power until Dr. Pusey joined us.  His great learning, his immense diligence, his simple devotion to the cause of religion, no less than his great influence in the university, at once gave us a position and a name.  He taught us that there ought to be more sense of responsibility in the tracts and in the whole movement.  Under his influence I wrote a work defining our relation to the Church of Rome, namely, “The Prophetical Office of the Church viewed relatively to Romanism and to Popular Protestantism.”  The subject of this volume, published in 1837, is the “Via Media.”  This was followed by my “Essay on Justification,” and other works; and so I went on for years up to 1841.  It was, in a human point of view, the happiest time of my life.  We prospered and spread.

But the movement was to come into collision with the nation, and with the Church of the nation.  In 1838 my bishop made some light animadversions on the tracts.  But my tract on the Thirty-nine Articles, designed to show that the Articles do not oppose Catholic teaching, and but partially oppose Roman dogma, while they do oppose the dominant errors of Rome, brought down, in 1839, a storm of indignation throughout the country.  I saw that my place in the movement was lost.

III.—­A THEOLOGICAL DEATH-BED

In the long vacation of 1839 I began to study the history of the Monophysites, and was-absorbed in the doctrinal question.  It was during this course of reading that for the first time a doubt came upon me of the tenableness of Anglicism, and by the end of August I was seriously alarmed.  My stronghold was antiquity; yet here, in the fifth century, I found Christendom of the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries reflected.

The drama of religion and the combat of truth and error were ever one and the same; the principles of the Roman Church now were those of the Church then; the principles of heretics then were those of Protestants now; there was an awful similitude.  Be my soul with the saints!  In the same month the words of St. Augustine were pointed out to me, "Securus judicat orbis terrarum"; they struck me with a power which I had never felt from any words before; the theory of the “Via Media” was absolutely pulverised.

In the summer of 1841, in retirement at Littlemore, I received three blows which broke me.  First, in the history of the Arians I found the same phenomena which I had found in the Monophysites:  the pure Arians were the Protestants, the semi-Arians were the Anglicans, and Rome now was what it was then.  Secondly, the bishops, one after another, began to charge against me in a formal, determinate movement.  Third, it was proposed by Anglican authorities to establish an Anglican bishopric in Jerusalem—­a step which amounted to a formal denial that the Anglican Church was a branch of the Catholic Church, and to a formal assertion that the Anglican was a Protestant Church.  The Jerusalem bishopric brought me to the beginning of the end.