how shall he be silent?  How shall he let doubts and difficulties appear, yet how shall he suppress them?—­doubts which may grow and become hopeless, but which, on the other hand, may be solved and disappear.  How shall he go on as if nothing had happened, when all the foundations of the world seem to have sunk from under him?  Yet how shall he disclose the dreadful secret, when he is not yet quite sure whether his mind will not still rally from its terror and despair?  He must in honesty, in kindness, give some warning, yet how much? and how to prevent it being taken for more than it means?  There are counter-considerations, to which he cannot shut his eyes.  There are friends who will not believe his warnings.  There are watchful enemies who are on the look-out for proofs of disingenuousness and bad faith.  He could cut through his difficulties at once by making the plunge in obedience to this or that plausible sign or train of reasoning, but his conscience and good faith will not let him take things so easily; and yet he knows that if he hangs on, he will be accused by and by, perhaps speciously, of having been dishonest and deceiving.  So subtle, so shifting, so impalpable are the steps by which a faith is disintegrated; so evanescent, and impossible to follow, the shades by which one set of convictions pass into others wholly opposite; for it is not knowledge and intellect alone which come into play, but all the moral tastes and habits of the character, its likings and dislikings, its weakness and its strength, its triumphs and its vexations, its keenness and its insensibilities, which are in full action, while the intellect alone seems to be busy with its problems.  A picture has been given us, belonging to this time, of the process, by a great master of human nature, and a great sufferer under the process; it is, perhaps, the greatest attempt ever made to describe it; but it is not wholly successful.  It tells us much, for it is written with touching good faith, but the complete effect as an intelligible whole is wanting.

“In the spring of 1839,” we read in the Apologia, “my position in the Anglican Church was at its height.  I had a supreme confidence in my controversial status, and I had a great and still growing success in recommending it to others."[84] This, then, may be taken as the point from which, in the writer’s own estimate, the change is to be traced.  He refers for illustration of his state of mind to the remarkable article on the “State of Religious Parties,” in the April number of the British Critic for 1839, which he has since republished under the title of “Prospects of the Anglican Church."[85] “I have looked over it now,” he writes in 1864, “for the first time since it was published; and have been struck by it for this reason:  it contains the last words which I ever spoke as an Anglican to Anglicans....  It may now be read as my parting address and valediction, made to my friends.  I little knew it at the time.”  He thus describes the position which he took in the article referred to:—­