Aquinas, and to make his "night prayers forty instead of thirty minutes." He determined during Lent "to use no pleasant bread (except on Sundays and feasts) such as cake and sweetmeat;" but he added the proviso "I do not include plain biscuits." Opposite this entry appears the word "kept". And yet his backslidings were many. Looking back over a single week, he was obliged to register "petulance twice" and "complacent visions." He heard his curate being commended for bringing so many souls to God during Lent, and he "could not bear it"; but the remorse was terrible: "I abhorred myself on the spot, and looked upward for help." He made out list upon list of the Almighty's special mercies towards him, and they included his creation, his regeneration, and (No. 5) "the preservation of my life six times to my knowledge—
(1) In illness at the age of nine.
(2) In the water.
(3) By a runaway horse at Oxford.
(4) By the same.
(5) By falling nearly through the ceiling of a church.
(6) Again by a fall of a horse. And I know not how often in shooting, riding, etc."
At last he became convalescent; but the spiritual experiences of those agitated weeks left an indelible mark upon his mind, and prepared the way for the great change which was to follow.
For he had other doubts besides those which held him in torment as to his own salvation; he was in doubt about the whole framework of his faith. Newman's conversion, he founds had meant something more to him than he had at first realised. It had seemed to come as a call to the redoubling of his Anglican activities; but supposing, in reality, it were a call towards something very different—towards an abandonment of those activities altogether? It might be a "trial," or again it might be a "leading"; how was he to judge?
