uncritical scepticism, a scepticism of the most unreceptive kind, with
regard to all opinions professed and all events said to have taken place
in the more recent centuries of ecclesiastical history. The Church of
Rome, on the other hand, seemed nearer in temper to the temper of the
past, and was more decidedly a continuation, though evidently at the
same time an amplification, of the early Christian habits of thinking
and believing.

With this altered view of the subject the alternative that presented
itself to me was that which presented itself to the brothers Newman, and
if I had found it necessary to my happiness to belong to a visible
Church of some kind, and if devotional feelings had been stronger than
the desire for mental independence, I should have joined the Church of
Rome.

There were, indeed, two or three strong temptations to that course. My
family had been a Catholic family in the past, and had sacrificed much
for the Church of Rome when she was laboring under oppression; for a
Hamerton to return to her would therefore have been quite in accordance
with those romantic sentiments about distant ancestors which were at
that time very strong in me. Besides this, I had all the feeling for the
august ceremonial of the Catholic Church which is found in the writer
who most influenced me, Sir Walter Scott; and there was already a
certain consciousness of artistic necessities and congruities which made
me dimly aware that if you admit the glories of ecclesiastical
architecture, it is only the asceticism of Puritan rebellion against art
that can deny magnificence to ritual. I had occasionally, though rarely,
been present at High Mass, and had felt a certain elevating influence,
and if I had said to myself, "Religion is only a poem by which the soul
is raised to the contemplation of the Eternal Mysteries," then I could