What was my surprise when I found that most of these excellent and really learned men were much more deeply interested in purely ecclesiastical questions, in the validity of Anglican orders, in the wearing of either gowns or surplices in the pulpit, in the question of candlesticks and genuflections. “What has all this to do with true religion?” I once said to dear Johnson. He laughed with his genial laugh, and blowing the smoke of his cigar away, said, “Oh, you don’t understand!” But I did understand, and a great deal more than he expected. Truly religious men, I thought, might please themselves with incense and candlesticks, provided they gave no offence to their neighbours. It seemed to me quite natural also that men like Johnson, with a taste for art, should prefer the Roman ritual to the simple and sometimes rather bare service of the Anglican Church, but that things such as incense and censers, surplice and gown, should be taken as they are, as paraphernalia, the work of human beings, the outcome of personal and local influences, as church-service, no doubt, but not as service of God. God has to be served by very different things, and there is the danger of the formal prevailing over the essential, the danger of idolatry of symbols as realities, whenever too much importance is attributed to the external forms of worship and divine service. The validity of Anglican orders was often discussed at the Observatory, and I no doubt gave great offence by openly declaring in my imperfect English that I considered Luther a better channel for the transmission of the Holy Ghost than a Caesar Borgia or even a Wolsey. Anyhow I could not bring myself to see the importance of such questions, if only the heart was right and if the whole of our life was in fact a real and constant life with God and in God. That is what I called a truly religious and truly Christian life. What struck me particularly, both on the Newman side, and among those whom I met at Jowett’s and Froude’s, was a curious want of openness and manliness in discussing these simple questions, simple, if not complicated by ecclesiastical theories. When Newman at Iffley was spoken of, it was in hushed tones, and when rumours of his going over to Rome reached his friends at Oxford, their consternation seemed to be like that of people watching the deathbed of a friend. I am sorry I saw nothing of Newman at that time; when I sat with him afterwards in his study at Birmingham, he was evidently tired of controversy, and unwilling to reopen questions which to him were settled once for all, or if not settled, at all events closed and relinquished. I could never form a clear idea of the man, much as I admired his sermons; his brother and his own friends gave such different accounts of him. That even at Littlemore he was still faithful to his own national Church, anxious only to bring it nearer to its ancient possibly Roman type, can hardly be doubted.