MEMOIR OF THE LATE JOHN PICKARD OWEN. (CHAPTER I. OF THE FAIR HAVEN.)
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The subject of this memoir, and author of the work which follows it, was
born in Goodge Street, Tottenham Court Road, London, on the 5th of
February 1832. He was my elder brother by about eighteen months. Our
father and mother had once been rich, but through a succession of
unavoidable misfortunes they were left with but a slender income when my
brother and myself were about three and four years old. My father died
some five or six years afterwards, and we only recollected him as a
singularly gentle and humorous playmate who doted upon us both and never
spoke unkindly.
The charm of such a recollection can never be dispelled; both my brother
and myself returned his love with interest, and cherished his memory with
the most affectionate regret, from the day on which he left us till the
time came that the one of us was again to see him face to face. So sweet
and winning was his nature that his slightest wish was our law--and
whenever we pleased him, no matter how little, he never failed to thank
us as though we had done him a service which we should have had a perfect
right to withhold. How proud were we upon any of these occasions, and
how we courted the opportunity of being thanked! He did indeed well know
the art of becoming idolised by his children, and dearly did he prize the
results of his own proficiency; yet truly there was no art about it; all
arose spontaneously from the well-spring of a sympathetic nature which
was quick to feel as others felt, whether old or young, rich or poor,
wise or foolish. On one point alone did he neglect us--I refer to our
religious education. On all other matters he was the kindest and most
careful teacher in the world. Love and gratitude be to his memory!
My mother loved us no less ardently than my father, but she was of a
quicker temper, and less adept at conciliating affection. She must have
been exceedingly handsome when she was young, and was still comely when
we first remembered her; she was also highly accomplished, but she felt
my father's loss of fortune more keenly than my father himself, and it
preyed upon her mind, though rather for our sake than for her own. Had
we not known my father we should have loved her better than any one in
the world, but affection goes by comparison, and my father spoiled us for
any one but himself; indeed, in after life, I remember my mother's
telling me, with many tears, how jealous she had often been of the love
we bore him, and how mean she had thought it of him to entrust all
scolding or repression to her, so that he might have more than his due
share of our affection. Not that I believe my father did this
consciously; still, he so greatly hated scolding that I dare say we might
often have got off scot-free when we really deserved reproof had not my
mother undertaken the _onus_ of scolding us herself. We therefore
naturally feared her more than my father, and fearing more we loved less.
For as love casteth out fear, so fear love.
This must have been hard to bear, and my mother scarcely knew the way to
bear it. She tried to upbraid us, in little ways, into loving her as
much as my father; the more she tried this, the less we could succeed in
doing it; and so on and so on in a fashion which need not be detailed.
Not but what we really loved her deeply, while her affection for us was
insurpassable; still we loved her less than we loved my father, and this
was the grievance.
My father entrusted our religious education entirely to my mother. He
was himself, I am assured, of a deeply religious turn of mind, and a
thoroughly consistent member of the Church of England; but he conceived,
and perhaps rightly, that it is the mother who should first teach her
children to lift their hands in prayer, and impart to them a knowledge of
the One in whom we live and move and have our being. My mother accepted
the task gladly, for in spite of a certain narrowness of view--the
natural but deplorable result of her earlier surroundings--she was one of
the most truly pious women whom I have ever known; unfortunately for
herself and us she had been trained in the lowest school of Evangelical
literalism--a school which in after life both my brother and myself came
to regard as the main obstacle to the complete overthrow of unbelief; we
therefore looked upon it with something stronger than aversion, and for
my own part I still deem it perhaps the most insidious enemy which the
cause of Christ has ever encountered. But of this more hereafter.
My mother, as I said, threw her whole soul into the work of our religious
education. Whatever she believed she believed literally, and, if I may
say so, with a harshness of realisation which left little scope for
imagination or mystery. Her ideas concerning heaven and her solutions of
life's enigmas were clear and simple, but they could only be reconciled
with certain obvious facts--such as the omnipotence and all-goodness of
God--by leaving many things absolutely out of sight. And this my mother
succeeded effectually in doing. She never doubted that her opinions
comprised the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth; she
therefore made haste to sow the good seed in our tender minds, and so far
succeeded that when my brother was four years old he could repeat the
Apostles' Creed, the general confession, and the Lord's Prayer without a
blunder. My mother made herself believe that he delighted in them; but,
alas! it was far otherwise; for strange as it may appear concerning one
whose later life was a continual prayer, in childhood he detested nothing
so much as being made to pray, and to learn his catechism. In this I am
sorry to say we were both heartily of a mind. As for Sunday the less
said the better.
