r controversy.

The occasion of this was an attack which had been made upon him at
Cambridge, where certain learned dons discovered on his appointment to
the professorship of history that he was a 'Cerinthian.' I do not
pretend to guess at their meaning. Anyhow he had avowed, in an
'epilogue' to his Essays, certain doubts as to the meaning of eternal
damnation--a doctrine which at that time enjoyed considerable
popularity. The explanation was in part simple. 'It is laid to my
charge,' he said, 'that I am a Latitudinarian. I have never met with a
single man who, like myself, had passed a long series of years in a free
intercourse with every class of society who was not more or less what is
called a Latitudinarian.' In fact, he had discovered that Clapham was
not the world, and that the conditions of salvation could hardly include
residence on the sacred common. This conviction, however, took a
peculiar form in his mind. His Essays show how widely he had sympathised
with many forms of the religious sentiment. He wrote with enthusiasm of
the great leaders of the Roman Catholic Church; of Hildebrand and St.
Francis, and even of Ignatius Loyola; and yet his enthusiasm does not
blind him to the merits of Martin Luther, or Baxter, or Wesley, or
Wilberforce. There were only two exceptions to his otherwise universal
sympathy. He always speaks of the rationalists in the ordinary tone of
dislike; and he looks coldly upon one school of orthodoxy. 'Sir James
Stephen,' as was said by someone, 'is tolerant towards every Church
except the Church of England.' This epigram indicated a fact. Although
he himself strenuously repudiated any charge of disloyalty to the Church
whose ordinances he scrupulously observed, he was entirely out of
sympathy with the specially Anglican movement of later years. This was
no doubt due in great part to the intensely strong sympathies of his
youth. When the Oxford movement began he was already in middle life and
thoroughly steeped in the doctrines which they attacked. He resembled
them, indeed, in his warm appreciation of the great men of Catholicism.
But the old churchmen appealed both to his instincts as a statesman and
to his strong love of the romantic. The Church of the middle ages had
wielded a vast power; men like Loyola and Xavier had been great
spiritual heroes. But what was to be said for the Church of England
since the Reformation? Henry Martyn, he says, in the 'Clapham Sect,' is
'the one heroic