These letters were written in 1843.  In the following year doubts and questionings began to stir in his mind.  He could not get rid of them.  They were forced upon him by his reading and his intercourse with men.  They grew and tortured him.  His teaching in the pulpit altered, and it became painful to him to preach.  He was reckoned of the Evangelical school, and he began to feel that his position was becoming a false one.  He felt the excellence and earnestness, and gladly recognised the work of the nobler portion of that party, but he felt also that he must separate from it.  In his strong reaction from its extreme tendencies, he understood with a shock which upturned his whole inward life for a time, that the system on which he had founded his whole faith and work could never be received by him again.  Within its pale, for him, there was henceforward neither life, peace, nor reality.  It was not, however, till almost the end of his ministry at Cheltenham that this became clearly manifest to him.  It had been growing slowly into a conviction.  An outward blow—­the sudden ruin of a friendship which he had wrought, as he imagined, for ever into his being—­a blow from which he never afterwards wholly recovered—­accelerated the inward crisis, and the result was a period of spiritual agony so awful that it not only shook his health to its centre, but smote his spirit down into so profound a darkness that of all his early faiths but one remained, “It must be right to do right.”

This seems to have been in 1846, and in the beginning of the next year he had already taken his new line.  The explanation does not explain much.  We have no right to ask for more than his friends think fit to tell us of this turning-point of his life.  But we observe that this deeply important passage is left with but little light and much manifest reticence.  That the crisis took place we have his own touching and eloquent words to assure us.  It left him also as firm in his altered convictions as he had been in his old ones.  What caused it, what were its circumstances and characteristics, and what affected its course and results, we can only guess.  But it was decisive and it was speedy.  He spent a few months in Germany in the end of 1846, and in the beginning of 1847 the Bishop of Oxford was willing to appoint him to St. Ebbe’s.  But his stay there was short.  Three months afterwards he accepted the chapel at Brighton which he held till his death in August 1853.

He was now the Robertson whom all the world knows, and the change was a most remarkable one.  It seems strictly accurate to say that he started at once into a new man—­new in all his views and tastes; new in the singular burst of power which at once shows itself in the keen, free, natural language of his letters and his other writings; new in the deep concentrated earnestness of character with which he seemed to grasp his peculiar calling and function.  All the conventionalities of his old school, which