his early associations
attached him to the doctrines of the Nicene Creed; but when he came to
talk of Christianity, he laid so much more stress on its ethics than
on its dogmatic side that his clerical antagonists thought he held no
creed at all. Dr. Pusey once said that he and Stanley did not worship
the same God. The point of difference between him and them was not so
much that he consciously disbelieved the dogmas they held--probably he
did not--as that he did not, like them, think that true religion and
final salvation depended on believing them. And the weak point in his
imagination was that he seemed never to understand their position, nor
to realise how sacred and how momentous to them were statements which
he saw in a purely imaginative light. He never could be got to see
that a Church without any dogmas would not be a Church at all in the
sense either of mankind in the past or of mankind in the present. An
anecdote was current that once when he had in Disraeli's presence been
descanting on the harm done by the enforcement of dogmatic standards,
Disraeli had observed, "But pray remember, Mr. Dean, no dogma, no
Dean."

Those who thought him a heathen would have assailed him less bitterly
if he had been content to admit his own differences from them. What
most incensed them was his habit of assuming that, except in mere
forms of expression, there were really no differences at all, and that
they also held Christianity to consist not in any body of doctrines,
but in reverence for God and purity of life. They would have preferred
heathenism itself to this kind of Universalism.

As ecclesiastical preferment had not discoloured the native hue of his
simplicity, so neither did the influences of royal favour. It says
little for human nature that few people should be proof against what
the philosopher deems the trivial and fleeting fascinations of a
court. Stanley's elevation of mind was proof. Intensely interested in
the knowledge of events passing behind the scenes which his relations
with the reigning family opened to him, he scarcely ever referred to
those relations, and seemed neither to be affected thereby, nor to
care a whit more for the pomps and vanities of power or wealth, a whit
less for the friends and the causes he had learned to value in his
youth.

In private, that which most struck one in his intellect was the quick
eagerness with which his imagination fastened upon any new fact,
caught its bearings,