Then indeed will be the stern encounter, when two real and living principles, simple, entire, and consistent, one in the Church, the other out of it, at length rush upon each other, contending not for names and words, a half view, but for elementary notions and distinctive moral characters.  Men will not keep standing in that very attitude which you call sound Church-of-Englandism or orthodox Protestantism.  They will take one view or another, but it will be a consistent one ... it will be real....  Is it sensible, sober, judicious, to be so very angry with the writers of the day who point to the fact, that our divines of the seventeenth century have occupied a ground which is the true and intelligible mean between extremes?...  Would you rather have your sons and your daughters members of the Church of England or of the Church of Rome?[87]

“The last words that I spoke as an Anglican to Anglicans,”—­so he describes this statement of his position and its reasons; so it seems to him, as he looks back.  And yet in the intimate and frank disclosures which he makes, he has shown us much that indicates both that his Anglicanism lasted much longer and that his Roman sympathies began to stir much earlier.  This only shows the enormous difficulties of measuring accurately the steps of a transition state.  The mind, in such a strain of buffeting, is never in one stay.  The old seems impregnable, yet it has been undermined; the new is indignantly and honestly repelled, and yet leaves behind it its never-to-be-forgotten and unaccountable spell.  The story, as he tells it, goes on, how, in the full swing and confidence of his Anglicanism, and in the course of his secure and fearless study of antiquity, appearance after appearance presented itself, unexpected, threatening, obstinate, in the history of the Early Church, by which this confidence was first shaken and then utterly broken down in the summer of 1839.  And he speaks as though all had been over after two years from that summer:  “From the end of 1841 I was on my death-bed, as regards my membership with the Anglican Church, though at the time I became aware of it only by degrees.”  In truth, it was only the end which showed that it was a “death-bed.”  He had not yet died to allegiance or “to hope, then or for some time afterwards.”  He speaks in later years of the result, and reads what was then in the light of what followed.  But after all that had happened, and much, of course, disturbing happened in 1841, he was a long way off from what then could have been spoken of as “a death-bed.”  Deep and painful misgivings may assail the sincerest faith; they are not fatal signs till faith has finally given way.