My own case, as towards certain Unitarian friends of mine, is quite similar to this. They preach to me the absolute moral perfection of a certain man (or rather, of a certain portrait) as a sufficient basis for my faith. Hereby they challenge me, and as it were force me, to inquire into its perfection. I have tried to confine the argument within a narrow circle. It is addressed by me specifically to them and not to others. I would _not_ address it to Trinitarians; partly, because they are not in a mental state to get anything from it but pain, partly because much of it becomes intrinsically bad _as argument_ when addressed to them. Many acts and words which would be _right_ from an incarnate God, or from an angel, are (in my opinion) highly _unbecoming_ from a man; consequently I must largely remould the argument before I could myself approve of it, if so addressed. The principle of the argument is such as Mr. Rogers justifies, when he says that Mr. Martineau _quite takes away all solid reasons for believing in Christ's absolute perfection._ ("Defence," p. 220.) I opened my chapter (chapter VII.) above with a distinct avowal of my wish to confine the perusal of it to a very limited circle. Mr. Rogers (acting, it seems, on the old principle, that whatever one's enemy deprecates, is a good) instantly pounces on the chapter, avows that "if infidelity _could_ be ruined, such imprudencies[17] would go far to ruin it," p. 22; and because he believes that it will be "unspeakably[18] painful" to the orthodox for whom I do _not_ intend it, he prints the greater part of it in an Appendix, and expresses his regret that he cannot publish "every syllable of it," p. 22. Such is his tender regard for the feeling of his co-religionists. My defender in the "Prospective Review" wound up as follows (x. p. 227):-- "And now we have concluded our painful task, which nothing but a feeling of what justice--literary, and personal--required, would have induced us to undertake. The tone of intellectual disparagement and moral rebuke which certain critics,--deceived by the shallowest sophisms with which an unscrupulous writer could work on their prepossessions and insult their understandings--have adopted towards Mr. Newman made exposure necessary. The length to which our remarks have extended requires apology. Evidence to character is necessarily cumulative, and not easily compressible within narrow limits. Enough has been said to show that there is not an art discreditable in controversy, to which recourse is not freely had in the 'Eclipse of Faith' and the Defence of it." The reader must judge for himself whether this severe and terrible sentence of the reviewer proceeds from ill-temper and personal mortification, as the author of the Eclipse and its Defence gratuitously lays down, or whether it was prompted by a sense of justice, as he himself affirms.