As to myself, I am getting into a very unsettled state as to aims and prospects.  I mean that as things are going on, a man does not know where he is going to; one cannot imagine what state of things to look forward to; in what way, and under what circumstances, one’s coming life—­if it does come—­is to be spent; what is to become of one.  I cannot at all imagine myself a convert; but how am I likely, in the probable state of things, to be able to serve as an English clergyman?  Shall I ever get Priest’s orders?  Shall I be able to continue always serving?  What is one’s line to be; what ought to be one’s aims; or can one have any?

The storm is not yet come:  how it may come, and how soon it may blow over, and what it may leave behind, is doubtful; but some sort of crisis, I think, must come before things settle.  With the Bishops against us, and Puritanism aggressive, we may see strange things before the end.

When the “storm” had at length come, though, before its final violence, the same writer continues: 

The present hopeless check and weight to our party—­what has for the time absolutely crushed us—­is the total loss of confidence arising from the strong tendency, no longer to be dissembled or explained away, among many of us to Rome.  I see no chance of our recovery, or getting our heads above water from this, at least in England, for years to come.  And it is a check which will one day be far greater than it is now.  Under the circumstances—­having not the most distant thought of leaving the English Church myself, and yet having no means of escaping the very natural suspicion of Romanising without giving up my best friends and the most saint-like men in England—­how am I to view my position?  What am I witnessing to?  What, if need be, is one to suffer for?  A man has no leaning towards Rome, does not feel, as others do, the strength of her exclusive claims to allegiance, the perfection of her system, its right so to overbalance all the good found in ours as to make ours absolutely untrustworthy for a Christian to rest in, notwithstanding all circumstances of habit, position, and national character; has such doubts on the Roman theory of the Church, the Ultramontane, and such instincts not only against many of their popular religious customs and practical ways of going on, but against their principles of belief (e.g. divine faith = relics), as to repel him from any wish to sacrifice his own communion for theirs; yet withal, and without any great right on his part to complain, is set down as a man who may any day, and certainly will some day, go over; and he has no lawful means of removing the suspicion:—­why is it tanti to submit to this?

However little sympathy we Englishmen have with Rome, the Western Churches under Rome are really living and holy branches of the Church Catholic; corruptions they may have, so may we; but putting these aside, they are Catholic Christians,