Thus from all sides came potent influences of personal friendship--of his friends and associates more onward--to give impulse and _momentum_ to Crashaw's mystical Roman-Catholic sympathies. The 'Ejection' of 1644 found Crashaw in the very heart of these influences, not swayed simply, but mastered by them. To one so secluded and unworldly, a crisis in which the pillars of the throne were shattered, and in which not the many for the one, but the one rather than the many, must be sacrificed, was a dazing bewilderment, and terror, and agony. All was chaos and weltering confusion; no resting-place in England for his dove-feet: dissonance, blasphemy as he weened, came to his shuddering heart: he saw the lifting-up of anchors never before lifted, and the Church drifting, drifting away aimlessly and helplessly (as he misjudged). Moses-like, he looked this way and that way, and saw no man--saw not The Man--and failed, I fear, to look UP, because of his very agony of looking down and in. And so, in his tremor and sorrow and weariness, he passed over to Roman Catholicism as the 'ideal' of his reading, and as the 'home' of the sainted ones whose words were as manna to his spirit. Not a strong, defiant, masterful soul, by any means--frail, timorous, shrinking, rather--he would 'fly away,' even if out to the wilderness, to be 'at rest.' The very 'inner life' of God was in his soft gentle heart, and that he carried with him through after-years, as Cowley bore brave witness by his magnanimous title of 'Saint.' Conscience too--ill-instructed possibly, yet true to its light, if true also to feelings that ought to have been wrestled with, not succumbed to--went with him: and what of God's grace is in a man keeps him, wherever ecclesiastically he may abide.