secondly, a continually recurring temptation
to entire scepticism as to everything external to himself. Every page
gives illustrations of the first of these. He votes for what was called
Catholic Emancipation, and is drifting into the ranks of liberalism. But
the external idea of liberty is very soon metamorphosed, in his view,
from the figure of an angel of light into that of a spirit of darkness;
first, by his academical feeling that a great University ought not to be
bullied even by a great Duke, and then by the altered temper of his own
feelings, as they are played upon by the alternate vibrations of the
gibes of "Hurrell Froude," and the deep tones of Mr. Keble's
ministrelsy.

The history of his religious alternations is in exact keeping with all
this. At every separate stage of his course, he constructs for himself a
tabernacle in which for a while he rests. This process he repeats with
an incessant simplicity of renewed commencements, which is almost like
the blind acting of instinct leading the insect, which is conscious of
its coming change, to spin afresh and afresh its ever-broken cocoon. He
is at one time an Anglo-Catholic, and sees Antichrist in Rome; he falls
back upon the Via Media--that breaks down, and left him, he says (p.
211), "very nearly a pure Protestant"; and again he has a "new theory
made expressly for the occasion, and is pleased with his new view" (p.
269); he then rests in "Samaria" before he finds his way over to Rome.
For the time every one of these transient tabernacles seems to
accomplish its purpose. He finds certain repose for his spirit. Whilst
sheltered by it, all the great unutterable phenomena of the external
world are viewed by him in relation to himself and to his home of
present rest. The gourd has grown up in a night, and shelters him by its
short-lived shadow from the tyrannous rays of the sunshine. But some
sudden irresistible change in his own inward preceptions alters
everything. The idea shoots across his mind that the English Church is
in the position of the Monophysite heretics of the fifth century (p.
209). At once all his views of truth are changed. He moves on to a new
position; pitches anew his tent; builds himself up a new theory; and
finds the altitudes of the stars above him, and the very forms of the
heavenly constellations, change with the change of his earthly
habitation.

* * * * *

In October the final step is taken, and in t