In regard to his intellectual gifts and powers, their peculiar cast has already been intimated.  The dominant feature of his genius was its deeply subjective and spiritual character.  The accidents of a subject never detained him for a moment from his search after the essential and the abiding.  Outward circumstances were of little interest to him.  And in this direction lay the main defect of his mind; it was too exclusively Platonic, subjective and spiritual.  Had his profound Germanic intuitiveness of vision been tempered with a little more of our homely Anglo-Saxon common sense, the combination would have been well-nigh perfect.

What has just been said of his intellectual peculiarities will help us to understand also his religious life.  It was preeminently an inward life; a fire in the very marrow of his being.  As it was his own solitary and independent reflection which first turned his feet toward Nazareth and Calvary, so was it by deep and steady communion with his own heart that he advanced in sanctity.  The natural and unchanging atmosphere of his life was that of faith and prayer.  His religious experience was rooted in peculiarly deep and pungent views of sin.  Not that he had gross outward offences to be ashamed of; but he felt the law of evil working within him, disturbing his peace; and he longed for the serenity of a child of God.  Thus did he learn his need of Christ.  His pupils relate with much interest how, on the evening of one of his birth-day festivals, when they were gathered at his house, he spoke to them of his own spiritual infirmities, and with trembling voice confessed himself a poor sinner seeking forgiveness through atoning blood.  Theologically, he was comparatively indifferent in regard to minor points; but he clung with the tenacity of a martyr’s faith to the great essentials of the Gospel.  His religious life was therefore at once very fervent and very catholic.  Loving Christ with all the ardor of a passion, he loved with a generous latitude of heart all those of every name in whom he discerned Christ’s image.  The motto adopted by him as best describing his own aim and method, was that of St. Augustine:  “Pectus est quod facit theologum.” It is the heart which makes the theologian. It was a Divine Form, for which he was ever seeking, while he walked about amongst men, as he walked up and down the centuries of our Christian faith, murmuring to himself:  “It is the Lord.”

As a writer of church history, his first great claim to gratitude is on account of the living pulse of faith and love which beats through all his pages.  He traces the golden thread of Christian life through the darkest centuries.  He does much to save the church of God from reproach, and God’s own gracious promise from contempt, by showing how much there has been of Christian grace and truth under the worst forms and in the worst ages.  He has thus made his History what he said it should be, “a speaking proof of the Divine power of Christianity, a school