Page:Some unpublished letters of Henry D. and Sophia E. Thoreau; a chapter in the history of a still-born book.djvu/58

 a book—The Nemesis of Faith—which, immediately following in the wake of the "Oxford Movement," gave a disagreeable shock to Anglican Churchmen, lay and cleric. The scholarly Fellow of Exeter College had been coquetting with Catholicism. He had managed to lose the faith of his fathers, but had utterly failed to find any surrogate; before him surged a weltering waste, pitiless storm, and blinding darkness, and no place whereon to plant his way-worn feet.

The obnoxious book was burned in the quadrangle by the Senior Fellow of Oriel College; "the old, familiar faces" either looked askance at the audacious doubter or were wholly averted; the Quarterlies were flooded with condemnatory reviews, in which even lay journalism participated,—and this in America as well as Great