he Church viewed in their matter, on the teaching of the
Ecumenical Councils, or on the controversies out of which they arose. He
took an eager courageous view of things on the whole. I should say that
his power of entering into the minds of others did not equal his other
gifts; he could not believe, for instance, that I really held the Roman
Church to be Anti-christian. On many points he would not believe but
that I agreed with him, when I did not. He seemed not to understand my
difficulties. His were of a different kind, the contrariety between
theory and fact. He was a high Tory of the Cavalier stamp, and was
disgusted with the Toryism of the opponents of the Reform Bill. He was
smitten with the love of the Theocratic Church; he went abroad and was
shocked by the degeneracy which he thought he saw in the Catholics of
Italy.

It is difficult to enumerate the precise additions to my theological
creed which I derived from a friend to whom I owe so much. He taught me
to look with admiration towards the Church of Rome, and in the same
degree to dislike the Reformation. He fixed deep in me the idea of
devotion to the Blessed Virgin, and he led me gradually to believe in
the Real Presence.

* * * * *

There is one remaining source of my opinions to be mentioned, and that
far from the least important. In proportion as I moved out of the shadow
of that liberalism which had hung over my course, my early devotion
towards the Fathers returned; and in the Long Vacation of 1828 I set
about to read them chronologically, beginning with St. Ignatius and St.
Justin. About 1830 a proposal was made to me by Mr. Hugh Rose, who with
Mr. Lyall (afterwards Dean of Canterbury) was providing writers for a
Theological Library, to furnish them with a History of the Principal
Councils. I accepted it, and at once set to work on the Council of
Nicaea. It was to launch myself on an ocean with currents innumerable;
and I was drifted back first to the ante-Nicene history, and then to the
Church of Alexandria. The work at last appeared under the title of "The
Arians of the Fourth Century;" and of its 422 pages, the first 117
consisted of introductory matter, and the Council of Nicaea did not
appear till the 254th, and then occupied at most twenty pages.

I do not know when I first learnt to consider that Antiquity was the
true exponent of the doctrines of Christianity and the basis of the
Church of England; but I tak