understand, than
he had done of a body of men as able, as well-instructed, as
deep-thinking, as brave, as earnest as himself in their war against sin
and worldliness. The stupidity, the perverse ill-nature, the resolute
ignorance, the audacious and fanatical application of Scripture
condemnations, the reckless judging without a desire to do justice,
which he felt and complained of so bitterly when turned against
himself, he had sanctioned and largely shared in when the same party
which attacked him in the end attacked the earlier revivers of
thoughtful and earnest religion. Nor do we find that he ever expressed
regret for a vehemence of condemnation which his after-knowledge must
have shown him that he had no business to pass, because, even if he
afterwards adhered to it, he had originally passed it on utterly false
and inadequate grounds. He only became as fierce against the
Evangelicals as he had been against the followers of Mr. Newman. He
never unlearnt the habit of harsh reprobation which his Evangelical
friends had encouraged. He only transferred its full force against
themselves.

He left Oxford and began his ministry, first at Winchester, and then at
Cheltenham, full of Evangelical _formulae_ and Evangelical narrow zeal.
It does not appear that, except as an earnest hard-working clergyman,
he was in any way distinguished from numbers of the same class, though
we are quite willing to believe that even then his preaching, in warmth
and vigour, was above the average. But as he, or his biographer, says,
he had not yet really begun to think. When he began to think, he did so
with the rapidity, the intensity, the impatient fervid vehemence which
lay all along at the bottom of his character. His Evangelical views
appear to have snapped to pieces and dissolved with a violence and
sudden abruptness entirely unaccounted for by anything which these
volumes show us. He read Carlyle; but so did many other people. He
found the religious world at Cheltenham not so pure as he had imagined
it; but this is what must have happened anywhere, and is not enough to
account for such a complete revolution of belief. He had a friend
deeply read in German philosophy and criticism who is said to have
exercised influence on him. Still, we repeat, the steps and processes
of the change from the Evangelicalism of Cheltenham to a condition, at
first, of almost absolute doubt, are very imperfectly explained:--

These letters were written i