In the discipline of the Church itself also Disraeli eventually found it imperative for the State to interfere. With extreme Ritualism, with amateur popery in an alien camp, effetely and sometimes treacherously practised, till the insubordination of a few, who were not in any sense strong men or leaders, began to infect the many, Disraeli could not sympathise. The Mass of the Roman Church as a solemn act he could reverence, but not the “masquerade” of amateur ultramontanes. With the High Anglicans, with the Tractarians, he in many respects sympathised profoundly. Their movements were those of noble aspiration and high endeavour. But most of the ultra-Ritualists were of wholly different calibre. Their attitude he typified most humorously in _Lothair_, and in the person of the “Reverend Dionysius Smylie,” who was wont to observe, “Rome will come to _me_.” Moreover, the Church had passed rapidly through varying vicissitudes. In the late ’thirties and early ’forties there had been a signal revival; but the secession of Newman, “apologised for but never explained,” had proved a blow under which “the Church still reels.” She lost a great, a generous, a necessary leader, when a leader was her need. “If,” Disraeli wrote in 1870, “a quarter of a century ago, there had arisen a Churchman equal to the occasion, the position of ecclesiastical affairs in this country would have been very different from that which they now occupy. But these great matters fell into the hands of monks and Schoolmen....” In the ’fifties there was some degeneration, and the revival of Convocation was not on the wider basis which might have quickened clerical energy and lay enthusiasm. In the ’sixties the Church began to be “in danger.” Radicalism and Ritualism united; and there is a manuscript letter of Disraeli, still extant, written at this period, and affording some very interesting and secret knowledge. What Disraeli disliked and regretted was that the choice between faith and free thought should be more and more presented as one between the Roman purple and the “Red Republic.” And this brings me to the consideration of Disraeli’s ideas regarding the Latin Church, the immortal Rome, “that great confederacy which has so much influenced the human race, and which has yet to play perhaps a mighty part in the fortunes of the world.”