Nor should his kindness to young men be forgotten. He may have sought their society in the first instance from the pleasure he took in all that was bright, and entertaining, and unaffected; but, as we have already tried to point out, his motives were commonly underlaid by some serious purpose which it was not always easy to discover. We do not maintain that he was specially successful in drawing young men out, for his own talk was often scrappy, anecdotical, and difficult to follow; still less do we mean that he tried to influence them in any particular direction by improving conversation, or the enunciation of any special opinions in politics or literature. But he certainly made his juniors feel sure of his sympathy and his good-will.
Of Milnes’s religious opinions it is difficult to give any positive account. His family had been Unitarian; at college he became an Evangelical; soon afterwards he fell under the influence of Irving, whom he proclaimed to be ‘the apostle of the age.’ Then, during his residence in Italy, as we have already mentioned, he chose Dr Wiseman for his intimate friend, and the higher Roman Catholic clergy had hopes of his conversion. ‘Mezzofanti,’ wrote one of his friends in 1832, ‘is full of hopes that you will return to the bosom of her whom Carlyle calls “the slain mother”.’ But, during this same period, while passing through what he calls ‘the twilight of his mind,’ he was the friend of Sterling and Maurice and Thirlwall, under whose influence he was hardly likely to submit to an infallible Church. He himself said that he was prevented from joining the Church of Rome by the uprising of a Catholic school in the Church of England. To this movement, as we have seen, he was deeply attached, and both spoke and wrote in its defence. In one of his commonplace books he called himself a Puseyite sceptic; sometimes he said he was a crypto-Catholic, and to the last he never entirely shook off the impressions of his youth. But Mr Reid is probably right in describing him as ‘a tolerant, liberal-minded man, apt to look at religion from many different points of view.’ We are not aware that he ever took part in any directly religious movement, or ever declared his allegiance to the Church of England except as a political organization. Partly from a love of paradox, partly from a habit of looking round a question rather than directly at it, he would have had something to say in defence of almost any system of religion, while his unfeigned charity would induce him to adopt that which recognized most fully the claims of suffering humanity.