not a particularly modest request on the part
of heresy and schism to say, " Do not attack us until
jou have beaten our brother infidelity ; we bargain
to settle the rule and order of the triple fight; you
shall not hit us, except selon regie, and we will make
the rigle." However, the Church has got so much to
do that you will probably find that she has at least no
time for a querulous parley with you because you are
hit too soon or too hard. She will tell you that it is
the distressing scene of infidelity all round her which
makes her now draw up her forces against you ;
for you, with your immense wealth, and state patron-
nage, and married clergy, and cumbrous system of
political subserviency, stand between her and the
huge infidel population ; she cannot get at them ; she
fights at a disadvantage when she fights against them

43
through you: active and incessant warfare against
the Establishment is at this day her paramount duty ;
and their intimate knowledge of Anglican feelings,
Anglican defects, and the like, are the poor tribute
of assistance which her newly reconciled children are
in duty bound to lay at her feet. The first thing an
old missionary did, when he landed on an uncon
verted shore, was to display the Cross; but if an
impostor had gone before him, beguiling the deluded
people with a false cross, it is not hard to see that
the false cross-bearer (if this be not a strained metaphor
for a Church which shows not the Cross) must be the
first object of his vehement attack. Of course you
may say, " Let the Roman Church do her worst; you
cannot beat us : " well, you are at liberty to take that
view ; it has nothing to do with the matter in hand ;
I am simply showing you that it is prejudice and
bigotry to expect converts to act otherwise than they
have done. I am more anxious to do my duty, and
care for my soul, than to indulge in prophetic antici
pations ; enough for each one is the duty each one
finds to do.
But you urge the intense misery which has ensued
in the way of family division. This is indeed a
most distressing subject to consider; and certainly,
so far as the matter has come under my own
cognizance, much the greater portion of the misery
has arisen from what I should consider the most
immoral, Jesuitical (in the Protestant sense of
the word), and tyrannical persecution. In nearly
every instance I have heard of, the doctrine that the
end sanctifies the means has been unblushingly
asserted and wickedly acted upon ; and I could reveal
histories which I think would shock even the most
antipopish Protestant among you, if he were not
personally interested in the matter. But, to say no
thing more of this subject, I would remind you of
our Blessed Lord's sweetly merciful anticipation
of this objection. As if He would have us spared

44
Somewhat of the perplexity of this apparent inter
ference with the sanctities of relationship, He has
even vouchsafed to make it a sort of note of the
true Church. "Do not think that I came to send
peace upon earth: I came not to send peace, but
the sword ; for I came to set a man at variance against
his father, and the daughter against her mother,
and the daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law,
and a man's enemies shall be they of his own house
hold." It was to be the very test of worthiness of
Him, as the next verse shows. But if you answer
that heresy could make use of this note of the
Church, I reply, yes, or of any note of the Church, or,
as Anglicanism does, of more than one, but not of all
of them together. Heresy made use of this test of
the Church at the Reformation; and were the Re
formers very delicately scrupulous about making
converts where the peaceful ties of relationship would
be interfered with thereby? But to urge this is only
a piece of that inseparable fraudulency which at
taches to the Anglican position : it always takes two
lines, and argues opposite and incompatible sides of
a question at the same time; and this it calls its
double witness, its Via Media. As I said some time
since, Anglicans at one and the same time play off
the visible Church against Dissenters, and the invisi
ble Church against Catholics : but people are begin
ning to see through this not very laudable general
ship; and so, as a desperate effort, you are now
beginning to take the line of reverence! You
know I am only saying what is fully borne out
by ecclesiastical history, that the parade of reve
rence, the affectation of disliking system, the self-
sufficient shrinking back from definition, have always
been the exclusive tokens of heresy, and did their
best in their day to hinder the safeguards being
placed upon the doctrine of the Incarnation against
the Arian, Nestorian, and Eutychian heresies; and
they are doing their best now to make people dis-

45
like the safeguard which the Church has placed on
the same blessed dogma when attacked through the
Holy Eucharist, and the Maternity of the Blessed
Virgin. Such tempers are quite in place in a com
munion which tolerates the promulgation of almost
every shade of heresy about the Incarnation; while
they superinduce a comfortably vague mist which
hinders people from seeing clearly what they do not
want to see, yet are suspiciously afraid of seeing — the
duty, of separating themselves from Anglican com
munion, and of submitting to the Catholic Church.
They say that people who live in glass houses should
not throw stones : now, instead of occupying yourself
with the immorality of the worthless converts, have
you not an imperious duty of the same sort at home ?
Are not you yourselves, the smallest of the numerous
sections of the Establishment, loudly accused of im
morally, dishonestly remaining where you are? Are
you not bound to try to satisfy your brethren, with
whom you are still in communion, on this very head,
namely, how you can tell (as a dignitary of your
Church told a member of one of the universities, quite
lately, when he wished to join the Roman Church)
one who consults you that he may hold all that the
Council of Trent teaches — the very fact of the Council
involving the Papal supremacy, — and yet remain an
Anglican? You are pointed at by old High-church
men, Evangelicals, Latitudinarians, and moderate
Tractarians, as immoral; are you in a condition to
occupy yourselves with us? I know we converts are
in a bad case : either we went too soon, or we stopped
too long, or we went in a wrong way, or we did wrong
in getting others to go the same way, or we are
much worsened in our morale since we went; and
they are bitterest who but some months ago talked
big about being Catholics themselves; such men,
of course, hate us by instinct. Now, I think it
would not be hard to make a valid apology both for
the " too soon," and the " too long;" but I have said

