nd consecrate; how men, commonly and very naturally,
look back on what they have left and think they have escaped from, with
the aversion of a captive to his prison; how they usually exaggerate
and make absolute their divergence from what they think has betrayed,
fooled, and degraded them; how easily they are tempted to visit on it
and on those who still cling to it their own mistakes and faults. Let
it be remembered that there was here to be told not only the history of
a change, but the history of a deep disappointment, of the failure of a
great design, of the breakdown of hopes the most promising and the most
absorbing; and this, not in the silence of a man's study, but in the
fever and contention of a great struggle wrought up to the highest
pitch of passion and fierceness, bringing with it on all sides and
leaving behind it, when over, the deep sense of wrong. It is no history
of a mere intellectual movement, or of a passage from strong belief to
a weakened and impaired one, to uncertainty, or vagueness, or
indifference; it is not the account of a change by a man who is half
sorry for his change, and speaks less hostilely of what he has left
because he feels less friendly towards what he has joined. There is no
reserved thought to be discerned in the background of disappointment or
a wish to go back again to where he once was. It is a book which
describes how a man, zealous and impatient for truth, thought he had
found it in one Church, then thought that his finding was a delusion,
and sought for it and believed he had gained it in another. What it
shows us is no serene readjustment of abstract doctrines, but the wreck
and overturning of trust and conviction and the practical grounds of
life, accompanied with everything to provoke, embitter, and exasperate.
It need not be said that what Dr. Newman holds he is ready to carry out
to the end, or that he can speak severely of men and systems.

Let all this be remembered, and also that there is an opposition
between what he was and what he is, which is usually viewed as
irreconcilable, and which, on the ordinary assumptions about it, is so;
and we venture to say that there is not another instance to be quoted,
of the history of a conversion, in which he who tells his conversion
has so retained his self-possession, his temper, his mastery over his
own real judgment and thoughts, his ancient and legitimate sympathies,
his superiority to the natural and inevitable temptatio