but also
with something of morbid despair of ever reaching such a standard. It
drove all dreams of ambition out of his mind. It made humility,
self-restraint, self-abasement, objects of unceasing, possibly not
always wise and healthy, effort. But the result was certainly a
character of great sweetness, tenderness, and lowly unselfishness, pure,
free from all worldliness, and deeply resigned to the will of God. He
caught from Mr. Keble, like Froude, two characteristic habits of mind--a
strong depreciation of mere intellect compared with the less showy
excellences of faithfulness to conscience and duty; and a horror and
hatred of everything that seemed like display or the desire of applause
or of immediate effect. Intellectual depreciators of intellect may
deceive themselves, and do not always escape the snare which they fear;
but in Isaac Williams there was a very genuine carrying out of the
Psalmist's words: "Surely I have behaved and quieted myself; I refrain
my soul and keep it low, as a child that is weaned from his mother."
This fear of display in a man of singularly delicate and fastidious
taste came to have something forced and morbid in it. It seemed
sometimes as if in preaching or talking he aimed at being dull and
clumsy. But in all that he did and wrote he aimed at being true at all
costs and in the very depths of his heart; and though, in his words, we
may wish sometimes for what we should feel to be more natural and
healthy in tone, we never can doubt that we are in the presence of one
who shrank from all conscious unreality like poison.

From Keble, or, it may be said, from the Kebles, he received his
theology. The Kebles were all of them men of the old-fashioned High
Church orthodoxy, of the Prayer Book and the Catechism--the orthodoxy
which was professed at Oxford, which was represented in London by Norris
of Hackney and Joshua Watson; which valued in religion sobriety,
reverence, and deference to authority, and in teaching, sound learning
and the wisdom of the great English divines; which vehemently disliked
the Evangelicals and Methodists for their poor and loose theology, their
love of excitement and display, their hunting after popularity. This
Church of England divinity was the theology of the old Vicar of Coln St.
Aldwyn's, a good scholar and a good parish priest, who had brought up
his two sons at home to be scholars; and had impressed his solid and
manly theology on them so strongly that amid all