e, few could
understand me, many were annoyed with me, some were angry, because I was
breaking up a compact party, and some, as a matter of conscience, could
not listen to me. When I looked round for those whom I might consult in
my difficulties, I found the very hypothesis of those difficulties
acting as a bar to their giving me their advice. Then I said, bitterly,
"You are throwing me on others, whether I will or no." Yet still I had
good and true friends around me of the old sort, in and out of Oxford
too, who were a great help to me. But on the other hand, though I
neither was so fond (with a few exceptions) of the persons, nor of the
methods of thought, which belonged to this new school, as of the old
set, though I could not trust in their firmness of purpose, for, like a
swarm of flies, they might come and go, and at length be divided and
dissipated, yet I had an intense sympathy in their object and in the
direction in which their path lay, in spite of my old friends, in spite
of my old life-long prejudices. In spite of my ingrained fears of Rome,
and the decision of my reason and conscience against her usages, in
spite of my affection for Oxford and Oriel, yet I had a secret longing
love of Rome the Mother of English Christianity, and I had a true
devotion to the Blessed Virgin, in whose College I lived, whose Altar I
served, and whose Immaculate Purity I had in one of my earliest printed
Sermons made much of. And it was the consciousness of this bias in
myself, if it is so to be called, which made me preach so earnestly
against the danger of being swayed in religious inquiry by our sympathy
rather than by our reason. And moreover, the members of this new school
looked up to me, as I have said, and did me true kindnesses, and really
loved me, and stood by me in trouble, when others went away, and for all
this I was grateful; nay, many of them were in trouble themselves, and
in the same boat with me, and that was a further cause of sympathy
between us; and hence it was, when the new school came on in force, and
into collision with the old, I had not the heart, any more than the
power, to repel them; I was in great perplexity, and hardly knew where I
stood; I took their part; and, when I wanted to be in peace and silence,
I had to speak out, and I incurred the charge of weakness from some men,
and of mysteriousness, shuffling, and underhand dealing from the
majority.

* * * * *

Now