he Theistic side. "A Stream of Tendency" can never satisfy the idea of
God, as ordinary humanity conceives it. It is not in human nature to
love a stream of tendency, or worship it, or ask boons of it; or to
credit it with powers of design, volition, or creation. A prayer
beginning "Stream" would sound as odd as Wordsworth's ode beginning
"Spade."[57]

But he had, as we have already seen, an unending admiration--a homage
which did not stop far short of worship--for the character and teaching
of Jesus Christ; and he placed salvation in conformity to that teaching,
as it is explained by St. Paul. And this meant death to sin; the
abrogation and annulment of bad habits and tendencies; resurrection with
Christ to the higher life which He taught us to pursue. _The law was
given by Moses, but grace and truth came by Jesus Christ._ He would have
allowed no antithesis between the two halves of the text, but would have
taught that the eternal welfare of man consisted in obeying the Law,
receiving the Grace, and pursuing the Truth.

Nothing more dogmatic than this could safely be put forward as
representing his theology; but, though not dogmatic, his mind was
intensely ecclesiastical. His contempt for individual whims and fancies,
his love of corporate action and collective control, operated as
powerfully in the religious as in the social sphere. He admired and
clave to the Church of England because it was not, like Miss Cobbe's new
religion and the British College of Health, the product of an individual
fancy, setting out to make all things new on a plan of its own. The
Church of England, whether it could theologically be called "Catholic"
or not, was certainly "the continuous and historical Church of this
country." In 1869 he praised his friend Temple, afterwards Archbishop,
for "showing his strong Church feeling, and sense of the value and
greatness of the historic development of Christianity, of which the
Church is the expression." It was the National organ for promoting
Righteousness and Perfection by means of Culture and for diffusing
Sweetness and Light. In the last year of his life he wrote to Mr. Lionel
Tollemache: "I consider myself, to adopt your very good expression, a
Liberal Anglican; and I think the times are in favour of our being
allowed so to call ourselves."

As regards differences of opinion inside the Church, he saw no harm in
them. He held that the Church must maintain Episcopacy as a matter of
historical