It was the most natural thing in the world that a young man of Elsmere's temperament should rally to the Church.

The place was passing through one of those periodical crises of reaction against an overdriven rationalism, which show themselves with tolerable regularity in any great centre of intellectual activity.
It had begun to be recognized with a great burst of enthusiasm and astonishment, that, after all, Mill and Herbert Spencer had not said the last word on all things in heaven and earth.

And now there was exaggerated recoil.

A fresh wave of religious romanticism was fast gathering strength; the spirit of Newman had reappeared in the place which Newman had loved and left; religion was becoming once more popular among the most trivial souls, and a deep reality among a large proportion of the nobler ones.
With this movement of opinion Robert had very soon found himself in close and sympathetic contact.

The meagre impression left upon his boyhood by the somewhat grotesque succession of the Harden curates, and by his mother's shifts of wit at their expense, was soon driven out of him by the stateliness and comely beauty of the Church order as it was revealed to him at Oxford.