I suppose I should never have felt toward Cardinal John Henry Newman as I do, had I not been once in a certain state of mind. It was my lot, as a divinity student, to feel under the necessity of examining into the grounds of my religious belief. I could not accept what my teachers gave me, simply because it was taught, much as I revered some of them. I had to test, examine, and conclude for myself. I evidently felt the difficulties of belief, as most of my fellow-students did not. At New Haven the main outlines of evangelical orthodoxy, at Cambridge the fundamental ideas of theism, were accepted, as a rule, without serious question. I envied my fellows their assurance; I, too, craved assurance, but I had to get it in my own way, and I was plunged into investigations, and beset by doubts that did not seem to occupy or perplex them. The question was, where could I find a point to start from; not what was the whole truth, but what was the truth I could be immediately sure of,--what was light that I could not question (or, at least, reasonably question)? For, once in possession of that, other things might naturally and logically follow. It seemed to me, that if there was any sure ground for the Christian believer, it was to be found in Christ himself; that if ever a voice from another world had spoken to this, it had been through him. The fundamental problem was, Was his consciousness to be trusted? It was after three years of examination into the origin and trustworthiness of the gospel records, of effort to form a faithful picture of Jesus' mind, of weighing of probabilities as to whether he could have been mistaken, and a decision that he could not have been, and that he was, under God, my appointed Lord, and Saviour, and Judge, as he was that of all men,--it was at this time that I fell in with the writings of Newman, and that he began to exercise a charm over me, which, amid all my subsequent changes of thought, I have never been willing to disown.