g me." His touching verses, beginning
"Lead, kindly Light," betray the same feeling. Gloom did encircle him,
but in the midst of it there was a light, which he strove and craved
to follow. Though mystical, in a certain sense, by temperament, he
resolved, he tells us, to be guided, not by his imagination, but by
his reason. He had once a strange emotional experience, but when it
was over he wished that it should not unduly influence him. "I had to
determine its logical value," he says, "and its bearing on my duty."
"What are we doing all through life, both as a necessity and as a
duty," he wrote many years afterwards, "but unlearning the world's
poetry and attaining to its prose? This is our education as boys and
as men, in the action of life and in the closet or library; in our
affections, in our aims, in our hopes, and in our memories. And in
like manner it is the education of our intellect." This is little more
than saying that the supreme rule of life is reason, that it is our
life-task to bring all the varied motions of our minds into harmony
with this ideal. The fact is that he became ultimately persuaded that
the Catholic creed was that rational and consistent creed of which he
was in search--rational and consistent that is, in the sense of being
in harmony with, and an outgrowth of, those fundamental ideas of a God
and of a revelation with which he started; and in addressing others
after he became a Catholic, he said, "Be convinced in your reason that
the Catholic Church is a teacher sent to you from God, and it is
enough. I do not wish you to join her till you are."

Yet while he was in search of the truth, while he was on the journey,
he excited no little suspicion and distrust. The very thing that lends
him charm to those who love to see intellectual movement and
development allowed apostles of prejudice and good, but narrow-minded,
men to think of him as insidious, leading his disciples on to
conclusions to which he designed to bring them, while his purpose was
veiled. But, says Froude, who tells us this, and was himself at Oxford
in those early days, he was on the contrary "the most transparent of
men. He told us what he believed to be true. He did not know where it
would carry him. No one who has ever risen to any great height in the
world refuses to move till he knows whither he is going." Such are the
words of one who, though he felt the spell of Newman, soon struck on
a different intellectual path. Matth