ty of our house to Westminster Abbey enabled me to enter into
the more chastened, yet dignified, beauty of the English rite. At Harrow
the brightness and colour of our School-Chapel struck my untutored eye
as "exceeding magnifical"; and the early celebrations in the Parish
Church had a solemnity which the Chapel lacked.

But the happiest memory of all is connected with a little Church[65]
about two miles from my home. It is a tiny structure of one aisle, with
the altar fenced off by a screen of carved oak. It served a group of
half a dozen houses, and it stood amid green fields, remote from
traffic, and scarcely visible except to those who searched for it. There
an enthusiastic and devoted priest spent five and twenty years of an
isolated ministry; and there, for the first time in our communion, I saw
the Divine Mysteries celebrated with the appropriate accessories.

My walks to that secluded altar, in the fresh brightness of summer
mornings, can never be forgotten until the whole tablet is blotted. On
the sky-line, the great masses of distant woodland, half-veiled in mist,
lay like a blue cloud. Within, there was "the fair white linen cloth
upon the wooden table, with fresh flowers above, and the worn slabs
beneath that record the dim names of the forgotten dead"; and there
"amid the faint streaks of the early dawn, the faithful, kneeling round
the oaken railing, took into their hands the worn silver of the Grail--

"The chalice of the Grapes of God."[66]

Perhaps it was just as well for a boy that these glimpses of beautiful
worship were few and far between. One was saved from the perils of a
mere externalism, and was driven inward on the unseen realities which
ceremonial may sometimes obscure. And then, when one got up to Oxford,
one found all the splendours of the sanctuary in rich abundance, and
enjoyed them with a whole-hearted self-abandonment. I need not repeat
what I have already said about St. Barnabas and Cowley and the other
strongholds of Catholic worship. I am eternally their debtor, and the
friends with whom I shared them have helped to shape my life.

But, in spite of all these enjoyments, religious life at Oxford between
1872 and 1876 was not altogether happy. A strong flood of Romanism burst
upon the University, and carried some of my best friends from my side;
and, concurrently with this disturbance, an American teacher attacked
our faith from the opposite quarter. He taught an absolute di