subtle and most redoubtable shapes, the
intellectual movement of modern times, could continue to feel the force
of both, and how he would attempt to harmonise them. Two things are
prominent in the whole history. One is the fact of religion, early and
deeply implanted in the writer's mind, absorbing and governing it
without rival throughout. He speaks of an "inward conversion" at the
age of fifteen, "of which I was conscious, and of which I am still more
certain than that I have hands and feet." It was the religion of dogma
and of a definite creed which made him "rest in the thought of two, and
two only, supreme and luminously self-evident beings, myself and my
Creator"--which completed itself with the idea of a visible Church and
its sacramental system. Religion, in this aspect of it, runs unchanged
from end to end of the scene of change:--

I have changed in many things; in this I have not. From the age of
fifteen dogma has been the fundamental principle of my religion; I
know no other religion. I cannot enter into the idea of any other
sort of religion; religion, as a mere sentiment, is to me a dream
and a mockery. As well can there be filial love without the fact
of a father, as devotion without the fact of a Supreme Being. What
I held in 1816 I held in 1833, and I hold in 1864. Please God I
shall hold it to the end. Even when I was under Dr. Whately's
influence I had no temptation to be less zealous for the dogmas of
the faith.

The other thing is the haunting necessity, in an age of thought and
innovation, of a philosophy of religion, equally deep, equally
comprehensive and thorough, with the invading powers which it was
wanted to counteract; a philosophy, not on paper or in theory, but
answering to and vouched for by the facts of real life. In the English
Church he found, we think that we may venture to say, the religion
which to him was life, but not the philosophy which he wanted. The
_Apologia_ is the narrative of his search for it. Two strongly marked
lines of thought are traceable all through, one modern in its scope and
sphere, the other ancient. The leading subject of his modern thought is
the contest with liberal unbelief; contrasted with this was his strong
interest in Christian antiquity, his deep attachment to the creed, the
history, and the moral temper of the early Church. The one line of
thought made him, and even now makes him, sympathise with Anglicanism,
w