To take leave of Mr. Newman (he writes on the morrow of the event) is a heavy task.  His step was not unforeseen; but when it is come those who knew him feel the fact as a real change within them—­feel as if they were entering upon a fresh stage of their own life.  May that very change turn to their profit, and discipline them by its hardness!  It may do so if they will use it so.  Let nobody complain; a time must come, sooner or later, in every one’s life, when he has to part with advantages, connexions, supports, consolations, that he has had hitherto, and face a new state of things.  Every one knows that he is not always to have all that he has now:  he says to himself, “What shall I do when this or that stay, or connexion, is gone?” and the answer is, “That he will do without it.” ...  The time comes when this is taken away; and then the mind is left alone, and is thrown back upon itself, as the expression is.  But no religious mind tolerates the notion of being really thrown upon itself; this is only to say in other words, that it is thrown back upon God....  Secret mental consolations, whether of innocent self-flattery or reposing confidence, are over; a more real and graver life begins—­a firmer, harder disinterestedness, able to go on its course by itself.  Let them see in the change a call to greater earnestness, sincerer simplicity, and more solid manliness.  What were weaknesses before will be sins now.[125]

“A new stage has begun.  Let no one complain":—­this, the expression of individual feeling, represents pretty accurately the temper into which the Church party settled when the first shock was over.  They knew that henceforward they had difficult times before them.  They knew that they must work under suspicion, even under proscription.  They knew that they must expect to see men among themselves perplexed, unsettled, swept away by the influences which had affected Mr. Newman, and still more by the precedent of his example.  They knew that they must be prepared to lose friends and fellow-helpers, and to lose them sometimes unexpectedly and suddenly, as the wont was so often at this time.  Above all, they knew that they had a new form of antagonism to reckon with, harder than any they had yet encountered.  It had the peculiar sad bitterness which belongs to civil war, when men’s foes are they of their own households—­the bitterness arising out of interrupted intimacy and affection.  Neither side could be held blameless; the charge from the one of betrayal and desertion was answered by the charge from the other of insincerity and faithlessness to conscience, and by natural but not always very fair attempts to proselytise; and undoubtedly, the English Church, and those who adhered to it, had, for some years after 1845, to hear from the lips of old friends the most cruel and merciless invectives which knowledge of her weak points, wit, argumentative power, eloquence, and the triumphant exultation at once of deliverance and superiority