Bishops might perhaps say about the Tract in their own charges. I agreed to their conditions. My one point was to save the Tract. Not a scrap of writing was given me, as a pledge of the performance of their side of the engagement. Parts of letters from them were read to me, without being put into my hands. It was an It was an "understanding." A clever man had warned me against "understandings" some six years before: I have hated them ever since. In the last words of my letter to the Bishop of Oxford I thus resigned my place in the Move ment: "I have nothing to be sorry for," I say to him, แ except having made your Lordship anxious, and others whom I am bound to revere. I have nothing to be sorry for, but every thing to rejoice in and be thankful for. I have never taken pleasure in seeming to be able to move a party, and whatever influence I have had, has been found, not sought after. I have acted because others did not act, and have sacrificed a quiet which I prized. May God be with me in time to come, as He has been hitherto! and He will be, if I can but keep my hand clean and my heart pure. I think I can bear, or at least will try to bear, any personal humiliation, so that I am preserved from betraying sacred interests, which the Lord of grace and power has given into my charge." PART V. HISTORY OF MY RELIGIOUS OPINIONS. AND now that I am about to trace, as far as I can, the course of that great revolution of mind, which led me to leave my own home, to which I was bound by so many strong and tender ties, I feel overcome with the difficulty of satisfying myself in my account of it, and have recoiled from doing so, till the near approach of the day, on which these lines must be given to the world, forces me to set about the task. For who can know himself, and the multitude of subtle influences which act upon him? and who can recollect, at the distance of twenty-five years, all that he once knew about his thoughts and his deeds, and that, during a portion of his life, when even at the time his observation, whether of himself or of the external world, was less than before or after, by very reason of the perplexity and dismay which weighed upon him,—when, though it would be most unthankful to seem to imply that he had not all-sufficient light amid his darkness, yet a darkness it emphatically was? And who can gird himself suddenly to a new and anxious un |