n 1843. In the following year doubts
and questionings began to stir in his mind. He could not get rid
of them. They were forced upon him by his reading and his
intercourse with men. They grew and tortured him. His teaching in
the pulpit altered, and it became painful to him to preach. He was
reckoned of the Evangelical school, and he began to feel that his
position was becoming a false one. He felt the excellence and
earnestness, and gladly recognised the work of the nobler portion
of that party, but he felt also that he must separate from it. In
his strong reaction from its extreme tendencies, he understood
with a shock which upturned his whole inward life for a time, that
the system on which he had founded his whole faith and work could
never be received by him again. Within its pale, for him, there
was henceforward neither life, peace, nor reality. It was not,
however, till almost the end of his ministry at Cheltenham that
this became clearly manifest to him. It had been growing slowly
into a conviction. An outward blow--the sudden ruin of a
friendship which he had wrought, as he imagined, for ever into his
being--a blow from which he never afterwards wholly
recovered--accelerated the inward crisis, and the result was a
period of spiritual agony so awful that it not only shook his
health to its centre, but smote his spirit down into so profound a
darkness that of all his early faiths but one remained, "It must
be right to do right."

This seems to have been in 1846, and in the beginning of the next year
he had already taken his new line. The explanation does not explain
much. We have no right to ask for more than his friends think fit to
tell us of this turning-point of his life. But we observe that this
deeply important passage is left with but little light and much
manifest reticence. That the crisis took place we have his own touching
and eloquent words to assure us. It left him also as firm in his
altered convictions as he had been in his old ones. What caused it,
what were its circumstances and characteristics, and what affected its
course and results, we can only guess. But it was decisive and it was
speedy. He spent a few months in Germany in the end of 1846, and in the
beginning of 1847 the Bishop of Oxford was willing to appoint him to
St. Ebbe's. But his stay there was short. Three months afterwards he
accepted the