Apologia Pro Vita Sua | Page 7

at length I did leave
the Anglican Church for the Roman, then they said to each other, "It is
just as we said: we knew it would be so."
This was the state of mind of masses of men twenty years ago, who
took no more than an external and common sense view of what was
going on. And partly the tradition, partly the effect of that feeling,
remains to the present time. Certainly I consider that, in my own case,
it is the great obstacle in the way of my being favourably heard, as at
present, when I have to make my defence. Not only am I now a
member of a most un-English communion, whose great aim is
considered to be the extinction of Protestantism and the Protestant
Church, and whose means of attack are popularly supposed to be
unscrupulous cunning and deceit, but how came I originally to have
any relations with the Church of Rome at all? did I, or my opinions,

drop from the sky? how came I, in Oxford, in gremio Universitatis, to
present myself to the eyes of men in that full blown investiture of
Popery? How could I dare, how could I have the conscience, with
warnings, with prophecies, with accusations against me, to persevere in
a path which steadily advanced towards, which ended in, the religion of
Rome? And how am I now to be trusted, when long ago I was trusted,
and was found wanting?
It is this which is the strength of the case of my Accuser against
me;--not the articles of impeachment which he has framed from my
writings, and which I shall easily crumble into dust, but the bias of the
court. It is the state of the atmosphere; it is the vibration all around,
which will echo his bold assertion of my dishonesty; it is that
prepossession against me, which takes it for granted that, when my
reasoning is convincing it is only ingenious, and that when my
statements are unanswerable, there is always something put out of sight
or hidden in my sleeve; it is that plausible, but cruel conclusion to
which men are apt to jump, that when much is imputed, much must be
true, and that it is more likely that one should be to blame, than that
many should be mistaken in blaming him;--these are the real foes
which I have to fight, and the auxiliaries to whom my Accuser makes
his advances.
Well, I must break through this barrier of prejudice against me if I can;
and I think I shall be able to do so. When first I read the Pamphlet of
Accusation, I almost despaired of meeting effectively such a heap of
misrepresentations and such a vehemence of animosity. What was the
good of answering first one point, and then another, and going through
the whole circle of its abuse; when my answer to the first point would
be forgotten, as soon as I got to the second? What was the use of
bringing out half a hundred separate principles or views for the
refutation of the separate counts in the Indictment, when rejoinders of
this sort would but confuse and torment the reader by their number and
their diversity? What hope was there of condensing into a pamphlet of
a readable length, matter which ought freely to expand itself into half a
dozen volumes? What means was there, except the expenditure of
interminable pages, to set right even one of that series of "single

passing hints," to use my Assailant's own language, which, "as with his
finger tip he had delivered" against me?
All those separate charges had their force in being illustrations of one
and the same great imputation. He had already a positive idea to
illuminate his whole matter, and to stamp it with a force, and to
quicken it with an interpretation. He called me a liar,--a simple, a broad,
an intelligible, to the English public a plausible arraignment; but for me,
to answer in detail charge one by reason one, and charge two by reason
two, and charge three by reason three, and so on through the whole
string both of accusations and replies, each of which was to be
independent of the rest, this would be certainly labour lost as regards
any effective result. What I needed was a corresponding antagonist
unity in my defence, and where was that to be found? We see, in the
case of commentators on the prophecies of Scripture, an
exemplification of the principle on which I am insisting; viz. how much
more powerful even a false interpretation of the sacred text is than none
at all;--how a certain key to the visions of the Apocalypse, for instance,
may cling to the mind (I have found it so in the