evident that the commoner type of Churchmen regarded him as an
antagonist all the more dangerous because he was to sympathetic. But the
negative and critical side of him was what in reality told least upon
his pupils. He was reserved, he talked with difficulty, and his respect
for the immaturity of the young lives near him was complete. So that
what he sowed others often reaped, or to quote the expression of a
well-known rationalist about him: 'The Tories were always carrying off
his honey to their hive.' Elsmere, for instance, took in all that Grey
had to give, drank in all the ideal fervor, the spiritual enthusiasm of
the great tutor, and then, as Grey himself would have done some twenty
years earlier, carried his religious passion so stimulated into the
service of the great positive tradition around him.

And at that particular moment in Oxford history, the passage from
philosophic idealism to glad acquiescence in the received Christian
system, was a peculiarly easy one. It was the most natural thing in
the world that a young man of Elsmere's temperament should rally to the
Church. The place was passing through one of those periodical crises of
reaction against an overdriven rationalism, which show themselves with
tolerable regularity in any great centre of intellectual activity.
It had begun to be recognized with a great burst of enthusiasm and
astonishment, that, after all, Mill and Herbert Spencer had not said
the last word on all things in heaven and earth. And now there was
exaggerated recoil. A fresh wave of religious romanticism was fast
gathering strength; the spirit of Newman had reappeared in the place
which Newman had loved and left; religion was becoming once more
popular among the most trivial souls, and a deep reality among a large
proportion of the nobler ones.

With this movement of opinion Robert had very soon found himself in
close and sympathetic contact. The meagre impression left upon his
boyhood by the somewhat grotesque succession of the Harden curates, and
by his mother's shifts of wit at their expense, was soon driven out of
him by the stateliness and comely beauty of the Church order as it was
revealed to him at Oxford. The religious air, the solemn beauty of
the place itself, its innumerable associations with an organized and
venerable faith, the great public functions and expressions of that
faith, possessed the boy's imagination more and more. As he sat in the
undergraduates' gallery at