the Church had been in the habit of sanctioning.
Eminently religious, he never could have been what he was to have been, a
lawyer; but as an independent writer on religion, as a co-worker with
Isaac Taylor, of Ongar, for instance, what might he not have done?
Another mistake of Maurice's is, that his mission is to the poor. His
style is the very last that would be popular with such. In the pulpit or
out, Maurice preaches not to the public, but to the select few--to
literary loungers--to men of ample time and elevated taste--to men of
thought rather than of action--to men freed from the hard necessities of
life, and who can leisurely sit and listen to his notes of 'linked
sweetness long drawn out.' Hence is it that he is more a favourite with
intellectual dissenters than with churchmen, and that I believe at
Lincoln's-inn-fields his congregation is made up more of the former than
the latter. They love his efforts at self-emancipation; they admire his
scholarship, his piety, his taste. They eminently appreciate him, as he,
like the intellectual power of the poet,

'Through words and things
Goes sounding on a dim and perilous way.'

The absence in him of all that is cold and priestly--his human
sympathies--his love to the erring and the weak and the doubting, whom he
would reclaim, are qualities with which the better class of religionists
would heartily sympathize, and with which perhaps they would sympathize
all the more that they come to them couched in language of dream-like
beauty, all glorious, though misty with 'exhalations of the dawn.'

As a writer, Mr. Maurice is well known for his 'History of Metaphysical
Philosophy,' his 'View of the Religions of the World,' his 'Articles of
the Church considered with Reference to the Roman Catholic Controversy,'
and his 'Essays,' which are more especially intended to grapple with the
difficulties Unitarians feel in connection with orthodox doctrine. They
have all obtained an extensive sale; but they are not for the public; not
for the men who buy and sell and get gain--who rise early and sit up
late; but for the student and divine. Hence it is that Maurice and the
school with whom he acts, such as Kingsley, Hare, and Trench, can never
reanimate the Church of England, nor win the operatives over to it. That
they do great good, I admit; that they have a mission, I grant; but not
where they fondly deem it to be. There is a destiny that shapes their
ends