left it, or because of his reasons for leaving it.  In truth, he appears never to have occupied a thoroughly real Church-of-England position.  He was at first, by education and private judgment, a Calvinistic Puritan; he became dissatisfied with the coldness and barrenness of this theory, and set about finding a new position for himself, and in so doing he skipped over true, sound English Churchmanship into a course of feeling and thought allied with and leading on to Rome.  Even the hindrances which so long held him back can scarcely be said to have been indeed the logical force of the unanswerable credentials of the English Church.  On the contrary they were rather personal impressions, feelings, and difficulties.  His faithful, loving nature made him cling desperately to early hopes, friendships, and affections.  Even to the end Thomas Scott never loses his hold upon him.  His narrative is not the history of the normal progress of a mind from England to Rome; it is so thoroughly exceptional that it does not seem calculated to seduce to Rome men governed in such high matters by argument and reason rather than by impulse and feeling.  We do not therefore think that the mere fact of this secession tells with any force against that communion whose claims satisfied to their dying day such men as Hooker and Andrewes, and Ussher and Hammond, and Bramhall and Butler.

But, beyond this, his present view of the English Church appears to be incompatible with that fierce and internecine hostility to the claim upon the loyalty of her children which is really essential to clear the act of perverting others from her ranks from the plainest guilt of schism.  It is not merely that the nobleness and tenderness of his nature make his tone so unlike that of many of those who have taken the same step with himself.  It is not that every provocation—­and how many they have been!—­every misunderstanding—­and they have been all but universal; every unworthy charge or insinuation—­down to those of Professor Kingsley, failed to embitter his feelings against the communion he has deserted and the friends whom he has left.  It is not this to which we refer, for this is personal to himself, and the fruit of his own generosity and true greatness of soul.  But we refer to his calm, deliberate estimate of the forsaken Church.  He says, indeed, that since his change he has “had no changes to record, no anxiety of heart whatever.  I have been in perfect peace and contentment.  I never had one doubt” (p. 373).  But, as we have seen already, this was always the temporary condition in which every new phase of opinion landed him.  He was always able to build up these tabernacles of rest.  The difference between this and those former resting-places is clear.  In those he was still a searcher after truth:  he needed and required conviction, and a new conviction might shake the old comfort.  But his present resting-place is built upon the denial of all further enquiry.  “I have,” he says (p. 374), “no further history of religious opinions to narrate”:  and some following words show how entirely it is this abandonment of the idea of the actual conviction of truth for the blind admission of the dictates of a despotic external authority on which he rests.