A Writers Recollections, vol 1 | Page 8

of his landing he was engaged to my mother. They were married in 1850, and I, their eldest child, was born in June, 1851.
And then the unexpected, the amazing thing happened. At the time of their marriage, and for some time after, my mother, who had been brought up in a Protestant "scriptural" atmosphere, and had been originally drawn to the younger "Tom Arnold," partly because he was the son of his father, as Stanley's Life had now made the headmaster known to the world, was a good deal troubled by the heretical views of her young husband. She had some difficulty in getting him to consent to the baptism of his elder children. He was still in many respects the Philip of the "Bothie," influenced by Goethe, and the French romantics, by Emerson, Kingsley, and Carlyle, and in touch still with all that Liberalism of the later 'forties in Oxford, of which his most intimate friend, Arthur Clough, and his elder brother, Matthew Arnold, were to become the foremost representatives. But all the while, under the surface, an extraordinary transformation was going on. He was never able to explain it afterward, even to me, who knew him best of all his children. I doubt whether he ever understood it himself. But he who had only once crossed the High Street to hear Newman preach, and felt no interest in the sermon, now, on the other side of the world, surrendered to Newman's influence. It is uncertain if they had ever spoken to each other at Oxford; yet that subtle pervasive intellect which captured for years the critical and skeptical mind of Mark Pattison, and indirectly transformed the Church of England after Newman himself had left it, now, reaching across the world, laid hold on Arnold's son, when Arnold himself was no longer there to fight it. A general reaction against the negations and philosophies of his youth set in for "Philip," as inevitable in his case as the revolt against St. Sulpice was for Ernest Renan. For my father was in truth born for religion, as his whole later life showed. In that he was the true son of Arnold of Rugby. But his speculative Liberalism had carried him so much farther than his father's had ever gone, that the recoil was correspondingly great. The steps of it are dim. He was "struck" one Sunday with the "authoritative" tone of the First Epistle of Peter. Who and what was Peter? What justified such a tone? At another time he found a _Life of St. Brigit of Sweden_ at a country inn, when he was on one of his school-inspecting journeys across the island. And he records a mysterious influence or "voice" from it, as he rode in meditative solitude through the sunny spaces of the Tasmanian bush. Last of all, he "obtained"--from England, no doubt--the Tracts for the Times. And as he went through them, the same documents, and the same arguments, which had taken Newman to Rome, nine years before, worked upon his late and distant disciple. But who can explain "conversion"? Is it not enough to say, as was said of old, "The Holy Ghost fell on them that believed"? The great "Malignant" had indeed triumphed. In October, 1854, my father was received at Hobart, Tasmania, into the Church of Rome; and two years later, after he had reached England, and written to Newman asking the new Father of the Oratory to receive him, Newman replied:
How strange it seems! What a world this is! I knew your father a little, and I really think I never had any unkind feeling toward him. I saw him at Oriel on the Purification before (I think) his death (January, 1842). I was glad to meet him. If I said ever a harsh thing against him I am very sorry for it. In seeing you, I should have a sort of pledge that he at the moment of his death made it all up with me. Excuse this. I came here last night, and it is so marvelous to have your letter this morning.
So, for the moment, ended one incident in the long bout between two noble fighters, Arnold and Newman, each worthy of the other's steel. For my father, indeed, this act of surrender was but the beginning of a long and troubled history. My poor mother felt as though the earth had crumbled under her. Her passionate affection for my father endured till her latest hour, but she never reconciled herself to what he had done. There was in her an instinctive dread of Catholicism, of which I have suggested some of the origins--ancestral and historical. It never abated. Many years afterward, in writing _Helbeck of Bannisdale_, I drew upon what I remembered of it in describing some traits