Very sorrowful, indeed, is the history, told so openly, so simply, so touchingly, of the once promising advance, of the great breakdown. And yet, to those who still cling to what he left, regret is not the only feeling. For he has the nobleness and the generosity to say what he _did_ find in the English Church, as well as what he did not find. He has given her up for good, but he tells and he shows, with no grudging frankness, what are the fruits of her discipline. "So I went on for years, up to 1841. It was, in a human point of view, the happiest time of my life.... I did not suppose that such sunshine would last, though I knew not what would be its termination. It was the time of plenty, and during its seven years I tried to lay up as much as I could for the dearth which was to follow it." He explains and defends what to us seem the fatal marks against Rome; but he lets us see with what force, and for how long, they kept alive his own resistance to an attraction which to him was so overwhelming. And he is at no pains to conceal--it seems even to console him to show--what a pang and wrench it cost him to break from that home under whose shadow his spiritual growth had increased. He has condemned us unreservedly; but there must, at any rate, be some wonderful power and charm about that which he loved with a love which is not yet extinguished; else how could he write of the past as he does? He has shown that he can understand, though he is unable to approve, that others should feel that power still.