about what the world
thought of appearances, or required as a satisfaction of seeming
consistency. In him was eminently illustrated the characteristic
strength and weakness of English religion, which naturally comes out in
that form of it which is called Anglicanism; that poor Anglicanism, the
butt and laughing-stock of all the clever and high-flying converts to
Rome, of all the clever and high-flying Liberals, and of all those poor
copyists of the first, far from clever, though very high-flying, who
now give themselves out as exclusive heirs of the great name of
Catholic; sneered at on all sides as narrow, meagre, shattered, barren;
which certainly does not always go to the bottom of questions, and is
too much given to "hunting-up" passages for _catenas_ of precedents and
authorities; but which yet has a strange, obstinate, tenacious moral
force in it; which, without being successful in formulating theories or
in solving fallacies, can pierce through pretences and shams; and which
in England seems the only shape in which intense religious faith can
unfold itself and connect itself with morality and duty, without
seeming to wear a peculiar dress of its own, and putting a barrier of
self-chosen watchwords and singularities between itself and the rest of
the nation.

It seems to us a great advantage to truth to have a character thus
exhibited in its unstudied and living completeness, and exhibited
directly, as the impression from life was produced on those before
whose eyes it drew itself out day by day in word and act, as the
occasion presented itself. There is, no doubt, a more vivid and
effective way; one in which the Dean of Westminster is a great master,
though it is not the method which he followed in what is probably his
most perfect work, the _Life of Dr. Arnold_--the method of singling out
points, and placing them, if possible, under a concentrated light, and
in strong contrast and relief. Thus in Keble's case it is easy, and
doubtless to many observers natural and tempting, to put side by side,
with a strange mixture of perplexity and repulsion, _The Christian
Year_, and the treatise _On Eucharistical Adoration_; to compare even
in Keble's poetry, his tone on nature and human life, on the ways of
children and the thoughts of death, with that on religious error and
ecclesiastical divergences from the Anglican type; and to dwell on the
contrast between Keble bearing his great gifts with such sweetness and
modesty