Which may 'serve for an explanation of what is meant by the "catholic instinct" "to look Romeward."

How it has happened that England has been at all periods so peculiarly apt to be "most erring and most unfortunate," is explained in the author's account of the council of Whitby," at which Wilfrid prevailed on Oswy to "conform to the Roman practice" of observing Easter.

This judgment of the council of Whitby was a great step towards the consummation of Wilfrid's hopes. In his speech he had laid open the true disease of England, the disease which was then drawing it onward to the brink of schism, which clung to it more or less, succouring the evil and baffling the good, even up to the primacy of Archbishop Warham; which plunged it into that depth of sacrilege, heresy, and libertinism, in which it has lain since the time of Henry VIII., and has hitherto retarded its penitence and self-abasement.-p. 36.

From this it appears that England had never yet reached to Mr. Newman's beau ideal of catholicity, even before its plunge into that "depth of sacrilege, heresy, and libertinism," that altogether make up the doctrine and discipline of the church of which Mr. Newman is a minister.

But to return to Wilfrid's exposition of the "disease" of England :—

He referred the stubborn nonconformity of his times to that narrow temper of self-praise fostered by our insular position, leading the great mass of common minds to overlook with a bigoted superciliousness almost the very existence of the universal church, and to disesteem the

privileges of communion with it. A particular church, priding itself upon its separate rights and independent jurisdiction, must end at last in arrogating to itself an inward purity, a liberty of change, [such, for instance, as is claimed in the preface of the Book of Common Prayer,] and an empire over the individual conscience far more stringent and tyrannous than was ever claimed by the Universal Church. [meaning, of course, by "the universal church," the pope and church of Rome, and those subject to their dominion.] In other words, nationalism must result in the meanest form of bigotry, and, as being essentially demoralizing, must be a fearful heresy in theology.-Ibid.

Perhaps it may be questioned, whether Mr. Newman and his friends are quite so good judges of what is either demoralizing or heretical, as they imagine themselves to be. Persons who have obtained their orders in the church of England, on the faith of their abjuration of Romanism, name and thing, must have their moral perceptions in a preternatural state of confusion, if, while continuing members and ministers of this church, they are labouring, as the very end and aim of their existence, to poison the public mind with Roman superstitions, and enslave their country with the yoke of a foreign domination. The beam in their own eye had better be extracted, before they set about their charitable operations on the eyes of others. But what infinite ignorance or what scandalously dishonest suppression-of the most notorious facts in the history of the church, is involved in this tirade against the church of England! The ancient British Christians

did not choose to give up their mode of calculating the time of Easter, and adopt the Roman computation. This was "nationalism," "essentially demoralizing," "a fearful heresy in theology." And is Mr. Newman ignorant of what our divines (Bishop Lloyd, for instance) have written on this subject? Or, if the writers of a church plunged in a "depth of sacrilege, heresy, and libertinism," meet but little respect at his hands-has he never read of Irenæus, and what he thought and wrote of Victor?

If the church of Rome is so wicked as to require her subjects in these countries to erect schismatical altars, rather than allow them to worship God in a liturgy constructed with so divine a spirit of charity and moderation, that it does not compel them to use a single word which can violate their conscientious scruples-if she is so essentially cruel and schismatical as to construct her own offices in such a manner that a member of our church, travelling in foreign countries, cannot communicate with her without being forced to commit idolatry-if these facts be as certain as any facts can be, what is to be thought or said of those, who make the squabbles in the eighth century about the paschal term a text, on which to found a charge of demoralizing heresy, against the church in which they have received their baptism and their orders?-the church, of which, to this hour, they choose to be considered members? No right-minded person can have a second opinion on the

subject. Let Mr. Newman, if he please, continue, like his model saint, to exert "all his influence to bring about conformity with the Holy Roman Church"*let him labour, if he please, to drag back his country to that state of things, when, as this writer triumphantly describes it, "crowned cowards quailed before the eye of the old man in his white cassock on the Vatican"t-or if the mercy of Heaven should protect us from the machinations of internal treachery, let him and his "little band" migrate to what their idolatrous fanaticism reveres as 66 THE FOUNTAIN OF HOPE, STRENGTH, AND JUSTICE, ST. PETER'S CHAIR;"+-but if there be shame or decency left among them, surely it should prevent those who propagate such truly demoralizing heresy regarding virginity and marriage, as I have transcribed into these pages from the Lives of the English Saints, from presuming to constitute themselves the accusers and judges of the church of England.

CHAPTER XI.

ST. WILFRID AND ST. THEODORE-APPEALS TO ROMEST. WILFRID A PLURALIST.

It would occupy too much space, and, I fear, weary the reader, to go through all the particulars of this life of Wilfrid; and yet, it is in the course of observations on matters otherwise of little moment or interest, that Mr. Newman's object in projecting this series of lives is developed. For example:from the quarrel between St. Wilfrid and St. Theodore (for St. Wilfrid seems to have quarrelled with almost every saint in the circle of his acquaintance,

so that our author tells us of one council where were present "five canonized saints, at that time enemies;"* but this, by the way,) he takes the opportunity to make the following remarks:

We can understand modern writers blaming Wilfrid for having brought the Church of his country more and more into subjection to Rome. Certainly, it is true that he materially aided the blessed work of rivetting more tightly the happy chains which held England to St. Peter's chair, -chains never snapped, as sad experience tells us, without the loss of many precious Christian things. Wilfrid did betray, to use modern language, the liberty of the national Church: that is, translated into catholic phraseology, he rescued England, even in the seventh century, from the wretched and debasing formality of nationalism. Such charges, however ungraceful in themselves, and perhaps

* Page 178.