hat
everything is referred--by that everything is explained.

In bringing home these great truths to the feelings of those who had
lived insensible to them lay the chief value of his preaching. He
awakened men to believe that there was freshness and reality in things
which they had by use become dulled to. There are no doubt minds which
rise to the truth most naturally and freely without the intervention of
dogmatic expressions, and to these such expressions, as they are a
limit and a warning, are also felt as a clog. Mr. Robertson's early
experience had made him suspicious and irritable about dogma as such;
and he prided himself on being able to dispense with it, while at the
same time preserving the principle and inner truth which it was
intended to convey. But in his ostentatious contempt of dogmatic
precision and exactness, none but those who have not thought about the
matter will see any proof of his strength or wisdom. Dogma, accurate,
subtle, scientific, does not prevent a mind of the first order from
breathing freshness of feeling, grandeur, originality, and the sense of
reality, into the exposition of the truth which it represents. It is no
fetter except to those minds which in their impulsiveness, their
self-confidence, and their want of adequate grasp and sustained force,
most need its salutary restraint. And no man has a right, however
eloquent and impressive his speech may be, to talk against dogma till
he shows that he does not confound accuracy of statement with
conventional formalism. Mr. Robertson lays down the law pretty
confidently about the blunders of everybody about him--Tractarian,
Evangelical, Dissenter, Romanist, and Rationalist. We must say that the
impression of every page of his letters is, that clear and "intuitive"
as he was, he had not always understood what he condemned. He was
especially satisfied with a view of Baptism which he thought rose above
both extremes and took in the truth of both while it avoided their
errors. But is it too much to say that a man who, not in the heat of
rhetoric, but when preparing candidates for Confirmation, and piquing
himself on his freedom from all prejudice, deliberately describes the
common Church view of Baptism as implying a "magical" change, and
actually illustrates what he means by the stories of magical changes in
the _Arabian Nights_--who knowing, or able to read, all that has been
said by divines on the subject from the days of Augustine, yet