‘I have heard some facts which seem to show a good spirit among the clergy…. Mr. ――――, about whom you may remember the great row that took place some years since for admitting a black to the Communion in company with whites, has now so completely broken down that feeling, that last Sunday, when I received the Sacrament at his Church, at which near two hundred people were present, all colours were mixed indiscriminately. In the Roman Catholic islands this was always insisted on, and carried with a high hand…. This island is very green, and its plants very exotic-looking, but there is a total want of beauty. For all I have yet seen, the coasts of the Mediterranean are the places “_mortalibus ægris munere concessæ Divom_.” Also, the negro features are so horridly ugly, at least the generality of them: now and then indeed one sees finely-chiselled Egyptian features, and among the others one can distinctly trace the difference of caste in all shades from man to monkey…. You will be shocked at my avowal, that I am every day becoming a less and less loyal son of the Reformation. It appears to me plain that in all matters that seem to us indifferent or even doubtful, we should conform our practices to those of the Church which has preserved its traditionary practices unbroken. We cannot know about any seemingly indifferent practice of the Church of Rome that it is not a development of the Apostolic ἦθος; and it is to no purpose to say that we can find no proof of it in the writings of the six first centuries; they must find a _dis_proof if they would do anything…. I have been reading the controversy between Law and Hoadly for the first time. Law’s brilliance quite astonished me: I think it the most striking specimen of writing I ever saw. Yet I own now and then he seems rather wild. Surely one could get such splendid compositions into circulation by puffing them? It was a noble end of Convocation to be put down for censuring Hoadly, and the censure looks well as the last record in Wilkins’s _Concilia_. The sun that set so bright must have a rising!… I have translated all the Becket correspondence, and should go [on] at once to Anselm, if I was not on the point of starting with the Bishop[164] on his Visitation. All I hear makes me wish to go to America, though I do not conceive the views of the clergy in general there to be very high. Preaching goes for everything, and a person that cannot fill his Church gets dismissed. I think that in the present state of religion preaching should be quite disconnected from the Services, and looked on as an address to the unconverted.[165]… We ought to employ itinerant talkers in England; I am sure I could stir up people very much in Devonshire and Cornwall in that way.’ To the Rev. J. H. NEWMAN, Jan. 25, 1834.