off the line, like Postel. But although
he deemed it the mark of inferiority to neglect a grain of the gold of
obsolete and eccentric writers, he always assigned to original
speculation a subordinate place, as a good servant but a bad master,
without the certainty and authority of history. What one of his English
friends writes of a divine they both admired, might fitly be applied to
him:

He was a disciple in the school of Bishop Butler, and had learned as
a first principle to recognise the limitations of human knowledge,
and the unphilosophical folly of trying to round off into finished
and pretentious schemes our fragmentary yet certain notices of our
own condition and of God's dealing with it.

He alarmed Archer Gurney by saying that all hope of an understanding is
at an end, if logic be applied for the rectification of dogma, and to
Dr. Plummer, who acknowledged him as the most capable of modern
theologians and historians, he spoke of the hopelessness of trying to
discover the meaning of terms used in definitions. To his archbishop he
wrote that men may discuss the mysteries of faith to the last day
without avail; "we stand here on the solid ground of history, evidence,
and fact." Expressing his innermost thought, that religion exists to
make men better, and that the ethical quality of dogma constitutes its
value, he once said: "Tantum valet quantum ad corrigendum, purgandum,
sanctificandum hominem confert." In theology as an intellectual
exercise, beyond its action on the soul, he felt less interest, and
those disputes most satisfied him which can be decided by appeal to the
historian.

From his early reputation and his position at the outpost, confronting
Protestant science, he was expected to make up his mind over a large
area of unsettled thought and disputed fact, and to be provided with an
opinion--a freehold opinion of his own--and a reasoned answer to every
difficulty. People had a right to know what he knew about the end of the
sixteenth chapter of St. Mark, and the beginning of the eighth chapter
of St. John, the lives of St. Patrick and the sources of Erigena, the
author of the _Imitation_ and of the _Twelve Articles_, the _Nag's Head_
and the _Casket Letters_. The suspense and poise of the mind, which is
the pride and privilege of the unprofessional scholar, was forbidden
him. Students could not wait for the master to complete his studies;
they flocked for dry light of knowledge, for