I am sorry to say I have not yet been able to read Mr. Martineau's
sermon, which I mean to do with care. I am, as you know, one
altogether attached to dogma, which I believe to be the skeleton
that carries the flesh, the blood, the life of the blessed thing
we call the Christian religion. But I do not believe that God's
tender mercies are restricted to a small portion of the human
family. I dare not be responsible for Dr. Newman, nor would he
thank me; but I hope he does not so believe, and this the more
because I have lately been reading Dr. Manning's letter to Dr.
Pusey; and, though Dr. Manning is far more exaggerated in his
religion than Dr. Newman, and seems to me almost to caricature it,
yet I think even he has by no means that limited view of the
mercies of God.

I have no mental difficulty in reconciling a belief in the Church,
and what may be called the high Christian doctrine, with that
comforting persuasion that those who do not receive the greatest
blessings (and each man must believe his religion to be greatest)
are notwithstanding the partakers, each in his measure, of other
gifts, and will be treated according to their use of them. I admit
there are schools of Christians who think otherwise. I was myself
brought up to think otherwise, and to believe that salvation
depended absolutely upon the reception of a particular and a very
narrow creed. But long, long have I cast those weeds behind me.
Unbelief may in given conditions be a moral offence; and only as
such, only like other disobedience, and on like principles, can it
be punishable.

To not a few the decisive change in Mr. Gladstone's mental history is the
change from the "very narrow creed" of his youth to the "high Christian
doctrine" of his after life. Still more will regard as the real transition
the attainment of this "comforting persuasion," this last word of
benignity and tolerance. Here we are on the foundations. Tolerance is far
more than the abandonment of civil usurpations over conscience. It is a
lesson often needed quite as much in the hearts of a minority as of a
majority. Tolerance means reverence for all the possibilities of Truth; it
means acknowledgment that she dwells in diverse mansions, and wears
vesture of many colours, and speaks in strange tongues; it means frank
respect for freedom of indwelling conscience against mecha