It was well that he was getting even by these slow degrees to a more comfortable faith; for in his university career he was destined to suffer, just at this time, several severe trials. He had carried off, in 1836, the prize for a poem on The Knights of St. John; but in the examination for his degree he made a comparative failure, his name appearing only in the second class, and, as a consequence of this misfortune, he was also defeated in a contest for a fellowship in his own college. To divert his mind from this double mortification and recruit his exhausted strength, he made a short visit to Germany with his brother, the Reverend Francis A. Faber. Soon after his return, he secured a fellowship at University College, and also carried off the Johnson divinity scholarship, for which there was a strong competition. His position being now secure, he began to prepare himself zealously for orders. He made the acquaintance of Doctor Newman, and joined in his scheme for compiling the Library of the Fathers, undertaking, as his share of the work, to translate the Books of St. Optatus against the Donatists. He obtained a few pupils, and during the vacation accompanied a small reading party to Ambleside, near the head of Windermere. There he was fortunate enough to form a friendship with Wordsworth, and used to spend long days rambling with the poet over the neighboring mountains—Wordsworth muttering verses in the intervals of conversation. His correspondence is full of admiring allusions to Wordsworth's poetry, "Well or sick," he says, "cheerful or sad, I can almost always get happiness and quiet and good resolves out of the old poet—God bless him! One may hang on one sonnet of his by the hour, like a bee in a fox-glove, and still get sweetness." His opinions of some other famous poets would be declared unquestionably heterodox. He wrote to his brother from Italy in 1843:
"I spent a delicious evening at Fiesole, yesterday, and not being, as I had feared, tormented by a single thought of the execrable rebel and heretic, Milton, I had nothing to disturb the beautiful tranquillity of the sunset, and the rosy mists of the garden-like Valdarno.... England has no 'need' of Milton: how can a country have need of any thing, policy, courage, talent, or any thing else, which is unblessed of God; and how can any talent in any subject-matter be blessed by the Eternal Father for one who, in prose and verse, denied, ridiculed, blasphemed the Godhead of the Eternal Son? Milton (accursed be his blasphemous memory) spent a great part of his life in writing down my Lord's divinity—my sole trust, my sole love; and that thought poisons Comus."
For Byron, "the beast who thrust Christ into company with Jove and Mohammed"—Byron, "trampling under foot his duties to his country, and scorning the natural pieties," his antipathy amounted to loathing. "I must say that I cannot comprehend the anomaly which strikes me both in guide-books and conversation of quoting and praising men like Milton and Byron, when a man professes to love Christ and to put all his hopes of salvation in him."
Mr. Faber's old master at Harrow, Doctor Longley, now Bishop of Ripon, ordained him deacon in 1837, and Bishop Bagot promoted him to the priesthood at Oxford in 1839. Meanwhile, he had spent the long vacations at Ambleside, assisting there in parochial work, and preaching twice a week, and the rest of the year he had passed among his books at Oxford. A devoted Anglican at this time, and full of hope that the movement guided by Pusey, Newman, and their associates would revolutionize the whole English establishment, he had gone so far toward Catholicism that when, just after his ordination as priest, he made a second visit to the continent, he wrote to the Rev. J. B. Morris the following curious letter from Cologne:
"I fear you will think me a sad Protestant. I determined, and so did M——, to conform to the Catholic ritual here. We both of us got Mechlin breviaries at Mechlin, and go to church pretty regularly every day to say the hours, and we say the rest of the hours as the priests do, in carriages, or inns, or anywhere. Also, I have been tutorized in the breviary by a very nice priest, a simple-hearted, pious fellow with little knowledge of theology. But it all will not do. The careless irreverence, the noise, the going in and out, the spitting of the priests on the altar-steps, the distressing representations of our Blessed Lord—I cannot get over them. The censing of the priests, the ringing of bells, the constant carrying of the blessed sacrament from one altar to another—this I can manage; because I can say psalms meanwhile. But at best, when I can get away into a side chapel with no wax virgins in it, and no hideous pictures of the Father, I cannot manage well."
The idea that Anglicans were excommunicate from Western Christendom was a terrible distress to him. "Would you not like," he writes to the same friend, "to spend six months among the Munich disciples of Möhler, Döllinger, etc., etc.? Of course I shall know more of all this when I have travelled. I shall strive to realize all such little ways of impeded communion as are unstopped. It will surely do me good, if no one else."
He soon had the coveted opportunity for more extended travel; for in 1841, he went abroad as tutor to a young gentleman from Ambleside, and spent six months journeying through the countries bordering on the Mediterranean and the Danube, Styria, the Tyrol, and Northern Germany. Memorials of this interesting tour are found in some of his published poems and in a volume called Sights and Thoughts in Foreign Churches and among Foreign Peoples, which appeared in 1842, dedicated to Wordsworth. Into this book the author introduced many reflections upon religious matters, chiefly in the form of conversations with an imaginary representative of mediæval Christianity, as well as of Mr. Faber's own Catholic feelings, whom he calls "the Stranger." The volume closes with a dream, in which the author conducts the stranger through English cathedrals, with their bare altars and empty niches. "The stranger regarded them with indignation, but did not speak. When we came out of the church, he turned to me, and said in a solemn voice, somewhat tremulous from deep emotion, 'You have led me through a land of closed churches and hushed bells, of unlighted altars and unstoled priests. Is England beneath an interdict?'"
The private journal of Mr. Faber's journey abounds with evidences of the deep impressions which Catholic customs made upon him, and his secret dissatisfaction with his own cold church—a dissatisfaction of which probably he was still himself unconscious. He is at Genoa on the Feast of the Annunciation, "and not to be utterly without sympathy with the Genoese around us, we decorated our room with a bunch of crimson tulips, apparently the favorite flower, that we might not be without somewhat to remind us of her
'Who so above
All mothers shone;
The Mother of
The Blessed One.'"