r thing to have that joyous youth to look back
upon, and at least it is a treasury of memory that no thief can steal in
the struggles of later life.

During those happy years my brain was given plenty of exercise. I used to
keep a list of the books I read, so that I might not neglect my work; and
finding a "Library of the Fathers" on the shelves, I selected that for
one _piece de resistance_. Soon those strange mystic writers won over me
a great fascination, and I threw myself ardently into a study of the
question: "Where is now the Catholic Church?". I read Pusey, and Liddon,
and Keble, with many another of that school, and many of the seventeenth
century English divines. I began to fast--to the intense disapproval of
my mother, who cared for my health far more than for all the Fathers the
Church could boast of--to use the sign of the cross, to go to weekly
communion. Indeed, the contrast I found between my early Evangelical
training and the doctrines of the Primitive Christian Church would have
driven me over to Rome, had it not been for the proofs afforded by Pusey
and his co-workers, that the English Church might be Catholic although
non-Roman. But for them I should most certainly have joined the Papal
Communion; for if the Church of the early centuries be compared with Rome
and with Geneva, there is no doubt that Rome shows marks of primitive
Christianity of which Geneva is entirely devoid. I became content when I
found that the practices and doctrines of the Anglican Church could be
knitted on to those of the martyrs and confessors of the early Church,
for it had not yet struck me that the early Church might itself be
challenged. To me, at that time, the authority of Jesus was supreme and
unassailable; his apostles were his infallible messengers; Clement of
Rome, Polycarp, and Barnabas, these were the very pupils of the apostles
themselves. I never dreamed of forgeries, of pious frauds, of writings
falsely ascribed to venerated names. Nor do I now regret that so it was;
for, without belief, the study of the early Fathers would be an
intolerable weariness; and that old reading of mine has served me well in
many of my later controversies with Christians, who knew the literature
of their Church less well than I.

To this ecclesiastical reading was added some study of stray scientific
works, but the number of these that came in my way was very limited. The
atmosphere surrounding me was literary rather than scientific.