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, which is in the same boat with him, holds the same principle of the unity and continuity of revealed truth, and is doing the same work, though, as he came to think in the end, feebly and hopelessly.  The other, more and more, carried him away from Anglicanism; and the contrast and opposition between it and the ancient Church, in organisation, in usage, and in that general tone of feeling which quickens and gives significance and expression to forms, overpowered more and more the sense of affinity, derived from the identity of creeds and sacraments and leading points of Church polity, and from the success with which the best and greatest Anglican writers had appropriated and assimilated the theology of the Fathers.  But though he urges the force of ecclesiastical precedents in a startling way, as in the account which he gives of the effect of the history of the Monophysites on his view of the tenableness of the Anglican theory, absolutely putting out of consideration the enormous difference of circumstances between the cases which are compared, and giving the instance in question a force and importance which seem to be in singular contrast with the general breadth and largeness of his reasoning, it was not the halting of an ecclesiastical theory which dissatisfied him with the English Church.