great many
visitors to Oxford from Easter to Commemoration; and Dr. Pusey and
myself had attracted attention, more, I think, than any former year.
I had put away from me the controversy with Rome for more than two
years. In my Parochial Sermons the subject had never been introduced:
there had been nothing for two years, either in my Tracts or in the
_British Critic_, of a polemical character. I was returning, for the
vacation, to the course of reading which I had many years before
chosen as especially my own. I have no reason to suppose that the
thoughts of Rome came across my mind at all. About the middle of June
I began to study and master the history of the Monophysites. I was
absorbed in the doctrinal question. This was from about June 13th to
August 30th. It was during this course of reading that for the first
time a doubt came upon me of the tenableness of Anglicanism. I
recollect on the 30th of July mentioning to a friend, whom I had
accidentally met, how remarkable the history was; but by the end of
August I was seriously alarmed.

I have described in a former work, how the history affected me. My
stronghold was Antiquity; now here, in the middle of the fifth
century, I found, as it seemed to me, Christendom of the sixteenth
and the nineteenth centuries reflected. I saw my face in that mirror,
and I was a Monophysite. The Church of the _Via Media_ was in the
position of the Oriental communion, Rome was, where she now is; and
the Protestants were the Eutychians. Of all passages of history,
since history has been, who would have thought of going to the
sayings and doings of old Eutyches, that _delirus senex_, as (I
think) Petavius calls him, and to the enormities of the unprincipled
Dioscorus, in order to be converted to Rome!

Now let it be simply understood that I am not writing
controversially, but with the one object of relating things as they
happened to me in the course of my conversion. With this view I will
quote a passage from the account, which I gave in 1850, of my
reasonings and feelings in 1839:

"It was difficult to make out how the Eutychians or Monophysites were
heretics, unless Protestants and Anglicans were heretics also;
difficult to find arguments against the Tridentine Fathers, which did
not tell against the Fathers of Chalcedon; difficult to condemn the
Popes of the sixteenth century, without condemning the Popes of the
fifth. The drama of religion, and the combat of truth and error, were