not for literary leisure, nor for the physical rest which he absolutely required, but merely as an excuse for greater and more arduous toil.  If such a man was not the man whom the Church of England would delight to honour, who was the man?  But he was gone; and a grave among England’s worthies was all that could be offered him now; and it was offered.  But those whose will on such a point was law, judged it to be more in keeping with the exquisite modesty and humility of Frederick Denison Maurice, that he should be laid out of sight, though not out of mind, by the side of his father and his mother.  Well:  be it so.  At least that green nook at Highgate will be a sacred spot to hundreds—­it may be to thousands—­who owe him more than they will care to tell to any created being.

It was, after all, in this—­in his personal influence—­that Mr. Maurice was greatest.  True, he was a great and rare thinker.  Those who wish to satisfy themselves of this should measure the capaciousness of his intellect by studying—­not by merely reading—­ his Boyle Lectures on the Religions of the world; and that Kingdom of Christ, the ablest “Apology” for the Catholic Faith which England has seen for more than two hundred years.  The ablest, and perhaps practically the most successful; for it has made the Catholic Faith look living, rational, practical, and practicable, to hundreds who could rest neither in modified Puritanism nor modified Romanism, and still less in scepticism, however earnest.  The fact that it is written from a Realist point of view, as all Mr. Maurice’s books are, will make it obscure to many readers.  Nominalism is just now so utterly in the ascendant, that most persons seem to have lost the power of thinking, as well as of talking, by any other method.  But when the tide of thought shall turn, this, and the rest of Mr. Maurice’s works, will become not only precious but luminous, to a generation which will have recollected that substance does not mean matter, that a person is not the net result of his circumstances, and that the real is not the visible Actual, but the invisible Ideal.

If anyone, again, would test Mr. Maurice’s faculty as an interpreter of Scripture, let him study the two volumes on the Gospel and the Epistles of St. John; and study, too, the two volumes on the Old Testament, which have been (as a fact) the means of delivering more than one or two from both the Rationalist and the Mythicist theories of interpretation.  I mention these only as peculiar examples of Mr. Maurice’s power.  To those who have read nothing of his, I would say:  “Take up what book you will, you will be sure to find in it something new to you, something noble, something which, if you can act on it, will make you a better man.”  And if anyone, on making the trial, should say:  “But I do not understand the book.  It is to me a new world;” then it must be answered:  “If you wish to read only books which you can understand