ken with the Evangelicals, to whom he had been
supposed to belong, and Whately's influence over him was waning, and
with Froude he looked up to Keble as the pattern of religious wisdom. He
had accepted the position of a Churchman as it was understood by Keble
and Froude; and thus there was nothing to hinder Williams's full
sympathy with him. But from the first there seems to have been an almost
impalpable bar between them, which is the more remarkable because
Williams appears to have seen with equanimity Froude's apparently more
violent and dangerous outbreaks of paradox and antipathy. Possibly,
after the catastrophe, he may, in looking back, have exaggerated his
early alarms. But from the first he says he saw in Newman what he had
learned to look upon as the gravest of dangers--the preponderance of
intellect among the elements of character and as the guide of life. "I
was greatly delighted and charmed with Newman, who was extremely kind to
me, but did not altogether trust his opinions; and though Froude was in
the habit of stating things in an extreme and paradoxical manner, yet
one always felt conscious of a ground of entire confidence and
agreement; but it was not so with Newman, even though one appeared more
in unison with his more moderate views."

But, in spite of all this, Newman offered and Isaac Williams accepted
the curacy of St. Mary's. "Things at Oxford [1830-32] at that time were
very dull." "Froude and I seemed entirely alone, with Newman only
secretly, as it were, beginning to sympathise. I became at once very
much attached to Newman, won by his kindness and delighted by his good
and wonderful qualities; and he proposed that I should be his curate at
St. Mary's.... I can remember a strong feeling of difference I first
felt on acting together with him from what I had been accustomed to:
that he was in the habit of looking for effect, and for what was
sensibly effective, which from the Bisley and Fairford School I had been
long habituated to avoid; but to do one's duty in faith and leave it to
God, and that all the more earnestly, because there were no sympathies
from without to answer. There was a felt but unexpressed difference of
this kind, but perhaps it became afterwards harmonised as we acted
together."[29]

Thus early, among those most closely united, there appeared the
beginnings of those different currents which became so divergent as time
went on. Isaac Williams, dear as he was to Newman, and ret