From this unpromising soil (intellectually, for in character it possessed its giants) was to spring the one great religious novel of the English language. I have thought it worth while to recall thus briefly, yet I fear tediously, the chief aspects of the controversy, because only as the result of a profound and, in many respects, violent national upheaval can the force and the inner veracity of _John Inglesant_ be comprehended. Mrs. Shorthouse fails to dwell on this point; indeed, it would appear from her record that the noise of the dispute reached her husband only from afar off. Yet during the years of composition he was dwelling in a house at Edgbaston within a stone's throw of the Oratory, where, at that time and to the end of his life, Cardinal Newman resided, having found peace at last in the surrender of his doubts to authority. The thought of that venerable man and of the agony through which he had come must have been often in the novelist's mind. And it was during these same ten years of composition that the forces of Low and High were lined up against each other like two hostile armies, under the banners of the English Church Union and the Church Association. The activity of this latter body, which was founded in 1865 for the express purpose of "putting down" the heresy of ritualism, may be gathered from the fact that at a single meeting it voted to raise a fund of some $250,000 for the sake of attacking High Church clergymen through the processes of law. Not without reason was it dubbed the Persecution Company limited.