age as thinkers and
writers. To the former class belonged Charles Seager, and John Brande
Morris, of Exeter College, both learned Orientalists, steeped in
recondite knowledge of all kinds; men who had worked their way to
knowledge through hardship and grinding labour, and not to be outdone in
Germany itself for devouring love of learning and a scholar's plainness
of life. In the other class may be mentioned Frederic Faber, J.D.
Dalgairns, and W.G. Ward, men who have all since risen to eminence in
their different spheres. Faber was a man with a high gift of
imagination, remarkable powers of assimilating knowledge, and a great
richness and novelty and elegance of thought, which with much melody of
voice made him ultimately a very attractive preacher. If the promise of
his powers has not been adequately fulfilled, it is partly to be traced
to a want of severity of taste and self-restraint, but his name will
live in some of his hymns, and in some very beautiful portions of his
devotional writings. Dalgairns's mind was of a different order. "That
man has an eye for theology," was the remark of a competent judge on
some early paper of Dalgairns's which came before him. He had something
of the Frenchman about him. There was in him, in his Oxford days, a
bright and frank briskness, a mixture of modesty and arch daring, which
gave him an almost boyish appearance; but beneath this boyish appearance
there was a subtle and powerful intellect, alive to the problems of
religious philosophy, and impatient of any but the most thorough
solutions of them; while, on the other hand, the religious affections
were part of his nature, and mind and will and heart yielded an
unreserved and absolute obedience to the leading and guidance of faith.
In his later days, with his mind at ease, Father Dalgairns threw himself
into the great battle with unbelief; and few men have commanded more
the respect of opponents not much given to think well of the arguments
for religion, by the freshness and the solidity of his reasoning. At
this time, enthusiastic in temper, and acute and exacting as a thinker,
he found the Church movement just, as it were, on the turn of the wave.
He was attracted to it at first by its reaction against what was unreal
and shallow, by its affinities with what was deep in idea and earnest in
life; then, and finally, he was repelled from it, by its want of
completeness, by its English acquiescence in compromise, by its
hesitations