46
as much as serves my present end, which is not self-
defence, but to show that the behaviour of the con
verts is no honest reason for your staying where you
are. The majority of the Anglican communion think we
were hardly justifiable in staying as long as we did
stay; but, if not an adequate, they think we have
made the best possible amends by our reluctant and
ungracious honesty in giving up, worldly advantages
at the last: so that we are, I trust, in somewhat
better odour among Anglicans than you are. When
you join us, you must behave better than we have
done; you must shame us into penance by your ex
ample: and, meanwhile, look at Francis of Sales,
Charles Borromeo, and Philip Neri; come to where
they stood, and follow after them, and forget us ex
cept in praying for us : you will be all the happier
for doffing the heavy ermined robe of judge of your
much-tried brethren.
9. Let us now approach another of your grounds,
" the new life in the English Church :" and let us
approach it as reverently as may be, eschewing, I
beseech you, as much as you can in conscience your
new line of interpretative commentaries on the awful
Providence of God Almighty, which sounds often in
my ears like the very jar of audacious blasphemy.
" The new life in the English Church :" is there not
here the same secret vein of pride, and the same
self-conferred prerogative of judge? The new life ! the
old state of things, then, which the majority of your
communion prefer, you take upon yourselves (for
your Church does not speak herself) to condemn. The
Evangelicals have been working hard, earnestly, ener
getically, these seventy years past; but that is not to
go for life : your own movement is, emphatically, the
life of the English Church ; therefore, a little life tied
to a great deal of death. Now, be this true or not,
I think you are hardly the proper persons so com
placently to promulgate the fact. Well — but life is

47
given in order to other functions; to motion, action,
and the like : the sick man recovered must walk and
work; and that portion of Tractarian life which has
walked, has put itself in motion, whither has it
walked, which way has it moved? Romewards, say
the other sections of your communion ; Romewards,
say the Dissenters. And has it been a natural ten
dency, or an eccentric deflection? You will find it
hard to persuade the common sense of mankind of the
latter. But you meet me here with something which
shocks me exceedingly. When I press you to ex
plain what you mean by " life," and the proofs of it,
you speak in a mysterious, incoherent, stiff way ; half
hinting at visions, at strange effects, physical or
otherwise, which you refer to Anglican celebrations
of communion. Indeed we cannot go much into
English society without observing how, like an un
disturbed guest amid all the intellectual doubt and
unbelief of the times, there is an immense amount
just now of trust in dreams, faith in delusions, advo
cacy of spiritual voices and appearances, and, indeed,
a gathering cloud of superstitious opinion and of
superstitious practice. Much religious instinct, find
ing neither voice nor vent in Anglicanism, takes this
morbid turn, until by rendering men victims to the
arrantest impostures and grossest delusions it has
revenged the Catholic Church on the proud reason
of her Protestant antagonists. There is not a necro
mancer who could not now find literary partisans;
alchemy, astrology, and mesmerism are but the three
most diligent partners of a large and flourishing firm ;
and if one meets with any stubborn sceptic, smiling
or frowning at these modern superstitions, in nine
cases out of ten it is a poor, bigoted, priest-led
Catholic, feeble enough to believe in purgatory, and
the intercession of the Saints, and sacramental grace !
And how is this to be explained, except that he has
the living, speaking, guidance of the visible Church,

48
which preserves him from these vagaries of Protestant
intellect, and the severe unhesitating legislator at the
confessional, visiting and condemning the slightest
collusion with the irreverent child's-play of Protest
ant superstition. And is all this developing now in
a grave school of Anglican theology ? ' The symptoms
of Protestantism are many, significant, and unfail
ing; but there are some that come earlier in the
disease, and some later. Forgive me if I think this
a very late one, and augur accordingly. My dear
friend, do take care what you are about ; we hear
of some such thing's in the lives of eminent Saints
of God; do not claim these things at random.
Among Catholics such events are left to autho
rities; the greatest strictness prevails with regard
to publishing them or attaching weight to them ;
and spiritual writers, with a vehemence propor
tioned to the danger they felt of Satanical delu
sion, loudly condemn the abandoning moral and
doctrinal marks, and ordinary rules, and common
place sign-posts, for visions, and voices, and mystical
effects : nay, they speak quite slightingly many times
of such things, and of dependence on them ; they con
sider them, as often as not, delusions; whereas out
ward moral tokens, including a living adherence to
creeds, are the divine guides of Church life. More
and more does your system hasten to degenerate into an
unauthorized mysticism, a wild developement of irre-*
verence ; so true is it, that out of the Catholic Church
there can be no spirituality without superstition.
But I turn fiom this to something a little, though
only a little, less shocking: for, as you know, one
of these reported miraculous manifestations we traced,
and had it explicitly denied by the person to whom
rumour said it had been vouchsafed. I turn then
to the "life" which you say you are told people
come across and see daily deepening in their expe
rience at the confessional ; and this, as far as you can
learn, you are honest enough to admit is confined to

