that only through a visible life of the Divines in the flesh could God become intelligible to men; that Christ was God’s idea of our nature realised; that only when we fall back on the glorious portrait of what has been, ran we be delivered from despair of Humanity; that in Christ “all the blood of all the nations ran,” and all the powers of man were redeemed.  Therefore he grasped as the highest truth, on which to rest life and thought, the reality expressed in the words, “the Word was made Flesh.”  The Incarnation was to him the centre of all history, the blossoming of Humanity.  The Life which followed the Incarnation was the explanation of the Life of God, and the only solution of the problem of the Life of man.  He did not speak much of loving Christ; his love was fitly mingled with that veneration which makes love perfect; his voice was solemn, and he paused before he spoke His name in common talk; for what that name meant had become the central thought of his intellect and the deepest realisation of his spirit.  He had spent a world of study, of reverent meditation, of adoring contemplation, on the Gospel history.  Nothing comes forward more frequently in his letters than the way in which he had entered into the human life of Christ.  To that everything is referred—­by that everything is explained.

In bringing home these great truths to the feelings of those who had lived insensible to them lay the chief value of his preaching.  He awakened men to believe that there was freshness and reality in things which they had by use become dulled to.  There are no doubt minds which rise to the truth most naturally and freely without the intervention of dogmatic expressions, and to these such expressions, as they are a limit and a warning, are also felt as a clog.  Mr. Robertson’s early experience had made him suspicious and irritable about dogma as such; and he prided himself on being able to dispense with it, while at the same time preserving the principle and inner truth which it was intended to convey.  But in his ostentatious contempt of dogmatic precision and exactness, none but those who have not thought about the matter will see any proof of his strength or wisdom.  Dogma, accurate, subtle, scientific, does not prevent a mind of the first order from breathing freshness of feeling, grandeur, originality, and the sense of reality, into the exposition of the truth which it represents.  It is no fetter except to those minds which in their impulsiveness, their self-confidence, and their want of adequate grasp and sustained force, most need its salutary restraint.  And no man has a right, however eloquent and impressive his speech may be, to talk against dogma till he shows that he does not confound accuracy of statement with conventional formalism.  Mr. Robertson lays down the law pretty confidently about the blunders of everybody about him—­Tractarian, Evangelical, Dissenter, Romanist, and Rationalist.  We must say that the impression of every page of his