I have already hinted (but as a warning to other parents had better,
perhaps, express myself more plainly) that this aversion was probably the
result of my mother's undue eagerness to reap an artificial fruit of lip-
service, which could have little meaning to the heart of one so young. I
believe that the severe check which the natural growth of faith
experienced in my brother's case was due almost entirely to this cause,
and to the school of literalism in which he had been trained; but,
however this may be, we both of us hated being made to say our prayers.
Morning and evening it was our one bugbear, and we would avoid it, as
indeed children generally will, by every artifice which we could employ.
Thus we were in the habit of feigning to be asleep shortly before prayer
time, and would gratefully hear my father tell my mother that it was a
shame to wake us; whereon he would carry us up to bed in a state
apparently of the profoundest slumber when we were really wide awake and
in great fear of detection. For we knew how to pretend to be asleep, but
we did not know how we ought to wake again; there was nothing for it
therefore when we were once committed, but to go on sleeping till we were
fairly undressed and put to bed, and could wake up safely in the dark.
But deceit is never long successful, and we were at last ignominiously
exposed.
It happened one evening that my mother suspected my brother John, and
tried to open his little hands which were lying clasped in front of him.
Now my brother was as yet very crude and inconsistent in his theories
concerning sleep, and had no conception what a real sleeper would do
under these circumstances. Fear deprived him of his powers of
reflection, and he thus unfortunately concluded that because sleepers, so
far as he had observed them, were always motionless, therefore they must
be rigid and incapable of motion; and indeed that any movement, under any
circumstances (for from his earliest childhood he liked to carry his
theories to their legitimate conclusion), would be physically impossible
for one who was really sleeping; forgetful, oh! unhappy one, of the
flexibility of his own body on being carried up stairs, and, more unhappy
still, ignorant of the art of waking. He therefore clenched his fingers
harder and harder as he felt my mother trying to unfold them, while his
head hung listless, and his eyes were closed as though he were sleeping
sweetly. It is needless to detail the agony of shame that followed. My
mother begged my father to box his ears, which my father flatly refused
to do. Then she boxed them herself, and there followed a scene, and a
day or two of disgrace for both of us.
Shortly after this there happened another misadventure. A lady came to
stay with my mother, and was to sleep in a bed that had been brought into
our nursery, for my father's fortunes had already failed, and we were
living in a humble way. We were still but four and five years old, so
the arrangement was not unnatural, and it was assumed that we should be
asleep before the lady went to bed, and be down stairs before she would
get up in the morning. But the arrival of this lady and her being put to
sleep in the nursery were great events to us in those days, and being
particularly wanted to go to sleep, we of course sat up in bed talking
and keeping ourselves awake till she should come up stairs. Perhaps we
had fancied that she would give us something, but if so we were
disappointed. However, whether this was the case or not, we were wide
awake when our visitor came to bed, and having no particular object to
gain, we made no pretence of sleeping. The lady kissed us both, told us
to lie still and go to sleep like good children, and then began doing her
hair.
I remember this was the occasion on which my brother discovered a good
many things in connection with the fair sex which had hitherto been
beyond his ken; more especially that the mass of petticoats and clothes
which envelop the female form were not, as he expressed it to me, "all
solid woman," but that women were not in reality more substantially built
than men, and had legs as much as he had--a fact which he had never yet
realised. On this he for a long time considered them as impostors, who
had wronged him by leading him to suppose that they had far more "body in
them" (so he said) than he now found they had.
This was a sort of thing which he regarded with stern moral reprobation.
If he had been old enough to have a solicitor I believe he would have put
the matter into his hands, as well as certain other things which had
lately troubled him. For but recently my mother had bought a fowl, and
he had seen it plucked, and the inside taken out; his irritation had been
extreme on discovering that fowls were not all solid flesh, but that
their insides--and these formed, as it appeared to him, an enormous
percentage of the bird--were perfectly useless. He was now beginning to
understand that sheep and cows were also hollow as far as good meat was
concerned; the flesh they had was only a mouthful in comparison with what
they ought to have considering their apparent bulk: insignificant, mere
skin and bone covering a cavern. What right had they, or anything else,
to assert themselves as so big, and prove so empty? And now this
discovery of woman's falsehood was quite too much for him. The world
itself was hollow, made up of shams and delusions, full of sound and fury
signifying nothing.
