292 ESSAYS m HISTORICAL CRITIC iSM
strain shortly after graduation by a visit to the family of an evangelical clergyman in Ireland, where he found Christian- ity to be "part of the atmosphere which we breathed." He saw there the genuine fruits of the Reformation which he had been taught at Oxford "to hate as rebellion." His reverence for the reformers revived. " Fact itself was speaking for them. . . . Modern history resumed its traditionary aspect." When he returned to Oxford in 1842, as Fellow of Exeter, he had learned " that equall}^ good men could take different views in theology, and Newmanism had ceased to have an exclusive interest for him."
Feeling unsettled in his views, he "read hard in modern history and literature," including Carlyle, Goethe, Lessing, Neander, and Schleiermacher. He approached modern sci- ence through The Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation. "As I had perceived before," he says, "that evangelicals could be as saint- like as Catholics, so now I found that men of the highest gifts could differ from both by whole diameters in the interpretation of the same phenomena." He then dis- covered that the Catholic revival in Oxford was but part of the general movement of reaction in Europe.
At this time he was invited by Newman to contribute to the Lives of English Saints. His reading for this purpose took him into a world where " the order of nature seems only to have existed to give holy men an opportunity of showing their superiority to material conditions." After writing one life he "had to retreat from his occupation." But "the excursion among the will-o'-the-wisps of the spiritual mo- rasses " did not leave him as it found him. "I had been taught by Newman that there was no difference in kind between the saints' miracles and the miracles of the Bible." The alternative probability now forced itself upon him, " that all supernatural stories were legendary, wherever found," and he met the issue with courage although not with com- posure. His distress drew from him a cry of pain, and in the mournful reflections of The Nemesis of Faith, 1848, he revealed to the world his mental struggles.
