It
may do so if they will use it so. Let nobody complain; a time must
come, sooner or later, in every one's life, when he has to part with
advantages, connexions, supports, consolations, that he has had
hitherto, and face a new state of things. Every one knows that he is
not always to have all that he has now: he says to himself, "What
shall I do when this or that stay, or connexion, is gone?" and the
answer is, "That he will do without it." ... The time comes when this
is taken away; and then the mind is left alone, and is thrown back
upon itself, as the expression is. But no religious mind tolerates the
notion of being really thrown upon itself; this is only to say in
other words, that it is thrown back upon God.... Secret mental
consolations, whether of innocent self-flattery or reposing
confidence, are over; a more real and graver life begins--a firmer,
harder disinterestedness, able to go on its course by itself. Let them
see in the change a call to greater earnestness, sincerer simplicity,
and more solid manliness. What were weaknesses before will be sins
now.[125]

"A new stage has begun. Let no one complain":--this, the expression of
individual feeling, represents pretty accurately the temper into which
the Church party settled when the first shock was over. They knew that
henceforward they had difficult times before them. They knew that they
must work under suspicion, even under proscription. They knew that they
must expect to see men among themselves perplexed, unsettled, swept
away by the influences which had affected Mr. Newman, and still more by
the precedent of his example. They knew that they must be prepared to
lose friends and fellow-helpers, and to lose them sometimes unexpectedly
and suddenly, as the wont was so often at this time. Above all, they
knew that they had a new form of antagonism to reckon with, harder than
any they had yet encountered. It had the peculiar sad bitterness which
belongs to civil war, when men's foes are they of their own
households--the bitterness arising out of interrupted intimacy and
affection. Neither side could be held blameless; the charge from the one
of betrayal and desertion was answered by the charge from the other of
insincerity and faithlessness to conscience, and by natural but not
always very fair attempts to proselytise; and undoubtedly, the English
Church, and those who adhered to it, had, for some years after 1845, to
hear