would have shrunk with more horror than Mr.
Maurice from the assumption of infallibility. Meanwhile, that the
author's manly confidence in the reasonableness of his method will be
justified hereafter, I must hope, if the Book of Revelation is to
remain, as God grant it may, the political text-book of the Christian
Church.

On one matter, however, Mr. Maurice is never obscure--on questions of
right and wrong. As with St. Paul, his theology, however seemingly
abstruse, always results in some lesson of plain practical morality.
To do the right and eschew the wrong, and that not from hope of
reward or fear of punishment--in which case the right ceases to be
right--but because a man loves the right and hates the wrong; about
this there is no hesitation or evasion in Mr. Maurice's writings. If
any man is in search of a mere philosophy, like the neo-Platonists of
old, or of a mere system of dogmas, by assenting to which he will
gain a right to look down on the unorthodox, while he is absolved
from the duty of becoming a better man than he is and as good a man
as he can be--then let him beware of Mr. Maurice's books, lest, while
searching merely for "thoughts that breathe," he should stumble upon
"words that burn," and were meant to burn. His books, like himself,
are full of that [Greek], that capacity of indignation, which Plato
says is the root of all virtues. "There was something," it has been
well said, "so awful, and yet so Christ-like in its awful sternness,
in the expression which came over that beautiful face when he heard
of anything base or cruel or wicked, that it brought home to the
bystander our Lord's judgment of sin."

And here, perhaps, lay the secret of the extraordinary personal
influence which he exercised; namely, in that truly formidable
element which underlaid a character which (as one said of him)
"combined all that was noblest in man and woman; all the tenderness
and all the strength, all the sensitiveness and all the fire, of
both; and with that a humility which made men feel the utter
baseness, meanness, of all pretension." For can there be true love
without wholesome fear? And does not the old Elizabethan "My dear
dread" express the noblest voluntary relation in which two human
souls can stand to each other? Perfect love casteth out fear. Yes:
but where is love perfect among imperfect beings, save a mother's for
her child? For all the rest, it is through fear that love is made
perfect; f