Truly a prosaic young gentleman enough. Everything with him was to be
exactly in all its parts what it appeared on the face of it, and
everything was to go on doing exactly what it had been doing hitherto. If
a thing looked solid, it was to be very solid; if hollow, very hollow;
nothing was to be half and half, and nothing was to change unless he had
himself already become accustomed to its times and manners of changing;
there were to be no exceptions and no contradictions; all things were to
be perfectly consistent, and all premisses to be carried with extremest
rigour to their legitimate conclusions. Heaven was to be very neat (for
he was always tidy himself), and free from sudden shocks to the nervous
system, such as those caused by dogs barking at him, or cows driven in
the streets. God was to resemble my father, and the Holy Spirit to bear
some sort of indistinct analogy to my mother.
Such were the ideal theories of his childhood--unconsciously formed, but
very firmly believed in. As he grew up he made such modifications as
were forced upon him by enlarged perceptions, but every modification was
an effort to him, in spite of a continual and successful resistance to
what he recognised as his initial mental defect.
I may perhaps be allowed to say here, in reference to a remark in the
preceding paragraph, that both my brother and myself used to notice it as
an almost invariable rule that children's earliest ideas of God are
modelled upon the character of their father--if they have one. Should
the father be kind, considerate, full of the warmest love, fond of
showing it, and reserved only about his displeasure, the child, having
learned to look upon God as his Heavenly Father through the Lord's Prayer
and our Church Services, will feel towards God as he does towards his own
father; this conception will stick to a man for years and years after he
has attained manhood--probably it will never leave him. On the other
hand, if a man has found his earthly father harsh and uncongenial, his
conception of his Heavenly Parent will be painful. He will begin by
seeing God as an exaggerated likeness of his father. He will therefore
shrink from Him. The rottenness of still-born love in the heart of a
child poisons the blood of the soul, and hence, later, crime.
To return, however, to the lady. When she had put on her night-gown, she
knelt down by her bed-side and, to our consternation, began to say her
prayers. This was a cruel blow to both of us; we had always been under
the impression that grown-up people were not made to say their prayers,
and the idea of any one saying them of his or her own accord had never
occurred to us as possible. Of course the lady would not say her prayers
if she were not obliged; and yet she did say them; therefore she must be
obliged to say them; therefore we should be obliged to say them, and this
was a great disappointment. Awe-struck and open-mouthed we listened
while the lady prayed aloud and with a good deal of pathos for many
virtues and blessings which I do not now remember, and finally for my
father and mother and for both of us--shortly afterwards she rose, blew
out the light and got into bed. Every word that she said had confirmed
our worst apprehensions: it was just what we had been taught to say
ourselves.
Next morning we compared notes and drew some painful inferences; but in
the course of the day our spirits rallied. We agreed that there were
many mysteries in connection with life and things which it was high time
to unravel, and that an opportunity was now afforded us which might not
readily occur again. All we had to do was to be true to ourselves and
equal to the occasion. We laid our plans with great astuteness. We
would be fast asleep when the lady came up to bed, but our heads should
be turned in the direction of her bed, and covered with clothes, all but
a single peep-hole. My brother, as the eldest, had clearly a right to be
nearest the lady, but I could see sufficiently, and could depend on his
reporting faithfully whatever should escape me.
There was no chance of her giving us anything--if she had meant to do so
she would have done it sooner; she might, indeed, consider the moment of
her departure as the most auspicious for this purpose, but then she was
not going yet, and the interval was at our own disposal. We spent the
afternoon in trying to learn to snore, but we were not certain about it,
and in the end concluded that as snoring was not _de rigueur_ we had
better dispense with it.
We were put to bed; the light was taken away; we were told to go to
sleep, and promised faithfully that we would do so; the tongue indeed
swore, but the mind was unsworn. It was agreed that we should keep
pinching one another to prevent our going to sleep. We did so at
frequent intervals; at last our patience was rewarded with the heavy
creak, as of a stout elderly lady labouring up the stairs, and presently
our victim entered.
To cut a long story short, the lady on satisfying herself that we were
asleep, never said her prayers at all; during the remainder of her visit
whenever she found us awake she always said them, but when she thought we
were asleep, she never prayed. I should perhaps say that we had the
matter out with her before she left, and that the consequences were
unpleasant for all parties; they added to the troubles in which we were
already involved as to our prayers, and were indirectly among the
earliest causes which led my brother to look with scepticism upon
religion.
