The oracle was always dark.
Placed in a high post in an age of political analysis, the bustling
intermeddler was unable to supply society with a single solution.
Enunciating secondhand, with characteristic precipitation, some big
principle in vogue, as if he were a discoverer, he invariably shrank
from its subsequent application the moment that he found it might be
unpopular and inconvenient. All his quandaries terminated in the same
catastrophe; a compromise. Abstract principles with him ever ended
in concrete expediency. The aggregate of circumstances outweighed the
isolated cause. The primordial tenet, which had been advocated with
uncompromising arrogance, gently subsided into some second-rate measure
recommended with all the artifice of an impenetrable ambiguity.
Beginning with the second Reformation, which was a little rash but
dashing, the bishop, always ready, had in the course of his episcopal
career placed himself at the head of every movement in the Church which
others had originated, and had as regularly withdrawn at the right
moment, when the heat was over, or had become, on the contrary,
excessive. Furiously evangelical, soberly high and dry, and fervently
Puseyite, each phasis of his faith concludes with what the Spaniards
term a 'transaction.
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