49
some six or seven confessionals. This is in truth
(for I cannot control my language any longer) a
sickening way of finding out the true Church. But
it explains a mystery to me. Some months ago a
lady wrote to me from a distance for some spiritual
direction, saying, that confession, where she was, was
out of the question, for it was getting more and more
notorious that things were talked of in society which
had been only revealed in confession ! Let Anglicans
beware, then, how they trust themselves to confession,
which is a condemned exotic amongst them ; their
ministers have never been brought up to it, neither
is there any authority to punish a breach of the seal
of silence, nor does there seem to be any appearance
of that special grace which so strikingly protects the
seal among the Catholic priesthood. In the tossings
of your rebellion, you have yourselves cast off disci
pline ; is it short of impiety to say now that the ab
sence of it is a token of God's careful foreseeing love?
And this, then, is to be the ground of communion
with a Church, — the knowledge of the hearsay of
six or seven confessionals about the life in the
Anglican communion! Shocking indeed! six or
seven confessionals! so that you constitute your
selves judges of life ; you fix it mainly to an ordi
nance rejected as corrupt by above three-quarters of
your Church ; you coop the life up among yourselves
by the very fixing it to that ordinance : you boast
fully, that is, with a boastful humility, claim this
peculiar manifestation of life for your own clique, by
far the smallest of the four or five mutually anathe
matizing schisms which make up what you call the
Anglican communion. Surely this only requires to
be stated, to fill every one with disgust; as it filled
me when first I heard it, which was before my own
conversion. This ground, and the claim to accept
the Council of Trent and yet remain Anglicans,
opened my eyes more than anything else to the real

50
untenableness, and the material, though I hope not
formal, dishonesty of my position.
But the evil of the dishonesty almost sinks out
of view when compared with the awfulness of this
other ground. If certain pleas were supposed to
infringe upon the integrity of a man's moral conduct,
this trenches upon something infinitely more sacred.
It is profanely tracking the trackless One ; speaking
as though men knew the mind of the All-holy, and
were in the secret counsels of the Most High. 0 my
dear friend, pause before you give in to this reckless
irreverence : God has vouchsafed to us purblind sin
ners outward, secure, realizable tokens of His Church ;
it is worse than madness, it is the sin of sins, to put
aside His gift, and trust to mysterious illusions, and
visionary profaneness, and Puritan extravagances.
Less and less can you attain, or keep, in your intri
cate ensnaring position, the calm simplicity of the
Gospel model, the temper of a child. But you say
that what among other things detains you, is the
manifest power of the Anglican Church to produce
crypto-Catholics, and that seems to you almost a proof
that it cannot be in schism. But surely " almost "
is not enough to settle a question like that, at all
comfortably. And I would ask you, Are crypto-
Catholics the produce of the Catholic Church? She
makes Catholics, not crypto-Catholics ; as she herself
is the city set on an hill, so are, or ought to be, each
of her members, in his measure, illustrations of her
teaching and training. When we discover in Bishop
Taylor whole pages of Saint Francis of Sales, and
other phenomena of that sort in others, it is not hard
to see whence, and by what process of borrowing and
imitating, the crypto-Catholic temper came. But
look to your own soul, and the tokens God has given
you to guide you to His Church : interpret not what His
purposes may be, or may have been, on others ; nor
hunt for life in the confessions of others, nor in the
uncertain mark of the number of those who confess.

51
There are two senses in which I can quite conceive you
to be crypto-Catholics, as you call it; that is, perhaps,
you are Catholics in heart without knowing it, or
Catholics, and dare not show it. If the former is
your case, we shall not be long separated; but, if you
are playiny false with your present position, you are
not likely to be drawn further. 0 ! they who half a
year ago were talking Romanism, indulging in clever
bitterness against the Anglican system, manifestly
restive under ecclesiological or other discomforts, how
little did they realize the responsibility of flippant
talk and brilliant magazine-writing ? they played false
with the system which they were under ; and it has
revenged itself by warping conscience. In the pre
sent excitement, and for a while, they may deafen
themselves with repeating " our Church says," " our
Church holds," " our Church rules," while they are
defending mere party opinions. But all this will
end ; they cannot much longer identify Tractarianism
with the Anglican Church; they must become iden
tified with the Thirty-nine Articles; and then will
follow doubts, and difficulties, and shrinkings, and
weariness, and inaction, and rueful retrospects, more
dismal far than even the torture through which some
have had to pass who now find rest. Unhappy, in
deed, will these men be when overtaken by their own
dishonesty! Who does not know the feelings of a
boy, quarrelling with himself, and impotently spiteful
to his companions, when he has screwed up his cou
rage to a leap, and gone back after his bravado,
while his playfellows have gone before him and he is
separated from them? It is, perhaps, an ignoble
simile; but write man for boy, and conscience for
temper, and religion for holyday ; and it gives us a
picture of moral wretchedness which it is not easy
to exceed. Remember, that staying when you ought
to go, may pass under the name of making use of
present means of grace; but it is in reality a most
wicked, though subtle, slighting of them, and of the
D 2

