Nor is the Anglican theory about the Catholic Church a more impossible absurdity than what they profess to believe, and apparently do believe, about their own, although they do not state their belief in the bare and unambiguous manner in which we will state it for them. That sect “existed,” they tell us, “before the so‐called Reformation, which was only a trivial episode in its history. It left the Church of England exactly what it was before, and only made it a little more Catholic. If its founders called the Mass a ‘blasphemous fable,’ they must have intended that it was the most sacred rite of the Christian religion. If, whenever they altered their new Prayer‐Book (which they did very often), it was always to make it less Catholic, this was probably in the hope that its doctrine would improve in quality as it lessened in quantity. If its bishops for many generations persecuted Catholics to death or tortured them as ‘idolaters’ this was only a quarrel of brothers, and they were as deeply enamored of the Catholic faith as those whom they murdered for professing it. If for more than a hundred years they gave the highest dignities to men who had never received episcopal ordination, that fact proved nothing against their reverence for the apostolic succession, or their conviction that they possessed it themselves. In like manner their casting down altars (in some cases making them into paving‐stones), and substituting a ‘wooden table,’ in no way affect our constant declaration that the doctrine of the Christian sacrifice was always most firmly held and taught in the Anglican Church. That they allowed their clergy every variety of creed may have been one way of testifying their conviction that truth is one. Their constant execration of the Catholic faith must be interpreted as meaning something quite opposite; in the same way, if you suppress the Homilies and reverse the Articles, which for some sagacious reason were written as they are, you will find the genuine theology of our founders. “Finally, if the Church of England pretended to be fiercely Protestant for three centuries, this was only to take the world by surprise about the year 1870, and thus secure the ‘Catholic revival’ which will hasten the time when Dr. Tait will be universally recognized as the legitimate successor of S. Anselm—particularly in his religious views—and the Anglican reformation justly appreciated as a noble protest against the noxious errors of Protestantism, with which it accidentally coincided in point of time, but had nothing in common in point of doctrine.”