Mr. Ward was well known in Oxford, and his language might have warned the Heads that if there was a drift towards Rome, it came from something much more serious than a hankering after a sentimental ritual or mediaeval legends.  In Mr. Ward’s writings in the British Critic, as in his conversation—­and he wrote much and at great length—­three ideas were manifestly at the bottom of his attraction to Rome.  One was that Rome did, and, he believed, nothing else did, keep up the continuous recognition of the supernatural element in religion, that consciousness of an ever-present power not of this world which is so prominent a feature in the New Testament, and which is spoken of there as a permanent and characteristic element in the Gospel dispensation.  The Roman view of the nature and offices of the Church, of man’s relations to the unseen world, of devotion, of the Eucharist and of the Sacraments in general, assumed and put forward this supernatural aspect; other systems ignored it or made it mean nothing, unless in secret to the individual and converted soul.  In the next place he revolted—­no weaker word can be used—­from the popular exhibition in England, more or less Lutheran and Calvinistic, of the doctrine of justification.  The ostentatious separation of justification from morality, with all its theological refinements and fictions, seemed to him profoundly unscriptural, profoundly unreal and hollow, or else profoundly immoral.  In conscience and moral honesty and strict obedience he saw the only safe and trustworthy guidance in regard to the choice and formation of religious opinions; it was a principle on which all his philosophy was built, that “careful and individual moral discipline is the only possible basis on which Christian faith and practice can be reared.”  In the third place he was greatly affected, not merely by the paramount place of sanctity in the Roman theology and the professed Roman system, but by the standard of saintliness which he found there, involving complete and heroic self-sacrifice for great religious ends, complete abandonment of the world, painful and continuous self-discipline, purified and exalted religious affections, beside which English piety and goodness at its best, in such examples as George Herbert and Ken and Bishop Wilson, seemed unambitious and pale and tame, of a different order from the Roman, and less closely resembling what we read of in the first ages and in the New Testament.  Whether such views were right or wrong, exaggerated or unbalanced, accurate or superficial, they were matters fit to interest grave men; but there is no reason to think that they made the slightest impression on the authorities of the University.