is--in his personal influence--that Mr.
Maurice was greatest. True, he was a great and rare thinker. Those
who wish to satisfy themselves of this should measure the
capaciousness of his intellect by studying--not by merely reading--
his Boyle Lectures on the Religions of the world; and that Kingdom of
Christ, the ablest "Apology" for the Catholic Faith which England has
seen for more than two hundred years. The ablest, and perhaps
practically the most successful; for it has made the Catholic Faith
look living, rational, practical, and practicable, to hundreds who
could rest neither in modified Puritanism nor modified Romanism, and
still less in scepticism, however earnest. The fact that it is
written from a Realist point of view, as all Mr. Maurice's books are,
will make it obscure to many readers. Nominalism is just now so
utterly in the ascendant, that most persons seem to have lost the
power of thinking, as well as of talking, by any other method. But
when the tide of thought shall turn, this, and the rest of Mr.
Maurice's works, will become not only precious but luminous, to a
generation which will have recollected that substance does not mean
matter, that a person is not the net result of his circumstances, and
that the real is not the visible Actual, but the invisible Ideal.

If anyone, again, would test Mr. Maurice's faculty as an interpreter
of Scripture, let him study the two volumes on the Gospel and the
Epistles of St. John; and study, too, the two volumes on the Old
Testament, which have been (as a fact) the means of delivering more
than one or two from both the Rationalist and the Mythicist theories
of interpretation. I mention these only as peculiar examples of Mr.
Maurice's power. To those who have read nothing of his, I would say:
"Take up what book you will, you will be sure to find in it something
new to you, something noble, something which, if you can act on it,
will make you a better man." And if anyone, on making the trial,
should say: "But I do not understand the book. It is to me a new
world;" then it must be answered: "If you wish to read only books
which you can understand at first sight, confine yourself to
periodical literature. As for finding yourself in a new world, is it
not good sometimes to do that?--to discover how vast the universe of
mind, as well as of matter, is; that it contains many worlds; and
that wise and beautiful souls may and do live in more worlds than
your ow