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 found, had meant something more to him than he had 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? 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….
(2) 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.