52
very end for which they were given. 0 how well
you know, how feelingly can you speak of it, how the
burden of a false position is a bar to all spiritual
growth! how cruelly it overlays the gladsome spirit
of Christian strictness !
But there is one argument drawn from the obser
vation of ' life ' within yourselves, which I must not
pass without a word, lest you should think I had
done so because it was unanswerable. It is some
times said, that so long as you feel you get on in re
ligion, so long as you feel that at the month's end
you have more strength to resist temptations, and to
go through self-denials than you had at the beginning,
so long you may be sure that you are within reach of
God's grace ; and so, being in a better state than you
deserve, you must not stir from it. Now is not all
this self-introversion a very miserable support, and
is it not likely to form a very morbid spiritual cha
racter; and are not all such signs of inward per
sonal life uncertain and precarious in the extreme?
And again, is not grace often given to lead men
further ; to lead heretics, for example, from false con
clusions to true ones, Cornelius from heathenism to
the Gospel? and may it not very possibly, and, to
judge from what is going on round you, very proba
bly, be given you to lead you further? and so may it
not be withdrawn in anger when after an adequate
trial it is not corresponded to in the manner which is
intended? But, to pass over all this, does not the
argument prove too much; and can it not be re
duced to a manifest absurdity? If it be true, then
no one can ever be converted from false doctrine to
true, until he has first fallen from the grace given
him ! His conversion, to be safe and acceptable to
God and not self-willed, must take place in mortal
sin ! If it take place while he is growing in grace,
be he Arian, Nestorian, Monophysite, or Anglican, it
is ' sinful,' ' fearful,' ' not the work of the Holy
Spirit.' Alas ! such " revenges has the whirligig of

53
time " brought in, that what Father Perrone said of
the immoralities of the Muggletonians comes true of
the Oxford theology! So is error ever shifting and
veering, shaking hands to-day with the heresy which
yesterday it anathematized, or performing that prime
feat of all heresy, holding opposite and incompatible
falsehoods at once !
10. But you desire far off to follow the Saints of
God. And how is this to be, while voluntarily under
excommunication; cut away, through perverse and
obstinate attachment to error, from the Divine Society
which nursed and formed them ? How shall Saints be
made without the practice of obedience ? and it was not
obedience to a system which made Saints, but obedience
to persons, obedience to God's living vice-gerents, to
spiritual directors, to episcopal and monastic superiors,
to him who sat on Peter's Chair. The Catholic Church
knows nothing of these dead systems, of frozen
articles and congealed liturgies, of the wrangling
worship of rubrics, of surplice insurrections and the
like: in her, men come in contact with flesh and
blood, and bow, and obey, and are wronged and kept
under, and obey the more lovingly, and the marks of
God are upon them, and they become Saints, and
countless generations venerate them. Anglican good
men must be made by obedience to Anglican bishops,
loving obedience, heart obedience, unlimited by pri
vate interpretations of rubrics; and is that the
manner of obedience which you pay to your bishops?
As to the good men you quote from your own com
munion in past times, I have already spoken of
qualifications which must be considered in reference
to them : but I am far from wishing _ to limit God's
mercies ; I am only contending that it is essentially
profane, and, as usual, unhumble, in another to have
grave doubts of his position, and yet count on such
mercies outflowing upon himself, wilfully thrusting
aside such doubts. The Saints are the creation of
the system of the Church which makes them Saints;

54
and, though that system be both doctrinal and ascetic,
it is perhaps more the doctrinal than the ascetic
part of it which gives out that sanctity: those
then who have for whatever cause fallen under
another system, and have been allowed to advance
themselves thereunder, their ignorance remaining in
vincible, have a character formed in them visibly of
a different type and stamp from that of the Catholic
Saints ; and so, when come to its highest growth, such
a character can but inadequately appreciate the life
and actions of the canonized.
But, my dear friend, this wish to imitate the
Saints leads me to say a few words, not of a
learned sort, but as addressed to one anxious about
his soul, on the miserable, much-vexed question of
Anglican orders. You have doubts and misgivings
about your position, and of course the Very first
question which faces a man who wishes to tread in
the steps of the Catholic Saints, is — " Am I sure
that I have priests round me, that they have juris
diction to absolve me, that I can attend upon the
highest ordinances of religion with faith, and with
out the perpetual distraction and unsettlement of
doubts, the existence of which on such subjects goes
far to destroy the very office of a visible Church?
Am I sure of all this ? and if not, and I do believe
in a visible Church, have I any right to be short
of sure on such matters?" Now I have purposely
avoided entering into any theological arguments,
which have been handled far better by others ; I have
kept to the peculiar grounds of yourself and your
friends; and have tried to look at everything in the
way in which I should have thought it would have
come home to one simply and seekingly anxious
about his soul. What little I shall say about Angli
can orders shall be in the same line. You say that
the Church has never decided the question, and that
the Pope has passed no dogmatic judgment on it, to
which you would bow when given. Now, my dear

55
friend, in the outset let me ask you if you are
acting honestly towards the Anglican communion,
when you remain in it with a determination, ready
beforehand, to submit to a decree of Gregory
XVI. on the subject of the orders of your mi
nisters? To be plain, is not this quite dishonest?
And then, in the next place, has not Rome implicitly
settled the question of your orders by the administra
tion of confirmation, and of ordination also, without
any condition? This is the more remarkable, from
the way in which the Church administers conditional
baptism to converts; without ceremonies, and with
every possible want of solemnity beyond what mere
safety requires, to intimate her fear of sacrilege,
and the simple prudence of charity which has forced
her thereto.
But now, look at the question of Anglican orders in
another way. If a man had wished to learn the mind
of the Church, as well as he could, on the Arian or
Eutychian heresies before they were condemned, the way
by which he would approach to it would be, by finding
that different theological schools in the Church, or even
her individual doctors, starting from different _ points
and premisses, and theologizing on somewhat different
principles, all came to conclusions equally unfavourable
to the heresy in question. Surely, if a man could
arrive at this, he would have grounds more than suf
ficient to act upon. And may not something of this
sort be arrived at, in regard to Anglican orders?
One set of men start with history; some take the
deposition of a consecrator, others other points, and
they decide against Anglican orders. Some start
from the point of " intention :" this man argues it on
the omission of intention in the consecration of bishops
for so many years ; that man argues it from the fact
that the compilers of the Thirty-nine Articles did, as
a matter of history, include the sacramentality of
orders under a " corrupt following of the Apostles,"
and that no subsequent High-church divines could in-

