The Church was aristocratic: the Church was the greatest landed proprietor in ...

The Church was aristocratic: the Church was the greatest landed proprietor in the kingdom: and in the sixties even well-disposed men might wonder anxiously whether the Church was still the bulwark it had once been against Popery and Infidelity. Viewed in perspective, the Anglo-Catholic movement is the emergence, in a prepared season, of the Caroline tradition, transmitted not only through the non-jurors but through many of the parochial clergy, unnamed, unknown, who had been bred in the writings of the Caroline divines.

As both Newman and Pusey proved, it is possible to construct from those writings such a body of permitted belief as makes the barriers between England and Rome transcendible at all save two or three insuperable points.

Perhaps

at two only, because, if

it be admitted with Hooker that transubstantiation is no matter for churches to part communion on, then all that remains is papal supremacy, and the veneration of the Virgin and saints. In other words, and to unspeculative English minds, the Anglo-Catholics had only to take one step more into idolatry, and the last step of all into Popery.

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