friends of the Stanley party, I did not feel
called upon to preach what, as I thought, every serious student knew
quite as well and probably much better than myself, though he might
for some reason or other prefer to keep silence thereon.

What was my surprise when I found that most of these excellent and
really learned men were much more deeply interested in purely
ecclesiastical questions, in the validity of Anglican orders, in the
wearing of either gowns or surplices in the pulpit, in the question of
candlesticks and genuflections. "What has all this to do with true
religion?" I once said to dear Johnson. He laughed with his genial
laugh, and blowing the smoke of his cigar away, said, "Oh, you don't
understand!" But I did understand, and a great deal more than he
expected. Truly religious men, I thought, might please themselves with
incense and candlesticks, provided they gave no offence to their
neighbours. It seemed to me quite natural also that men like Johnson,
with a taste for art, should prefer the Roman ritual to the simple and
sometimes rather bare service of the Anglican Church, but that things
such as incense and censers, surplice and gown, should be taken as
they are, as paraphernalia, the work of human beings, the outcome of
personal and local influences, as church-service, no doubt, but not as
service of God. God has to be served by very different things, and
there is the danger of the formal prevailing over the essential, the
danger of idolatry of symbols as realities, whenever too much
importance is attributed to the external forms of worship and divine
service.

The validity of Anglican orders was often discussed at the
Observatory, and I no doubt gave great offence by openly declaring in
my imperfect English that I considered Luther a better channel for
the transmission of the Holy Ghost than a Caesar Borgia or even a
Wolsey. Anyhow I could not bring myself to see the importance of such
questions, if only the heart was right and if the whole of our life
was in fact a real and constant life with God and in God. That is what
I called a truly religious and truly Christian life. What struck me
particularly, both on the Newman side, and among those whom I met at
Jowett's and Froude's, was a curious want of openness and manliness in
discussing these simple questions, simple, if not complicated by
ecclesiastical theories. When Newman at Iffley was spoken of, it was
in hushed tones, and when rumours of hi