Page:True and False Infallibility of Popes.pdf/187

16

the close of last session of Parliament, when the Public Worship Bill was before the House, Mr. Gladstone proposed a series of resolutions protective of the Ritualists that dropped dead on the instant. He subsequently relieved his mind in the well-known article defensive of Ritualism in the Contemporary Review. But there was one point which the accomplished political fencer had especially to guard, and that was the popular impression that Ritualism leads to the Catholic Church. Nor could Mr. Gladstone forget that he had himself been repeatedly and publicly charged with being a Catholic. Since Lord John Russell's Durham Letter it had become a habit in England to scourge the Ritualists on the backs of the Catholics; so this unfair and dishonorable cruelty was no innovation, but a good Protestant tradition with a ritual of its own—that the Catholics be striped for the crimes of the Ritualists.

Mr. Gladstone struck out with his unjust blows in the following terms:

'But there is a question which it is the special pur pose of this paper to suggest for consideration by my fellow-Christians generally, which is more practical and of greater importance, as it seems to me, and has far stronger claims on the attention of the nation and of the rulers of the Church than the question whether a handful of the clergy are or are not engaged in an utterly hopeless and visionary effort to Romanise the Church and people of England. At no time since the bloody reign of Mary has such a scheme been possible.