w and
inadequate. It makes an equal Providence, the Father of all, care
only for a mere handful of species, leaving the rest (such is the
theory) to the chances of eternal misery. If God interferes at all
to procure the happiness of mankind, it must be on a far more
comprehensive scale than by providing for them a Church of which
far the majority of them will never hear. It was on this line of
thought, the details of which I need not pursue, that I passed out
of the Catholic phase, but slowly, and in many years, to that
highest development when all religions appear in their historical
light as efforts of the human spirit to come to an understanding
with that Unseen Power whose pressure it feels, but whose motives
are a riddle. Thus Catholicism dropped off me as another husk which
I had outgrown (pp. 327-328).

So a marked epoch came to its close, and this was one of the many forms
in which the great Anglican impulse expended itself. While Newman and
others sank their own individuality in religious devotion to authority
and tradition, Pusey turned what had been discussion into controversy,
and from a theologian became a powerful ecclesiastical manager. Others
dropped their religious interests, and cultivated cynicism and letters.
The railway mania, the political outbursts of 1848, utilitarian
liberalism, all in turn swept over the Oxford field, and obliterated the
old sanctuaries. Pattison went his own way alone. The time came when he
looked back upon religion with some of the angry contempt with which
George Eliot makes Bardo, the blind old humanist of the fifteenth
century, speak of his son, who had left learning and liberal pursuits,
'that he might lash himself and howl at midnight with besotted
friars--that he might go wandering on pilgrimages befitting men who knew
no past older than the missal and the crucifix.'

It is a critical moment in life when middle age awakens a man from the
illusions that have been crowning the earlier years with inward glory.
Some are contemptuously willing to let the vision and the dream pass
into easy oblivion, while they hasten to make up for lost time in close
pursuit of the main chance. Others can forgive anything sooner than
their own exploded ideal, and the ghost of their dead enthusiasm haunts
them with an embittering presence. Pattison drops a good many
expressions about his Anglo-Catholic days that betray somethin