"I was at this time living at Althorp, my father's principal residence in the country, serving as a curate to the parish to which it was attached, though the park itself is extra-parochial. Among the visitors who resorted there, was one of the most distinguished scholars of the day, to whom, as to many more of the Anglican Church, I owe a debt of gratitude for the interest which he took in me, and to the help I actually received from him in the course of inquiry, which has happily terminated in the haven of the true Church. I should like to make a grateful and honourable mention of his name, but as this has been found fault with, I forbear. I was one day explaining to him with earnestness the line of argument which I was pursuing with dissenters, and my hopes from it; I suppose I expected encouragement, such as I had received from many others. But he simply and candidly said, 'These would be {115} very convenient doctrines, if we could make use of them, but they are available only for Roman Catholics; they will not serve us.' I saw in a moment the truth of his remark, and his character and position gave it additional weight. I did not answer him; but as a soldier who has received what he feels to be a mortal wound, will suddenly stand still, and then quietly retire out of the _mêlée_, and seek a quiet spot to die in, so I went away with my High Churchism mortally wounded in the very prime of its vigour and youth, to die for ever to the character of an Anglican High Churchman. Why did not this open my eyes, you will say, to the truth of Catholicity? I answer, simply because my early prejudices were too strong. The unanswerable remark of my friend was like a _reductio ad absurdum_ of all High Church ideas. If they were true, the Catholic would be so: _which is absurd_, as I remember Euclid would say. 'Therefore,' &c. The grand support of the High Church system, church authority, having been thus overthrown, it was an easy though gradual work to get out of my mind all its minor details and accompaniments, one after another; such as regard for holy places, for holy days, for consecrated persons, for ecclesiastical writers; finally, almost all definite dogmatic notions. It would seem that all was slipping away, when, coming to the conviction of the truth of Catholicity some years after, it was with extraordinary delight I found myself picking up again the shattered dispersed pieces of the beautiful fabric, and placing them now in better order on the right foundation, solid and firm, no longer exposed to such a catastrophe as had upset my card-castle of Anglican churchmanship. This little passage in my ancient religious history is so sweetly interesting to me in the remembrance, that I have looked into an old diary which I used to keep at the time, to make out the dates, and I find by this that the duration of my High Church ideas was shorter than I should have