St. Paul, and St. John. My imagination
was stained by the effects of this doctrine up to the year 1843; it had
been obliterated from my reason and judgment at an earlier date; but the
thought remained upon me as a sort of false conscience. Hence came that
conflict of mind, which so many have felt besides myself;--leading some
men to make a compromise between two ideas, so inconsistent with each
other,--driving others to beat out the one idea or the other from their
minds,--and ending in my own case, after many years of intellectual
unrest, in the gradual decay and extinction of one of them,--I do not
say in its violent death, for why should I not have murdered it sooner,
if I murdered it at all?

I am obliged to mention, though I do it with great reluctance, another
deep imagination, which at this time, the autumn of 1816, took
possession of me,--there can be no mistake about the fact; viz. that it
would be the will of God that I should lead a single life. This
anticipation, which has held its ground almost continuously ever
since,--with the break of a month now and a month then, up to 1829, and,
after that date, without any break at all,--was more or less connected
in my mind with the notion, that my calling in life would require such a
sacrifice as celibacy involved; as, for instance, missionary work among
the heathen, to which I had a great drawing for some years. It also
strengthened my feeling of separation from the visible world, of which I
have spoken above.

In 1822 I came under very different influences from those to which I had
hitherto been subjected. At that time, Mr. Whately, as he was then,
afterwards Archbishop of Dublin, for the few months he remained in
Oxford, which he was leaving for good, showed great kindness to me. He
renewed it in 1825, when he became Principal of Alban Hall, making me
his Vice-Principal and Tutor. Of Dr. Whately I will speak presently: for
from 1822 to 1825 I saw most of the present Provost of Oriel, Dr.
Hawkins, at that time Vicar of St. Mary's; and, when I took orders in
1824 and had a curacy in Oxford, then, during the Long Vacations, I was
especially thrown into his company. I can say with a full heart that I
love him, and have never ceased to love him; and I thus preface what
otherwise might sound rude, that in the course of the many years in
which we were together afterwards, he provoked me very much from time to
time, though I am perfectly certain that I have provoked hi