y. He was happiest in solitude where, undisturbed, he
could solve the abstruse problems of ethics, or be a delighted critic
of metaphysical theories, or seek to penetrate the mysteries of
theology. He was consequently in danger of contemplating his
subjects, like so many others of his time, both in Church and State,
too much in their refined essence, and too little in their
comprehensive practical relations; rather as things, in his judgment,
ought to be, than as they are; too much in the light of a fictitious
principle, and too little in that of experience, history, and analogy;
rather according to God's original constitution than the actual
necessities of a fallen state; too much as they may be in the ultimate
development of God's moral providence, and too little as they are in
its administrative course. Hence, but for the greatest care which, in
the main, he exercised, he would have been likely to crowd into his
definitions and postulates more than they naturally admitted, or to
make them less than they naturally required; to mistake, for the basis
of his fulcrum, a speculative subtlety instead of a practical reality;
and, consequently, to make his inexorable logic draw too much, or to
little, for legitimate practical effect. If, occasionally tempted by
the excitement of our present types of speculative and conjectural
science, he seemed to overstep the limits which God has prescribed to
us in our present probationary state, and to make the human a measure
of the Divine, it was done not presumptuously, from a spirit of
conceited and ambitious intermeddling with things forbidden, but
unconsciously, from an honest desire for knowledge. When he perceived,
as he was not slow to perceive, that many of the objects which now so
much allure the learned men of the world, who are falsely so called,
were not real, but ideal and conceptional only, not actual knowledge
verifiable by a day-light test, but shadows and chimeras chasing one
another over the moonlit sky, then he retreated. He chose to stop,
reverentially, as taught by Scripture, when he must, rather than to be
driven back by the cherubim and the flaming sword. Not even Kant, or
Coleridge, or any of their living imitators, however congenial their
respective tastes for speculative subtleties, could tempt him so to
disregard the boundary between reason and faith as to lose sight of
Calvary, or mistake an _ignis fatuus_ for the Sun of Righteousness.
His college experience,