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, and touching with such tenderness and depth the most delicate and the purest of human feelings, and Keble as the editor of Fronde’s Remains, forward against Dr. Hampden, breaking off a friendship of years with Dr. Arnold, stiff against Liberal change and indulgent to ancient folly and error, the eulogist of patristic mysticism and Bishop Wilson’s “discipline,” and busy in the ecclesiastical agitations and legal wranglings of our later days, about Jerusalem Bishoprics and Courts of Final Appeal and ritual details, about Gorham judgments, Essays and Reviews prosecutions, and Colenso scandals.  The objection to this method of contrast is that it does not give the whole truth.  It does not take notice that, in appreciating a man like Keble, the thing to start from is that his ideal and model and rule of character was neither more nor less than the old Christian one.  It was simply