is lodged was different. The thoughts of God and man, of the world, of
creation, of providence and prayer, of the nature and means of
salvation, are similar. Newman was right in discovering that from the
first he had thought, only and always, in what he called Catholic terms.
It was veiled from him that many of those who ardently opposed him
thought in those same terms.

It is impossible to write upon the theme which this book sets itself
without using the terms Catholic and Protestant in the conventional
sense. The words stand for certain historic magnitudes. It is equally
impossible to conceal from ourselves how misleading the language often
is. The line between that which has been happily called the religion of
authority and the religion of the spirit does not run between Catholic
and Protestant. It runs through the middle of many Protestant bodies,
through the border only of some, and who will say that the Roman Church
knows nothing of this contrast? The sole use of recurrence here to the
historic distinction is to emphasise the fact that this distinction
stands for less than has commonly been supposed. In a large way the
history of Christian thought, from earliest times to the end of the
eighteenth century, presents a very striking unity.

In contrast with this, that modern reflection which has taken the
phenomenon known as religion and, specifically, that historic form of
religion known as Christianity, as its object, has indeed also slowly
revealed the fact that it is in possession of certain principles.
Furthermore, these principles, as they have emerged, have been felt to
be new and distinctive principles. They are essentially modern
principles. They are the principles which, taken together, differentiate
the thinker of the nineteenth century from all who have ever been before
him. They are principles which unite all thinkers at the end of the