"[13]

[Footnote 13: _Life and Letters_, p. 295.]

This, taken in conjunction with the passage quoted above from
Clark's Life, in which it is hard to believe that he is not speaking
of himself, seems decisive enough, and in a mind of such speculative
grasp and activity it is remarkable. "Right down through the
storm-zone of the nineteenth century," writes one who knew him well,
"he comes untroubled by the force of the '_aliquid inconcussum_.'
Edinburgh, Germany, Berwick; Hamilton, Kant, Hegel, Strauss, Renan, it
is all the same. The cause seems to me luminously plain. Saints are
never doubters. His religious intuitions were so deep and clear that
he was able always to find his way by their aid. They gave him his
independent certainty, his '_aliquid inconcussum_.'"

His influence on the religious life of his time was largely due to
the spiritual faculty in him that is here referred to. He was the
power he was, not so much because of his intellectual strength as
because of his character,--because he was "a great Christian." But
in this respect he had the defects of his qualities; and it is open
to question whether he ever truly appreciated the formidable character
of modern doubt, just because he himself had never had full experience
of its power, because the iron of it had never really entered into
his soul.

George Gilfillan, who, with all his defects, had often gleams of real
insight, wrote thus in his diary 14th January 1863: "I got yesterday
sent me, per post, a lecture by John Cairns on 'Rationalism,
Ritualism, and Pure Religion,' or some such title, and have read it
with interest, attention, and a good deal of admiration of its ability
and, on the whole, of its spirit. But I can see from it that he is
not the man to grapple with the scepticism of the age. He has not
sufficient sympathy with it, he has not lived in its atmosphere, he
has not visited its profoundest or tossed in its stormiest depths.
Intellectually and logically he understands it as he understands most
other matters, but sympathetically and experimentally he does not."

There is a considerable amount of truth in this, although it is
lacking somewhat in the sympathy which the critic desiderates in the
man he is criticising. Cairns did not feel that the battle with modern
doubt was of absolutely overwhelming importance, and this, along with
the other things to which reference has been made, kept him from
giving to the world that new statement of