The reader of these pages can now understand something of the nature of those stirring and exciting times in the ecclesiastical world in which Mr. Baker began his career, and of the events and questions about which we were daily conversing together. Bishop Whittingham approved of the principle of interpreting the Articles laid down in the Ninetieth Tract. On this principle, I gave my assent to them at my examination for orders, and could not otherwise have assented to them with a safe conscience. The ordination of Mr. Carey opened the way for us to go forward to the full extent of holding all the doctrines of the Council of Trent. The current of Oxford thought and literature was sweeping us in that direction. We had full access to it, and felt its power, although, as I have said, we were a good deal behind the movement, and ignorant of many things which were taking place in England. Mr. Baker was far in advance of me at the time our friendship began. He never had that feeling of hostility to the Roman Church with which so many were filled. {57} His early education, and the knowledge he had of Catholicity and of the Catholic clergy and laity in Baltimore, preserved him from that strong prejudice which I retained from the impressions of childhood, and which he aided me greatly to overcome. Neither of us ever looked on the Roman communion as heretical, schismatical, or essentially corrupt. We adopted, at first, the prevalent idea that it was in a schismatical position in England, and in those parts of the United States where we supposed the Protestant Episcopal Church had prior possession. We dropped this notion, however, after a while; and I remember well that it was a friend of ours, who was then and is now a minister of the Episcopal Church, who drove it finally out of my head by solid and unanswerable arguments. We could not agree with the bishop and his party in their anti-Roman sentiments, and disliked the offensive use of the terms "Romish" and "Romanist." We regarded the Catholic Church as composed of three great branches--the Latin, Greek, and Anglican--unhappily estranged from each other, and all more or less to blame for the separation. We did not believe in the supremacy of the Pope, in the full Catholic sense, as constituting the e essential principle of Catholic unity, or that communion with the Holy See was necessary to the very being of a Church. We did, however, come to believe by degrees in a certain Primacy, partly divine and partly ecclesiastical, as necessary to order, and the means of preserving intercommunion among all bishops. What we regarded as errors in Roman doctrine, we looked upon as much less fundamental than those Protestant errors which pervaded so extensively our own Church; we considered them much in the same light with which Bishop Griswold and his brethren regarded the peculiar doctrines of the Greek Church, as matters to be tolerated, until all branches of the