s and charity; and one of the worst faults laid to his charge is
a perilous sort of catholicity. The dissenters never liked his dealings
with the Church of England; and both Episcopalians and Presbyterians
have regretted his intimacy with avowed or suspected Arians. Bishop
Warburton reproached him for editing Hervey's Meditations, and Nathaniel
Neal warned him of the contempt he was incurring amongst many by
associating with "honest crazy Whitefield;" whilst the "rational
dissenters," represented by Dr. Kippis, have regretted that his superior
intelligence was never cast into the Socinian scale. Judging from his
early letters, this latter consummation was at one time far from
unlikely; but the older and more earnest he grew, the more definite
became his creed, and the more intense his affinity for spiritual
Christianity. In ecclesiastical polity he never was a partisan, and for
piety his attraction was always more powerful than for mere theology.
But in that essential element of vital Christianity, a profound and
adoring attachment to the Saviour of men, the orthodoxy of Doddridge was
never gainsaid. Had any one intercepted a packet of his letters, and
found one addressed to Whitefield and another to Wesley; one to the
Archbishop of Canterbury and another to Dr. Webster of Edinburgh; one to
Henry Baker, F.R.S., describing a five-legged limb and similar
prodigies; and another to the Countess of Huntingdon or Joseph Williams,
the Kidderminster manufacturer, on some rare phasis of spiritual
experience; he might have been at a loss to devise a sufficient theory
for such a miscellaneous man. And yet he had a theory. As he writes to
his wife, "I do not merely talk of it, but I feel it at my heart, that
the only important end of life, and the greatest happiness to be
expected in it, consists in seeking in all things to please God,
attempting all the good we can." And from the post-office could the
querist have returned to the great house at the top of the town, and
spent a day in the study, the parlor, and the lecture-room, he would
have found that after all there was a true unity amidst these several
forthgoings. Like Northampton itself, which marches with more counties
than any other shire in England, his tastes were various and his heart
was large, and consequently his borderline was long. And yet Northampton
has a surface and a solid content, as well as a circumference; and
amidst all his complaisance and all his versatility