Moreover, Protestant orthodoxy did not have any firm hold on some fundamental parts and evident implications of the faith I already held, and was struggling to keep. The idea of the Church itself was weak in most Protestant mind; they "spiritualized" it, as they said; but when Jesus spoke of confessing him _before men_, he evidently laid the foundations of a visible Church. Again, Jesus felt that he spoke with Divine authority, and as he was commissioned, so he commissioned others to stand for him before the world, and to speak in his name. He left them to be his witnesses, to continue his message and his work after he should be gone. He had the power to forgive sins, for example, and he conveyed it to others, solemnly saying that whatever was bound or loosed on earth, should be bound or loosed in heaven. Was it exactly natural, I asked myself, that divine light and guidance and forgiveness should be thus present, as it were, on earth for a few years, and then become entirely a matter of history and antiquarian research? If there was reason for Jesus' commissioning the apostles, was there not equal reason for the apostles commissioning others who should take their places? Protestants said the revelation was in a book; but Jesus never spoke of a book. If something else was authoritative in the apostolic days, what absurdity was there in supposing that something else might be authoritative in later days? And yet, no Protestant church or synod or council ever claimed to be such a living witness of God on the earth. The most zealous Protestants were careful to say that they gave only their human, fallible interpretations of the distant revelation; that it was even blasphemous for a man to claim to forgive sins; that the Bible, and the Bible only, was their religion. And yet, the Bible, it was severally claimed, gave the basis to the Presbyterian creed, to the Methodist creed, to, one might say, a hundred creeds, even including the slender one of Unitarians. How certain words of Newman came home to me in the midst of such reflections! "There is an overpowering antecedent improbability in Almighty God's announcing that He has revealed something, and then revealing nothing; there is no antecedent improbability in His revealing it elsewhere than in an inspired volume." I do not mean to say that I was converted by Newman; but I was open to light on that side. I did not shut my mind, as most Protestants seemed to, and I dimly felt, I had a sort of foreboding that, if what I already held was true, reason might be on his side. And it was reason--the demand for a set of views that should be harmonious and consistent--that made me dissatisfied; and so I could give credit to the idea that Newman in his changes, and in his final act, was influenced by reason.