oint
to the fact, that our divines of the seventeenth century have occupied
a ground which is the true and intelligible mean between extremes?...
Would you rather have your sons and your daughters members of the
Church of England or of the Church of Rome?[87]

"The last words that I spoke as an Anglican to Anglicans,"--so he
describes this statement of his position and its reasons; so it seems to
him, as he looks back. And yet in the intimate and frank disclosures
which he makes, he has shown us much that indicates both that his
Anglicanism lasted much longer and that his Roman sympathies began to
stir much earlier. This only shows the enormous difficulties of
measuring accurately the steps of a transition state. The mind, in such
a strain of buffeting, is never in one stay. The old seems impregnable,
yet it has been undermined; the new is indignantly and honestly
repelled, and yet leaves behind it its never-to-be-forgotten and
unaccountable spell. The story, as he tells it, goes on, how, in the
full swing and confidence of his Anglicanism, and in the course of his
secure and fearless study of antiquity, appearance after appearance
presented itself, unexpected, threatening, obstinate, in the history of
the Early Church, by which this confidence was first shaken and then
utterly broken down in the summer of 1839. And he speaks as though all
had been over after two years from that summer: "From the end of 1841 I
was on my death-bed, as regards my membership with the Anglican Church,
though at the time I became aware of it only by degrees." In truth, it
was only the end which showed that it was a "death-bed." He had not yet
died to allegiance or "to hope, then or for some time afterwards." He
speaks in later years of the result, and reads what was then in the
light of what followed. But after all that had happened, and much, of
course, disturbing happened in 1841, he was a long way off from what
then could have been spoken of as "a death-bed." Deep and painful
misgivings may assail the sincerest faith; they are not fatal signs till
faith has finally given way.

What is true is, that the whole state of religion, and the whole aspect
of Christianity in the world, had come to seem to him portentously
strange and anomalous. No theory would take in and suit all the facts,
which the certainties of history and experience presented. Neither in
England, nor in Rome, and much less anywhere else, did the old, to which
all a