l sunt_, was a warning against
confusing the two, but was an earnest recognition of the claims of each.
The solemn religious words in which his prefaces and general statements
often wind up with thanksgiving and hope and prayer, are no mere words
of course; they breathe the spirit of the deepest conviction. It is true
that he takes the religion of Christendom as he finds it. The grounds of
belief, the relation of faith to reason, the profounder inquiries into
the basis of man's knowledge of the Eternal and Invisible, are out of
the circle within which he works. What we now call the philosophy of
religion is absent from his writings. In truth, his mind was not
qualified to grapple with such questions. There is no sign in his
writings that he ever tried his strength against them; that he ever
cared to go below the surface into the hidden things of mind, and what
mind deals with above and beyond sense--those metaphysical difficulties
and depths, as we call them, which there is no escaping, and which are
as hard to explore and as dangerous to mistake as the forces and
combinations of external nature. But it does not follow, because he had
not asked all the questions that others have asked, that he had not
thought out his reasonable faith. His religion was not one of mere vague
sentiment: it was the result of reflection and deliberate judgment. It
was the discriminating and intelligent Church of England religion of
Hooker and Andrewes, which had gone back to something deeper and nobler
in Christianity than the popular Calvinism of the earlier Reformation;
and though sternly hostile to the system of the Papacy, both on
religious and political grounds, attempted to judge it with knowledge
and justice. This deliberate character of his belief is shown in the
remarkable Confession of Faith which he left behind him: a
closely-reasoned and nobly-expressed survey of Christian theology--"a
_summa theologiae_, digested into seven pages of the finest English of
the days when its tones were finest." "The entire scheme of Christian
theology," as Mr. Spedding says, "is constantly in his thoughts;
underlies everything; defines for him the limits of human speculation;
and, as often as the course of inquiry touches at any point the boundary
line, never fails to present itself. There is hardly any occasion or any
kind of argument into which it does not at one time or another
incidentally introduce itself." Doubtless it was a religion which in h