name which adorns her annals since the days of
Elizabeth. Her apostolic men either quitted or were cast out of her
communion. Her _Acta Sanctorum_ may be read from end to end with a dry
eye and an unquickened pulse.' He had perhaps heard too many sermons.
'Dear Mother Church,' he says after one such experience, 'thy spokesmen
are not selected so as to create any danger that we should be dazzled by
human eloquence or entangled by human wisdom.' The Church of England, as
he says elsewhere ('Baxter'), afforded a refuge for three centuries to
the great, the learned, and the worldly wise, but was long before it
took to the nobler end of raising the poor, and then, as he would have
added, under the influence of the Clapham Sect. The Church presented
itself to him mainly as the religious department of the State, in which
more care was taken to suppress eccentricity than to arouse enthusiasm;
it was eminently respectable, but at the very antipodes of the heroic.
Could he then lean to Rome? He could not do so without damning the men
he most loved, even could his keen and in some ways sceptical intellect
have consented to commit suicide. Or to the Romanising party in the
Church? The movement sprang from the cloister, and he had breathed the
bracing air of secular life. He was far too clear-headed not to see
whither they were tending. To him they appeared to be simply feeble
imitations of the real thing, dabbling with dangerous arguments, and
trying to revive beliefs long sentenced to extinction.

And yet, with his strong religious beliefs, he could not turn towards
the freethinkers. He perceived indeed with perfect clearness that the
Christian belief was being tried by new tests severer than the old, and
that schools of thought were arising with which the orthodox would have
to reckon. Occasional intimations to this effect dropped from him in his
conversations with my brother and others. But, on the whole, the simple
fact was that he never ventured to go deeply into the fundamental
questions. His official duties left him little time for abstract
thought; and his surpassingly ingenious and versatile mind employed
itself rather in framing excuses for not answering than in finding
thorough answers to possible doubts. He adopted a version of the
doctrine _crede ut intelligas_, and denounced the mere reasoning
machines like David Hume who appealed unequivocally to reason. But what
the faculty was which was to guide or to overrule reas