in many things, but not in this; religion, as a mere
sentiment, has been to me from childhood a dream and a mockery.
Secondly, I was confident that there was a visible Church, with
sacraments and rites which are the channels of invisible grace. Here,
again, I have not changed. But, thirdly, I held a view of the Church of
Rome which I have utterly renounced since.

The attack of liberalism upon the university and upon the old orthodoxy
of England began in 1834. Thus, in a pamphlet by Dr. Hampden it was
maintained that religion is distinct from theological opinion, that it
is but a common prejudice to identify theological propositions with the
simple religion of Christ; and so on. The tracts were widely read and
discussed, but the counter-attack against liberalism was not a power
until Dr. Pusey joined us. His great learning, his immense diligence,
his simple devotion to the cause of religion, no less than his great
influence in the university, at once gave us a position and a name. He
taught us that there ought to be more sense of responsibility in the
tracts and in the whole movement. Under his influence I wrote a work
defining our relation to the Church of Rome, namely, "The Prophetical
Office of the Church viewed relatively to Romanism and to Popular
Protestantism." The subject of this volume, published in 1837, is the
"Via Media." This was followed by my "Essay on Justification," and other
works; and so I went on for years up to 1841. It was, in a human point
of view, the happiest time of my life. We prospered and spread.

But the movement was to come into collision with the nation, and with
the Church of the nation. In 1838 my bishop made some light
animadversions on the tracts. But my tract on the Thirty-nine Articles,
designed to show that the Articles do not oppose Catholic teaching, and
but partially oppose Roman dogma, while they do oppose the dominant
errors of Rome, brought down, in 1839, a storm of indignation throughout
the country. I saw that my place in the movement was lost.

_III.--A THEOLOGICAL DEATH-BED_

In the long vacation of 1839 I began to study the history of the
Monophysites, and was-absorbed in the doctrinal question. It was during
this course of reading that for the first time a doubt came upon me of
the tenableness of Anglicism, and by the end of August I was seriously
alarmed. My stronghold was antiquity; yet here, in the fifth century, I
found Christendom of the sixteenth and ninete