nctity, yet there is
no degree of Divine love that may not be reached by the commoner and
normal path; there have been saints outside the cloister as well as
inside. One could hardly offend the first principles of the Gospel more
grievously than by making intelligence, culture, and contemplative
capacity conditions of a nearer approach to Christ.

It seems to us then that Patmore failed to get at the root of the
neglected truth after which he was groping, and thereby fell into a
one-sidedness just as real as that against which his chief work was a
revolt and protest.

As a convert, Patmore is most uninteresting to the controversialist. His
mind was altogether concrete, affirmative, and synthetic, with a
profound distrust of abstract and analytical reasoning. As we have said,
Christianity and, later, Catholicism appealed profoundly to his
intellectual imagination in virtue of some of their deeper tenets, for
whose sake he took over all the rest _per modum unius_.

The idea [of the Incarnation] no sooner flashed upon me as a possible
reality than it became, what it has ever since remained, ... the only
reality worth seriously caring for; a reality so clearly seen and
possessed that the most irrefragable logic of disproof has always
affected me as something trifling and irrelevant.

Again: "Christianity is not an 'historical religion,' but a revelation
which is renewed in every receiver of it." "My heart loves that of whose
existence my intellect allows the probability, and my will puts the seal
to the blessed compact which produces faith"--an ingenious application
of his favourite category.

Of the efforts of Manning and de Vere to proselytize him, he says:

Their position seemed to me to be so logically perfect that I was long
repelled by its perfection. I felt, half unconsciously, that a living
thing ought not to be so spick and span in its external evidence for
itself, and that what I wanted for conviction was not the sight of a
faultless intellectual superficies, but the touch and pressure of a
moral solid.

Whatever some may think or have thought of his theology, none who knew
him could have any doubt as to the robust and uncompromising character
of his faith. It was because he felt so sure of his footing that he
allowed himself a liberty of movement perplexing to those whose position
was one of more delicate balance. He had a ruthlessness in tossing aside
what might be called "non-essentials," that was dicta