has its moral.  But the moral is not the ordinary vulgar one of the history of a religious change.  It is not the supplement or disguise of a polemical argument.  It is the deep want and necessity in our age of the Church, even to the most intensely religious and devoted minds, of a sound and secure intellectual basis for the faith which they value more than life and all things.  We hope that we are strong enough to afford to judge fairly of such a spectacle, and to lay to heart its warnings, even though the particular results seem to go against what we think most right.  It is a mortification and a trial to the English Church to have seen her finest mind carried away and lost to her, but it is a mortification which more confident and peremptory systems than hers have had to undergo; the parting was not without its compensations if only that it brought home so keenly to many the awfulness and the seriousness of truth; and surely never did any man break so utterly with a Church, who left so many sympathies behind him and took so many with him, who continued to feel so kindly and with such large-hearted justice to those from whom his changed position separated him in this world for ever.

The Apologia is the history of a great battle against Liberalism, understanding by Liberalism the tendencies of modern thought to destroy the basis of revealed religion, and ultimately of all that can be called religion at all.  The question which he professedly addresses himself to set at rest, that of his honesty, is comparatively of slight concern to those who knew him, except so far that they must be interested that others, who did not know him, should not be led to do a revolting injustice.  The real interest is to see how one who felt so keenly the claims both of what is new and what is old, who, with such deep and unusual love and trust for antiquity, took in with quick sympathy, and in its most 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:—­