For awhile, however, all went on as though nothing had happened. An
effect of distrust, indeed, remained after the cause had been forgotten,
but my brother was still too young to oppose anything that my mother told
him, and to all outward appearance he grew in grace no less rapidly than
in stature.
For years we led a quiet and eventless life, broken only by the one great
sorrow of our father's death. Shortly after this we were sent to a day
school in Bloomsbury. We were neither of us very happy there, but my
brother, who always took kindly to his books, picked up a fair knowledge
of Latin and Greek; he also learned to draw, and to exercise himself a
little in English composition. When I was about fourteen my mother
capitalised a part of her income and started me off to America, where she
had friends who could give me a helping hand; by their kindness I was
enabled, after an absence of twenty years, to return with a handsome
income, but not, alas! before the death of my mother.
Up to the time of my departure my mother continued to read the Bible with
us and explain it. She had become enamoured of those millenarian
opinions which laid hold of so many some twenty-five or thirty years ago.
The Apocalypse was perhaps her favourite book in the Bible, and she was
imbued with a conviction that all the many and varied horrors with which
it teems were upon the eve of their accomplishment. The year eighteen
hundred and forty-eight was to be (as indeed it was) a time of general
bloodshed and confusion, while in eighteen hundred and sixty-six, should
it please God to spare her, her eyes would be gladdened by the visible
descent of the Son of Man with a shout, with the voice of the Archangel,
with the trump of God, and the dead in Christ should rise first; then
she, as one of them that were alive, would be caught up with other saints
into the air, and would possibly receive while rising some distinguishing
token of confidence and approbation which should fall with due
impressiveness upon the surrounding multitude; then would come the
consummation of all things, and she would be ever with the Lord. She
died peaceably in her bed before she could know that a commercial panic
was the nearest approach to the fulfilment of prophecy which the year
eighteen hundred and sixty-six brought forth.
These opinions of my mother's injured her naturally healthy and vigorous
mind by leading her to indulge in all manner of dreamy and fanciful
interpretations of Scripture, which any but the most narrow literalist
would feel at once to be untenable. Thus several times she expressed to
us her conviction that my brother and myself were to be the two witnesses
mentioned in the eleventh chapter of the Book of Revelation, and dilated
upon the gratification she should experience upon finding that we had
indeed been reserved for a position of such distinction. We were as yet
mere children, and naturally took all for granted that our mother told
us; we therefore made a careful examination of the passage which threw
light upon our future. On finding that the prospect was gloomy and full
of bloodshed we protested against the honours which were intended for us,
more especially when we reflected that the mother of the two witnesses
was not menaced in Scripture with any particular discomfort. If we were
to be martyrs, my mother ought to wish to be a martyr too, whereas
nothing was farther from her intention. Her notion clearly was that we
were to be massacred somewhere in the streets of London, in consequence
of the anti-Christian machinations of the Pope; that after lying about
unburied for three days and a half we were to come to life again; and
finally, that we should conspicuously ascend to heaven, in front,
perhaps, of the Foundling Hospital.
She was not herself indeed to share either our martyrdom or our
glorification, but was to survive us many years on earth, living in an
odour of great sanctity and reflected splendour, as the central and most
august figure in a select society. She would perhaps be able indirectly,
through her sons' influence with the Almighty, to have a voice in most of
the arrangements both of this world and of the next. If all this were to
come true (and things seemed very like it), those friends who had
neglected us in our adversity would not find it too easy to be restored
to favour, however greatly they might desire it--that is to say, they
would not have found it too easy in the case of one less magnanimous and
spiritually-minded than herself. My mother said but little of the above
directly, but the fragments which occasionally escaped her were pregnant,
and on looking back it is easy to perceive that she must have been
building one of the most stupendous aerial fabrics that have ever been
reared.
I have given the above in its more amusing aspect, and am half afraid
that I may appear to be making a jest of weakness on the part of one of
the most devotedly unselfish mothers who have ever existed. But one can
love while smiling, and the very wildness of my mother's dream serves to
show how entirely her whole soul was occupied with the things which are
above. To her, religion was all in all; the earth was but a place of
pilgrimage--only so far important as it was a possible road to heaven.
She impressed this upon both of us by every word and action--instant in
season and out of season, so that she might but fill us more deeply with
a sense of the things belonging to our peace.
