m as the history of the Church. He was
liable at this time to the periods of spiritual exaltation--matched, as
we shall see later on, by fits of intense despondency--which marked him
through life."

This remarkable intellectual activity brought with it doubts of
religious truth. "The imaginative delight in Rome as a living witness to
the faith entirely left him, and at the same time he was attacked by
mental disturbances and doubts of the truth of Christianity. There are
contemporary indications, and still plainer accounts in the letters of
his later life, of acute suffering from these trials. The study of
Biblical criticism, even in the early stages it had then reached, seems
immediately to have occasioned them; and the suffering they caused him
was aggravated into intense and almost alarming depression by the
feebleness of his bodily health." He says, speaking of this phase in his
life, "Many and many an hour have I passed, alone, in bitter tears, on
the _loggia_ of the English College, when every one was reposing in the
afternoon, and I was fighting with subtle thoughts and venomous
suggestions of a fiendlike infidelity which I durst not confide to any
one, for there was no one that could have sympathized with me. This
lasted for years; but it made me study and think, to conquer the
plague--for I can hardly call it danger--both for myself and for others.
But during the actual struggle the simple submission of faith is the
only remedy. Thoughts against faith must be treated at the time like
temptations against any other virtue--put away; though in cooler moments
they may be safely analyzed and unraveled." Again he wrote of these
years as, "Years of solitude, of desolation, years of shattered nerves,
dread often of instant insanity, consumptive weakness, of sleepless
nights and weary days, and hours of tears which no one witnessed."

"Of the effect of these years of desolation on his character he speaks
as being simply invaluable. It completed what Ushaw had begun, the
training in patience, self-reliance, and concentration in spite of
mental depression. It was amid these trials, he adds, 'that I wrote my
"Horae Syriacae" and collected my notes for the lectures on the
"Connection between Science and Revealed Religion" and the "Eucharist."
Without this training I should not have thrown myself into the Puseyite
controversy at a later period.' Any usefulness which discovered itself
in later years he considers the 'result