or others associated with him, and exhibited itself in the later numbers of the Rambler after it passed into their hands, in the Home and Foreign Review, the North British Review, and the Chronicle. But the Catholics of this country repelled the poison, and these publications dropped rapidly one after another into their grave."[1]
Meanwhile, on the other side, Ward's ambition was to demonstrate "how extensive is the intellectual captivity imposed by God on every loyal Catholic."[2] And there is no possibility to doubt which of the two schools was congenial to Roman authority. For the editor of the Dublin Review was rewarded with expressions of papal approval, while Lord Acton's literary ventures were one after another brought to untimely ends.[3] But the thing that flourished, the work upon whose eccentricities and extravagances Roman authority looked with favour, was the Apologetic of Ward in the Dublin Review. Utterly unhistorical as it assuredly was, more Ultramontane than Rome itself, carrying recent development to unprecedented excess, and exhibiting exactly those characteristics of wilful blindness to uncongenial facts which roused so justly Acton's moral indignation, Ward's Essays were nevertheless the approved and sanctioned type of Roman doctrine and Roman defence offered for the edification and guidance of Roman Catholics in this land. There is something exceedingly tragic in the suppression of Acton's plea for sincerity and moral rectitude, coupled with the encouragement given to the reckless and painfully superficial utterances of the Dublin Review.
The English Romanists as a body were scared by