But the inevitable consequences happened; my mother had aimed too high
and had overshot her mark. The influence indeed of her guileless and
unworldly nature remained impressed upon my brother even during the time
of his extremest unbelief (perhaps his ultimate safety is in the main
referable to this cause, and to the happy memories of my father, which
had predisposed him to love God), but my mother had insisted on the most
minute verbal accuracy of every part of the Bible; she had also dwelt
upon the duty of independent research, and on the necessity of giving up
everything rather than assent to things which our conscience did not
assent to. No one could have more effectually taught us to try _to
think_ the truth, and we had taken her at her word because our hearts
told us that she was right. But she required three incompatible things.
When my brother grew older he came to feel that independent and
unflinching examination, with a determination to abide by the results,
would lead him to reject the point which to my mother was more important
than any other--I mean the absolute accuracy of the Gospel records. My
mother was inexpressibly shocked at hearing my brother doubt the
authenticity of the Epistle to the Hebrews; and then, as it appeared to
him, she tried to make him violate the duties of examination and candour
which he had learnt too thoroughly to unlearn. Thereon came pain and an
estrangement which was none the less profound for being mutually
concealed. It seemed to my mother that he would not give up the
wilfulness of his own opinions for her and for his Redeemer's sake. To
him it seemed that he was ready to give up not only his mother but Christ
Himself for Christ's sake.
This estrangement was the gradual work of some five or six years, during
which my brother was between eleven and seventeen years old. At
seventeen, I am told that he was remarkably well informed and clever. His
manners were, like my father's, singularly genial, and his appearance
very prepossessing. He had as yet no doubt concerning the soundness of
any fundamental Christian doctrine, but his mind was already too active
to allow of his being contented with my mother's childlike faith. There
were points on which he did not indeed doubt, but which it would none the
less be interesting to consider; such for example as the perfectibility
of the regenerate Christian, and the meaning of the mysterious central
chapters of the Epistle to the Romans. He was engaged in these
researches though still only a boy, when an event occurred which gave the
first real shock to his faith.
He was accustomed to teach in a school for the poorest children every
Sunday afternoon, a task for which his patience and good temper well
fitted him. On one occasion, however, while he was explaining the effect
of baptism to one of his favourite pupils, he discovered to his great
surprise that the boy had never been baptized. He pushed his inquiries
further, and found that out of the fifteen boys in his class only five
had been baptized, and, not only so, but that no difference in
disposition or conduct could be discovered between the regenerate boys
and the unregenerate. The good and bad boys were distributed in
proportions equal to the respective numbers of the baptized and
unbaptized. In spite of a certain impetuosity of natural character, he
was also of a matter-of-fact and experimental turn of mind; he therefore
went through the whole school, which numbered about a hundred boys, and
found out who had been baptized and who had not. The same results
appeared. The majority had not been baptized; yet the good and bad
dispositions were so distributed as to preclude all possibility of
maintaining that the baptized boys were better than the unbaptized.
The reader may smile at the idea of any one's faith being troubled by a
fact of which the explanation is so obvious, but as a matter of fact my
brother was seriously and painfully shocked. The teacher to whom he
applied for a solution of the difficulty was not a man of any real power,
and reported my brother to the rector for having disturbed the school by
his inquiries. The rector was old and self-opinionated; the difficulty,
indeed, was plainly as new to him as it had been to my brother, but
instead of saying so at once, and referring to any recognised theological
authority, he tried to put him off with words which seemed intended to
silence him rather than to satisfy him; finally he lost his temper, and
my brother fell under suspicion of unorthodoxy.
This kind of treatment did not answer with my brother. He alludes to it
resentfully in the introductory chapter of his book. He became
suspicious that a preconceived opinion was being defended at the expense
of honest scrutiny, and was thus driven upon his own unaided
investigation. The result may be guessed: he began to go astray, and
strayed further and further. The children of God, he reasoned, the
members of Christ and inheritors of the kingdom of heaven, were no more
spiritually minded than the children of the world and the devil. Was
then the grace of God a gift which left no trace whatever upon those who
were possessed of it? A thing the presence or absence of which might be
ascertained by consulting the parish registry, but was not discernible in
conduct? The grace of man was more clearly perceptible than this.
Assuredly there must be a screw loose somewhere, which, for aught he
knew, might be jeopardising the salvation of all Christendom. Where then
was this loose screw to be found?
