Over-tolerant

Still sermonizing.  Once I've dispatched Walter Farquhar Hook, who is doing duty as the representative "Tractarian against Roman Catholicism," I'll be moving on to complaints about the culture of excessive toleration in Victorian Protestantism.  Our keywords today are "liberalism" and "liberality":

The Protestant Churches, in their fancied wisdom, gentleness, and liberality, have not only nearly ceased to call the Pope Antichrist and the Man of Sin, but in the doubtfulness of faith engendered by modern disputations, have almost ceased to view any longer Popery in its true scriptural character. Some, in the anticipation of a more open and temporary manifestation of wickedness (and I would not deny that the scriptures bear them out in this) lose sight of that past spiritual, but equally real and predicted, existence, which wickedness has had in Popery, and which appeared to our forefathers clearly to correspond to, and realize the prophecies of the New Testament; a wickedness which had been leavening the visible Church with its sour and hypocritical leaven for above 1200 years. Others again, not I believe in the sureness of scriptural knowledge, but in the uncertain theories of the liberalism of these days, think that Popery will be mended and not destroyed.  [1]

How solemnly does this record of our fathers’ faith condemn the whining affectation of that undistinguishing liberalism which neutralizes in our times the principles of the Reformation! [2]

While the Church of Rome is making unexampled efforts to regain her lost influence in this country, Protestant vigilance, it is to be feared, is fast degenerating into a spurious liberality, which seems ready to throw down every barrier which our forefathers interposed between the respective principles of the two systems. [3]

Anglicans usually argued against "persecuting" Catholics, by which they meant that Catholics should not be executed or subjected to unduly harsh penalties for their beliefs.  (If you were Hugh M'Neile, the second clergyman I quoted above, "should not be executed" did not necessarily extend to priests who heard confession! [4])  But they nevertheless firmly asserted that Catholics were not being persecuted when they were denied full civil rights; in fact, some evangelicals argued that in order to save Britain from God's wrath, the Catholic Emancipation Act of 1829 needed to be repealed.  Emancipation was corruption, not progress--a political act that fatally tainted the entire country.    

"Liberalism" and "liberality" are not being used very precisely here, but they do signify a misguided tendency towards ecumenical sentiments and an even more misguided tendency towards mincing words.   For clergymen like Bickersteth, there was nothing remotely insulting about calling the Pope the Antichrist; it was, after all, literal truth, easily understood by anyone who paid serious attention to Biblical prophecy.  If Catholics were annoyed or offended by the truth, then so much the worse for them.  As a writer for The Bulwark sweetly put it, "We would not unnecessarily do anything that might be regarded as discourteous, and we would willingly concede to them any designation they choose to assume, provided it was in itself accurately descriptive, and provided it did not countenance any unwarrantable assumption on their part, or any unwarrantable concession on ours. Now, we know of no single or compendious designation for the adherents of the Church of Rome that answers these conditions, except Papist or Romanist" [5].  True charity meant denouncing Catholicism for the greater good of the misguided Catholics, not making Catholics "comfortable." 

[1] Edward Bickersteth, The Present Duties of the Protestant Churches.  A Sermon... (London: G. Norman, 1837), 15.

[2] Hugh M'Neile, The Abominations of Babylon.  A Sermon... (London: For the [Continental] Society, [1826]), 25.

[3] J. Bowen, The Translation and Circulation of the Holy Scriptures, the True Cause of the Reformation: A Sermon..., in Sermons on Some of the Leading Points in Difference Between Protestantism and the Church of Rome, Delivered in the Parish Church of Newcastle-Under-Lyme (Newcastle: W. H. Hyde, 1836), 31.

[4] For M'Neile's (temporary) advocacy of execution for confessors, see Robert J. Klaus, The Pope, the Protestants, and the Irish: Papal Aggression and Anti-Catholicism in Mid-Nineteenth Century England (New York: Garland Publishing, 1987), 229. 

[5] "On the Use of the Names 'Popery' and 'Romanism,' and 'Papist' and 'Romanist,'" The Bulwark 1.1 (August 1851): 24.