flashing wit, always seemed to
us the history of those days when a well-meant but impertinent series of
religious intrusions was well-nigh driving the wise man mad.

We have followed out these steps thus in detail, not only because of
their intense interest as an autobiography, but also because the
narrative itself seems to throw the strongest possible light on the
mainly-important question how far this defection of one of her greatest
sons does really tend to weaken the argumentative position of the
English Church in her strife with Rome. What has been said already will
suffice to prove that in our opinion no such consequence can justly
follow from it. We acknowledge freely the greatness of the individual
loss. But the causes of that defection are, we think, clearly shown to
have been the peculiarities of the individual, not the weakness of the
side which he abandoned. His steps mark no path to any other. He sprang
clear over the guarding walls of the sheepfold, and opened no way
through them for other wanderers. Men may have left the Church of
England because their leader left it; but they could not leave it as he
left it, or because of his reasons for leaving it. In truth, he appears
never to have occupied a thoroughly real Church-of-England position. He
was at first, by education and private judgment, a Calvinistic Puritan;
he became dissatisfied with the coldness and barrenness of this theory,
and set about finding a new position for himself, and in so doing he
skipped over true, sound English Churchmanship into a course of feeling
and thought allied with and leading on to Rome. Even the hindrances
which so long held him back can scarcely be said to have been indeed the
logical force of the unanswerable credentials of the English Church. On
the contrary they were rather personal impressions, feelings, and
difficulties. His faithful, loving nature made him cling desperately to
early hopes, friendships, and affections. Even to the end Thomas Scott
never loses his hold upon him. His narrative is not the history of the
normal progress of a mind from England to Rome; it is so thoroughly
exceptional that it does not seem calculated to seduce to Rome men
governed in such high matters by argument and reason rather than by
impulse and feeling. We do not therefore think that the mere fact of
this secession tells with any force against that communion whose claims
satisfied to their dying day such men as Hooker and Andrewes, a