I was brought up to delight in the Bible, but I had no formed religious convictions till I was fifteen.  Of course, I had a perfect knowledge of my Catechism.  But when I was fifteen I fell under the influence of a definite creed, and believed that the inward conversion of which I was conscious, and of which I am still more certain than that I have hands and feet, would last into the next life, and that I was elected to eternal glory.  This belief faded away at the age of twenty-one; but it had had some influence on my opinions, in isolating me from the objects which surrounded me, in confirming my mistrust of the reality of material phenomena, and in making me rest in the thought of two, and two only, absolute and luminously self-evident beings, myself and my Creator.  At the age of fifteen also I was deeply impressed by the works of Thomas Scott, by Law’s “Serious Call,” by Joseph Milner’s “Church History,” and by Newton, “On the Prophecies.”  Newton’s book stained my imagination, till 1843, with the doctrine that the Pope was Antichrist.  At this same time, the autumn of 1816, I realised that it would be the will of God that I should lead a single life, and this anticipation strengthened my feeling of separation from the visible world.

In 1822, at Oxford, I came under new influences.  Dr. Hawkins, then vicar of St. Mary’s, a man of most exact mind, led me to the doctrine of tradition, and taught me to anticipate that before many years there would be an attack made upon the books and the canon of Scripture.  He gave me Summer’s “Treatise on Apostolic Preaching,” by which I was led to give up my remaining Calvinism, and to receive the doctrine of baptismal regeneration.  I now read Butler’s “Analogy,” from which I learned two principles which underlie much of my teaching:  first, that the idea of an analogy between the separate works of God leads to the conclusion that the less important system is sacramentally connected with the more momentous system; and secondly, Butler’s doctrine that probability is the guide of life led me to the question of the logical cogency of faith.

I owe much to Dr. Whately, who taught me the existence of the Church as a substantive corporation, and fixed in me those anti-Erastian views of Church polity which characterized the Tractarian movement.  That movement, unknown to ourselves, was taking form.  Its true author, John Keble, had left Oxford for a country parish, but his “Christian Year” had waked a new music in the hearts of thousands.  His creative mind repeated, in a new form, Butler’s two principles:  that material phenomena are the types and instruments of real things unseen; and that, in religious certitude, faith and love give to probability a force which it has not in itself.

Hurrell Froude, one of his pupils and a man of high genius, taught me to venerate the Church of Rome and to dislike the Reformation.  About 1830 I set to work on “The Arians of the Fourth Century,” and the broad philosophy of Clement and Origen, based on the mystical or sacramental principle, came like music to my inward ear.