So blessed and sanctioned, Ward went straight ahead. The Ultramontanism of the Dublin Review must have been gall and bitterness to the old-fashioned English Romanist.
While Ward and the Dublin Review, supported by Manning, pushed papal absolutism to the furthest extremes, Lord Acton and the series of journals with which he was connected, such as the Rambler and the short-lived but brilliant Home and Foreign Review, recalled the Catholic mind to the facts of History. Abbot Gasquet's estimate of the Dublin Review and the Rambler is significant.
"The Dublin Review and the Rambler were conducted upon lines wholly divergent. In historical matters the policy of the Dublin Review appears to have been to avoid as far as possible facing unpleasant facts in the past, and to explain away, if it could not directly deny, the existence of blots in the ecclesiastical annals of the older centuries. The Rambler, on the other hand, held the view that the Church had nothing to lose and much to gain by meeting facts as they were."[1]
The refusal to face the facts, the resolve to manipulate them in the interests of edification, was characteristic of an extensive controversial school of which the Dublin Review was a vigorous and extreme exponent. It was done deliberately, on principle, prompted by a profound distrust of history. Lord Acton's criticisms[2] on this uncritical method of advancing truth are inimitable.
