describe it; taking in all its real contradictions and anomalies, its subtle and delicate shades; fixing upon the things which strike us in ourselves or our neighbours as ways of acting and marks of character; following it through its wide and varying range, its diversified and hidden folds and subtle self-involving realities of feeling and shiftiness; touching it in all its complex sensibilities, anticipating its dim consciousnesses, half-raising veils which hide what it instinctively shrinks from, sending through it unexpected thrills and shocks; large-hearted in indulgence, yet exacting; most tender, yet most severe.  And against all this real play of nature he sets in their full force and depth the great ideas of God, of sin, and of the Cross; and, appealing not to the intelligence of an aristocracy of choice natures, but to the needs and troubles and longings which make all men one, he claimed men’s common sympathy for the heroic in purpose and standard.  He warned them against being fastidious, where they should be hardy.  He spoke in a way that all could understand of brave ventures, of resolutely committing themselves to truth and duty.

The most practical of sermons, the most real and natural in their way of dealing with life and conduct, they are also intensely dogmatic.  The writer’s whole teaching presupposes, as we all know, a dogmatic religion; and these sermons are perhaps the best vindication of it which our time, disposed to think of dogmas with suspicion, has seen.  For they show, on a large scale and in actual working instances, how what is noblest, most elevated, most poetical, most free and searching in a thinker’s way of regarding the wonderful scene of life, falls in naturally, and without strain, with a great dogmatic system like that of the Church.  Such an example does not prove that system to be true, but it proves that a dogmatic system, as such, is not the cast-iron, arbitrary, artificial thing which it is often assumed to be.  It is, indeed, the most shallow of all commonplaces, intelligible in ordinary minds, but unaccountable in those of high power and range, whether they believe or not, that a dogmatic religion is of course a hard, dry, narrow, unreal religion, without any affinities to poetry or the truth of things, or to the deeper and more sacred and powerful of human thoughts.  If dogmas are not true, that is another matter; but it is the fashion to imply that dogmas are worthless, mere things of the past, without sense or substance or interest, because they are dogmas.  As if Dante was not dogmatic in form and essence; as if the grandest and worthiest religious prose in the English language was not that of Hooker, nourished up amid the subtleties, but also amid the vast horizons and solemn heights, of scholastic divinity.  A dogmatic system is hard in hard hands, and shallow in shallow minds, and barren in dull ones, and unreal and empty to preoccupied and unsympathising ones; we dwarf and distort ideas