but a deep effect on my mind.

I am not aware of any other religious opinion which I owe to Dr.
Whately. In his special theological tenets I had no sympathy. In the
next year, 1827, he told me he considered that I was Arianizing. The
case was this: though at that time I had not read Bishop Bull's
_Defensio_ nor the Fathers, I was just then very strong for that
ante-Nicene view of the Trinitarian doctrine, which some writers, both
Catholic and non-Catholic, have accused of wearing a sort of Arian
exterior. This is the meaning of a passage in Froude's Remains, in which
he seems to accuse me of speaking against the Athanasian Creed. I had
contrasted the two aspects of the Trinitarian doctrine, which are
respectively presented by the Athanasian Creed and the Nicene. My
criticisms were to the effect that some of the verses of the former
Creed were unnecessarily scientific. This is a specimen of a certain
disdain for Antiquity which had been growing on me now for several
years. It showed itself in some flippant language against the Fathers in
the Encyclopaedia Metropolitana, about whom I knew little at the time,
except what I had learnt as a boy from Joseph Milner. In writing on the
Scripture Miracles in 1825-6, I had read Middleton on the Miracles of
the early Church, and had imbibed a portion of his spirit.

The truth is, I was beginning to prefer intellectual excellence to
moral; I was drifting in the direction of the Liberalism of the day[3].
I was rudely awakened from my dream at the end of 1827 by two great
blows--illness and bereavement.

[3] Vide Note A, _Liberalism_, at the end of the volume.

In the beginning of 1829, came the formal break between Dr. Whately and
me; the affair of Mr. Peel's re-election was the occasion of it. I think
in 1828 or 1827 I had voted in the minority, when the Petition to
Parliament against the Catholic Claims was brought into Convocation. I
did so mainly on the views suggested to me in the Letters of an
Episcopalian. Also I shrank from the bigoted "two-bottle-orthodox," as
they were invidiously called. When then I took part against Mr. Peel, it
was on an academical, not at all an ecclesiastical or a political
ground; and this I professed at the time. I considered that Mr. Peel had
taken the University by surprise; that his friends had no right to call
upon us to turn round on a sudden, and to expose ourselves to the
imputation of time-serving; and that a great University ought not to