is personal and public character;
and lastly, the force--we had almost said genius--displayed in his
various publications. The peculiarity of Robinson's character may be
described by one word, completeness--_totus atque teres rotundus_. The
united testimony of admirers and opponents witnesses his integrity,
purity, courtesy, prudence, and charity. But he possessed other
qualities. He was chiefly distinguished by what we venture to call a
very rare characteristic, in the sense in which we understand it,--an
intense love of truth, which ever stimulated him to search after it as
the chief part of his being's aim and end, and which never permitted him
to swerve a hair's breath from it in practice. This made him a
nonconformist, a separatist, an exile, an independent; a growing
Christian, a profound theologian, an able controversialist; a student at
Leyden University, although he had previously graduated and held a
fellowship at Cambridge; a diligent attendant on the lectures of both
Polyander and Episcopus, at the time when all Leyden was agitated by the
rival theories of the two professors on the subject of Arminianism; and
an avowed advocate of the principle, that though Christian men were
confirmed in their own doctrinal and ecclesiastical principles, it was
their duty to hear what their opponents had to say, even if it should
lead them to the parish church.

This love of truth was both a principle and a passion. It grew with his
growth, strengthened with his strength, and was the chief source of all
his excellence. It made him learned in a learned age, and wise in the
knowledge of human nature and the experience of the world, at a period
when such wisdom was rare. It fitted him to be the counsellor of his
fellow-exiles in the emergencies of their strange position, and the
statesman-like adviser of the pilgrims when they went forth to clear the
wilderness, and lay the foundations of civil life afresh in a new world.
In a word, he may be said to have lived in the spirit of his own
aphorism;--"He that knows not in his measure, what he ought to know,
especially in the matters of God, is but a beast amongst men; he that
knows what is simply needful and no more, is a man amongst men; _but he
who knows according to the help vouchsafed him of God, what may well be
known, and so far as to direct himself and others aright, is as a God
amongst men_."

It is impossible to do justice to the writings of Robinson in a brief
notice l