The final result of all this was long in coming; there was, we know, a bitter agony of five years, a prolonged and obstinate and cruel struggle between the deepest affections and ever-growing convictions.  But this struggle, as has been said, did not begin with the conviction in which it ended.  It began and long continued with the belief that though England was wrong, Rome was not right; that though the Roman argument seemed more and more unanswerable, there were insuperable difficulties of certain fact which made the Roman conclusion incredible; that there was so much good and truth in England, with all its defects and faults, which was unaccountable and unintelligible on the Roman hypothesis; that the real upshot was that the whole state of things in Christendom was abnormal; that to English Churchmen the English Church had immediate and direct claims which nothing but the most irresistible counter-claims could overcome or neutralise—­the claims of a shipwrecked body cut off from country and home, yet as a shipwrecked body still organised, and with much saved from the wreck, and not to be deserted, as long as it held together, in an uncertain attempt to rejoin its lost unity.  Resignation, retirement, silence, lay communion, the hope of ultimate, though perhaps long-deferred reunion—­these were his first thoughts.  Misgivings could not be helped, would not be denied, but need not be paraded, were to be kept at arm’s-length as long as possible.  This is the picture presented in the autobiography of these painful and dreary years; and there is every evidence that it is a faithful one.  It is conceivable, though not very probable, that such a course might go on indefinitely.  It is conceivable that under different circumstances he might, like other perplexed and doubting seekers after truth, have worked round through doubt and perplexity to his first conviction.  But the actual result, as it came, was natural enough; and it was accelerated by provocation, by opponents without, and by the pressure of advanced and impatient followers and disciples in the party itself.

2.  This last was the second of the two influences spoken of above.  It worked from below, as the first worked from above.

Discussions and agitations, such as accompanied the movement, however much under the control of the moral and intellectual ascendancy of the leaders, could not of course be guaranteed from escaping from that control.  And as the time went on, men joined the movement who had but qualified sympathy with that passionate love and zeal for the actual English Church, that acquaintance with its historical theology, and that temper of discipline, sobriety, and self-distrust, which marked its first representatives.  These younger disciples shared in the growing excitement of the society round them.  They were attracted by visible height of character, and brilliant intellectual power.  They were alive to vast and original prospects, opening a new world which should be a contrast to