And to this charge it seems to us that Mr. Maurice is open.  There is sense and manliness in his disclaimer of proselytism; and there is a meaning in which we can agree with his account of truth.  “If I could persuade all Dissenters,” he says, “to become members of my Church to-morrow, I should be very sorry to do it.  I believe the chances are they might leave it the next day.  I do not wish to make them think as I think.  But I want that they and I should be what we pretend to be, and then I doubt not we should find that there is a common ground for us all far beneath our thinkings.  For truth I hold not to be that which every man troweth, but to be that which lies at the bottom of all men’s trowings, that in which those trowings have their only meeting-point.”  He would make as clear as can be that deep substructure, and leave the sight of it to work its natural effect on the honest heart.  A noble aim; but surely requiring, if anything can, the clear eye, the steady hand, the heart as calm as earnest.  Surely a work in which the greatest exactness and precision, as well as largeness of thought, would not be too much.  For if we but take away the “trowings” without coming down to the central foundation, or lose ourselves, and mistake a new “trowing” of our own for it, it is hardly a sufficient degree of blame to say that we have done no good.

And in these qualities of exactness and precision it does seem to us that Mr. Maurice is, for his purpose, fatally deficient.  His criticisms are often acute, his thrusts on each side often very home ones, and but too full of truth; his suggestions often full of thought and instruction; his balancings and contrasts of errors and truths, if sometimes too artificial, yet generally striking.  But when we come to seek for the reconciling truth, which one side has overlaid and distorted, and the other ignorantly shrunk back from, but which, when placed in its real light and fairly seen, is to attract the love and homage of both, we seem—­not to grasp a shadow—­Mr. Maurice is too earnest and real a believer for that—­but to be very much where we were, except that a cloud of words surrounds us.  His positive statements seem like a running protest against being obliged to commit himself and come to the point; like a continual assertion of the hopelessness and uselessness of a definite form of speaking about the matter in hand.  Take, for instance, the following short statement:—­

“My object,” he says, speaking of the words which he has taken as the subject of his essays, “has been to examine the language with which we are most familiar, and which has been open to most objections, especially from Unitarians.  Respecting the Conception I have been purposely silent; not because I have any doubt about that article, or am indifferent to it, but because I believe the word ‘miraculous,’ which we ordinarily connect with it, suggests an untrue meaning; because I think the truth is conveyed