56
ject an interpretative intention into words not intended
to convey it; and both decide against Anglican orders.
Others start with the principle of jurisdiction, which
you as well as they consider essential to the power of
keys, except in articulo mortis ; if you do not hold
the Queen to be the fountain of ecclesiastical jurisdic
tion, nor the Chair of Peter, then I presume you
must consider it as infused into each individual
bishop at the moment of consecration, and for this
theory I fear you are unprovided either with scripture
or tradition : and these scholars, on the ground of juris
diction, decide against Anglican orders. Then, again,
the "English Churchman" has made it most probable
that several bishops may have been unbaptized, from
the suicidal exposure which the Editor has made of
negligence and sacrilege among Anglicans in their
practice of baptism ; and here again it fares ill with
Anglican orders.
Now, I do not wish to argue the question in
any hard theological way; I do not mean to say
that any one of these theories is necessarily true,
or of itself decisive against the orders: but I ask
you, if the diversity goes to show that the Church
has not yet, totidem verbis, decided the question,
do not the variety of premisses, and the unity of con
clusion, prove to a moral certainty how the Church
would decide it? And alas! can it be well, can it be
right, can it be — to use your own fearful, bold word-
Providential, that you should go on your way encum
bered and weighed down with this dismal blighting
cloud, pressing on you at every turn, darkening every
ministerial act you confront, turning into ungraceful,
yea, intolerable gloom, all that was meant to cheer
and to illuminate the poor striving penitent? Ah!
how many a young man's heart is bleeding at every
pore, miserable under the weight of his past years,
half-ruined by the neglect of what calls itself his
Church and spiritual mother, now humbling himself
to confession, and in many, many cases repulsed, his

57
confession refused to be heard, bandied from one mi
nister to another ; and, when all is over, to have no
security, but every ground for gravely doubting whe
ther he has ever been absolved at all, or ever re
ceived the Blessed Eucharist, or can by any possi
bility come across any of the endearing powers lodged
by virtue of the Incarnation in the priesthood of
the Catholic Church ! Is not this positively affright
ing? Is it not enough to make the deadest and
the coldest Catholic call loudly and imploringly
upon you to abandon that perverse system, which
you are trying to force upon your own reluctant
communion; and which every day takes more and
more the compact and cognizable form of a dread
ful delusion? Is it sinful to unsettle men's minds
when they are lying in the lap of death, and know
it not? Is it sinful, when we reject your claim
to be a Church, or to have bishops, or to be other
than a misled disunited number of wandering sheep,
to call you one by one, as we can, and where we can,
and when we can? Are we, as you say, immoral
when we treat you as in no Church at all, because
we do not admit your premisses, and so cannot act
on your conclusions? Are you not judging us through
out, as though we held what you hold? If it be un
dignified treatment for those who buoy themselves
up on the inflated claims of Anglicanism, it is such
treatment as the strenuous, pitiful, charity of Catho
lics in all ages has shown to blindfold perishing souls.
I am really surprised at the way in which some
urge the immorality of unsettling men's minds ; as if it
was not a positive obligation to unsettle those whom we
believe in fearful error. Surely it is most false, as
well as daring, to say that a work is not from the
Holy Spirit because it is not calm : shall we venture
to limit His dealings? shall we condemn, for the sake
of some sickly theory of our own, the tumultuous con
trition which the Saints have deemed heroic, and
which has sometimes separated body and soul.
d5

58
Surely one would rather say that truth in its begin
nings has mostly, and very markedly, been an un
settling thing; and it should be remembered that
solemn steps may be taken while the greatest calm
ness reigns within, which, nevertheless, from certain
outward circumstances, may have every appearance of
hurry and perturbation. But is not such a charge as
this, brought forward with quiet unsuspecting self-
complacency, another sign of the marvellous blind
pride which characterizes your position? and all such
charges are of quite recent invention ; you have made
a new position for yourselves. For, supposing such a
charge to be true, or fair, it comes with an uncom
monly bad grace from men who first unsettled our
minds ; who have unsettled their own communion from
its very bottom, with quite as much appearance of
wantonness as we have shown; who are more pain
fully unsettling it now by their remaining, than we by
our seceding ; and whose work was not only not calm
in its beginnings, nor calm in its progress, but
breeds even daily increasing scandal, tumult, strife,
faction, and schism, among yourselves, as it ap
proaches, by the help of the momentum which juve
nile ecclesiologists have given it, to its goal of a
broken purpose and frustrate expectations. Are you
to have a monopoly of unsettlement? Have you
some graduated scale of unsettlement, up to which men's
minds may be blamelessly disturbed, and which you
alone know how to manage ? After all you have done,
and all you are doing in your own communion, this
show of meek indignation at our immoral unsettling
of men's minds must be, to Dissenters and Low-church
men, amusing and instructive in the extreme. Yet
it is natural enough ; it is but the jealous snappish
anger of a sportsman with one who crosses his beat.
Forgive me this ill-natured figure, which really forces
itself upon me. I am sure that, in lieu of this almost
spiteful urging of the immorality of unsettling and
converting men, you would be defending your position

