e wider stage of London politics or general religious
controversy.

The conflicts which for a time turned Oxford into a kind of image of
what Florence was in the days of Savonarola, with its nicknames,
Puseyites, and Neomaniacs, and High and Dry, counterparts to the
_Piagnoni_ and _Arrabbiati_, of the older strife, began around a student
of retired habits, interested more than was usual at Oxford in abstruse
philosophy, and the last person who might be expected to be the occasion
of great dissensions in the University. Dr. Hampden was a man who, with
no definite intentions of innovating on the received doctrines of the
Church--indeed, as his sermons showed, with a full acceptance of
them--had taken a very difficult subject for a course of Bampton
Lectures, without at all fathoming its depth and reach, and had got into
a serious scrape in consequence. Personally he was a man of serious but
cold religion, having little sympathy with others, and consequently not
able to attract any. His isolation during the whole of his career is
remarkable; he attached no one, as Whately or Arnold attached men. His
mind, which was a speculative one, was not one, in its own order, of the
first class. He had not the grasp nor the subtlety necessary for his
task. He had a certain power of statement, but little of co-ordination;
he seems not to have had the power of seeing when his ideas were really
irreconcilable, and he thought that simply by insisting on his
distinctly orthodox statements he not only balanced, but neutralised,
and did away with his distinctly unorthodox ones. He had read a good
deal of Aristotle and something of the Schoolmen, which probably no one
else in Oxford had done except Blanco White; and the temptation of
having read what no one else knows anything about sometimes leads men to
make an unprofitable use of their special knowledge, which they consider
their monopoly.

The creed and dogmas of the Christian Church are at least in their
broad features, not a speculation, but a fact. That not only the
Apostles' Creed, but the Nicene and Constantinopolitan Creeds, are
assumed as facts by the whole of anything that can be called the Church,
is as certain as the reception by the same body, and for the same time,
of the Scriptures. Not only the Creed, but, up to the sixteenth century,
the hierarchy, and not only Creed and hierarchy and Scriptures, but the
sacramental idea as expressed in the liturgies, are equally in the sa