He concluded after some months of reflection that the mischief was caused
by the system of sponsors and by infant baptism. He, therefore, to my
mother's inexpressible grief, joined the Baptists, and was immersed in a
pond near Dorking. With the Baptists he remained quiet about three
months, and then began to quarrel with his instructors as to their
doctrine of predestination. Shortly afterwards he came accidentally upon
a fascinating stranger who was no less struck with my brother than my
brother with him, and this gentleman, who turned out to be a Roman
Catholic missionary, landed him in the Church of Rome, where he felt sure
that he had now found rest for his soul. But here, too, he was mistaken;
after about two years he rebelled against the stifling of all free
inquiry; on this rebellion the flood-gates of scepticism were opened, and
he was soon battling with unbelief. He then fell in with one who was a
pure Deist, and was shorn of every shred of dogma which he had ever held,
except a belief in the personality and providence of the Creator.
On reviewing his letters written to me about this time, I am painfully
struck with the manner in which they show that all these pitiable
vagaries were to be traced to a single cause--a cause which still exists
to the misleading of hundreds of thousands, and which, I fear, seems
likely to continue in full force for many a year to come--I mean, to a
false system of training which teaches people to regard Christianity as a
thing one and indivisible, to be accepted entirely in the strictest
reading of the letter, or to be rejected as absolutely untrue. The fact
is, that all permanent truth is as one of those coal measures, a seam of
which lies near the surface, and even crops up above the ground, but
which is generally of an inferior quality and soon worked out; beneath it
there comes a labour of sand and clay, and then at last the true seam of
precious quality, and in virtually inexhaustible supply. The truth which
is on the surface is rarely the whole truth. It is seldom until this has
been worked out and done with--as in the case of the apparent flatness of
the earth--that unchangeable truth is discovered. It is the glory of the
Lord to conceal a matter: it is the glory of the king to find it out. If
my brother, from whom I have taken the above illustration, had had some
judicious and wide-minded friend, to correct and supplement the mainly
admirable principles which had been instilled into him by my mother, he
would have been saved years of spiritual wandering; but, as it was, he
fell in with one after another, each in his own way as literal and
unspiritual as the other--each impressed with one aspect of religious
truth, and with one only. In the end he became perhaps the widest-minded
and most original thinker whom I have ever met; but no one from his early
manhood could have augured this result; on the contrary, he showed every
sign of being likely to develop into one of those who can never see more
than one side of a question at a time, in spite of their seeing that side
with singular clearness of mental vision. In after life, he often met
with mere lads who seemed to him to be years and years in advance of what
he had been at their age, and would say, smiling, "With a great sum
obtained I this freedom; but thou wast free-born."
Yet when one comes to think of it, a late development and laborious
growth are generally more fruitful than those which are over early
luxuriant. Drawing an illustration from the art of painting, with which
he was well acquainted, my brother used to say that all the greatest
painters had begun with a hard and precise manner, from which they had
only broken after several years of effort; and that in like manner all
the early schools were founded upon definiteness of outline to the
exclusion of truth of effect. This may be true; but in my brother's case
there was something even more unpromising than this; there was a
commonness, so to speak, of mental execution, from which no one could
have foreseen his after-emancipation. Yet in the course of time he was
indeed emancipated to the very uttermost, while his bonds will, I firmly
trust, be found to have been of inestimable service to the whole human
race.
For although it was so many years before he was enabled to see the
Christian scheme _as a whole_, or even to conceive the idea that there
was any whole at all, other than each one of the stages of opinion
through which he was at the time passing; yet when the idea was at length
presented to him by one whom I must not name, the discarded fragments of
his faith assumed shape, and formed themselves into a consistently
organised scheme. Then became apparent the value of his knowledge of the
details of so many different sides of Christian verity. Buried in the
details, he had hitherto ignored the fact that they were only the
unessential developments of certain component parts. Awakening to the
perception of the whole after an intimate acquaintance with the details,
he was able to realise the position and meaning of all that he had
hitherto experienced in a way which has been vouchsafed to few, if any
others. Thus he became truly a broad Churchman. Not broad in the
ordinary and ill-considered use of the term (for the broad Churchman is
as little able to sympathise with Romanists, extreme High Churchmen and
Dissenters, as these are with himself--he is only one of a sect which is
called by the name of broad, though it is no broader than its own base),
but in the true sense of being able to believe in the naturalness,
legitimacy, and truth _qua_ Christianity even of those doctrines which
seem to stand most widely and irreconcilably asunder.