eir
meaning and their wealth. He wished all men, all churches, all
nations, to be true to the light which they had already, to
whatsoever was godlike, and therefore God-given, in their own
thoughts; and so to rise from their partial apprehensions, their
scattered gleams of light, toward that full knowledge and light which
was contained--so he said, even with his dying lips--in the orthodox
Catholic faith. This was the ideal of the man and his work; and it
left him neither courage nor time to found a school or promulgate a
system. God had His own system: a system vaster than Augustine's,
vaster than Dante's, vaster than all the thoughts of all thinkers,
orthodox and heterodox, put together; for God was His own system, and
by Him all thing's consisted, and in Him they lived and moved and had
their being; and He was here, living and working, and we were living
and working in Him, and had, instead of building systems of our own,
to find out His eternal laws for men, for nations, for churches; for
only in obedience to them is Life. Yes, a man who held this could
found no system. "Other foundation," he used to say, "can no man
lay, save that which is laid, even Jesus Christ." And as he said it,
his voice and eye told those who heard him that it was to him the
most potent, the most inevitable, the most terrible, and yet the most
hopeful, of all facts.

As for temptations to vanity, and love of power--he may have had to
fight with them in the heyday of youth, and genius, and perhaps
ambition. But the stories of his childhood are stories of the same
generosity, courtesy, unselfishness, which graced his later years.
At least, if he had been tempted, he had conquered. In more than
five-and-twenty years, I have known no being so utterly unselfish, so
utterly humble, so utterly careless of power or influence, for the
mere enjoyment--and a terrible enjoyment it is--of using them.
Staunch to his own opinion only when it seemed to involve some moral
principle, he was almost too ready to yield it, in all practical
matters, to anyone whom he supposed to possess more practical
knowledge than he. To distrust himself, to accuse himself, to
confess his proneness to hard judgments, while, to the eye of those
who knew him and the facts, he was exercising a splendid charity and
magnanimity; to hold himself up as a warning of "wasted time," while
he was, but too literally, working himself to death--this was the
childlike temper which