‘But a new era was upon us. The miraculous nineteenth century was coming of age, and all the world was to be remade…. History was reconstructed for us. I had learned, like other Protestant children, that the Pope was Antichrist, and that Gregory VII. HAD BEEN A SPECIAL REVELATION OF THAT BEING. I WAS NOW TAUGHT THAT GREGORY VII. was a Saint. I had been told to honour the Reformers. The Reformation became the Great Schism, Cranmer a traitor, and Latimer a vulgar ranter. Milton was a name of horror, and Charles I. was canonised and spoken of as the holy and blessed Martyr St. Charles. I asked once whether the Church of England was able properly to create a Saint? St. Charles was immediately pointed out to me. Similarly, we were to admire the Nonjurors, to speak of James III. instead of The Pretender; to look for Antichrist, not in the Pope, but in Whigs and revolutionists and all their works. Henry of Exeter,[377] so famous in those days, announced once, in my hearing, that the Court of Rome had regretted the Emancipation Act as a victory of Latitudinarianism. I suppose he believed what he was saying…. * * * * * ‘These were the views which we used to hear in our home-circle, when the Tracts were first beginning. We had been bred, all of us, Tories of the old school. This was Toryism in ecclesiastical costume. My brother was young, gifted, brilliant, and enthusiastic. No man is ever good for much who has not been carried off his feet by enthusiasm, between twenty and thirty; but it needs to be bridled and bitted; and my brother did not live to be taught the difference between fact and speculation. Taught it he would have been, if time had been allowed him. No one ever recognised facts more loyally than he, when once he saw them. This I am sure of, that when the intricacies of the situation pressed upon him, when it became clear to him that if his conception of the Church, and of its rights and position, was true at all, it was not true of the Church of England in which he was born, and that he must renounce his theory as visionary or join another Communion, he would not have “minimised” the Roman doctrines that they might be more easy for him to swallow, or have explained away plain propositions till they meant anything or nothing. Whether he would have swallowed them, or not, I cannot say; I was not eighteen when he died, and I do not so much as form an opinion about it; but his course, whatever it was, would have been direct and straightforward; he was a man far more than a theologian: and if he had gone, he would have gone with his whole heart and conscience, unassisted by subtleties and nice distinctions. It is, however, at least equally possible that he would not have gone at all…. * * * * *