“I have not yet discovered of what I am to die, but I rather believe I shall be burnt alive by the Puseyites.  Nothing so remarkable in England as the progress of these foolish people.[177] I have no conception what they mean, if it be not to revive every absurd ceremony, and every antiquated folly, which the common sense of mankind has set to sleep.  You will find at your return a fanatical Church of England, but pray do not let it prevent your return.  We can always gather together, in Green Street, a chosen few who have never bowed the knee to Rimmon.”

It may be questioned whether the Hermit of Green Street was very well qualified to settle the points at issue between the “Puseyites” and himself, or had bestowed very close attention on what is, after all, mainly a question of Documents.  In earlier days, when it suited his purpose to argue for greater liberality towards Roman Catholics, he had said:—­

    “In their tenets, in their church-government, in the nature of their
    endowments, the Dissenters are infinitely more distant from the Church
    of England than the Catholics are.”

In 1813 he had intervened in the controversy which raged round the cradle of that most pacific institution, the British and Foreign Bible Society, and had taken the unexpectedly clerical view that Churchmen were bound to “circulate the Scriptures with the Prayer Book, in preference to any other method.”  But he grounded a claim to promotion on the fact that he had “always avoided speculative, and preached practical, religion.”  He spoke of a “theological” bishop in the sense of dispraise, and linked the epithet with “bitter” and “bustling.”  Beyond question he had read the Bible, but he was not alarmingly familiar with the sacred text.  It is reported[178] that he once referred to the case of the man who puts his hand to the plough and looks back[179] as being “somewhere in the Epistles.”  He forgot the names of Job’s daughters, until reminded by a neighbouring Squire who had called his greyhounds Jemima, Kezia, and Keren-Happuch.  He attributed the Nunc Dimittis to an author vaguely but conveniently known as “The Psalmist,” and by so doing drew down on himself the ridicule of Wilson Croker.[180] It may be questioned whether he ever read the Prayer Book except in Church.  With the literature of Christian antiquity he had not, so far as his writings show, the slightest acquaintance; and his knowledge of Anglican divines—­Wake, and Cleaver, and Sherlock, and Horsley—­has a suspicious air of having been hastily acquired for the express purpose of confuting Bishop Marsh.  So we will not cite him as a witness in a case where the highest and deepest mysteries of Revelation are involved, and where a minute acquaintance with documents is an indispensable equipment.  We prefer to take leave of him as a Christian preacher, seeking only the edification of his hearers.  In a sermon on the Holy Communion, preached from the pulpit of St. Paul’s, he delivers this striking testimony to a religious truth, which, if stated in a formal proposition, he would probably have disavowed:—­