“. . .  This was the body of death which philosophy detected but could not explain, and from which Catholicism now came forward with its magnificent promise of deliverance.

“The carnal doctrine of the sacraments, which they are compelled to acknowledge to have been taught as fully in the early Church as it is now taught by the Roman Catholics, has long been the stumbling-block to Protestants.  It was the very essence of Christianity itself.  Unless the body could be purified, the soul could not be saved; or, rather, as from the beginning, soul and flesh were one man and inseparable, without his flesh, man was lost, or would cease to be.  But the natural organization of the flesh was infected, and unless organization could begin again from a new original, no pure material substance could exist at all.  He, therefore, by whom God had first made the world, entered into the womb of the Virgin in the form (so to speak) of a new organic cell, and around it, through the virtue of His creative energy, a material body grew again of the substance of His mother, pure of taint and clean as the first body of the first man when it passed out under His hand in the beginning of all things.”

Throughout his essay on the Philosophy of Christianity, where he was maintaining a thesis odious to the majority of his readers, he rings as hard as ever.  The philosophy of Christianity is frankly declared to be Catholicism and Catholicism alone; the truth of Christianity is denied.  It is called a thing “worn and old” even in Luther’s time (upon page 194), and he definitely prophesies a period when “our posterity” shall learn “to despise the miserable fabric which Luther stitched together out of its tatters.”

His judgments are short, violent, compressed.  They are not the judgments of balance.  They are final not as a goal reached is final, but as a death-wound delivered.  He throws out sentences which all the world can see to be insufficient and thin, but whose sharpness is the sharpness of conviction and of a striving determination to achieve conviction in others —–­or if he fails in that, at least to leave an enemy smarting.  Everywhere you have up and down his prose those short parentheses, those side sentences, which are strokes of offence.  Thus on page 199, “We hear—–­or we used to hear when the High Church party were more formidable than they are,” &c.; or again, on page 210, “The Bishop of Natal” (Colenso) has done such and such things, “coupled with certain arithmetical calculations far which he has a special aptitude.”  There are dozens of these in every book he wrote.  They wounded, and were intended to wound.

His intellect may therefore be compared, as I have compared it, to an instrument or a weapon of steel, to a chisel or a sword.  It was hard, polished, keen, stronger than what it bit into, and of its nature enduring.  This was the first of the characters that gave him his secure place in English letters.