as in my eyes a certain element of
Antichrist in the Reform Act, and that act was cordially hated,
though the leaders soon perceived that there would be no step
backward. It was only under the second government of Sir Robert
Peel that I learned how impotent and barren was the conservative
office for the church, though that government was formed of men
able, upright, and extremely well-disposed. It was well for me that
the unfolding destiny carried me off in a considerable degree from
political ecclesiasticism of which I should at that time have made
a sad mess. Providence directed that my mind should find its food
in other pastures than those in which my youthfulness would have
loved to seek it. I went beyond the general views of the tory party
in state churchism, ... it was my opinion that as to religions
other than those of the state, the state should tolerate only and
not pay. So I was against salaries for prison chaplains not of the
church, and I applied a logic plaster to all difficulties.... So
that Macaulay ... was justified in treating me as belonging to the
ultra section of the tories, had he limited himself to
ecclesiastical questions.

In 1840, when he received Manning's imprimatur for _Church Principles_,
he notes how hard the time and circumstances were in which he had to
steer his little bark. 'But the polestar is clear. Reflection shows me
that a political position is mainly valuable as instrumental for the
good of the church, and under this rule every question becomes one of
detail only.' By 1842 reflection had taken him a step further:--

I now approach the _mezzo del cammin_; my years glide away. It is
time to look forward to the close, and I do look forward. My life
... has two prospective objects, for which I hope the performance
of my present public duties may, if not qualify, yet extrinsically
enable me. One, the adjustment of certain relations of the church
to the state. Not that I think the action of the latter can be
harmonised to the laws of the former. We have passed the point at
which that was possible.... But it would be much if the state would
honestly aim at enabling the church to develop her own intrinsic
means. To this I look. The second is, unfolding the catholic system
within her in some establishment or machinery looking both towards
th