No one can have less interest than I have in claiming poetical privileges for the clergy; and no one, I believe, is more thoroughly convinced that the standard which society prescribes for us, and to which we ordinarily conform ourselves, instead of being too severe and lofty, is far too secular and grovelling.  But I apprehend the limitations of this kind which are imposed upon us are themselves exceedingly secular, betokening an entire misconception of the nature of our work, proceeding from maxims and habits which tend to make it utterly insignificant and abortive.  If a man confines himself to the utterance of his own experiences, those experiences are likely to become every day more narrow and less real.  If he confines himself to the defence of certain propositions, he is sure gradually to lose all sense of the connection between those propositions and his own life, or the life of man.  In either case he becomes utterly ineffectual as a teacher.  Those whose education and character are different from his own, whose processes of mind have therefore been different, are utterly unintelligible to him.  Even a cordial desire for sympathy is not able to break through the prickly hedge of habits, notions, and technicalities which separates them.  Oftentimes the desire itself is extinguished in those who ought to cherish it most, by the fear of meeting with something portentous or dangerous.  Nor can he defend a dogma better than he communes with men; for he knows not that which attacks it.  He supposes it to be a set of book arguments, whereas it is something lying very deep in the heart of the disputant, into which he has never penetrated.

Hence there is a general complaint that we ’are ignorant of the thoughts and feelings of our contemporaries’; most attribute this to a fear of looking below the surface, lest we should find hollowness within; many like to have it so, because they have thus an excuse for despising us.  But surely such an ignorance is more inexcusable in us, than in the priests of any nation:  we, less than any, are kept from the sun and air; our discipline is less than any contrived merely to make us acquainted with the commonplaces of divinity.  We are enabled, nay, obliged, from our youth upwards, to mix with people of our own age, who are destined for all occupations and modes of life; to share in their studies, their enjoyments, their perplexities, their temptations.  Experience, often so dearly bought, is surely not meant to be thrown away:  whether it has been obtained without the sacrifice of that which is most precious, or whether the lost blessing has been restored twofold, and good is understood, not only as the opposite of evil, but as the deliverance from it, we cannot be meant to forget all that we have been learning.  The teachers of other nations may reasonably mock us, as having less of direct book-lore than themselves; they should not be able to say, that we are without the compensation of knowing a little more of living creatures.