Page:Tracts for the Times Vol 3.djvu/20

 conviction lead to the same result with regard to the sacraments of their Lord; whether they have not already taken the first steps.

This again I would regard as the inevitable result of the use of ridicule; and its ill tendency is the more illustrated by its having corrupted your natural love of fairness. It is part of the character which you have adopted, not of your own. For having once resolved on the fiction which was to be the vehicle of your satire, then the laws of composition required that the fiction should be in keeping, however at variance with the laws of truth. The laws of fiction are indeed stern laws, since they require the sacrifice of whatever is at variance with themselves. Having adopted the fiction of a letter from the Pope to certain members of your Church, as being his emissaries, it became necessary, by disguise, or omission, or perversion, to conceal whatever would have disturbed the unity of the drama. For instance, you play not unfrequently upon the words which one of these writers addresses to the Church of Rome,—"Cum talis sis, utinam noster esses." And who would not echo the wish? Who,—bearing in mind the holy truths which Rome, amid her corruptions, yet holds, how much of the highest Christian truth, which many Protestant bodies have lost, or are in jeopardy of losing, on the mystery of the Trinity, of the Incarnation, and its consequences; or considering, again, the extent of her Communion,—would not wish, and long, and pray that she might be freed from her anti-Christian servitude; that she, as ourselves have been, might be restored to her primeval purity, when she was once the guardian of Christian truth; that God would "break the yoke of her burden, the staff on her shoulder, and the rod of her oppressor?" (Is. ix. 4.) Taken then in their obvious sense, the words are the expression of every Christian heart Your fiction, however, required that they should express a desire for union with Rome as she is; and in this sense, accordingly, you