59
in a more straightforward way by showing that sub
mission to Rome is a corruption of Tractarianism,
instead of a legitimate fulfilment of its tendencies.
Do this, and it will go further to condemn us, further
to settle those whom we have unsettled, further to do
away with the scandal you are giving to your own
communion, than all this objectless complaining and
self-satisfied mysticism.
You complain that we pray people away one by
one, instead of praying for the conversion of the
Anglican communion as a body. And are you to
rule even the tenour of our prayers? what manner
of immodest querulousness is this! Is not prayer
ever answered according to the goodness and wisdom
of Him to whom we offer it, and not according to
the ignorance of us who pray? Our very inter
cessions disturb you; and yet you say you leave
yourself quietly in God's hand ! Whence, then,
this inexplicable disquietude? because you know
that village priests, and illiterate confraternities, and
bead-telling old women, and simple nuns, and school
children, and medal-loving girls, and office-saying
monks, are praying for you ! Why not pray us back?
still more, why not keep your deserting brethren with
you by prayer? why not pray away unsettlement?
why not (most of all) pray yourselves calm, content
ed, utterly submissive to your own position, and to
your spiritual superiors? We pray for you one by
one, because our mother the Church tells us that is
the proper fashion of our prayers, and we inquire no
further ; it is the way she has ever acted upon the
horde of sinners and deluded souls ; she overlooks the
almost indistinguishable distinctions between their
false religions; the differences to her eye are but
faintly marked and hardly worth a thought, su
premely important as they seem to you, vexed at
being confounded with the less aristocratic modes of
Protestant belief. So it is, that either she prays for
you one by one, as the diligent search of charity

60
brings you before her ; or she prays for the conversion
of England, rather than of the Anglican Church ; the
division of nations being the ordinance of God, and
the Protestant Establishment only one monument of
rebellion against Him : and thus she confounds you
with the other shapes of heresy and schism which
abound between our four seas. She fixes not a
graduated scale of guilt; she barely notices the
arbitrary pales by which you fence yourselves off from
other Protestants ; the wealth you share with Quakers,
and the gentility you share with Socinians, amount,
in her estimation, to no real distinction : and do you
yourselves think the Thirty-nine Articles a more
real denial of Protestant sympathies? Still, prayer is
answered according to the wisdom of Heaven's love,
not the blindness of earth's asking; so why this
dread of Catholic supplications ? Is it the Alliance of
the Saints, and the Help of Mary, that make them
formidable? You leave me to suppose that you put
less faith in the intercession of an Anglican congre
gational communion, than in the rapid inaudible
Memento of a solitary Mass.
I have of course been obliged, by the way, to use
many expressions about the Anglican succession and
sacraments which must have been exceedingly painful
to you. But I do not wish, in the way of argument,
to speak as if the question were absolutely decided,
whatever I may think about it; because I particu
larly aim at showing you that, independent of that,
you cannot in honesty to your own soul, or in
honesty to your own overwearied communion, remain
where you are : you hold enough, and more than enough,
to make your continuing in theAnglican communion
morally wrong. A deeply seated, and vague, and to
your mind sacred, attachment to the Church, into
which you were not baptized, which was not the
Church of your forefathers, where you cannot help
those who have more immediately preceded you to
the grave, and the lessons of whose doctors you have

61
been studiously unlearning yourselves and unteaching
others, — a blind sacred attachment to a customary
system, is by no means an adequate, rational, con
scientious, or religious reason for remaining where
you are in a time and crisis like the present. It
will not bear the pressure of the emergency. It is
playing with danger ; it is, to judge from the lan
guage of some of you, an almost wild and fierce de
termination not to realize the truth: and to bid
others banish all doubt and anxiety about their soul's
safety, because you yourselves have this attachment
which is explicable only to yourselves, is so shocking
a presumption, and rebellious interference with pos
sible calls of God, that I cannot trust myself to
speak of it. If you are really to put aside all out
ward notes and tokens, and rest upon moral grounds,
(I say moral, as distinguishing between such and the
quasi-revelations some of you quote,) then surely
your reverence for the authority of S. Thomas, back
ed as it is by Suarez and S. Alphonso, may incline
you to admit principles of moral theology, which,
with respect to the very questions of the succession
and sacraments, may point out a line of conduct
different from the one you are pursuing. They, in com
mon with the other masters of moral science, rule that
in matter of faith and sacraments it is not lawful to
follow even a very probable opinion, but that the
safe and more certain side is to be followed; that
there is a religious obligation on men to follow it :
and the propositions, taking the other side, have
been condemned by the Church in the pontificate
of Innocent XL; and it is remarkable that even
the bold proposition, condemned by him, itself de
nies the right to use the probable opinion in the
case of priests' or bishops' orders. Now you, on
your own showing, have not a shadow of a doubt
about our succession and our sacraments ; whereas, to
say the least, you confess to having chill and un
comfortable misgivings about your own ; and this, on

