FREDERICK DENISON MAURICE. {337} IN MEMORIAM

On Friday, the fifth of April, a noteworthy assemblage gathered round
an open vault in a corner of Highgate Cemetery. Some hundreds of
persons, closely packed up the steep banks among the trees and
shrubs, had found in that grave a common bond of brotherhood. I say,
in that grave. They were no sect, clique, or school of disciples,
held together by community of opinions. They were simply men and
women, held together, for the moment at least, by love of a man, and
that man, as they had believed, a man of God. All shades of opinion,
almost of creed, were represented there; though the majority were
members of the Church of England--many probably reconciled to that
Church by him who lay below. All sorts and conditions of men, and
indeed of women, were there; for he had had a word for all sorts and
conditions of men. Most of them had never seen each other before--
would never see each other again. But each felt that the man,
however unknown to him who stood next him, was indeed a brother in
loyalty to that beautiful soul, beautiful face, beautiful smile,
beautiful voice, from which, in public or in secret, each had
received noble impulses, tender consolation, loving correction, and
clearer and juster conceptions of God, of duty, of the meaning of
themselves and of the universe. And when they turned and left his
body there, the world--as one said who served him gallantly and long-
-seemed darker now he had left it; but he had stayed here long enough
to do the work for which he was fitted. He had wasted no time, but
died, like a valiant man, at his work, and of his work.

He might have been buried in Westminster Abbey. There was no lack of
men of mark who held that such a public recognition of his worth was
due, not only to the man himself, but to the honour of the Church of
England. His life had been one of rare sanctity; he was a
philosopher of learning and acuteness, unsurpassed by any man of his
generation; he had done more than any man of that generation to
defend the Church's doctrines; to recommend her to highly-cultivated
men and women; to bring within her pale those who had been born
outside it, or had wandered from it; to reconcile the revolutionary
party among the workmen of the great cities with Christianity, order,
law; to make all ranks understand that if Christianity meant
anything, it meant that a man should not merely strive to save his
own soul