, and touching with such tenderness and depth the most delicate
and the purest of human feelings, and Keble as the editor of Fronde's
_Remains_, forward against Dr. Hampden, breaking off a friendship of
years with Dr. Arnold, stiff against Liberal change and indulgent to
ancient folly and error, the eulogist of patristic mysticism and Bishop
Wilson's "discipline," and busy in the ecclesiastical agitations and
legal wranglings of our later days, about Jerusalem Bishoprics and
Courts of Final Appeal and ritual details, about Gorham judgments,
_Essays and Reviews_ prosecutions, and Colenso scandals. The objection
to this method of contrast is that it does not give the whole truth. It
does not take notice that, in appreciating a man like Keble, the thing
to start from is that his ideal and model and rule of character was
neither more nor less than the old Christian one. It was simply what
was accepted as right and obvious and indisputable, not by Churchmen
only, but by all earnest believers up to our own days. Given certain
conditions of Christian faith and duty which he took for granted as
much as the ordinary laws of morality, then the man's own individual
gifts or temper or leanings displayed themselves. But when people talk
of Keble being narrow and rigid and harsh and intolerant, they ought
first to recollect that he had been brought up with the ideas common to
all whom he ever heard of or knew as religious people. All earnest
religious conviction must seem narrow to those who do not share it. It
was nothing individual or peculiar, either to him or his friends, to
have strong notions about defending what they believed that they had
received as the truth; and they were people who knew what they were
about, too, and did not take things up at random. In this he was not
different from Hooker, or Jeremy Taylor, or Bishop Butler, or Baxter,
or Wesley, or Dr. Chalmers; it may be added, that he was not different
from Dr. Arnold or Archbishop Whately. It must not be forgotten that
till of late years there was always supposed, rightly or wrongly, to be
such a thing as false doctrine, and that intolerance of it, within the
limits of common justice, was always held as much part of the Christian
character as devotion and charity. Men differed widely as to what was
false doctrine, but they did not differ much as to there being such a
thing, and as to what was to be thought of it. Keble, like other people
of his time, took up his syste