of what he loves, condemns, or, in his infinite mercy,
pardons?--the moral being that we ought to cast stones at nobody, and
should in especial refrain from condemning our departed brother, who,
for anything which we knew to the contrary, might be just as acceptable
to God as any one of ourselves.

All my impressions of Jowett as a religious teacher were summed up in my
impressions of that one sermon. Though his tone in delivering it was one
of unusual tenderness, there lurked in it, nevertheless, a mordant and
petulant animus against the Christian religion as a whole, if regarded
as miraculously revealed or as postulating the occurrence of any
definite miracle. It was the voice of one who, while setting all belief
in the miraculous aside, on the ground that it had no evidence of a
scientific kind to support it, was proclaiming with confidence some
vague creed as unassailable, the evidence in support of which was very
much more nebulous, or what many would describe as _nil_. A story used
to be told about him by which his position in this respect is aptly and
amusingly illustrated. He was taking a walk with an undergraduate, who
confessed to him that his deepest trouble was his failure to find
anything which accurate reason could accept as a proof of God's
existence. Jowett did not utter a word till he and the young man parted.
Then he said, "Mr. Smith, if you can't find a satisfactory proof of
God's existence during the next three weeks, I shall have to send you
down for a term." Had I been in the young man's place I should have
retorted, "And pray, Mr. Jowett, what satisfactory proofs are you able
to adduce yourself?"

But, in speaking of Jowett thus, I am not wholly, or even mainly,
speaking of him as a single individual, I speak of him mainly as a type,
exceptional indeed on account of his signal intellect, but otherwise
representing a moral and mental attitude which was common not only to
the teaching body of Balliol, but also to the age in general, in so far
as its traditional temper had been influenced by scientific knowledge.
Nearly all the Balliol dons--even those who never spoke of
religion--seemed to start with the same foregone conclusion, that the
dogmatic theology of the churches was as dead as the geocentric
astronomy. They assumed this, just as Jowett did, on what purported to
be scientific grounds, and yet when they sought, as he did, to put in
the place of this some solemn system of quasi-scientific et