English Church to the height of its own standard.  But in the autumn of that year (1839), as he has told us, a change took place.  In the summer of 1839, he had set himself to study the history of the Monophysite controversy.  “I have no reason,” he writes, “to suppose that the thought of Rome came across my mind at all....  It was during this course of reading that for the first time a doubt came across me of the tenableness of Anglicanism.  I had seen the shadow of a hand on the wall.  He who has seen a ghost cannot be as if he had never seen it.  The heavens had opened and closed again.”  To less imaginative and slower minds this seems an overwrought description of a phenomenon, which must present itself sometime or other to all who search the foundations of conviction; and by itself he was for the time proof against its force.  “The thought for the moment had been, The Church of Rome will be found right after all; and then it had vanished.  My old convictions remained as before.”  But another blow came, and then another.  An article by Dr. Wiseman on the Donatists greatly disturbed him.  The words of St. Augustine about the Donatists, securus judicat orbis terrarum, rang continually in his ears, like words out of the sky.  He found the threatenings of the Monophysite controversy renewed in the Arian:  “the ghost had come a second time.”  It was a “most uncomfortable article,” he writes in his letters; “the first real hit from Romanism which has happened to me”; it gave him, as he says, “a stomach-ache.”  But he still held his ground, and returned his answer to the attack in an article in the British Critic, on the “Catholicity of the English Church.”  He did not mean to take the attack for more than it was worth, an able bit of ex parte statement.  But it told on him, as nothing had yet told on him.  What it did, was to “open a vista which was closed before, and of which he could not see the end”; “we are not at the bottom of things,” was the sting it left behind From this time, the hope and exultation with which, in spite of checks and misgivings, he had watched the movement, gave way to uneasiness and distress.  A new struggle was beginning, a long struggle with himself, a long struggle between rival claims which would not be denied, each equally imperious, and involving fatal consequences if by mistake the wrong one was admitted.  And it was not only the effect of these thoughts on his own mind which filled him with grief and trouble.  He always thought much for others; and now there was the misery of perhaps unsettling others—­others who had trusted him with their very souls—­others, to whom it was impossible to explain the conflicts which were passing in his own mind.  It was so bitter to unsettle their hope and confidence.  All through this time, more trying than his own difficulties, were the perplexities and sorrows which he foresaw for those whom he loved.  Very illogical and inconsecutive, doubtless; if only he had had the hard heart of a