Yet his sermons, which a great Anglo-Catholic declared to me with a mocking mordancy to be full of “edification,” do often enter that region of religion which seems to demand an appeal to the emotions; moreover, it is not to be thought for a moment that the Bishop is not deeply concerned with all moral questions, that he is in the least degree indifferent to the high importance of conduct.  But for myself these excursions, earnest and well-intentioned as they are, proclaim rather the social energy of the good citizen than the fervent zeal of an apostle on fire with his Master’s message.  The evangelicalism of the Bishop has taken, as it were, the cast of politics, and he enters the pulpit of Christ to proclaim the reasonableness of the moral law with the alacrity of the lecturer.

This is what makes him so interesting a study for those curious about the workings of religious psychology.  Here is a thoroughly good man, as fearless and upright as any man in the kingdom, a figure among scholars, a power among organisers, a very able, sincere, and trenchant personality, who has thrown the whole weight of all he has to give on the side of Christianity, but who, for some reason, in despite of all his hard work and unquestionable earnestness, does not convey any idea of the attraction of Christ.

It makes one doubt, not that the Bishop has reserved his feelings for another affection, but whether he has any feelings to bestow.  One thinks that he has drawn up and concentrated so effectually all the forces of his personality into the intellect that it is now impossible for him to see religion except as an intellectual problem.  One thinks, too, that he has never dreamed of converting other people to his views, but only of arguing them out of theirs.  Yet, after all, there are more ways of converting the world than beating a drum.

I am certain, however, that he could easier convince a socialistic collier or a communistic iron-moulder of the absurdity of his economics than persuade either the one or the other of the spiritual satisfaction of his own religion.  Perhaps religion presents itself to the Bishop, as it does to a great number of other people, as a consecration of moral law, and clearly moral law is something to be established by reason, not commended by appeals to the sentiments; not for one moment, all the same, would he countenance the famous cynicism of Gibbon—­“The various modes of worship, which prevailed in the Roman world, were all considered by the people as equally true; by the philosophers as equally false; and by the magistrate as equally useful”—­for no man sees more clearly the permanent need of religion in the human spirit, and no man is more sincerely convinced of the truth of the Christian religion.  But he brings to religion, as I think, only his intellect, and so he has intellectualised its ethic, and has left its deepest meaning to those who possess, what he has either always lacked or has forfeited in his intellectual discipleship, the qualities of mysticism.