Already, before his illness, these doubts had begun to take possession of his mind. "I am conscious to myself," he wrote in his Diary, "of an extensively changed feeling towards the Church of Rome … The Church of England seems to me to be diseased:—1. Organically (six sub-headings). 2. Functionally (seven sub-headings) … Wherever it seems healthy it approximates the system of Rome." Then thoughts of the Virgin Mary suddenly began to assail him—
"(1) If John the Baptist were sanctified from the womb, how much more the B.V.!
(2) If Enoch and Elijah were exempted from death, why not the B.V. from sin?
(3) It is a strange way of loving the Son to slight the mother!"
The arguments seemed irresistible, and a few weeks, later the following entry occurs—"Strange thoughts have visited me:
(1) I have felt that the Episcopate of the Church of England is secularised and bound down beyond hope. …
(6) I feel as if a light had fallen upon me. My feeling about the Roman Church is not intellectual. I have intellectual difficulties, but the great moral difficulties seem melting.
(7) Something keeps rising and saying, 'You will end in the Roman Church.'"
He noted altogether twenty-five of these "strange thoughts." His mind hovered anxiously round—
"(1) The Incarnation,
(2) The Real Presence,
- i. Regeneration,
- ii. Eucharist,
and (3) The Exaltation of S. M. and Saints."
His twenty-second strange thought was as follows:—"How do I know where I may be two years hence? Where was Newman five years ago?"
