I do not wish to make them think as I
think. But I want that they and I should be what we pretend to be, and
then I doubt not we should find that there is a common ground for us
all far beneath our thinkings. For truth I hold not to be that which
every man troweth, but to be that which lies at the bottom of all men's
trowings, that in which those trowings have their only meeting-point."
He would make as clear as can be that deep substructure, and leave the
sight of it to work its natural effect on the honest heart. A noble
aim; but surely requiring, if anything can, the clear eye, the steady
hand, the heart as calm as earnest. Surely a work in which the greatest
exactness and precision, as well as largeness of thought, would not be
too much. For if we but take away the "trowings" without coming down to
the central foundation, or lose ourselves, and mistake a new "trowing"
of our own for it, it is hardly a sufficient degree of blame to say
that we have done no good.

And in these qualities of exactness and precision it does seem to us
that Mr. Maurice is, for his purpose, fatally deficient. His criticisms
are often acute, his thrusts on each side often very home ones, and
but too full of truth; his suggestions often full of thought and
instruction; his balancings and contrasts of errors and truths, if
sometimes too artificial, yet generally striking. But when we come to
seek for the reconciling truth, which one side has overlaid and
distorted, and the other ignorantly shrunk back from, but which, when
placed in its real light and fairly seen, is to attract the love and
homage of both, we seem--not to grasp a shadow--Mr. Maurice is too
earnest and real a believer for that--but to be very much where we
were, except that a cloud of words surrounds us. His positive
statements seem like a running protest against being obliged to commit
himself and come to the point; like a continual assertion of the
hopelessness and uselessness of a definite form of speaking about the
matter in hand. Take, for instance, the following short statement:--

"My object," he says, speaking of the words which he has taken as
the subject of his essays, "has been to examine the language with
which we are most familiar, and which has been open to most
objections, especially from Unitarians. Respecting the Conception
I have been purposely silent; not because I have any doubt about
that article, or am indifferent to it, but becau