But over and above the general course of events which forces us to reconsider this question, circumstances have taken place in the past year which we may boldly pronounce to be without a parallel in the history of the Church in England since she became divided from Catholic communion. Those who have followed with anxious sympathy that great restorative movement which, for twelve years, has agitated her bosom,--those who have felt with an ever increasing conviction, as time went on, and the different parties consolidated and unfolded themselves, that it was at the bottom a contest for the ancient faith delivered to the saints, for dogmatic truth, for a visible Church, in whom, as in a great sacrament, was lodged the presence of the Lord, communicating Himself by a thousand acts of spiritual efficacy, against the monstrous and shapeless latitudinarianism of the day; against the unnumbered and even unsuspected heresies which have infected the whole atmosphere that we breathe; against, in fine, the individual will of fallen man, under cover of which the coming Antichrist is marshalling interests the most opposite, and passions the most contradictory; and further, those not few nor inconsiderable, we believe, who, by God's grace, owe to the teaching of _one man_ in particular a debt they never can repay,--the recovery, perchance, of themselves from some form of error which he has taught them to discern, or the building them up in a faith whose fair proportions he first discovered to them,--these will feel with deeper sorrow than we can express the urgency of the occasion to which we allude. For how, indeed, could the question, whether the Church of England is fallen into schism, or be, as from the laver of their regeneration they have been taught to believe, a member of that one sacred Body in which Christ incarnate dwells,--how could this question be so forced upon their minds, as by the fact that her Champion, whom they had hitherto felt to be invincible, who had seemed her heaven-sent defender, with the talisman of victory in his hands, of whom they were even tempted to think Si Pergama dextra Defendi possent, etiam hac defensa fuissent,