n after taking his degree, and shortly after that was
chosen professor of poetry.

And now came the moment of his great danger. After many mental
struggles, and an agony of doubt which may be well surmised, the
great prophet of the Tractarians confessed himself a Roman Catholic.
Mr. Newman left the Church of England and with him carried many a
waverer. He did not carry off Mr. Arabin, but the escape which that
gentleman had was a very narrow one. He left Oxford for awhile that
he might meditate in complete peace on the step which appeared to him
to be all but unavoidable, and shut himself up in a little village on
the sea-shore of one of our remotest counties, that he might learn
by communing with his own soul whether or no he could with a safe
conscience remain within the pale of his mother church.

Things would have gone badly with him there had he been left entirely
to himself. Everything was against him: all his worldly interests
required him to remain a Protestant, and he looked on his worldly
interests as a legion of foes, to get the better of whom was a point
of extremest honour. In his then state of ecstatic agony such a
conquest would have cost him little; he could easily have thrown away
all his livelihood; but it cost him much to get over the idea that by
choosing the Church of England he should be open in his own mind to
the charge that he had been led to such a choice by unworthy motives.
Then his heart was against him: he loved with a strong and eager love
the man who had hitherto been his guide, and yearned to follow his
footsteps. His tastes were against him: the ceremonies and pomps of
the Church of Rome, their august feasts and solemn fasts, invited
his imagination and pleased his eye. His flesh was against him:
how great an aid would it be to a poor, weak, wavering man to be
constrained to high moral duties, self-denial, obedience, and
chastity by laws which were certain in their enactments, and not to
be broken without loud, palpable, unmistakable sin! Then his faith
was against him: he required to believe so much; panted so eagerly to
give signs of his belief; deemed it so insufficient to wash himself
simply in the waters of Jordan; that some great deed, such as that
of forsaking everything for a true Church, had for him allurements
almost past withstanding.

Mr. Arabin was at this time a very young man, and when he left Oxford
for his far retreat was much too confident in his powers of fence,
a