But in almost all
cases there was a great surrender of what English life has to offer to
those brought up in it. Of the defeated party, those who remained had
much to think about, between grief at the breaking of old ties, and the
loss of dear friends, and perplexities about their own position. The
anxiety, the sorrow at differing and parting, seem now almost
extravagant and unintelligible. There are those who sneer at the
"distress" of that time. There had not been the same suffering, the same
estrangement, when Churchmen turned dissenters, like Bulteel and Baptist
Noel. But the movement had raised the whole scale of feeling about
religious matters so high, the questions were felt to be so momentous,
the stake and the issue so precious, the "Loss and Gain" so immense,
that to differ on such subjects was the differing on the greatest things
which men could differ about. But in a time of distress, of which few
analogous situations in our days can give the measure, the leaders stood
firm. Dr. Pusey, Mr. Keble, Mr. Marriott accepted, with unshaken faith
in the cause of the English Church, the terrible separation. They
submitted to the blow--submitted to the reproach of having been
associates of those who had betrayed hopes and done so much mischief;
submitted to the charge of inconsistency, insincerity, cowardice; but
they did not flinch. Their unshrinking attitude was a new point of
departure for those who believed in the Catholic foundation of the
English Church.

Among those deeply affected by these changes, there were many who had
been absolutely uninfluenced by the strong Roman current. They had
recognised many good things in the Roman Church; they were fully alive
to many shortcomings in the English Church; but the possibility of
submission to the Roman claims had never been a question with them. A
typical example of such minds was Mr. Isaac Williams, a pupil of Mr.
Keble, an intimate friend of Mr. Newman, a man of simple and saintly
life, with heart and soul steeped in the ancient theology of undivided
Christendom, and for that very reason untempted by the newer principles
and fashions of Rome. There were numbers who thought like him; but there
were others also, who were forced in afresh upon themselves, and who had
to ask themselves why they stayed, when a teacher, to whom they had
looked up as they had to Mr. Newman, and into whose confidence they had
been admitted, thought it his duty to go. With some the ultimat