One very important volume on these questions ought not to be passed by without notice. This was the _Treatise on the Church of Christ_, 1838, by Mr. W. Palmer, who had already by his _Origines_ of the English Ritual, 1832, done much to keep up that interest of Churchmen in the early devotional language of the Church, which had first been called forth by Bishop Lloyd's lectures on the Prayer Book. The _Treatise on the Church_ was an honour to English theology and learning; in point of plan and structure we have few books like it.[72] It is comprehensive, methodical, well-compacted, and, from its own point of view, exhaustive. It is written with full knowledge of the state of the question at the time, both on the Anglican side and on the Roman. Its author evades no objection, and is aware of most. It is rigorous in form, and has no place for anything but substantial argument. It is a book which, as the _Apologia_ tells us, commanded the respect of such an accomplished controversialist as Perrone; and, it may be added, of a theologian of an opposite school, Dr. Döllinger. It is also one on which the highest value has been set by Mr. Gladstone. It is remarkable that it did not exercise more influence on religious thought in Oxford at the critical time when it appeared. But it had defects, and the moment was against it. It was dry and formal--inevitably so, from the scientific plan deliberately adopted for it; it treated as problems of the theological schools, to be discussed by the rules of severe and passionless disputation, questions which were once more, after the interval of more than a century, beginning to touch hearts and consciences, and were felt to be fraught with the gravest practical issues. And Mr. Newman, in his mode of dealing with them, unsystematic, incomplete, unsatisfactory in many ways as it was, yet saw in them not abstract and scholastic inquiries, however important, but matters in which not only sound argument, but sympathy and quick intelligence of the conditions and working of the living minds around him, were needed to win their attention and interest. To persons accustomed to Mr. Newman's habit of mind and way of writing, his ease, his frankness, his candour, his impatience of conventionality, his piercing insight into the very centre of questions, his ever-ready recognition of nature and reality, his range of thought, his bright and clear and fearless style of argument, his undisplayed but never unfelt consciousness of the true awfulness of anything connected with religion, any stiff and heavy way of treating questions which he had treated would have seemed unattractive and unpersuasive. He had spoiled his friends for any mere technical handling, however skilful, of great and critical subjects. He himself pointed out in a review the unique merit and the real value of Mr. Palmer's book, pointing out also, significantly enough, where it fell short, both in substance and in manner. Observing that the