Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: E88AT IV. AN ENGLISH BROAD CHURCHMAN.1 There exist at all times in the world's history, but rather pre-eminently in our own age, minds of an order with which it is somewhat difficult to deal justly. They are those which seem to be without logical cohesion, whose ideas and opinions (often full of genius and of wisdom) seem disparate one from another, and out of whose recorded words it is impossible to construct a consistent or even intelligible system. Like so many orchids, their luxuriant flowers attract our eyes, while their sweetness touches our hearts; but when we try to find the root of faith from which such beauty has sprung,—lo ! some old decaying tree, to which the delicate stem lightly adheres, is all we can discover. We always seem in the wrong as regards them. They attract us, delight us, truly aid our spiritual life by their insight and their tender piety. Then we think to make them our guides; but the magi of old might as well have followed a fire-fly! Again, we are provoked, indignant. We condemn them, and even in our impatience question their honesty: Why does not the man who says this and this, say also this and this ? Why does he who avows ideas such as thefounders of his Church never dreamed of, or condemned bitterly if they did, stop within their fold, and profess to find green pastures where there are but swine's husks of dead symbols ? Hardly have we uttered the question, but we are rebuked. " Men so good, so meek of heart, so pure of life, so full of high and holy thoughts—what are we that we should summon them before our tribunal, or judge them, by the laws of our individual conscience of sincerity ? Let us return and hearken to their prophesyings." The books of these men are like those districts of Wales and Ireland, 1 The Life and Letters of the Re... --This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.