Anglicanism was not daring enough for him.  With his ideas of the coming dangers and conflicts, he wanted something bold and thoroughgoing, wide-reaching in its aims, resolute in its language, claiming and venturing much.  Anglicanism was not that.  It had given up as impracticable much that the Church had once attempted.  It did not pretend to rise so high, to answer such great questions, to lay down such precise definitions.  Wisely modest, or timidly uncertain—­mindful of the unalterable limits of our human condition, we say; forgetful, he thought, or doubting, or distrustful, of the gifts and promises of a supernatural dispensation—­it certainly gave no such complete and decisive account of the condition and difficulties of religion and the world, as had been done once, and as there were some who did still.  There were problems which it did not profess to solve; there were assertions which others boldly risked, and which it shrunk from making; there were demands which it ventured not to put forward.  Again, it was not refined enough for him; it had little taste for the higher forms of the saintly ideal; it wanted the austere and high-strung-virtues; it was contented, for the most part, with the domestic type of excellence, in which goodness merged itself in the interests and business of the common world, and, working in them, took no care to disengage itself or mark itself off, as something distinct from them and above them.  Above all, Anglicanism was too limited; it was local, insular, national; its theory was made for its special circumstances; and he describes in a remarkable passage how, in contrast with this, there rung in his ears continually the proud self-assertion of the other side, Securus judicat orbis terrarum.  What he wanted, what it was the aim of his life to find, was a great and effective engine against Liberalism; for years he tried, with eager but failing hope, to find it in the theology and working of the English Church; when he made up his mind that Anglicanism was not strong enough for the task, he left it for a system which had one strong power; which claimed to be able to shut up dangerous thought.

Very sorrowful, indeed, is the history, told so openly, so simply, so touchingly, of the once promising advance, of the great breakdown.  And yet, to those who still cling to what he left, regret is not the only feeling.  For he has the nobleness and the generosity to say what he did find in the English Church, as well as what he did not find.  He has given her up for good, but he tells and he shows, with no grudging frankness, what are the fruits of her discipline.  “So I went on for years, up to 1841.  It was, in a human point of view, the happiest time of my life....  I did not suppose that such sunshine would last, though I knew not what would be its termination.  It was the time of plenty, and during its seven years I tried to lay up as much as I could for the dearth which was to follow it.”  He explains and