But at least the Roman Church had not only preserved, but maintained at full strength through the centuries to our day two things of which the New Testament was full, and which are characteristic of it—­devotion and self-sacrifice.  The crowds at a pilgrimage, a shrine, or a “pardon” were much more like the multitudes who followed our Lord about the hills of Galilee—­like them probably in that imperfect faith which we call superstition—­than anything that could be seen in the English Church, even if the Salvation Army were one of its instruments.  And the spirit which governed the Roman Church had prevailed on men to make the sacrifice of celibacy a matter of course, as a condition of ministering in a regular and systematic way not only to the souls, but to the bodies of men, not only for the Priesthood, but for educational Brotherhoods, and Sisters of the poor and of hospitals.  Devotion and sacrifice, prayer and self-denying charity, in one word sanctity, are at once on the surface of the New Testament and interwoven with all its substance.  He recoiled from a representation of the religion of the New Testament which to his eye was without them.  He turned to where, in spite of every other disadvantage, he thought he found them.  In S. Filippo Neri he could find a link between the New Testament and progressive civilisation.  He could find no S. Filippo—­so modern and yet so Scriptural—­when he sought at home.

His mind, naturally alive to all greatness, had early been impressed with the greatness of the Church of Rome.  But in his early days it was the greatness of Anti-Christ.  Then came the change, and his sense of greatness was satisfied by the commanding and undoubting attitude of the Roman system, by the completeness of its theory, by the sweep of its claims and its rule, by the even march of its vast administration.  It could not and it did not escape him, that the Roman Church, with all the good things which it had, was, as a whole, as unlike the Church of the New Testament and of the first ages as the English.  He recognised it frankly, and built up a great theory to account for the fact, incorporating and modernising great portions of the received Roman explanations of the fact.  But what won his heart and his enthusiasm was one thing; what justified itself to his intellect was another.  And it was the reproduction, partial, as it might be, yet real and characteristic, in the Roman Church of the life and ways of the New Testament, which was the irresistible attraction that tore him from the associations and the affections of half a lifetime.

The final break with the English Church was with much heat and bitterness; and both sides knew too much each of the other to warrant the language used on each side.  The English Church had received too much loyal and invaluable service from him in teaching and example to have insulted him, as many of its chief authorities did, with the charges of dishonesty and bad faith; his persecutors forgot that a little effort on his part might, if he had been what they called him, and had really been a traitor, have formed a large and compact party, whose secession might have caused fatal damage.  And he, too, knew too much of the better side of English religious life to justify the fierce invective and sarcasm with which he assailed for a time the English Church as a mere system of comfortable and self-deceiving worldliness.