German theology was talked about as a kind of forbidden fruit, as if it was not right for them to look at it, to taste it, or to examine it. Even years later people were afraid to meet Professor Ewald, Bishop Colenso, and other so-called heretics at my house. They even fell on poor Ewald at an evening party. Ewald was staying with me and working hard at some Hebrew MSS. at the Bodleian. He was then already an old man, but in his appearance a powerful and venerable champion. He is the only man I remember who, after copying Hebrew MSS. for twelve hours at the Bodleian with nothing but a sandwich to sustain him, complained of the short time allowed there for work. He came home for dinner very tired, and when the conversation or rather the disputation began between him and some of our young liberal theologians, he spoke in short pithy sentences only. He considered himself perfectly orthodox, nay, one of the pillars of religion in Germany, and laid down the law with unhesitating conviction. As far as I can remember, he was answering a number of questions about St. Paul, and what he thought of Christ, of the Kingdom of Christ, and the Life to come, and being pestered and driven into a corner by his various questioners, and asked at last how he knew St. Paul’s secret thoughts, he not knowing how to express himself in fluent English, exclaimed in a loud voice, “I know it by the Holy Ghost.” Here the conversation naturally stopped, and poor Ewald was allowed to finish his dinner in peace. He had been Professor at Bonn, when Pusey came there as a young man to study Hebrew after he had been appointed Canon of Christ Church and Professor of Hebrew, and he expressed to me a wish to see Dr. Pusey. I told him it would not be easy to arrange a meeting, considering how strongly opposed Dr. Pusey was to Ewald’s opinions. Personally I always found Pusey tolerant, and his kindness to me was a surprise to all my young friends. But the fact was, we moved on different planes, and though he knew my religious opinions well, they only excited a smile, and he often said with a sigh, “I know you are a German.” His own idea was that he was placed at Oxford in order to save the younger generation from seeing the abyss into which he himself had looked with terror. He had read more heresy, he used to say, than anybody, and he wished no one to pass through the trials and agonies through which he had passed, chiefly, I should think, during his stay at a German university. The historical element was wanting in him, nay, like Hegel, he sometimes seemed to lay stress on the unhistorical character of Christianity. My idea, on the contrary, was that Christianity was a true historical event, prepared by many events that had gone before and alone made it possible and real. Even the abyss, if there were such an abyss, was, as it seemed to me, meant to be there on our passage through life, and was to be faced with a brave heart.