62
the principles which define and limit the nature and
extent of probable conscience, ought at once to de
cide your submission to the Church. In a word,
either you must go back to the simpler Protestant
ism you have outgrown, and realize that; — or you
must go on, and submit to the Roman, Church ; — or
you must deal unfairly and dishonestly with your
conscience and your present communion in remain
ing where you are. You have come now to the place
where the roads part ; the next step may involve final
grace : and if, with grave doubts yourself, you invoke
your brother's blood upon your head, by stifling
his doubts by your superiority of intellect, it pro
bably will involve final grace.
Now, without entering directly into the question of
Anglican orders, and the validity of your sacraments,
and avoiding, not altogether certainly, yet as far as was
possible, the use of distressing language which would
take for granted a view so painful to you, I have
shown that there is at least a very grave doubt cast
over the whole subject, to put it no higher than a
doubt ; and that such a doubt is in many ways in
expressibly injurious to the life of the soul, retarding,
thwarting, chilling, quenching everything which is
high and holy and aiming at perfection. Then I
have shown you, that supposing you have a very
strong probability on your side, still in matter of
faith and sacraments that is not sufficient ; and that,
according to the doctrine of S. Thomas, and S. Al
phonso, and all the great masters of moral theology,
you are bound in those matters, not to put up with
probable opinion, but to take the safer side. I do
not think that, if you give these two points the con
sideration they deserve, you can be quite easy even
about the orders and the sacraments regarding which
you were so confident. But let us now advance a third
step. You say it is a comfort to you that anyhow
you have the sacraments, and so you are safe. You
entrench yourself here; here you are inexpugnable;

63
you are safe. Yet after all, not so safe as you ima
gine ; for, putting aside the doubts about your orders,
putting aside the moral obligation there is upon you
to take the safer and not the probable opinion in such
a matter, yet valid sacraments do not give safety :
there is the injury of schism. You may eat the
Lamb, as we learn from the well-known words of S.
Jerome ; yet, for all that, the eating may only be pro
faneness, when they who eat are out of the House built
on Peter. Theologians teach us that schism invali
dates none of the sacraments but that of penance,
wherein the absolution is, except in articulo mortis,
affected by the want of jurisdiction; but it puts a
bar to their efficacy ; it shuts them up within them
selves ; it suspends them, and confines them in that
unprofitable suspense, until the charity of the Gospel,
the caritas of S. Augustine which he ever ex
plains of the unity of the Church, gains them
access to the souls of men. In this sense is to be
understood the passage of S. Basil, where he draws
so fearful a picture of the damage incurred through
schism. But the Donatist controversy is the famous
parallel, and you quote S. Augustine as teach
ing you two things; 1, that if you have valid
sacraments you are safe, and 2, that he denied that
the Donatists had valid sacraments ; and so all paral
lel between them and Anglicans ceases. Well now
— let S. Austin be heard for himself. He says
(cont. Crescon. ii. 12. [x] ed Paris,) " In truth you
have not the Christian Church, you have not Chris
tian charity. Truly, I recognize in you the Christian
sacraments, while I disapprove and abhor your deny
ing (exsuffletis) in Catholics the very same which
you have even in schism. The Church altogether
acknowledges in you all things which are her own;
nor are they on that account not hers, because they
are found with you also. With you, truly, they are
alien things ; but when she to whom they belong re
ceives you converted, they become your own to your

64
health, which before were pernicious to you and not
your own." Again (epist. cxli. Bened.) : " If then
you should not despise that which God gave you, but
after a cause so diligently pleaded, so diligently eluci
dated, you relinquish your perverse custom and con
sent to the peace and unity of Christ, we shall rejoice
over your conversion; and the sacraments of Christ,
which in the sacrilege of schism you possess to
condemnation (ad judicium), will become profitable
and wholesome to you when you shall have the Head,
Christ, in the Catholic peace, where charity covers
the multitude of sins." Once more (epist. lxi.),
writing about the reception of converts from the
Donatists, he says, "acknowledging in them the good
gifts of God, whether holy baptism, or the blessing of
ordination, or the possession of continence, or the
sealing of virginity, or the faith of the Trinity, and
whatever others there may be; all which, although
they were there, yet profited nothing, inasmuch as
charity was not there. For who can truly say that
he has the charity of Christ, when he does not em
brace His unity? When, therefore, they come to the
Catholic Church, they do not receive here what they
have; but they receive here what they had not, in
order that that whicli they had might begin to profit
them. Foe they receive here the root of charity, in
the bond of peace and in the society of unity, that all
those sacraments of truth which they have may avail
them, not to condemnation, but to liberation. For the
branches ought not to boast that they are not thorn
branches, but vine branches; for if they do not live
in the root, they shall be burnt with all their beauty."
Thus, then, it appears on the authority of the very
Father whom you so confidently quote, that in order
to be safe it is very far from enough to have valid
sacraments; the doctrine in which you have taken
your last refuge is directly opposed to the doctrine of
the Church even in S. Austin's day. You have not
only a most harassing and gloomy doubt throwii over

