It was a position open to obvious and formidable criticism; but against this criticism is to be set the fact, that in a long and energetic life, in which amidst great trials and changes there was a singular uniformity and consistency of character maintained, he did unite the two—­the most devout Christianity with the most fearless and unshrinking boldness in facing the latest announcements and possibilities of modern thought.  That he always satisfactorily explained his point of view to others is more than can be said; but he certainly satisfied numbers of keen and anxious thinkers, who were discontented and disheartened both by religion as it is presented by our great schools and parties, and by science as its principles and consequences are expounded by the leading philosophical authorities of the day.  The other point to which we have adverted partly explains the influence which he had with such minds.  He had no system to formulate or to teach.  He was singularly ready to accept, as adequate expressions of those truths in whose existence he so persistently believed, the old consecrated forms in which simpler times had attempted to express them.  He believed that these truths are wider and vaster than the human mind which is to be made wiser and better by them.  And his aim was to reach up to an ever more exact, and real, and harmonious hold of these truths, which in their essential greatness he felt to be above him; to reach to it in life as much as in thought.  And so to the end he was ever striving, not so much to find new truths as to find the heart and core of old ones, the truth of the truth, the inner life and significance of the letter, of which he was always loth to refuse the traditional form.  In these efforts at unfolding and harmonising there was considerable uniformity; no one could mistake Mr. Maurice’s manner of presenting the meaning and bearing of an article of the Creed for the manner of any one else; but the result of this way of working, in the effect of the things which he said, and in his relations to different bodies of opinion and thought both in the Church and in society, was to give the appearance of great and important changes in his teaching and his general point of view, as life went on.  This governing thought of his, of the immeasurably transcendent compass and height of all truths compared with the human mind and spirit which was to bow to them and to gain life and elevation by accepting them, explains the curious and at present almost unique combination in him, of deep reverence for the old language of dogmatic theology, and an energetic maintenance of its fitness and value, with dissatisfaction, equally deep and impartially universal, at the interpretations put on this dogmatic language by modern theological schools, and at the modes in which its meaning is applied by them both in directing thought and influencing practice.  This habit of distinguishing sharply and peremptorily between dogmatic language and the popular reading of it at any given time is conspicuous in his earliest as in his latest handling of these subjects; in the pamphlet of 1835, Subscription no Bondage, explaining and defending the old practice at Oxford; and in the papers and letters, which have appeared from him in periodicals, on the Athanasian Creed, and which are, we suppose, almost his last writings.