Has not all our misery, as a Church, arisen from people being afraid to look difficulties in the face? They have palliated acts, when they should have denounced them…. And what is the consequence? That our Church has, through centuries, ever been sinking lower and lower, till good part of its pretensions and professions is mere sham, though it be a duty to make the best of what we have received. Yet, though bound to make the best of other men’s shams, let us not incur any of our own. The truest friends of our Church are they, who say boldly when her rulers are going wrong, and the consequences; and (to speak catachrestically) they are most likely to die in the Church, who are, under these black circumstances, most prepared to leave it.
—J.H. Newman, Apologia pro Vita Sua, p. 274
