floating invisible in angels, inspiring saints, and investing
with miraculous properties the commonest material things. No
wonder that they found such a spectacle hard to bring into line
with the institution which had been evolved from the divorce of
Henry VIII, the intrigues of Elizabethan parliaments, and the
Revolution of 1688. They did, no doubt, soon satisfy themselves
that they had succeeded in this apparently hopeless task; but,
the conclusions which they came to in order to do so were
decidedly startling.

The Church of England, they declared, was indeed the one true
Church, but she had been under an eclipse since the Reformation;
in fact, since she had begun to exist. She had, it is true,
escaped the corruptions of Rome; but she had become enslaved by
the secular power, and degraded by the false doctrines of
Protestantism. The Christian Religion was still preserved intact
by the English priesthood, but it was preserved, as it were,
unconsciously--a priceless deposit, handed down blindly from
generation to generation, and subsisting less by the will of man
than through the ordinance of God as expressed in the mysterious
virtue of the Sacraments. Christianity, in short, had become
entangled in a series of unfortunate circumstances from which it
was the plain duty of Newman and his friends to rescue it
forthwith. What was curious was that this task had been reserved,
in so marked a manner, for them. Some of the divines of the
seventeenth century had, perhaps, been vouchsafed glimpses of the
truth; but they were glimpses and nothing more. No, the waters of
the true Faith had dived underground at the Reformation, and they
were waiting for the wand of Newman to strike the rock before
they should burst forth once more into the light of day. The