ition nor criticism.
His authority was reinforced by advantages of aspect and station; by a
stately manner, by a noble and commanding eloquence. But all these gifts
were as nothing when compared with the power of his lifelong
consistency. When he was a boy at Harrow, a brutal scene at a pauper's
funeral awoke his devotion to the cause of the poor and helpless.
Seventy years later, when he lay on his deathbed, his only regret was
that he must leave the world with so much misery in it. From first to
last, he was an Evangelical of the highest and purest type, displaying
all the religious and social virtues of that school in their perfection.
Yet he left it on record that he had been more harshly treated by the
Evangelical party than by any other. Perhaps the explanation is that
those excellent people were only kicking against the pricks of a
too-absolute control.

Such were the religious associations of my early life; and I am deeply
thankful for them. I have found, by much experiment, that there is no
foundation on which the superstructure of Catholic religion can be more
securely built than on the Evangelical confession of man's utter
sinfulness, and of the free pardon purchased by the Blood of Christ. A
man trained in that confession may, without sacrificing a jot of his
earlier creed, learn to accept all that the Catholic Church teaches
about Orders and Sacraments; but to the end he will retain some
characteristic marks of his spiritual beginnings. For my own part, I
hold with Mr. Gladstone that to label oneself with an ecclesiastical
nickname would be to compromise "the first of earthly blessings--one's
mental freedom[64]"; but if anyone chose to call me a "Catholic
Evangelical," I should not quarrel with the designation.

I said in an earlier chapter that I had an inborn fondness for Catholic
ceremonial, and this, I suppose, was part of my general love of material
beauty. Amid such surroundings as I have described, it was a fondness
not easily indulged. When I was twelve years old, I was staying at
Leamington in August, and on a Holy Day I peeped into the Roman Church
there, and saw for the first time the ceremonies of High Mass; and from
that day on I longed to see them reproduced in the Church of England.
During one of our periodical visits to London, I discovered the
beautiful church in Gordon Square where the "Adherents of a Restored
Apostolate" celebrate Divine Worship with bewildering splendour. The
propinqui