At the same time he formed close and eager relations with the heads of the religious party in Oxford. His mother’s Evangelical training of him, and Mr. Grey’s influence, together, perhaps, with certain drifts of temperament, prevented him from becoming a High Churchman. The sacramental, ceremonial view of the Church never took hold upon him. But to the English Church as a great national institution for the promotion of God’s work on earth no one could have been more deeply loyal, and none coming close to him could mistake the fervor and passion of his Christian feeling. At the same time he did not know what rancor or bitterness meant, so that men of all shades of Christian belief reckoned a friend in him, and he went through life surrounded by an unusual, perhaps a dangerous, amount of liking and affection. He threw himself ardently into the charitable work of Oxford, now helping a High Church vicar, and now toiling with Gray and one or two other Liberal fellows, at the maintenance of a coffee-palace and lecture-room just started by them in one of the suburbs; while in the second year of his lectureship the success of some first attempts at preaching fixed the attention of the religious leaders upon him as upon a man certain to make his mark. So the three years passed--not, perhaps, of great intellectual advance, for other forces in him than those of the intellect were mainly to the fore, but years certainly of continuous growth in character and moral experience. And at the end of them Mowbray Elsmere made his offer, and it was accepted. The secret of it, of course, was overwork. Mrs. Elsmere, from the little house in Morton Street where she had established herself, had watched her boy’s meteoric career through those crowded months with very frequent misgivings. No one knew better than she that Robert was constitutionally not of the toughest fibre, and she realized long before he did that the Oxford life as he was bent on leading it must end for him in premature breakdown. But, as always happens, neither her remonstrance, nor Mr. Grey’s common sense, nor Langham’s fidgety protests had any effect on the young enthusiast to whom self-slaughter came so easy. During the latter half of his third year of teaching he was continually being sent away by the doctors, and coming back only to break down again. At last, in the January of his fourth year, the collapse became so decided, that he consented, bribed by the prospect of the Holy Land, to go away for three months to Egypt and the East, accompanied by his mother and a college friend.