ut pain, to see that I was gradually
surrendering myself to the influence of others, who had not their own
claims upon me, younger men, and of a cast of mind in no small degree
uncongenial to my own. A new school of thought was rising, as is usual
in doctrinal inquiries, and was sweeping the original party of the
Movement aside, and was taking its place. The most prominent person in
it, was a man of elegant genius, of classical mind, of rare talent in
literary composition:--Mr. Oakeley. He was not far from my own age; I
had long known him, though of late years he had not been in residence at
Oxford; and quite lately, he has been taking several signal occasions of
renewing that kindness, which he ever showed towards me when we were
both in the Anglican Church. His tone of mind was not unlike that which
gave a character to the early Movement; he was almost a typical Oxford
man, and, as far as I recollect, both in political and ecclesiastical
views, would have been of one spirit with the Oriel party of 1826-1833.
But he had entered late into the Movement; he did not know its first
years; and, beginning with a new start, he was naturally thrown together
with that body of eager, acute, resolute minds who had begun their
Catholic life about the same time as he, who knew nothing about the _Via
Media_, but had heard much about Rome. This new party rapidly formed and
increased, in and out of Oxford, and, as it so happened,
contemporaneously with that very summer, when I received so serious a
blow to my ecclesiastical views from the study of the Monophysite
controversy. These men cut into the original Movement at an angle, fell
across its line of thought, and then set about turning that line in its
own direction. They were most of them keenly religious men, with a true
concern for their souls as the first matter of all, with a great zeal
for me, but giving little certainty at the time as to which way they
would ultimately turn. Some in the event have remained firm to
Anglicanism, some have become Catholics, and some have found a refuge in
Liberalism. Nothing was clearer concerning them, than that they needed
to be kept in order; and on me who had had so much to do with the making
of them, that duty was as clearly incumbent; and it is equally clear,
from what I have already said, that I was just the person, above all
others, who could not undertake it. There are no friends like old
friends; but of those old friends, few could help m