65
your orders, you are not only obliged to push aside
all the admitted principles of moral theology, to use
probable conscience where those principles and the
express decision of the Church forbid it to be used ;
but, going the most generous and unnecessary length
of admitting the validity of your sacraments, still
there is actually no safe shelter even in that validity ;
and you must be, not half satisfied, not probably con
vinced, but morally sure that separation from the
Holy See {and from the rest of Christendom, in
cluding your Eastern friends, who but the other day
laid an awful anathema on the denial of the " wor
ship of Mary," by which excommunication every
member of the Anglican Church is now virtually de
clared to be " a vessel of Satan, and unworthy of the
Body and Blood of our Lord Jesus Christ;" unless,
indeed, you maintain that the Anglican Church up
holds the worship of Mary, the use of images, and
transubstantiation) — you must he sure that such sepa
ration is not schism, before you can even extricate your
self from these preliminary objections to your position ;
or be free, wearied and battle-soiled with this wretch
ed strife, to go with what heart you may to a loath
some wrestling with those separate difficulties then
meeting you as untried, untired, antagonists, arising
out of heresies which, either through the Blessed
Virgin, or the Saints, or the Faithful Departed, or
the Eucharist, more or less impugn the grand doc
trine of the Incarnation. Alas ! how far you still are
from having proved your safety! And yet — you
have a call to act, a soul to save, and a peace which
you would fain ensue! 0 may She to whom you
never speak win from her Son the grace which shall
prove too sweetly strong for the perversity of those
who have so many, many titles to my love, and a special
title to her prayers, in that they wrong her preroga
tives, and so provoke her charity !
And, now to conclude. You will say that this is
nothing more than an argumentum ad hominem

66
throughout: true, it was meant for nothing more.
I want to see you a Catholic, because I think your
soul is in imminent danger where you are ; I want
to see you a Catholic, because I think your remain
ing behind is not right or honest; I want to see you
a Catholic, because the highest sympathies and yearn
ings you have are unsatisfied where you are ; I want
to see you in the Church into which you were baptized,
the one Catholic Fold of Christ, out of which you
have fallen since the use of reason by overt acts of
schism; I want to see you in the Church of your
good fathers and forefathers, where you can help
them by prayers and masses, and not where a chill se
paration keeps you from them, where (0 miserable,
unaffectionate, degrading cruelty!) you have excom
municated the dead, and your brethren boast thereof.
I crave all this, and therefore I have written as I
have done. Allow me to say, in summing up, what
must necessarily sound a little positive, that while I
think your grounds inconclusive one by one, so do I
think them inconclusive in cumulo, from the mere fact
that they are destructive one of another; they tend to
prove that all the notes of the Catholic Church can
suffer a total eclipse, so that the Church shall be
visible and invisible by turns ; they try to substitute
those unmanageable jerks of fitfully reviving ear
nestness, in which Anglicanism has thrown off for
safety's sake, as well as comfort's sake, first the
Nonconformists, and then the Nonjurors, and then
the Wesleyans, for the continuous, if not strictly
equable, life of the Catholic Church; they go upon
the supposition, that, if a man's position is so proud
as I would maintain yours to be, he must find it out,
as if pride were at all an obvious sin, and not the
most secret, subtle, complacent, and modest-looking of
all sins ; they lead you to rest upon notes of inward
life in others, when to be safe you should feel it
rather in yourself, and then the obvious danger of
resting upon the results of self-introversion, and the

67
unhumble character of subjective reasoning, would be
come apparent, and you might happily be led to
abandon it altogether.
You cannot expect to see all this clearly while
yet you go wandering out of the One True Fold of
Christ. But enough you must see to make you
feel, that you are in a position of the greatest possible
difficulty; and, let me affectionately add, of danger
no less than of difficulty. I have written, you will
say, as a renegade: dear friend, do not think of
me, but think of what I have said ; think if there
is truth in it; I know there is much love; try to
overlook the rude manner, the style of a turncoat,
or whatever else you will think it. I have told
you plainly why I abjured Protestantism, and have
not contented myself with denying that I abjured
it on this or that ground; and what I have said
so plainly must of necessity offend. Of the peace,
the happiness, the child-like naturalness, which one
who is converted from your particular position ex
periences, I shall say nothing. 0 how much I long
to say: but the latest development of High- church-
ism makes me loathe, as a diseased thing, the ob
trusion of these subjective grounds. In all your
grounds I have seemed to detect four character
istics, running through them all and appearing every
where: — 1, a secret, subtle, and intolerant pride,
which keeps ever and anon mounting the judgment-
seat almost unawares; — 2, a most profane, sickly,
Puritanical mysticism, into which your system is
daily sinking deeper and deeper, as though it were
the mire of Montanism; — 3, a keeping at arm's
length the simple, penitential, humbling anxiety
about your own soul, and an eager catching at views
and generalities, and "coigns of vantage" to cling to; —
and 4, a fretful disobedience to your present position,
cloaking itself under the garb of a mournfully humble
endurance of it, asking for sympathy with such a
rueful complaining as involves the most ungraceful

68
restiveness: to one or other of these four things,
everything you urge seems to me to be at once re
ferable. Alas! so must it ever be with those who
have not, can not as yet have, faith. You are not a
Catholic, and so such belief alone is yours as St.
Ambrose speaks of, (how long shall it be true of you
and yours?) Credis quod tibi prodesse prcesumis ; non
credis quod Deo dignum est.
Very affectionately yours,
Frederick William Faber.

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