The work will not be regarded by puseyites and papists as a plea in their favor. Rather, if I am not much mistaken, it will be felt by them, so far as it may come under their observation, to be one of the most weighty and effective arguments they have yet been called to encounter, in this country, in opposition to their cause. For it is not to be disguised that a great deal of the war which is now carried on in this direction is as little adapted to make any impression on the enemy as a battery of popguns in continual fire. Instead of being alarmed or troubled on its account, the enemy is up doubt pleased with it at heart. Nothing can be more vain than to imagine that a blind and indiscriminate warfare here can lead to any true and lasting advantage. Not with circumstances and accidents simply must the controversy grapple, but with principles in their inmost life, to reach any result. The present argument accordingly, in throwing itself back upon the true principle of Protestantism, with a full acknowledgment of the difficulties that surround it, while proper pains are taken to put them out of the way, may be said to occupy the only ground, on which any effectual stand can be made against the claims of Rome.
To contend successfully with any error it is all important that we should understand properly and acknowledge fairly the truth in which it finds its life. The polemic who assails such a system as popery or puseyism with the assumption that its pretensions are built upon sheer wind, shows himself utterly unfit for his work, and must necessarily betray more or less the cause he has undertaken to defend. All error of this sort involves truth, apprehended in a onesided and extreme way, with the sacrifice of truth in the opposite direction. Hence a purely negative opposition to it, bent simply on the destruction of the system as a whole, must itself also become inevitably onesided and false, and can only serve so far to justify and sustain what it labors to overthrow. Romanism includes generally some vast truth in every one of its vast errors, and no one is prepared to make war upon the error, who has not felt, in his inmost soul the authority of its imprisoned truth and who is not concerned to rescue and save this, while the prison itself is torn to the ground. In this view, no respect is due to an infidel or godless zeal, when it may happen to be turned in this direction, and that must be counted always a spurious religious zeal, which can suffer itself to be drawn into communion with such an irreligious element, simply because for the moment it has become excited against Rome. It is greatly to be feared, that the spirit into which some are betrayed in this way is unhallowed and profane, even where they take to themselves the credit of the most active zeal for tfce glory of God. So with regard to puseyism. Nothing can well be more shallow than the convenient imagination that the system is simply a religious monstrosity, engrafted on the body of the Church from without, and calling only for a wholesale amputation to effect a cure. Such a supposition is contradicted, to every intelligent mind by the history of the system itself. No new phase of religion could so spread and prevail as this has done, within so short a period of time, if it did not embody in itself, along with all its errors, the moving force of some mighty truth, whose rights needed to be asserted, and the want of which had come to be felt in the living consciousness of the Church, vastly farther than it was clearly understood. If the evils against which the system protests were purely imaginary, it could never have acquired so solid a character itself, as it has done in fact. Most assuredly the case is one that calls for something more than a merely negative and destructive opposition. Only by acknowledging and honoring that which is true and good in the movement, is it possible to come to any right issue with it so far as it is false. The truth which it includes must be reconciled with the truth it rejects, in a position more advanced than its own, before it can be said to be fairly overcome. In this view, it is not saying too much to affirm, that a large part of the controversy directed against it thus far has been of very little force. It has been too blind and undiscriminating, as one-sidedly false in its own direction at times, as the error it has opposed in the other. Our newspapers, and reviews, and pamphlets and books show too often that the question is only half understood by those who undertake to settle its merits. While they valiantly defend the citadel of Protestantism at one point, they leave it miserably exposed to the attacks of its enemies at another. With many it might seem to be the easiest thing in the world, to demolish the pretensions of this High Church system. Its theory of the Church is taken to be a sheer figment, its idea of the sacraments a baseless absurdity, its reverence for forms a senseless superstition. The possibility of going wrong in the opposite direction is not apprehended at all. Such a posture however with regard to the subject, is itself prima face. evidence that those who occupy it are not competent to do justice to the case.