find
favour in an age of activity, doubt, and change. But, as it was
realised in Mr. Keble, there it is in Sir John Coleridge's pages,
perfectly real, perfectly natural, perfectly whole and uniform, with
nothing double or incongruous in it, though it unfolded itself in
various and opposite ways. And its ideal was simply that which has been
consecrated as the saintly character in the Christian Church since the
days of St. John--the deepest and most genuine love of all that was
good; the deepest and most genuine hatred of all that was believed to
be evil.

The picture which Sir John Coleridge puts before us, though deficient
in what is striking and brilliant, is a sufficiently remarkable and
uncommon one. It is the picture of a man of high cultivation and
intellect, in whom religion was not merely something flavouring and
elevating life, not merely a great element and object of spiritual
activity, but really and unaffectedly the one absorbing interest, and
the spring of every thought and purpose. Whether people like such a
character or not, and whether or not they may think the religion wrong,
or distorted and imperfect, if they would fairly understand the writer
of the _Christian Year_ they must start from this point. He was a man
who, without a particle of the religious cant of any school, without
any self-consciousness or pretension or unnatural strain, literally
passed his clays under the quick and pervading influence, for restraint
and for stimulus, of the will and presence of God. With this his whole
soul was possessed; its power over him had not to be invoked and
stirred up; it acted spontaneously and unnoticed in him; it was
dominant in all his activity; it quenched in him aims, and even, it may
be, faculties; it continually hampered the free play of his powers and
gifts, and made him often seem, to those who had not the key, awkward,
unequal, and unintelligible. But for this awful sense of truth and
reality unseen, which dwarfed to him all personal thoughts and all
present things, he might have been a more finished writer, a more
attractive preacher, a less indifferent foster-father to his own works.
But it seemed to him a shame, in the presence of all that his thoughts
habitually dwelt with, to think of the ordinary objects of authorship,
of studying anything of this world for its own sake, of perfecting
works of art, of cultivating the subtle forces and spells of language
to give attractiveness to his writing