all. He who has seen a ghost cannot be as if he
had never seen it. The heavens had opened and closed again." To less
imaginative and slower minds this seems an overwrought description of a
phenomenon, which must present itself sometime or other to all who
search the foundations of conviction; and by itself he was for the time
proof against its force. "The thought for the moment had been, The
Church of Rome will be found right after all; and then it had vanished.
My old convictions remained as before." But another blow came, and then
another. An article by Dr. Wiseman on the Donatists greatly disturbed
him. The words of St. Augustine about the Donatists, _securus judicat
orbis terrarum_, rang continually in his ears, like words out of the
sky. He found the threatenings of the Monophysite controversy renewed in
the _Arian_: "the ghost had come a second time." It was a "most
uncomfortable article," he writes in his letters; "the first real hit
from Romanism which has happened to me"; it gave him, as he says, "a
stomach-ache." But he still held his ground, and returned his answer to
the attack in an article in the _British Critic_, on the "Catholicity of
the English Church." He did not mean to take the attack for more than it
was worth, an able bit of _ex parte_ statement. But it told on him, as
nothing had yet told on him. What it did, was to "open a vista which was
closed before, and of which he could not see the end"; "we are not at
the bottom of things," was the sting it left behind From this time, the
hope and exultation with which, in spite of checks and misgivings, he
had watched the movement, gave way to uneasiness and distress. A new
struggle was beginning, a long struggle with himself, a long struggle
between rival claims which would not be denied, each equally imperious,
and involving fatal consequences if by mistake the wrong one was
admitted. And it was not only the effect of these thoughts on his own
mind which filled him with grief and trouble. He always thought much for
others; and now there was the misery of perhaps unsettling
others--others who had trusted him with their very souls--others, to
whom it was impossible to explain the conflicts which were passing in
his own mind. It was so bitter to unsettle their hope and confidence.
All through this time, more trying than his own difficulties, were the
perplexities and sorrows which he foresaw for those whom he loved. Very
illogical and inconsecutive, doubtles