intelligible in ordinary
minds, but unaccountable in those of high power and range, whether they
believe or not, that a dogmatic religion is of course a hard, dry,
narrow, unreal religion, without any affinities to poetry or the truth
of things, or to the deeper and more sacred and powerful of human
thoughts. If dogmas are not true, that is another matter; but it is the
fashion to imply that dogmas are worthless, mere things of the past,
without sense or substance or interest, because they are dogmas. As if
Dante was not dogmatic in form and essence; as if the grandest and
worthiest religious prose in the English language was not that of
Hooker, nourished up amid the subtleties, but also amid the vast
horizons and solemn heights, of scholastic divinity. A dogmatic system
is hard in hard hands, and shallow in shallow minds, and barren in dull
ones, and unreal and empty to preoccupied and unsympathising ones; we
dwarf and distort ideas that we do not like, and when we have put them
in our own shapes and in our own connection, we call them unmeaning or
impossible. Dogmas are but expedients, common to all great departments
of human thought, and felt in all to be necessary, for representing
what are believed as truths, for exhibiting their order and
consequences, for expressing the meaning of terms, and the relations of
thought. If they are wrong, they are, like everything else in the
world, open to be proved wrong; if they are inadequate, they are open
to correction; but it is idle to sneer at them for being what they must
be, if religious facts and truths are to be followed out by the
thoughts and expressed by the language of man. And what dogmas are in
unfriendly and incapable hands is no proof of what they may be when
they are approached as things instinct with truth and life; it is no
measure of the way in which they may be inextricably interwoven with
the most unquestionably living thought and feeling, as in these
sermons. Jealous, too, as the preacher is for Church doctrines as the
springs of Christian life, no writer of our time perhaps has so
emphatically and impressively recalled the narrow limits within which
human language can represent Divine realities. No one that we know of
shows that he has before his mind with such intense force and
distinctness the idea of God; and in proportion as a mind takes in and
submits itself to the impression of that awful vision, the gulf widens
between all possible human words and